Robert Silverberg: In the Clone Zone

“I could kill you ,” Aristegui said. “Right now. I should. After what I have told you, you own my life.”

Again Mondschein shrugged. “Then kill me. For whatever good it’ll do you. I’m not going to inform on you.”

“Nor cooperate with me.”

“Neither one nor the other.”

“All you want is to live in peace,” said Aristegui savagely. “But how do you know you will? Alvarado has asked you to work for him again, and you have refused.” He held up a hand. “Yes, yes, I know that. I will not kill you, though I should. But he might, though he has no reason to. Think about that, Senor Doctor.”

He rose and glared at Mondschein a moment, and left without another word.

Mondschein’s body clock had caught up with Tierra Alvarado time by this time. But that night, once again, he lay until dawn in utterly lucid wakefulness before exhaustion at last brought him some rest. It was as though sleep were a concept he had never quite managed to understand.

The next summons came from Alvarado himself.

The Presidential Palace, which Mondschein remembered as a compact, somewhat austere building in vaguely Roman style, had expanded in the course of a quarter of a century into an incomprehensible mazelike edifice that seemed consciously intended to rival Versailles in ostentatious grandeur. The Hall of Audience was a good sixty meters long, with rich burgundy draperies along the walls and thick blood-red carpeting. There was a marble dais at the far end where the Maximum Leader sat enthroned like an emperor. Dazzling sunlight flooded down on him through a dome of shimmering glass set in the ceiling. Mondschein wondered if he was supposed to offer a genuflection.

There were no guards in the room, only the two of them. But security screens in the floor created an invisible air-wall around the dais. Mondschein found himself forced to halt by subtle pressure when he was still at least fifteen meters short of the throne. Alvarado came stiffly to his feet and they stood facing each other in silence for a long moment.

It seemed anticlimactic, this confrontation at last. Mondschein was surprised to discover that he felt none of the teeth-on-edge uneasiness that the man had always been able to engender in him. Perhaps having seen the clone-Alvarado earlier had taken the edge off the impact.

Alvarado said, “You have found all the arrangements satisfactory so far, I hope, doctor?”

“In the old days you called me Rafael.”

“Rafael, yes. It was so long ago. How good it is to see you again, Rafael. You look well.”

“As do you.”

“Yes. Thank you. Your villa is satisfactory, Rafael?”

“Quite satisfactory,” said Mondschein. “I look forward to a few last years of quiet retirement in my native country.”

“So I am told,” Alvarado said.

He seemed overly formal, weirdly remote, hardly even human. In the huge hall his crisp, cool voice had a buzzing androidal undertone that Mondschein found unfamiliar. Possibly that was an atmospheric diffraction effect caused by the security screens. But then it occurred to Mondschein that this too might be one of the clones. He stared hard, trying to tell, trying to call on the intuitive sense that once had made it possible for him to tell quite easily, even without running the alpha-wave test. The AAA Class clones had been intended to be indistinguishable from the original to nine decimal places, but nevertheless when you collapsed the first twenty or thirty years of a man’s life into the three-year accelerated-development period of the cloning process you inevitably lost something, and Mondschein had always been able to detect the difference purely subjectively, at a single glance. Now, though, he wasn’t sure. It had been simple enough to see that the Alvarado who had greeted him in the Ministry of Scientific Development was a replica, but here, at this distance, in this room that resonated with the presence of the Maximum Leader, there were too many ambiguities and uncertainties.

He said, “The Minister explained to me that the national genetic laboratories are facing heavy competition from abroad, that you want me to step in and pull things together. But I can’t do it. My technical knowledge is hopelessly out of date. I’m simply not familiar with current work in the field. If I had known ahead of time that the reason you had decided to let me come home was to that you wanted me to go back into the labs, I never would have—”

“Forget about the labs,” Alvarado said. “That isn’t why I invited you to return.”

“But the Minister of Scientific Development said—”

“Let the Minister of Scientific Development say anything he wishes. The Minister has his agenda and I have mine, doctor.” He had dropped the first-name talk, Mondschein noticed. “Is it true that there is a method of determining whether a given individual is an authentic human or merely a highly accurate clone?”

Mondschein hesitated. Something was definitely wrong here.

“Yes,” he said finally. “There is. You know that there is.”

“You are too certain of what I know and what I do not know. Tell me about this method, doctor.”

He was more and more certain that he was talking to one of the clones. Alvarado must be staging one of his elaborate charades.

“It involves matching brain rhythms. When I created the AAA Class Alvarado clones, I built a recognition key into them that would enable me, using a simple EEG hookup, to distinguish their brain-wave patterns from yours. I did this at your request, so that in the case of a possible coup d’état attempt by one of the clones you’d be able to unmask the pretender. The method uses my own brain waves as the baseline. If you jack my EEG output into a comparator circuit and overlay it with yours, the two patterns will conflict, the way any two patterns from different human beings will. But if my EEG gets matched against one of your clones, the pattern will drop immediately into alpha rhythms, as if we’re both under deep hypnosis. It amazes me that you’ve forgotten this.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you’re not Alvarado at all, but simply one of his—what’s the word?—one of his brothers.”

“Very good, doctor.”

“Am I right?”

“Come closer and see for yourself.”

“I can’t. The security screens—”

“I have switched them off.”

Mondschein approached. There was no air resistance. When he was five meters away he felt the unmistakable click of recognition.

“Yes, I am right. Even without an EEG test. You’re a clone, aren’t you?”

“That is so.”

“Is the real Alvarado too busy for me today, or is it that he doesn’t have the courage to look me in the eye?”

“I will tell you something very strange, which is a great secret,” said the clone. “The real Alvarado is no longer in command here. For the past several months I have run the government of Tierra Alvarado. No one here is aware of this, no one at all. No one except you, now.”

For a moment Mondschein was unable to speak.

“You seriously expect me to believe that?” he said at last.

The clone managed a glacial smile. “During the years of your absence there have been several internal upheavals in Tierra Alvarado. On three occasions assassination plots resulted in the deaths of Alvarado clones who were playing the role of the Maximum Leader at public ceremonies. Each time, the death of the clone was successfully covered up. The conspirators were apprehended and things continued as if nothing had occurred. On the fourth such occasion, an implosion grenade was thrown toward the Maximum Leader’s car while he was en route to Iquique for a ceremony of rededication. I happened to be accompanying him on that journey so that I could double for him in the riskier parts of the ceremony, when the general public would be present. The impact of the grenade was tremendous. There were many fatalities and serious injuries. In the confusion afterward I was mistaken for the true Maximum Leader. I quickly understood the situation and began to act accordingly. And so it has been ever since.”