"How do you feel?" Quotis asked.
"Still stiff," said the patient.
"But otherwise?"
"Otherwise fine. They told me how you saved my life, doctor," the
patient said in Arcturan.
"I'm still surprised how well you speak my language."
"I seem to have a gift for tongues. I can speak Earthian, Arcturan,
Sirian, Fomalhaution, and naturally, my own Kedaki. All of them with
just about no accent, all of them equally well."
"We'll be taking the bandages off today. You still don't have any
hair, but that ought to grow back later. You're alive, and that's what
counts. Can you believe that every square inch of your skin surface was
gone when they found you last month?"
"That's what the nurses keep telling me. Do you think that after the
bandages are removed, doctor, they might find out about me?"
"We were hoping your memory would come back of its own accord.
Otherwise," Quotis shrugged, "there are other ways. As you can
imagine, thousands of your fellow Kedaki are still missing, after the
quake. Most of them probably will never be found, so there ought to
be thousands of people through here to look at you--when you're well
enough. Never fear, one of them will know you."
"But the prison office? Doesn't it mean something that I was found in
the prison office?"
"It might, but the prison authorities report that all their men are
accounted for, safe, killed, injured--none missing. Why, do you
remember working in the prison?"
"No," said Rhodes, "I don't remember anything."
"Relax! Please, relax. Someone will know you. Someone will be able to
trigger that memory of yours. Relax, if you will...."
"There were no marks of identification on me?"
"No, none. Your clothing was burned off. You were naked as well
as completely skinned," said Quotis, beaming. "Remarkable cure.
Remarkable. On Arcturus, when I return, I will astound the medical
profession. Here on Kedaki, unfortunately, there is no such organized
profession. Well, now, about your new skin...."
"What about fingerprints?" Rhodes persisted. "My identity may not be
important to you, doctor. But it's important to me."
"I understand, I understand. I didn't mean to be so callous. But
consider. You have no fingerprints. It will be a while before the
whorls re-establish themselves on your new skin. Immediately after the
operation, before you were bandaged, we took your retinal pattern, but
there was no record of it in the Junction City Identity Center or with
the local police. There is absolutely no way you can be identified,
except through your own memory or the efforts of your Kedaki friends
and relatives to find you. In time, I'm sure everything will
straighten out. Meanwhile," said Quotis, smiling, "if you're ready,
we can remove the bandages from your face. Tomorrow, from the rest of
your body. If there are any imperfections, don't worry. Eventually, the
artificial skin we have given you shall become your old skin again.
I mean that literally. For example, if we have left out--through
ignorance--a birthmark or a mole, it will reappear again after six
or seven months have passed. Your fingerprints will also, as I have
indicated, re-establish themselves. If we have made your pigmentation
too light or too dark, your true color will also appear after some
months.... Well, then, are you ready? Ready for that first look at
yourself? It might help, you know. It might trigger something!" cried
Quotis enthusiastically.
Even while he was speaking, he had begun to remove the bandages from
Rhodes' face. "The room will be dark," he said. "Gradually, we will
increase the light. Your eyes have been in darkness for a long time."
"My eyes...." said Rhodes in sudden fear.
"You are worrying about them? You needn't. They were examined when the
retinal pattern was taken. Miraculously, as miraculously as the fact
that you are alive, your eyes are all right. Now, then, here we are!
See--ummmm, no you cannot see yet. It is dark. There, a little more
light. A little more. The eyes, they are all right?"
"It seems awfully bright."
"Any light would, at first. There, a little more. But you are young!
Hardly more than a boy, I should judge. The purple of your skin--yes,
the purple looks fine.... Not a mark, not a trace. My boy, you will not
even be scarred."
His face still felt stiff, but very cool. The contact with air was very
welcome and the soft stirring of the currents of air as the doctor's
hands did some final adjustments on the bandages which still covered
him from the neck down, tucking them back into place.
The first thing he saw was the doctor, a small bespectacled man with
the vividly orange skin of a full-blooded Arcturan. The doctor was all
smiles, and understandably. Then he saw a mirror. It was held before
his face and he was aware of the doctor's slight intake of breath as he
waited for a reaction, hoping some forgotten memory might be triggered.
He looked in the mirror. "I--I'm purple!" he gawked.
