Cluster c-1

by Piers Anthony

  Flint drifted upward, savoring the experience. He had never imagined sea living could be so blissful. He saw the hanging discoloration signifying the fringe of the Impact zone. Lower creatures could pass through it freely, but he knew he should turn back. But he felt like exploring! He was a courier; he had a right to tour out of bounds, didn’t he?

  On through the Sibilant boundary. What fun! The thrill of seeing unfamiliar territory added to his satisfaction. He could cruise indefinitely!

  Then he spied something special ahead. It was a pair of entities, an Undulant and a Sibilant. Of course—the Undulants were working in the Sibilant zone this period, just as the Sibilants were working in the Impact zone. So long as the three types never came together in the same place at the same time, no problem.

  So why did he experience this heightening, secret, almost obscene excitement?

  The Sibilant had the same nebulous torso and eye-stalks as the others, but it lacked both flippers and vertical flattening. It propelled itself forward by jetting water from its main body tube. This action was accompanied by a gentle susurration that gave the entity its name. It was capable of considerable speed through the water, and especially rapid starts.

  But that was of no immediate concern to Flint. The moment he spied the pair of creatures, something changed in him. He felt a guilty but powerful attraction. He shot forward on a collision course. If only they didn’t see him too soon!

  He was successful; by the time the others became aware of him, it was too late. He collided.

  There was only a slight impact. His body did not shove theirs over; it merely overlapped theirs. Part of his flesh intersected that of the Sibilant, and part of it interacted with that of the Undulant. Their substance was so diffuse that it merged with his to make a solid-seeming cross-section.

  This state of partial merging was tremendously exciting and compulsive. He now had a firm hold on each of the other entities, not with his flippers but with the actual flesh of his body. Diagrammatically, it looked like this, with Flint the center entity.

  He gathered his strength and heaved. As his body flexed at the edges it thinned at the center, drawing them in closer to each other. Then he flexed outward, taking in more of their substance, extending his overlap, experiencing a phenomenal satisfaction in the process.

  By a series of pulses he brought the Sibilant and the Undulant into contact with each other—within his own flesh. Now their efforts joined his, so that the pulses became more powerful. The effort became transcendentally important. Flint gathered his resources, tightened his grip on each of the others, and threw his entire strength into a convulsive contraction that hauled both entities all the way into his flesh and into each others’ flesh. The process was both painful and fantastically rewarding. In fact it was orgasmic.

  Orgasm…

  Flint’s first transfer had set a pattern. He knew he was in an alien body, but it was much like knowing he was a man; it was right. He still thought of himself as human. His alien sensation translated so readily into the human equivalents that he was hardly conscious of it after the first moments. Intellectually, he kept noticing details and comparing them with his other embodiments, but that was much the way a man compared one world to another. While everything was changed, he was still fundamentally a man. Here in the Spican locale he had had a more stringent adaptation, to a swimming form—but he was still basically a swimming man. And the Undulant he had escorted was a swimming woman. Or he could think of it as a dog, cat, mouse system. Different, yet still basically comprehensible.

  Now he was caught up in something beyond his prior experience. It could not be translated into human or animal terms.

  It was sex—with three sexes.

  His body, prompted by instinct, continued its heroic efforts, forcing a complete melding of masses. No, not complete; each individual had a private portion that did not overlap, and two segments of overlap with the others, and a minority segment of double overlap:

  The individual portion was liquid, almost gaseous in its diffusion; the single overlaps were viscous; and the double overlap was virtually solid.

  The three entities were penetrating each other—but not as a man penetrated a woman. Not even as a two-man/one-woman trio. They were interpenetrating.

  Flint could not rationalize this into any human act. It was genuinely alien. Not perverted so much as inconceivable.

  The concept sundered his rationale. He could no longer think of himself as a visiting human; he was immersed in an alien scheme.

