They passed down a smooth ramp, where on Earth there would have been stairs. Of course; ramps were better for wheels, stairs for legs. Ramps were everywhere, contributing to the fluidity of the architectural design.
They had to roll single file, for efficient progress through the throng. Tsopi’s trail just ahead of him was sweet; she had a tantalizingly feminine taste.
Taste? Flint concentrated, and it came: Polarians laid down taste trails with their wheels, much as humans laid down scent. No, more than that: These were actual, conscious signatures of passage, like the trails of Earthly snails. He remembered the first snail he had seen, beside the huge water of the ocean inlet, under the odd blue sky of Earth. Today he didn’t even notice the color of the sky of a given planet; sky was sky color, right for its world. But this taste; every Polarian was really a super-bloodhound, sniffing out every other, all the time. It was the natural way. In fact, it was already difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise.
“These are our power generators,” Tsopi murmured against his hide, flinging back her tail in a very fetching way. This mode of communication was pleasantly ultimate: touch and speech together. In fact, Polarians were a togetherness species, expecting and requiring closer camaraderie than the creatures of Sphere Sol. “Orbiting micro-satellites reflect half the sunlight passing near our planet into our generators, and that fuels our matter transport system. Our remaining energy needs are met by—”
“The center of power,” Flint said, rolling his own ball on her surface. My, this was fun! “The highest Minister, Regent, ruler—”
“Big Wheel,” she supplied. “He’s really more of a coordinator, a converger of spirals. We don’t have your sort of—”
“Whatever you call him: the one to whom I should report. He’s in this vicinity?”
“Yes, the Wheel is here. But there is no—”
“I’m sorry if I affront your sensitivities,” Flint said. “I like your company a lot, and do want to learn about your Sphere. But my mission is of galactic importance. Business before pleasure.” And he broke away from her, dodging into the nearest crosshall.
“You do not understand,” she buzzed against the floor, dodging after him. “With us, there is no separation between—first there must be—”
But Flint, in any body, was adept at pursuit and eluding. He accelerated, getting the feel of his wheel—and it was a good wheel, even though it was spherical. Tsopi could outspeed his human body on level ground, but his mind in a healthy Polarian body was too much for her. He zipped around another corner, shot across the ramp, and damped out his scent amidst a welter of tastes on a well-used trail. In moments he had lost her, as surely as he had lost his pursuers on Luna, back three worlds ago.
Yet he had not, in the end, been able to escape his fate, there on Earth’s huge barren moon. He had carried his destiny within himself. Poor parallel, though; now he was not running from, but rolling to his mission.
He paused to reflect, working out his rationale after the fact. Flint trusted his primitive instincts, but his mind refused to give them complete play without comprehending them. There were civilized aspects to his mind, like them or not, and he had to give them their turn. Why had he needed to free himself of so helpful and lovely a creature as Tsopi? Especially since he had known her back home on Planet Outworld and chased a dinosaur with her. Rather, had been chased with her; nobody chased Old Snort!
Because she was threatening to interfere with the performance of his mission, yes. Perhaps not intentionally. But it would be very easy to become romantically distracted by her, because she was not only sweet to the taste, she was genuinely nice. He did not want to sully his memory of Honeybloom by chasing after the first pretty tail he met. Yet he should have been able to persuade her of his mission’s importance, had he really tried. So that was not the whole reason. He had to dig deeper.
And it came: Tsopi knew too much about him. That made her dangerous, however well-meaning she might be. Until he confronted the authorities of this Sphere, he was vulnerable; if anything happened to him, Polaris would be lost to the galactic coalition. Sol had now tried other agents, sending them to other Spheres such as huge Sador, and they had not returned. Remembering his misadventures in Canopus and Spica Spheres, Flint could understand why failure would be common. Only Flint himself had been able to negotiate the intricacies of transfer to alien bodies and cultures and return to Sol. He had succeeded twice, as much by luck as by skill, and this one promised to be his easiest mission yet—but he could take nothing for granted. He could not afford the risk of delay, however attractive it might seem at the moment.
Yet even this was not the whole problem. Every time he scraped to the bottom of his apprehension, he found a deeper level. Was Tsopi a well-meaning innocent—or was she in fact an active anticoalition agent, either native or possessed by alien transfer? She did not have a potent Kirlian aura—but he could not assume that the Polarian-body perceptions could pick this up, or that it was impossible to conceal such an aura. If she were possessed, could she really be ¢le of A[th], or Llyana the Undulant of Spica—the persona that had animated them? Even the least-threatening situation could have its complications. Perhaps it was his slightly paranoid suspicions that had enabled him to survive while others perished. If Tsopi were actually a transferee, she was extremely dangerous. Of course the chance of her being possessed by that malignant yet intriguing alien-Sphere entity who had tried to kill him before seemed remote, as he had anchored that female to the host-body for some time to come, but much could have happened, such as the accidental death of the infant, freeing the mother. Or a similar entity could have taken over. They knew how to locate him; the question was, how badly did they want him?
Yet Tsopi had been here before him. Unless the spies had access to Sphere Sol information, that virtually eliminated possession. They could not trace his transfer before he transferred! Nevertheless it was a risk, for no one had told him he would be expected in Sphere Polaris. Of course it could be an administrative foulup; they happened often enough. It would be just like Earth’s Council of Ministers to have forgotten to inform him, the most critical party, of their plans for him. Or maybe the Polarians had such a good intelligence network that they had tapped in on Sol’s secret and acted on it. If it turned out Tsopi were innocent, he would apologize to her most handsomely—after the Big Wheel had the technology of transfer.
Meanwhile, he was lost and alone—as usual. It didn’t bother him. He could best proceed on his own.
Exactly where would the Big Wheel be? Since Tsopi would undoubtedly raise the hue and cry for him—or whatever rolling equivalent Polarians had—he had to act fast. Somewhere in his host-memories would be the information he needed, but he had already expended too much time exploring his own motives and could not take time to sift tediously through the host-library now. What he really needed was time; his prior missions had taught him to avoid acting precipitously. At the same time he had to complete his mission immediately—a paradox.
He crossed a scent-trail that offered a safe temporary haven for troubled entities. It was a priestly taste, consciously laid down—perhaps a Polarian monk. Since Flint dared act neither slowly nor ignorantly, perhaps this would help. He wheeled to follow the trail.