Viscous Circle

Piers Anthony

 

 

Prolog

 

 

Three million years ago a galaxy-spanning civilization vanished, leaving only scattered evidences of its operations, in the form of derelict Ancient Sites and a strange pattern of surviving species. Some Sites are merely huge earthworks, long eroded and overrun by vegetation and development; others contain valuable artifacts of intense interest to scholars and technicians; and some few are "live" with operative equipment, sometimes self-animating. All contemporary cultures of the known universe eagerly seek such Sites within their spheres of influence, as the technology of the Ancients was beyond anything known today.

For example, all cultures now suffer from Spherical Regression, being unable to maintain an advanced level of civilization at their perimeters. This represents an inherent limit on their expansion, and is thus a considerable annoyance. The Ancients seem not to have suffered this regression; they had some secret that enabled them to maintain their civilization at its optimum level throughout its entire region. Thus the discovery of a functioning Ancient Site is generally the signal for a mad intercultural scramble, in which the usual restraints of civilization hardly apply. Yet often the effects of such discoveries are other than anticipated, and have galaxy- or cluster-spanning ramifications.

Many of the technological innovations that have transformed contemporary interspecies society derive from the knowledge of the Ancients as discovered in their Sites. Two of the three major systems of transport and communication are examples: Mattermission and Transfer. Mattermission is the virtually instantaneous transmission of objects and creatures across interplanetary and interstellar distances. However, this mode is so expensive in energy that it can only be used on special occasions. Unrestricted use would result in the deterioration of the substance of the galaxy in that vicinity, as the binding atomic forces weaken. That is not healthy.

Transfer is the artificial shifting of the aura, or soul—which includes personal identity, consciousness, and memory—from one person to the body, or "host," of another. This system uses approximately one millionth the energy of Mattermission and automatically equips the Transferee with the language and background of the host, even when that host is a completely alien creature. With Transfer, interspecies commerce is feasible, and larger Spheres of Influence are practical. Empires can be formed and maintained.

An entire framework of Transfer has been developed, with many specialists. The Society of Hosts assumes responsibility for the welfare of hosts temporarily deprived of their auras. Its motto derives from Kipling's “Recessional”: "Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,/Lest we forget—lest we forget!" The Transferee who forgets his origin will fade into nonexistence. The military has trained people with intense auras to be transfer agents, who transfer to hosts among the cultures being spied on. The work is dangerous, since if the alien host dies before the mission is concluded, the visiting aura dies with it. But this is a notorious, dashing sort of employment with unique rewards. Many seek it; few achieve it.

This is the story of one such agent.
 

 

 

 

Chapter 1:

Mission

 

 

Ronald Snowden launched himself into the tube with his customary verve and plunged like a cannonball through the rocky heart of the planetoid. Some termed these orbiting chunks of material asteroids, he thought, but that was wrong; they were not small stars, but small planets. As such they had become quite useful to man, serving as way stations and isolated training camps and mines for assorted substances. Why, even gravel for concrete would be prohibitively expensive if lifted by the ton from the surface of a full planet! In a planetoid belt, gravel was cheap; one had only to seine it from space and float it to the construction site.

Ronald was a grown Solarian male verging on the nether side of prime, but at the moment he was like a boy, complete with the tousling brown hair and self-satisfied grin. He narrowed his gaze to make the details of the travel tube blur, and thought of himself as a zooming rocket.

When he came to the residential region, he caught hold of a bar and swung himself into the crosstube with the neatness of fine muscle tone and experience. He enjoyed token gravity and hated to return to full weight. But that was a necessary evil; if he ever allowed his system to atrophy in null-G, he would be unable to set foot on a full-mass planet without horrendous and possibly lethal complications.

Ronald popped into the residential cylinder. The volume of it spun about him, since the entrance was in the axis. This, too, he liked; he drifted, as it were, in the center of this miniature world. What self-centered philosophies he might evolve to explain this phenomenon!
I, Lord of all I survey
...

But he had business. He could not dally in idle indulgence, however tempting it was. He was not lord of anything. He had no rank even among the personnel of this station; he was just an employee. A rather special employee, to be sure, but no more than that.

He drew the fins out from his sleeves and trouser legs, locked them in place with practiced shakes of his limbs, then stroked through the warm, damp air for the rim. Soon he was moving swiftly down, as the atmosphere helped him along and centrifugal force bore him outward. He guided himself toward his sector and his lot, banking sharply and running in the air to take the abrupt one-gravity landing. In his exuberance he overshot, and knocked down a cornstalk.

His wife shot out of the house as if jet propelled. She was a handsome red-tressed woman whose esthetic countenance was marred at the moment by anger. "You clumsy oaf!" she cried. "You trampled my garden again!"

Ronald was obviously at fault, yet he wished she had not been so quick to take issue. She seemed not to be concerned whether
he
had suffered any injury. She cared more at the moment for a cornstalk than for him.

