Cluster 3 - Kirlian Quest Piers Anthony

He never looked through a telescope. He was perhaps the leading research astronomer of Galaxy Milky Way: experienced, capable, intelligent, and of high-Kirlian aura. He formed an ear-horn to listen to audios, and an eye-stalk to view the graphics, and he pooled comfortably in his basin while he worked. He was a creature of repute, but by no means a hero; there was little in his makeup to suggest that he had the capacity to become involved in Cluster adventure. In fact, his type went into shock at the mere threat of extreme danger.

He specialized in Fringe-Cluster phenomena. The major galaxies of Andromeda and Milky Way did not really interest him, and the lesser structures like Pinwheel and the irregular galactic satellites were hardly more intriguing. It was the far-out fragments, dwarf ellipses, and globular star-clusters that compelled his attention. He knew more about "wild" globs and nongalactic stars than any other creature of the Cluster.

Now his attention focused on the Amoeba—a tiny pseudonebula hardly a hundred light-years in diameter. It was a nonluminous, diffuse, vague shape hidden behind the dwarf elliptoid called Furnace—itself worth contemplation as the "missing link" between Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

the tiny globular clusters and the small elliptical galaxies. Yet the fifteen-thousand-light-year diameter of Furnace loomed monstrously compared to the tiny haze of the Amoeba. In fact, the Amoeba had not even been discovered until the past century, as it was virtually invisible to all conventional observation techniques.

The astronomer formed a second eye and contemplated a holograph of the Amoeba. It appeared to have a number of projecting pseudopods, each curving slightly; this was what had given it its name. Overall it was amazingly regular; the pseudopods seemed individual and evenly spaced.

Its discovery had been largely serendipitous, a result of the Cluster survey program instituted after the Second War of Energy. After twice narrowly averting destruction of their galaxy, the coalition of species of the Milky Way intended to keep fully informed of all future developments in the Cluster. The most powerful Segments—Qaval, Etamin, Knyfh, Lodo, and Weew—had pooled their resources and manufactured the largest fleet of spaceships ever known: 125 billion strong. But they were very small ships, any one of which an average-sized sapient could have lifted in a single appendage without effort. Each contained perceptive apparatus, mainly optical, and a tiny molecule mattermitter. They were dispersed around the entire outer surface of the Cluster, accelerating to one-tenth the speed of light and then drifting outward until they were, theoretically at least, eventually recovered by the gravity of the Cluster. Every ten years each unit mattermitted back what was visible from its quota of space. Each ship was about ten lightyears from its neighbors, and so was responsible for a surface area of a hundred light-years; its report was normally current within about seven years. Thus no major intrusion into the Cluster could escape detection; the Net would report it long before the light reached the nearest galaxy.

The Net had been in operation for almost a thousand years. As the fear of alien intrusion had abated, the main beneficiaries of this expensive program had been the astronomers and stellar cartographers. The entire Cluster had been mapped with phenomenal accuracy—retroactively. For the Net reported what it saw—and it saw what the Cluster had looked like up to a million years before, because of the time it had taken the plodding light of distant stars to travel.

The section of the Net launched from Furnace had penetrated a hundred light-years into space—and picked up the Amoeba. Only two specific reports on it existed, and neither was remarkably clear, for it remained at the fringe of the Net's awareness. Only specialized research astronomers such as this one were able to perceive anything of significance there. To the untrained eye, it was only a faint haze against the backdrop of deep space. Perhaps merely a smear on the image, or some distortion of the lens.

He substituted the second holograph, taken from the same units ten years later, or one light-year closer. The image was very similar and a bit sharper, but a trifling discrepancy caught his attention. He reactivated the first holograph, projecting it in modified color, and superimposed it on the second. He grew a third eye on a long stalk, so that he could study the superimposition from three directions at once.

The two images differed, even after adjustment for slightly differing ranges. There seemed to be a slow rotation of the subject. He compensated for this, aligning the curved arms of it precisely, magnifying the smaller image until its absolute perspective exactly matched the scale of the other.

There was no doubt The Amoeba had expanded. The projections extended some five light-years farther than before.

What constituted the substance of this obscure, minor formation? Not gas. The refraction indices of the wan light of distant background galaxies were wrong. Not dust; that would have blotted out such light entirely. The indications were so fuzzy; there simply was no way to properly analyze a dark obscuration without going there, and it would take the local units of the Net the better part of another century to pass through the physical Amoeba. Mattermission directly to the Amoeba could not be used until the first receiver was delivered, and Transfer required a living host already present. A number of attempts to Transfer there had been made, all without success. There appeared to be no sapient life in the Amoeba. And why should there be? Life normally required the services of a sun; it could hardly evolve in the great abyss that was intergalactic space.

The holographs did not resolve any bodies of planetary size. Indications suggested that the Amoeba consisted of perhaps a million fragments of rock, none larger than a planetoid. An assemblage of meteoroids, like a monstrous comet, way out in Fringe-Cluster space. An anomaly! Which was what made it so intriguing.

Possibly it was the remnant of a planetary explosion, and its expansion reflected the continuing impetus of that cataclysm. Even so, there were questions. The planet could not have been formed in deep space; it had to have coalesced or come from somewhere.

This cloud of fragments had not been traveling, for the two holographs would have shown the change in position that marked that velocity; instead the Amoeba was virtually stationary with respect to Furnace.

It had not coalesced; prior holographs going back a thousand years showed no dust cloud there. A dust or gas cloud was easier to track than a planetary body, because it spread over a much greater volume of space and obscured far more background light, Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

however faintly. Instruments could analyze this, though it might be too subtle for the naked sapient eye. Not that such an accretion from gas or dust could have occurred in so brief a period. No, the planet had to have been there before, invisibly small, and exploded approximately two hundred years ago, after remaining quiescent for at least a hundred years.

But there had been no explosion of that magnitude. The sensors of the Net would have picked up such radiation within a few decades, instead of having to wait to come into dark-body perception range. In fact, the telescopes of Sphere Furnace would have caught it within a century—and they had not. So there had been no explosion—at least, none of the force required to propel elements of the planet outward at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Yet the Amoeba was there, and it was growing. It could not have resulted from an explosion anyway; it was not an expanding shell of debris, but a growing semi-material structure. The arms were elongating, or extending from the center, almost like a living thing.

Yet it was only gravel—wasn't it?

A mystery indeed! There had to be some explanation, for the thing existed. The astronomer did not propose to wait decades for new evidence from the Net. He was the Galaxy's leading research astronomer, and he had all the information anyone had. This was the kind of challenge that gave his life meaning!

For days he labored over his references, checking and rechecking. He did supplementary research, seeking new insights. He meditated, and viewed the holographs with as many as six eyes simultaneously, and put them on sonic translation and listened with several ears. His well-trained, subservient maid brought him food and carried away his refuse; he never moved from his basin. He would crack the riddle of the Space Amoeba before he left here!

News circulated, for nothing the ranking experts did was entirely private. A tremendous breakthrough must be in the offing! Other astronomers studied the Amoeba, hoping to upstage the master, for this was a highly competitive field. But they could not solve the mystery; data were insufficient, and there was much more pressing business. It was not as though it were an important subject, this far-distant tentacular system of dead pebbles.

Suddenly, in the privacy of his office, the researcher stiffened. @The Space Amoeba is—@ he exclaimed in his native language.

Then he sank into shock.

His loyal maid summoned the authorities, and they rushed him to the medical center for treatment. But the astronomer lay puddled in his basin, oblivious. They could not revive him.

They knew that the force of his insight about the Amoeba had done it. His species was subject to such shock when faced with overwhelming danger. It was a defensive mechanism that had often saved individuals before, rendering them insensate and pliable enough to survive severe abuse. Obviously in this case there had been no direct physical threat. They knew the matter had to be supremely important, for no minor revelation would have had this effect on such an expert. Therefore it was necessary to ascertain the specific nature of the intellectual shock, in case it affected others of the culture.

No doctor of the Segment could bring the astronomer out of it. They could not fathom how the distant Amoeba could threaten anyone here, but they dared not gamble on their ignorance. So they made an arrangement with the leading shock-technician of the Cluster: a super-Kirlian entity of Sphere Slash, Andromeda, named Herald the Healer.

