The wheel spun so fast that it grew warm, then hot. Both Flint and Tsopi secreted extra fluid to bathe that sphere in its sealed chamber and alleviate friction, but still the heat increased. It was like traveling through a boiling lake at super-Polarian velocity. Flint knew, now, that that heat was penetrating the globe, making it pervious to the special juices. The elixir was reaching inward, deeper, changing the cellular structure of the mass, activating unique enzymes.
At last something within the wheel reacted. There was an electrochemical shift, as of a fire flaring up. It was the climax, that first stirring of buried animation. There was an instant of almost unbearable rapture as the shock went through the mass, then exhaustion.
Flint and Tsopi fell apart. The wheel rolled free of both of them, steaming. And while they struggled to regain their strength—complicated by the absence of their wheels, through which they normally ate, respirated, and eliminated—the loose mass began to shake and flex as though something inside were trying to get out. But it did not break open like a hatching egg; it elongated and unfolded, stage by stage, until it emerged complete, sculptured by the hand of nature: a young Polarian.
The newcomer spent some time getting the feel of his wheel and ball and achieving proper balance. Then, abruptly, he departed.
“Children take care of themselves,” Tsopi explained, her ball vibrating weakly against the floor.
“So I note. But what about us? We’ve been dewheeled.” For answer, she disengaged her tail, put it to her empty base, and popped the little communication ball in. Her base closed about it despite the disparity of size. With difficulty she got up, until she stood balanced precariously on that tiny ball. There was her new wheel!
Then she cast about with her empty tail until she found Flint’s trunk. Her ball socket embraced the available portion of his ball, as he had embraced her embryo-wheel before. For a moment the little ball spun swiftly between them in a remarkably intimate, sweet kiss, a wheel-copulation in miniature; then she drew away, and took the ball with her. And with that pang of separation, Flint’s remaining passion expired. He was sated.
Finally Tsopi wobbled over to his full-sized wheel, and nudged it forward with her body. Slowly it rolled until it touched him. He twisted about to seat it in its natural socket. The thing was cold and unpleasant at first, a slimy dead mass, but soon his torso warmed it and refreshed its surface lubricant, making it comfortable again. Now he was mobile. But he was unable to speak.
“Do not be concerned,” Tsopi said, vibrating her new ball against him. Her voice was burred, as though she had not yet gotten the feel of the equipment; his ball was slightly larger than hers. The burr of abatement, it was called; a fond allusion to a common satisfaction. “You will soon grow another, even as I lay down new protein around your seed to expand my wheel to full size. In our species, the female suffers her confinement after parturition, and the male is mute.” She paused. “We forgot about that, before; naturally the Big Wheel realized right away that the debt had not been abated.”
Flint was already aware that the Wheel had done some uncircular scheming. But perhaps that had been necessary. How would the Big Stick—correction, the huge phallus—no, he was still fouled up in the symbolisms of translation, accurately as they might reflect the underlying thrust of Solarian culture—the regent or emperor of Sphere Sol have reacted to a Polarian emissary who refused to come to the point? He probably would have diverted the creature to some safe place, investigated privately to ascertain what the hell was the matter, then acted to correct the problem without much regard for the niceties of human convention.
So now at last the mystery of Polarian reproduction had been explained. The seed started with the male, becoming his communication ball, encased in just enough nutrient protein to keep it secure and serviceable, until he passed it along to his mate. Next time she mated it would become an individual entity. No, not necessarily; he realized now that this was an optional aspect of the exchange. Usually the female took the male’s ball directly for her new wheel, in what humans would think of as a genital kiss. But if she had special regard for him, she saved his ball, substituting her own ball for the wheel, as on this occasion. In this manner she retained part of him for as long as she chose. After any mating she could transform that seed-bearing ball to wheel-status, thus setting up the union of their two genetic pools, or she could retain it indefinitely.
There was no parallel to this in human reproduction, but he liked it. The female had a very special control. Tsopi’s next mating would be infertile, for her virginal wheel contained no male seed. Her first wheel, just manifested as offspring, was actually the legacy of her own male parent; in a sense she had mated with her father. But her first ball had been her own, therefore sterile, and it was now a sterile wheel. She could plan ahead, activating Flint’s seed when she incurred a debt exchange with some other male she really respected, simply by having an interim non-debt affair to eliminate the sterile wheel. The debt system, in its subtler applications, was a very fine mechanism!
Actually, this was a variant of the three-sex system of Spica, for it required three individuals to produce one offspring. One male to provide the seed; the female to expand it to proper size; and a second male to trigger it into birth. That was why consecutive matings could not occur in a given couple; a male could not trigger his own seed. Hence romance was one-shot, and there was no permanent union. The notion of consecutive matings with one female now appalled Flint; it was akin to the incest taboo of his own culture. Repetition was possible, since Tsopi’s new wheel in this case was not his ball, but only in an emergency such as near-elimination of the species, or unavoidable repetition of debt exchange, would that become permissible. Much as sibling or cousin mating was possible among humans, and theoretically practiced by the children of Adam and Eve and the children of Noah, but never otherwise tolerated. No doubt facets of the concept of “original sin” entered here; a man should neither kill his brother nor impregnate his sister.
Oh, there was much to meditate on here, and comprehension of the Polarian system led to penetrating insights into his own human system. It would take a Tarot deck to unravel them all!
“Farewell, Plint,” Tsopi said. “The debt has been abated.” And she minced unsteadily away on her tiny wheel.
Flint, though profoundly moved by the experience, no longer felt any desire to associate with her. All that interest, it seemed, had been concentrated in his ball—and now she had that. In fact, the male ball equated closely with the human testicle, in both practice and the vernacular of both species, and was the subject of dirty jokes—yet it was ultimately the same as the female wheel. There were very strict language conventions here. Just as the tentacle was always called the male’s trunk and the female’s tail, the communications sphere was always the ball, and the traveling sphere always the wheel. Scratch a seemingly pointless but absolutely firm distinction, and Sex was bound to be at the root of it!
What of his male wheel, however? Could it also become a young Polarian? A wave of deep disgust at the notion assured him otherwise; it was merely a mass of protein, a kind of storage of resources. Males could survive for extended periods by feeding on their wheels. One terrible Polarian torture—oh yes, torture was known here!—consisted of isolating a male without sustenance for a prolonged period, so that his wheel gradually shrank, until it was as small as a ball. When he resembled a recently mated female, he would be released to suffer ridicule. Many preferred to seek their own repose, rather than endure that humiliation. Another punishment was to remove and destroy the wheel, letting the individual survive or die as he might.