Chaining the Lady c-2

by Piers Anthony

  —You have an aura of the family keyed to this generation of sites. The Slash entity you knew as Llume was of this family, but her aura was not strong enough. Your own exceeds two hundred, which we believe more than meets the necessary level. Therefore you and you alone are able to penetrate the ultimate secrets of the Ancients.—

  That explained Dash’s interest in her from the start. Just as the Andromedans were robbing the Milky Way galaxy of its vital energy, they were taking its best animate potentials. Good, hard business sense.

  Many years ago an Andromedan agent had tempted the Milky Way Solarian hero, Flint of Outworld, with similar logic. She had told him that his own species would have acted much the same as hers had it possessed the opportunity, and she had been right. Yet in the end it was he who convinced her, though he was the barbarian and she the sophisticated issue of a leading civilization. She had defected to the Milky Way, and parity had returned to the galaxies.

  But whatever had happened in the past, she was sure that Mintaka would not have sacrificed any galaxies for its own advantage. This ambition of Sphere Dash was wrong, and she could not support any part of it, regardless what happened to her or her Sphere. Better to kill herself, thus depriving the enemy of any possible use of her unique aura.

  So she remained silent, though now she knew Dash would not shoot her. Should she try to bargain with him for whatever she could salvage, be it only half or a quarter of the Milky Way? Could she trust him or his Sphere that far?

  —I cannot read your mind, precisely,— Dash said. —But I am responsive to the fluxes of your beautiful aura. I believe you are concerned primarily for your galaxy. Tap one foot if I am correct.—

  No harm in that. Melody tapped one foot.

  —I cannot promise you anything in that regard. But I can say this: If you evoke the secret science of the Ancients for us, we may no longer need the energy of your galaxy to sustain our civilization. Then it would be spared. However, since we do not know what is available in the Ancient sites, this is a gamble.—

  A gamble whose terms were all in favor of Sphere Dash. If they won, they had the universe; if they lost, they still had the Milky Way. Yet did she have any better alternative? She could not decide.

  Dash took her hesitation for negation, which it probably was. —I dislike coercive measures, but the matter is urgent.—

  Melody, perhaps on the verge of acquiescence (and perhaps not), now hesitated for another reason. If he could not do anything to her £ host, how could he do anything to her? He could only kill her Mintakan body, which would defeat his stated purpose.

  —I did some research on Sphere Mintaka,— Dash said.—It was not thorough, for I only recently managed to signal my fleet and get picked up. Marooned in a prison host! Fortunately Hammer of Quadpoint was alert, and caught our crude broadcast.—

  So the hostages had adapted the missing transfer unit for regular intergalactic transfer and used it to send Dash Boyd and the others home. Later, it had been used to send her here.

  —Forgive me if I overlook the nuances of your culture. But as I understand it, Mintakans are born neuter, turn female at maturity, and male after the first mating. You never mated in your natural body, so spent your life as a female.—

  That was close enough. A permanently sexed entity would hardly comprehend the intricacies of triensent sex.

  —The sex of your Mintakan body determines the sex of your aura,— Dash continued after a pause. —What do you suppose would happen if the sex of that body should change?—

  So that was it! Melody felt peculiar horror. They had a male Mintakan here, who would take the initiative. They could do it.

  She might kill the male, but that would finish her own body too. And killing them all would not salvage her galaxy. The question she had to answer was whether she could help her galaxy better as a captive female or a free male. She knew the answer.

  —You are way ahead of me, I know,— Dash said. —But to be certain we understand each other I will state it openly. There would seem to be two possible consequences of a change in sex in your Mintakan body. One is that your aura would change sex with it. In that case you would be unable to remain in your female £ host, and would have to vacate. Then I believe we would have you, for we control the transfer apparatus and alternate hosts.—

  Melody had not thought of that. What would happen to a male aura in a female host? It was impossible to transfer into a host of the opposite sex; only neuter-sexed entities had any option, and even that was uncertain. Would her aura be bounced into the nearest available male host, which was exactly what Dash was ready for? Or would her aura simply be destroyed by the incompatibility of the host? Either way, she was lost.

  —Or,— Dash continued, —would your aura fail to change, in which case you would be unable to return to you own body? That seems paradoxical, so I am prepared to gamble on the first prospect. Unless, of course, you elect to cooperate; that would solve all problems.—

  No doubt. But Melody still had a galaxy to protect. She would have to gamble. And one part of her mind wondered about the anomaly: What would happen? Horrible that it should happen to her, but the scientific curiosity…

  —Well, we proceed,— Dash said. He made a whirring signal with his wings. Music played abruptly. It was a strange harmony, vibrant but incomplete, unlike anything Cnom had ever heard. It was bud music.

  Bud music: the compelling sound of a pair of Mintakans in the throes of love. In Sphere Mintaka, mating chambers were soundproofed, to prevent contagion. Otherwise the mating of one couple would trigger compulsive mating by many others within sonic range, and this was not desirable. The decision to mate was supposed to be based on intellectual preference, not sound, but it didn’t always happen that way.