PART I

KIRLIAN

Abatement of Honor

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

& All units drift by for geographic review. &

0 Action units 1 through 9 drifting by. 0

X Research units A through Z drifting by. X

& Target Cluster now in range. Geographic unit report. & G Two full-scale Galaxies, one small Galaxy, all spiral, six ellipses, seven irregulars, assorted lesser fragments. Overall, typical small Cluster. Nomenclature of local sapients: Milky Way, Andromeda, Pinwheel, Furnace, Sculp, Cloud 9, Cloud 6. G

& Dispense with detail listing; local species identifiers will shortly become passé. & His host-body was a peculiar amalgam of loops. He was not certain whether it was all in one jointless string or whether it branched and rejoined at twisted intervals. It had no disks, feet, or treads; on a flat surface it would have been a disaster.

*There are no plane surfaces here,* the host-mind informed him. *No flatnesses. Do not be concerned. I shall convey you safely wherever you wish.*

/Appreciation,/ Herald replied, employing his own mode of intonation, though of course he used the language of Sphere Ast. /I come to encounter Whorl of Precipice./

Immediately the body moved. It twisted up and through a lattice of stone, spun around an angled ceramic column, and tied into a metal basket-frame. This in turn moved, following a flexible line through an astonishing network of shapes. Commercial transport, of course, but a far beam from the forthright geometry of Herald's own Sphere.

They came into a cavern laced with stalactites. The host halted abruptly and withdrew his personality, yielding full control to the Transferee. Herald realized that he had arrived.

An entity that was superficially like his host convoluted up to meet him. A loop of its body touched Herald's form, and moved in the sensation-language of this species. This one had a good aura of about fifty. *Welcome, expert of Slash,* he pulsed. *I am Whorl of Precipice.*

Herald's normal mode of expression, modulated laser, was even less well suited to inter-entity communication than to internal-host dialogue. But a certain perverse pride of origin caused him to employ it anyway. The result was a tactile rendition that seemed affected.

/I am Herald the Healer./

*Your incredible aura needs no introduction! Just what rating, if I may ask, is it, precisely?*

/Two hundred thirty-six./ Herald was used to such queries, and suffered from no sense of intrusion of privacy. He had the most intense Kirlian aura ever measured, higher even than those of the famous historical characters Flint of Outworld and Melody of Mintaka, from whom it was said he was deviously descended. Their auras had come to historical prominence in the Wars of Energy; there was now no war, so he had made his aura part of his profession.

*Two hundred and thirty-six times normal!* Whorl exclaimed in a violent vibration.

/You have purchased one unit of my time,/ Herald reminded him. /It commenced when we met. You will not wish to waste it./

*Your fee is high, but I feel that only you will be able to help me.*

/I do not guarantee it. Some maladies are not amenable to my art./

*This one surely is. I require the answer to a single question—and you, as the greatest living blazoner, surely have the information.*

/Surely,/ Herald agreed. /I shall of course blazon an Achievement for you. That is the other facet of my profession./

*Unnecessary. I have my Shield of Arms. I merely wish... an interpretation.*

/You have wasted your fee! Any heraldic scholar of your own Sphere can give you an interpretation at the merest fraction of what Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

you are paying me, and it will be quite as accurate. Heraldry is a fixed art; there is little leeway for interpretation. Perhaps even a text can provide what you require. Surely your Planetary Library—/

*I queried the library once. Not again!*

Herald perceived fluctuations in the entity's aura. There was an emotional charge to the matter. So it was not a strictly routine query, as quite often his cases weren't. Herald's fee was high because he brought extraordinary ability into play. Still he affected a certain modesty. /If you feel my particular interpretation is worthwhile, you shall have it. Yet it will not differ materially from—/

*Let me explain. The Family of Precipice is of recent formation. It required some difficult maneuvers on my part for me to gain...

are you familiar with the hereditary mechanisms of our Sphere?*

/My business requires me to be conversant with the derivations for Shields of Arms in many Spheres. Beyond the legal procedures I become vague about specifics, until some particular case requires my spot education. I do not, for example, comprehend precisely how your five-sex mode of reproduction operates; I have not felt it necessary to pry into such private matters. Is this information necessary for proper application to your question?/

*Perhaps not. I mention it only passingly, then. We do not, despite widespread belief in other Spheres, possess five sexes. Rather our quintuplets consist of four complementary males and one female. Our procedures for the selection of particular types of males for family continuity depend on the types of interfamily liaison desired. Suffice to say, the matter can become complex, and at times certain family lines must be legally discontinued and new ones constituted. Development of a new family therefore requires a new Shield of Arms, with impalements representing the critical ancestral elements.*

/This is elementary, Whorl, though I point out as an aside that your use of the term 'impalement' is imprecise. Impaling is the specific process of marshaling arms together by mounting them side by side on the Shield; it can only be done by pairs. Thus your shield is actually—/

*Please, I am not conversant with every technical detail. Otherwise I would not need to summon an expert.*

/Of course. My apology, Whorl. But this being the case, I trust you engaged a competent heraldic artisan to design and execute your Achievement?/

*I insisted on the very best. It cost me a great amount of value, for there was resistance, but I brought sufficient twist and constriction to bear, and it was handled personally by the King of Arms for Sphere Ast.*

Herald flashed an internal beam of exclamation. Whorl must indeed have applied political and economic pressure to command performance by such a figure. The top echelons of legal heraldry were known to be extremely jealous of their prerogatives, and notoriously resistant to the urges of outsiders.

/I have had occasional dealings with your College of Arms and found it quite competent. I am sure your hereditament is more than sufficient. Be assured that you may display it without apology./

*I am not so assured. There are those who... who have sniggered.* A snigger, in Ast terms, was a most expressive and borderline-obscene ripple of implied meaning, the depth of bad taste.

/An Achievement rendered by the King of Arms is not to be sniggered at,/ Herald assured him. /Such entities only demonstrate their own gross ignorance./

*They are not ignorant. They are—* Whorl broke off. *This is why I require your service. There is something wrong.*

/We appear to be at an impasse, Whorl. I assure you that I am unlikely to divine any error of substance or detail in your Shield of Arms. For one thing, the Spherical Colleges of Arms define legitimacy in hereditaments. Their records are public, and their Grants are valid across the entire Galactic Cluster. The Universe, as much as we know of it, accepts the authority of your Family Shield.

As far away as the Milky Way and Pinwheel, aficionados are contemplating your Achievement and considering its merits. If you are unsatisfied with the actual design or execution..

*No, both are magnificent. I was most pleased.*

Herald considered briefly. /Perhaps I have overlooked a nuance of Ast meaning. I perceive no service I can offer./

*All I require is that you examine my Shield and give me your completely candid opinion.*

/I shall be gratified to. I offer no other type of opinion than candid./

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Whorl twined to another section of his convolute residence, and Herald followed. Here in the living rock bordering a corkscrew chamber was emblazoned in relief a creature-sized Shield of Arms.

It was beautiful. The outer shield was in the shape of an ellipse set at an angle, representing Galaxy Andromeda, bordered inside by a wreath of intertwining serpents to designate Sphere Ast. Within that were the Family Arms of Precipice, resembling an ornate overhanging cliff. Herald moved his loops across it, savoring its aspects. It had superior form, texture, and color, and was, in its fashion, a genuine work of art. The King of Arms of Ast was certainly a master!

*What do you find?* The query was urgent.

/I find an excellent and flawless emblazon./

*Did you not say 'blazon' before?*

The tedious questions of amateurs! But Herald repressed his annoyance, for courtesy was vital to his profession.

/I did, Whorl. The 'blazon' of a Shield of Arms is the precise linguistic specification of its elements. To 'emblazon' is to render this description into physical actuality./

*I comprehend. The one is the description, the other is the carving. I feared for a moment there was something wrong with it.*

/No, your Achievement is quite in order. Azurine, a cliff of thirty-seven rocks and forty-two rills, alternately thirteen, twelve, thirteen, seven, eleven, twenty-three, pearline, all within a bordure of the Serpents Rampant./

Herald winced inwardly as he communicated, for the old-style heraldic term "rampant" was restricted to certain quadrupedal beasts of prey, standing erect on the left foot raising the right foot in stride, balancing with the left forefoot outthrust, the right raised to strike. It was technically impossible for a legless serpent to be "rampant." But the broadening of the system to include diverse Cluster cultures had forced the fudging of some terms. However, as he had informed Whorl, the local Colleges of Arms defined legitimacy. So he had to accept it, nonsensical as it was in derivation. Regardless, this remained an excellent Shield of Arms, in concept and execution.

But as this chain of thought proceeded on the surface, something more insidious was percolating in the depths. Abruptly it surfaced. Herald suppressed a quiver of sheer incredulity.

