‘You have failed to find him?’
He had to fight to control his voice. Being face to face with three of himself was still a powerful shock. The replicas shook their heads.
‘He has obviously gone to ground in the mist.’
‘It is the logical answer.’
‘Should we spread our search?’
Jeb Stuart Ho took a chance.
‘We could return to the ziggurat, and resume our search at daybreak. Our task would be made easy if we had horsemen to act as beaters.’
None of the three seemed to find anything wrong with his suggestion. Jeb Stuart Ho knew it was sound. He also knew that the replicas’ thought patterns were exactly like his. If they went back to the ziggurat they would almost certainly report to A.A. Catto. That would give him the chance to kill her. He looked around for comment on his suggestion.
‘We should wait for the other two to find us. Then we can decide.’
‘One of them may already have completed the task.’
Ho nodded.
‘That is possible.’
Another replica appeared out of the mist.
‘Have you found Ho?’
The replica shook his head.
‘He must have moved further up the mountain.’
‘We were debating whether to return to the ziggurat or spread the search.’
‘We decided to wait until we were all assembled.’
The newcomer nodded.
‘There is only one of us to come.’
They stood in silence. The wait, however, wasn’t all that long. After only a few minutes, the sixth Ho replica appeared out of the mist. He was dragging a black-clad body behind him. Jeb Stuart Ho’s stomach turned over. He had been counting on the Ho replicas not finding the body. From now on, he would have to improvise. He quickly made the first move.
‘You’ve killed him.’
The replica shook his head.
‘I didn’t kill him. I just found the body.’
‘Then who did kill him?’
The replicas all looked at each other. Jeb Stuart Ho knew that they were all thinking in the same way, and that they’d quickly come to the same conclusion.
‘Nobody here admits to killing him?’
‘How did he die?’
‘He was killed by a single sword thrust.’
‘If none of us claims to have killed him, perhaps he committed suicide.’
‘That seems unlikely.’
‘We must assume that he is one of us, and not the subject. He must have been killed by Ho.’
‘Then one of the six of us is Ho.’
The six men looked carefully at each other. Jeb Stuart Ho voiced what they were all thinking.
‘We have no way of telling which of us is the subject.’
‘We cannot now return to the ziggurat under any circumstances. If we did that, it would give the one which is Ho the ideal opportunity to complete his own task and kill A.A. Catto. We cannot take that risk.’
‘So what is the answer to our problem?’
The answer came to Jeb Stuart Ho in an ugly flash. The six men were standing in a rough circle. The man standing opposite Ho put it into words.
‘The only effective way in which we can be certain to discharge our task is to …’
He hesitated. The others joined in with his final words.
‘… destroy each other.’
As the words were spoken there was a flurry of movement. Jeb Stuart Ho made his last possible move. He threw himself flat on the ground. Simultaneously there was a crash of gunfire. He looked up, surprised to be still alive. Four of the replicas lay dead. The man standing opposite him, however, was slowly getting to his feet. Jeb Stuart Ho sprang up, ‘We have both survived.’
‘We both decided to duck instead of fire.’
The two men faced each other. Their hands hovered over their holstered guns.
‘Why is it we didn’t think like the others?’
‘There is bound to be some variation in our thinking.’
‘That’s true.’
The replica looked hard at Ho.
‘The probability is that one of us is the subject. One of us is Ho.’
Ho watched the replica’s gun hand carefully. It was uncanny, facing and trying to outwit himself. He wasn’t even sure if it was possible.
‘It could be that neither of us is Ho.’
‘Less probable, though.’
‘Is it?’
The replica nodded.
‘The majority would wipe each other out, as we have seen. The subject would seek to preserve himself, if at all possible, in order to complete his task.’
Ho anticipated the next proposition.
‘One of the six might realize this and also attempt to preserve himself to prevent the subject escaping in this way.’
Ho smiled grimly.
‘Then you are the subject.’
‘I know I am not the subject.’
Their hands moved to their guns almost as one. The two .90 magnums exploded together. Jeb Stuart Ho felt the big bullet rip into him. The replica spun round and fell face downwards. Ho tottered backwards, swayed for a few moments, and crumpled to the ground.
***
A.A. Catto was celebrating. There had been an unbearable tension after gunfire had been heard at the ziggurat. A party of horsemen had been sent out to investigate. To Billy and the others, waiting for the horsemen to return was like being on the rack. Before the gunfire had been reported things had been difficult, but A.A. Catto had been preoccupied with ordering up dozens more Ho replicas and watching them troop out of the receiver.
Once the horsemen had been dispatched, she had returned to the throne, and sat drumming her nails on one of the arms. Billy knew that if they’d returned with an adverse report, A.A. Catto would undoubtedly have him, Reave and the Minstrel Boy killed. The Wanderer had wisely vanished.
The news had been good, however. The horsemen had found seven black-clad bodies on the hillside. Jeb Stuart Ho was dead. A.A. Catto was off the hook. She hugged Nancy, and the party began.
It was the strangest celebration Billy had ever seen. A.A. Catto went mad on the stuff receiver. A vast range of drinks, drugs, delicacies and entertainment poured from the receiver room. She ordered dancers, jugglers, dwarfs, plus the full range of exotic sexual types that could be found in the catalogue. She had also ordered a hundred or more extra Ho replicas. She seemed to be busily building herself an army. Once things had been arranged the way she wanted, A.A. Catto withdrew to her throne, from where she could survey the strange mixture of wild horsemen, black-clad assassins and spangled freaks.
A.A. Catto had, somewhere along the line, divested herself of her clothes. She sprawled naked across the cushions of the throne. Nancy sat at her feet, leaning against one of A.A. Catto’s legs, absently caressing the inside of her knee. Nancy was totally out on duramene. A tiny tattooed hermaphrodite perched on one of the arms of the throne, massaging A.A. Catto’s body. A pink chubby little boy in a toga and gold laurel wreath stood on the other side of the throne with a fistful of pressure injectors clutched in his fat hand. He’d bang a dose into her outstretched arm every time she snapped her fingers.
The effect of the sudden intake of stimulants and depressives on the horsemen and Ho replicas was the most startling feature of the whole event. Most were in a state of physical shock. Their systems were totally unused to such massive abuse, but A.A. Catto insisted that they all did what she did.
It affected them in a lot of different ways, as the drugs fought with their programming. A lot of the Ho substitutes who’d been filled with duramene and other uppers, simply became rigid and stood at muscle-cracking attention, like statues scattered round the room. Others, who had had a preponderance of downers, were slumped on the floor unconscious. Some had gone into comas and a few sat crosslegged and recited incomprehensible mathematic progressions.