He gasped. “Your villa has been prepared for you,” Aristegui had told him at the airport. Guest of the nation, yes. But Mondschein hadn’t thought to interpret Aristegui’s words literally. They’d be giving him a villa, some villa. But the handsome two-story building with the white facade and the red tile roof in front of which the limousine had halted was in fact his villa, the actual and literal and much-beloved one he had lived in long ago, until the night when the swarthy little frog-faced officer of the Guardia had come to him to tell him that he was expelled from the country. He had had to leave everything behind then, his books, his collection of ancient scientific instruments, his pre-Columbian ceramics, his rack of Italian-made suits and fine vicuna coats, his pipes, his cello, his family albums, his greenhouse full of orchids, even his dogs. One small suitcase was all they had let him take with him on the morning flight to Madrid, and from that day on he had never permitted himself to acquire possessions, but had lived in a simple way, staying easily within the very modest allowance that the Maximum Leader in his great kindness sent him each month wherever he might be. And now they had given him back his actual villa. Mondschein wondered who had been evicted, on how much notice and for what trumped-up cause, to make this building available to him again after all this time.
All that he had wanted, certainly all that he had expected, was some ordinary little flat in the center of the city. The thought of returning to the old villa sickened him. There would be too many ghosts roaming in it. For the first time he wondered whether his impulsive decision to accept Alvarado’s astonishing invitation to return to the country had been a mistake.
“You recognize this house?” Aristegui asked. “You are surprised, are you not? You are amazed with joy?”
They had made no attempt to restore his lost possessions or to undo the changes that had come to the house since he had lived there. Perhaps such a refinement of cruelty was beyond the Maximum Leader’s imagination, or, more probably, no one had any recollection of what had become of his things after so many years. It was just as well. He had long since managed to put his collections of antiquities out of his mind and he had no interest in playing the cello any more, or in smoking pipes. The villa now was furnished in standard upper-class Peruvian-style comfort of the early years of the century, everything very safe, very unexceptionable, very familiar, very dull. He was provided with a staff of four, a housekeeper, a cook, a driver, a gardener. Wandering through the airy rambling house, he felt less pain than he had anticipated. His spirit was long gone from it; it was just a house. There were caged parrots in the garden and a white-and-gray cat was slinking about outside as if it belonged there; perhaps it was the cat of the former resident and had found its way back in the night.
He bathed and rested and had a light lunch. In the afternoon the driver came to him and said, “May I take you to the Palace of Government now, Senor Dr. Mondschein? The Minister is eager.” The driver must be a Guardia man also, Mondschein realized. But that was all right. All of it was all right, whatever they did now.
The Palace of Government hadn’t been finished in Mondschein’s time. It was a huge sprawling thing made of blocks of black stone, fitted together dry-wall fashion to give it a massive pseudo-Inca look, and it was big enough to have housed the entire bureaucracy of the Roman Empire at its peak. Relays of functionaries, some in Guardia uniform, some not, led him through gloomy high-vaulted corridors, across walled courtyards, and up grand and ponderous stone staircases until at last an officious florid-faced aide-de-camp conducted him into the wing that was the domain of the Ministry of Scientific Development. Here he passed through a procession of outer offices and finally was admitted to a brightly lit reception hall lined with somber portraits in oils. He recognized Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci and guessed that the others were Aristotle, Darwin, Galileo, perhaps Isaac Newton. And in the place of honor, of course, a grand representation of the Maximum Leader himself, looking down with brooding intensity.
“His Excellency the Minister,” said the florid aide-de-camp, waving him into an office paneled with dark exotic woods at the far end of the reception hall. A tall man in an ornately brocaded costume worthy of a bullfighter rose from a glistening desk to greet him. And unexpectedly Mondschein found himself staring yet again at the unforgettable face of Diego Alvarado.
One of the clones, Mondschein thought. It had to be.
All the same it felt like being clubbed in the teeth. The Minister of Scientific Development had Alvarado’s hard icy blue eyes, his thin lips, his broad brow, his jutting cleft chin. His smile was Alvarado’s cold smile, his teeth were Alvarado’s perfect glistening teeth. He had the coarse curling bangs—graying now—that gave the Maximum Leader the look of a youthful indomitable Caesar. His lanky body was lean and gaunt, a dancer’s body, and his movements were a dancer’s movements, graceful and precise. Seeing him awoke long-forgotten terrors in Mondschein. And yet he knew that this must be one of the clones. After that first shock of recognition, something told Mondschein subliminally that he was looking at an example of his own fine handiwork.
“President Alvarado asks me to convey his warmest greetings,” the clone said. It was Alvarado’s voice, cool and dry. “He will welcome you personally when his schedule permits, but he wishes you to know that he is honored in the deepest way by your decision to accept his hospitality.”
The aging had worked very well, Mondschein thought. Alvarado would be about seventy now, still vigorous, still in his prime. There were lines on this man’s face in the right places, changes in the lines of his cheekbones and jaw, exactly as should have happened in twenty-five years.
“It wasn’t any decision at all,” Mondschein said. He tried to sound casual. “I was ready and eager to come back. Your homeland, your native soil, the place where your ancestors lived and died for three hundred years—as you get older you realize that nothing can ever take its place.”
“I quite understand,” said the clone.
Do you? Mondschein wondered. Your only ancestor is a scrap of cellular material. You were born in a tissue-culture vat. And yet you quite understand.
I made you, Mondschein thought. I made you.
He said, “Of course the invitation to return came as an immense surprise.”
“Yes. No doubt it did. But the Maximum Leader is a man of great compassion. He felt you had suffered in exile long enough. One day he said, We have done a great injustice to that man, and now it must be remedied. So long as Rafael Mondschein y Gonzalez dwells in foreign lands, our soul can never rest. And so the word went forth to you that all is forgiven, that you were pardoned.”
“Only a man of true greatness could have done such a thing,” said Mondschein.
“Indeed. Indeed.”
Mondschein’s crime had been the crime of overachievement. He had built Alvarado’s cloning laboratories to such a level of technical skill that they were the envy of all the world; and when eventually the anti-cloning zealots in North America and Europe had grown so strident that there was talk of trade sanctions and the laboratories had to be shut down, Mondschein had become the scapegoat. Alvarado had proposed to find him guilty of creating vile unnatural abominations, but Mondschein had not been willing to let them hang such an absurdity around his neck, and in the end he had allowed them to manufacture supposed embezzlements in his name instead. In return for a waiver of trial he accepted exile for life. Of course the laboratories had reopened after a while, this time secretly and illicitly, and before long ten or eleven other countries had started to turn out A and even AA Class clones also and the industry had become too important to the world economy to allow zealotry to interfere with it any longer; but Mondschein remained overseas, rotting in oblivion, purposelessly wandering like a wraith from Madrid to Prague, from Prague to Stockholm, from Stockholm to Marseilles. And now at last the Maximum Leader in his great compassion had relented.