Bud music: the compelling sound of a pair of Mintakans in the throes of love. In Sphere Mintaka, mating chambers were soundproofed, to prevent contagion. Otherwise the mating of one couple would trigger compulsive mating by many others within sonic range, and this was not desirable. The decision to mate was supposed to be based on intellectual preference, not sound, but it didn’t always happen that way.
The male Mintakan stirred, approaching the old female husk. He had no intellectual preference; the bud music governed him. The female shell, though void of aura, would function. Not even the atmosphere bubbles separated them; Melody saw those two enclosures merge, in their own kind of mating, and form into just one chamber.
No! No! This was the most insidiously hellish rape! Dash had worked out an appallingly effective physical and intellectual torture for her! She would rather suffer anything than this!
Anything except the betrayal of her galaxy—and that was the price. So she could not stop this gruesome exhibit, this ultimate obscenity. But she could not watch it either. She closed her side eye.
But she could not close off the sound, for it came at her sensitive skin (impervious to talons, but responsive to sound) on every side. She tried to turn her attention away from it, and succeeded only in dredging up her painful past.
She had been just two years old when Ariose came. He was a handsome, extremely high-Kirlian sonic male of four, seeming quite mature and cultured. In Solarian terms he would have been thirty-two, she sixteen, each somewhat younger than Dash Boyd and Yael of Dragon, but with a similar set of outlooks. Two was the age of Mintakan blooming, when the tubes first rounded out and the strings became taut, and the diaphragms resonated to every trifling vibration. The age of delight, experiment, ambition, and beauty—and naiveté.
She had all nine feet, by definition the state of female virginity (the concepts were synonymous), of greatest innocence, desirability, and availability. The great majority of adult Mintakans were to some degree male; only once in life was one fully female.
Despite his age, Ariose had eight feet. He had mated only once. She was curious about that, since a male of his talents and presentation should have had opportunity to bud himself all the way down to three feet, had he wanted to. Why had he saved himself for her? She let herself believe that it was her physical beauty and sonic vibrance in intellectual qualities.
Mature Mintakans came at the agreement to bud circumspectly. Often they remained together for life, though there was no legal or moral requirement to do this. It merely reflected the wisdom of their initial decision: truly compatible entities had no need to wander.
Budding was not a casual, multiple performance like the chronic sexual efforts of Solarians, who copulated tens or hundreds of times for every offspring they produced. In fact, it was said in other Spheres that Solarians indulged in sexual activity more for transient personal pleasure than for the extension of the species. Melody knew that was a gross exaggeration; still her impressionable postadolescent mind was intrigued by the amazing concept. How much pleasure was there in budding that made it worth the permanent loss of a foot?
So when Ariose intimated that he would like to lose one foot with her, she reacted with foolish enthusiasm. She went with him in a brushcar to a mating chamber, and after feeding each other several strands of vermiculate food and absorbing sprays of liquid, they settled down to serious music.
Melody, of course, had never done this before. That was one reason for the system, she theorized. Since a Mintakan did not turn male until completing first budding, and two females could not mate, it guaranteed one experienced partner to show the way. She had heard that Solarians (Sphere Sol was the butt of a wealth of segment humor, perhaps because of its irritating thrust-culture that forced itself into the awareness of dissimilar species) sometimes got together for copulation and didn’t know what to do. Or the reverse: They copulated without realizing what it was—until an infant Solarian manifested. Of course, such jokes would have been more effective had they had even the slightest credibility.
Ariose started the unique budding music, and Melody followed it without difficulty. As the sound intensified, they approached each other. He raised one clapper-foot invitingly, tapping with the other seven in intricate point and counterpoint. Melody raised one of her own fair feet, and now her eight tapping ones off-balanced his seven, creating a peculiar sensation of incompleteness. Discord and incompleteness were anathema to Mintakans; music had to be right.
“Your strings are as tight as steel wires,” Ariose played. “Your tubes are as round and full as great organ pipes. Your drums are loud and mellow. Your clappers are marvels of precision.”
Oh, such praise! Females, because of their inherent inexperience, were notoriously subject to flattery, and she was no exception. She drew closer, her raised foot seeking his.
“And your aura,” he played. “Like none ever known before.”
“My aura?” This struck an unmelodious note; females were not generally praised for their auras. It was akin to praising a Solarian female for her money.
“Did you not know,” he played, “you have the highest Kirlian aura ever measured—the only one in the Sphere that is higher than mine. I came to bud with you, hoping to produce a super-Kirlian entity…”
He wanted her only for her aural The whole thing had been arranged.
“How long I waited for you to mature, to emerge from drab neuterdom,” Ariose continued, oblivious to the effect his commentary was having. “The success of such a budding—”
Melody made a discordance so vehement it almost broke her own strings. She swept her foot sidewise, knocking his clapper away.
Ariose, caught by surprise and ready for the budding connection, lost his foot. It flew off and crashed into the wall. His music stopped abruptly.
Then Melody suffered chagrin—for she had castrated him. She had knocked off his bud, unmerged. She fled from the mating chamber.
But the compulsive bud music stayed with her, pressing in from all around, inescapable. Her £ eye opened.
Her youth-budding had been horribly aborted. But the age-budding of her auraless body continued, forced by the compulsion of the recorded music. The male had extended one foot, and the female met it with one of her own. The seven male feet clattered in the imperfect counterpoint to the eight female feet, making the music unfulfilled. The beats had to match. Yet there was no eighth foot on the male side free to complete the last pair.
Except for the conjoined foot. Driven by the music, the feet melted together, becoming a single unit. This was the bud. Soon it would flower into a complete immature entity.
Melody closed her £ eye again. She had not fled far from Ariose before some sense penetrated her two-year mentality. So he wanted her for her aura. What, really, was wrong with that? After all, she had wanted him for his aura; she merely hadn’t said so openly. She could have budded already with some lesser male, but only the high-Kirlian male had really excited her. Normal-level Kirlians were not even aware of aura; it was as though they were blind or deaf, not even able to appreciate what they were missing. Of course aura was important; it was the real key to modern civilization. She really had little else to distinguish her. Why let irrelevancies interfere with romance? Ariose had acted with perfect sense. He had formed a conception of his ideal female, based on Kirlian intensity, and had sought that female out. She should have appreciated the enormous honor for what it was.