Here you'll find

 

Traces of Doubt

 

 

 

 

11. Undeceived

"I've never had a friend like him. I mean 每 nobody like him, and also nobody I'd have liked nearly as much. He was always so good-humored and all, and man, was he clever! I sometimes thought I actually ought to envy him more than anything, you know, because he was so damn intelligent and always learned things so quickly, but I just couldn't. We used to do everything together, study and go out and all that..."

Troyen's voice was so quiet and soft that Terry was soon holding his breath to catch every word, but he didn't want to pull the dark man out of his reverie by questions. At least not yet. He steeled himself against the emotions lapping against his mind, determined to listen more to what Troyen wanted to tell him than what his mind was saying; he knew he'd catch enough in any case.

"Studying with him was actually such a lot of fun, you know? We'd quiz each other and make sure we'd understood everything. Such a memory he had, it was quite incredible!"

Terry smothered a bitter smile at this.

"He used to love going for walks, and sailing, and surfing, and all that." Troyen nearly grinned. "We'd go to the beach on weekends and take loads of food with us, so we could stay there all day, if the weather wasn't too sunny of course. We had such fun..."

His voice trailed off. Terry waited patiently.

"He was really brilliant, study-wise," the young man went on, after just sitting and fingering his momentarily forgotten can of beer for a long while. "But that's not why I miss him. Although it's true that I haven't been performing too well after 每 more recently."

Terry nodded, well noticing the last-moment correction. Troyen looked at him from under his dark eyebrows and seemed to be seriously considering something. Finally he nodded to himself.

"You want to see?" he asked quietly.

"So you have more pictures of him?" Terry was curious about the 'loads' Troy had thought about earlier, and saw a ghost of a smile on the full mouth.

"Sure. I'm one of those people who never go anywhere without a camera," he chuckled dryly. "Wait, I'll show you."

He scrambled to the table, nearly dropped the can in the process, and picked up a datapad that looked like it'd been through a lot.

"They're here, all of them," he muttered while accessing the pictures with deft hands. "I was always filming, live and stills... he used to joke about that a lot. I had this tiny thing that I hid in a hat, and then I got some surprise footage, but then he guessed what it was, and... here!"

'Loads' of pictures hadn't been an exaggeration, even though Troyen only showed him selected shots. Terry had trouble keeping his emotions in check as they flipped through the images, captured moments of Salvador's 每 no, Benedict's 每 life on Tabaimo. On several occasions he was on the brink of tears, choking on the unfairness of it all. Ben was a happy, outgoing, playful, lively and slightly mischievous young man with an incredibly bright smile. The more Terry saw, the surer he was that Ben had had a crush on his friend. He was occasionally downright flirty, conscious enough of his good looks and their effect on Troyen who appeared alternately amused, confused and scandalized by his antics. Many of the pictures showing the two of them together revealed much closeness, and in more than one the look in Ben's eyes was so telling that Terry was busily swallowing tears.

Troyen didn't notice, though; his gaze didn't waver from the pictures, and Terry knew this wasn't the first time he was browsing them since Ben's disappearance, not by a long shot. Troyen knew each picture, commented on when and where it had been taken, what they had been doing there, what they had talked about...

Terry wasn't ashamed to have his 'tentacles' out to catch signs of an intimate relationship 每 after all he was here on reconnaissance 每 but didn't pick up any. Affection and tenderness, yes, Troyen was extremely fond of his friend. Ben's blatant flirting with the camera and the person behind it, however, made him blush and hasten to explain it away, every time.

Terry nearly gulped a mouthful of lemonade straight into his windpipe when a live clip flashed in front of him and he saw himself... no, Salvador, or actually Benedict, sprawled comfortably in the very same blue armchair he was currently sitting in. It was surreal. The same room and the same chair, only from a slightly different angle, his golden-haired twin lazily lounging there and leering at the camera, head cocked.

"Ah-ha, shooting me again! Don't think you'll catch me unawares, Troy!" He stretched his arms and wiggled still lower in the chair so that the hem of his shirt climbed out of his trouser waistband to reveal a smooth stomach.

"I know you know I'm filming you!" came Troyen's voice from outside the picture. "And here is Ben who has, as usual, taken possession of the armchair and tries to trickle out of it, looking indecent as usual..."

"I'll show you indecent!" Ben promised ominously and turned his head so that he could direct a challenging, slanted look at the camera. He licked his lips, hands ghosting to his midriff, and began to unbutton his shirt while the other hand pushed the shirt out of the way and started to rub slow circles around his navel. "Mmmhh... here goes the first button..."

