The Parallel Man by Richard Purtill Read Free Book Online

I said. “The less you ask me the less I’ll have to do either.” Benton laughed and shrugged, but there was admiration in his eyes; whatever explanation he was imagining for my mysterious activities was evidently creditable to me. I was quite pleased with myself; at one stroke I had cut away the immense complication of pretending to be a wealthy man of whose real life I knew nothing. I might still betray myself by my ignorance in conversation with these folk, but I did not have to keep up the character of Fenric.
    As it turned out, I need not have worried. Young Benton was an enthusiast of hunting and was glad to talk of nothing else. For a knight of Thorn, hunting is part of the yearly round; one of the things that is done in season, for food and to exercise the skills of hand and eye that a knight needs. As the prince, I had been expected to take the lead in hunting as well as in war, and older and more experienced men had quietly made sure that I knew my business. I had heard plenty of hunting stories, for that was one of their ways of teaching, and I had myself taken most of the kinds of birds and beasts that are counted worth hunting: deer and wild pigs for the table, of course, but also beasts of the warren; wolves, foxes and wildcats, badgers, martens and otter, even squirrels and hares. And, of course, I had hawked for hares and for game birds.
    There is a skill to taking each of these beasts, and my teachers would not have counted me a hunter if I had not known each of these skills. Benton seemed to know little of such skills, except for the most elementary sort of tracking; his talk was all of hunts in which he had put his life at risk against large and dangerous beasts, including many whose nature I could only guess at from details he let drop in the telling. Of course a hunter must have courage; a stag may turn at bay and boars are notoriously dangerous and unpredictable. But battle, not the chase, is the place to demonstrate bravery; skill is what counts in the hunt.
    In fact, I was growing a little weary of Benton’s stories, for an armed and skillful man is in little real danger from a beast. But then he said something which changed my mind. Looking around the richly furnished room where we sat on cushioned chairs while our magical craft flew high in the air, Benton said hesitantly, “Most of my friends think I’m a bit of a fool to spend so much time and credit on hunting, you know. But it seems more . . . more real than most things a man can do these days. Just your own skill and a few primitive weapons against, well, against Nature. No machines to do it for you, to get between you and the thing you’re doing.”
    Remembering the giant towers, the broad sterile streets with their few trees for show, thinking of weapons which made a man unconscious with the pressure of a finger, I began to realize that the hunt would have a value for these enchanters which a man of Thorn could scarcely understand. If they went to war it would probably be with strange wizardries which would leave little room for strength or bravery. I smiled at Benton and said, “You’ll be glad enough of a spear between you and the boar; a full-grown tusker can rip a man from knee to breast and lay him stark dead with one stroke. Have these beasts been hunted at all yet?”
    Benton shook his head. “Not these; they’re just out of the tanks not long ago. But we managed to salvage some memory chains from the beast in the museum exhibit. Don’t know if you’ve followed the techniques they’re using these days for memory recovery from dead cells. They reckon that by what they call mix and blend techniques they can create quite a good facsimile of the original memory, with some artificial memories mixed in. Of course they’d only really know if they tried it on humans, and the Citizens’ Liberties Union would be after them if they tried that. Not to say it hasn’t been done in secret, of course.”
    “Ran across a man named