Cluster

10. Blinding the Giant

*alarm! priority development*

—out with it—

*ancient mode transfer from hyades open cluster*

—disaster! initiate council available entities—

*too late milky way galaxy has mastered ancient technology our agent failed we are helpless*

—recall all agents from that galaxy immediately we may be able to salvage something—

*but that would mean surrendering our energy transfer stations*

—that’s right we’ll have to gamble by leaving them in place and putting all our personnel on alert—

*POWER*

—oh, disconnect!—

His body was astonishing. Whenever he moved, he jangled, beeped, and boomed. His several feet were little clappers, supporting a triple web of taut wires like three harps. Fitted within the inner curves of these were tiers of drum-diaphragms. Strong tubular framing provided resonance for moving air, with emplaceable reeds. In short, he was an animate orchestra.

He had some kind of sonar/radar perception. He used it to orient on something more familiar: the night sky, perceivable through the image-porous ceiling. There were stars, not exactly bits of light but similar centers of emission. He concentrated, determined to find some point of orientation. This was not the sky of the Ancients, but it was within a galaxy, for there were the massed clouds and stars, the milky way to be seen within any galaxy.

He visualized (though this was not exactly what his new mind did) the night sky as seen from Sphere Sol, and from Etamin, Canopus, Polaris, and the Hyades, trying to superimpose some aspect of it on what he saw here. This was a challenging exercise, the more so because he was aware that some stars had different intensities of emission in the range he could now perceive. What appeared to be a small-illumination visible star might be a large-emission infrared star. But his mind was trained in this, and he made the necessary adjustments. It was rather like rotating a sphere of galactic space, taking cross-sectional slices, sliding them around, searching for any region of congruence.

A fringe of familiarity came. Here was a large red giant, like Betelgeuse, just about the same magnitude he knew. There was a cluster of—could it be the Pleiades? But they were over four hundred light-years away from Sol, whereas this cluster was twice that distance by the aspect of it, even after allowing for his changed perception, if it were of the same absolute brightness, and there was no Taurus constellation associated with it. Here was one like Rigel, but a bit brighter, therefore closer? And—yes it was! The Great Nebula of Orion, not in Orion at all, but brighter, in the correct position relative to Rigel and Betelgeuse.

Abruptly it clicked into place. This was Sphere Mintaka! Naturally the Great Nebula was not in this constellation now; he was in it, looking back five hundred light-years toward Sol, where the Nebula was. He was well beyond Rigel and Betelgeuse, on a planet in the Belt, fifteen hundred light-years from Sol.

So this had to be a Mintakan host. The Ancient animation arena had really been a transfer station whose destination was controlled by the thought of the transferee. He was thinking of Mintaka as he died—and here he was!

So his life had been returned to him—for a while. For his Kirlian aura was at reduced strength, and his human body had been blasted apart. No one at home would know what had really happened to him. He had, in his fashion, gone to heaven.

Well, he would communicate from the dead. He retained the remaining formulas, and this added revelation of the nature of the Ancient equipment would enable the Milky Way galaxy to overcome the Andromeda galaxy. He had perhaps sixty Earth days, maybe more, before his Kirlian aura faded below the threshold of human individuality. That should be time enough, considering that Sphere Mintaka had already been contacted by Sphere Mirzam and given transfer. Providing that was not a lie told by the renegade Mintakan.

Renegade Mintakan? How was that possible, when this musical body was the true Mintakan form? The spy could not have been any form of Mintakan. Yet it had not been a transferee either. Paradox!

No—merely erroneous conclusion. The representative from Sphere Mirzam had been the first killed, for it would have known the spy was no Mintakan. Yet if neither Mintakan nor transferee, what could it have been, so fierce in the defense of the interests of Andromeda?

Who else but his nemesis, ¢le of A[^th] or Llyana the Undulant, native of Andromeda? Now he remembered: The creature he had fought in the Hyades had had extremely high Kirlian force, parallel to his own. He had not been able to make the connection in the midst of the battle, but now it was obvious. The Queen of Energy!

She had been mattermitted in her own body all the way from Andromeda. The cost—beyond belief. Which was why he had not believed it. What value the enemy had put on that site!

Now she was dead, and it was doubly important that he get his information to his galaxy. Andromeda had set that value, and Andromeda was in a position to know. It was, literally, the ransom of a galaxy.

All right. Mintaka would have transfer technology now, because he would provide it. Then he would get in touch with Sphere Sol, making a complete report that would change the face of this section of the universe. This cluster of stars known as the Milky Way would survive. Then he could fade out, satisfied that he had done his job. His galaxy had been saved, and Honeybloom would live happily in her Stone Age idyll, and Tsopi the Polarian in her circular one.