The doctor frowned. "Of course, purple. The Kedaki color."
"I'm sorry. I don't know why it startled me."
"Well, I can tell you. I am an Arcturan. This is an Arcturan hospital,
and we have been speaking Arcturan. Even if you had been unable to see
until today, you associated everything about this place with Arcturus.
Probably," and Dr. Quotis laughed, "you were expecting orange skin."
"Probably," said Rhodes, and laughed with him.
"Well, enough excitement for one day. If you are strong enough,
tomorrow we can have the first of your visitors, people trying to
identify you. I warn you, there will be hundreds, thousands."
"Any time you say," Rhodes replied eagerly. But behind the eagerness
was a certain vague confusion. Why had the purple tints of his new skin
stirred him so strangely? Purple. Kedaki skin color. What else did he
expect?
* * * * *
The Director of the Five Bureau, the Kedaki Secret Police, said, "Stop
acting like a fool, please."
"But sir," wailed the prison warden. "I tell you, the Earthman's body
was not uncovered in what remained of the prison."
"What does that mean?" the Director demanded scornfully. "I have here
the final earthquake casualty report for Junction City--shall I read
it to you? There are over six thousand people still missing, my dear
warden. Six thousand."
"Yes, I know," persisted the prison official. "But doesn't it seem
strange that of all the inmates and guards at the prison, the Earth
archaeologist alone is missing?"
"Nevertheless, we can assume that virtually all of those missing are
dead, buried forever under the debris of the municipal disaster."
"Still, you know how important this Earthman is, what trouble he can
cause...."
"_I_ know," snapped the Director arrogantly, "But do you?"
"Well, I have been told...."
"Told! Told what you had to know, told to furnish the Earthman with a
maximum security cell, and so forth. You know nothing!"
"I still...."
With a wave of his hand, the Director dismissed the warden.
Then, sitting alone at his desk, he lit a cigarette. It was an
Earth-cigarette, and a good one. These things, the Director mused, we
accept from the outworlders. Their little luxuries. But their way of
life, he told himself, never. Whatever threatens our way of life, we
seek out and destroy. He leaned on a corner of the desk's surface and
in a moment a serving girl came obsequiously into the room with a tray.
Patting her rump playfully, as you might stroke the head of a dog, the
Director selected the bottle he wanted from the tray, indicating that
she should make him a drink. He waited, watching her graceful movements
as she set down the tray and poured the liquid into a delicate glass
of Regan crystal. The drink, heady and delicious, was Aldeberanean
fire wine. He savored it slowly, then with a gesture indicated that
the girl, who wore nothing but a kirtle to cover the nakedness of her
loins, should depart. He leaned back and thought: This too--not the
wine, but the woman.
Because the woman would be impossible if the Kedaki way of life were
changed. A system, he went on thinking, founded on bedrock as strong as
the pull between the planets.
Metempsychosis....
Do you believe in reincarnation? he asked himself. He chuckled, the
sound deep in his throat. He was no fool and did not hold a fool's
belief. But the others? The servant classes, the slaves? Yes, they
believed. All their lives, they were indoctrinated to believe.
Reincarnation was the stuff of which their dreams were fashioned, and
so it was that they accepted the hard lot of lifelong servitude with
the hope that in their next birth, had they led a good, loyal life,
they would be born to a higher station.
Change that? thought the Director. He shook his head slowly, grimly.
But the Earthman Rhodes had been a problem, for in the age-old ruins
of Balata 'kai he'd stumbled on the manuscript of _The Book of the
Dead_, a five thousand year old document which had first propounded
the beliefs of metempsychosis. _The Book of the Dead_ was a dangerous
document, a document which could ignite Kedak in revolutionary
conflagration, for it showed clearly that the so-called gods of the
earliest Kedaki civilization were not gods at all and their so-called
revelation of metempsychosis not a revelation at all but a clever
trick calculated to win them a life of ease at the expense of gullible
subjects.
What am I thinking? the Director asked himself. The Earthman Rhodes
is dead, of course. He couldn't possibly be alive. I'm as bad as the
warden, but the warden is a fool who knows nothing.... Still, even if
the warden is a fool and Rhodes is dead, _The Book of the Dead_ is
still missing. And if there is one chance in a million that Rhodes
lives, then every stone on this planet must be turned to find him....