They were four and a half years through their term marriage. In half a year they would either renew for another five, or let it lapse. Their actual decision would have to come before then, to enable the changeover, if it came, to be smooth. Traditionally, promiscuous affairs were tolerated in the final three months of a term, as people compared each other to the remaining options. Generally the reality was considerably more staid than the tradition, and serious couples never experimented at all. Still, the matter bore consideration. Ronald had been conscious of the approaching deadlines, but not thought seriously about them. Perhaps it was time to do that thinking. Perhaps, in fact, Helen had already done so, and her attitude was showing it.

Yet he had to be fair. He
had
landed carelessly. He would have been just as annoyed if she had broken any of his puzzle-sculptures or his three-headed dog statuette memento. Their marriage should not be allowed to founder on trifles; it should be settled rationally.

"I admit fault," he said. "Name my penance."

"Penance!" she snapped. "How can you fix a broken stalk? That corn is done for! Besides, you haven't stowed your fins."

Ronald quickly snapped his arm fins back into his sleeves. The leg fins closed automatically when he came in for landing; otherwise the procedure would have been almost impossible. The designers of station clothing had profited from decades and centuries of trial-and-error experience.

"If you knew how hard it is to grow corn out here in space..." Helen resumed.

She would not let go of the trivial. Well, if that was the way it was, that was the way it was. He would have to meditate on what kind of woman he would prefer next time. Certainly not one who nagged a man about stalks! "I'm sorry," he said, and stalked inside, conscious of an inappropriate pun. Stalk—stalked. It wasn't funny.

Then, in the inexplicable way of the gender, she changed attitude. "You must have an assignment. Of course you were distracted. Let me make you some tea."

Ronald used no mind- or body-affecting drugs idly, tannic acid among them. But it didn't matter; this wasn't real tea. Nothing available here on the planetoid research station was non-nutritive or habit forming in any physiological manner. Some people took coffee, cocoa, cola or wine as purely social devices, since caffeine and alcohol and cocaine did not exist here. Helen liked the associations of tea, so she brewed dainty cups of it on special occasions. Sometimes, on cues known only to herself, she made demitasse instead. It was her way of apologizing for a display of anger.

Ronald indulged her in the ritual, accepting tea, sanitized sugar, and genuine reconstituted imitation cream in a pseudo-china cup on a decorated saucer. Helen had a flair for serving that he had always appreciated; it was her special indulgence, similar to his zooming through the low-gee tunnels, and she was at her best when honoring these forms. He realized that tea had historically been used as a social mechanism, giving form to encounters that might otherwise become awkward. He recalled the joke: "I'm sorry I had to put poison in your tea, dear." "That's all right; it was delicious." Then he glanced at Helen with a muted flash of uncertainty. Poison? But of course that was a foolish thought; she would never poison anyone, and in any event there was no such chemical on the planetoid or in it. If she did not wish to stay with him, she had only to wait six months.

She proffered him a little plate of delicate cookies. Ronald took one and nipped at its rim. He knew it was thoroughly fortified with all manner of nutrition, but it tasted just like vanilla wafer. She was really pulling out the stops.

Helen looked a query at him, and Ronald had to tell about his mission. "There's an unincorporated region about a hundred and fifty parsecs out, not halfway to Mintaka. Of no interest to anyone except obscurity scholars, until this moment. We picked up a galactic rumor that there is an Ancient Site there."

"An Ancient Site!" she exclaimed, almost spilling her tea. Only the grossest amazement could cause her to forget herself to that extent. "The whole Galaxy will be charging into the area!"

"No, it's only a rumor. Been around for centuries, never verified. Mirzam's checked it out more than once in the past couple hundred years, and Mintaka ran a survey there last millennium, and even Sador in its heyday sent a crew there. Now Bellatrix, the closest Sphere, has a station there, but if they found any Ancient Site they never developed it. No one has been able to find the thing, so the other sapients have concluded it's a false lead."

"All those other Spheres have existed longer than Sphere Sol," she said. "How do we know better than they do?"

"Solarian snooping. There's a local species, sub-Spherical. They're sort of spinning circles. All different colors. Like hollow-centered Frisbees. No society; they just float about magnetically, somehow. We call them Ringers. Seems someone transferred to a Ringer host, maybe a research nut, just to see if it could be done, and there in this thing's quaint mind was the memory of its visit to a kind of shrine where its ancestors learned to fly—and when that Transfer traveler came back, he realized that shrine must have been an Ancient Site in excellent repair. So now we're pretty sure it's true; there
is
a Site there. We don't know exactly where; that wasn't clear from the secondhand memory. But it almost definitely exists. So now all we have to do is find it, before any alien Spheres catch on to our hot new lead."

"Why didn't you put that Transfer traveler on a total readout and get the specific data? There's always a lot more in the mind than can be consciously recalled, especially when Transfer is involved."

"You're telling me? I'm in the business!" But Ronald was happy now, telling his secret. "Couldn't. He wrote out his report, then went back to his Ringer host on a scrambled setting; couldn't recall him. Guy must have been addled, but his report seemed straight. So if it can be verified—"

"An Ancient Site!" she repeated, awed. "All the key technological breakthroughs of Galactic history have derived from Ancient Sites. Matter transmission, Transfer of auras—"