Macroscope

by Pierce Anthony

  Groton paused. “Now here is the second one: This person is determined to test the mettle of reality in every possible sort of hard effort He desires to bring everything down to a utilitarian basis. At his best he is able to organize or redirect the energies of himself and others to an increased advantage; at his worst he is apt to become wholly malcontent and unsocial. Life for him must be purposeful; he is readily stimulated. He is high-visioned, optimistic, gregarious to a fault and often gullible. He must be challenged to do his best, or he becomes dogmatic and jealous. He is a realist in minor things, a do-or-die idealist otherwise.”

  Ivo thought about it. “They’re both so general, and I’m not sure I like either one too much. But the second seems closer. I do like to help people, but too often it doesn’t work out. And I’d much rather earn my way by hard work than do something dramatic. I’m certainly not fearless.”

  “This is my impression. Human traits are not portioned off precisely, and we all have a little of everything, so character summations are necessarily vague in spots. But the first hardly describes you. It is Aries the Ram in the twelfth house. Aries is part of the fire element — that’s why I commented on your figure of speech.”

  “My — ?”

  “You said ‘fire at will.’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “The second is Aquarius the Water Carrier in the sixth house — air element. I could go on with the other planets — this was the sun, of course — but this differentiation is typical. You appear to fit Aquarius, not Aries.”

  “And my birth date?”

  “Aries.”

  “So I’m a misfit. Don’t know where I belong. Whose birthday is Aquarius?”

  “I played a hunch from something my wife mentioned. Sidney Lanier.”

  Ivo felt a nasty emotional shock. Pseudo-science or not, this was striking pretty close. “So you say I should be fire when I seem to be air. Could you have miscalculated?”

  “No. That’s the mystery. I rechecked very carefully and it stands. Your personality is entirely different from the one indicated by your horoscope, and your personal episode only corroborates that difference. I could be mistaken in detail, but hardly to this extent. So: assuming my tenets to be valid, either your birth date is not the one you gave me, or—”

  “Or — ?”

  “Do you play chess?”

  “No.” Ivo did not challenge the abrupt change of subject.

  “It happens that I do. I’m not very good at it, but I used to play quite a bit, before I found more important uses for my time. So I believe I know what that message means.”

  “Message?”

  “Schön’s last. You remember: ‘My pawn is pinned.’ That’s a chess expression.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I think you would, Ivo, but I’ll explain. Each piece in chess has a different motion and a different value. A pawn is a minor piece reckoned at one point and it moves straight ahead, one step at a time. The knight and the bishop are worth three points each, and their motions are correspondingly more intricate and far-ranging. The castle is worth five, and the queen nine or ten, so you see she is a very powerful piece. The pointages are only general guides to strategic value; no numerical score is kept, of course. The queen moves as far as she wants in any direction; it is her mobility that gives her strength, and her presence changes the entire complexion of the game.”

  “I don’t entirely follow the explanation, but I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The point is, you dare not ignore the queen. She can strike from any distance, while a pawn is severely limited. So the queen can check and even mate the king without danger to herself, but the pawn has to be guarded.”

  “Mate? Guard?”

  Groton sighed. “You really don’t know chess, do you! Here.” He brought out a blackboard and made a checkerboard on it in chalk. Blackboards seemed to be popular among engineers. “The squares are black and white, but forget that for now.” He added some letters. “Here’s the black queen — she’s circled. It could be a black bishop, of course; principle’s the same. She’s on king’s-rook-eight, while all the whites are set up on the seventh and eight ranks, so.” He ignored Ivo’s confusion. “Now white’s pawn is about to be queened, but can’t because it is pinned. That’s what Schön is talking about.”

  Ivo contemplated the illustration. “I’m glad it makes sense to you.”

  Groton pursued his logic relentlessly. “The king is the game, you see. You can’t allow him to move into check. Your opponent will call you down for incorrect play if you do; there are no pitfalls of that nature in chess. Look — pawn moves up like this, next it’s black’s move and queen checks king. So pawn can’t move, not while it’s pinned. It has to protect the king.”

  “That much I follow. I think. The pawn is like a bodyguard — if it steps out, assassination.”

  “Close enough. But here is the rest of it: the pawn is a special piece, especially in this position, because if it gets to the back row it changes into a queen, or any other piece it chooses to. That can change the whole course of the game, because an extra queen in the end-game is a terror.”