  Flint lost his sanity. He saw himself as two irreconcilable entities: one human, the other monster. A man’s mind could not exist in the carcass of a jellyfish. This was a prison worse than the most gruesome sickness. He had to get out!

  But he was trapped. Transfer of personality, once completed, could not be revoked. He could go home only by being retransferred, and that meant first completing his mission.

  The host body went on with its repulsive act, generating its obscene pleasure. The animated pornography engulfed him within its horror. He reacted violently, with utter revulsion. With his whole force of being, he drove off the intolerable connection.

  The globular mass exploded apart. Flint experienced a tearing sensation that was at once painful and climactically fulfilling. The two other creatures shot out from him, like a double arrow loosed from a bow, still linked with each other. But the moment they cleared his flesh, they underwent a subexplosion so violent that the overlapping portions of them were not parted but were torn loose as a separate mass.

  Flint, feeling only relief at being free, paddled rapidly away from the carnage. He didn’t care what happened to the others; he had to shield himself from the disgust of the experience.

  Yet he couldn’t. The act had been fundamentally shocking—but after the fact came comprehension, and that was even worse. Suddenly he understood the plight of a girl on Outworld who had been hurt and terrified by being raped—but then came to realize that she carried her attacker’s baby, and would have to bear it and raise it, forever after a reminder of the experience. Illegitimacy was a cardinal social offense on Outworld. Flint, like other men, had shrugged and said “Too bad,” and not given the girl’s plight much further thought, and of course had been careful neither to help her nor support her in any way. The rapist had been from another tribe, and had later been killed by a dinosaur, so that ended the matter. Then the girl had killed herself, to Flint’s amazement. He had volunteered for the burial detail—really, the Shaman had made him do it—carrying her body out to the place of exposure and leaving it there for the vulture-dactyls and other predators who would do the job of cleaning the flesh from the bones. He had gazed at her nude body, still quite pretty, since she was young and the pregnancy was not far advanced, and marveled that she should have been so foolish as to sacrifice her life when fate had already revenged her. Several days later he had come to collect the bones for burial under her sleeping place, so that her spirit would be at rest. Even her bones had been shapely, and very nice in their pure whiteness, except for a couple that had been cracked open by some larger predator for their marrow. He had tied those together so that her ghost would not be crippled, and he had interred the whole in a curled-up position under her lean-to. Everything had been done according to form—yet she had not rested. For months thereafter her lean-to had been haunted by her restless spirit, and finally the village had had to relocate. It had been a nuisance. Flint had shaken his head at the foolishness of girls. The Shaman had declined to explain it, though he had seemed sad. But now, faced with the growing realization of what he had just participated in, Flint understood why the tribesgirl had acted as she did.

  Actually, the star Spica (a double star, as befitted Flint’s notion of fitness, his home star, Etamin, being similar) was part of the constellation Virgo, as seen from Earth. There were many legends about this maiden, said by some to be the original harvest goddess; but since Flint’s tribe had not advanced to the level of agriculture, bei
ng Paleolithic rather than Neolithic, he identified more with the constellation’s identity as Erigone the Early Born. Erigone’s father was Icarius, and when he died she hanged herself in grief—another curious feminine reaction that Flint suddenly appreciated. Tribesmen seldom lived to the age of forty on Outworld; if they lived long enough to see their children safely married, there was little cause for grief when they died. Their job, after all, was done. Flint’s own parents had died before he was ten Solarian years, and that had been unfortunate, but the Shaman had taken him over and given him a better life than he had had before. Certainly no cause for suicide. But now he saw that for those who felt really strongly about another person or thing, the loss of such a value could evoke a reaction as strong as to require death. The maiden Erigone, patroness of the wheat field, had gone to heaven with an ear of wheat in her hand, and that ear of wheat was the star Spica. Perhaps the story of the death of her father was a euphemism; actually she might have been raped, and here was the evidence in the form of a planet of rape.

