Cluster

  "You agree?" she played after a pause.

  "Yes. I personally feel civilization is not worth the price of macro-genocide. But I'm only a Stone Age man. My species obviously feels otherwise. Self-interest is our guiding force. Polaris may be morally superior, but not Sol. I don't like the truth, but I acknowledge it."

  She was silent. She had led him into this trap so that she could kill him conveniently and without fuss. But she was not in her Amazon Andromedan body now. She had no cutting disks, no burning lasers. She was in a true Mintakan host, as he was, and though these bodies were of uniform sex, his masculine nature had oriented on a large, strong host, while her feminine nature had taken a petite one. She had appearance; he had power. Thus he had a physical advantage.

  And if the Mintakans suspected what was happening, they would come immediately and use the overriding master-tune to open the door. They should catch on—for two host bodies were gone. All he had to do was stall Andromeda long enough.

  "You must have been here before," he played with a counterpoint of annoyed admiration. "You are familiar with Mintakan nature and custom, and had this chamber all set up—"

  "I oriented on the Mirzam transfer to Mintaka," she agreed. "I was late, because of your fiendish ploy at Spica—"

  Flint burst into a fibrillation of mirth. "So now your true sentiments come out! You don't want to return to Spica!"

  Her chords were intensely hostile. "I am glad I have the opportunity to destroy you tediously."

  "So you were late, and Mintaka was already into transfer technology," he played liltingly. "So when this Ancient site discovery came up you intercepted Mirzam's next envoy and impersonated Mintaka on Godawful IV. But because your Spican bondage had depleted your aura, you couldn't transfer to a local body. That would have given you away anyway. Your galaxy had to undertake the hideous expense of intergalactic mattermission—"

  "We shall recover that energy from the essence of your galaxy!" she twanged.

  "And then you lost your body, and must die along with me."

  "But my mission is accomplished," she played. "You shall not relay the secret of energy-Kirlian, so shall not achieve parity with us."

  "But I did relay the secret of transfer orientation to the Canopian," he played. "So now our Spheres will be able to trace your transfers, even as you traced ours, and send counteragents to weed out all your spies. And we'll locate and destroy your energy-relay stations too. But first we'll study them, and get the secret of energy transfer anyway. We may not be able to do to Andromeda what you have tried to do to us, but we can now protect our galaxy from yours."

  "Your schlish myriad-image ploy," she complained. "Had I been able to kill you in time—"

  "And without that ill-gotten energy, your civilization will have to regress at the Fringe, just as our Spheres do," he continued. "You will be pleasantly primitive at the rim, and no threat to your neighbors."

  "We shall develop other sources of supply."

  "Not if we run tracers on your intergalactic transfers and warn alien Spheres of—"

  She emitted a sudden blast of discordance so powerful it disrupted his own instrumentation. It was a painful experience, and he damped violently and automatically. These creatures could kill with mere sound! He lost his balance as he fought off the terrible noise, and one drum-deck brushed hers.

  There was the electric tingle of one intense aura impinging on another. As always, it affected him profoundly—and more so this time, because the shock of discordance had made him vulnerable. Suddenly he didn't want to fight her any more. But he knew he had to, for the information he had could make his galaxy paramount. Not just Kirlian-energy, but something the Andromedans lacked: involuntary hosting, whereby a high-Kirlian entity could be projected to a fully functioning entity and take over that entity. It was right there in his memorized formulas. If only he could get it to his galaxy....

  "So you have sentient feelings," he played as his strings relaxed. "You're not the complete huntress after all."

  "Huntress?" she played, her anger muted but still audible in the background melody.

  "Too bad you didn't visit Sphere Sol," he played, and now his tune was of affected pity. But was it pity for her—or for himself? His Kirlian missions had cost him his fiancée and his Paleolithic innocence—and these seemed unbearably precious in retrospect. "We have a rich mythology based on the visible stars. If you will desist from trying to kill me for a while, I'll tell you about it."

  "I haven't been trying to kill you. I brought no weapon. We both will die anyway. I merely render you incommunicado until your aura fades."

