Cluster (38 page)

“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 want 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 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 sexually to visitors, part of the hospitality of the house. So it may have been a legitimate situation, albeit it 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. Any sentient, sapient or not, was fascinated by the convention 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's 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 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 those 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 itself, 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. Or 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. 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 to 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 than reality too. I am not the same entity I was, either and 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 into me.”

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 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 genders, 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 complications of intergalactic 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.

“This 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.”