Cluster

by Piers Anthony

  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, being 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 fles
h 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.

  Two Impacts spied him and swam up. "Bopek—a charge of rape has been lodged against you," one said. "You will accompany us to the hearing."

  "Rape?" Flint was stunned. "I never—"

  "Did you not depart the Impact zone without authorization and enter the Sibilant zone?"

  Oh-oh. Violation of the zones was a serious matter, as he would have known had he bothered to check his host's memory. He had been careless. Better to admit the truth. "I was under the influence of the healing salve—"

  "And there you encroached on a Sibilant/Undulant pair and assumed the role of catalyst, forcing on them involuntary mergence?"

  "I did not realize—"

  "And as a result of that union, a Sibilant offspring was created, forcing unanticipated parentage on the original Sibilant?"

  Flint realized that he was in trouble. Ignorant of the mating system of this species, and intoxicated by the salve, he had not taken time to explore the cultural restrictions stored within his brain. The whole matter had seemed complex and irrelevant to his mission. Now it was clear: Mating was a three-entity affair, impossible with two, compulsive the moment a third appeared. The third served as a catalyst, forcing the other two to mate immediately. Like the game of scissors-paper-stone, which he had played as a child on Outworld though no real scissors or paper existed there, the order of the matchings determined the outcome. Scissors cut paper, paper wrapped stone, and stone crushed scissors. So the sex of the catalyst determined the sex of the offspring—but the offspring did not match the catalyst. Hence the intricate zone system, in which visitors of only one sex were permitted at a time. The game could not be played unless all three were present.

  Since major construction required the talents of all three types, some subzones had been instituted, and couriers brought otherwise unauthorized Undulants through the Impact zone to that subzone without encountering any Sibilants. When Bopek had danced into the Sibilant zone, he had trespassed in much the way a strange male trespasses when he enters a harem. He had thus encountered a Sibilant with an Undulant visitor, and had become the catalyst, forcing involuntary mergence. That, by this culture's definition, was rape.

  He was guilty.

  But he could not linger for the trial and penalty. The foreign Sphere agent might already be here, and he had to nullify her before she got oriented and nullified him. His mission came before the niceties of Spican etiquette.

  "Fellows, I apologize," he said.

  Whereupon he invoked the most disgusting crime of which a Spican sapient was capable. He "fushed" them. He visualized them as a Sibilant and an Undulant, himself as a catalyst, and puffed out his bodily perimeter to intersect theirs. He overlapped them both, then contracted, hauling them together inside his flesh.

  The act was appalling. Only in the filthiest of jokes was it even conceivable. A wave of intense revulsion almost overwhelmed the mind of his host. Th
is was despicable homosexual rape! But Flint, desperate and rendered cynical by his recent experience, forced the two to intersect each other. Then he expelled them violently, firing them through the water, linked to each other.

  Both Impacts were unconscious, overcome by sheer shock and horror. And Flint was now guilty of a capital offense. His Impact brain urged immediate penance in the form of suicide. But he had already suffered his readjustment, his impairment of sanity. The sense of separation he had achieved during his prior sexual encounter shielded him. He hated himself, but he swam on.

  Now he was near his original awakening spot, guided by Bopek's unerring directional/distance sense. And the injured Undulant was still there, in the temporary sub-zone, swimming uncertainly. He was in time—probably because her sudden awakening must have canceled their plans to remove her from the area.

  This would be tricky, but he had to risk it. He swam up boldly. "I see my client has revived. Good work! I must now convey the Undulant to the assigned construction site."

  The others had not yet received news of his crime spree. Relieved of responsibility, they turned the Undulant over to him.

  The Undulant accompanied him without protest, as he had been sure she would. The mind of the recent transferee was still orienting, still trying to assimilate the complexities of this Spican scheme. He had to keep that mind distracted until he could nullify her.

  But first he had to make quite sure that she was his enemy agent, and not the real Undulant. So he touched her.

  There was the powerful aura, equivalent to his own. "So you know me already," she said. "You are aware of my mission."

  "You tried to kill me, there in the Keel of the Ship," be replied. "If need be, I shall counter you with love, here in the Ear of Wheat."

  "Ear of Wheat?" she inquired, perplexed. "Love?" She was confused but also playing for time, until she could ascertain the best way to kill him. But he had the advantage of prior experience in this realm.