A nurse approached. Her Castanet feet made a pleasant clatter, and the lines of her tubing were esthetic. Flint always had acute perception for feminine allure, whatever form it happened to take, and this was a good specimen. “Welcome to Sphere Mintaka,” she played.

And that was literal. Her strings and tubes played an intricate little melody counterpointed by the beat of her drums. The meaning was in the music itself. “From what Sphere do you sing?”

No need for concealment! “I am from Sphere Sol,” Flint played in reply. The music came automatically, for it was inherent in this entity’s nature; still it was a pretty melody. “I am pleased to discover Mintaka so well provided with hosts.”

“We are pleased to possess at last the secret of transfer,” she fluted. The music for the concept of transfer was a complex chord with undertones of technology and overtones of spirituality: a completely fitting definition. Already Flint liked this mode of communication better than any of the others he had experienced, including the human. Every entity an expert musician and orchestra combined! “And we owe it all to Sphere Sol, who released the information to the galaxy. We regret very much that we are not suited to vacuum maneuvers and could not participate in the Hyades exploration, but we are most interested. Please come with me.”

Flint followed her, relieved that contact was so easy right when he needed it. It had been similar in Sphere Polaris, but he had messed that up with his own unwarranted suspicions. Now he was in the final Death/Transformation stage of his Tarot reading—how apt that was!—and had no cause for anxiety. His clapper-feet made a tapdance of satisfaction-syncopation. His paraphernalia, at first so strange, was becoming normal. Music was the most natural thing, so why not make it naturally?

They emerged into an open walkway. Here there were many similar creatures, varying in colors, size, and tonal quality, and a few Mintakan animals. The sapients kept their music sedate, exuding noncommittal harmonies, but the animals made constant sounds of low-grade meaning, akin to the barking of Earth dogs. There were plants spaced decoratively that were shaped like musical instruments but these could not make music.

His nurse-guide brought him to a vehicle. It had a low sill so that it was convenient for their little feet, and high sides to support their upper frames comfortably. It extruded myriad fine wires beneath and brushed along its channel. It was somewhat like a boat and somewhat like a car and somewhat like a magic rug. Flint explored his host-knowledge and ascertained that the wires vibrated under the guidance of special frequencies. As they moved in their almost imperceptible patterns, the vehicle was impelled forward. It was a sophisticated yet basically simple mode of transportation that reflected both the level and the type of civilization here. This was another Sphere in advance of Sol—as it had to be, to maintain so huge a volume of influence.

Soon they left the city. The large structures of the central metropolis shaped to reduce untoward acoustical vibrations gave way to simpler residential dwellings. Their shapes were quite different, being oriented on acoustic principles, but they resembled in their fashion the individual family houses on Earth, or lean-tos on Outworld. The plants became larger: tree-lyres, thicket-drums, flute-vines. Though they were not musical singly, they became so in concert; they did not make music but they became music.

At length the brushcar entered a region of massed bubbles. The two of them stepped out and approached one, their feet evoking melodic echoes. Flint tried to break his pattern of walking experimentally, to disrupt the adumbration, the foreshadowing of his own sounds by prior echoes, and found he could not comfortably do so. Music was ingrained; to be unmusical was anathema, fundamentally uncomfortable.

The nurse played a special tune Flint could not quite hear, and the portal opened. They entered, and the door fastened firmly behind them.

It was a well-appointed private apartment. There was a basket of wormlike wires Flint recognized through his host-memory as a Mintakan food delicacy, a vapor spray for thirst, an assortment of powders for detuned anatomy, and a disposal tube for wastes.

“I expected to meet your officials,” Flint played with undertones of mild confusion. “What is this place?”

“A mating chamber,” she hummed sweetly. Now that he had to explore the concept, he realized that Mintakans, like Antareans, were sexless. He thought of his companion as female because she had the aspect of a nurse, and he regarded that as a female occupation. He had encountered several nurses in the course of his initial Earth training. They were generally pretty, and remarkably agile when eluding the male grasp.

“I did not come to this Sphere to mate,” he jangled, though he remembered the confusion caused by the Polarian mode of debt settlement. “However, if it is part of your necessary preliminaries to Spherical business—” How the hell did sexless creatures mate? His host-memory, typically, had that information hopelessly buried in suppressions.

“It is for the sake of complete privacy,” she explained. “No one will disturb us here for any reason. No sound will escape. Therefore we can proceed to our business.”

“But I have no business with you!” The something connected in his melodic mind. “Unless—”

“Concurrence,” she played with an ironic trill.

He was in the presence of Andromeda, the Queen of Energy. She had been with him when the Ancient site collapsed; she had transferred with him. It was obvious, yet it hadn’t occurred to him. He moved near enough to perceive the fringe of her Kirlian aura: yes, it was true.

