A World Divided (31 page)

Kerwin remembered some of this from his briefing on the ship. “Are you talking about the government or the common people?”

“Both,” the Legate snorted. “The government’s a little hard to locate. At first we thought there wasn’t any. Hell, there might as well
not
be!”

The Darkovans, according to the Legate, were ruled by a caste who lived in virtual seclusion; they were incorruptible and, especially, unapproachable. A mystery, a riddle.

“One of the few things they do trade for, is
horses
,” the Legate told him. “Horses. Can you figure that? We offer them planes, surface transit, roadbuilding machinery—and what do they buy? Horses. I gather there are big herds of them, out on the outer steppes, the plains of Valeron and Arilinn, and in the uplands of the Kilghard Hills. They say they don’t want to build roads, and from what I know of the terrain, it wouldn’t be easy, but we’ve offered them all kinds of technical help and they don’t want it. They buy a few planes, now and then. God knows what they do with them. They don’t have airstrips and they don’t buy enough fuel, but they do buy them.” He leaned his chin on his hands.

“It’s a crazy place. I never have figured it out. To tell the truth, I don’t really give a damn. Who knows? Maybe you’ll figure it out some day.”

 

When he next had free time, late the next day, Kerwin went out through the more respectable section of the Trade City, toward the Spacemen’s Orphanage. He remembered every step of the way. It rose before him, a white cool building, strange and alien as it had always been among the trees, set back at the end of a long walk from the street; the Terran star-and-rocket emblem blazed over the door. The outer hall was empty, but through an open door he saw a small group of boys working industriously around a globe. From behind the building he could hear the high cheery sound of children playing.

In the big office that had been the terror of his childhood, Kerwin waited until a lady dressed respectably in muted Darkovan clothing—loose skirt, furred jacket over all—came out and inquired in a friendly manner what she could do for him.

When he told her of his errand, she held out her hand cordially. “So you were one of our boys? I think you must have been before my time. Your name—?”

“Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, Junior.”

Her forehead ridged in a polite effort at concentration. “I may possibly have seen the name in Records, I don’t remember offhand. I think you must have been before my time. When did you leave? At thirteen? Oh, that is unusual. Mostly our boys stay until they are nineteen or twenty; then, after testing, we find them work here.”

“I was sent to my father’s family on Earth.”

“Then we will surely have records on you, Jeff. If your parents are known—” She hesitated. “Of course, we try to keep complete records, but it’s possible we may only have one parent’s name; there have been—” She hesitated, trying to find a courteous way to phrase it. “—unfortunate liaisons—”

“You mean, if my mother was one of the women of the spaceport bars, my father may not have bothered tell you who she was?”

She nodded, looked ruffled at this plain speaking. “It does happen. Or one of your young women may choose to have a child without informing us of the father, though in your case that wouldn’t seem to apply. If you’ll wait a minute.” She went into a little side office. Through the open door he caught a glimpse of office machines and a trim Darkovan girl wearing Terran uniform. After a few minutes the lady came back looking puzzled and a little annoyed, and her voice was curt.

“Well, Mr. Kerwin, it seems there is no record of you in our orphanage. It must have been some other planet.”

Kerwin stared, in amazement. “But that’s impossible,” he said reasonably. “I lived here until I was thirteen years old. I slept in Dormitory Four, the matron’s name was Rosaura. I used to play ball on that field back there.” He pointed.

She shook her head. “Well, we certainly have no records of you, Mr. Kerwin. Is it possible you were registered here under another name?”

He shook his head. “No, I was always called Jeff Kerwin.”

“Furthermore we have no record of any of our boys being sent to Terra in his thirteenth year. That would be very unusual, not our regular procedure at all, and it would certainly have been carefully recorded. Everyone here would certainly remember it.”

Kerwin took a step forward. He leaned over the woman, a big man, menacing, furious. “What are you trying to say? What do you
mean
, you have no records on me? In God’s name, what possible reason would I have for lying about it? I tell you, I lived here thirteen years, do you think I don’t
know
? Damn it, I can prove it!”

She shrank away from him. “Please—”

“Look,” Kerwin said, trying to be reasonable. “There has got to be some kind of mistake. Could the name be misfiled, could your computer have malfunctioned? I need to know what kind of records were kept on me. Will you check the spelling again, please?” He spelled it again for her, and she said coldly, “I checked that name, and two or three possible spelling variations. Of course, if you had been registered here under another name—”

“No, damn it,” Kerwin shouted. “It’s
Kerwin
! I learned to
write
my name—in that schoolroom right at the end of that corridor, the one with a big picture of John Reade on the north wall!”

“I am sorry,” she said. “We have no record of anyone called Kerwin.”

“What kind of half-headed, fumbled-fingered idiot have you got tending your computer, then? Are they filed under names, fingerprints, retinal prints?” He had forgotten that. Names could be altered, changed, misfiled, but fingerprints did not change.

She said coldly, “If it will convince you, and you know anything about computers ...”

“I’ve been working in Comm Terra with a Barry-Reade KSO4 for seven years.”

Her voice was icy. “Then, sir, I suggest you come in here and check the banks yourself. If you feel the name may have been misrecorded, misspelled, or misfiled, every child who has passed through the Orphanage is coded for fingerprint access.” She bent silently and handed him a card form, pressed his fingers, one by one, against the special molecular-sensitive paper that recorded, invisibly, the grooves and whorls of the raised lines, pore-patterns, skin type and texture. She faced the card into a slot. He watched the great silent face of the machine, the glassy front, like blind eyes staring.

