The Parallel Man Read Online Free

it was as if you were looking through a hole in the wall into the room again, but from a different angle. At first the sudden shifts made me dizzy, but gradually I began to see a sort of sense to the changing images; it was as if you saw through the eyes of someone in the room with the women, who now went closer to them, now stepped away, now changed his position with respect to them.
    The women continued to talk, and a serf with the same odd blue skullcap that the serf in my room wore brought them cups of some beverage, then left the room. Gradually their talk began to make some sense to me. They were speaking about a man named John who went away on some sort of journey; they spoke of him as “flitting.” One of the women was John’s wife or lover; she was worried because in John’s absence she had “gone into red.” This seemed somehow connected with the circle of color on her wrist, which was red instead of being green like mine and like the other woman’s. The other woman seemed sure that John would not be angry for a while after he returned. They began to speak of love and I grew weary of them; I touched the circle on the bed again and the oval showed only a swirl of colors again.
    I lay back on the bed trying to make; some sense of what I had seen. Enchanters, I knew, could call up visions, indeed my tutor, Mortifer, had called up visions for me as part of my education. But I was no enchanter and I had called up these visions by merely touching a circle drawn on my bed. indeed, even the serf had touched one of the circles to get my food and another to dispose of my soiled tunic. Some of these enchantments seemed to work for anyone, even a serf. Others seemed to need the glittering objects which Molly and the other woman wore at their belts.
    I felt that I knew enough to escape from this room and begin my search for Delora, but I would rather do so without raising an alarm. Best go soon before day came and brought more people to deal with. . . .
    I cursed as a white rectangle appeared on the wall and became a door. Had I left it too late? But what came through the door was another blue-capped serf; he turned to the one already in the room and said, “Report to Central and wait for orders.”
    The serf addressed shook his blue-capped head obstinately. “Orders to stay here,” he said.
    The new serf said in a low voice, “Override Argent. Report to Central.” The other serf slouched out the door, which vanished as before. I tensed my muscles; might as well hit this new jailer before he got fully oriented.
    He was pulling something from the waist of his gray garment and stepping toward me with strangely unserflike quickness and alertness when I launched myself at him. His hand came up holding something and there was a purple flash, then my shoulder hit him in the midrift, and he went over backwards, his head hitting the floor with a satisfying thunk. I was on top of him in an instant, my hands poised to strike, but there was no mistaking the flaccid sprawl of his limbs; that rap of his head on the floor had knocked him out.
    Something about his head was odd; surely I hadn’t cracked his skull? No, it was the blue cap, slightly askew. I pulled it off, a thin cap of metal, curiously flexible. Under the cap was short-cut hair and the face, on closer examination, was not the face of a serf. Whoever this man was, he had been masquerading. What he could do, I could do. I bent over his body, trying to solve the fastenings on his gray garment. These were simple enough; a touch at a circle on the collar and the garment opened down the front and I was able to peel it off of him. The stuff it was made of stretched easily and I was able to draw it onto my body without trouble. Another touch at the circle on the collar and the garment closed itself again.
    The man wore underlinen not unlike the tunic I wore and I began to wonder if I could pass his unconscious body off as mine for a while. Something had rolled away when I