“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 novas!” 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, hidin
g 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.
“The Hermit and the Queen of Energy,” Flint played musingly. “Neither able to prevail or to trust the other, playing at potential love. What would the cards say?”
Yet her sentiments paralleled his, keyed by the music that acted as virtual telepathy. “Even though he raped her as Merope, and cost her much pride and much time, she recognized in him a force and intelligence that matched her own. Her culture forbade it, but he was her ideal mate, and the call of the aura had to find expression. Then she became revolted at her own suppressed passion, and knew she had to kill him, though it was really that element within herself she hated. So she summoned the scorpion—or perhaps forced him to summon it—but she really died with him.”
“You flatter my intellect without believing in it,” Flint played harshly, denying his own urgings. “You are trying to seduce me, not kill me. You want the secret of involuntary transfer-hosting for your galaxy, and I alone possess it.” But he was bluffing, though he knew there was truth in his words; she had moved him by the insidious appeal of her melody, making his strings vibrate sympathetically, and his drums and tubes follow. They were indeed ideal mates, despite grotesque distinctions of form, and now there was little reason to fight it. He, too, felt superior because of his Kirlian aura; he, too, had a fundamental urge to produce offspring with a Kirlian aura intensity that matched his own. Left to chance, a similar aura might not appear for a thousand years; this way, a new, high-Kirlian strain might be initiated immediately.
Yet of course their Mintakan host-bodies carried none of their original genes. Still, phenomenal things happened in the diverse universe, and the limits of Kirlian potential were not known. “You could have locked me in here alone and let me die while you transferred home to make your report. Why didn’t you?”
“We both are dead,” she played sadly. “That is irrevocable. But there will be no other chance to establish our kind. We, you and I, are Kirlians, not Andromedans or Milky Wayans. I had hoped that before we expired—”
He understood her perfectly. Yet there was also that in him that made him resist. “It may come,” he played. “But only if you play me the truth. You are the professional huntress, well able to live and die without romance. What do you really want of me?” Maybe he was just trying to establish his male dominance. They both knew the stakes: the formulas in his mind. Whichever galaxy got them would win. He could not allow her to seduce him into giving that information to Galaxy Andromeda.
She played an intricate little tune of submission that was thoroughly alluring. “You have eidetic recall.”
“Yes, of course. Don’t you?”
“No. I have many talents, but lack that one. Otherwise I would have instantly memorized all the equations you evoked in the Ancient field and broadcast them to our relay station.”
“There was more there than you possess?” He knew there was, but he wanted her to admit it.
“Much more. The Hyades site was the best-preserved one yet discovered in the galactic cluster. In those equations are techniques millennia ahead of anything we know. Perhaps the whole answer to the energy problem is there. If we had that, there would be no need to draw from other galaxies…”
“And so you want me to spell out those equations for your technicians.”
“And yours too! There need be no further strife between the galaxies!”
This caught him by surprise. Not one galaxy or the other, but both, joined in one superior civilization, the ethic of energy now unifying them instead of dividing them? It was a mighty vision, and an appealing one. “Why didn’t you just tell me this at the outset?”
“I knew you would not believe me—”
“Unless you softened me up first. Very calculating.” And that was his true objection. Her intellectual and aura appeals struck him as valid, but he did not appreciate being used, manipulated, or deluded. As long as she tried to use one technique to soften him for another, she was practicing deceit, and he would not have it that way.
“There was also—” She lost her tune, and had to start over. “Orion and Diana. I used the political situation as a pretext to enable the personal one. There is so little time remaining. I don’t know how to—”
“How to love?” he asked. This inversion undercut his position abruptly. If she were not playing at love for the sake of politics, but was playing at politics for the sake of a love she could not confess… “And you wanted to?”
Her music stopped complete
ly, making an awkward silence. He remembered that she had been conditioned, and he was sure her galaxy had fiendishly efficient techniques for that. But if that conditioning remained in force, he certainly could not trust her.
At last a single, faint, half-muted chord. “Yes.”
Could he believe her? Conditioned or not, she was a devilishly clever and ruthless huntress. Yet the Kirlian quest might override all other considerations. They could not have interfered with her aura without destroying her. “Prove it.”
“I don’t know how.” Now her tune was pleading.
“I can show you how to love, once I figure out the Mintakan system. I’ve had experience.” In several Spheres. But in his mind he saw Honeybloom’s body laid out for the carrion-feeders, symbol of the loss of his love for her through no fault of hers; an awful vision. Honeybloom’s love had been true, his flawed. “I mean, prove your sincerity about galactic cooperation.”
She played the key tune, and the door opened.
“I am free to go?” Flint inquired dubiously.
“Only if I am allowed to broadcast the information to my station before your aura fades entirely and you forget the knowledge of the Ancients.”
“I don’t trust this.”
“Then you make both broadcasts. I will give you the code for my station, betraying its location.”
The bait was too tempting. Where was the trap?
“Address it to the Available Entities of the Council of Andromeda: *, —, ::, oo or to the head / of my own Sphere. * is always on duty. Tell them you are providing the information to both galaxies on condition that they cease hostilities. If the Council gives concurrence, they will honor that.”
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