  But how much worse for a man! A pretty girl was made to be impregnated by one means or another, but any such suggestion for a man was an abomination. He tried to put the horrendous concept out of his mind; he did not want to comprehend it. He tried to shove this debased body away from him, as he would the gore of a slain animal’s ruptured intestine, knowing it was impossible, yet still making the effort, just as the pregnant girl must have tried to shove out her hateful baby.

  *orientation effected*

  What? A strange voice was talking in his brain. Not his head, for he had no head—that was part of the problem!—but his brain, integrated with his lateral line system, his pressure perceptors, balance organs, density control, and mergence response syndrome. Somewhere, in this melange of suddenly realized synapses and feedbacks was an alien communication.

  He tried to focus on the alien. Here was possible escape! What he was able to grasp was a picture of three spheres. Two were tangent, touching each other; the third was a little apart. The first was labeled SIRE, the second PARENT, and the separate one CATALYST. What did it mean?

  —dispatch agent this time she’d better perform!—

  There was that alien voice again. It spoke in an unfamiliar language or series of meaning-symbols that somehow he could understand. The picture, too, was becoming clear: each circle represented a Spican entity. Three entities, three functions—but which was which? Each time he concentrated, it seemed there was a different alignment. Impact, Undulant, Sibilant… sire, parent, catalyst… dog, cat, mouse. At times an Impact was a dog and at other times a cat or even a mouse. Dog mating with cat and giving birth to mouse? No, that wasn’t it.

  Yet he had done it! Why couldn’t he understand it?

  Because, as with human reproduction, it functioned best when there was no understanding, just instinct. Understanding brought complications such as birth control, and nature didn’t like that.

  Abruptly he realized that the spheres or circles were from his host’s memory of a long-ago orientation session that had had a profound, even unnerving effect. It had been a sex-education class, pornographic in its implications yet necessary. What was pornography anyway, but the portrayal of the necessary with too much enthusiasm? “Why are the three sexes kept always apart?” immature Bopek had asked persistently, so they had told him. And shocked him. As Flint had been shocked, the first time he saw a grown tribesman put it to a girl. She had cried and kicked her legs, and Flint had thought he was killing her. But she had only been wounded, and not seriously; there was only a bit of blood between her legs. And she had been presented thereafter as a woman, her initiation complete, though her breasts were hardly developed. Within a Sol-year she had been married, happily; it was evident that she had not been harmed. That had been Flint’s own sex-education class, in the direct Stone Age manner. It had been alarming at first, but reassuring when time showed there were no bad consequences. Next year he had laughed when younger children flinched at the annual demonstration, and the following year he had come of age by making the demonstration himself. But when he took up with Honeybloom he had preferred privacy. Demonstration classes were one thing; love was another. So he understood Bopek’s horror and gradual acceptance. That was the way of it.

  He summoned another picture. In this one the three spheres had come together, each touching at the fringe, like the borders of stellar empires. Perhaps this was an analogy; when Sphere Sol had exchanged technology with Sphere Antares (though Sol had been only a system then, for it was the mattermission secret it obtained from Antares that enabled it to form its interstellar colonization program)—had it been a form of mating? Cultural intercourse. It was not an objectionable parallel. Yet young Bopek had thrilled to a guilty excitement. Three sexes touching! His very flesh had pulsed.

  And so did Flint’s, remembering that pornography:

  *POWER*

  —CIVILIZATION—

  “Get out of my mind!” he yelled at the meaning-bursts. Now, where was he? Cat—sire—dog… no, not cat, but catalyst. Forget the Earth animals, concentrate on the lesson material.

