Macroscope

Home > Other > Macroscope > Page 26
Macroscope Page 26

by Pierce Anthony


  Ivo was beginning to get lost, much as he had when Brad attempted a “simplified” explanation. He did see the bucket-shape, however, with the handle toward the left and a semicircle of filled slices to the right. “So the way Afra just went ahead on her own to revive Brad, without worrying about the risk or what she would do afterward — that was spelled out the moment she was born? Because Mars happened to be in Aries? And you could have predicted—”

  “It’s hardly that simple, Ivo. There are so many other factors, and she could have reacted in some entirely different fashion. Hindsight is no justification. But I did foresee some kind of crisis. There is an activation of Saturn at about this time in her life, following the emphasis of Mars that seemed to account for her prior problem with Brad. When he became destroyed. In another year there is a predomination of Uranus. That’s three crises in fairly rapid order, for her — but the timing can vary by a year or more either way, and I simply cannot pin any of these down precisely.”

  “But the odds are she’ll have a third crisis as bad as the first two, within a year?”

  “In your terms, that about sums it up. Remember, I make no claim to—”

  “I remember. Is it possible for me to read this chart and look up the descriptions myself? You said you wanted to get an independent opinion—”

  “I don’t think you’d find it very instructive, Ivo. It takes years to—”

  “I’ll bet the chart on me says somewhere that I like to do things for myself.”

  “Not exactly.” Then Groton paused, catching the hint. “As you wish. Here are the texts. Here are the listings of symbols I wrote out, and you already have the chart. There are things I haven’t explained yet, such as the grand trine in fire, and—”

  “I think I have enough to go on. Suppose you leave me to it for an hour or so? I may misread terribly, but I’ll try to come up with a notion where I stand. Then we can decide about the trial. And I think I’d better have the other charts, too, for comparison.”

  “It’s in the stars,” Groton said, yielding with good grace, and left him to it.

  Ivo began by checking Beatryx’s chart. It was a twelve-slice disk like the first, but the markings differed. In the center it gave her date and place of birth: February 20, 1943, 6:23 CST a.m., Dallas, Texas, 33N 97W. Geographic coordinates, he decided. Below were several mathematical notes and the word SEE-SAW. He ignored these and concentrated on the symbols.

  He found the sun in the first house, just as Groton had said. “Purpose in identity,” he murmured, and leafed through the nearest text until he came to a section titled “The Planets in the Twelve Houses.” A glance at the description assured him that he had researched correctly.

  With more confidence he located the moon in the seventh house. “Feeling in partnership,” he said, checking his lists. He found the place and read: “…at his best is able to find common elements in his associations with any other individuals, and at his worst he is apt to make things unnecessarily hard for himself.” He recollected the interests she shared with him, poetic and musical, that had only appeared when there was need for conversation and companionship, and nodded. He also recalled her intensely personal reaction to Afra’s folly.

  He tried next for the signs. Her sun was in Pisces: purpose in sympathy. The first volume was open at the houses and he wanted to keep his place, so he opened the second. It was an old, weathered tome.

  “Pisces produces a very sensitive nature…” he read. “Longing to understand and forgive his fellow men, to feel himself one with them and above all to succor those who are ill-treated by the world… vaguely sad idealism…often somewhat of a Cinderella in practical life…”

  He paused to think about that, too. It was as apt a description of Beatryx as he could imagine. It was almost as though the passage had been written with her in mind.

  He flipped back to the title page: Astrology and Its Practical Application, by E. Parker. Translated from the Dutch. Published in 1927.

  Fifteen years or more before Beatryx had been born.

  He checked her chart again and located the moon in Virgo. “Feeling in Assimilation,” he thought. The book said: “There is much love for the fine arts, especially for literature. Works of art are often inwardly enjoyed without its being much shown…”

  Excited, now, he went to the other text — one copyrighted 1945 by one Marc Edmund Jones — and looked up moon-in-Virgo for confirmation. “Reacts to others with a deep hunger for common experience…”

  Be objective, he told himself. You’re only reacting to what matches.