With uncanny speed a card was released, slid down into a tray; Kerwin snatched it up before the woman could give it to him, disregarding the cold outrage on her face. But as he turned it over his triumph and assurance that she had, for some reason, been lying to him, drained away. A cold terror gripped at his stomach. In the characterless capitals of mechanical printing it read:

 

NO RECORD OF SUBJECT

 

She took the card from Kerwin’s suddenly lax fingertips.

“You cannot accuse a machine of lying,” she said coldly. “Now, if you please, I’ll have to ask you to leave.” Her tone said clearer than words that unless he did she would have someone come and put him out.

Kerwin clawed desperately at the counter edge. He felt as if he had stepped into some cold and reeling expanse of space. Shocked and desperate, he said, “How could I be mistaken? Is there another Spacemen’s Orphanage on Darkover? I—I
lived
here, I tell you—”

She stared at him until a sort of pity took the place of her anger. “No, Mr. Kerwin,” she said gently. “Why don’t you go back to the HQ and check with Section Eight there? If there is a—a mistake—maybe they could help you.”

Section Eight. Medic and Psych
. Kerwin swallowed hard and went, without any further protest. That meant she thought he was deranged, that he needed psychiatric help. He didn’t blame her. After what he had just heard, he kind of thought so himself. He stumbled out into the cold air, his feet numb, his head whirling.

No; that was what every paranoid psychotic thought; somebody was lying,
they were all lying, there was a plot against him. ...
Some mysterious and elusive
they
was conspiring against him.

But how could he have been mistaken? Damn it, he thought as he walked down the steps, I used to play ball over there; kickball and catch-the-monkey when I was little, more structured games when I was older. He looked up at the windows of his old dormitory. He had climbed into them often enough after some escapade, aided by convenient low branches of that very tree. He felt like climbing up into the dormitory to see if the initials he had carved into the windowframe were still there. But he abandoned the notion; the way his luck was running, they’d just catch him and think he was a potential child molester. He turned and stared again at the white walls of the building where he had spent his childhood ...
or had he?

He clasped his hands at his temples, searching out elusive memories. He could remember so much. All his conscious memories were of the orphanage, of the grounds where he stood now, running around these grounds; when he was very small he had fallen on these steps and skinned his knee ... how old had he been then? Seven, perhaps, or eight. They had taken him up to the infirmary and said they were going to sew up his knee, and he had wondered how in the world they would get his knee into a sewing machine; and when they showed him the needle, he had been so intrigued at how it was done that he had forgotten to cry; it was his first really clear memory.

Did he have any memories
before
the orphanage? Try as he might, he could remember only a glimpse of violet sky, four moons hanging like jewels and a soft woman’s voice that said, “Look, little son, you will not see this again for years. ...” He knew, from his geography lessons, that a conjunction of the four moons together in the sky did not come very often; but he could not remember where he had been when he saw it, or when he had seen it again. A man in a green and golden cloak strode down a long corridor of stone that shone like marble, a hood flung loose over blazing red hair; and somewhere there had been a room with blue light ... and then he was in the Spacemen’s Orphanage, studying, sleeping, playing ball with a dozen other boys his age, in a cluster of kids in blue pants and white shirts. When he was ten he had had a crush on a Darkovan nurse called—what had been her name? Maruca. She moved softly in heel-less slippers, her white robes moving around her with fluid grace, and her voice was very gentle and low.
She tousled my hair and called me Tallo, though it was against the rules, and once when I had some kind of fever, she sat by me all night in the infirmary, and put cold cloths on my head, and sang to me. Her voice was deep contralto, very sweet.
And when he was eleven he’d bloodied the nose of a boy named Hjalmar for calling him
bastard
, yelling that at least he
knew
his father’s name, and they’d been pulled apart, kicking and spitting gutter insults at each other, by the grey-haired mathematics teacher. And just a few weeks before they bundled him, scared and shaking and listless from the drugs, aboard the starship that would take him to Terra, there’d been a girl named Ivy, in a class higher than his. He had hoarded his allotment of sweets for her, and they had held hands shyly, walking under those trees at the far edge of the playground; and once, awkwardly, he had kissed her, but she had turned away her face so that he had kissed only a mouthful of fine, pale-brown, sweet-scented hair.

No, they couldn’t tell him he was crazy. He remembered too much. He’d go to the HQ as the woman said, only not to Medic and Psych, but Records. They had a record there of everyone who had ever worked in the Empire service. Everyone. They’d know.

 

The man in Records sounded a little startled when Kerwin asked for a check, and Kerwin couldn’t exactly blame him. After all, you don’t usually walk up and ask for your own record, unless you’re applying for a job transfer. Kerwin fumbled for an excuse.

“I was born here. I never knew who my mother was, and there might be records of my birth and parentage. ...”

The man took his fingerprint and punched buttons disinterestedly. After a time a printer began clattering, and finally a hard copy slid out into the tray. Kerwin took it up and read it, at first with satisfaction because it was obviously a full record, but with growing disbelief.

There was no more. Kerwin frowned. “Look that’s my employment record; what I wanted was birth records, that kind of thing. I was born here on Cottman IV.”