Identity Matrix (1982) (4 page)

I just nodded, letting him tell his curious story. I couldn't imagine where he was going with it, though.

"Anyway," Dan continued, "today they ride around in huge fishing trawlers.

Rich, well-educated, and still as clannish and as trustworthy as the Mafia. The girl, there, is the son of a big shot-chief you might call him. He and his wife had a big falling out and she took a hike with the kid up the Pass to relatives in Whitehorse. The old man threw a fit. Declared war, more or less. Started trying to ram Canadian boats, caused all sorts of trou-ble, which brought us in. The family's so strong, rich, and powerful we couldn't settle them down without the U.S. Marines and you know what
that
would look like in the papers."

I nodded again, seeing his point exactly. Wouldn't the Russians, for example, have a field day with Marines shooting it out with Indians in this day and time?

"Well, the old lady was stubborn, and the Canadian government wanted no part of it, so we did the only thing our bosses decided we could do. Like common criminals, we snatched the kid and are taking her home to Daddy."

"I gather this wasn't supposed to be your way out," I noted.

"You said a mouthful," he came back. "Hell, all of Momma's relatives are on our trail, not to mention the Mounties, and if we don't beat 'em down to Skagway there's gonna be a
hell
of a stink."

I sighed and shook my head. Your U.S. government tax dollars at work, I thought glumly.

"Dan!" the other man hissed, and got up quickly. "I think I heard horses!"

The other man got up and looked around, also con-cerned. I strained my ears and, after a moment, thought I
could
hear sounds back up the trail.

"Damn!" the leader swore. "I guess we better get moving."

"Hey, Dan—wait a minute," Charlie said thoughtfully.

"You know, they're looking for the girl most of all. I know there's only one, but we might meet more. It'll mix 'em up, anyway."

The leader paused and considered it. I wasn't follow-ing their conversation, but I
did
want them to move. The last thing I wanted was to be in the middle of what might well be a shooting match.

Don turned quickly to the girl, who by this time had also gotten up. "
Grtusi
shm du krttha nsi
," he said to her. Her eyes widened a bit, then she nodded, turned, and looked at me with the oddest expression on her cute little face.

Finally she said, "
Grtusi, mckryss, ka
," nodded, then walked up to me. I couldn't imagine what was going on and just stood there like an idiot, wondering.

A tiny brown hand reached out, took mine…

My entire body seemed to explode and crackle electrically. There was a searing, all-encompassing pain as if every nerve in my body suddenly cried out, then one massive blow that seemed to explode inside my head. It was as if the entire fibre of my being were being somehow drawn, or sucked from my body, leaving, in an instant, only oblivion.

Chapter Two awoke feeling groggy and totally numb, except that my head pounded with a thousand off-key variations of the anvil chorus. I groaned slightly, but couldn't move for a moment.

I opened my eyes and saw only a terrible blur, but, after a moment, my vision seemed to clear and I could see off in the distance. Off—and up. Clearly I had been hit over the head or, perhaps, shot, and my body had been thrown off the side of the cliff. Luckily, I'd landed on a flat patch wedged between rock outcrops, probably the only thing that had saved my life.

Still, I wasn't sure if I were really awake or still dreaming. For one thing, I was
seeing
, and it was per-fectly obvious that I was wearing no glasses. The colors, too, seemed slightly wrong, a little darker and different in texture than they should have. Still, my vision was crisp and clear, and, after a moment, I was convinced that in fact I
was
seeing through my eyes. Could the blow and the fall somehow have restored my eyesight?

It didn't seem possible, yet there seemed no other explanation.

Still, I was too numb, too stunned to move, and I was aware that I was in shock.

Voices came to me—men's voices from above, where the camp was. Then, suddenly, I heard the sound of rifle shots, their crisp crackle echoing and re-echoing from the rocks around, and there were men yelling. One of the men in the camp came to the edge of the cliff and I tried to call out to him, to tell him I was here, but all I could manage was a weak gurgling sound. I prayed that he would look down, see me lying here, but he wasn't looking at me. He had a very nasty-looking semiauto-matic rifle and he was looking out and down, away from my position.