*Continue, Herald,* Whorl vibrated anxiously. But Herald could not continue. He was too busy stifling an emotion that threatened to overwhelm him. *You perceive!* Whorl shuddered. *You are aware!* Herald controlled himself with difficulty. /I regret I may not help you. I shall refund your fee./

*No! Every knowledgeable entity to whom I have so proudly displayed this Achievement has laughed! None will tell me why. It is as if some huge private joke exists at my expense. All say the Shield of Arms is perfect yet they practically uncoil in their obscene mirth. Now you do the same. I have paid—I insist to know—you must perform service, by the honor of your profession. What is wrong with my Shield? *

Herald writhed away. /Nothing is wrong. It is completely accurate in execution./

*There you go again! That cannot be! I demand to be advised!*

Herald quivered carefully. /There is one qualification. But it is unusual, of no technical account. You would prefer not to know. I void your fee and depart./

Whorl flung himself into an anguished knot. *Accept your fee or void it—that matters not! I charge you by the Lot of Asterisk— tell me!*

Herald paused. The Ast had invoked a powerful convention that required the truthful exchange of information. But there were certain key reservations.

/By the Lot of Asterisk I may not tell you, for I now perceive the answer would harm you./

*I absolve you of all guilt for that harm, Herald! Tell me, lest I lose my sanity!*

Herald was not certain of the proper course. Would the telling do more harm than the withholding? Whorl did seem to be on the verge of nervous collapse, yet the truth.... It was a problem of ethics he had not encountered before. /I know not where expediency Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

lies. Therefore I accept your release of guilt, and accede./

*Thank you! Thank you!*

/I fear the thanks is undeserved. Your Achievement is perfect in every respect but one: it possesses an abatement in Stainand. This is the handsome color of tenne, or brown./

*Yes, I have taken great pride in that hue, and pointed it out to important visitors.*

/Unfortunately, in heraldic terms this signifies a question of honor./

*I do not comprehend!*

/I fear it has reference to some scandal in the roots of your family, perhaps a claim to an improper honor. One that is technically legitimate, but morally suspect./

The Ast was stricken. *The King of Arms has damned me! I thought no one knew of that matter!*

If all Whorl's friends had sniggered, many must have known!

/It seems the King has a subtle way of advising you of his research and opinion./

*Shame! Shame! I am undone! Now everyone knows! My friends, my business associates to whom I described that very aspect of the Shield! My potential family-mates! Sapients all over the Galactic Cluster! I am a laughingstock everywhere, everywhere!*

Herald tried to alleviate the creature's concern. /On the contrary. Few know. Ordinary entities neither seek nor comprehend the significance of heraldic devices and conventions, do not know shield from crest. Had there been justification for any legal action against you, your Achievement would have been voided from the start. Obviously your family honors are valid. This merely...

diminishes their impact. In fact, the very concept of hereditary abatements is suspect; I have never seen it done before in a recognized Achievement. I believe you could initiate a formal challenge on that basis, and perhaps have the abatement nullified./

*And bring my shame into Cluster Court for all the nonheraldic sapients to perceive too? I'll be damned if I do that!*

And Herald realized that the Ast was not indulging in vernacular; he meant quite literally that his cherished honor would suffer damnation. Pride of family was a thing quite apart from law.

/I will lodge a protest on your behalf,/ Herald offered.

*No, the damage is done. My only recourse lies beyond the auspices of heraldry.*

Yes, it was serious! Should he have refused to tell? What was Whorl going to do now, assassinate the King of Arms? What mischief this Achievement had wrought!

But Herald could not afford to interfere further; this was no longer his business.

/As you wish. I deeply regret bringing this news upon you./

The Ast recovered himself.

*I thank you, Herald. Please accept your fee; you have earned it. There will be no complaint. Parting.*

Further dialogue was pointless; the noble of Precipice had made up his mind. /Parting,/ Herald said, and writhed away toward the transporter. He did not feel at ease.

As he left the domicile, he thought he perceived a faint pulse in the rock, echo of a distant tactile exclamation: *The whole Cluster!

Shame!* The anguish was horrible.

Even before Herald transferred out, the news of the suicide of Whorl of Precipice and the dissolution of his nascent family was pulsing through Sphere Ast. The reason for this act was a mystery, but Herald knew the truth. He shuddered with anger and remorse. He had tried to honor his profession and deliver honest service for his fee, but had been forced into being an accomplice for an execution. If he made any protest now, his share in it would be exposed, and he might well be liable before the Cluster Court. Therefore he had to maintain silence, for there was no way he could benefit Whorl at this stage.

The King of Arms of Sphere Ast had gotten away with murder. One day he would have to settle for that crime.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Child of Grief

& Research units drift by for assignment. &

X Drifting by. X

& Research Command make assignments. &

X Assignments as follows: one unit per local cultural division. Units lettered, cultures symbolized. X

Milky Way: B

E" F

Koo L• Nσσ Qδ T::: W@ Z¿

Andromeda: A* C% D— P:: S/

Pinwheel: R^ Uθ

Other: G$ J= M¢ V# Y§

& Action units drift by for assignments as invoiced. & 0 Drifting by. 0

& Take samples of life and verify for aura and sapience. & Herald's next host was a creature of treads and powerful hammering chisels, adapted for life within the rock wedged between the frozen ammonia of the surface and the superheated lava of the depths. This creature moved by drilling the stone ahead, and ate by sifting nutrients from the crushings. It was a pleasant enough livelihood when the region being mined was good. This was a planet in Sphere Quadpoint, halfway across the Galaxy. Herald went where his business took him.

He explained his mission to his host, and was conveyed with surprising speed through the rock. The material pounded from the front was cast back to block the passage behind; it was bad form to leave an open tunnel. A predator could come up from an exposed rear, or the hole could interrupt the rhythm of another sapient entity. Of course, one of the planetary shifts would soon collapse everything and make way for a new cycle, but still, a self-sufficient creature cut and filled his own way. Soon he arrived at the territory of his client, Bore of Metamorphic.

Like most of Herald's clients this was a wealthy and powerful representative of his Sphere. It was not that Herald sought riches; rather, he could not afford to travel the universe for a pittance. He sought some way to serve the most needy, but at present it was necessary to serve the rich needy first. Once he had developed a retirement fund, he would do what he could to improve the lot of the downtrodden masses of Sphere Slash, struggling under what was ironically termed the "Curse of Llume."

Or was he, like so many he dealt with, merely a hypocrite? He thought he was storing up wealth in order to promote good, yet he had seen how easy it was to forget the latter part once the first had been accomplished. He hoped his life, in its entirety, would benefit his Sphere and his Cluster, but he could not be sure of that, yet.

Bore came right to the point, as was characteristic of his kind. ::My offspring will die. It is a malady of mineral insufficiency, incurable. For your fee you will enable her to knock out with grace, without pain. We are informed you have done this before, with other immature entities.::

/I have, and with mature entities, too. However, each case differs./

The Lady Bore was more evocative. ::It is said that you interviewed a dying little bird of Sphere Dash, and that before you came the chick was in such depression he would not flap at all, but that afterward he glowed and consoled his parents with all three wings and then died in simple peace and comfort. And when they asked him what the Healer had done all he said was—He touched me!—and so it was never explained, but they were satisfied more than they could convey.:: Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

/True,/ Herald agreed.

::If you do not do this for ours, we shall revoke your exorbitant fee,:: Bore said gruffly. ::I permit your intrusion in this hour of our bereavement only at the muddlebrained behest of the Lady. We have no use for your kind here.::

::Bore!:: the Lady protested. ::We have no prejudice against the Slash, even if they did betray the Galaxy. We are enlightened sapients.::

Prejudice? No, not much! thought Herald. The Curse of Llume marked his kind indelibly, as it had for a thousand years.

/You are assured of her condition?/

::Assured, Healer. Do your job.::

So blunt about the incipient demise of his young! But Herald knew better than to react to the seeming inadequacies of his client's manner; his profession required understanding and tolerance. He knew that often a gruff manner masked a tender sentiment.

Creatures accustomed to smashing through hard rock all their lives might be forgiven their hard-hitting personalities.

/Convey me to Smallbore./ All Quadpoint immature used the diminutive of their parents' titles. /And then leave us alone, please./

Both adult Quadpoints seemed a bit taken aback at the expletive "please," but honored the request. The child rested in her small cave, too weak to carve her own tunnels anymore.

/Hello, Smallbore,/ Herald said. The child did not respond. /I have come to bring you peace./

::Then you are Death or the Devil,:: she said, evoking an image from his host-memory. Death was simple oblivion, but the Devil was a lithic monster who gleefully collapsed crushing layers of rock on trapped entities, or opened cracks to let ammonia snow pour in on the innocent. Smallbore sounded much like her father.

