“That’s how you — turn into Schön?”
“That’s one way. There are others.” He decided to change the subject. “Of course, I’ll never know whether I really had tongues. It could all have been American English, with the suggestion of translation. Just enough for verisimilitude in the dream.”
“Dream?” Afra said.
“The Phoenician episode I summarized for you. It seemed like several days, and it was real for me, but—”
“Maybe we’d better play off one of the tapes,” Groton said.
“Tapes?” It was Ivo’s turn to be perplexed.
Afra was already busy. “Listen.” She switched on the playback.
A stream of gibberish poured out of the speaker. “This was yesterday,” Afra said. “That is, about twenty-seven hours ago. Your voice.”
“I was speaking?”
“Ancient Phoenician. Fluently. I was able to pick out words only here and there, so we set up a program and ran the tape through the computer and patched up a translation. Do you want to hear it?”
“I’d better.”
She lifted the printout. “Are you trusting yourself to a stranger? A brigand, perhaps a rapist or murderer? No. Ifarsh of America. I was captured by a ship and brought to Mattan for questioning. What I don’t comprehend is the reason he sent me for sacrifice. How could—”
“That’s enough,” Ivo said, embarrassed. “Did you translate — everything I said?”
“Yes. We had to.”
“We rigged up a real-time continuous translation,” Groton said, “and monitored it. In case there was any way we could help. Just now you messed it by switching to non-programmed languages.”
Ivo tried to remember all the things he had said, particularly to Aia. He felt his cheeks growing hot.
“How did you finally fight your way out of it?” Groton asked him. “We knew something special was happening, but we couldn’t tell what. You were telling someone there about your presence here, but—”
“I was telling you, Harold.” And with that statement he had another realization: that this man had become Harold instead of Groton in thought as well as speech. That was significant. “Or at least your ancestor-in-spirit. An astrologer, and an honest and knowledgeable man. I remembered that they were the best-educated men in those days, because they were the true astronomers and scientists before those fields were recognized as such, always questing for the secrets of things. It seemed to me that if I could convince one intelligent person in that world that I didn’t belong there — literally — then the framework would be rent, or at least punctured. And I guess I convinced him, because it happened.” He thought about the implications. “I hope Gorolot wasn’t too upset when I disappeared.”
“Aia will console him,” Afra said with gentle irony. It had not taken her long to revert to her normal cynicism. Had she been crying for him, that moment he first returned?
“Similar to punching through by gravitational collapse,” Harold said. “This would have been credibility collapse, though. You do believe that world was real?” He was asking for an opinion rather than a defense.
“I would hate to believe that it wasn’t. If I was really speaking Phoenician—”
“I think I understand.” Harold looked about. “We’d better take a break, now that it’s over. This has been rough on all of us, and my wife doesn’t even—”
Beatryx appeared, carrying a tray. Incongruously, that reminded Ivo that now they were in a gravity defocuser, rather than the intensifier of Triton days, since they were buried in massive Neptune. How much stranger this situation was than the one he had visited!
Beatryx saw him. “Ivo!” she cried immediately. “You’re back!”
That seemed to make it complete.
Though less than three days had passed, it was a novelty to sleep in a modern bed again, and to be free of the pain of a flesh wound on the arm and a cut on the hand. He had been too much a part of the world of Tyre, had experienced too much there. He had sought only to leave it — yet now he was sorry, perversely, that it was gone. Was it that he craved the adventure it had offered?
There he had been a man — a man in constant danger and discomfort, but a man. Here he was no more than a surrogate, a mild-mannered reporter waiting for Superman to take over. He wondered whether, if the offer of such adventure were made again, he would accept it. Give Schön what he wanted, in exchange for that satisfaction. For Schön could do that, if he chose; and the covenant would bind him. He could relegate Ivo to a fantasy fragment, his personality turned inward instead of outward, and let him live out his life there untrammeled by the inadequacies of the present. Perhaps it would be a short life, but—
There was a motion nearby that made him jump. “Hello, Ivo.”
Afra.
She sat down beside him: fresh, white, perfumed, elegantly packaged. “I think I know what you’re thinking, Ivo. You’re nostalgic for that world.”
“I guess I am, now that it’s over.”
“And you’re afraid you might go back to it the next time you use the macroscope, or something like it.”
He nodded. She was so beautiful in the half-light that he felt her presence as heat radiating against the side of his body toward her. The effect might be subjective, but it was powerful.
“This Aia — was she me?”
“No. She was a spy, a courtesan.”
“She still could have been me, Ivo. That name is close. And I was used to — to keep you at the station, so that Schön would be available. I’m not very proud of that.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have known. I don’t like being stupid, particularly about a thing like that. Brad told me to be nice to you. I — I’m trying to say I’m sorry. About that and a lot of things. But that isn’t why I came here.”
He felt it safest not to comment. Why did a lovely woman come to the bed of an admirer? To reminisce?
“I suppose it’s like the — the handling. I’ll just have to say it. And do it. I heard what you said to her. About me.”
Oh-oh. “I was afraid of that. I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t you apologize to me! I’m the one at fault. All I can say is that I was dense, or blind, or both. I didn’t know, I really didn’t know — until I read it on the printout. I didn’t know you loved me.”
“I didn’t want you to know. I’d rather you forgot it.”
She did not move, but it was as though she leaned over him where he lay. “That isn’t the past tense, is it, Ivo. You love me now — and I won’t forget it. I — well, you know my situation. I can’t say I love you or ever will.”
“I understand.”
“That Aia — she offered herself to you, and you wanted her. But you told her—”
Ivo felt his face burning again. “Can’t we just let that pass?”
“No we can’t, Ivo. You held her in your arms and she made you recite poetry — but then you didn’t make love to her. And you could have.”
“How do you know? It was my vision.”
“Not entirely, Ivo. I do know. Did you think you were having an innocent wet dream? I was with you.”