Cluster (16 page)

Now he was caught up in something beyond his prior experience. It could not be translated into human or animal terms.

It was sex—with three genders.

His body, prompted by instinct, continued its heroic efforts, forcing a complete melding of masses. No, not complete; each individual had a private portion that did not overlap, and two segments of overlap with the others, and a minority segment of double overlap:
 

 

 

The individual portion was liquid, almost gaseous in its diffusion; the single overlaps were viscous; and the double overlap was virtually solid.

The three entities were penetrating each other, but not as a human man penetrated a woman. Not even as a two man / one woman trio. They were
inter
penetrating.

Flint could not rationalize this into any human act. It was genuinely alien. Not perverted so much as inconceivable.

The concept sundered his rationale. He could no longer think of himself as a visiting human; he was immersed in an alien scheme.

Flint lost his sanity. He saw himself as two irreconcilable entities, one human, the other monster. A man's mind could not exist in the carcass of a jellyfish. He had to get out!

But he was trapped. Transfer of personality, once completed, could not be revoked. He could go home only by being retransferred, and that meant first completing his mission.

The host body went on with its repulsive act, generating its obscene pleasure. The animated pornography engulfed him within its horror. He reacted violently, with utter revulsion. With his whole force of being, he drove off the intolerable connection.

The globular mass exploded apart. Flint experienced a tearing sensation that was at once painful and climactically fulfilling. The two other creatures shot out from him, like a double arrow loosed from a bow, still linked with each other. But the moment they cleared his flesh, they underwent a sub-explosion so violent that the overlapping portions of them were not parted but were torn loose as a separate mass.

Flint, feeling only relief at being free, paddled rapidly away from the carnage. He didn't care what happened to the others; he had to shield himself from the disgust of the experience.

Yet he couldn't. The act had been fundamentally shocking, but after the fact came comprehension, and that was even worse. Suddenly he understood the plight of a girl on Outworld who had been hurt and terrified of being raped, but then came to realize that she carried her attacker's baby. And that she would have to bear it and raise it, forever after a reminder of the experience. Illegitimacy was a cardinal offense on Outworld.
 

Flint, like other men, had shrugged and said “Too bad,” and not given the girl's plight much further thought, and of course had been careful neither to help her nor support her in any way. The rapist had been from another tribe, and had not long later been killed by a dinosaur, so that ended the matter.
 

Then the girl had killed herself, to Flint's amazement. He had volunteered for the burial detail—really, the Shaman had made him do it—carrying the body out to the place of exposure and leaving it there for the vulture-dactyls and other scavengers who would do the job of cleaning the flesh from the bones. He had gazed at her nude body, still quite pretty, since she had been young and the pregnancy was not far advanced, and marveled that she should have been so foolish as to sacrifice her life when fate had already avenged her.
 

Several days later he had come to collect the bones for burial under her sleeping place, so that her spirit would be at rest. Even her bones had been shapely, and very nice in their pure whiteness, except for a couple that had been cracked open by some larger predator for their marrow. He had tied those together so that her ghost would not be crippled, and he had interred the whole in a curled-up position under her lean-to. Everything had been done according to form.
 

Yet she had not rested. For months thereafter her lean-to had been haunted by her restless spirit, and finally the village had had to relocate. In had been a nuisance. Flint had shaken his head at the foolishness of girls. The Shaman had declined to explain it, though he had seemed sad.
 

But now, faced with the growing realization of what he had just participated in, Flint understood why the tribesgirl had acted as she did.

Actually, the star Spica (a double star, as befitted Flint's notion of fitness; his home star, Etamin, being similar) was part of the constellation Virgo, as seen from Earth. There were many legends about this virgin maiden, said by some to be the original harvest goddess. But since Flint's tribe had not advanced to the level of agriculture, being Paleolithic rather than Neolithic, he identified more with the constellation's identity as Erigone the Early Born. Erigone's father was Icarus, and when he died she hanged herself in grief. Another curious feminine reaction that Flint suddenly appreciated.
 

Tribesmen seldom lived to the age of forty on Outworld; if they lived long enough to see their children safely married, there was little cause for grief when they died. Their job, after all, was done. Flint's own parents had died before he was ten Solarian years old, and that had been unfortunate, but the Shaman had taken him over and given him a better life than he had had before. Certainly no cause for suicide.
 

But now he saw that for those who felt really strongly about another person or thing, the loss of such a value could evoke a reaction as strong as to require death. The maiden Erigone, patroness of the wheat field, had gone to heaven with an ear of wheat in her hand, and that ear of wheat was the star Spica. Perhaps the story of the death of her father was a euphemism; actually she might have been raped, and here was the evidence in the form of a planet of rape.

But how much worse for a man! A pretty girl was made to be impregnated by one means or another, but any such suggestion for a man was an abomination. He tried to put the horrendous concept out of his mind; he did not
want
to comprehend it. He tried to shove this debased body away from him, as he would the gore of a slain animal's ruptured intestine, knowing it was impossible, yet still making the effort. Just as the pregnant girl must have tried to shove out her hateful baby.

*
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 the 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. He 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, Sibilant...sire, parent, catalyst...dog, cat, mouse. At times the impact was a dog and other the times a cat or even a mouse. Dog mating with cat and giving birth to a 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 genders 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 the man was killing her. But she had merely been wounded, and not seriously; there was only a bit of blood between her legs. 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 permanently 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. At least the young virgin girl had been willing, with him, and not just because he had been gentle. 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!” Flint yelled in the Spican manner 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 come 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, voluptuous, spread-eagled girl being kissed by a naked, tumescent man. The curve-sided triangle between the three tangent circles matched the phallic triangles of hair, the two triangles about to be superimposed. 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–

::CONCURRANCE::

“Fush!” Flint cried aloud, expressing in that one distorted syllable the exact superimposition of lust, condemnation, 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, acceptance, and cynicism, but indubitably himself. Now he grasped emotionally what previously had been intellectual: he was an alien. He might look and act like a three-gendered 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 alienness 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 naïve 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 Spicans in the cause of saving the galaxy.