“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 error 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.”