MacRoscope (42 page)

“That’s how you — turn into Schön?”

“That’s one way. There are others.” He decided to change the subject. “Of course, I’ll never know whether I really
had
tongues. It could all have been American English, with the suggestion of translation. Just enough for verisimilitude in the dream.”

“Dream?” Afra said.

“The Phoenician episode I summarized for you. It seemed like several days, and it was real for me, but—”

“Maybe we’d better play off one of the tapes,” Groton said.

“Tapes?” It was Ivo’s turn to be perplexed.

Afra was already busy. “Listen.” She switched on the playback.

A stream of gibberish poured out of the speaker. “This was yesterday,” Afra said. “That is, about twenty-seven hours ago. Your voice.”

“I was
speaking
?”

“Ancient Phoenician. Fluently. I was able to pick out words only here and there, so we set up a program and ran the tape through the computer and patched up a translation. Do you want to hear it?”

“I’d better.”

She lifted the printout. “Are you trusting yourself to a stranger? A brigand, perhaps a rapist or murderer? No. Ifarsh of America. I was captured by a ship and brought to Mattan for questioning. What I don’t comprehend is the reason he sent me for sacrifice. How could—”

“That’s enough,” Ivo said, embarrassed. “Did you translate — everything I said?”

“Yes. We had to.”

“We rigged up a real-time continuous translation,” Groton said, “and monitored it. In case there was any way we could help. Just now you messed it by switching to non-programmed languages.”

Ivo tried to remember all the things he had said, particularly to Aia. He felt his cheeks growing hot.

“How did you finally fight your way out of it?” Groton asked him. “We knew something special was happening, but we couldn’t tell
what
. You were telling someone
there
about your presence
here
, but—”

“I was telling
you
, Harold.” And with that statement he had another realization: that this man had become Harold instead of Groton in thought as well as speech. That was significant. “Or at least your ancestor-in-spirit. An astrologer, and an honest and knowledgeable man. I remembered that they were the best-educated men in those days, because they were the true astronomers and scientists before those fields were recognized as such, always questing for the secrets of things. It seemed to me that if I could convince one intelligent person in that world that I didn’t belong there — literally — then the framework would be rent, or at least punctured. And I guess I convinced him, because it happened.” He thought about the implications. “I hope Gorolot wasn’t too upset when I disappeared.”

“Aia will console him,” Afra said with gentle irony. It had not taken her long to revert to her normal cynicism. Had she been crying for
him
, that moment he first returned?

“Similar to punching through by gravitational collapse,” Harold said. “This would have been credibility collapse, though. You do believe that world was real?” He was asking for an opinion rather than a defense.

“I would hate to believe that it
wasn’t
. If I was really speaking Phoenician—”

“I think I understand.” Harold looked about. “We’d better take a break, now that it’s over. This has been rough on all of us, and my wife doesn’t even—”

Beatryx appeared, carrying a tray. Incongruously, that reminded Ivo that now they were in a gravity defocuser, rather than the intensifier of Triton days, since they were buried in massive Neptune. How much stranger this situation was than the one he had visited!

Beatryx saw him. “Ivo!” she cried immediately. “You’re back!”

That seemed to make it complete.

Though less than three days had passed, it was a novelty to sleep in a modern bed again, and to be free of the pain of a flesh wound on the arm and a cut on the hand. He had been too much a part of the world of Tyre, had experienced too much there. He had sought only to leave it — yet now he was sorry, perversely, that it was gone. Was it that he craved the adventure it had offered?

There he had been a man — a man in constant danger and discomfort, but a man. Here he was no more than a surrogate, a mild-mannered reporter waiting for Superman to take over. He wondered whether, if the offer of such adventure were made again, he would accept it. Give Schön what he wanted, in exchange for that satisfaction. For Schön could do that, if he chose; and the covenant would bind him. He could relegate Ivo to a fantasy fragment, his personality turned inward instead of outward, and let him live out his life there untrammeled by the inadequacies of the present. Perhaps it would be a short life, but—

There was a motion nearby that made him jump. “Hello, Ivo.”

