Macroscope

Half an hour later she summoned them. She was pale and her eyes were open too wide, but her voice was desperately calm. “It works,” she said.

Brad’s clothing was folded neatly on his former chair. Near it was a covered coffinlike container. There was no other sign of what had passed.

But Afra was very uneasy. “Let’s assume it works — the complete cycle. That we come through it and emerge exactly as we are now, to all appearances. I still can’t accept it intellectually — no, I mean emotionally. How do we know we have survived it? That the same person comes out of it that goes in?”

“I’ll know if I’m the same,” Ivo said defensively.

“But will you, Ivo? You may look the same, sound the same — but how do we know you are the same? Not another person of identical configuration?”

Ivo shrugged. “I’d know it. I’d know if anything were different.”

She concentrated on him with that disarming intensity. She was loveliest when expressing emotion. “Would you? Or would you only think you hadn’t changed? How could you be sure you weren’t an impostor, using Ivo’s body and mind and experience?”

“What else is there? If I have Ivo’s physique and personality, I’m Ivo, aren’t I?”

“No! You could be an identical twin — a congruent copy — a different individual. A different self.”

“What’s different about it?”

“What’s different about any two people, or any two apples or pencils or planets? If they coexist, they’re discrete individuals.”

“But I’m not coexisting with anybody else. Any other me, I mean. How can I be different?”

“Your soul could be different!”

“Oh-oh,” Groton said.

“How else can you term it?” Afra flared at him.

“I’m not trying to bring religion into it — though that might not be a bad idea — I’m just asking how we can verify the price we pay for this wonder from a foreign galaxy. How can we measure self, when physique and mind are suspect? I don’t want to be replaced by a twin that looks and thinks like me; I don’t care how good the facsimile is, if it isn’t me.”

Ivo wondered more urgently just what she had seen happen to Brad. She had been profoundly shaken, and now was clutching at theoretical, philosophical objections.

“It happens I’ve thought along similar lines,” Groton said. “I used to question whether the person who woke up in the morning was the same as the one who had gone to bed at night. Whether the identity changed a little with each change in composition — each new bite of food, each act of elimination. I finally concluded that people do change, all the time — and that it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter!”

“The important thing is that we perform our functions while we exist,” he said. “That we live each day as it comes, and don’t regret it. If a new person lives the next day, he is responsible. He is guided by his configurations, and his successors after him, and it is not right or wrong so much as predestined.”

“Astrology again?” she inquired disdainfully.

“One day you may come to have a better opinion of it, Afra,” he said mildly.

She sniffed, astonishing Ivo — he had not thought the ma

He also wondered whether the fervor of her reactions against Groton’s ideas indicated a lurking suspicion that there might be something to them after all.

“At any rate,” Groton continued, “it seems we must either undertake this process, or submit to the approaching UN party. Perhaps the question is whether we prefer to escape in alternate guise, or to surrender in our own.”

“You,” Afra said, “are a fourteen-carat casuist.”

“What are we going to do?” Ivo asked.

“All right. Since I object the most, I’ll go first. But I want some subjective reassurance. I’ve seen it; you haven’t. Once you witness it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I don’t care what’s foreordained; I want to believe I’m me.”

Groton kept a straight face. “No one else can do it for you.”

“Yes they can. I want someone else to believe I’m me, too.”

“Does it matter what we think?”

“It does.”

“Feedback,” Ivo said.

Unexpectedly, she flashed him a smile. Then she unbuttoned her blouse.

The three watched, hesitating to comment. Afra stripped methodically, completely, and without affectation. She stood before them, a splendid figure of a woman in her prime. “I want — to be handled.”

“Confirmation by tactile perception — very important,” Groton said, not mocking her; but he did not move.

“I don’t understand,” Beatryx said, seemingly more put out by this display than the men were.

“I want you — all of you — to handle me,” Afra explained as though she were giving instructions in storing groceries. Her voice was normal but a flush was developing upon cheek and neck and spreading attractively downward. “So that afterwards you will know me as well as you can, not just by sight or sound.” She smiled fleetingly. “Or temper. So that you can tell whether it is the same girl, outside. When you watch me melt down, you’ll never believe I’m whole again, unless you prove it with all your senses. And if you don’t believe, how can I?”

“I couldn’t tell one girl from another, by touch,” Ivo objected, feeling his own face heating.

“Do it,” Groton muttered.

“Me?”

Groton nodded.

Ivo stood up, far more embarrassed than Afra appeared to be. He walked jerkily toward her. He raised one hand and stopped, overcome by uncertainty. Almost, he wished the drive would fail; anything to break this up.

“Pretend you’re a doctor,” Beatryx suggested sympathetically — but there was an overtone that hinted at hysteria. This must go, he thought, entirely against her grain.

And what of his own grain? Brad had called him prudish. Brad, again, had known.

“No!” Afra said in reply to Beatryx. “No impersonal examination. That’s pointless. Do whatever you have to do to know who I am.”

“I already have some idea.” Ivo was aware that he was now blushing visibly — a phenomenon that very seldom appeared in him, since his complexion was dark. Before he met Afra, he corrected himself. The suffusion of his features fed upon itself, summoning more blood; this, too. was feedback. He was embarrassed because he was embarrassed. Could Afra have any inkling how he felt about her?

“This is as hard for me as for you,” she said. “I don’t like acting like a whore. I just don’t see any other practical way. Here.” She caught his hand and jammed it against her midriff.

Ivo remained frozen, shocked as much by her words as her action. It had been, by his dubious reckoning, less than forty-eight hours since their first meeting, and hardly more than that since this entire adventure had dropped on him. His hand, half-closed, rested against her warm, smooth, gently-heaving abdomen.

“She is trying to preserve her identity,” Groton said helpfully. “But it isn’t an entirely physical thing. She requires an experience — emotional, sexual, spiritual — the words are hardly important.”

“Sexual?” The inane query was out before he could halt it.

“Not stimulation in the erotic sense,” Groton replied carefully. “It is possible to copulate without any genuine involvement, after all. Rather, a shared sensation. Your actions and reactions are an important part of it, for they deepen its relevance. When you interact with intimacy, you accomplish something meaningful. She does not exist alone; she needs an audience. Otherwise, like the unread book or the unheard symphony, she is unrealized. Move her, be moved by her; make an experience whose significance will not easily fade. React!”

Afra nodded quickly, and the motion sent a tremor through her flesh and his. “Yes, yes — I think you understand it better than I do,” she said, speaking to Groton.