And was that so bad? Better to die than be a slave! Someone in Sphere Sol’s past had said that. Maybe his hope of escape had been as illusory as the lovely moonscape names. Reality was this darkening airless void.
He fell. His faceplate nudged into moondust, the support straps about his head holding his face clear of the lens. It was not an uncomfortable position. He was prone now, resting—yet panting. The air could no longer sustain him. He had no strength to get up; his vital energy was being drained, as the energy of the galaxy was being drained by the Andromedans. At some point the loss of force from the strong interaction of the local atomic nuclei would diminish their cohesion, and matter as this galaxy knew it would cease to exist.
Those Ministers of Imperial Earth were not such bad sorts. They were only trying to do their job. They didn’t like working with a Stone Age man, but they did it graciously. And the Masters of Canopus, slavedrivers yet sensible, reversing their eons-long policy of Spherical isolation, to help save the common galaxy. They had set their dream of privacy aside.
That female who had followed him to Canopus—who was she? The Minister of Alien Spheres had claimed to have sent no other agent there, and had affected great surprise at this part of Flint’s report. But Flint knew they had a woman with a Kirlian aura intensity near a hundred, and they were surely using her somewhere. So they had to be concealing something from him, and he didn’t like that. Too bad he’d never get to meet her, to find out the truth. Could she have transferred on her own, somehow, sensing his need? But she had tried to kill him at first! So she must be from some unknown enemy Sphere. Yet she had an aura very like his own; she was his kind…
And his kind would soon be minus one, for here he was, perishing in weakness like one diseased. Not spin-sick, but moonstruck.
“Oh, hell!” he muttered. “I’m not cut out to die like this! Not in gasping foulness. I’ve got to fight, to make it swift and clean, like an honest spearthrust. Those damned Andromedans…”
He turned on his suit radio. “Okay—vacation’s over—come and get me,” he said clearly just before he passed out.
5. Ear of Wheat
*notice kirlian transfer sphere sol to sphere spica 200 intensity*
—that’s what we’ve been waiting for redispatch agent—
*POWER*
—CIVILIZATION—
As before, the transition was instant and painless. Flint found himself inhaling water—but not choking. He was in a sea, flushing the liquid out through gills in his shoulder region, though he lacked shoulders.
All right. His transfer identity always seemed basically human. Always these two times, at least. A man in a scuba-diving outfit would have as much to get used to as this. He was sure of that; knowing that the Sphere Spica Imperial Planet was waterbound, the Ministers had had him trained in scuba, just in case. For a man who had never seen an ocean prior to his first Earth visit, it had been quite an experience.
He flexed his arms and legs and found they were flippers. Excellent for swimming, not as good for manipulating objects. But they did have terminal digits. Man in deep-sea swimming gear: yes, the image would do.
“Bopek recovers!” a voice said, very close and clear in the liquid medium. Water was just great for transmitting sound.
“Swim, Bopek!” other voices urged. “Restore your system.”
Flint swam. His powerful flipper arms and legs threshed the water and propelled him forward handsomely. Fresh water passed through his system, revitalizing it. It was a nice body, in a nice environment. There was some pain, however, and he turned his eyes on the affected part to investigate. It was easy to see—his eyes were on extensible stalks, highly flexible, able to look anywhere quickly.
His body was bulbous, balloonlike, and somewhat nebulous. He seemed to have no skin, no well-defined outer boundary; instead he thinned into a frothy fadeout. His breath was more than respiration, and his gills less than solid. He took in water through his mouth, then pumped it through his entire system and finally out in fine bubbles. This carried oxygen and nourishment into his system and carried wastes out. It seemed a reasonably simple, efficient, comfortable arrangement—as long as the water was fresh. A man in scuba gear, like one in a spacesuit on the moon, could die in an unfresh medium…
But of course the human on Earth used air in a similar fashion. All people breathed from a common pool, and passed many of their wastes back into it. Plants and bacteria renewed it constantly—as they did for the water environment here. So this was a perfectly comprehensible system, not like a confined suit at all.
But part of him had been crushed. The normal froth-pattern was abnormally irregular and discolored, and much of the mass had suffered where the nutrient flow had been too long interrupted. The seawater was like blood; when it stopped passing through, the tissues perished. Too gross an interruption, and regeneration became impossible.
The body had been injured severely enough to cause the loss of its Kirlian aura: spiritual extinction. But Flint’s far more intense aura had animated it, restoring it to life. What was fatal to an aura of intensity one was survivable to an aura of intensity two hundred.
Now he had a body and an identity. But after his experience as a transferee in the slave Sphere, he was cautious about advertising it First he would ascertain the nature of this society, and of his place in it. Then he would make his contact—directly, properly, without dangerous missteps.
He explored his new mind. Its content was not immediately clear to him, but he wasn’t worried. It was bound to be a serviceable mind, because of the nature of transfer.
Though Flint had the symbology of transfer memorized, his comprehension of its actual mechanism was vague. It was instantaneous, like mattermission. A subject could be “beamed” to a specific locale, generally a planet in a Sphere. But there was no receiving station; instead there had to be a host with which the arriving Kirlian aura could associate. There was no problem about getting lost or landing in an unsuitable body; if there were no appropriate mind in the target region, the aura bounced, reanimating its original body. There were other qualifications, having to do with the aura’s notion of what was suitable; the potential host had to be sapient and of the same sex. Why this was so was not clear; there was a great deal the Solarian technologists did not yet know. But transfer worked; that was what counted.
So Flint knew he had a sapient, male body he could make function. But as before, he had to work at physical coordination, and to concentrate in order to isolate specific memories, while the language process was largely automatic. He swam some more, while he pieced it together. Swimming enhanced his alertness by providing greater flow of water through his system.
He was Bopek, an Impact. He was a courier. There were three groups of sapient Spicans, all waterdwellers: the Impacts, the Undulants, and the Sibilants. This was an Impact zone. As courier he had to convey Undulants from the Undulant zone through the Neutral Corridor to the Undulant enclave.
Did that make sense? Flint visualized it as a world of swimming dogs, cats, and mice, three of the animals who had helped man colonize Outworld. He was a dog conducting a cat past the mice warren to the cat enclave. Not exact, but helpful for orienting. It was important—and here a confusing complex of alarms sprouted from his host’s memories and experience—to keep the three types separate except on special occasions. Any two could associate freely, in any numbers, but never all three types. Apparently cats did not eat mice except in the presence of dogs, and dogs did not chase cats unless mice were watching.