"Ben!" Troyen's voice rose in a warning but the blond clone just smirked and opened a second button. Terry glanced at the owner of the voice; his cheeks were burning but he stared transfixed at the image in front of him. Ben granted the camera a lingering smile, his right hand continued to unbutton the shirt while the left crept under the trouser waistband. "Ben, stop that! You wouldn't!"

"Are you s-u-r-e?" Ben singsonged and popped yet another button open. "Just watch me..."

"Ben, you're crazy!"

"You're the one behind the camera, Troy!" The blond giggled and began to ease the trousers lower on slim hips. "Who's going to stop first, hmm? Me doing this or you filming me doing this, Troy?"

The clip ended, leaving Terry to pant for a moment. Troyen stared blindly at the wall before burying his face in hands. For a while Terry was unsure whether he was crying or what, but then Troy looked up and glanced at him, still blushing heavily.

"I'm sorry..." he mumbled, embarrassed, and emptied his can of beer. "I shouldn't have... shown that. He was always playing games with me when I had the camera, you know. But that was just 每 so Ben."

"Obviously a fun person to be around," Terry said with a smile. "And yet you were absolutely furious at him when you thought you saw him back in the cafeteria."

Troyen's face darkened, he jumped up from the bed and went to snatch another can of beer from the fridge.

"I need to know about that, too," Terry prompted cautiously. "What happened?"

"He 每 he betrayed me!" Troyen nearly shouted, fist banging against the door of the fridge. "I hate him!"

Terry waited until his senses told him Troyen had regained some control over himself, and tried again. "Please tell me. It's very important. Why did you think that I was one of the Union people?"

"Well wasn't Ben then?" Troy snorted. "How else do you explain what happened?"

Terry cocked his head and merely looked at him, and Troyen's shoulders sagged.

"Right," he said throatily. "You don't know what happened. Well, whom does it harm any more even if I tell you? The harm's done already."

He trudged back to the bed and sat heavily down shoving his fingers through his short hair. "It's about Hal. My cousin, Haldor Leboyer. He's a truck driver, lives... lived here, in another part of the city. Nobody else but me knew that he occasionally did gigs for the rebels. Wolves of Ashanti, I bet you've heard about them?"

"Who hasn't?" Terry countered and Troyen nodded dully.

"Yeah, they're the most famous rebel group around. Anyway, I don't know too well about what exactly it was, but Hal used to handle some transports for them. I gathered it must be something from the factories here, parts or spares or the like, that they were somehow getting shipped to the Wolves. Hal did it rather regularly, I think."

"So nobody else knew but you, and Hal?" Terry asked. "What happened?"

"I was stupid enough to hint something to Ben," Troyen said ominously. "And then, some time later, Hal was arrested by the Union. I don't know what happened to him, but I haven't heard of him since."

"And you think Ben leaked the information to someone?"

"Who else could it have been?" Troyen snarled. "I was the only one who knew about it, and I know I didn't breathe a word about it to anyone else but Ben! I trusted him, for fuck's sake! Then cousin Hal is taken by the Union. I think that's too much of a coincidence. Don't you?"

"It sounds too well timed," Terry admitted. "What happened then?"

"I was of course furious," Troyen sighed. "I felt absolutely awful, I mean, to think that Hal was taken prisoner because I was an idiot and couldn't keep my mouth shut. It was my fault! I hated Ben for that!"

"Then you told him so, and the two of you had a big argument."

"Yeah. We had a godalmightly quarrel, I accused him of spilling the beans to somebody and he swore he hadn't said a word... of course I didn't believe him, and we fell out, big way."

Tell him that I didn't do it. Terry thought of Salvador's desperate words and sighed. So that was the lingering memory that haunted the distraught clone even after the mission had been supposedly wiped from his mind. Troy, his beloved friend whom he had to find, to tell him that Ben hadn't betrayed his trust.

A major quarrel between him and his best friend... big emotions involved... so the events Salvador still could remember traces of were things that had meant a lot to him emotionally. Was that why their imprint cut too deep to be fully erased by the lower-power wiping unit? Terry made a mental note to talk about this with Andr谷 and Rori as soon as he got the chance.

And the irony of it all was, of course, that Salvador was wrong. Only he didn't know it himself. No doubt Haldor Leboyer had been very small fry, but information of his involvement with the rebels, however minor in the grand scheme of things, had been a nice little extra to the more pertinent data extracted from Benedict's brain. The Union hadn't hesitated to take out even the little fish while proceeding to capture the bigger ones... an unexpected sidetrack but obviously something worth pursuing anyway.

