Альфред Бестер - Star of Stars [Anthology]

Halloween.

Yoshi said: Their karmas are two. They are two. She sat on a stool by the bead curtain front door, spreading her shawl over Will and Phil on her sides, and she held their hands—Will's left, Phil's right joined on her lap. The heart and the head line will never meet on Will's palm; he's going to be an impulsive boy. Phil will be pensive. See, where they join, the head and the heart line, in one. This swelling shows fortune and foresight. The life line is long but the mountain of love is shrivelled; dimpled and broken his pride and reliance. Will too shows good fortune but is reckless and wild. The field of Dishnana augurs abundance, but the mountain of love is like Phil's, just like Phil's, and his life line is cut through by Asuras. Their karmas are two, said Yoshi.

Palm Sunday.

I gave Phil a bunny with floppy ears, but he cried till Will got one just like it. I gave Willy a set of jinglebells but he broke them in two, half for him, half for Philly. I gave them a team of galloping horses hitched to a covered wagon. They cried they did not want one but two. But there wasn't another one, not in all of Vanyambadi. So they cried and they said: We are scared of it, take it away!

This is as far as she got. Poor mother. Here her hand was halted.

Had she listened to Yoshi, perhaps the earth would have tarried. And we were to leave anyway, for Dad had been called to the Christ Church in Chicago. But the earth did not wait. God knows why it was sore at me and my Will.

There is not much I can remember. A sulky day of frightening colors. The kitten vomited and mewed, and the sheep dog had his tail between his legs. Yoshi was off to the village. Rice wine, too much rice wine, 1 remem­ber they said. Has anybody ever seen a sunset like this, they said. A cloud with a golden rim was hovering over the horizon like a monster. Then I felt dizzy, trying to hold myself on all fours, and sick to my stomach. When it was over, the house had crumbled and the yard was gaping and smoking and the sheep dog was howling at the ruins and Dad took me in his arms and kissed me and carried me away. Mother had gone to Heaven, he said, and Will had gone with her so she wouldn't be lonely, but Philly and Daddy would go to Chicago. The stars had long tails and swirled over the sky through the ship's bull's eye.

Poor father. Had he listened to me, we might have found Will, for he was not in Heaven. I heard his voice calling in the night and wept to the nurse who came to soothe me. "My Will is crying, my Will wants me." I heard him often and knew him to be sick and looking for us. Phil is missing Will so, they said.

There was a mirror in the dressing room at the Nursery School in Chicago. I looked at it, while the teacher but-toned up my snowsuit, and called, overjoyed, "There is my Will." The other children too began to point at their selves in the mirror and shouted names and jumped and laughed. There is another Dick. Where is the other Helen? My Tommy! Many a one fancied a twin. It was a game like another. Thus my Will faded to fantasy and then was forgotten. He was put away with the old toys for new ones.

That was thirty years ago.

Rome, December 3. William Sailor, thirty-four-year-old Anglo-Indian, was murdered this afternoon in his apartment in Via Sistina. Apparently he was attacked by his wife, the former Martha Egan, a television starlet, with a hunt­ing knife. The woman, who was found to be doped and drunk, stabbed his left cheek and wounded his left arm. While Sailor was staggering and trying to regain his senses, the woman fired two shots from a pistol. Sailor was killed instantly. Neighbors and police were brought to the scene by the shots. Mrs. Sailor suffered a nervous breakdown. The Sailors had been heard quarrelling sev­eral times before.

Sailor lost all his family during the earthquake of Vanyambadi, India, in 1921. At sixteen he joined the British Merchant Navy and led an adventurous life that took him over most of the Asian and African coasts. After the war he settled in Rome where he married Martha Egan in 1949. William Sailor is the author of numerous books on travel and adventure. His best known work is a novel, No Home for Strangers.

"Did you see that, Phil?" Robby McNutting said over the luncheon table. "It's this morning's Trib. He looked just exactly like you. My word, I've never seen such a likeness in all my life. Look at the forehead, generous like yours; the short cropped hair, the questioning eyes. Must be dark, like yours. The long straight nose, and the folds down the mouth, deeper on one side. Look, he even draws one shoulder up like you. Your mirror image." And he handed the page to Phil.

The paper trembled in Phil's hand so he put it down before him on the table and wiped over it with the back of his spoon as though to flatten it, or to see whether it was really there. Jim Wilder pushed his chair round the corner of the table, to look at the picture too, and Ted Con­nally, on the opposite side, got up, walked round, leaned his arms on the back of Phil's chair, and looked over his shoulder.

"Boy," Jim Wilder said, "it's almost uncanny."

"Phil, old fellow," Ted Connally guffawed, slapping him on the shoulder, "how does it feel to have been murdered?"

"Oh, come on," Robby McNutting said helpfully, "you can't tell from a telephoto. Maybe the man looked altogether different."

Phil kept staring at the picture and the story. "And I knew it, I knew it, I knew it all the time," he mumbled. Then he poured down his Martini, and McNutting's and Wilder's and what was left of Ted Connally's second, and staggered out of the Club.

Rome, De­cember 7. Theophil Thorndike, a Chicago banker, arrived here today by plane from New York. He claimed to be the twin brother of William Sailor who was murdered by his wife on December 3. Thomdike said he had documents to prove the relationship. People who knew William Sailor said the similarity to Thorndike was astounding. Thorndike hired a lawyer to defend Mrs. Sailor and obtained her transfer, pending trial, to a private room at the sanatorium Villa Igea.

They certainly had explained my coming. But probably she had not listened. She was easily distracted. When I opened the door she seemed utterly unprepared.

She stared at me, buried her face in her hands, then stared again, forlorn. She jerked up from the red uphol­stered armchair in which she had been resting and retreated towards the red-framed window, groping blindly backwards with her arms, always staring at me, through me, at the red rousing wall. She leaned against the window, her palms cooling on the glass pane. Her black open hair fell over her black shoulders. Her face was pale and contorted. A witch condemned to the stake, a poor sick suffering girl. "Go away," she hissed, "please go away and leave me alone."

"How do you do, Martha." The calm swing of a trained business voice sounded utterly out of place, even to me. "I am Will's brother Phil Thorndike. From Chi­cago. Didn't they tell you?" There was not another sound to be gotten out of her. She stood there black and twisted, her arms spread out, a barren tree against the darkling sky. A quarter of an hour, perhaps half an hour, and night fell. I stole towards the door and slipped out.

The next morning he brought her roses and candies.

"Hello, Martha, you look fine today. Had a good rest? It was cold in Chicago when I left, you know; the wings of the plane were heavy with ice. We had a hard time tak­ing off. Didn't he ever tell you he had a brother? He probably didn't remember. I couldn't either, but then I knew it even though he ceased to be real long ago, in a certain way. Dad kept talking about him and mother, and there were pictures and the baby book. I'll show them to you. Look, I bought a copy of No Home for Strangers. Started reading it. He must have been a tough guy. You know, I wanted to be a writer, too. Took a couple of courses in creative writing at college. But then, I met—Martha—my wife's name was Martha too—and then I got a job at the Morris Trust Company and went to Lass School. I guess that didn't leave much time for anything else. Why don't you try these candies? You smoke? You know, I don't know a soul here in Rome. It's funny. But there are American bars all over the place. Hot dogs deluxe—the Romans take them so seriously and they're terribly fashionable. But I don't like it here. People star­ing at me. `That must be William Sailor's brother'—do I really look so much like Will?"