There had been clues. Too subtle for the likes of me, but somebody smarter might have caught on ages ago.

Beta — the name implied “number two” or a second version. Ritu’s middle name was Lizabetha. And in mythology, Maharal — the name her father chose to adopt before she was born — had been a title given to the greatest late medieval maker of golems … while another reverent appellation for one with that skill was Betalel or Betzalel.

And so it went, on and on. The sort of childish puzzle-hints that made you groan, both over your own stupidity and the comic book immaturity of it all.

Another reason I never caught on? Maybe because I’m old-fashioned at heart. The gender difference between lovely-reserved Ritu and the prodigally flamboyant Beta shouldn’t have fooled a worldly fellow like me, who’s seen plenty of ostentatious cross-roxing in his time. The fact that it did trick me proves what a conservative old fart I really am, dammit. Unwarranted assumptions are the bane of any private eye.

I still had trouble absorbing this, trying desperately to recall what I’ve learned over the years about Multiple Personality Disorder, or MPD.

It’s not an either-or thing. Most people experience the fluid overlap of amorphous subselves from time to time, debating or contesting internally when awkward decisions have to be made — imagining inner dialogues till the conflict is resolved. They do this without engendering any lasting fracture or disturbing the illusion of a single, unified identity. At the opposite extreme are those with mental schisms that are rigid, adamant, and even self-hateful, erecting permanent personas who hold opposing values, voices, and names, battling each other over control.

You seldom ran across truly blatant examples back in pre-kilning days, outside of a few famous case studies and some movie exaggerations, because one body and brain don’t offer enough room! Confined to a single cranium, one dominant character-facade usually held fierce command. If others lurked — products of trauma perhaps, or neural injury — they’d be reduced to waging guerrilla wars of spite or life sabotage from below.

Dittoing changed all that. Though MPD is still rare, I’ve seen imprinting unleash the unexpected from time to time. Some peculiarity that lay dormant or suppressed in the original would burst forth in a duplicate, unleashed to manifest in ditto form.

But never anything as extreme as this Ritu/Beta flipflop! One in which the original person — a seemingly competent professional — somehow remained unaware of the very existence of her alter ego, even though it hijacked nearly every ditto that she made.

As a mere criminalist, I’m no expert psych-diagnostician. Guessing, I pondered a possible link to Yang-Pimintel disease. Possibly a variant of Smersh-Foxleitner, or a rare and dangerous variety of Moral Orthogonality syndrome. Frightening stuff! Especially since a few of these disorders show significant association with the worst kind of genius. The persuasively self-deceptive kind, fashioning brilliantly amoral rationalizations for any crime.

History shows that some of these psychopathologies have been heritable, passing from one generation to the next. It could explain why I’ve been outclassed from the very start.

Much of this raced through my mind a few seconds after Ritu obliquely revealed the truth through her parable of the chrysalis. I wanted to stand and stare, to blink in a fugue of dismayed realization, stammering incoherent questions — in other words, all the time-honored ways that folks react to extreme surprise. But there wasn’t time to do any of that, only to resume our hurried march. What choice did we have, with one platoon of Betas in front of us, fighting their ahead way through the tunnel, and a contingent of reinforcements pressing close behind?

I finally understood why the two groups of Beta-drones had left us alone so far, allowing the gap around us to remain intact. Ritu — their archie and reproducer — was now safely pinned right where they wanted, available in case more dittos had to be made. Till then, they had no reason to harass her any further. Indeed, they would be fiercely devoted to protecting her physical welfare.

I tried frantically to make sense of this.

Ritu always had the power to destroy Beta, by staying off copying machines! If the butterfly refused to lay any more eggs, there’d soon be no more chomping caterpillars.

To protect against that, paranoid Beta would have stashed extra frozen copies all over town. I met one of them behind the Teller Building, after Tuesday’s raid, when it spoke about someone “taking over my operations …” Did one of those backup copies follow us here to force Ritu onto an imprinter?

Why, in all the time since we set out on Tuesday night, did Ritu never warn me about this!

All right, at one point she mentioned that her dittos were “unreliable,” that most of them went missing, unaccountably. Even the fraction who loyally performed their assigned chores only brought home partial memories, because — I now knew — the missing experiences were seized and stored away by the proto-Beta personality, hiding in her brain. From Ritu’s point of view, dittoing must have seemed a horribly inefficient and unsatisfying process, even before she learned the truth about Beta.

In that case, I wondered, why do it at all?

Rationalizations. People are talented at coming up with reasons to keep doing stupid things. Perhaps she worried about the modern bigotry toward those who cannot ditto — the unkind implication that such folks are barren, with no soul to copy.

Or she might have kept imprinting because an official of Universal Kilns has to send out duplicates, even if it takes four tries to make one that goes where it’s told. Certainly she could afford the cost.

Maybe she needed desperately to pretend she was like everybody else.

I guessed one more reason. A compulsion from below. Inner pressure that could only be satisfied by laying between the soul-probes, feeling them palp and massage, pressing her Standing Wave sensually into wet clay. Something like an addiction, along with the denial blindness to addiction that has always plagued junkies, of every kind.

No wonder it took years for her to admit her problem aloud.

I had been wondering how Beta managed to track us across open desert, then follow us past every security screen into a buried national security redoubt. The answer hit me. He did nothing of the sort! Beta simply lay quiescent inside Ritu, building pressure within her till the strain grew intolerable. At which point she slipped away from me and Corporal Chen, rushing to one of the giant military autokilns we had seen. Loathing herself, like any addict giving in to a foul habit, she laid herself down, seeking relief between the floating tetragramatron tendrils, surrendering to her insistent, stronger half — a master thief and desperate character, the sort of devil-may-care who dared all and defied every authority of the lawful outer world.

No wonder I was never able to connect Beta to a real person! Oh, the endless hours I spent in ebony form, laboriously noting and encoding fragments of Beta’s speech and other personality quirks, sieving the Net in search of someone who used similar patterns of phrasing, syntax, and emphasis — the sort of arduous slog that lets a plodding detective track down even the shrewdest arch criminal, given enough time.

Only all that work was wasted in this case. Because the villain had a perfect hiding place, and Ritu spoke with a voice-manner that was nothing at all like Beta’s.