There was something oddly incongruous about his appearance that made me think it might have been a dream after all. He looked like neither Indian nor Mountie, nor anybody else. He seemed to be dressed in a black suit more out of the 1890s than today, wearing a derby and sporting an outrageously large handlebar moustache. In my shock and delirium I thought perhaps I was seeing the ghost of Soapy Smith—but the rifle he held was very modern indeed.

He didn't look down but turned back to unseen others and yelled something.

There was a scramble and a rush, and I heard horses moving out, down, and away from me. Far off in the distance I thought I could hear the sound of a helicopter, and that, at least, gave me some hope. Tlingit kidnapping, indeed.

Federal officers indeed. They were what I first suspected, I knew. Fugi-tives from some crime above, probably in the Yukon. Well, they wouldn't get far, I reassured myself—they were descending into the most totally escape-proof box canyon ever devised by nature, and Skagway had barely 1500 people. Still, if they had copters looking, it meant that I might be able to attract their attention—if I could move, and if I hadn't broken every bone in my body.

A sense of cold came over me, and numbness grad-ually subsided, to be replaced by aches over much of my body. Still, it was encouraging, and, after a while, I tried once again to move and managed to get somewhat to a sitting position. Almost immediately I felt a sense of wrongness, of something unthinkably different about myself. For a moment I put it down to the after-effects of the blow and fall, but now, as shock wore off and I became more fully aware of myself, I realized at once that several things were terribly wrong.

I had no glasses, yet I saw, sharply, everywhere. I had teeth in the top of my head—not the omnipresent upper plate, but real teeth. And, as I moved my head, I felt weight and something of a drag and I reached up and took hold of a large mass of glossy, coal-black hair.

My reaction to all this was curiously schizophrenic. At once I knew for a certainty that I, now, somehow, was that little Indian girl I'd seen ride in with the two strange men—yet, of course, I knew too that such a thing was unthinkable, impossible. The human mind was an incredibly complex organism—how could you possibly change it for another? I sat there, awestruck and trembling slightly with the certainty that, were I not mad, such an exchange was not only possible but had happened to me. Happened because that girl had wished it to happen—no, had been
ordered
to make it happen.

What kind of a monster was she? What sort of thing, creature, whatever, had the power to trade bodies as casually as it changed a suit of clothes? This went beyond any ESP or similar powers, real or imagined in parapsy-chology. It smacked, almost, of demonic power, of the supernatural in which I had never really believed. I went back to my memory of her sitting there atop that horse, oblivious to me and to the others.

Relax, keep calm, think it out, I told myself. Consider only the facts first.

Fact: that girl could and did trade bodies with me. My memory and all that I thought of as me seemed unim-paired in even the slightest detail. If anything, my mind seemed clearer, able to recall more detail about more things than I could ever remember.

Fact: at least one person could trade minds. Maybe more, but at least one.

Fact: somebody else knew it. Those men with her—bodyguards? Allies? Or could they, too, be possessed of that power? But her protectors weren't the only ones who knew. Others knew, and were pursuing them even now, if they hadn't caught them already. So they could be killed—perhaps even captured, although that seemed hard to imagine. Physical touch had been required, that's for sure.

The girl had reached out and taken my hand
—
my
hand!—
and that had done it.

That meant no disem-bodied spirits in the dark. They could swap bodies, but they needed bodies in which to live. They were as mor-tal as we, and that alone gave me some comfort.

Was she, then, some sort of mutation, some freak of nature or the result of some unknown experiment? She—not the girl, surely. What did the creature look like at birth? Who or what was it? Certainly that was many bodies ago. But such a one would be enormously power-ful, almost godlike, I told myself.

And the girl, clearly, hadn't been in charge. Hadn't even spoken any language resembling any one I'd ever heard. The lead man, Dan,
he'd
been the boss.

Charlie was the new man. Dan had remarked to him, "When you've been at this as long as I have" or words to that effect. This hadn't been the first time, then.