  But still he wondered…

  He drew forth Afra’s chart and began looking up its elements and making notes. Even so, he quickly lost track of the multiple factors, and found some conflicts between texts. Finally he decided to handle it in businesslike fashion: he made a table of the abbreviated elements, so that he could consider it as a unit:

  PLANET | HOUSE | SIGN | DESCRIPTION

  Sun | 9th | Cap. | purpose X understanding, discrimination

  Moon | 9th | Cap. | feeling X understanding, discrimination

  Mars | 12th | Aries | initiative X confinement, aspiration

  Venus | 8th | Sag. | acquisitiveness X regeneration, administration

  Merc. | 9th | Cap. | mentality X understanding, discrimination

  Jup. | 6th | Libra | enthusiasm X duty, equivalence

  Sat. | 7th | Sag. | sensitiveness X partnership, administration

  Ur. | 4th | Leo | independence X home, assurance

  Nep. | 6th | Scorp. | obligation X duty, creativity

  Plu. | 5th | Virgo | obsession X offspring, assimilation

  Ivo contemplated his production with a certain frustrated pride. He had made an unintelligible horoscope intelligible; he had reduced voluminous verbiage to its essence. Chaos to order, as it were — and he still didn’t know what to make of it. There was a lot of discrimination, tied in with purpose, feeling and mentality, and this certainly seemed to reflect Afra’s drives. But understanding tied in with the same three qualities. Then there was enthusiasm for duty and equivalence; obligation for duty and creativity; obsession for offspring and assimilation?

  What did all this say about her probable reaction to a Tritonian trial? Would it help her, or would it drive her to suicide? Or would she see through it all and laugh?

  Afra was a person, not a chart or a table.

  He should have left the astrology to Groton.

  Ivo shook his bursting head as though to rattle loose a productive notion and put the papers aside. He went to his own apartment and picked up the box that held his useless artifacts of Earth. He had never returned them to his clothing after the melting. The penny should still be there, amidst the junk… yes, his questing fingers found the disk. He fished it out without looking, flipped it into the air, caught it and slapped it against his wrist. “Heads we try her, tails we forget it,” he said aloud. Then he looked.

  It was the bus token, possessing neither head nor tail.

  Groton rapped for attention. “We do not need to be unduly formal. Ivo, you’ve been assigned to prosecute. Please make your case.”

  Ivo rose, feeling for a moment as though he were actually in a formal courtroom, addressing a jury of twelve. “Harold, it is my purpose to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Afra Summerfield did willfully and with malice aforethought murder Bradley Carpenter. She—”

  Afra jumped to her feet in a fury. “What a thing to say! Of all the ridiculous, unwarranted, slanderous—”

  She broke off, seeing the other three silent and solemn.

  Groton turned slowly to address her. “You are of course entitled to express yourself, Afra. But it would be better if you let Beatryx speak in your defense. We do need to ascertain the truth of this matter, if we are to exist in harmony here.”

  She subsided, pitiful in her misery and sudden uncertainty. “Yes, of course, Harold. I understand.”

  “Proceed, Ivo, if you please.”

  �
��We have here a pampered and arrogant young woman of the upper middle class. She was raised to believe herself superior to the common folk, by reason of the purity of her breeding, the finances of her family and the quality of her education. She possesses an alert mind and tends to deem those of more leisurely intellect to be inferior for that reason, too. At the same time, she resents those of demonstrably greater intelligence than hers, since such people appear by her definition to occupy a higher niche in the hierarchy. They are, in a word, superior.”

  Afra watched him, appalled. “Is that what you really believe? That I—” But she halted again, seeing his impassive demeanor. “I’m sorry. I won’t interrupt again.”

  “Now picture the situation that obtained when she became employed within the orbiting Macroscope Project as a high-powered secretary. Many — perhaps most — of the trained personnel there exceeded both her education and her natural ability. Compared to them she was both ignorant and stupid. Surely this fostered in her a state of continuing resentment. No one likes to believe himself to be inferior, or to have others believe it, whatever the actual case may be.”