  The male Mintakan stirred, approaching the old female husk. He had no intellectual preference; the bud music governed him. The female shell, though void of aura, would function. Not even the atmosphere bubbles separated them; Melody saw those two enclosures merge, in their own kind of mating, and form into just one chamber.

  No! No! This was the most insidiously hellish rape! Dash had worked out an appallingly effective physical and intellectual torture for her! She would rather suffer anything than this!

  Anything except the betrayal of her galaxy—and that was the price. So she could not stop this gruesome exhibit, this ultimate obscenity. But she could not watch it either. She closed her side eye.

  But she could not close off the sound, for it came at her sensitive skin (impervious to talons, but responsive to sound) on every side. She tried to turn her attention away from it, and succeeded only in dredging up her painful past.

  She had been just two years old when Ariose came. He was a handsome, extremely high-Kirlian sonic male of four, seeming quite mature and cultured. In Solarian terms he would have been thirty-two, she sixteen, each somewhat younger than Dash Boyd and Yael of Dragon, but with a similar set of outlooks. Two was the age of Mintakan blooming, when the tubes first rounded out and the strings became taut, and the diaphragms resonated to every trifling vibration. The age of delight, experiment, ambition, and beauty—and naiveté.

  She had all nine feet, by definition the state of female virginity (the concepts were synonymous), of greatest innocence, desirability, and availability. The great majority of adult Mintakans were to some degree male; only once in life was one fully female.

  Despite his age, Ariose had eight feet. He had mated only once. She was curious about that, since a male of his talents and presentation should have had opportunity to bud himself all the way down to three feet, had he wanted to. Why had he saved himself for her? She let herself believe that it was her physical beauty and sonic vibrance in intellectual qualities.

  Mature Mintakans came at the agreement to bud circumspectly. Often they remained together for life, though there was no legal or moral requirement to do this. It merely reflected the wisdom of their initial decision: truly compatible entities had no need to wander.


  Budding was not a casual, multiple performance like the chronic sexual efforts of Solarians, who copulated tens or hundreds of times for every offspring they produced. In fact, it was said in other Spheres that Solarians indulged in sexual activity more for transient personal pleasure than for the extension of the species. Melody knew that was a gross exaggeration; still her impressionable postadolescent mind was intrigued by the amazing concept. How much pleasure was there in budding that made it worth the permanent loss of a foot?

  So when Ariose intimated that he would like to lose one foot with her, she reacted with foolish enthusiasm. She went with him in a brushcar to a mating chamber, and after feeding each other several strands of vermiculate food and absorbing sprays of liquid, they settled down to serious music.

  Melody, of course, had never done this before. That was one reason for the system, she theorized. Since a Mintakan did not turn male until completing first budding, and two females could not mate, it guaranteed one experienced partner to show the way. She had heard that Solarians (Sphere Sol was the butt of a wealth of segment humor, perhaps because of its irritating thrust-culture that forced itself into the awareness of dissimilar species) sometimes got together for copulation and didn’t know what to do. Or the reverse: They copulated without realizing what it was—until an infant Solarian manifested. Of course, such jokes would have been more effective had they had even the slightest credibility.

  Ariose started the unique budding music, and Melody followed it without difficulty. As the sound intensified, they approached each other. He raised one clapper-foot invitingly, tapping with the other seven in intricate point and counterpoint. Melody raised one of her own fair feet, and now her eight tapping ones off-balanced his seven, creating a peculiar sensation of incompleteness. Discord and incompleteness were anathema to Mintakans; music had to be right.

  “Your strings are as tight as steel wires,” Ariose played. “Your tubes are as round and full as great organ pipes. Your drums are loud and mellow. Your clappers are marvels of precision.”

  Oh, such praise! Females, because of their inherent inexperience, were notoriously subject to flattery, and she was no exception. She drew closer, her raised foot seeking his.

  “And your aura,” he played. “Like none ever known before.”

  “My aura?” This struck an unmelodious note; females were not generally praised for their auras. It was akin to praising a Solarian female for her money.

  “Did you not know,” he played, “you have the highest Kirlian aura ever measured—the only one in the Sphere that is higher than mine. I came to bud with you, hoping to produce a super-Kirlian entity…”

  He wanted her only for her aural The whole thing had been arranged.

  “How long I waited for you to mature, to emerge from drab neuterdom,” Ariose continued, oblivious to the effect his commentary was having. “The success of such a budding—”

  Melody made a discordance so vehement it almost broke her own strings. She swept her foot sidewise, knocking his clapper away.

  Ariose, caught by surprise and ready for the budding connection, lost his foot. It flew off and crashed into the wall. His music stopped abruptly.

  Then Melody suffered chagrin—for she had castrated him. She had knocked off his bud, unmerged. She fled from the mating chamber.

  But the compulsive bud music stayed with her, pressing in from all around, inescapable. Her £ eye opened.

  Her youth-budding had been horribly aborted. But the age-budding of her auraless body continued, forced by the compulsion of the recorded music. The male had extended one foot, and the female met it with one of her own. The seven male feet clattered in the imperfect counterpoint to the eight female feet, making the music unfulfilled. The beats had to match. Yet there was no eighth foot on the male side free to complete the last pair.

