“You certainly are a coin,” he agreed. “You roll and you’re precious.”
“Thank you,” she said, vibrating her ball against his trunk in a most stimulating way.
“And I have seen some combat in my time, so I’m a Sword. In fact, I’m a flintsmith—I make weapons. Good ones, too.”
“I am aware. I knew you then. Remember?”
“So you did.” He paused. “You knew me as a human being. So to you I’m a stick figure, all angles and bones. Doesn’t it bother you?”
“No. We believe in outside contacts, in exogamous cooperation. It’s part of our nature. We have known of the nature of Solarians for many centuries. The Tarot itself has prepared the way, for we associate ourselves with the circular Coins and Solarians with the thrust of Swords. The message of the Tarot is that all systems are valid, no matter how strange some may seem at first. I know you are a fine person in alien guise. And we have a common debt. And now you are here in rotary form, visiting my Suit of Solid as it were, and it is good.”
“Yet you will not let me—the Big Wheel will not let me complete my mission.”
She drew up on a fine expanse of hard foliage overlooking a flowing stream. Paddlewheeled waterfowl disported on its surface, and two-wheeled animals moved away, alarmed by the intrusion of sapients. Originally all creatures of the Solarian home planet had been bicycled, but in time the sapients had lifted one wheel, becoming unicycled, freeing the other to become the communicatory ball. The pattern seemed familiar to Flint; human beings had progressed similarly, from quadruped to biped status.
“Try to understand,” she said. “To us, the individual is paramount in the circuit. Government exists only to serve the needs of the citizens. Where the interests of a single entity conflict with that of society, the entity takes precedence.”
“That’s backwards! Government must always serve the good of the greatest number.”
“In a thrust-culture, perhaps that is so. Here, no.” She made a little gesture with her tail, much as a human used hands to augment a difficult point. “What is good for the individual is good for the society.”
“But centralized society would collapse!” Flint was not used to debating economics or political science, yet his point seemed irrefutable.
“Well, it is true we lack the straight-thrust dynamism of your muscle-and-bone mode. But we have achieved the equilibrium of the turning wheel. We accomplish much by accommodation and mutual respect, rather than force.”
“And your Sphere is twice the diameter of ours,” Flint said. “I don’t claim to comprehend it, but I admit I like it. But what happens when the interests of individuals conflict?”
“This is the heart of our system. It is a form of mutual debt. They must work it out together.”
“Debt. There is the key I don’t have. How do you—”
“Divergent interests must be reconciled. Factions must unify. The interest of one entity must merge with the other, so that no dichotomy exists. You might call it love.”
“Love thine enemy?” Flint remembered another of the fragments of wisdom of the Shaman that had not come clear.
“There can be no enemy. Only debt to be expiated.”
Flint pondered. “Let me see whether I have it straight,” he said at last. “Or curved, as the case may be.”
“Circular,” she supplied. “At Sol, a straight line may be the solution to most problems; here it is a spiral.”
“Yes. You and I saved each other’s lives, and so we owed each other our lives. A mutual debt, very hard to repay. You can’t take back a life, after all. Now in our thrust-culture, we’d call that self-canceling. Equal and opposite forces. But I suppose if you plotted it on a spiral, it could start quite a spin. Equal and opposite thrusts applied to the two sides of a wheel can make it roll twice as fast. So—” But he stopped, beginning to realize. “Pleasant news from a lady…”
“I’m aware that different conventions obtain in your culture,” she said. “You tend to be indrawn, perhaps as the natural consequence of your outward thrust.”
“That’s what I was saying! The Shaman explained it to me, back when I hardly understood and had to stretch my mind to take it in. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
“Yes. So you are an expansive, extroverted species—but also strongly introverted, alienophobic. Your mating pattern reflects this. You seek a stranger for the purpose of procreation, then establish lifelong liaison with that stranger. To us that seems extreme. We prefer familiar matings—but we form no restrictive relation.”
“You’re saying you’re polygamous?”
“No, that would be the wrong connotation. We mate for social or economic reasons, but our love is intense while it endures. At the end, there is a child—and all debts have been expiated by that act of creation, all differences reconciled in that child. The chapter is finished; we never mate again with the same partners.”
“To us that would be frivolous,” Flint said. “Mating is tantamount to marriage—a permanent commitment. This is my relation to Honeybloom, the Queen of Liquid. Or Water, Cups, or Hearts, by the cards. When I return to Outworld, I’ll marry her.”
“I understand that, and I wish you well. It is your system,” Tsopi said. “But at the moment you are part of the Polarian culture, and you cannot complete your technical mission until our debt is expiated. There is no conflict between me and Honeybloom”—she had used his term, for there were no parallel concepts in Polarian, no flowers, hence no blooms and no bees and no honey—“so love me now, and never again. You may regard this in the line of duty, since the Big Wheel is anxious to have our debt abated, and will meet with you immediately afterward.”
So, circuitously, politics had become sex. “On Planet Earth, that would be called prostitution,” he said.
“I do not understand the term.”
Indeed, there had been no concept for this either; he had had to use the human word. “Allow me to be a bit finicky,” he said. “I can indulge in sex on a purely casual basis, or as a necessity of my mission, or I can marry. You seem to be offering something in between. Short-term love. And I don’t even know how it is done here. You have no—do you know how Solarians do it?”
“Yes,” she said, glowing with distaste. “It is linear, again. The male pokes his little stick into the female’s—
“All right. You have the idea. Now how do Polarians get the male seed together with the female egg?”
“I propose to show you,” she said.
“I could learn faster if you told me first,” he said with developing exasperation. This reluctance to speak directly to the point—but of course, that was Polarian nature.
“Why did you stop me from describing the Solarian act?” she inquired in return.
“Solarian act?” For a moment he was baffled.
“How the male makes his stick stiff and—”
“Oh. That sort of thing isn’t discussed openly among humans. Not in mixed company.” Then he did a double-take. “I see. Some things are better performed than described.”
“Yes. Also, your human viewpoint might cause you as much distress as our own viewpoint causes us in contemplation of the Solarian act, which seems aggressive and unnatural to us. Why, if the male poked too hard, or missed the opening—”
“All right!” Flint made a fluid shrug. “Better done than said, as we agreed. I don’t promise to be an effective partner, but—”