/Perhaps. Will you play a game with me?/

::I don't feel like playing 'Spaceship,' and if I did I wouldn't play it with a Slash!:: Herald produced a stack of thin stone panels. He had specified that his Quadpoint host carry these in his reserve hopper. /A game of guesses, Smallbore./

Despite herself, the child evinced interest. ::Guesses?::

/I shall lay down a card, and you shall guess its meaning. If you succeed, you keep the card./

::What the crush do I want with a crushing card? I am dying!::

Herald ignored the cursing. He moved close, and the potent fringe of his aura touched her. /To die is unfortunate, Smallbore. To die without meaning is tragedy./

She made a sandy sigh. ::Oh, lay down your card!::

He shook the deck in his front tongs, shuffling it, and flipped out a random card. The mica-thin leaf landed face up on the floor between them.

Smallbore considered it. ::A picture of three entities rising from a deep pit, beneath a representation of Galaxy Andromeda,:: she said. ::Oh, I know what that means! It is the Andromedan Council of Spheres summoning the Slash for judgment. See, the creatures don't want to come!:: There was a certain malice in her tone.

But Herald accepted the slur against his Sphere without rancor, having had a great deal of practice in this sort of thing. These cards had pictures, true, but the pictures served to evoke suppressed reactions, to dredge up interpretations that reflected the most fundamental concerns of those who considered them. The animus against Sphere Slash was very strong in Sphere Quadpoint, which was natural. The Bores of Metamorphic had performed an act bordering on ignominy when they summoned a Slash to heal their child.

/You have guessed it, Smallbore. The card is yours. But do you know why the Slash are so poorly regarded?/

::They committed a crime against our Galaxy. They betrayed us to the enemy.:: Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

/Yes. That crime is known as the Curse of Llume. May I tell you our side of it?/

::Slash has a side?:: she asked incredulously.

/Strange as it may seem, it does./

::Oh, all right,:: she said, pleased at her success in winning the card she didn't want ::We Quadpoints are enlightened sapients, after all.::

Uh-huh. /In the time of the Second Energy War, a thousand years ago, there was an agent from Sphere Slash who, on the verge of success in her mission, renounced it and defected to the enemy galaxy, Milky Way, thereby enabling Melody of Mintaka to reverse the course of the war. The situation was very nearly saved by the fine general Hammer of Quadpoint.

::Hammer!:: she cried, recognizing the hero instantly. :: Admiral Hammer!::

/This Slash agent was called 'Llume' because that was the local identifier of the Milky Way host she first took in Transfer. It was a Spican Undulant of Segment Etamin. Llume became enamored of Melody of Mintaka, whose aura was very like hers but almost as strong as mine. Thus she was the arch-traitor of Sphere Slash, just as another female Slash, whose name history has refused even to record, had been in the First War of Energy a thousand years before that. The Sphere did not endorse the treachery of either female, but it nevertheless suffered the stigma of it, and the idea developed that the sapients of Slash were somehow traitorous by nature.

Ever since, we have labored under that onus. The irony was, both females thought they were doing right, granting parity to the Milky Way so that it would not be destroyed. Llume prayed to the God of Hosts that Sphere Slash might one year redeem itself in honor./

::Didn't Andromeda seek to destroy the whole Milky Way?:: Smallbore seemed unaware that the thrust of her question had changed.

/Andromeda merely sought to harvest the energy of the enemy galaxy for better purposes. That energy was needed to promote the level of civilization itself./

::At the price of sapiencide? I do not see that Llume was such a criminal, or that the Sphere she represents is necessarily cursed.

She sought a blessing! ::

/Thank you, Smallbore./

Startled, she sputtered sand for a moment ::You—I—you are from Sphere Slash?::

/Yes./

::Is your aura like Llume's?::

/Perceptive of you to guess that! Perhaps I shall have to give you my aura, like the card! Yes, it is like Llume's, and like Melody of Mintaka's, and perhaps like Flint of Outworld's too, at least in intensity./

::Then you must be the one to abate the Kirlian Curse!::

/All things are possible, if unlikely. Would you like to trade places with me?/

::Never!::

Herald reshuffled the deck, preparing to flip out another card. The first had done very well. But Smallbore stopped him.

::What is this set of pictures that you use?::

He hadn't intended to go into that yet, but decided to answer honestly.

/It is called the Cluster Tarot. The roots of it date back some three thousand Sol years (as you know, we use this alien measurement of time because the conquerors imposed it on our whole galaxy, along with much of the rest of their dubious system of measurements) to educational pictures made by an obscure cult. Sibling Paul of Sol revised the deck and popularized it among Galactic species. The cards have changed many times in form and meaning, but have persisted to this day, owing largely to the continuing influence of the Temples of Tarot, which in certain periods have been very pervasive. Normally a Tarot cube is used, showing images on each of six faces, but individual cards have been used as emblems for many cultures. Spaceships are still designed along these lines, falling into five broad types after the five suits, resembling Wands, Cups, Swords, Disks, and Atoms.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

The Milky Way Society of Hosts used the card of Temperance, an entity transferring fluid from one vessel to another—/

::Transfer!::

/Yes. They used to supervise matters relating to it, caring for both hosts and the vacant bodies of Transferees. Because they used to use only Kirlian-vacant bodies as hosts, you see./

::Zombies! Ugh!::

/It certainly seems primitive today! But Kirlian science, like other sciences, had to progress from primitive origins. After control of the body passed to the host, regardless of the strength of the visiting aura, the Society's power faded. There is no longer any such thing as involuntary hosting, so no creature need worry. This Quad-point host of mine can assume control any time, but since he earns his living by serving as host, he would not do so unless extreme circumstances warranted. But that is off the point. Other Tarot images occur elsewhere. The Queen of Energy—the Thirteen of Wands—remains the symbol for Galaxy Andromeda. That is the chained lady, about to be consumed by a monster of the sea. Since she is of the Suit of Fire, this is a hideous fate indeed./

::I've seen that! I did not know it derived from Tarot!::

/Actually it derives from pre-Tarot Solarian mythology. It—/

::Show me another card.:: She was a child; her attention-span was short.

This time Herald sorted through the pack and selected a particular card. Sometimes Tarot worked best by seemingly random examples, but in the critical areas he preferred to choose his symbols. He flipped it down. It showed a Quadpoint male doing tricks with colored rocks.

::A magician!:: A picture instantly recognizable to any child of the Cluster, whatever species might be represented.

/You are correct again, chip of Metamorphic!/

::I may be young, but I'm not stupid. I know I don't know enough about this image. Who is this magician? Is he you? Are you going to do a trick?::

Very intelligent child! Such a pity she could not survive. /I am the magician, at the moment, and I am going to do my trick. This is how I earn my fee./ Herald extended his long and touched her nearest tread.

The child reacted. ::What is this? Suddenly I feel so good!::

/I have lent you my aura, Smallbore. I am Herald the Healer, and this is the way I heal./

::Oh, I... I never knew this... this... what is this aura? I feel it, yet I do not comprehend it.::

/The nature of the aura is cumbersome to explain, Smallbore./

::No more cumbersome than knocking out in ignorance, Healer!::

How eager the young mind was, once given the taste of health and knowledge! /Perhaps, not. The aura, according to Zlqx of ¢, who authored the earliest surviving study, is a composite para-electronic complex that—/

::You confuse me already!::

He had been afraid of that. She was a bright child, but nevertheless a child, lacking the background for technicalities beyond her immediate experience. /Well, in my own flashes, it is an aspect of bio-pseudo-luminescent energy that manifests in all living—/

::I am just a little Quad, Herald.::

Herald made a beam of good-natured resignation that translated into a rattle in his host's treads. /I hesitate to offend you by flashing below your level./

::Oh, please offend me, Healer!::

Her attitude had been transformed by his aura, but he knew it would not last unless he reached her inner belief. Aura combined with intelligence: that was the key.

/In that case I shall tell how the simplest and most recent of the great Cluster species discovered and named the aura. That would be Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

the—/

::I know! The Solarians!::

Herald had actually been thinking of Segment Thousandstar, in neighboring Milky Way Galaxy. But he was also conversant with the similarly brash Solarians of Segment Etamin, so he obliged her by orienting on that instead.

/Yes, the infamous Solarians, who somehow obliged the rest of the Cluster to employ their nonsensical system of measurements.