"Soon after that Ben just disappeared," Troyen continued quietly. "I heard he had transferred to another university to go on with his studies. I didn't even bother to find out which one. I couldn't care less..."

Oh, but you did anyway, Terry thought. Only you were too hurt and too badly mauled by guilt to admit it to yourself until later. And that's why you've been doing less than well in your studies, having a hard time concentrating on anything, and drinking more than is good for you. You've missed him, and felt guilty because of that, and because of what happened to Hal.

"But why did you want to know all this?" Troyen asked suddenly, turning sharp dark eyes to Terry. "You still haven't told me a word about your part. Why are you here asking questions about Ben? You said he needs help?"

"I'm going to tell you," Terry said, "but right now I'm wondering where the hell I should start. You see, as I said earlier it's an awfully complicated thing and I don't know what I should tell you first."

"Well, first of all you might tell me what you meant by Ben being sort of alive," Troyen challenged. "Either one is alive or one isn't!"

"All right," Terry sighed. "How to put this now... the person you knew as Ben is alive, but strictly speaking he's not Ben any more."

Troyen stared at him, round-eyed. "What's that supposed to mean? Is he in a coma or something?"

"No. I guess I'll have to start from the basics, otherwise you won't get heads or tails out of what will come. Have you ever heard of the Union's cloning program?"

He launched into a long explanation about clones in general and T-clones in particular, their abilities, their missions, priming and wiping, guardians, the lot. Troyen listened at first in disbelieving silence, but when the pieces began to fall into place, he started asking questions. Lots of questions. Terry answered him as thoroughly as he could, and was gratified to feel how Troy's mind was finding peace and order as he got answers to questions that had been haunting him.

"That uncle of his!" Troyen exclaimed at some point. "He must've been that 'guardian' you were talking about!"

"Precisely," Terry said. "That supposed 'uncle' was indeed the guardian. David Romy."

"Yeah, that was his name." Troyen's nose wrinkled. "I never liked him, pompous bastard. And I know Ben was rather intimidated by him, too. I always used to tease him about their Sunday dinners, because Ben was so out of it on Mondays... asked what they actually drank there, or something, and why he always insisted on going anyway."

"What did he say?" Terry asked, curious.

"He looked frightened and said that oh, his uncle would be so upset, he had to go there!" Troyen laughed a little. "One weekend I played this trick on him, you know 每 we took a tent and food and everything, and went to Tengez Island to stay overnight. I'd agreed with the boatman that he wouldn't come to pick us up until Sunday evening. We had such good time that poor Ben totally forgot about Uncle's dinner! Then when we came back, Uncle David was waiting for us at his door!"

"Angry, I take it?"

"You bet! He was practically fuming, and I really hated to see how Ben shrunk when he saw him..." Troyen rubbed his hands on his thighs as if to expel a nasty memory. "He made Ben promise he'd come on Monday then. Is that when he did this, what was it, scanning?"

"That's right." Terry nodded. "And that's why Ben was unwell the next day, because scanning hurts and the guardian has to use a strong sedative before doing it."

"Ugh, disgusting..." Troyen frowned for a while. "Hey, wait. Let me see if I've understood everything so far. So Ben was really a T-clone, just like you. They made him into 'Ben' for a mission here, and that's how they also got to know about Hal and arrested him, even though he wasn't really the one they were after. And when Ben vanished, that was because he'd gathered all the necessary information about whoever the primary targets were?"

"Exactly."

"But how come you then know about me? If he's been wiped and all, then he shouldn't remember anything about Tabaimo? I still don't understand how I come into the picture!" Troyen stopped suddenly, eyes growing wide. "Oh no... I guess didn't fully understand it before... but..."

He swallowed with difficulty. "You mean Ben is gone? That there is just this 每 other person?"

"Yes," Terry said quietly. "The Ben you have shown me is gone. He still looks the same, but it is no more Benedict Duchamp."

Troyen buried his face in his hands with a muffled sob.

"No, it can't be! He was so 每 brilliant!" His voice was thick. "So clever, so much fun... all that can't be gone, you can't mean it!"

Terry let him cry until his breathing finally steadied and he wiped his face clumsily with a piece of tissue. He looked ashamed.

"Sorry. It's just so... unfair." He took a deep breath, bracing himself for what was to come. "All right. Tell me about who he is now. I want to know the rest."