“You still possess dangerous information,” she played. “Therefore I must finish my task.”

“How did you get away from Spica?”

“When I was emotionally able to part with my offspring, I arranged to have another Andromedan female, of low aura, exchange with me. Her aura faded into the host-identity almost immediately, but the child was not aware of the change, so I was free. This was a complex procedure, details of which I need not go into. You succeeded in isolating me for some time, and I compliment you on your cleverness. You will note a certain musical justice in this present reversal.”

“Trapped in a mating chamber,” Flint played. “Yes, I appreciate the irony, and compliment you in turn on its neatness of concept and execution. Perhaps I can escape it as neatly.”

“Perhaps,” she played with a drumbeat of smugly challenging doubt.

She must be pretty sure her trap is tight, he realized. “You knew what we would find at the Ancient site,” Flint played with harmonies of accusation. This melodic mood-conveyance was extremely convenient!

“Of course. We excavated an Ancient site in Andromeda three centuries ago, though it was not as good as yours.”

“The Ancients colonized Galaxy Andromeda too?” Flint was amazed at this confirmation. He had supposed, comfortably, that the Ancients had been a local phenomenon—local within a few thousand light-years of Sol, at any rate.

“They colonized the entire galactic cluster. Everywhere we go, they have been there first. They were a remarkable civilization.”

“You’ve been to other galaxies?” Flint realized she was only playing freely because she expected to kill him here; but this was most interesting information.

“Via transfer, of course. Looking for new sources of energy. But there are none, only the strong atomic interaction of matter, whose exploitation destroys that matter. So we had to concentrate on taking what was most convenient, with the greatest margin of safety.”

“And destroy our galaxy!” Flint sang with a triple harmony and discordance of outrage.

“It was a hard decision, but it had to be made. There have always had to be sacrifices for higher civilization. Would it be better to have two fragmented, semicivilized galaxies—or one fully civilized one? We judged that, considered in terms of the universe, consolidation warranted the sacrifice. Our coalition of Spheres could not embrace all of Andromeda unless we had virtually unlimited energy to abate the Spherical regression effect. With that energy we could achieve unity rivaling that of the Ancients. Higher civilization was at stake. You Would have done the same, in our circumstance.”

“I would not have done the same!” Flint played back strongly.

“Yet you called down explosive bombing on your own head and destroyed the most valuable reservoir of science in your galaxy.”

“That was to protect my galaxy!”

“What I do is to protect civilization,” she played softly. She had a note, he had to admit. Solarians had practiced destruction and genocide to further their interests—in the name of civilization!—as long as they had had the ability. He remembered how his tribe had killed the dinosaur Old Snort, taking the magnificent creature’s life merely to provide bodily energy in the form of food. How did that differ, except in scale, from what Andromeda was doing? No, his kind was not morally superior, and there was something to be said for spreading civilization. There were many species and many Spheres, but there had been only one achievement like that of the Ancients. To realize that potential again—maybe it was worth the price of a galaxy.

He wavered, then played firmly: “Yet I am of my galaxy. I cannot sacrifice its interest. The Milky Way did not set out to destroy Andromeda; we only defend ourselves.”

“An accident of situation,” she responded with a hint of dissonance. “Had you come across that site five hundred years ago, you would have learned how to transfer energy, and inevitably raided us. You have no moral claim, only the innocence of the lack of opportunity.”

“Agreed.” Flint clapped over and tried the door, but it was firm against his push and he lacked the musical key to solve the lock. These devices were sophisticated, his host-memory told him; he could try melodic variations for the rest of his life without coming close. The phone—actually quite similar to the Earth instrument of the same purpose—was similarly keyed. He could not communicate with the outside unless Andromeda allowed him—and of course she would not.

“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 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, 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.

“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 completely, 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: *, —, ::, ^o_o 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.”

“They might launch a last-ditch attack instead.”

“Lock me in here, then. You can reset the door to your own tune. Do what seems best; I trust your judgment.”

“All right,” Flint agreed, still not crediting this seeming victory. With his host-memory guiding him, he reset the lock and closed the door. Andromeda made no protest.

He summoned a wirecar. In a moment one drew up. He got in, knowing that he never had to return.

/ of Andromeda had extended her trust to him.

He got out, returned to the privacy chamber, and sung it open. Andromeda made a little trill of query and hope.

“I forgot the equations,” Flint played.

“Why lie? I gave you freedom.”

“I believe you, now. I don’t trust the galaxies—yours or mine—with this technology. There is parity as it stands. Why meddle further?”

“Maybe that is best.”

“And before our auras fade—”

“We must name it ‘Melody,’ ” she played.

He closed the door.