“Are you trying to suggest—”
“You knew we derive from the Echinoderm superphylum. You know the characteristics of that type of life. What did you suppose would happen, when you interfered with the evolutionary reconstitution? By abolishing the timing mechanism, you permitted the subject to run its full course — without benefit of the proper terminal environment.”
“Oh, Brad!” she cried in anguish.
“But you wouldn’t have cared to marry a starfish, however mature. So — you arranged to kill him.”
“I didn’t know!”
“Sweetie, ignorance of the law is never an excuse — particularly the law of nature, and most particularly when you are supposed to be a student of nature lecturing.”
“But—”
“But even proper attention would not have reconstituted his blasted mind. Recycling can’t extirpate tissue damage; it merely reshapes what’s there. He would have made a very stupid starfish.”
“Stop it!” she cried.
“You stop it. You know how — if you have the courage.”
And she was in the supermarket again, still terrified.
The sound of the gun’s explosion was fresh in her ears. There was a struggle occurring at the counter. The checkout girl screamed, a man fell. The silk hat rolled across the floor toward Afra. It was huge, and it grew larger as it came, swelling as though to crush her beneath its turning mass.
She screamed and ran. She crashed into the bean shelf, hurting her shoulder and sending cans toppling heavily… somehow aware that this had happened before, but unable to stop. People turned to stare, but she ignored them, crying “No! No! No!”
Somehow her unguided rush took her through a door at the rear, and she was hustling through a winter chamber with hanging slabs of raw meat, stumbling among tremendous boxes. A man with a cleaver loomed over her, and she saw the dark blood on it, and she screamed again and crashed through another door.
Then she was in a narrow alley, running between steaming garbage cans. The door behind her burst open and a man charged out. “Little girl!” he bellowed. “Little girl! Come back here!”
He was twice her size in every direction, and his skin was dark, his teeth great and white, and she fled.
There were trucks with baked black rubber tires taller than she was, and an ambience of gasoline odors and growling motors and the choking fog of exhausts, and she was trapped between them and the black man. She screamed again and dashed for yet another door, symbol of escape. It was closed. Desperately she reached up to grasp the handle and pull down the stiff latch, while the black pursuer closed in.
Suddenly it opened and she burst inside. These were strange quarters: tables of alien contour, bed-pallets of singular discomfort, toilet facilities embarrassingly foreign to biped anatomy. Yet they were obviously quarters, intended to be of comfort for resident creatures of established form, if not for man.
Afra went through the rooms of this complex, wondering whether the owners were present or when they might return. Obviously someone ran this station, or at least attended it periodically, and this was where the caretakers reclined in comfort during their off-hours.
One room terminated in a low wall, emptiness above it. She found that it was a balcony. It overlooked a courtyard of fair size, and green shrubbery sprouted from planters about its nether perimeter. This suggested that the caretakers were not so different from human beings in the things that mattered. This was essentially Earth-air, Earth-gravity, human-comfort temperature, and the decor was harmonious to manlike tastes. There had to be strong biological resemblances between the species, however many eyes or ears or antennae either had.
Noise; and into the court below marched a troop of men, a motley mob. They were in blue-collar working clothes — overalls, protective helmets, grime. Some were white in the face, some black, some yellow; most were composite shades.
She discovered that she had with her a huge shopping bag, evidently acquired at the supermarket, and she was holding it in her arms as she tried to lean over the rail for a better view. The balcony had been constructed with adults in mind, and she had a hard time of it. It did not occur to her to put down the shopping bag; that was filled with nameless but wonderfully promising things. Things that her mother would undoubtedly fashion mysteriously into chocolate cake, raspberry ice cream and crisp pin-wheel cookies. She could not let that bag go, even for a moment.
But as she poked her head over, so that one pigtail flopped against the rail, the men beneath spotted her. A rolling cry went up. “We want REPRESENTATION!” the workers cried.
“Well, send up your represen — repre — somebody!” she called back, not expecting her soprano voice to be heard in all that clamor.
A single man entered behind her. “I am he,” he said, startling her. She began to cry, but stopped in a moment, realizing that it could do no good.
The man was Schön, tremendous.
“I thought you were a crystal gazer,” she remarked in an attempt to conceal her lingering tears. She was not, actually, as surprised as she might have been.
“That was back at Aries 9,” he said. “The sun. The ref scored it 10 to 2, favor of the crystal gazer, incidentally. This is the moon: Gemini 21 for me, Capricorn 19 for you. I see you are dressed for the part.”
“The part?” This adult conversation was difficult.
“Your symbol. A CHILD OF ABOUT FIVE WITH A HUGE SHOPPING BAG.”
“I’m seven,” she corrected him primly. Then she reacted to her own statement. “I am?”
She was. No wonder adults appeared so large.
“And you called me immature!” he exclaimed, laughing. “What a fine time you had analyzing me, after I injected a little excitement into Ivo’s determined mundanity. You — a card-carrying WASP — wanted to psychoanalyze me in absentia. Little appreciating the inherence of aggression in the human species, the factor that brought it to dominance on Earth. Well, call me a BLASP, you who think in terms of acronyms.”
“A what?”
“A black Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Or a brown Mongolian Catholic, or a yellow Hottentot Moslem. I represent all of them; I am all of them, as you see by my symbol outside. And perhaps it is fitting, precious, that your name is Afra. That’s very close to Afram, or Afro-American, the convenient designation for—”
“A whole group. A whole — labor demonstration?”
“Exactly. I am Man’s universal spirit, and I reject all property and private rights as invalid limitations, other than purely social. I tell you that right and justice only prevail when properly dramatized — when the issue is forced. And I attack this problem, as I do all problems, with courage.”
“And not a trace of false modesty,” she murmured. Yet she felt the need to help the demonstrating workers, whatever their problem might be. She wanted to be a part of the group, to participate, to conform, even in rebellion. “What do you want, speci — anyway?” Her stature as a five- or seven-year-old child (physically five, mentally seven?), though it prevented her from getting out the entire word “specifically,” was not any more incongruous than the rest of this bizarre sequence.
“I want freedom,” Schön said, menacing in his emphasis. “I want security. I want power. I want equality. I, the hapless peoples of the world, want everything you have now.”
“Me — the modern white?”
“Yes. You have the good life. I want the right to ravage the world as you have done. I want to destroy as much as you have done. I want to drive myself to the brink of extinction as you have done, you smug white turd. You little bitch, I mean to take—”