"The splitting?" Hartsik raised his eyebrows, then shook his head in disappointment. "Huh. You remember the story in First Kings, about the two women who came before King Solomon? They had a live baby and a dead baby, and each woman claimed the live one was hers. According to the Bible, Solomon called for a sword and offered to cut the baby in half."
"Yes. It always seemed implausible to me-that the lying woman would agree to that, would say, 'Yes, cut him in half.'"
"Well, sure-because actually Solomon didn't call for a 'sword' to settle the argument. The old copyists put in the word sword because it seemed to make more sense than the word that was in the oldest manuscripts-it began with the Hebrew letters cheth and resh, as sword does, but it was a neologism-paleologism, I suppose-a combination of blasphemy and destruction and potter's wheel, which are all spelled similarly."
A potter's wheel, thought Hale-a changing form, rotating. "A djinn," he said. "Solomon called for a djinn."
"Right. Apparently Solomon really was able to confine the djinn, abbreviate and summarize their tumultuous thoughts down to something he could pop into a jug and then seal with"-he pointed at the lead balls on the desk-"a threaded cluster of those. Threaded, see? So that they'd have to be rotated, assimilated, for the djinn to get out; and assimilating those would kill the thing. In any case, if you expose a tabula rasa infant to the attention of a djinn, there's a bond formed-neither side can help it, the child has no defensive mental walls yet, and the djinn is no more able to not look into the child's eyes than water can not run downhill. The djinn almost adopts the child, recognizes it as family. Djinn apparently perceive humans as autistic-"
Hale suppressed a wince, remembering having shared that perception in the Ahora Gorge.
"-but they can tell that a baby is new-it's not the child's fault that it can't express anything. Now this procedure, this sacrament, is fine for inter-species relations, but it's hard on the child-the shock of it polarizes the child's mind, as if you were to freeze a glass of gin and tonic-you'd wind up with liquid gin and solid tonic, right? The child becomes two children; that is, the child is able to be in two places at once, literally." He shrugged. "It's not so implausible that the lying woman in the Biblical story was willing to settle for half of such a split."
"Jesus. This was done to Kim Philby?"
"Very shortly after his birth in India, yes. And until he was ten years old he was verifiably able to be in two places at once, and he seemed destined to be the rafiq to the djinn. But then St. John had to go and father an illegitimate baby-you-who was born on Kim Philby's tenth birthday. December thirty-first, both of you, though your birthday has always been given as January sixth, so as not to rouse Philby's suspicions, and he has always claimed January first as his own. But you were both born on the same day in the solar year, you see? The night sky was the same again on your birthday as it had been on Philby's, and the djinn in their literal way confused you with Philby. The two of you became the polarized pair, and Philby wasn't able to be in two places at the same time anymore."
Again there was a knock at the office door; and when Hartsik got up and unlocked it to let Farid in, the Arab said, "I now smite the other man too hard. He bleeds more than this one."
Hartsik stamped his foot on the floor. "For God's sake, Farid! Very well, hit this fellow again, carefully, and then get out of here." He glanced at Hale and shrugged. "I do apologize, old man."
Hale stared at the Arab in disbelief. "No," he told Hartsik. "I'll just smear blood around."
Hartsik shook his head. "This has to be perfect, I'm sorry. Mammalian will be very suspicious in any case-you must be a precise match for the man who's being interrogated."
Hale sighed deeply and turned toward Farid, bracing himself again. "If this becomes necessary one more time," he told the Arab tightly, "I'll smite you, I promise."
"Has to be perfect!" protested Farid. "Hold still, please."
Hale closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, and the fresh, hard blow on his already bruised cheekbone rocked his head and brought bile to the back of his throat; and he had to lower his head and breathe spittily through his mouth to keep the rainbow glitter of unconsciousness from filling his vision.
He didn't see Farid leave, but over the ringing in his ears he heard the door click shut.
Hale took a deep breath and rocked his head back to blink at Hartsik out of his right eye. The man was relocking the door. "Does Philby know?" Hale asked thickly. "That he and I are half-brothers?"
"Not that we know of. He might well suspect that St. John had an illegitimate child, and that the birth ruined Kim's prepared destiny; broke it in half."
"Broke it. So Philby and I are two halves of one person."
"Well, in a sense." Hartsik walked back to his chair behind the desk and sat down. "We suspect that you've been able to hear each other's thoughts, in the season when the sky has assumed the definition of you; and probably you dream each other's dreams then. And you do appear to-" Hartsik paused, awkwardly.
"Don't hesitate," Hale said, "to add insult to injury."
"Well, Philby appears to have got-this is imprecise, you understand, armchair speculation-he appears to have got all the family feeling, the-practically obsession, in his case-with hearth-and-home, parents and wife and children. He's been married three times, and he's got five children. He has, though, no comprehension of loyalty, duty. Those qualities all seem to have flowed your way."
"And the Russians want-because the djinn require-the entire rafiq to be present."
"That's it. You were both there in the gorge in '48, but not working together. They couldn't see you properly. This time they will open their gates to the two of you-and you will kill them."
"How?" Hale waved at the lead balls on the table. "Shoot them with these?"
"Yes-a lot of them, cast in a much smaller scale. Birdshot caliber. Several shops in Beirut are now manned with clerks who will sell you prepared shot shells and an American derringer, chambered for the American.410 shell and rifled to the right so that the pellets will emerge in a pattern that's turning clockwise as it expands, to match the spinning of the djinn if you fire upward. The djinn will assimilate the shot pellets-which is to say, assimilate the experience of death. Dying, they will no doubt throw spontaneous egg-shapes of their own, made of mountain stone or whatever is at hand, and ideally a chain-reaction will ensue. You will buy several boxes of shells-but you must save one shell for Philby."
Theodora had mentioned this, but Hale had not known then that Philby was his half-brother. "What about his protections?" Hale asked, mainly just to slow this discussion. "His Achilles-heel date isn't due to come round again for nearly another year."
"The protections aren't against self-injury. You are virtually him, in this context; that will be especially true on Mount Ararat."
The other half of me, Hale thought. The hearth-and-home half of me. "Very well," he said unsteadily, "I'll shoot him." He may be my brother, he told himself, but Philby is still the man who betrayed my men in the gorge. I can shoot him for that.