  Nowhere else were the three entities depicted together, actually touching. Now Flint applied his own memories, and merged them with Bopek’s—and it started to become clear. The human equivalent—there was no precise parallel, but as close as he could make it, and he had to find some kind of parallel, in order to regain his orientation—was a fragrant soft bed of flowerferns in a private glade, bearing a naked, spreadeagled voluptuous girl being kissed by a naked, tumescent man. The curve-sided triangle between the three tangent circles matched the pubic triangles of hair—the two triangles about to be superimposed. And now they drew together, overlapping, forming the single mass he had visualized before. Raw sex, without question. Secret, lewdly exciting, sniggers, repression, desire, unspeakable urges, interpenetrating—

  :: CONCURRENCE ::

  “Fush!” Flint cried aloud, expressing in that one distorted syllable the exact superimposition of lust and condemnation and fascination and outrage he felt, balked by the interfering meaning transmission. No better syllable existed, since his present body was unable to render the human word.

  In moments he was back in the security of the Impact zone. Now, as the excitement of revulsion and discovery abated, his identification with his host-body returned. Once again he was Flint—in alien circumstances, and with a matured awareness and acceptance and cynicism, but indubitably himself. Now he grasped emotionally what previously had been intellectual: he was an alien. He might look and act like a three-sexed Spican, but he was not. He was an alien essence making use of a native host; in fact, he was a demon possessing a poor local boy. He was not part of this society, not bound by its conventions.

  His period of disorientation had brought him much to ponder. He hoped never again to forget his basic alien-ness to the host, and not to allow himself to become trapped into involuntary sexual activity. But more important: his Kirlian aura, temporarily extended from the host in its vain effort to separate, had somehow ranged out and intercepted some kind of message in the transfer medium. At first that had been confusing—but Flint, however naive he might be about Spican sex life, was no fool. One of the tools at his command was an efficient mode of integrating information. His disorientation now separated into three elements that could be analyzed: his repudiation of the act of his host body, the reproductive lesson material from the host memory, and this alien transmission. His revulsion was out of line: He was not Spican, the Spican was not human, and there could be no transfer of morality either way. It was important that he understand, accept, and perhaps even use this distinction. For his job was not to preserve himself or spread Sol Sphere culture, but to enlist other Spheres in the cause of saving the galaxy.

  Yet evidently there was a Sphere that opposed this cause. They had traced his transfer to Canopus and sent an agent there, not to help him but to kill him. She had failed, and had had to turn about and help him, ironically, in order to
protect the secret of her identity. The alien voices in his brain had indicated she was to be sent to the Ear of Wheat.

  And he had a fair idea whose host-body she would occupy.

  He had to act quickly, for the agent was deadly. She knew transfer technology, so could return to her Sphere after dispatching him. She probably didn’t even have to educate the Spicans; her knowledge was so sophisticated that she just might be able to make do on her own. Or maybe her government was able to recall her without a transfer unit at this end. He should not gamble with it He had to nullify her first, and return to Sphere Sol with the news. Maybe the Minister of Alien Spheres would know which Sphere it was, from the hints Flint had picked up; or maybe Flint could transfer to Knyfh Sphere and consult with their experts. One thing was certain: The galactic allies had to locate that enemy Sphere and neutralize it, or the whole effort would be sabotaged before it ever touched Andromeda.

  Could he somehow trap and interrogate the alien agent? Flint rejected that immediately. He lacked the expertise, and it was too risky here. Better to nullify the agent, return to Imperial Earth, and let them send a party to deal with the agent. Or have her shipped to Sol Sphere with him—no, he had tried that before, and she had somehow slipped the net. He could not trust her to transfer again. Play it safe; give her no chance to foul him up.

  Yet he retained an image of ¢le of A[th] of Sphere Canopus, a pretty little thing in humanoid terms. The host-body was not the transfer mind, of course, and he could not judge the nature of the entity that had possessed her, yet it was hard to disengage the two entirely. Body did make a difference; he had to admit to himself that he would not have loved Honeybloom had she been ugly. And that powerful Kirlian aura of the other Sphere entity, as strong as his own; alluring. He had begun traveling to other Spheres partly to find his own level of aura, after all. Enemy she might be, but he did not want to kill her. Not yet.