  So that was it! If he killed her, he would still be trapped here. He would win release only if he could make her release him—and that was extremely unlikely. She was a hardened professional intergalactic agent, inured to the concept of genocide, a ruthless killer, the Queen of Energy.

  Unless he could prevail upon her suppressed femininity, and make her want to release him. Maybe that was what she wanted, in whatever subconscious her kind possessed. Maybe their interactions in the Spheres of Canopus and Spica and the open cluster of the Hyades had developed an affinity. It had been fun mating with her as Impact-Undulant, and they did have matching Kirlian auras.... "If we must die together, we might as well be social," he played sweetly. "I'll play you our legends, and you play me yours."

  She made noncommittal music. Good, she was amenable.

  "In our pantheon, Mintaka is one of three bright stars forming Orion's Belt," he played. "It is perhaps our most impressive constellation, that glowing Belt, with red Betelgeuse—children call it 'beetle juice'—above and white Rigel below, making the giant's shoulder and leg. Orion was a handsome giant in our old Greek mythology. His parents desperately wanted a son, so three visiting gods urinated on the hide of a heifer and buried it in the ground. Nine months later Orion, their son, emerged."

  "This is your normal mode of reproduction?" she inquired with vague dissonance.

  "No. It's a pun on 'Orion' and 'urine,' terms which are similar in more than one of our languages." He paused, aware that the concept of urine had no relevance to a Mintakan body, whose wastes were powdery. However, this was an Andromedan, and she seemed to comprehend. "But actually there is some relevance. In the human body, the urination outlet of the male is also used for inserting the seed into the body of the female, where it combines with her egg cell and grows in nine months to a separate entity. So maybe the myth actually describes the gods using that urine tube to impregnate the 'heifer'—which may be taken as Orion's mother. Possibly his father was impotent or sterile, so this was the only way to beget a son. Of course, in some of our cultures it was the custom for the husband to lend his wife to visitors, part of the hospitality of the house. So it may have been a legitimate situation, albeit somewhat delicate. Men are proud of their virility." He was waxing unusually philosophic, but why not? Maybe he could have been a philosopher in other circumstances, had he had an education extending to more than the lore of the stars.

  "Disgusting," Andromeda played, and Flint wasn't certain to which aspect of his commentary she referred. "Continue."

  Flint avoided any musical chuckle. She was hooked, all right—and his tale had just begun. As an extragalactic sapient about to die, she wanted to assuage her curiosity while she could. And any sentient, sapient or not, was fascinated by the conventions of reproduction; it was an inherent function.

  "Orion had a dog called Sirius—and that is also a star in our firmament, not far from the Belt. Or so it appears from Sol. Actually Sirius is within nine light-years of Sol, while Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka of the Belt are sixteen and fifteen hundred light-years distant. But to our primitives, it was Canis Major, the big dog standing by his master."

  "In our sky, at home in Sphere /," Andromeda played reminiscently, "there is a great double-circle of bright stars: the two outer disks of our mightiest hunter. He was created from the collision of two supernovas—"

  "Collision of nov
as!" Flint tootled.

  "Our legends are no more ludicrous than yours! Better a birth by novas than by urinating into your female."

  "Could be," Flint agreed, reminding himself that it was not his purpose to antagonize her. "You /s reproduce by means of light?"

  "We lock together two lasers on the mating frequency and—but what business is it of yours?"

  "I admit we two are as dissimilar physically as two species can be," Flint said. "That was some fight, in the Hyades! But we seem to have similar personalities, and the aura—"

  "We are enemies!"

  "You never mated in Andromeda, did you?"

  "I was too busy protecting my galaxy!"

  Uh-huh. "Orion married a beautiful girl named Side, who I think was very like my Honeybloom. But she was vain—"

  "You are married?" Andromeda queried sharply, so that he had to damp down the sympathetic vibration of the overnote in his own strings. She employed a combination of concepts: mating, permanency, and societal authentication. There was, it seemed, no marriage in Sphere Mintaka—but the Andromedan / pattern was similar to that of Flint's own species. The slicing disk and the stabbing spear: aspects of the same urge. Could it be that she was jealous?