Two and a half of their millennia ago—that would be about thirty-five Quadpointers—before they strayed from their small dense homeplanet, there was a man named Kilner of London. He was a special kind of healer called a 'doctor' who worked with primitive radiation called 'X rays.' He became interested in stories of a nimbus or invisible aura around living creatures that he thought reflected their states of health./ Herald paused. /This is not insultingly simple?/

::It is somewhat simple. But I like stories about primitive cultures.::

/So do I, Smallbore! Kilner made colored lenses through which he was able to perceive this aura. He found that it consisted of three or four layers, a very narrow band that exactly followed the contours of the body, that he called the 'Etheric Double,' and a deeper layer beyond it he called the 'Inner Aura,' and a more diffuse and irregular layer outside that called the 'Outer Aura,' and sometimes an extremely tenuous outer band that faded away indefinitely. These bands tended to be broader and clearer in healthy individuals, and distorted or intermittent in unhealthy ones. He catalogued and described all variations and published a text on the subject, but other doctors did not believe him, and he died without recognition for his fundamental research./

::I knew Solarians were stupid, but not that stupid! No wonder they were so late to master Transfer!::

/They were ignorant, not stupid, Smallbore. They did not like to change their ways of thinking, which is why they were so late to achieve space. So in essence you are correct. Thirty years after Kilner's observations, another man named Kirlian of Krasnodar managed to photograph the aura, that is, to make a sort of two-dimensional holograph of it, very crude. Then the Solarians began to believe. As they put it, 'Seeing is believing.' So they named it the 'Kirlian Aura,' in this manner managing to avoid advertising their mistake about Kilner's work, and now that term is known throughout the Cluster./

::Funny how the terms of the primitives displace those of advanced cultures such as Quadpoint.::

/It is one of the anomalies of nomenclature. A Solarian maxim covers the situation, perhaps: 'Bad money drives out good.'/

Her mirth rattled the full length of her treads. ::Bad terminology drives out good! Bad maxims drive out good! Bad cultures drive out good! Bad life—:: She broke off.

Herald continued hastily, to interrupt that thought before it undid all that he had accomplished so far. /The Solarians developed more sophisticated methods of analysis in due course, and soon learned what others in the Cluster knew: that the aura is not merely a force that permeates and surrounds living creatures, but that it is the very essence of those creatures. If the aura is moved to another host, it induces its typical patterns in that host, much as a magnetic field induces its current in the output coil of a transformer. That host becomes the original entity, in mind and memory and emotion. In this manner, instantaneous travel across galactic distances becomes possible, for the Transfer of an aura requires much less energy than the mattermission of the entire host.

But since the aura fades slowly in an alien host, only those personalities with auras more intense than the norm can travel this way.

A normal aura would very soon fade out; in effect, death. Intensity of aura thus becomes an advantage—/

::And you have the most intense aura of all!::

/Yes. The stronger auras fill out, until at my level they become perfect spheres, except when specially focused. But it is intensity and type that count, rather than size or outline. There are many families of auras, distinct from species associations, and close aural affinity is regarded as more significant than genetic relationship. Thus I can claim relationship to Melody of Mintaka and to Flint of Outworld, though neither entity was of my species. The very strong auras also can help strengthen weaker auras, and a strengthened aura improves health and outlook. Thus we become healers. Anyone can heal somewhat; those with very high auras heal much more dramatically. And this is the power I have, Smallbore. I cannot make you live longer, for your malady is of the physical body, not the aura. No amount of faith can make you well. But I can enable you to accept your fate with grace./

::You have done so, Healer! Death is no specter, now.::

/Unfortunately, there is much we do not know about the aura. We can measure it by color, type, intensity—a complex science of aural analysis has been developed—yet this has never approached the level the Ancients possessed. They alone knew the ultimate secrets of aura./

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

::The Ancients! I know about them! They died out three million Sol years ago.::

/And that is about as much as anyone does know, Smallbore. I cannot answer the next question you will ask. I don't know how it was that the greatest healers of all could not save themselves from extinction./

She made a tread-clacking chuckle. ::No, I was going to ask about the other part of your name. Why are you called Herald, if what you do is Healing?::

/I am called Herald because I also practice the art and science of heraldry. This is a Cluster convention of increasing popularity as divergent sapient species mix. There are so many types of sapience, in so many forms, in so many alternate Transfer hosts, that it becomes difficult to find common reference points. Heraldry satisfies a certain part of that need./

::But isn't it just drawing little pictures, like those Tarot cards?::

/Ah, but they are very special pictures my dear! They are symbols, representing most specific identities, and are fundamental to the unification of the Cluster./

::Herald, I don't understand.::

/Do you really want to, Smallbore?/

::Yes! I have so little time, I want to know all I can before I know nothing at all. I mean—::

/I understand. We must do in life, and learn in life, and feel in life, for in death it is over./

::Yes, Herald! You understand so well!::

In a moment she was back on the subject. ::How did heraldry start?::

/Many species, in their pretechnical phases, wore special apparel to protect them from the attacks of physical weapons. This apparel was called 'armor,' and it was so encompassing that it became impossible to recognize the individual entity within it, the 'knight,'

which figure is also represented in the Tarot deck. Therefore it became necessary to decorate his shield with some characteristic design, typical of his household and affiliation, so that friend could be distinguished from enemy. This eliminated the awkwardness of a knight lining up behind the formation of his enemy, supposing he was among friends. Or even attacking his friends, thinking they were enemies. The markings on the shield made everything instantly clear, even when the knights were not personally known to each other. This was the origin of heraldry. Today, all great families of all species in the Cluster have their registered Shields of Arms, even though they may never engage in combat./

::My family has a Shield! I never knew what it meant.::

/Come, I will explain what it means./ Following her directions, Herald located the Metamorphic Shield and placed it against the wall where both could view it. /Note that the shape of this Shield is elliptical, a kind of angled oval that signifies Galaxy Andromeda./

::But Andromeda is a spiral!::

/So it is. But from Milky Way it appears elliptical. (Since Andromeda lost the Wars of Energy, we suffer the additional humiliation of the ellipse. The Milky Way Shield is the fundamental shape, flat across the top, round or partly pointed across the bottom. Other Galaxies have other shapes.) Within this is the band of prints, the little four-point patterns, signifying Sphere Quadpoint. In Milky Way there are two bands, since that Galaxy is organized into segments and Spheres, but it is the same idea. Then the main design, the symbol of Family Metamorphic: a lump of edible rock superimposed on the geologic flowchart of its derivation. A distinctive Achievement—that is what the complete affair is called—recognizable anywhere in the Cluster./

::Can you recognize any Shield of Arms in the whole Cluster?:: she asked, a bit awed.

/Within certain broad categories, yes. It is my business. And this is true generally. Two completely alien sapients could meet on a barren planetoid, perhaps shipwrecked from different vessels, possessing no common language, form or status, and they could recognize each other by their Shields of Arms. That would provide their common experience. Each would know the other was sapient and civilized, and where he was from, and that he honored Cluster conventions of behavior./

::How wonderful! Both would be like modern knights in armor, only one might be from Quadpoint, and the other from Thousandstar. Are there still knights in armor today?::

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

/Indeed there are! It happens that my next client resides in a genuine medieval-Solarian-reconstruction society. No modern weapons, only swords and bows. No motorized transport. He needs me to exorcise a ghost in his castle./

::Oh, I wish I could go with you! Are there such things as ghosts? I mean, really?::

/Perhaps. I would lose business if there were not. This seems to be a Kirlian ghost, a manifesting aura of strong intensity. At any rate, I shall soon find out./

Smallbore paused, concentrating. ::Oh, be careful, Herald. I just got an awful feeling about this ghost. I perceive terrible pain for you, worse than that of death itself. You cannot save my life, but you can save—:: She halted, unable to grasp the full concept.

::Three million years,:: she finished. ::Does that make any sense at all, Herald?::

/That sounds like the Ancients,/ he said, uncertain what to make of this. Was it his future or her own she had glimpsed? /Of course, I am searching for the legendary 'Kirlian Crest,' or the Shield of Arms of the Ancients themselves—there is a distinction between shield and crest, but that does not matter in this context—that will reveal at last their actual nature. But of course this is chimerical./

::No, not that, exactly. Oh, I have lost it! Something about the ghost host, old, old, that will destroy you—Herald, my mind blanks it off, it is too horrible. Do not go—but no, you must go—oh, I can't face it!:: What could be too horrible for a dying child to face, when death itself no longer frightened her? Herald had a premonition that this was no idle warning, but he had no way to grasp its nature.