  Ivo had intended to overstate the case, not really believing it himself, but he found himself responding to his own rhetoric. In accusing her, he was voicing some of his own attitudes. He felt inferior, and he had never liked it. And Afra was an intellectual snob.

  “In addition, these personnel were multiracial. Negroes, Mongolians and halfbreeds were ranked above her, inherently and socially. Even certain members of the maintenance crew were able to earn privileges she was denied. Remember, she is Georgia-born. To her, such persons are niggers, chinks and spies, tolerable so long as they ‘keep their place’ but never to be acknowledged as equals, let alone betters. These were also of foreign nationalities and foreign ideologies: to wit, socialist, communist and fascist. To her, a belch after a meal is uncouth and a cheek-to-cheek greeting between members of the same sex disgusting.”

  He was going too far, bringing in irrelevancies, but could not seem to stop. His resentments were coming out, and she personified them. He was angry at her because he loved her.

  “But one thing kept her there, despite her obvious unsuitability for the position. She met an attractive young American scientist only slightly more intelligent than she who was willing to fraternize. She — became infatuated with him.” Translation: Ivo was angry because Afra loved Brad…

  A crease appeared in Afra’s brow and her color heightened, but she did not move or speak.

  “But it turned out, after a brief but intimate liaison, that this American had deceived her. He was far more able intellectually than she, having falsified his status in that respect. He had far, more education, and regarded what she had taken to be a commitment for marriage as no more than a temporary entertainment. Further, he proposed to reassign her favors to an acquaintance. She thus found herself reduced to the lowest status imaginable to her: so-called white slavery.”

  Beatryx gestured in distress. “Ivo, that’s horrible. You have no right to accuse her of—”

  He felt cold now, no longer angry. “Of de facto prostitution? I was not doing so. I was making the point that Bradley Carpenter treated her as a diversion. His real purpose—”

  “You’re overdoing it,” Groton cautioned him. “Brad isn’t on trial.”

  Ivo was glad to let that aspect drop. Brad had, after all, been his friend. He had known for twenty years what Brad was like: a polite, cautious, dull Schön. If Brad used people ruthlessly, what would Schön do?

  “It subsequently turned out that her supposed fiancé was himself of mixed blood: by her definition, a mulatto or worse. And he had been raised in a free-love colony where morality in the conventional sense was unknown. Thus she learned that she had not been the first to share intimacies with him; rather, she was the last in a very long line, and followed after girls — and boys — of all the races of the world.”

  Some condemnation! Ivo himself was as conservative as Afra, and as biased, despite what he knew of his origin. Yet he had shared much of the life of the project until its breakup. When, thereafter, he had encountered individual girls from it, he had indulged in the usual amenities. Outsiders would have considered this to be flagrant promiscuity. Yet the project bond was special; its members shared a heritage, and there were no reservations between them. What was more natural than a sharing of intellect and experience, in this way recapturing a fragment of that larger camaraderie?

  Ivo had been shocked by Afra’s nudity and actions at the time of the handling — but that was because she was a nonproject girl. Had he been properly objective, he would have had no problem. She had been true to her viewpoint, then and in her relation to Brad, while he was a thorough hypocrite. He should be on trial, not she…

  Time to wrap it up, before he got carried away again. He gestured at Afra. “It is not for us, as it was not for her, to judge the morality of Bradley Carpenter. He is dead by this woman’s hand. It is for us to determine whether the defendant had motivation for murder — and surely, by her bigoted definitions, she had. Her act must be interpreted in this light. There can be no verdict but guilty.”

  He had spoken well, but he felt tight and sick. This trial had shown him unwelcome things in himself.

  Beatryx, assigned counsel for the defense, took the floor. She was gaunt now, and troubled, but her voice was strong. “Harold, this is all wrong. Ivo has put things all out of proportion. There’s hardly anybody who couldn’t be condemned by that sort of reasoning. Afra was trying to bring back the man she loved, and she tried very hard, but it didn’t work. Nobody else did anything. The rest of us would have let him fade away, there in his tank. If she had known what would happen, she never would have—”

  “No,” Afra said. “I couldn’t stand to have him remain as jelly, or as an idiot. Better to have him dead, than that.”

