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?”
“All that for self-preservation, chick. Ivo was bound to foul up somewhere, and he could have gotten us all killed instead of just the two or three he did manage. I don’t appreciate having my destiny managed by a moron. I had to be ready to step in if he ever got smart enough to cry uncle.”
“Or even a moment before.”
“He didn’t always know when he had had enough.”
“If you were able to accomplish something as complex as blocking off a single memory,” she said slowly, “why didn’t you simply block off Ivo while you were at it? You seem to be able to function well enough without him. What prevented you from taking control any time you chose?”
“Honey, if I told you that, I would be in your power forever,” he said.
His attitude suggested that he was lying; and so she believed him.
The next room contained no heavy machinery. Instead it was laid out rather like a lecture hall, with benches lined up before a podium. Afra passed through it and paused before going on. “Did you run out of symbols, genius?” she called back. She knew that she had not lost the Venus round by much; perhaps two points.
Then the benches became occupied — by perching birds. Sparrows, storks, hummingbirds, eagles, parakeets and buzzards — all species were represented, crowded together in the close atmosphere, wings rustling, feathers drifting, ordure falling. And she was among them, a bird herself, of a type she could not quite identify. She, too, was confined within the tremendous cage the room had become.
Outside, in the area that a moment ago had held the podium, were the human attendees. They were spectacularly dressed, as though seeking to out-splendor the avian horde. Each couple was more elegantly garbed than the last, and all paraded by without a glance into the aviary. In fact, the people were oblivious to it, far more concerned with the display of their own finery.
She recognized the nature of it at last: this was an Easter promenade, following fittingly the sunrise service of the prior vision. But this was as vain an assemblage as she had ever seen. Every member of it seemed to crave attention, and to fear for the least fleck of dirt in the vicinity.
Schön was in it too, resplendent in… a tall silk hat.
She did not even notice what else he had on. He had gone too far. Furious, she looked about to see in what manner she might act. Surely something in this situation could be turned to her advantage. It was merely necessary to extend the breadth of her resources.
She scrambled — it was far too crowded to fly — to the large front gate that separated aves from homo, jostling aside the other birds officiously. This should be about where, in station geography, the podium stood. There should be a — yes, the catch was a simple one, not intended to withstand the attack of a human-brained bird. An ordered prying of the beak, a tuned shove with the wing, and—