Smallbore changed the subject. ::May I deal a card now?::

Herald presented her with the cards. Here he had come to heal her, and she was trying to heal him! Yet such interactions happened on occasion. It was one of the mysteries of aura. Some entities placed a religious interpretation on such things; Herald did not, but it left him without adequate explanations.

Smallbore mixed the cards inexpertly and flipped one down. ::What is this?::

/The Universe./

::I don't understand.::

/Certainly you do, Smallbore! There is a whole geography of stars and planets and galaxies and clusters in space out beyond these tunnels. That is the Universe. Everything. More than we can even imagine./

::You mean the Milky Way is not just another tunnel?:: she inquired facetiously. ::Have you traveled the Universe, Herald?::

/The Universe, no. The Cluster, yes, but the Cluster is merely a rough ellipsoid in space, a sort of flattened ball, with Andromeda at one end and Milky Way at the other, each with its satellites or associated lesser galaxies. Andromeda has a couple of cute little spiral galaxies in attendance, and Milky Way has a couple of irregular blobs./

Smallbore's laughter rattled her treads again. ::You're making that up!::

/No, it is really true. The larger blob is ten parsecs through. And that's about thirty-three light-years—oops, multiply those figures by a thousand; I'm trying to make dwarfs of giants—over thirty thousand light-years through, called Cloud Nine. The sapients of Sphere $ reside there. The smaller one is Cloud Six, and it contains Sphere ¢. Both cultures are very sensitive about their status.

They point out that superficial regularity has nothing to do with cultural merit, and that there are many remarkable constellations within their clouds, some quite beautiful. They say that if Milky Way had not thrown its weight about for the past few billion years, distorting its satellites, they would by now have formed into perfect elliptical galaxies, and not the smallest ones in the Cluster, either. I think they have a case./

::I'm sorry. When I knock out, I will Transfer over there and apologize to the two irregular blobs.::

/That would be nice,/ Herald agreed gravely. /It is merely a matter of rotation. All galaxies start as blobs; those that have sufficient rotation evolve into more orderly disks in due course. Andromeda is one of the most scenic galaxies in the Universe, but we have our shame, too./

::I know. We lost the energy wars.::

/Our shame is not that we lost, but that we instigated the wars. We tried to destroy our sister galaxy, the Milky Way./

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Now she argued the other side again, as he had thought she might. This was a good, positive, juvenile reaction. ::But we needed their energy to promote our civilization!::

/Civilization promoted by such means would not be worthwhile. We must never again consider the horror of galacticide./

::You know, if we had tried it against a smaller galaxy, we might have won. There would still have been plenty of energy.::

/Which galaxy? Pinwheel? It has two major sapient species, Sphere Pin and Sphere Wheel./

::Pin and Wheel!:: she exclaimed in delight ::No, we couldn't destroy that galaxy; it's too cute.::

/Well, what about one of the dwarf ellipsoids or irregulars that fill in the volume of the Cluster? There is Sculp with its Sphere §, or Furnace with its Sphere #. he trailed off.

::Why are you silent, Herald? Have you traveled there? What do you know about them?::

/Oh, Sculp and Furnace are very special in their way. They resemble globular clusters, which are little balls of stars perhaps eighty parsecs in diameter, very tightly packed with about a hundred thousand old red stars. But Sculp is two thousand parsecs in diameter, and Furnace four or five thousand parsecs. They are grossly oversized for globs, yet too small to be galaxies. They actually represent the 'missing link,' the intermediate stage between—/

::You are evading my question, Herald. I feel it in your marvelous healing aura. Would you lie to a dying child?:: Herald paused, shaken. /Yes, child, I do evade. I have traveled to Sculp on business, but will never go to Furnace./

::Why not?:: She sensed a mystery here, and was excited.

/I think this is not a thing you would understand./

::That is exactly the kind of thing that interests me most! Please, Herald; I will keep your secret. Tell me what keeps you from Furnace. Is it very hot there?::

/The sapients of # are hot, but that would not dissuade me, as I would naturally go there in Transfer./

::Come on, tell me—or I'll condemn Furnace to be destroyed for our energy supply!::

/You bargain ruthlessly! Therefore I must confess: my betrothed is there./ He dealt a card: the Devil.

::Oh, I am sorry, Herald. I would not really have destroyed Furnace! But—how could you love her if you have never been there?

Did she come to Andromeda?::

/No, we have never met. It was a birth-betrothal, decreed by the Cluster Council. We are the two highest Kirlians living in the Cluster and so by law, we must mate with each other before we take any other mates./

Smallbore finally took note of the card. ::The Devil? Now I really don't understand, Herald. Why is this law? Where is the Devil?

You are not even of her species, are you?::

/I hardly understand it myself, Smallbore. There is a body of experts who believe that the mating of two high-Kirlian entities is more likely to produce high-Kirlian descendants. Many other experts doubt this. The available evidence lends itself to differing interpretations. But for the past few centuries, that law has been in force; it applies to all auras of one hundred fifty or above. Thus I am betrothed to this devil female./

::So you have to marry this hot one! Why is that so bad?::

/Just how old are you, child?/

::Old enough to snoop on my parents, some. I know what the words mean.:: Herald sighed, hoping he wouldn't get in trouble with the older Metamorphics. Some cultures still had regressive notions about what was fitting for children to know.

/I have to mate with Flame of Furnace. After she conceives by me, I am free to mate and marry elsewhere. But I refuse to honor this dictate, so I shall never Transfer to Furnace, or permit Flame to Transfer to me./

::But she might be a nice girl!::

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

/That is irrelevant. It is a matter of principle. The Cluster Council shall not dictate my personal life./

::Won't that get you in trouble with the Cluster Council?::

/Not so long as I don't marry elsewhere. I shall remain celibate./

Smallbore considered that. ::But you might have a child like me. Would you deny me my short life?:: Herald was silent, struck by the ramifications of the question. A child like her?

::Oh, I have wounded you,:: Smallbore cried contritely. ::I am sorry, Herald. Forgive me!::

/No fault in you,/ Herald replied quickly. /You have caused me to examine my motives, and they are unworthy. I would not deny you life./

Smallbore looked through the deck, found a card and laid it down: Death. She considered it for a long moment before speaking.

::Strange, Herald. I know it for what it is, yet I find no terror in it. How can this be?::

/Many things in life are worse than death. Not long ago I analyzed the Shield of Arms of a noble Ast, and he charged me by the Lot of Asterisk to explain its fault. When I did, he died. For him, abatement of honor was worse than death, though in truth it was the fault of the vengeful King of Arms of Ast./

::Oh, the poor entity! I must comfort him, when I enter that realm.::

/That might be appropriate,/ Herald agreed.

::And after that, I shall go haunt the King of Arms of Ast!:: she said with a return of childish malice.

/Perhaps that, too, would be appropriate,/ Herald said. If there were any reality to life after death....

When Bore returned, Herald had gone. Smallbore remained too ill to drill, sinking toward death, but now there was a special brightness to her finish, a kind of metallic radiance all about her, and she was at peace. ::I will die very soon,:: she announced.

::Isn't it wonderful?::

Bore was suspicious. Had the alien drugged her? ::Tell me what passed between you and the Healer.::

::He touched me, and he showed me pictures, and he told me stories,:: she said simply. ::It was such a wonderful conversation!

Daddy, I love you!::

::Did he give you funny rock to eat? Did he flash compelling patterns on your receptors? Did he make subtle threats?:: She laughed, her whole body vibrating. ::None of it, Daddy! No poison, no hypnosis, no warnings. He made me feel so good! :: Now an even darker suspicion occurred. She was, after all, old enough to snoop on her parents and to know what the terms meant

::Did he touch you... in a certain way?::

::Daddy!:: the child exclaimed with mock shock. ::I'm way too young to know what you mean, let alone to breed. And anyway, do you think I'd do it with a Slash?::

Embarrassed by his daughter's perception and humor, Bore desisted. ::It is only that you were so sad, and now you are so happy, yet nothing has changed. If the Healer did nothing but talk to you, I paid—uh—::

::I know you paid him a lot of mineral, Daddybore. He is a very expensive healer and he is very good. But I am sorry if it was not worth it to you.:: And she began to dim.

::It was worth it!:: Bore vibrated quickly. ::It was worth the whole punctured planet! I just don't understand it!:: Her treads clinked cheerfully. ::He said you would not, Daddy. He explained how sad you would be after I died, because you don't understand about apologizing to irregular blobs or haunting Kings of Arms or Devils having little girls like me.::

::I certainly don't! ::

::But he told me how to make you happy again, in the little time I have left. May I do that?:: Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Amazed, Bore vibrated acceptance.

