A Borrowed Man Read Online Free PDF

steal.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Colette said. “I never asked.”
    â€œDid they send you the inventory?”
    She nodded. “Now you’ll ask if there was anything missing. There wasn’t. Or if there was, it was something I didn’t know about. Now tell me, please. What do you think we should do?”
    I know that nobody who reads this is going to believe it; but right then was the first time I really and truly understood myself, what I was and what had been done to me, and how unreal all of it had been. I was not the man I thought I was, the one whose name I used—whose name I still use right now, for that matter. I was somebody else, a kid who had been grown from that guy’s DNA and loaded up with his memories, phony memories of things that had never happened to me and never could happen to me. “Implanted” was what they said; but all it really meant was that years and years of dead stuff had been read into me while I lay in a sort of coma.
    I was a kid who had no real memories of his own except the library, dumb memories of sitting on my shelf until the library closed, of moving around a little then, running up and down the stairs, doing push-ups, arm wrestling, eating and talking over dinner with other twenty-first-century people who were just as phony as I was. Of thinking and thinking about Arabella and the day they would discover her, clone her the way I had been cloned, and shelve her in Poetry …
    One by one across the desert
    Until our boots grow too heavy with
    The sands of time.
    I carried the memories of ten thousand decisions big and small, but I had never made a real one. Sitting there, holding—sometimes—Colette’s hand, I knew I did not even know what intercourse was really like. I had touched the hands of a few women. Nothing more than that! Now I kept smelling Colette’s perfume, her perfume and the freshness of the cold water our feet splashed. Lovely, flowing water. Clear, cold water that could never, ever, wash away the sands.
    Not that I had accumulated a lot, or that they were apt to fill my boots really soon. We are bound to last a long time, we library people. That is a joke we make, and I have never understood why so many of us laugh at it.
    I had never had a real childhood.
    â€œWhat should we do, Mr. Smithe?” Colette repeated.
    I wanted to tell her I did not know, but the words stuck in my throat.

 
    3
    W HAT W E D ID
    â€œHonestly,” Colette said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”
    I sighed, hating to leave the water and the grass, scared half to death to end the moment. “Surely that’s obvious.”
    â€œNot to me.” She sounded sincere. “Oh, I’m so glad I checked you out!”
    â€œWe talk to the expert who opened the safe for your brother. But first”—inside I was jumping up and down at having thought of it—“you tell me the other reason you’re so certain Murder on Mars is valuable.” I had laid it down on the bank beside me. When Colette just sat there without saying anything, I picked it up, riffled the pages, and handed it back to her.
    She took it, looking thoughtful. “I could throw it in this creek, couldn’t I? Doing that now might save a lot of trouble.”
    â€œSuppose they captured you, tortured you? Do they know you have it? They’d never believe you’d thrown it away.”
    â€œI suppose you’re right. As for their knowing I’ve got it, perhaps they do—or they may just think it’s likely. They must have known somehow that my brother had it, but he didn’t have it when somebody murdered him. They must have thought he had it on his person then—in a pocket or in his traveling bag. But of course it wasn’t there; he’d left it with me. Why do you want to talk to the man who opened the safe?”
    I took a deep breath, really sucking in the air. This was chancy and I