Chaining the Lady (43 page)

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, on 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 that 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 neither could she watch it. 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 naivete.

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. Melody 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 know 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 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 aura!
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 aura-less 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 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 wring 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 and deaf, not even able to appreciate what they were missing.
Of course
aura was important; it was the real key to modern civilization. She had 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.

She returned to the mating chamber, but Ariose was gone. What should she have expected? She had struck off his foot in as callously degrading a gesture as it was possible for one Mintakan to make to another. She had rendered him a male personality with a female number of feet; how could he mate now? Actually, once a Mintakan turned male, he remained male for life, unless he should use up all his feet—unlikely, since then he could not walk—in which case he would be honorably neuter again. But budding required that disparity of feet; two six-footed Mintakans could not mate, even though one were seven footed in outlook.

She had never seen Ariose again, and never met another like him. His aura had been 190, and she never encountered another close to it. It was as though all high-Kirlian Mintakans avoided her now. Perhaps the music about her had spread. She could hardly blame them. She was lucky Ariose had not pressed a charge of mutilation against her.

She had retreated into her study of Tarot, after a brief apprenticeship with the local Temple of Tarot, and found some solace there. Never again had she been seriously tempted to bud.

There was an abrupt change in the music. Again her eye opened, though she tried to keep it closed. The bud formed from the merged feet had now disconnected from the female's body. Attached to the male, it left him with eight feet, and now he had eight feet also. The beat had equalized. That changed the music.

Then the bud dropped off the male's leg too. The music stopped. The bud had been formed as a separate entity, incorporating the heredity of each parent. It would, with proper care, grow into a small Mintakan neuter. The miracle of reproduction of the species.

But now Melody's native body had budded. It had become, by the definition of its nature, male.

She, here in the £ host, what was she, now?

She dared not remain here to find out.

Chapter 22:

Crisis of Gender

–it is not merely a matter of the etamin agent, quadpoint it is aposiopesis if the agent can lead us to–

::this is ridiculous! A simple matter of nullifying one captive agent of a defeated galaxy::

–our own agent is working on the matter there are very great potential rewards–

::assuming your ancient site can yield us anything we cannot already possess with present technology, to utilize a conscious, dedicated agent of a foreign power to explore it is an exercise in such folly as to make my chisels blunt! are you not aware you are placing our entire program in jeopardy? I absolutely forbid this!::

–it is too late the quest has already been initiated–

::there is something about you slavekeeping creatures, here and in the milky way, that is alien to my comprehension! from certain victory you seek defeat::

* * *

Melody whirled back out of the chamber. –You cannot escape! Your body is here!– Dash whirred.

But she crashed out of the doorway, knocking out a supporting post. Part of the upper floor sagged. She bounced to the other side of the hall, bashing in a wooden wall. The aroma of freshly ruptured scentwood surrounded her. Then, venting her inner frustration and uncertainty, she deliberately attacked more posts.

The wood was strong, but was not braced for horizontal impact from such a huge, solid body. The city began to collapse about her. The air was filled with whirrings of panic as thousands of Dash birds were disturbed.

Yet what was this accomplishing, this blind bashing against those who had conquered her galaxy? Like the shallow entity she had been in youth, she destroyed what affronted her, and maybe did herself the most damage.

She burst out of the city and thundered down a channel toward the bog. Now it seemed the hue and cry was out; other £ were charging after her. What did it matter? She had no body and no galaxy to return to!

Something was funny about the pursuing £. They had no mahouts! Without Dash direction, why should they be chasing her?

No time to wonder. She plunged into the bog. As the atmosphere thickened about her, as the jelly formed and exerted its drag, her first passion faded. What, actually, had happened?

“It is the Rendezvous,” Cnom informed her. “Your emotion triggered it.”

The Rendezvous: a periodic gathering of the £ in the depths of the bog, for the purpose of acquaintance, decision, and mating. It occurred irregularly, generally when some reason arose. This time Melody was that reason.

Could there be any help for her in the Rendezvous? She did not know. She felt much as she had when the
Ace of Swords
had been going derelict around her.

The £ continued down the channels, this time avoiding the wooden lattice. The jelly grew thicker, until it seemed impossible to push through it much farther. This was the depth at which the Dash failed. They had dismounted in a hurry when the Rendezvous began. Somehow all £ and Dash had known the moment it started; even the sick £ were hauling themselves along.

But with increasing depth, the jell began to thin, until at last it was the consistency of mere water. Like plasma, Melody thought; the pressure was too great for the jell to maintain its structure. Yet the £ handled it well enough.

“Do the Dash know of this lessoning of viscosity?” Melody asked Cnom. The question was rhetorical, for she knew Cnom didn't know the answer. What difference did it make anyway? Sub-jelly pressure was fatal to Dash; £ logic pursued the matter no further.

No light penetrated here. She was aware of the terrain by its sonic vibrations, and the echoes of the vibrations of the multitude of tramping £. Nevertheless, there was plant life in this gloom. The huge trunks of the assorted deepwoods were rooted here, the scentwoods and the larger nether supports of the lattice. Feather leaves were also present, not as light refractors but as nets to collect edible debris sifting down from above. The jelly held and assimilated most of it. Melody suddenly realized that the jell itself was a form of life. The gel had wastes of its own that made excellent plant food. The ecology of a planet was always in balance.

Her host-body contracted as the intensifying pressure worked on it, much as the Spican bodies did. The £ were remarkable creatures, capable of adapting rapidly to extremes of environment. It was cold down here, but the sheer mass of her body insulated her.

In the deepest hollow of the bog the £ converged for the Rendezvous. There were thousands of them, but their vibrations became minimal; this was an almost silent meeting.

There were no trees here; a great hollow was clear of all obstructions. Had the £ trampled it out? No, Cnom's memory showed that it had always been here. Yet it was far more than natural processes should account for.

Melody realized that this space was, indeed, artificial. The vibrations from deep below had the signature of dense metal. It seemed to predate Dash civilization. What could it mean?