And for the few days that Smallbore survived, she made her parents happy, for she was happy. After she was gone, a plaque to Herald the Healer was erected in the Metamorphic household, and no slight to Sphere Slash was permitted.

There was of course no possible connection, but the King of Arms of Ast became indisposed shortly thereafter. Forced to retire from office, he was heard to mutter, * Damn that child!*

Kastle of Kade

0 Samples taken and inspected. All are aural nonsapients. 0

& As always. Any association with the sapients? & 0 Yes. The sapients control them, breed them, utilize their products, and slaughter them for food. 0

& They employ aural entities—as cattle? &

0 I have consulted with all my units. There is no question. These samples are animals, bred for docility, production, and potability of flesh. Not for intelligence. 0

& Surely this culture must be expunged from the face of the Universe! We shall give this Cluster to the animals, letting the meek inherit. As we have done before. &

0 As we have done before. 0

& Research units report in order, routine reports omitted. & D Our assignment, Sphere Dash Andromeda, contains several operative ancient planetary sites. One on planet £ has been penetrated, circa eleven cycles BP, but no evidence of exploitation, and site was resealed. D

& Planet £? This has a familiar aspect. &

D Its designation is taken from its formerly dominant species, the tripeds. Sapient but nonspacefaring, owing to their extreme bulk.

& It was this species that penetrated the site? & D Correct. Two £ entities died within it. Presumed malfunction of admittance procedure, corrected by site computer when intruders were analyzed. D

& Orient action unit. &

0 Action unit 1, orient on that site. 0

1 Oriented. 1

& Act only if site is reactivated by Cluster entities. It is necessary to prevent ancient technology from falling into their capability, but destruction of a secure site would be wasteful, and waste is abomination. This site has historical relevance, and its level is parallel to our present technology. &

1 Clarification of assignment: should the site be reactivated by local entities— 1

& This would indicate a repeat activation, highly suggestive. Destroy it, and extirpate life on that planet. & Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

The item on Herald's schedule said "Exorcism," followed by a Shield of Arms. One glance at that Shield gave him the address, for it was the shape of Galaxy Milky Way, inset by the dragon of Segment Etamin, itself inset by the disk of Sphere Sador, one of the so-termed circular cultures. The specific Achievement was that of Planet Keep, inset by the device of the Duke of Kade. Beyond that, Herald would have to research; he was not conversant with every device of every planet in the Cluster. There were, after all, in the neighborhood of a million sapient-populated planets, with new ones being added and old ones being closed down constantly.

Herald was eager to get the job finished, so he could go home and relax for a day in his own body. His aura suffered only trifling depletion on his excursions, but still he liked to keep it at optimum strength, and that could only be done at home. The interview with Smallbore of Metamorphic had shaken him, coming so soon after the suicide of Whorl of Precipice. Had her warning of the hazard of this mission been a true manifestation of the paranormal? Powerful but incomprehensible forces seemed to swirl about him, settling in to wreak he knew not what. He had been a creature without evident destiny; was that now to change?

The way Smallbore had forced his rethinking about his fiancée, Flame of Furnace... would it be better to abate his foolish pride, go and mate with her and perhaps produce a child like Smallbore? It would not matter to him if that child had no significant aura; she would still be a charming individual. But it would be hard, very hard, to admit so dramatically that his prior stand had been wrong.

He could picture the half-veiled flicker of contempt of Flame of Furnace when he came to her.

Best to get this exorcism done with rapidly, so he could relax and sort out his private thoughts. He proceeded to Planet Keep of Milky Way without delay, not bothering with the spot research that would normally have prepared him for the immediate detail. He would learn what he needed while on location; this was not a matter of heraldry anyway.

He arrived in a Solarian host, an upright quadruped creature formed of bone, cartilage, tendon, and meat, ambulating on two digits and employing the other two for manipulation. Its primary senses were optical and auditory and tactile. He had utilized a humanoid host once before, so had no real problem adjusting to its oddities. This was not as convenient a body as his own, but it would serve.

He sat—that is, his body was partially supported in a folded position—in a plushly padded chair in a chamber hung with elegant tapestries adorned with heraldic motifs. He was clothed in a loose tunic with holes for appendages to project, emblazoned with the Achievement of Kade.

/I am present, host,/ he announced. /Please conduct me to the assignment./

Immediately the body shifted weight, brought the solid head forward, and lifted with the large muscles of the thighs so as to balance on the legs. It leaned forward and thrust out each leg in turn to break the incipient fall threatened by its unbalance; a precarious but effective mode of propulsion. One arm stretched forward and drew aside a fiber panel, providing access to another chamber.

A genuine Solarian turned from his contemplation of a window-aperture, startled. He was solid for his species, seeming to possess some superfluous avoirdupois, but seemed nevertheless powerful.

"I am Herald the Healer," Herald said, noting with interest that his communication was not manifested in his normal slashes. He generally stayed with his natural intonation as a matter of pride, but in some hosts the set language patterns were too strong. It didn't really matter; this was a good host, not intruding in any other manner.

He was used to the surprise that his rapid adaptations evoked. Most entities seldom Transferred, even those of high aura, so they took some time to adjust to their alternate hosts. Herald's whole business involved Transfer, so that he was able to make an adjustment in a minute that might have required an hour or even longer for another entity.

"Please produce the subject for exorcism," Herald said, still faintly bemused by the way his words emerged in quotes. No doubt he would grow accustomed to this, as he would to the other oddities of this situation.

But it was not to be so easy. "I am Duke of Kade," the man said, extending his right hand.

Herald took that hand with his own right, honoring the custom of digital contact common to many species, and a boon to those checking on aura. The Duke's aura was a strong one of seventy-five. The man was of middle human age, with pale blue-green hide color and orange disks around the black pupils of his two eyes. Since the Solarian base-stock had been black, white, yellow, or shadings between, Herald knew that this was a galactic offshoot, modified by generations of life aboard other planets. Most sapients suffered similar variations as they settled on alien worlds; local conditions inevitably had their effect.

"There are things you must know before you proceed," the Duke said. "Your presence was imposed on this house. I shall grant you the amenities of guest status, but it is my wish to be rid of you as soon as possible. Do not allow my politeness in company to mislead you about my basic attitude. Do we understand one another?"

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Now Herald felt the hostility that permeated the man's aura, worse than that of Bore of Metamorphic. He was at the same time aware of a fundamental integrity and strength of purpose that he had to admire.

"I am not always welcome, but I always perform proper service for my fee," Herald said. This entity's animosity did not appear to be rooted in anti-Slash prejudice, but in some local matter of principle. Could it be similar to Herald's own refusal to mate with Flame of Furnace?

"I do not desire your service," Kade said bluntly. "I regard you as a charlatan. But I have made a covenant with my enemies that requires your participation. I shall now summon the enemy representative, who shall serve witness to the fact of your presence.

Upon his arrival, you shall proceed to your ritual. I shall be pleased if it is brief."

"I appreciate your candor, and shall be as brief as possible." This fitted nicely with Herald's own preference; the mission should be over soon.

Kade made a snap with his fingers. A servant-Solarian appeared, garbed in a plain tunic: a contrast to the ornately embroidered robe of the master. Clothing, in this culture, made the entity. "Fetch the Witness," the Duke said.

The servant disappeared. Kade turned to Herald with grim formality. "Now, as befits a good host, I shall show you the grounds," he announced.

Herald was momentarily startled by the use of the word "host," but realized that in this context it lacked the usual connotations. To those who did not Transfer, a host simply meant the proprietor of a domicile. "It is not necessary," he said.

"One does not permit the agent of a malign influence to wander the premises unattended."

The antipathy was strong indeed! But there was no element of hypocrisy in it. This man hated him, but Herald knew he was quite safe from molestation in this residence. This was heraldic honor of the old style.

Herald shrugged, hoping the enemy witness would arrive promptly. "May I say, sir, that I feel better at ease with an enemy of your integrity than I would feel with a friendly hypocrite."

Kade gave him a bleakly appraising glance. "Thank you."

Kastle Kade was an impressive fortress. It was roughly circular, as befitted an artifact of a Disk culture (though this was still an oddity, since this was evidently a Sword-culture enclave within the Disk-culture Sphere), with outer walls about eighty feet high.

These were braced by a triangular pattern of towers extending upward another twenty feet. Within this large enclosure was the keep: a massive stronghold substantially taller than the main wall, overlooking an entire lake—for the castle was an island in a lake formed by the damming of the River Donnybrook. Beyond the lovely water the mountains rose into the sky, their peaks snow-girt.

