He gathered his strength and heaved. As his body flexed at the edges it thinned at the center, drawing them in closer to each other. Then he flexed outward, taking in more of their substance, extending his overlap, experiencing a phenomenal satisfaction in the process.
By a series of pulses he brought the Sibilant and the Undulant into contact with each other—within his own flesh. Now their efforts joined his, so that the pulses became more powerful. The effort became transcendentally important. Flint gathered his resources, tightened his grip on each of the others, and threw his entire strength into a convulsive contraction that hauled both entities all the way into his flesh and into each others’ flesh. The process was both painful and fantastically rewarding. In fact it was orgasmic.
Orgasm…
Flint’s first transfer had set a pattern. He knew he was in an alien body, but it was much like knowing he was a man; it was right. He still thought of himself as human. His alien sensation translated so readily into the human equivalents that he was hardly conscious of it after the first moments. Intellectually, he kept noticing details and comparing them with his other embodiments, but that was much the way a man compared one world to another. While everything was changed, he was still fundamentally a man. Here in the Spican locale he had had a more stringent adaptation, to a swimming form—but he was still basically a swimming man. And the Undulant he had escorted was a swimming woman. Or he could think of it as a dog, cat, mouse system. Different, yet still basically comprehensible.
Now he was caught up in something beyond his prior experience. It could not be translated into human or animal terms.
It was sex—with three sexes.
His body, prompted by instinct, continued its heroic efforts, forcing a complete melding of masses. No, not complete; each individual had a private portion that did not overlap, and two segments of overlap with the others, and a minority segment of double overlap:
The individual portion was liquid, almost gaseous in its diffusion; the single overlaps were viscous; and the double overlap was virtually solid.
The three entities were penetrating each other—but not as a man penetrated a woman. Not even as a two-man/one-woman trio. They were interpenetrating.
Flint could not rationalize this into any human act. It was genuinely alien. Not perverted so much as inconceivable.
The concept sundered his rationale. He could no longer think of himself as a visiting human; he was immersed in an alien scheme.
Flint lost his sanity. He saw himself as two irreconcilable entities: one human, the other monster. A man’s mind could not exist in the carcass of a jellyfish. This was a prison worse than the most gruesome sickness. He had to get out!
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.