“Do you remember Yvonne?” she asked him.
The image vanished. Schön turned on her, the bottle in his hand replaced by S′, and it was as though the fire of his essence took physical form. “Brad, you bastard!” he cried. “You told!”
But he was in his weakness, she in her strength. “You have a memory like mine, one you can’t face,” she said. “It is the reason you could not take over control from Ivo, whatever else you managed. It is the knowledge that gives me power over you.” But only if the circumstance were appropriate — and that could be a matter of definition.
For there had been a third genius of the project, one falling between Brad and Schön. Yvonne — “The Archer” — and there had been intense conflict.
They were five years old when the culmination came, both having experienced more of life in all areas than had most adults, but both remaining children emotionally. It was the classic case of two scorpions in a bottle, two nations with nuclear overkill and insufficient patience: two children with the powers of adults. Because they were male and female, there was a certain mitigating attraction; but their rivalry was stronger, and when the camaraderie ended they put it on the line: a game, a contest, more than physical, more than intellectual, whose precise rules no other person comprehended. For a day and a night they had faced each other, locked in a private room, and in the end Schön had won and Ivo had committed suicide.
Then Schön, protecting himself, had operated on the body and made it resemble a mutilated version of his own in certain ways that would deceive the outside world. He had arranged an impressive “accident” of conflagratory nature that made the deception complete, and had then assumed her place in the project community. Thus he had become Ivo, and somehow managed to alter the records to confuse the prying adults. It seemed to them that a male child had died, yet the count did not confirm this; instead one male had been mislabeled female. Yet if a female had been lost, which one? Schön had gotten away with murder. But he had not confused his contemporaries. They were not as clever as he, but they knew him, and they knew the score. They were his peer-group, and it operated with unprecedented force. They did not report his crime to the adults, for that was not the peer-code; they did pass the word informally and judge him themselves and impose a sentence on him. He became Ivo, then. No longer could he masquerade as another person by choice and convenience. For the group had this special power over its members, part ethics, part force, part religion, part family: what the group decreed, the individual honored. It could not be otherwise, even for Schön.
The secret had been kept, but he had been punished. Even after the project disbanded, the peer-power remained, the inflexible code, a geis on him he could not break.
Only Ivo himself could set him loose when the need arose — and Ivo had never known the truth, and was stubborn to boot. Ivo had thought it was the tedium of daily existence that kept Schön buried originally. He had never heard of Ivo.
As the Traveler disciplined the universe; as the destroyer disciplined the galaxy; as circumstance disciplined mankind; so the peer-group disciplined Schön.
And nothing else! Schön still had the galactic instrument, S′, and this was not Earth-locale, and Afra was not a peer of the project. “You cannot get home without me,” he said. “The sentence cannot be invoked, here; there is still need for me.”
So the grand ploy had failed, and now that pendulum was swinging back, restoring his power, diminishing hers. It was her turn to retreat.
The next room was another highly technical one: a strange conduit admitted something invisible, and stranger equipment manipulated it.
“Conversion,” Schön remarked with some of his old confidence. “Channeled gravitrons adapted to macrons for the broadcast.” He touched S′.
Five people stood on an Earthscape in the sunshine. A woman and two men faced south; two women — one older, one younger — stood fifty feet away, in the trio’s line of sight.
For the first time Afra saw the symbols and remained in doubt as to which one was hers. The woman in the northern group might be herself; the men might be Schön and Ivo. One of the southern pair was an old-fashioned woman; the other was an up-to-date girl. The one pinched, stiff; the other alert, open-faced. Their clothing and manner identified their types — but which of the three women, really, was Afra?
This seemed to be the time for indecision, and Schön evidently shared the mood. “Am I so bad?” he demanded somewhat plaintively. “I never tortured to death an animal, and not many who pass through conventional childhood can say that. I never shot a man, and not many who served in the armed forces can say that. All I did was play a fair game for high stakes and win. Had I lost, I would have died. I have always abided by the rules of the game.”
Then Afra knew that the woman between the two men was Ivo, as she might have been at maturity. Schön was bracketed by his past, and by competing demands, and it was not in her to condemn him out of hand.
But Afra was bracketed too. She had witnessed the history of the galaxy and absorbed its significance. Was she now to return to her old, narrow ways and attitudes, or was she to open her mind and personality to change, movement, spontaneity? Which woman was she? There was advantage in conventionality, but also in initiative.
She had never realized before that her own prejudice against Negroes stemmed at least in part from that chase in her childhood by a well-meaning supermarket employee. She had remembered that pursuit subconsciously and associated it with the sudden, crushing death of her father, fatally wounded that day, and she had somehow blamed all Negroes for it. Yet it had been a white man who fired the shot, attempting to hold up the cashier. It had been a Negro who had tried to help, even to the extent of expressing an unjustified confidence in her father’s health. The strongest elements of the experience had been the killing and the Negro, and her subconscious had made a connection her conscious had not. No doubt the climate of her upbringing had promoted this, too…
There were no answers for either of them here. They moved to the next room.
Maintenance: cleaners, repair machines, testing robots. She walked down the aisle, Schön following several paces behind. At the far end was a spherical dance of light, communicating in the galactic code. She studied it — and understood that it was warning all comers that the next compartment contained the destroyer programming mechanism.
The other chambers had not had warnings; why did this one?
She was sure she knew. Theoretically, any creature who was able to travel to this station had achieved the maturity to be immune to the destroyer concept. But there could be less mature associates, as in the case of the species that had actually emplaced this unit; the truly mature individuals were not capable of violence, however practical its application. Younger species would have to maintain the equipment and do the work.
Or — there could be children, recapitulating evolution, poking aggressively into dangerous nooks. So — a warning. There could be stray destroyer emanation here.
“This is the end of the line,” she said, showing him the warner. “We have to go back. Why don’t we stop this foolish contest and try to help each other?” And she wondered whether her distaste for him had dissipated with her fear.
He brightened. “We are prisoners of what we are. These symbolic animations are only projections of our two personalities. We are Neptune now, planet of obligation… and such. For you this is A HOUSE RAISING, helpfulness, cooperation, joy in common enterprise. That is why you have spoken as you have.”