“But the destroyer—”
“Either he doesn’t know about that, or he isn’t afraid of it.”
“Why didn’t he give you just one language — Phoenician?”
“It doesn’t work that way. He can’t give me part of a talent. Only so many speech centers in the brain, as I make it.”
“But that would mean that English takes up one,” Afra said, “and all the other languages of the world, the other. That isn’t reasonable.”
“Schön isn’t reasonable, by our definition. Maybe he has some other setup. Anyway, it’s everything, or it’s nothing.”
“Do you have it now?” Afra asked, mopping her face. She looked so much like Aia that it set him back. Obviously one girl had been modeled from the other, just as one astrologer had emulated the other.
“No.”
“He took it away when you broke out?” Groton asked.
“No. I left it there. I didn’t want it.”
The two looked at him.
“It’s hard to explain. This arrangement between us — it isn’t absolutely set. He can give me things, like the intuitive computations, and I can accept them. But I can’t take anything he doesn’t make available and he can’t force anything on me that I refuse to accept. This episode was a special case; I was off-balance and tired, and I accepted more than I should have. Then I had to fight my way out by his rules, the hard way. But I stopped it there; I didn’t take the gift with me.”
“But why?” Afra cried. “The gift of tongues! Every language anyone ever spoke!”
“Because each trait I accept from him brings me that much closer to him. I started with two, and that’s the way I like it. I don’t need tongues.”
“But if you can have all that and remain yourself—”
This was like arguing with Aia. “I can’t. As I stand, I have two parts out of, say, twenty that make up Schön. Tongues would be a third part, and then I might be tempted to gamble on artistic ability or eidetic recollection. And after that I might get a craving for physical dexterity — you know, be a champion at sports, be able to do sleight-of-hand, control the roll of dice — and at some point Schön would achieve controlling interest. It’s more subtle than the destroyer, but the effect is the same, for me.” And suddenly another reason he had been able to avoid the destroyer popped up: he had had a lifetime of practice protecting his individuality from oblivion.
“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.”