  Except for the conjoined foot. Driven by the music, the feet melted together, becoming a single unit. This was the bud. Soon it would flower into a complete immature entity.

  Melody closed her £ eye again. She had not fled far from Ariose before some sense penetrated her two-year mentality. So he wanted her for her aura. What, really, was wrong with that? After all, she had wanted him for his aura; she merely hadn’t said so openly. She could have budded already with some lesser male, but only the high-Kirlian male had really excited her. Normal-level Kirlians were not even aware of aura; it was as though they were blind or deaf, not even able to appreciate what they were missing. Of course aura was important; it was the real key to modern civilization. She really had little else to distinguish her. Why let irrelevancies interfere with romance? Ariose had acted with perfect sense. He had formed a conception of his ideal female, based on Kirlian intensity, and had sought that female out. She should have appreciated the enormous honor for what it was.

  She returned to the mating chamber, but Ariose was gone. What should she have expected? She had struck off his foot in as callously degrading a gesture as it was possible for one Mintakan to make to another. She had rendered him a male personality with a female number of feet; how could he mate now? Actually, once a Mintakan turned male, he remained so for life, unless he should use up all his feet—unlikely, since then he could not walk —in which case he would be honorably neuter again. But budding required that disparity of feet; two six-footed Mintakans could not mate, even though one were seven-footed in outlook.

  She had never seen Ariose again, and never met another like him. His aura had been 190, and she never encountered another close to it. It was as though all high-Kirlian Mintakans avoided her now. Perhaps the music about her had spread. She could hardly blame them! She was lucky Ariose had not pressed a charge of mutilation against her.

  She had retreated into her study of Tarot, after a brief apprenticeship with the local Temple of Tarot, and found some solace there. Never again had she been seriously tempted to bud.

  There was an abrupt change in the music. Again her eye opened, though she tried to keep it closed. The bud formed from the merged feet had now disconnected from the female’s body. Attached to the male, it left him with eight feet; and she now had eight feet also. The beat had equalized. That changed the music.

  Then the bud dropped off the male’s leg too. The music stopped. The bud had been formed as a separate entity, incorporating the heredity of each parent. It would, with proper care, grow into a small Mintakan neuter. The miracle of reproduction of the species!

  But now Melody’s native body had budded. It had become, by the definition of its nature, male.

  She, here in the £ host, what was she, now?

  She dared not remain here to find out.

  22. Crisis of Sex

  —it is not merely a matter of the etamin agent, quadpoint it is aposiopesis if the agent can lead us to—

  :: this is ridiculous! a simple matter of nullifying one captive agent of a defeated galaxy ::

  —our own agent is working on the matter there are very great potential rewards—

  :: assuming your ancient site can yield us anything we cannot already possess with present technology, to utilize a conscious, dedicated agent of a foreign power to explore it is an exercise in such folly as to make my chisels blunt! are you not aware you are placing our entire program in jeopardy? I absolutely forbid this! ::

  —it is too late the quest has already been initiated—

  :: there is something about you slavekeeping creatures, here and in the milky way, that is alien to my comprehension from certain victory you seek defeat ::

  Melody whirled back out of the chamber. —You cannot escape! Your body is here!— Dash whirred.

  But she crashed out of the doorway, knocking out a supporting post. Part of the upper floor sagged. She bounced to the other side of the hall, bashing in a wooden wall. The aroma of freshly ruptured scentwood surrounded her. Then, venting her inner frustration and uncertainty, she deliberately attacked more posts.

  The wood was strong, but was not braced for horizontal impact from such
a huge, solid body. The city began to collapse about her. The air was filled with whirrings of panic as thousands of Dash birds were disturbed.

  Yet what was this accomplishing, this blind bashing against those who had conquered her galaxy? Like the shallow entity she had been in youth, she destroyed what affronted her—and maybe did herself the most damage.

  She burst out of the city and thundered down a channel toward the bog. Now it seemed the hue and cry was out; other £ were charging after her. What did it matter? She had no body and no galaxy to return to!

  Something was funny about the pursuing £. They had no mahouts! Without Dash direction, why should they be chasing her?

  No time to wonder! She plunged into the bog. As the atmosphere thickened about her, as the jelly formed and exerted its drag, her first passion faded. What, actually, had happened?

  “It is the Rendezvous,” Cnom informed her. “Your emotion triggered it.”

  The Rendezvous: a periodic gathering of the £ in the depths of the bog, for the purpose of acquaintance, decision, and mating. It occurred irregularly, generally when some reason arose. This time Melody was that reason.

  Could there be any help for her in the Rendezvous? She did not know. She felt much as she had when the Ace of Swords had been going derelict around her.

  The £ continued down the channels, this time avoiding the wooden lattice. The jelly grew thicker, until it seemed impossible to push through it much farther. This was the depth at which the Dash failed. They had dismounted in a hurry when the Rendezvous began. Somehow all £ and Dash had known the moment it started; even the sick £ were hauling themselves along.

  But with increasing depth, the jell began to thin, until at last it was the consistency of mere water. Like plasma, Melody thought; the pressure was too great for the jell to maintain its structure.