Piers Anthony: Cluster

“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?