Terry nodded and recounted what they knew of Salvador's brief life, starting from TerraFour and ending on Jainah. Troyen was attentiveness personified, and when it fully dawned on him that Terry was involved with the rebels, his whole countenance changed for good. Tears welled in his eyes once more when Terry, himself choking on words, told him about the picture Salvador cherished like his most valuable treasure.

"He's so lost," Terry said weakly. "His whole memory is in pieces, there are these few things that he feels are significant, and he's clinging to those. We've tried everything we could think of, but he's not making any progress. And we finally drew the conclusion that those idiots have messed him up with that experimental, substandard equipment of theirs, and that we need help. Your help, because somehow you seem to be the trigger that makes other things happen, too."

"But how can I possibly help him?" Troyen asked desperately. "What do you expect me to do, Terry?"

"First of all, you've already done something big," Terry said. "You've told me what happened while he was here, and that's vitally important. Perhaps you could give me a message, something to take along, and tell him that it's all right, that you forgive him... something like that."

Troyen slowly shook his head. "That feels like so little. So 每 insignificant. Do you really think that'd help him?"

"Troy, I came here hoping to get something," Terry reminded him. "I would be lying if I told you I didn't have high hopes, but I had to be realistic. For all I knew, you might've just as well tried to bash my nose in by way of greeting. We'd deduced that the two of you didn't exactly part as friends."

"You're a T-clone as well," Troyen said and tilted his head appraisingly. "Couldn't you have just taken whatever you wanted out of my head, and never even let me see you?"

"Not so easily," Terry smiled. "Contrary to what people tend to think when they first hear about our abilities, we can't go rummaging around in their heads just like that."

"Oh." Troyen thought about this for a while and then smiled faintly back. "I suppose that's a consolation."

"I can pick up feelings and surface thoughts and such without even trying," Terry supplied. "But getting anything very coherent or significant out of a person, and keeping the person unaware of the fact that something fishy is going on, is next to impossible."

He hesitated before saying almost timidly: "Troy, may I ask you about one more thing?"

"You'll ask anyway," Troyen said with a small grin. "Go ahead."

"All right... I have been wondering if the two of you were just friends, or was there something more?"

"Wha... what do you mean?" Troy panted, a blush creeping once more on his face.

"Were you lovers?"

"No!" Troyen jumped on his feet and shook his head furiously. "No we weren't! Where 每 how 每 why do you even ask something like that? We're both men! Of course not!"

"Sorry." Terry watched as the dark young man wandered restlessly around the room, picking up things with trembling hands, only to put them back a moment later. "On Jainah, among many other planets, it's a perfectly normal thing for two men, or two women, to be lovers. Sorry if I shocked you."

"But why do you ask me about 每 such a thing?" Troyen insisted. Terry shrugged.

"The way Salvador treats your picture... how he used to sleep next to Juri at night and call him 'Troy' when he woke up... all those stills and live clips you showed. There's so much affection between you, it's so clear. I just wanted to know, to make sure I fully understand and won't be making any awful mistakes."

Troyen nodded and hung his head, avoiding Terry's eyes.

"I... had this feeling that Ben... that he l-liked me very much," he whispered. "He always wanted to be close, sit right next to me and all that... Hal sometimes asked me if he was, you know, a 'sissy'..."

Terry blinked at the clear memory that accompanied the thought, and his jaw clenched in response. "So your cousin Hal disliked guys who were that way," he mimicked before thinking, but obviously Troyen was too used to the euphemistic expression to accuse Terry of prying into his mind.

"Yeah, he really didn't like them. Hal was always a little suspicious about Ben because of the way he behaved, and of course Ben would always just step it up when Hal was around!"

Troyen rolled his eyes, still embarrassed at the memory, and Terry made a mental note that cousin Haldor didn't sound like a person who'd feel much at home on Jainah. He had a strong suspicion that if it hadn't been for the sobering effect Haldor Leboyer seemed to have on his cousin, the relationship between Troyen and Benedict might've been much more intimate, the slightly stiff and well-behaved atmosphere of Tabaimo notwithstanding.

He could also feel that Troyen was almost ready to regret that it hadn't happened anyway.

"Would you like to be alone?" he asked gently. Troyen nodded, still staring at a spot on the floor.

"Yeah... if you don't mind."

"Sure I don't." Terry pushed himself up from the comfortable chair, picked Troy's comm from the table and pressed it to his own for a moment. A flash of green showed that contact information had been exchanged, and he pocketed his own comm again. "Look, I'm staying in a hotel, not far from the University. Call me, please. And think about that message."

"I promise."

Terry walked out of the apartment, head still reeling and so deep in thought that the quiet click of the closing door behind him made him start.

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