Afra.

She sat down beside him: fresh, white, perfumed, elegantly packaged. “I think I know what you’re thinking, Ivo. You’re nostalgic for that world.”

“I guess I am, now that it’s over.”

“And you’re afraid you might go back to it the next time you use the macroscope, or something like it.”

He nodded. She was so beautiful in the half-light that he felt her presence as heat radiating against the side of his body toward her. The effect might be subjective, but it was powerful.

“This Aia — was she me?”

“No. She was a spy, a courtesan.”

“She still could have been me, Ivo. That name is close. And I was used to — to keep you at the station, so that Schön would be available. I’m not very proud of that.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I
should
have known. I don’t like being stupid, particularly about a thing like that. Brad told me to be nice to you. I — I’m trying to say I’m sorry. About that and a lot of things. But that isn’t why I came here.”

He felt it safest not to comment. Why
did
a lovely woman come to the bed of an admirer? To reminisce?

“I suppose it’s like the — the handling. I’ll just have to
say
it. And
do
it. I heard what you said to her. About me.”

Oh-oh. “I was afraid of that. I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t
you
apologize to
me! I’m
the one at fault. All I can say is that I was dense, or blind, or both. I didn’t know, I really didn’t know — until I read it on the printout. I didn’t know you loved me.”

“I didn’t want you to know. I’d rather you forgot it.”

She did not move, but it was as though she leaned over him where he lay. “That isn’t the past tense, is it, Ivo. You love me now — and I
won’t
forget it. I — well, you know my situation. I can’t say I love you or ever will.”

“I understand.”

“That Aia — she offered herself to you, and you wanted her. But you told her—”

Ivo felt his face burning again. “Can’t we just let that pass?”

“No we can’t, Ivo. You held her in your arms and she made you recite poetry — but then you didn’t make love to her. And you could have.”

“How do you know? It was
my
vision.”

“Not entirely, Ivo. I
do
know. Did you think you were having an innocent wet dream?
I was with you
.”

He had thought he was already embarrassed, but once again she had made him realize that he had been naïvely skirting the edge of the chasm. Again he had fallen in.

“I know this hurts you, but I have to say it. The girl you held was me. Naked, ready—”

What possible comment? “But if I’d—”

“I said you
could
have. I won’t say I’m sorry you didn’t.”

“But
why
?”

“I had this crazy idea that if I could somehow bridge the gap between us — between your world and mine — it would bring you back. I felt responsible… maybe guilty is the word. It wasn’t premeditated. There was something nagging at my mind — something Brad once told me about Schön — but it wouldn’t come clear. I did realize where Schön was, of course, though it took me entirely too long to put two and two together. And I think if Schön had won, I could have — I don’t know. I just had to
do
something. I was monitoring the tape, the others were asleep, and… the time seemed right. And — we do need you, Ivo. Objectively. We can’t locate ourselves in the galaxy without you. Not close enough.”

She had been talking rapidly, throwing justifications at him as quickly as she thought of them. As though she had to apologize for ever having offered her body to him in any guise. And, he thought bitterly, if she felt ashamed of the impulse, then her apology was in order. She had said once that she did not like acting like a whore.

She took his silence as an objection. “We had to have you back. It was that simple. It isn’t as though there are any physical secrets between us, after the handling and the melting. If you were falling and I could offer a hand to pull you back — the principle is the same. You did it for me, on Triton, with your trial. So this time it was my turn to — to contribute.”

The irony was that it might have worked. Could he possibly have made physical love to Afra and
not
been drawn back to her world? He doubted it.

“I thank you for the gesture,” he said, feeling quixotic.

“Now that we understand each other,” she said, relieved, “the rest is easy. I want you to know that this world needs you more than that one does. So — this world
offers
you more. It is, as I said, that simple.”

“It’s still too complicated for me. What are you getting at now?”

