“And that explains several things, such as the dichotomy in my charts. So it must be right.”
“So what must be right?”
“That you are Schön. The fire element.”
“Sure. And the pin?” Careless words — but the game was over.
“You sat through the sequence that put away Brad and killed the senator. You survived it, probably because you came below its critical limit. But Schön is buried in your mind, unconscious or penned in somewhere. He doesn’t get burned because your mind takes the brunt, and you’re just a pawn. But the moment he comes out — when you turn queen — that memory is there, waiting to blast him. And he knows it. So he can’t come out; his pawn is pinned.”
Ivo nodded. “You take your time, but you do get there.”
“So you were aware of it? I thought it might be hidden from you.” Groton glanced out the port at the frigid plateau, not seeming gratified at his success. “Your horoscope pointed the way, of course. There had to be an explanation for the chart’s failure to match observation, and as is so often the case, the error was in the observation. So now the question is, how do we remove the pin? We can’t get at the queen and we don’t have many pieces on our board. Of course it’s not so simple as I have it — this illustration has loopholes even taken purely as chess — but I could set up a sounder analogy if it were worth the trouble. It seems that the four of us will have to do it if it’s going to be done at all. Do you agree?”
“I think so. But how do you wipe out a memory? And even if you could, Schön probably couldn’t use the macroscope himself. Not with that signal still there.”
“I don’t know. That falls beyond the province of engineering, I fear. But we might hold a meeting on it, let Afra take a crack at it. But one other consideration—”
“I know. What happens when Schön comes. To me.”
“Right.”
“I’m gone. The truth is, I only exist in Schön’s imagination.”
“This, again, is what your horoscope suggested. It spelled out, in the sometimes perplexing way they do, Schön rather than Ivo. Nevertheless you seem pretty real to me.”
“I’m not. When Schön got fed up and decided to leave — which happened when he was about five years old — he did it by inventing an innocuous personality and setting it loose. Someone not too bright, so that the project supervisors wouldn’t be attracted, but not suspiciously stupid either. Someone more or less colorless, but again, not suspiciously. Someone average in his exceptionality, if you see what I mean. So he worked it out and set it up in one aspect of his mind, and went to sleep. I am what remains — a genuine programmed personality. Somehow he cleared it with all the kids who knew him, and they forgot what he had been like and thought I had always been there. Except for Brad, of course. He sort of watched over me. But I was born full-blown at the age of five and never had a project childhood.”
“Most people would consider ages five to ten the flower of childhood.”
“Not at 330 Pecker Place! It was all over when I got there. That’s what I meant when I told you before that I had no childhood episode for you. Everything was — set.”
Groton let that sidelight drop. “And Schön never came back?”
“Well, he has to be summoned. That’s my job — to judge when the time is right. But he had no reason to return. Ordinary life is unbearably tedious to him, so he leaves the mundane maintenance to me.”
“He left just because of tedium? But that isn’t very likely, is it? Why would things have to be tedious for Schön? And why would he make his return involuntary — on his part, I mean? I’d be inclined to suspect some more urgent reason for that setup.”
“What else could there be?” Ivo asked uneasily. His own understanding of the conditions of his existence was beginning to seem insufficient to him.
Groton plainly was not satisfied. “I may take a more careful look at the chart.”
“Best luck. Meanwhile, I’ll just muddle along as well as I can.”
“Muddle? I’d call it a mature adjustment to reality on your part.”
“That’s the nicest description for desperation I’ve heard today! When he wakes — and he’ll have to wake, if the time comes — I’ll be reintegrated into his total personality, and all my memories and aspirations with me, and I’ll be gone. It’s like a planetoid falling into the sun.”
“I was afraid of that. When the pawn queens, it isn’t a pawn any more, not even in part. I can see why you never were anxious to invoke Schön.”
“I’m selfish, yes. Now that I’m here, I want to live. I want to prove myself. I don’t like Schön.”
“I believe I would feel the same way.” Groton thought for a moment more. “That trick with the sprouts—”
“That’s one of the few talents Schön bequeathed me in the name of not being a complete nonentity. That, and the flute playing. The supervisors had a ball analyzing the reasons I was so advanced in those areas and so retarded in others. I think they developed a whole new theory of child-potential, deciding that in a normal family situation both talents would have been suppressed. I don’t really know. Anyway, that’s where you see Schön’s full power — except that he’s like that in just about every area.”
“And you wiped out the sprouts champion of the station, after one practice game, without even sweating.”
“I wouldn’t say that. There are limits, and sprouts gets pretty complicated.”
“Uh-huh. And my wife says you play the flute better than any person she’s heard. And she has heard the masters; she’s a classical music nut.”
“She never told me that.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“Well, I didn’t expect to keep the secret forever.”
“One by one we pry into your qualities. The Triton situation is too intimate for proper privacy.”
“That’s the way Purgatory is, I guess.”
“No. That’s the way friendship is. A great sharing, a good sharing.” He paused again, troubled. “Look, Ivo, despite all that, I don’t much like this particular turn of the wheel. Maybe I prefer Aquarius to Aries. Afra will catch on soon enough anyway. What say we let it ride for a while, see what develops?”
Gratefully, Ivo nodded.
Base operations continued apace, until the physical plant was complete. Then, with the urgency gone, the isolation pressed in again. Triton was not Earth, no matter how luxurious it became, and all of them were increasingly aware of it. The news from Earthside was depressing; hope faded that any return was politically feasible within a span of years.
Ivo spent his allotted time at the macroscope, transcribing processes for which they had only theoretical use. There were truly potent force-fields capable of compressing solid rock into a state of degenerate matter; there were heavy-duty robotoids capable of constructing duplicate macroscopes. For what purpose, such miracles? They already had everything they needed except home.
Groton enlarged the atmospheric screen and made other nominal improvements. Beatryx cooked and did their laundry by hand (though they easily could have had food and clothing that needed neither treatment) and cultivated and weeded her garden, while the galactic devices for such tasks stood idle.
Afra reacted most strenuously. She set up a formidable laboratory and buried herself in it for many hours at a time. She demanded a search for specialized galactic medical techniques, and pored over what Ivo obligingly produced until her eyes were sunken and staring. She insisted on an extension of the macroscope screen for her lab, though they all knew it would have been suicidal for her to watch it. The great glass vat in which she had arranged to store Brad’s protoplasm (bubbling eerily because of the aeration) rested upon a shelf, morbidly overlooking her efforts.