*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 flesh 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 intellectuaclass="underline" 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.