“Astrology,” he said. “You have closed your mind to it, and that makes it ideal for my purpose. So the symbolic ascendant means nothing to you.”
She waited, refusing this time to rise to the bait. Schön, obviously, had dipped into Ivo’s memory and picked up her continuing debate with Harold. He was trying to annoy her — and that could mean that his power would be diminished if she refused to react. The sophisticated response to his exertions was best.
“The ascendant is the overall indication of personality; the rising sign for each individual. My own ascendant falls at Aries 21, and the symbol for that position is A PUGILIST ENTERING THE RING, as you can readily perceive if you concentrate. This indicates full confidence in my own powers — justified, of course — and a complete lack of personal sensitiveness. Thus the galactic machine has dramatized my basic personality and graphically illustrated the power inherent in me.”
“That isn’t the way Harold described astrology,” Afra murmured, wishing this time that she had taken the trouble to learn more about it, whether she believed in it or not. Its rules were evidently governing this game.
“Harold was an engineer, not an astrologer. His approach was too conventional and conservative, though last I saw of him he was getting disabused in a hurry. Those old galactics really had their sciences worked out.”
He was still toying with her. If she tried to defend Harold, she would be defending his hobby as well, and so be on exceedingly tenuous ground. “What about Ivo?”
Schön gazed at her speculatively across the ring, but did not challenge the shift in topic. “Ah yes, Ivo. There’s someone really confused, for all that I invented him. He oriented on something from each of you, not really knowing the proper use of S-prime, and came up with a mélange that must have made the galactic creators wince. Harold Groton’s astrology, Sidney Lanier’s poetry, darlin’ Afra Glynn’s supposed intellectual discrimination and Tryx Groton’s suicidal sympathy — all tied in with a galactic history text that the instrument put out as a kind of sideshow attraction. Fascinating juxtaposition, I admit. I was a fiery ram, ‘Aspiration’ astrologically, ‘Trade’ poetically, and the strings musically. I engaged in First Siege internecine power politics. I had a good thing going, too — until you torpedoed Ivo for me.”
Suddenly the goat image made sense to her, and the evocative music of the bassoon. These had been her symbols, in the combined context. And love — where the poem had specified Trade for him, it had specified Love for her. And she had felt it—
“What is my symbol?” she inquired, genuinely curious now. “My — ascendant.”
“You don’t want to know it, cutie. You are afraid of it, neurotic that you are.”
“Am I? Or is it that you are afraid to animate my symbol, instead of yours? Would that give me dominance?”
“Lady, I’ll gladly match symbols with you planet by planet. That would put us on an even footing, in spite of my inordinate superiority in overt life. But you would achieve parity only if you are able to face your own nature when you see it objectively — and you aren’t. Your ascendant controls you, and probably your planets do too. It is a contest you would lose by your own prejudice.”
“I’ll take that chance — if you will. I don’t think you know how to compete, on an even basis.”
He smiled, the vicious grin of the warrior tasting blood. “Calling my bluff, Glynn?”
She smiled back, as maliciously as he, though she was afraid of him. “Yes, prettyboy. And if you cheat, you lose.” She wasn’t sure what to expect, or whether Schön would really bind himself to the outcome of a fair competition, but if it nullified the advantage of his intellect…
“Take it, child,” he said, touching the instrument. “Your ascendant is Taurus 15 — A MAN MUFFLED UP, WITH A RAKISH SILK HAT.”
And she was back in the supermarket, the same one she had fled, and she was facing the man beside the checkout counter. She had asked for it — and she was terrified.
Something obscure happened. People backed away from the cash register. The muffled man looked up, around, pausing a moment as though considering. It seemed that he was looming over Afra, and she was very small, very fragile. Something remarkable was about to happen—
The large man moved.
There was the sound of a gun being fired.
She wrenched herself out of it — and was out of the rope enclosure and passing through the door she had originally been running toward. She had escaped one vision only to return to another — unless she could also escape Schön and the galactic, the demonic, S′ device.
This room was thoroughly finite, at least, and well lighted. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment stood against the walls, and there were a number of screens flashing what she took to be broadcast patterns. This was, by her reckoning, a communications center. That suggested some kind of occupation of the station, at least at intervals. Automatic machinery would not be set up for viewing like this.
Schön was there ahead of her. He sat on a podium in the center of the room, behind a table whose white cloth extended down to touch the floor. He wore a high turban and stared into a shiny crystal ball. “Man,” he said grandiosely, “has the capacity to bring the entire universe within the purview of his mind.”
She had either to retreat into the original chamber or to pass directly by him. Neither alternative appealed, so she temporized. “I thought you were supposed to be a pugilist.”
“That, my dear, as I so tediously explained, was the ascendant. Now we are with the sun, and it behooves us to be more acute. My sun is in Aries 19, and so I am as you see me: A CRYSTAL GAZER. So it is written in the most authoritative text.” He stared into the ball. “I see that the referee has graded the first round on the ten-point must system: ten points to Fire, no points to Earth, who washed out. An excellent start — though it would be more entertaining if you were to at least put up some show of competition.”
So she hadn’t lost yet! “How do I know that’s an honest score?”
He shoved the ball in her direction. “Witness.”
She stepped up to look into it. Inside was a great-horned ram copulating with a frightened doe.
“Miscegenation is all I see,” she said. Then, saying it, she realized that the animals too were symbols: the ram of Aries and the goat of Capricorn. Schön had played his little prank on her. Two different species — somewhat as the two of them were of different races. A bald proposition, a dirty joke — or a threat. He had said that her own prejudice would cost her victory…
“Too bad nature forbids it,” she said in reply to his mocking gaze. She resented the implication that this was the only use for her — to submit to the sexual assault of the male — knowing it to be a conventional objection of womankind but still stirred by it. There was that about Schön that fascinated her in ways Ivo had not; yet she was not about to encourage his casual lewdness. In her mind was the remark Ivo had made about childhood sexual activity at their project: homo, hetero and group. She would contest the issue more fiercely in the coming rounds.
It was amazing what a difference the mind made. Schön did not resemble Ivo at all, though the body was the same.
“Yes, you would lecture on nature,” he remarked, as though that proved something. “Your symbol for Capricorn 12 is A STUDENT OF NATURE LECTURING.”
“How do you know?” she demanded, nettled again in spite of her disbelief in the personal relevance of such things.