  “It does look pretty bad for that king, bottled in the corner like that.”

  “White pawn promotes into a white queen; that’s good for this king. Matter of fact, it means white can win the game — if that pawn can only move up. That’s why the pin has to be broken; it is the crux of the game.”

  “We’re white?”

  “Right. And black is some alien intelligence fifteen thousand light-years deep in the galaxy.”

  “The destroyer?”

  “That’s what I mean. Somebody set up that alien queen, and she has our king threatened, all the way across the board. And all we have are pawns to hold her off.”

  “And we’ve lost six pawns already.”

  “Right Our seventh and eighth are on the board at the seventh rank. And one of them is pinned — the important one. The one in a position to queen.”

  “Which one is that — in life, I mean.”

  “That one.” Groton aimed a heavy finger at Ivo.

  “Me? Because I can use the macroscope a little?”

  “Because you can fetch the white queen. Schön.”

  “But how am I pinned?” Groton, now that he was on the trail, was as persistent as Afra.

  “I have been wondering about that. You are obviously Schön’s pawn, and he has confirmed his involvement by sending us cryptic little messages. My guess is that he would come to us if he could. He told us why he can’t, if we can only make sense of it.” Groton looked at his diagram. “Now that pawn is pinned by the queen, so that’s you pinned by the destroyer. If that pawn could move even one step, it would be another queen. So it is in effect a queen that is pinned, in the guise of a pawn. They are the same; the one is inherent in the other.”

  “I suppose so, but—”

  “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 erro
r 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.

  “I don’t like this,” Groton said privately to the others. “She can’t he thinking of reconstituting Brad and operating on him herself. But I’m afraid she is.”

  “Does she have surgical training?” Ivo asked.

  “No. She’s trying to learn it all now, on her own. She’ll kill him.”

  “What is she going to do?” Beatryx asked, worried.

  “As I make it, she means to remove his damaged nervous tissue and grow it back or replace it with galactic substitutes. As though she were grafting an artificial hand.”

  “But it’s his brain that’s burned…” Beatryx said.

  Ivo mulled the point. How could it be possible to replace any portion of the brain, without drastically changing the personality? Even if Afra were to accomplish it, the result would not be the Brad she had known. And the civilization that set up the destroyer would surely have known about feasible corrective techniques, and arranged to make them useless, lest its barricade be breached. Salvation could not lie in that direction.

  Or was he rationalizing, jealous of the possible return of a rival? Had there not been something about becoming dogmatic and jealous, in that Aquarius portrait Groton had provided?

  “She can’t reconstitute him unless I tune in the station,” Ivo remarked.

  “Are you sure? Don’t forget, sh
e supervised his melting. She insisted on having a macroscope-screen extension. And that reconstitution signal tunes in itself, as it has to to revive a melt when nobody’s around to supervise. I’d say she can do it — and will.”

  “I don’t know. I’d hate to risk it.”

  This, too, had to ride. They were pinned. Any interference was as likely to provoke calamity as to alleviate it.

  Afra’s preparations neared completion. They could tell by the way she hummed in her laboratory, by her air of expectancy, though she turned aside all questions.

  When the tension became unbearable, Groton went to reason with her — but she had locked them out. “Could get around that soon enough,” he muttered, since he had directed the building of room, door and lock, and still had functioning mechanicals available. “But what’s the point? She means to see it through, and she’s an imperious lass. All fire and earth.”

  Ivo was beginning to recognize astrological allusions. Fire burned and earth endured — or something like that. “Should we let her do it?”

  “All in favor of stopping her by sheer physical force,” Groton said, and shrugged. Neither Ivo nor Beatryx cared to register a vote.

  “But we should watch her,” Ivo said. “We know it’s disaster, but we don’t know exactly what kind. There will be pieces to pick up.”

  “Literally,” Groton agreed. “Ours, if we break in.”

  “I was thinking of the macroscope.”

  Groton’s eyes widened. “Let’s go!” he cried. “Beatryx, you stay here — but don’t go in after her, no matter what you hear. Unless she calls for help.”

  Frightened, she nodded. She looked, in that moment, haggard; she had lost sleep and weight. Ivo had not realized until this glance how deeply involved in this crisis Beatryx, the only other woman on Triton, felt herself to be. Why did he so often forget that other people had emotions as pressing as his own?