“Oh,” she played with a mixed background. Mintakan chords could convey so much meaning! “Sing me Diana.”
“She was a musician who liked singing and dancing, and was skilled in all things except love. When she and Orion went hunting together, he was struck by her beauty and competence, and he touched her—”
“As you touched me in Spica!” she played angrily. “How lucky I was that it wasn’t in Sol, or you would have rammed your defecation tube—”
Flint let the description pass. “That’s possible,” he agreed. “You’re quite a female in your fashion.”
“My fashion is Sphere / of Andromeda!” But in a moment she muted. “How did she kill him? With a laser?”
“Not as clean as that. She summoned a scorpion to sting him to death. That’s a bug with a jointed tail containing venom, very potent. Now that scorpion is also in the sky. When it rises, Orion’s constellation fades, hiding from it.”
“I wonder whether there are Mintakan scorpions?” she played musingly.
“Let’s go out and see.”
She trilled her laughter. “You are very clever, no matter what host you bear. We remain here. We shall be blinded together.”
Until the Mintakans traced the missing hosts, Flint thought. “That could be very tedious,” he played. “I have aura to carry my identity at least sixty days, and probably you do too. What will we do to pass the time? Make love?”
“I suspected you would think of that,” she played. “It seems to be characteristic of males all over the universe. Even here, where there are no sexes, some entities are constantly eager to make music together.”
“Not physically, not by laser exchange, but by making music together? I’d really like to know how—”
“Don’t be concerned. Death hastens the demise of the aura, and even transfer cannot extend it long. A living body suffers in the absence of its aura, and the aura suffers in the absence of its natural host.”
“So that’s what happened to my body when I returned from Sphere Polaris! I was so sick—”
“Yes. The body must be reanimated periodically, exercised, or it gets rusty. You did not know?”
“Our species is new to transfer.”
“Then accept my information: Our Kirlian auras have faded considerably already, because the tie to the natural host is never completely severed, and death is the ultimate burden. In just a few hours we shall expire.”
“A few hours!” There went his hope. In sixty Earth-days discovery was almost certain; in six hours it was prohibitively unlikely, unless the Mintakans were a lot more sophisticated about such things than the average Sphere bureaucracy. So Andromeda had won after all. He believed her; now he could feel his own aura depletion, like the loss of blood, an insidious draining of his most vital resource.
“It is ironic but perhaps fitting that the two most intense Kirlian entities in our galactic cluster should terminate quietly together,” she played hauntingly.
“It must have been foreordained. When I read the Tarot in Sphere Polaris—” He paused in mid-chord. “Tarotism hasn’t spread to Andromeda yet, has it?”
“Not as a cult. I made a report on it as part of my mission, as it seems to relate indirectly to the powers of the Ancients.”
“Well, there’s something about the cards, whatever their rationale. They informed me that I was crossed—that is, opposed—by the Queen of Energy, defined as the Devil, in turn crossed by the Four of Gas. They said I could not destroy her, only neutralize her. I did not know then that—”
“It might be that Diana had never encountered a male worthy of her,” Andromeda played, seemingly oblivious to his tones. “Perhaps she had the most intense aura ever measured, and could not squander it on inferior entities. When she met her equal, crude and alien though he seemed at first, she felt the first stirrings of… of…” Her melody faded out in confused dissonance.
So she had suffered the impact of their similar auras too! There had been a magic about her from the outset in Sphere Canopus, not sexual attraction but the unique Kirlian aura. Officially he had been on a mission to save his galaxy, but personally he had been questing for his natural mate. That, despite the complication of inter-galactic politics, was / of Andromeda. She had strength and courage and intelligence and beauty and aura—and the last overwhelmed all the rest. If she reacted similarly to his aura, she was already largely captive to her fundamental instinct to reproduce; not her species, but her aura.
“The Hermit and the Queen of Energy,” Flint played musingly. “Neither able to prevail or to trust the other, playing at potential love. What would the cards say?”
Yet her sentiments paralleled his, keyed by the music that acted as virtual telepathy. “Even though he raped her as Merope, and cost her much pride and much time, she recognized in him a force and intelligence that matched her own. Her culture forbade it, but he was her ideal mate, and the call of the aura had to find expression. Then she became revolted at her own suppressed passion, and knew she had to kill him, though it was really that element within herself she hated. So she summoned the scorpion—or perhaps forced him to summon it—but she really died with him.”
“You flatter my intellect without believing in it,” Flint played harshly, denying his own urgings. “You are trying to seduce me, not kill me. You want the secret of involuntary transfer-hosting for your galaxy, and I alone possess it.” But he was bluffing, though he knew there was truth in his words; she had moved him by the insidious appeal of her melody, making his strings vibrate sympathetically, and his drums and tubes follow. They were indeed ideal mates, despite grotesque distinctions of form, and now there was little reason to fight it. He, too, felt superior because of his Kirlian aura; he, too, had a fundamental urge to produce offspring with a Kirlian aura intensity that matched his own. Left to chance, a similar aura might not appear for a thousand years; this way, a new, high-Kirlian strain might be initiated immediately.
Yet of course their Mintakan host-bodies carried none of their original genes. Still, phenomenal things happened in the diverse universe, and the limits of Kirlian potential were not known. “You could have locked me in here alone and let me die while you transferred home to make your report. Why didn’t you?”
“We both are dead,” she played sadly. “That is irrevocable. But there will be no other chance to establish our kind. We, you and I, are Kirlians, not Andromedans or Milky Wayans. I had hoped that before we expired—”
He understood her perfectly. Yet there was also that in him that made him resist. “It may come,” he played. “But only if you play me the truth. You are the professional huntress, well able to live and die without romance. What do you really want of me?” Maybe he was just trying to establish his male dominance. They both knew the stakes: the formulas in his mind. Whichever galaxy got them would win. He could not allow her to seduce him into giving that information to Galaxy Andromeda.
She played an intricate little tune of submission that was thoroughly alluring. “You have eidetic recall.”
“Yes, of course. Don’t you?”
“No. I have many talents, but lack that one. Otherwise I would have instantly memorized all the equations you evoked in the Ancient field and broadcast them to our relay station.”
“There was more there than you possess?” He knew there was, but he wanted her to admit it.
“Much more. The Hyades site was the best-preserved one yet discovered in the galactic cluster. In those equations are techniques millennia ahead of anything we know. Perhaps the whole answer to the energy problem is there. If we had that, there would be no need to draw from other galaxies…”