The UFO report in the paper came back to me—although even if that were related it was hard to see how something that far away could have wound up here. Unless… Unless NORAD hadn't lost the object, but almost captured the occupant that it dropped. Come close enough, in fact, to force a wild chase through the bush. If those men's job was to get that alien passenger down to civilization, and if their covers were blown, they might just criss-cross enough, trying to shake pur-suit, and so wind up almost anywhere. For the same reason that Skagway was a trap it'd also be the last place most government agents would look for fleeing fugitives.

I considered that angle. Whatever they'd tried hadn't worked. The government—probably both governments, U.S. and Canadian—were on to them, chasing them, closing in. Ordinarily they'd just change bodies and identities and slip into the crowd, but they hadn't—until now. Why? Because too many leftover innocents in wrong bodies would be a trail in itself? Because it would blow their existence wide open, causing panic, suspicion, para-noia. They swapped when they had to, not otherwise. They'd swapped with me because the girl had been a dead giveaway. Now they might split up, two men going one way and one the other, probably losing the horses, playing cat and mouse in the rocks, trying to surprise their pursuers, get one or two off by themselves and swap.

And that left me. First of all, I was no longer who I used to be, possibly forever. My past was gone, everything was gone. Oddly, I felt pangs of regret about that, despite my depression and loneliness, for now, it came home to me, I had lost the one thing I had always had—security. Of course, I could hail the pursuers, those who might understand what had happened to me—but would they? Did they really know or understand the power they were facing? Were they, in fact, a killing party? If so, they'd be looking for an Indian girl and they might shoot first and ask questions later. I couldn't take a chance on it.

Still, what were the alternatives? I stood up, somewhat unsteadily at first, and felt the sore points on my new body. Miraculously, nothing appeared broken, although I knew I was going to feel the bruises even worse as time went on. I checked the pockets of the jacket and jeans but they were empty, except for one stick of chewing gum. Curious, I thought. Or was it just there from the body's original owner?

The fact was that I was now, and possibly forever, suddenly female. That seemed at least interesting. It certainly couldn't be worse than I'd been. I loosened the jeans and felt the area around my crotch. How strange, how different it was. I refastened the pants and felt my chest, where, it seemed, two incipient breasts were just beginning to push out slightly.

I looked at my reddish-brown hand and arm. I was also an Indian, a pureblooded Indian. That didn't really bother me so much, but it
did
mark me socially. In my old circles it would have been a real plus, but up here—the government controlled a lot of Indian life, and there were certainly people who didn't like Indians.

Finally I was twelve, perhaps, certainly no more than thirteen. Just edging into the teen years—but there were drawbacks, too. Mentally and culturally I was a thirty--five-year-old associate professor at Hopkins and gradu-ate Ph.D. from Harvard. Goodbye degrees, unless I somehow got the chance and was willing to do all that work again. If I were picked up, I'd look like an Indian escapee from seventh grade. Going through
that
, at my age, in some Indian orphan asylum—or, worse, being returned to the parents of the original girl—was not something I wanted at all.

I started looking around to see what else they might have tossed down here. I spotted the tent forty or fifty feet below me, which gave me some hope that they'

d just tossed everything over in the hopes of disguising the fact that there had been a switch at all. I spotted my pack on another ledge, a little down from me, and, after a pretty precarious climb I managed to reach it. I gener-ally stuck my wallet and other personal things in the pack when sleeping outdoors, both as theft protection and because they were uncomfortable to sleep on. I rummaged around and came up with several things—my spare pair of glasses, for example, which I took out and looked through. My whole head almost was able to fit between the frames, and the world was a horribly blurred, indistinct mess with them. I tossed them away.

Finally I found it—both my wallet and my checkbook! The wallet contained a little over three hundred dollars in U.S. and Canadian cash, and
that
was a godsend. The traveler's checks I regretfully had to conclude were worth-less.

Even though I could sign them—who'd believe that a little Indian-girl was Victor Gonser? Still, it was hard to abandon over five hundred more dollars, and I de-cided to keep them for a little while. You never knew—one time I might find somebody willing to take them.