be told that I had quarreled with him and left home. I would allow no one to see me for a time, and then, in makeup, in a dim room, speak occasionally to some favored caller. It was an impossible plan, but at the time I believed it possible and even easy. My scalpel was in my pocket and ready. The body could be destroyed in his own laboratory.
He read it in my face. He spoke to me as he always had, but I think he knew. There were flowers in the room, something that had never been before, and I wondered if he had not known even earlier and had them brought in, as for a special event. Instead of telling me to lie on the leather-covered table, he gestured toward a chair and seated himself at his writing desk. “We will have company today,” he said.
I looked at him.
“You’re angry with me. I’ve seen it growing in you. Don’t you know who—”
He was about to say something further when there was a tap at the door, and when he called, “Come in!” it was opened by Nerissa, who ushered in a demimondaine and Dr. Marsch. I was surprised to see him, and still more surprised to see one of the girls in my father’s library. She seated herself beside Marsch in a way that showed he was her benefactor for the night.
“Good evening, Doctor,” my father said. “Have you been enjoying yourself?”
Marsch smiled, showing large, square teeth. He wore clothing of the most fashionable cut now, but the contrast between his beard and the colorless skin of his cheeks was as remarkable as ever. “Both sensually and intellectually,” he said. “I’ve seen a naked girl, a giantess twice the height of a man, walk through a wall.”
I said, “That’s done with holographs.”
He smiled again. “I know. And I have seen a great many other things as well. I was going to recite them all, but perhaps I would only bore my audience; I will content myself with saying that you have a remarkable establishment—but you know that.”
My father said, “It is always flattering to hear it again.”
“And now are we going to have the discussion we spoke of earlier?”
My father looked at the demimondaine; she rose, kissed Dr. Marsch, and left the room. The heavy library door swung shut behind her with a soft click.
L
ike the sound of a switch, or old glass breaking.
I
have thought since, many times, of that girl as I saw her leaving: the high-heeled platform shoes and grotesquely long legs, the backless dress dipping an inch below the coccyx. The bare nape of her neck, her hair piled and teased and threaded with ribbons and tiny lights. As she closed the door she was ending, though she could not have known it, the world she and I had known.
“She’ll be waiting when you come out,” my father said to Marsch.
“And if she’s not, I’m sure you can supply others.” The anthropologist’s green eyes seemed to glow in the lamplight. “But now, how can I help you?”
“You study race. Could you call a group of similar men thinking similar thoughts a race?”
“And women,” Marsch said, smiling.
“And here,” my father continued, “here on Sainte Croix, you are gathering material to take back with you to Earth?”
“I am gathering material, certainly. Whether or not I shall return to the mother planet is problematical.”
I must have looked at him sharply; he turned his smile toward me, and it became, if possible, even more patronizing than before. “You’re surprised?”
“I’ve always considered Earth the center of scientific thought,” I said. “I can easily imagine a scientist leaving it to do fieldwork, but—”
“But it is inconceivable that one might want to stay in the field?
“Consider my position. You are not alone—happily for me—in respecting the mother world’s gray hairs and wisdom. As an Earth-trained man I’ve been offered a department in your university at almost any salary I care to name, with a sabbatical every second year. And the trip from here to Earth requires twenty years of Newtonian time, only six months subjectively for me, of course, but when I return, if I do, my education will be forty years out of date. No, I’m afraid your planet may have acquired an intellectual luminary.”
My father said, “We’re straying from the subject, I think.”
Marsch nodded, then added, “But I was about to say that an anthropologist is peculiarly equipped to make himself at home in any culture—even in so strange a one as this family has constructed about itself. I think I may call it a family, since there are two members resident besides yourself. You don’t object to my addressing the pair of you in the singular?”
He looked at me as if expecting a protest, then when I said nothing: “I mean your son, David—that and not brother is his real relationship to your continuing personality—and the woman you call your aunt. She is in reality daughter to an earlier—shall we say ‘version’?—of yourself.”
“You’re trying to tell me I’m a cloned duplicate of my father, and I see both of you expect me to be shocked. I’m not. I’ve suspected it for some time.”
My father said, “I’m glad to hear that. Frankly, when I was your age the discovery disturbed me a great deal; I came into my father’s library—this room—to confront him, and I intended to kill him.”
Dr. Marsch asked, “And did you?”
“I don’t think it matters—the point is that it was my intention. I hope that having you here will make things easier for Number Five.”
“Is that what you call him?”
“It’s more convenient since his name is the same as my own.”
