“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.
They were lying, lying. Somebody’s lying. She was lying and he knew it; he could feel her lying....
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.
KERWIN, JEFFERSON ANDREW. WHITE. MALE. CITIZEN TERRA. HOME MOUNT DENVER. SECTOR Two. STATUS single. HAIR red. EYES grey. COLORING fair. EMPLOYMENT HISTORY age twenty apprentice CommTerra. PERFORMANCE satisfactory. PERSONALITY withdrawn. POTENTIAL high.
TRANSFER age 22. Sent as warranted Comm Terra certificate junior status, Consulate Megaera. PERFORMANCE excellent. PERSONALITY acceptable, introverted. POTENTIAL very high. DEMERITS none. No entanglements known. PRIVATE LIFE normal as far as known. PROMOTIONS regular and rapid.
TRANSFER age 26. Phi Coronis IV. CommTerra ratings expert. Legation. PERFORMANCE excellent; commendations for extraordinary work. PERSONALITY introverted but twice reprimanded for fights in native quarter. POTENTIAL very high, but in view of repeated requests for transfer possibly unstable. No marriages. No liaisons of record. No communicable diseases.
TRANSFER age 29, Cottman IV, Darkover. (requested for personal reasons, unstated.) Request approved, granted, suggest Kerwin not be transferred again except at loss of accumulated seniority. PERFORMANCE no records as yet, one reprimand for intrusion into quarter off limits. PERSONALITY APPRAISAL excellent and valuable employee but significant personality and stability defects. POTENTIAL excellent.
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.”
“That’s your official transcript, Kerwin. It’s all the computer has on you.”
“No birth records at all?”
The man shook his head. “If you were born outside the Terran Zone—and your mother was a native—well, it wouldn’t be recorded. I don’t know what kind of birth records they keep out there—” He waved an inclusive hand at the view of distant mountains—“but it’s for sure they’re not in our computer. I’ll try you in Birth Records; and I can try pass rights for orphans. If you were sent back to Terra at thirteen, that would be under Section Eighteen, the Repatriation of Spacemen’s Orphans and Widows Act.” He punched buttons for several minutes, then shook his head.
“See for yourself,” he said. It kept coming up: NO RECORD OF SUBJECT.
“Here are all the birth records we have for Kerwin; we have an Evelina Kerwin, born to one of our nurses here, died at six months. And there’s an employment record on a Henderson Kerwin black, male, age 45, who was an engineer in Thendara spaceport and died of radiation burns after an accident to the reactor. And under pass rights for orphans I found a Teddy Kerlayne, who was sent to Delta Ophiuchi four years ago. Not relevant, huh?”
Kerwin mechanically shredded the paper into bits, his fingers knotting with the frustration he felt. “Try one more thing,” he said. “Try my father. Jefferson Andrew Kerwin, senior.” He crushed his own printout in his hands, remembering it had said, no marriages, no recorded liaisons. His father’s marriage, or liaison, with his unknown mother, would have had to be recorded, in order for the older Jeff Kerwin to get Empire citizenship for his son. The procedure had been carefully explained to him when he joined the Civil Service; how to record native marriages—few Empire planets were as tough on fraternization and mixing with natives as Darkover—and how to legitimize a child, with or without Terran marriage. He knew how it would have to be done. “See when and where my father filed a 784-D application, will you?”
The man shrugged. “Buddy, you sure are hard to convince. If you had ever been listed on a 784, it would have showed up on that employment record.”
But he started to punch buttons again, staring at the glassed-in surface where the information appeared before the hard copy was printed. Abruptly, he started; his lips pursed. Then he turned and said civilly, “Sorry, Kerwin; no records. Somebody’s steered you wrong; we don’t have any record of a Jeff Kerwin in Civil Service. Nobody but you.”
Kerwin snapped, “You’ve got to be lying! Or what are you gawping at on that screen? Damn it, move your hand and let me see it myself!”
The clerk shrugged. “Suit yourself.” But he had punched another button and the screen was blank.
Fury and frustration surged up in Kerwin like a cresting wave. “Damn it, are you trying to tell me I don’t exist?”
“Look,” the clerk said wearily, “you can erase an entry in a ledger. But show me anybody who can tamper with the memory banks of CommTerra records, and I’ll show you a cross between a man and a crystoped. According to official records, you came to Darkover for the first time two days ago. Now go down and see Medic and Psych, and quit bothering me!”
How naive do they think I am? CommTerra can be fudged so no outsider can get at the records, if you have the right codes for access. Someone, for some obscure reason, had fixed it so that he couldn’t get access to the data.
But why would they bother?
The alternative was what the woman had said. She had thought he was crazy, confabulating, that he had never been on Darkover before, that for some reason he was inventing an elaborate Darkovan past for himself....
Kerwin reached into his
pocket, extended a folded bill.
“Try my father again. Okay?”
The clerk looked up, and now Kerwin knew that his guess had been right. It was worth the money, though he couldn’t afford it, to know that he wasn’t crazy. Greed and fear wavered in the man’s face, and finally he said, whisking the bill quickly into his pocket, “Okay. But if the banks are being monitored, it could be my job. And whatever we get, that’s it; no more questions, okay?”
Kerwin watched the programming this time. The machine burped slowly to itself. Then the panel flashed a red light, blink-blink-blink, an urgent panic signal. The clerk said softly, “Shunting circuit.”
Red letters flashed on the panel.
REQUESTED INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON PRIORITY CODE ONLY: CLOSED ACCESS. GIVE VALID ACCESS CODE AND AUTHORITY FOR FURTHER ACCESS.
The letter flashed on and off with hypnotic intensity. Kerwin finally shook his head and motioned and the clerk shut off the lights. The screen stared back at them, blank and enigmatic.
“Well?” the clerk asked. Kerwin knew he wanted another bribe to try and break the access code, but Kerwin had as good a chance of breaking it as the clerk did. Anyhow, that proved there was something there.
He didn’t know what. But it explained the way the woman at the Orphanage had acted, too.
He turned and went out, resolve slowly hardening in him. He had been drawn back to Darkover—only to find greater mysteries awaiting him. Somewhere, somehow, he would find out what they were.
Only he didn’t know where to start.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Technician
He let it alone for the next few days. He had to; breaking in on a new job, however simple the job was, and however similar to the one on his last planet, demanded all his attention. It was a highly specialized branch of Communications—the testing, calibrating, and occasional repair of the intercom equipment both in the HQ building itself and from point to point in the Terran Zone. It was time consuming and tedious rather than difficult, and he often found himself wondering why they bothered to bring Terran personnel in from outside, rather than training local technicians. But when he put the question to one of his associates, his friend only shrugged:
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