She turned a horrified glance on him. “You — you actually — ?”
“Be practical, doll. Why should I match Mars to Venus, or give the water-carrier his goat? If Ivo had known how you really felt, he never would have yielded to me. As it was, the thing was near. Only his depression and the sudden breaking of the theme while he was in harness—”
“Oh, Ivo!” she exclaimed with the sharpest pang yet.
“A little late for regrets, cutie. Ivo no longer exists, unless you count his special memories, that are now part of my own experience. He has no more reality than I did while he was in control. You will have to settle for his body.”
She was running again, routed again, and it was Macon. She knew that the man behind must inevitably catch up, for there was no place to hide, no one to protect her. Her father was gone; she had seen him fall when the gun fired, there in his great overcoat; and his hat, not really silk, had rolled gruesomely toward her as though it were his severed head…
Now the black murderer was almost upon her, seeking to kill her too. In a moment his hands would fall heavily on her frail body and tear her apart—
She tripped and fell headlong on the cold pavement. He came up, his giant body looming over hers, and, as in a nightmare, she could not move.
“Got you!” he exclaimed.
It was an Easter sunrise service. Jesus Christ had died and had risen again, and she was present to give thanks, this lovely anniversary of this holy occasion. Yet her heart was heavy, for no miracle of this nature had come into her own life. Twice, three times her warning might have saved a life, the life of someone dear to her — a warning she had been too confused or self-centered to provide.
She had lost, again — yet somehow she had acquired a spiritual resource, an immortal strength to bear whatever had happened. This dawn ceremony—
She was near a tree, in this open country gathering for worship. It was a spreading live-oak, the moss festooned upon it elegantly, and on the bark of the most proximate branch nestled a large and rather handsome cocoon. As she watched, momentarily distracted from the service, the chrysalis opened and a butterfly emerged, damp and gleaming. It spread its new wings, waiting for them to dry, and it was a beautiful creature unlike any other.
Iridescence traveled along its vanes. “They don’t call me Schön for nothing,” it said to her.
She snapped out of it. The room was another mass of machinery in the bowels of the station. Monstrous power cables drained into a multi-layered grid whose purpose she could not fathom. It, too, in its way, was beautiful; everything during this session seemed to be rainbow.
“Gravity generator,” Schön remarked. “Neat trick, converting electrical power to gravitrons so efficiently. Of course they learned it millions of years ago from other species, via the macroscope; no one knows who first developed the technology for broadcasting, because the early species were hesitant to use it. Once we return to Earth, we’ll set up a local station; lots of things that process is good for besides sending information to space.”
“Is that all you’re interested in? How to make a profit from this?”
“By no means, babe. I would hardly be wasting my effort on you, in that case. I routed you by six points in Mars, by the way.”
That put him ahead 40 to 11, cumulative point score. She had to begin fighting back, or the final rounds would be meaningless. “Why are you wasting time on me? Because I’m the only viable girl within fifty thousand light-years?”
“Simplistic thought. You always did view male-female interaction as primarily sexual. That was one of the things that put Ivo off. He gave you love, and in exchange you offered pudenda.” He paused, but she had no comment. “Strange notion, that it is the woman who does the giving, in intellectual or physical love. In truth, all she does is acquiesce to the gifts of the man.”
“Assuming she acquiesces at all. Not every gift is attractive.”
“Fortunately, in the human species it is the male who has control. This is one of the reasons Man developed intelligence and culture instead of remaining backward. The control of reproduction, and thus of evolution, had to be taken away from the female before progress could be made. Some claim that man’s capacity for rape makes him more evil than those animals that are not up to such activity, but the opposite is true.”
“Of all the — !” But she was failing into his verbal snare again. That was the way of defeat.
“Even so, sex is overrated. The moment the urge is indulged, it becomes uninteresting. My real passion is for knowledge; satisfaction there only begets the desire to know even more. I have an insatiable appetite for intellectual experience. A man can sustain himself for a long time, acquiring comprehension, particularly with the macroscope.”
He still hadn’t admitted his real reason for pursuing her, in that case. Once she knew what he wanted from her, she might have the clue to prevail against him, somehow.
“How did you get around the destroyer?” she inquired, trying another approach. “You claim that exposure to it would kill you immediately, but yet you plan to travel.”
“You wouldn’t understand the technical medical description, so I’ll make it foolishly simple,” he said with a fine air of condescension. She had learned not to challenge him, and did not. He continued: “The problem was in blocking off a memory without experiencing it. I knew it was there, but I did not dare touch any part of it. It did not hurt Ivo because his personality was incomplete, acting as an inherent barrier; but the moment I absorbed that facet into the rest, the network would be complete, the circuit closed, the dam breached. Yet without that portion, I could not control the body, so I had to have it. And, unfortunately, memory is not confined to any particular area of the brain. A single impression may be laid down across untold synapses, like a thin layer of snow. It really is a generalized acid conversion. So I had to delineate the particular memory layer that was the destroyer concept, and isolate it a step at a time, neutralizing it synapse by synapse until every avenue had been caulked.”
He walked about the room, happy to be telling of his achievement. “I had to do it by developing spot enzymes attuned to, and only to, the acidic configurations typical of the destroyer trace. All without leaving my own body or brain. You ever try exerting conscious control over your own enzymes, when you didn’t even have it for your body? I dare say that was the most remarkable act of surgery ever performed by man.”
Afra was impressed in spite of herself. “You operated on your own brain-chemistry?”
“It took me six months,” he said. “The final step was rephasing the synapses I’d blocked, so that I had access to other memories without invoking the destroyer. I didn’t want to be stuck with Ivo’s superficiality, which was what would have happened had I merely hurdled the gap without reestablishing the lines. I wasn’t crossing over into his world, I was assimilating it into mine, with that one culvert remaining. But that involved mass testing and alignment. So I cast him into a historical adventure with a fair variety of experience, where I had a certain measure of supervisory control, and set up my alternate connections while that barrage of new signals was coming through.”
“All that — just so you could come out and chase a girl around the office?”