  Ivo froze. Beatryx was making a good case — and Afra had just undermined it.

  “That isn’t true!” Beatryx told her. “You just think because he died, you have to take the blame. But he did it himself — he watched the destroyer on purpose.”

  Afra stared straight ahead. Beatryx was right. Afra hadn’t tried to kill Brad. She had taken a wild gamble in an effort to bring him back — from the dead, in effect. Her failure did not imply malice.

  “Do you have any statement to make on your own behalf?” Groton asked Afra after a moment.

  There was no response.

  “In that case, having heard the presentation and being already familiar with the background of this case, it behooves me to render an impartial decision.”

  Groton was going through with it, but it seemed to Ivo that this “trial” was in a shambles. Afra had not fought back properly, and so had not been officially vindicated. They had accomplished nothing.

  “I find the defendant guilty of conduct prejudicial to the well-being of the decedent, Bradley Carpenter. Motivation for overt, premeditated murder, however, has by no means been shown, and more than a single interpretation may be placed on the defendant’s physical actions. At worst, they were reckless. The actual instrument of demise appears to have been the phenomenon we term the destroyer, combined with an incompletely understood function of the melting cycle. Rehabilitation of the defendant therefore seems feasible.”

  Brother! Would Afra swallow this?

  “Are you saying it was an accident?” Beatryx asked. “But she still has to pay for it?”

  “Just about,” Groton conceded. “Recklessness, though, has been well established in my judgment.”

  “I suppose that’s all right, then.”

  Ivo nodded acquiescence.

  “I therefore sentence you, Afra Summerfield of Georgia, to exile from the equal society of man until such time as the neutralization of the said destroyer seems feasible, so that no other person need ever be similarly afflicted. This will be considered penance by corrective endeavor. Further: because to a considerable extent your personal pride was at fault, this
sentence includes a period of confinement at onerous labor. You shall assume the gardening and cooking and laundry chores for the Triton encampment and shall not leave the garden-kitchen-laundry areas except to make beds and to perform such other menial tasks as may be required of you by the other members of this encampment. This labor shall terminate only upon the group’s departure from the present locale, at which time you shall be permitted to petition the group for readmittance to its society on a probationary basis.

  “Until that point you shall not again be addressed by name, nor shall you address any member of the group by name.”

  And Afra, amazingly, nodded. She wanted to be punished!

  “This sentence,” Groton said after a pause, “is suspended, owing to—”

  “No!” Afra said dully. “It’s a fair sentence.”

  So Groton had intended only a token reprimand. Afra, anticipating this, had insisted that it be real. Her privilege, of course — but were they helping her to recover, or merely catering to her masochism?

  “Girl,” Ivo snapped into the intercom.

  After a few seconds Afra’s voice came back. “Sir?”

  “Report to the drawing room for conference.”

  She appeared duly, clad in a simple black skirt falling below the knees, with a long-sleeved blouse overset by a loose housecoat. A drab kerchief bound her hair, giving her something of the aspect of a nun.

  She stood silently, waiting for him to speak.

  “Sit down.”

  “Sir?”

  “Down. I have something to show you.”

  She settled on the least comfortable perch available.

  Ivo took his stance before the blackboard he had set up. “A conception of cosmology,” he said, assuming the manner of a lecturer. “The evidence available indicates that our universe is in a state of continual expansion. Calculations suggest that there is a finite limit to such expansion, governed by variables too complex to discuss at this time. For convenience we shall think of the present universe as that four-dimensional volume beyond which our three-dimensional physical space and matter cannot expand: the cosmic limitation. We shall further consider these four dimensions to be spatial in nature, though in fact the universe is a complex of n dimensions, few of which are spatial and many of which interact with spatial planes deviously. Do you understand?”

 

‹ Prev