Anthony, Piers Cluster 3 Kirlian Quest

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dedicated to a purpose without recourse to reason. This is their tragedy-and yours!|||
&How can this be?& It was as though the Coordinator had to listen to an indictment delivered in his own mode, and
could not shunt it aside as easily as one delivered in an alien mode. &You are not one of us!&
|||I am not one of you,||| she agreed. |||I am of your fine old equipment, which performs its set mission better than you
do yours. Even now, that machinery is turning against your misplaced thrust, halting your erroneous sterilization of
this Cluster. No more Kirlian sapients shall be destroyed by your confusion.|||
&Terminate her!& the Coordinator said to his technician.
"Is this the way you spare innocents?" Herald called. How like this was to the final moments at Kastle Kade, but this
time there could be no reversal of the tragedy. Flame, Psyche, the Cluster, and Kirlian life itself hung in the balance.
And he-could do nothing!
There was a pause. |||I cannot!||| the tech cried, bewildered. |||The field does not respond!|||
He was correct. Suddenly Herald himself was released.
In a moment the Coordinator had verified it: The ship's controls did not obey his directives. &We have been
betrayed, sabotaged!&
|||No,||| Flame Sixteen replied. |||You have been saved from your own folly. Now you shall be educated. Consider
these my offspring, sired by this high-Kirlian male while in Transfer.|||
It was Sixteen talking, somehow, in Amoebic. But what was this about the Amoeba's own equipment turning against
the invasion? Sixteen could not have set that up! Had Flame somehow managed to take over the unit from inside?
But she was no longer in the circuitry! There was a missing element that confused him almost as much as it
confused the Coordinator. No one not thoroughly conversant with the equipment of the Amoeba should have been
able to wrest control from Amoeba technicians. He had occupied the related Ancient equipment himself and knew
its complexity! This had to be some sort of bluff.
The technician played his analyzer beam over the infant Jets. At least that beam responded to control! ||| They have
auras in the normal Kirlian-animal range- yet they are sapient,||| the technician announced, shaken.
"Normal auras?" Herald cried. "Not fractional?"
"They are normal," Sixteen said, this time in Quotes. So it couldn't be Flame, who had never occupied an Etamin
host and did not speak Quotes. No, he was confusing himself; Flame would use the linguistics of the host. "I knew
they would be. I had faith."
&Faith,& the Coordinator echoed faintly.
"Do you realize what this means?" Herald demanded of the Coordinator. "A male of Slash can interbreed with a
female of Glob, in terms of aura. My aura of over two hundred merged with her aura of one two-hundredth, and the
offspring are the median, or normal. That cannot be coincidence; no Jet has had that high an aura before! If a high-
aura sapient Transferred to an Amoeba host-"
The Coordinator, shaken by the problem with the equipment and Sixteen's declarations, seemed on the verge of
accepting part of the concept of existent Kirlian sapience. Right now he reminded Herald of the Duke of Kade,
coming to recognize the horrible truth (yet untruth) of Possession. The Ancients were like the Cluster entities-if they
could only accept it.
&Impossible. We have no auras at all.&
"But you are closely related to the Jets of Glob," Herald persisted. "With them and some genetic engineering, you
might interbreed, and your offspring would have fractional auras. Then full Kirlians could Transfer into those
hosts...."
The bait was too tempting. The Coordinator's resistance broke. He wanted to believe. &Our dream for these fifty
thousand cycles! Soul Sapience at last!& The translation told Herald that was about four and a half million years,
which suggested that the Ancients had been doing this for one and a half million years before they came to this
Cluster the first time. Such persistence!
Victory had been granted to the Cluster-and to the Amoeba too. "I don't know how you did it," Herald said to Flame
Sixteen. "I don't even know which of you did it. But it was a magnificent job, and I love you both." Then he had to
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add: "But Psyche is the one I long for. Without her, my personal life is bereft, and I have no wish to continue after I
am assured the Cluster is secure."
Sixteen looked at him, not approaching. "How do you propose to explain your affairs with two other females?"
"I don't think I would even try. The exigencies of my position were foreign to her culture. Yet to promote her
interest I would have affairs with a thousand other females, and each would be meaningless. Had I never met
Psyche, I could have loved you, Flame; I know I could! In my ignorance I wronged you. And though I am
emotionally deaf to low aura, I might have loved you, too, Sixteen. But I did meet Psyche, and she conquered me,
and though it was her enhanced aura that first broke down my resistance, it is her I love forever, high aura or low,
whether she lives or dies or whatever form she takes. I do love you girls, and know you each are worthy, but it is as
a satellite to my greater love for her. I love you in part because you helped me in my quest for her. I regret that I
must treat you so, using you both as I have, but that is the way it is. The truth must be told. Now I must search for
her-for the rest of my life, if need be. Because without her I have no life."
Now Sixteen moved closer, and be felt more of her Transfer aura. "Flame understands," she said. "That is why she
elected to stay in circuit and handle the equipment takeover. This is the prime unit, here aboard this ship; all others
key into it. So she controls the Amoeba fleet, now."
Herald paused. "Flame controls it? But she-"
She was almost upon him, her aura passing two hundred. The equipment had enhanced it beyond Flame's level,
obviously. "And Sixteen needs an aura, and I need a host." Now her aura paralleled his own, moving above it. "I,
too, understand, Herald. I always understood. The ways of other cultures are not my own, and they cannot be judged
in terms of mine. You were a creature of Slash, a foreign Galaxy, alien to me in form and culture, yet love
ameliorated everything. All that sustained me through my long exile in hell, desperately hiding, concealing my
nature from the meters of the devils, learning their language and custom and the liabilities of their largely automatic
system, coming to know that they were after all well-meaning sapients unswervingly loyal to their mission, as I was
to mine-all that sustained me was my overwhelming love for you. I knew it was returned. Every dialogue you held
near Ancient equipment I perceived, though I could not answer lest I betray myself and lose all. Now-"
"Psyche!" he cried, finally recognizing her aura, finally comprehending her meaning. "You jumped to the host, not
Flame! You saved me from execution!" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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