“You’re not like that,” Jillan said. HisJillan, the older one. “That isn’t why I married you.”

He looked at her, smiled sadly at loyalty reflected in both her versions. “But I am,” he said. “That’s what you got, Jillan-love. A bad man who’s told you the truth for once, because he had to tell it to himself.” He gathered himself to his feet and walked off from them, their eyes. Looked back again, having remembered suffering beside Jillan’s and his own. “Kepta said a lot would rest on me; and knowing me,” he said to Rafe Three, “Kepta judged I needed help. Maybe that’s why you’re here. I don’t know. You’re stronger than I am. I need you.” And having admitted that: “I’m full of shadow-spots. He said you had only one secret. I won’t ask you what that is.”

“I have a thousand,” said Rafe Three in uncomfortable charity. “Doesn’t any human born?”

“You have one,” Paul said.

“Damn that thing!” Jillan cried, leaping to her feet. “It’s got no bloody right to mess with us!”

“And you,” Paul said, staring at her directly, “ useyours.”

Her eyes fixed on him in sudden, white-edged shock. “He told you? He told you that?”

“Not what it was. Just how you work.”

“What does it know about humanity?”

He listened to that. Secrets wielded like a shield, deflecting questions that could go through to the heart. He nodded, quite calm about it, armored in the truth. “Trust isn’t the way you work. You never trusted me with the truth. Maybe I couldn’t have stood it. You always protected me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not making sense, Paul.”

“You are. Making sense, I mean. To me. Don’t change. I love you. Love me back. That’s all I want. Does it cost too much?”

“No,” she said, not understanding him. She would not, he thought, understand him; or believe truth when she heard it, though she was wise in other ways. And in the wickedness of his heart he found that he was in one way stronger, and wiser, and for once he had something to give away.

He smiled at her. Watched both her versions frown.

“Rafe,” he said, looking back at the Original. “I figure when the stuff starts to go, hard, you know?—we’ll be separate. Could be any minute. Maybe when we figure something essential Kepta wants he’ll snatch us out of here. I want you to know—you’re brother, father, mother to me. She,my real family—they made her mother in a lab; she and gran did the best they could with me. Ma wasn’t any rebel like I told you. They shot her by accident. She just got in the way. That was the way she was. Like gran. Wrong place. Wrong time. That’s all.”

“Guessed she wasn’t any rebel,” Rafe said in the faintest, most diffident of voices. “They gave you that station share. They never would have, if she’d been on the rebel side. However young you were.”

He nodded, head up, discovering the nakedness he had always suspected with them. “Couldn’t impress you, could l?”

“Didn’t have to,” Rafe said. “Not that way. You’re family, Paul.”

“Family,” he said back. “Yes, you are. All the love and hate and everything that is. Everything that holds me together. I want you to know that.”

He felt a hand slide past the hollow of his arm, his own Jillan’s slim, smooth touch; her head pressed against him.

And beside the counter, the other two, the new-made set, not touching, nonparticipant and already alive, because they had chosen not to touch, because they had not consented to what he felt. He put his arm about his Jillan. At last his doppelganger did, for whatever his own thoughts were—put his about the other Jillan, who drew a deep, insubstantial breath for hers.

“It said,” said that other Jillan, “that twoof you went wrong.

“One of me,” said Rafe.

“Or me,” said Rafe Two, moving finally, to sit on the counter edge. “We don’t really know which one.”

“Does it make a difference?” Rafe one asked

“As to how far off it is,” said Rafe Two, “as to how it adapts to the dark—it might.”

The Original shook his head. “No. If it came from as early as I think it might—no difference, except in what it’s been through.”

“Isn’t that always the difference?” Paul asked, discovering this in himself. “Events change us. Isn’t that why we all exist? I’m not that other Paul. He’s not me. We’re all of us—very real.”

“I feel that way,” Rafe Three said with a small, desperate laugh. “I feelalive.” And looking distractedly at Jillan: “You said that once.”

So <> had made <>’s move. </> was not impressed.

“Mistake,” </> said, and unleashed the entity </> had made, Paul-Rafe, while </> stalked larger quarry.

“See,” <^> wailed, knowing this, skipping along at <>’s side as they proceeded elsewhere in the ship. “<> have lost.”

“Not yet,” <> said.

<^> remained. Puzzled; and angry. And frightened, that foremost, as <> and <^> built barriers.

“This is retreat,” <^> said.

“Maneuver,” said <>.

“It’s late for that,” said <^>.

“Everything is late,” <> said.

“<>,” <> heard, a pulse that made <> wince. </> had gathered strength. “<> , </> am waiting for <> to cross the line.”

Meanwhile, Paul One had moved, slipping through the corridors. = = = = went at Paul One’s side, in all = = = =’s segments. Some of them shrieked in protest, but they all went, having no choice in this new alignment.

There was dark in the side-corridors of Fargone docks, the kind of deep twilight of betweentimes, between main and alterday, and someone stalked. Rafe ran, in starkest terror.

“Hey, miner-brat,” security yelled and he ought to have turned and faced the man, but he had no pass to be across the lines at this hour, a miner in spacer territory.

He rounded a corner, slid in among shipping canisters awaiting the mover to pick them up. Their shadows passed and his heart crashed against his ribs in regular, aching pulses.

They searched. If they caught him they hauled him in for questions; questions led to Welfare, and Welfare to assigned jobs. Forever.

“Please,” they would ask of spacers, shyly on the docks, asked them daily, nightly, in the shadows of twilight hours, “sir, got a fetch-carry? Just a chit or two?”

Most had no job for them. Some trusted Jillan but not him. Docksiders stole. Now and again one gave him a message to run—payment at the other end. Sometimes he was cheated. Once a white-haired woman offered him money and a bed and he took the key she offered and went to that sleepover, humiliated when he discovered what she had not wanted at all. Just charity, for a starving kid trying to stay off Station Welfare lists.

He was humiliated more that he had been willing to sell himself, for what she gave away.

And he did not tell Jillan about that night. He did not tell it even to Paul.

“The time has come,” <> said, and made two simulacra. “Wear this,” <> said to <^> of Jillan-shape. “<^>’ll find things in common with her.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Paul said to Rafe’s question. “I don’t—”

And there were two more of them: a fourth Rafe; a third Jillan standing there, in front of the EVA-pod that reflected them and the hall askew in its warped faceplate.

A pair of them, with that deep-eyed stare. There was horror in newcomer-Jillan’s eyes.

“Kepta,” Paul said, guessing.

And: “Kepta,” said Rafe, getting to his feet as the rest of them had, “dammit, let Jillan be!”

“Call him Marandu,” Kepta said of the anxious Jillan-shape beside him. “That was something like his name. Hedoesn’t quite describe him. But shedoesn’t do it either.”