  "I was married in my fashion. Posthumously, as it were. I, too, had my personal life preempted by the needs of my galaxy. It is a sad thing, isn't it."

  As he played his comment, she accompanied him with a haunting tune of agreement. The sheer beauty of the impromptu duet startled him. When Mintakans communicated, they really did make beautiful music together! It was far superior to the human forms, both as dialogue and music. In that affinity of sound, he realized how lovely she could be when she chose. If he were not careful, he could fall into the same snare he was fashioning for her. The lure of a Kirlian aura matching his own....

  "Side boasted of her beauty, and was sent to hell by the jealous queen of the gods," Flint continued. As was Honeybloom, shamed, exiled by her tribe, deprived of her luster; existing in a living hell. How he missed her, now that he could never recover what had been.

  "So was Starshine," Andromeda played softly. "Her beams were the clearest, and so she was banished for life, and her star still glows near the indomitable disks of the Hero...."

  A strikingly similar legend—or was she making it up, playing a variation of his tune, teasing him? It hardly mattered; the theme was still new. "Then Orion fell in love with Merope, and killed all the savage beasts on her father's island kingdom," Flint continued. He was enjoying these mythological memories. Myths were very important to Stone Age man, especially myths relating to the visible stars. The constellations had been different from Outworld, but the Earth myths, easier to relate to than modern Earth, remained. "This was to find favor with her father, Oenopion, so that he would permit them to marry. When Oenopion rejected him, Orion took Merope by force."

  "How is this possible?" she played. "Either party can interrupt the beam—"

  "In other Spheres involuntary mating is possible, as in Spica." Where Andromeda herself had been raped. "A Solarian's urination tube can become very stiff: it can penetrate against resistance. And Merope may have been amenable; it was her father who objected."

  "As one's galaxy may object, enforcing by powerful conditioning." She played so softly he barely received it. But the meaning was startling: She had been conditioned against him? She must, then, have evinced some inclination, as had Merope.

  And in his own life, was Merope the Polarian Tsopi? He could not marry her, for they were of different Spheres. Anyway, her culture and nature forbade permanent liaisons. But while it lasted, it was wonderful, once cultural misunderstandings were resolved. Call Sphere Polaris Oenopion, blinding him to its secrets... no, there was no good analogy here. And why should there be? This was only a game. Or was it?

  "Illicit beam exchange!" Andromeda played, comprehending. "Yes, that happens, despite serious opposition. It is mooted as most intense. The stigma of his prior exchange made him an unsatisfactory liaison...."

  "You're catching on. So Oenopion drugged Orion into a deep sleep and put out his eyes. Lenses, to you."

  "He blinded the giant!" she played.

  "That's in your legend too?"

  "That's what you are doing to my galaxy. You are cutting off our ability to transfer into other galaxies, to investigate their sentient Spheres."

  "Because your are stealing our vital energy!" Flint played back fortissimo, his harmonics jarring against her melody.

  She did not respond directly. "Did you mean it, about the morality of your species being no better than ours?"

  Again, he forced himself to express the truth, rather than uttering human or Milky Way patriotism. "Yes. I may have been more cynical at the outset, but my experiences in other bodies and other cultures have changed me. In Canopus I learned that to be humanoid was not to be superior; in Spica I found three sides to any question; in Polaris I appreciated circularity. I have learned that there are many validities, and like the Tarotists I find myself concluding that they all are proper. If I went to Galaxy Andromeda I would probably come to appreciate that reality too. I am not the same entity I was, either as an individual or a species."

  "Concurrence." The tune was hardly more than a wish. Then: "Was that the end of Orion?"

  "No. He learned that he could recover his sight by traveling toward the sun—"

  "By seeking a new source of energy!"

  "Maybe. When he could see again, he went to Crete and went hunting with Artemis or Diana—"

  "What name?"

