Could he somehow trap and interrogate the alien agent? Flint rejected that immediately. He lacked the expertise, and it was too risky here. Better to nullify the agent, return to Imperial Earth, and let them send a party to deal with the agent. Or have her shipped to Sol Sphere with him—no, he had tried that before, and she had somehow slipped the net. He could not trust her to transfer again. Play it safe; give her no chance to foul him up.
Yet he retained an image of ¢le of A[th] of Sphere Canopus, a pretty little thing in humanoid terms. The host-body was not the transfer mind, of course, and he could not judge the nature of the entity that had possessed her, yet it was hard to disengage the two entirely. Body did make a difference; he had to admit to himself that he would not have loved Honeybloom had she been ugly. And that powerful Kirlian aura of the other Sphere entity, as strong as his own; alluring. He had begun traveling to other Spheres partly to find his own level of aura, after all. Enemy she might be, but he did not want to kill her. Not yet.
Two Impacts spied him and swam up. “Bopek—a charge of rape has been lodged against you,” one said. “You will accompany us to the hearing.”
“Rape?” Flint was stunned. “I never—”
“Did you not depart the Impact zone without authorization and enter the Sibilant zone?”
Oh-oh. Violation of the zones was a serious matter, as he would have known had he bothered to check his host’s memory. He had been careless. Better to admit the truth. “I was under the influence of the healing salve—”
“And there you encroached on a Sibilant/Undulant pair and assumed the role of catalyst, forcing on them involuntary mergence?”
“I did not realize—”
“And as a result of that union, a Sibilant offspring was created, forcing unanticipated parentage on the original Sibilant?”
Flint realized that he was in trouble. Ignorant of the mating system of this species, and intoxicated by the salve, he had not taken time to explore the cultural restrictions stored within his brain. The whole matter had seemed complex and irrelevant to his mission. Now it was clear: Mating was a three-entity affair, impossible with two, compulsive the moment a third appeared. The third served as a catalyst, forcing the other two to mate immediately. Like the game of scissors-paper-stone, which he had played as a child on Outworld though no real scissors or paper existed there, the order of the matchings determined the outcome. Scissors cut paper, paper wrapped stone, and stone crushed scissors. So the sex of the catalyst determined the sex of the offspring—but the offspring did not match the catalyst. Hence the intricate zone system, in which visitors of only one sex were permitted at a time. The game could not be played unless all three were present.
Since major construction required the talents of all three types, some subzones had been instituted, and couriers brought otherwise unauthorized Undulants through the Impact zone to that subzone without encountering any Sibilants. When Bopek had danced into the Sibilant zone, he had trespassed in much the way a strange male trespasses when he enters a harem. He had thus encountered a Sibilant with an Undulant visitor, and had become the catalyst, forcing involuntary mergence. That, by this culture’s definition, was rape.
He was guilty.
But he could not linger for the trial and penalty. The foreign Sphere agent might already be here, and he had to nullify her before she got oriented and nullified him. His mission came before the niceties of Spican etiquette.
“Fellows, I apologize,” he said.
Whereupon he invoked the most disgusting crime of which a Spican sapient was capable. He “fushed” them. He visualized them as a Sibilant and an Undulant, himself as a catalyst, and puffed out his bodily perimeter to intersect theirs. He overlapped them both, then contracted, hauling them together inside his flesh.
The act was appalling. Only in the filthiest of jokes was it even conceivable. A wave of intense revulsion almost overwhelmed the mind of his host. This was despicable homosexual rape! But Flint, desperate and rendered cynical by his recent experience, forced the two to intersect each other. Then he expelled them violently, firing them through the water, linked to each other.
Both Impacts were unconscious, overcome by sheer shock and horror. And Flint was now guilty of a capital offense. His Impact brain urged immediate penance in the form of suicide. But he had already suffered his readjustment, his impairment of sanity. The sense of separation he had achieved during his prior sexual encounter shielded him. He hated himself, but he swam on.
Now he was near his original awakening spot, guided by Bopek’s unerring directional/distance sense. And the injured Undulant was still there, in the temporary sub-zone, swimming uncertainly. He was in time—probably because her sudden awakening must have canceled their plans to remove her from the area.
This would be tricky, but he had to risk it. He swam up boldly. “I see my client has revived. Good work! I must now convey the Undulant to the assigned construction site.”
The others had not yet received news of his crime spree. Relieved of responsibility, they turned the Undulant over to him.
The Undulant accompanied him without protest, as he had been sure she would. The mind of the recent transferee was still orienting, still trying to assimilate the complexities of this Spican scheme. He had to keep that mind distracted until he could nullify her.
But first he had to make quite sure that she was his enemy agent, and not the real Undulant. So he touched her.
There was the powerful aura, equivalent to his own. “So you know me already,” she said. “You are aware of my mission.”
“You tried to kill me, there in the Keel of the Ship,” be replied. “If need be, I shall counter you with love, here in the Ear of Wheat.”
“Ear of Wheat?” she inquired, perplexed. “Love?” She was confused but also playing for time, until she could ascertain the best way to kill him. But he had the advantage of prior experience in this realm.
“I’ll explain about the wheat,” he said as they swam. With one part of his mind he noted how smoothly she moved, despite her injury. Did the Kirlian aura of a lovely creature seek out a lovely host, or did the animation enhance the host? Twice she had been beautiful; it could be coincidence. “My species began to be civilized when it mastered wheat. Wheat is a grain, the seed of a grass, a type of plant. You have plants on your home planet?”
“Yes,” she said. “But not wheat.”
“This grain is nutritious and it keeps well. It enabled my ancestors, who were more civilized than I am, to store food over the barren winter months. They ground it up between stones and cooked it into masses of substance called bread. This reliable supply of good food greatly increased their survival capacity. In fact, we call it the Neolithic Revolution, the great progress of the New Stone Age. They had to learn to weave baskets to store the grain, and had to make records to dispense it fairly, and this led to many other skills. Eventually it resulted in complete modern civilization.” How glibly he reiterated the Shaman’s discourse on the subject! The Paleolithic Flint himself had little affinity for such concepts. But it was one of the bits of knowledge that was becoming clear as he perceived the astonishing manifestations of advanced civilization. “Wheat was so important that man even placed it in the sky. The system of Spica is called the Ear of Wheat, held in the hand of the Virgin. It covers her bare bottom, for she is evidently modest. But the relevance of wheat to Spica is even more pertinent.”
“Its pertinence eludes me,” she said. She was willing to talk, for she too was stalling for time, thinking him a fool. Last time they had met, she had tried to kill him violently; this time she was being more cautious, but her objective was the same.