“You love me. I need you. That’s not the same thing, I know, but it’s honest. If my embrace will hold you here, I give it to you. Anything Aia had for you — I will match. Anything
any
woman has for you. You don’t have to travel to any other world — you
mustn’t
travel—”

“I suppose you
are
pretty much like Aia.”

There was no flickering lamplight, but the classic lines of her forehead, nose and chin wavered in his gaze. “That’s no compliment, but it’s the truth,” she said. “We sell what we have for what we need. Men their brains, women their bodies. Better that than hypocrisy.”

There was a silence of several minutes. Ivo thought of all the things he might say, but knew she knew them already. She had said one thing and meant another, earlier; now the truth was coming into view as the base warred with the sublime. She was offering paid love — the last thing he wanted from her, but all she had, realistically, to give.

Again the question he had asked himself in Tyre: why
not
settle for the best he could get? He had been willing to embrace Aia’s body in lieu of Afra; why not accept
Afra’s
body — in lieu of Afra? Both women had come to terms with their necessities, knowing they could not bring their lovers back to life; why not he?

Yet if he had learned any lesson in Tyre, it was this:
there was no salvation in a surrogate
.

“Maybe next time,” he said.

She did not move or look at him. “Look off, dear Love, across the sallow sands…”

She was still sitting there when he fell asleep.

It was night in the marshes of Glynn. He had either to wait a few hours and try again, or travel to the daylight side of the globe.

He felt Afra’s hand take his left. “If you go, I will don the goggles and follow you,” she said. It was a threat, for she would encounter not Tyre but the destroyer.

“I’m on guard now, and rested,” he replied. “It’s safe.” But he felt better for the touch of her fingers, their almost-affectionate pressure. Last night he had turned her down; today, oddly, she was warmer toward him.

Tyre appeared unchanged, superficially. Warships still docked at the ports of the island city and the buildings remained tall and crowded. He recognized the temple complex and the area where he had met Aia, that night.

“We don’t seem to have moved,” he said, perplexed. He wondered how he could have seen the city so accurately before, since they had probably removed him from the macroscope as soon as he fell into the Mediterranean. He
must
have been there!

“More likely it’s a fifty-year jump,” Afra said. “Backward or forward or sidewise. Can you find a landmark?” She still had not relinquished his hand, except for the brief periods he needed it for coordinated adjustments.

He centered on Gorolot’s house, quite curious and a little nervous. Strangers occupied it, and the configurations of the structure had changed, as though the house had been rebuilt. Ivo lingered, disappointed, though he remained apprehensive about the effect the sight of Gorolot — or Aia — might have on him.

“You
can
go back,” a masculine voice said in his ear, in Phoenician.

Ivo clenched Afra’s hand. “Pull me out!” he said urgently. “It’s Schön!”

He felt her fingers returning his pressure, as from a distance, and the tug of the goggles coming off — but the scene did not shift.

“Why do you fight me?” Schön asked in Ivo’s voice.

“Because you may be destroyed the moment you take over, for one thing. Don’t you know that?”

“When I take over,” Schön said as though never doubting the eventuality, “I will have the whole of your experience to draw on, should I require it. At present I have almost none of it. It is exceedingly difficult for me even to contact you, since you don’t let go until your mind is distracted. So I don’t know what your problem is — but I do know there is something intriguing afoot.”

Someone was still tugging at a distant extremity. “Hold up a minute, Afra,” Ivo called. “He only wants to talk.”

“I don’t trust him,” she said from the far reaches.

“Give us two minutes.”

“Little puritan Ivo has a girlfriend now?” Schön inquired. Obviously he knew — but how much?

“No. Now look, I have to explain why I can’t let you have the body. We’re in touch with a nonhuman signal that—”

“I can give you romantic prowess. No woman can withstand that. A warty toad could seduce a princess.”

“I know, but no. Now this galactic civilization has broadcast what we call the destroyer signal that—”

“How about turning me loose for a specified interval? Just long enough to lick this problem of yours.”