  "Artemis in Greek, Diana in Roman. Same girl. Diana was a beautiful, skilled, chaste huntress who loved no male. She—"

  "You are making sport of me!" Andromeda clanged, and the notes of her voice were like lasers.

  "Believe me, that's really the legend. I may have reason to kill you, but never to ridicule you. But don't be concerned; she killed him."

  "Oh," she played with a mixed background. Mintakan chords could convey so much meaning! "Sing me Diana."

  "She was a musician who liked singing and dancing, and was skilled in all things except love. When she and Orion went hunting together, he was struck by her beauty and competence, and he touched her—"

  "As you touched me in Spica!" she played angrily. "How lucky I was that it wasn't in Sol, or you would have rammed your defecation tube—"

  Flint let the description pass. "That's possible," he agreed. "You're quite a female in your fashion."

  "My fashion is Sphere / of Andromeda!" But in a moment she muted. "How did she kill him? With a laser?"

  "Not as clean as that. She summoned a scorpion to sting him to death. That's a bug with a jointed tail containing venom, very potent. Now that scorpion is also in the sky. When it rises, Orion's constellation fades, hiding from it."

  "I wonder whether there are Mintakan scorpions?" she played musingly.

  "Let's go out and see."

  She trilled her laughter. "You are very clever, no matter what host you bear. We remain here. We shall be blinded together."

  Until the Mintakans traced the missing hosts, Flint thought. "That could be very tedious," he played. "I have aura to carry my identity at least sixty days, and probably you do too. What will we do to pass the time? Make love?"

  "I suspected you would think of that," she played. "It seems to be characteristic of males all over the universe. Even here, where there are no sexes, some entities are constantly eager to make music together."

  "Not physically, not by laser exchange, but by making music together? I'd really like to know how—"

  "Don't be concerned. Death hastens the demise of the aura, and even transfer cannot extend it long. A living body suffers in the absence of its aura, and the aura suffers in the absence of its natural host."

  "So that's what happened to my body when I returned from Sphere Polaris! I was so sick—"

  "Yes. The body must be reanimated periodically, exercised, or it gets rusty. You did not know?"

 
"Our species is new to transfer."

  "Then accept my information: Our Kirlian auras have faded considerably already, because the tie to the natural host is never completely severed, and death is the ultimate burden. In just a few hours we shall expire."

  "A few hours!" There went his hope. In sixty Earth-days discovery was almost certain; in six hours it was prohibitively unlikely, unless the Mintakans were a lot more sophisticated about such things than the average Sphere bureaucracy. So Andromeda had won after all. He believed her; now he could feel his own aura depletion, like the loss of blood, an insidious draining of his most vital resource.

  "It is ironic but perhaps fitting that the two most intense Kirlian entities in our galactic cluster should terminate quietly together," she played hauntingly.

  "It must have been foreordained. When I read the Tarot in Sphere Polaris—" He paused in mid-chord. "Tarotism hasn't spread to Andromeda yet, has it?"

  "Not as a cult. I made a report on it as part of my mission, as it seems to relate indirectly to the powers of the Ancients."

  "Well, there's something about the cards, whatever their rationale. They informed me that I was crossed—that is, opposed—by the Queen of Energy, defined as the Devil, in turn crossed by the Four of Gas. They said I could not destroy her, only neutralize her. I did not know then that—"

  "It might be that Diana had never encountered a male worthy of her," Andromeda played, seemingly oblivious to his tones. "Perhaps she had the most intense aura ever measured, and could not squander it on inferior entities. When she met her equal, crude and alien though he seemed at first, she felt the first stirrings of... of...." Her melody faded out in confused dissonance.

  So she had suffered the impact of their similar auras too! There had been a magic about her from the outset in Sphere Canopus, not sexual attraction but the unique Kirlian aura. Officially he had been on a mission to save his galaxy, but personally he had been questing for his natural mate. That, despite the complication of inter-galactic politics, was / of Andromeda. She had strength and courage and intelligence and beauty and aura—and the last overwhelmed all the rest. If she reacted similarly to his aura, she was already largely captive to her fundamental instinct to reproduce; not her species, but her aura.