To the east the ascent was virtually vertical, with cliffs the height of the castle plunging into the water. Only to the south, where the dam was, and to the north where the narrow river emerged, was there room for a level road.

"The stables," said Kade. He showed the way through a passage lined with chambers containing multiply wheeled creatures.

"Planet Keep is within the old Sphere Sador, as reflected in the Shield of Arms. Sadors are wheeled entities, from the sapients to the sentients. But these are good steeds, as strong and responsive as the horses of ancient Earth." His suppressed ire could not conceal his pride in his stock.

Herald was unable to visualize how such creatures might be ridden, as their wheels projected in six directions. But he nodded affirmatively. The remainder of the premises were similarly intriguing, but he really was impatient to complete the mission.

At last the Enemy Witness arrived. He was a sapient wheeler, who superficially resembled the wheeled horses, but he was smaller, and his wheels differed, being smoother and finer. The topmost wheel spun rapidly, making vibrations in the air as its angled spokes tuned in. "I am Whirl of Sador, Earl of Dollar," he said, poking one side wheel forward.

A "dollar," Herald remembered, had once been a circular unit of currency formed of metal. So this designation was consistent with the culture. He touched the rim of the wheel with one hand. This, too, was a strong Kirlian entity, with an aural intensity of about fifty. High-aural individuals tended to gravitate to positions of power or responsibility. "Herald the Healer, of Sphere Slash, Andromeda." Privately, he marveled at the similarity of name-concepts; he had not so long ago interviewed an entity called

"Whorl." But this was a different planet, and a different species, and a different language. Only the coincidence of his recent experience in the other galaxy made the analogy apparent. Herald had a natural tendency to integrate diverse factors; that was part of his skill as a healer and developer of Shields of Arms. But he also had to recognize when a juxtaposition was meaningless, as in this case. Whirl... Whorl... perhaps a multilingual intellectual riddle could be fashioned from it!

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"Now we shall meet the subject for exorcism," Kade said stiffly. He snapped his fingers again. "Advise the Lady of our approach,"

he said to the servant who appeared.

They proceeded to an upper room. Kade lifted a heavy fiber bar from its crude catch which freed the door to swing open. So the Lady was a captive!

Inside, a small figure stood facing the narrow window. She did not turn or react as they entered. To Herald she conveyed an impression of forlorn indifference rather than anger or fear. She wore a sleek tunic shaped to be subtly feminine, and light slippers on her dainty feet. A female child, reminiscent of Smallbore of Metamorphic, but somewhat older. Certainly no demon!

"My daughter, the Lady Kade," the Duke said.

The figure turned, and Herald saw that she was indeed a lady, albeit a young one, barely nubile by the standards of the species.

"Herald the Healer, the exorcist," Kade said tightly. "Whirl of Dollar, Enemy Witness." His irony verged on discourtesy, but no one took overt notice. "If I may now absent myself from these proceedings...."

Now the Lady reacted, albeit timorously. "Father...." Her voice was thin and sweet, tinged with fear. The breast of her tunic pulsed slightly with the beat of her human heart beneath it, another hint of the tension that gripped her.

"Herald is a Cluster-famous healer," the Duke told her, his voice abruptly softening. "He would not destroy his reputation by harming you. The Earl is a creature of honor; he rests in judgment of the proceedings, not of you. When these two entities ascertain that you are innocent, they will make their reports and depart, and all will be well again."

"It has never been well," she said. But she seemed reassured.

Kade turned an inscrutable look upon Herald and the Witness. Without further word, he spun on his feet and departed.

Whirl settled on his side wheels. "I merely witness," he said. "I do not interfere."

Herald understood that there was a great deal he had not been told. But he preferred to obtain his information in his own fashion.

"Lady, may I touch you?" he asked, unsmiling. A smile was a stretching of the human mouth to suggest happiness or good intent, but at this stage it would have been hypocritical. He had been presented as an agent of the enemy, tolerated only because of terms imposed. Already he knew that the social or political situation was a large part of the problem. This girl might be an innocent focus, attacked by the enemy because she was dear to the Duke.

She put out one delicate hand as though suffering its amputation, while averting her gaze. Herald extended his own hand slowly, so as not to startle her into flight, and touched the tips of her small fingers.

She had a respectable but not remarkable aura of twenty-five, its type typical of a rare but established aural family. It exhibited the patina of stress, but was essentially normal and healthy. She was certainly not possessed by any alien aura.

She felt the tremendous healing power of his own aura, like none known in the Cluster for three thousand years—and melted. Her face turned to him, the large eyes focusing. They were orange, like her father's. The sunrise of hope emerged from the vacant gaze and seemed to illuminate her golden hair. In that slow moment she expanded from the forlorn child into a shining young woman, a truly regal Lady.

The Earl lifted on his wheels. "Supercircular!" he exclaimed. "With one touch you have transformed her! Even I, alien to your form, can perceive the miracle!" Then he broke off, stopping his communication wheel. And spun it again, momentarily. "Apology.

I promised not to interfere."

The Lady turned to the Sador, but retained contact with Herald. "How is it that you, the Enemy Witness, react so positively to my pleasure? Do you not wish to burn me?"

"No, Lady, no!" the Earl exclaimed. "I wish you cured, that this unhealthy strife may be gone from fair Keep. Kastle Kade was ever the bulwark against deceit and oppression, the strongest and truest wheel of the King. Only this—this misfortune prevents it from being so again. I am enemy not to you or to your father, but to the demon possession that took your illustrious mother and threatens you. Be as you are at this instant, and we are all friends."

There was no mistaking the sincerity of the Earl's expression. Yet this was strange, for there should have been no need to summon a healer if the opposing factions were so eager to settle their differences.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"This girl suffers no possession," Herald said. "Her aura is rare but normal."

But now the Sador became adamant. "She is normal now, Healer. And perhaps with your help she will be normal always. But she has been possessed, and this is our concern."

"Perhaps we suffer a confusion of terms," Herald said. "By 'possession' I refer to the inhabitation of a host by a hostile, malevolent aura, what was historically termed 'hostaging.' "

"Precisely."

"This is not the case, here. Since an aura can be removed from a given host only by Transfer, the Lady cannot have been possessed—unless there is a Transfer unit in this castle. Then of course the hostile aura could have directed her to that instrument, and departed. But normally a good host is not given up so readily. And of course a foreign aura cannot control a host without the acquiescence of that host—"

"A demon can," Whirl said. "We of Keep know of cases."

Local superstition, Herald was sure. "Still, the other restrictions remain. Without a Transfer unit—"

"There is no Transfer unit here," the Earl said. "As Witness, I brought equipment to verify this."

"Exactly my point, sir. Since an alien aura could not have departed, and since there is none present now, possession cannot have been the case."

Still the Sador wheeled his ground. "It has been the case. I do not attempt to explain it, I merely affirm that it is so."

Herald returned to the girl, whose hand he still held. "Do you know whereof he speaks, Lady?"

"No, sir," she said. "I have never suffered siege by a hostile aura, though it is true that here on Keep such things can occur. My father believes that our enemies seek to harm him through me; to terminate the lineage of Kade, that they may accede to the spoils.

Therefore this charge."

Herald nodded; the same suspicion had occurred to him. Heraldic manner often accompanied heraldic politics, the other face of the coin.

"False!" the Earl cried, his wheel seeming almost to fly off with his vehemence. "We are no part of such dishonor. We care only for the repute and welfare of our fine planet!"

Herald removed his hand from the Lady and stepped toward Whirl. "May I touch you again, Dollar?"

"I insist!" And the Sador extended his front wheel.

The contact showed considerable agitation of aura, but there was no deceit in it. The Earl was completely sincere.

"This is a problem," Herald said. "Your position seems unreasonable, yet you uphold it honestly. Is this typical of the forces you represent?"

"It is typical, Healer. It is not unreasonable. We have had experience. There is a demon among us, and the Lady Kade is now its focus. We do not profess to comprehend its mechanism; that is why we summoned you."

There might be a demon about, Herald thought, but it seemed to have possessed the enemy, not the Lady! He returned to her. "I cannot heal what needs no healing. Unless this demon manifests itself for me—"

"It will," the Sador said. "You have merely to remain here until it happens."

"I had expected to return within hours to my own Galaxy."

"If you do, and the demon manifests again, we shall have to burn the Lady," the Sador said. "Please do not force this course upon us; we regard it as an abomination."

"Burn her! In the Lady's presence, the Enemy Witness speaks thus!" Herald remarked with edged reproach. "Burning is characteristic of demons, not of Ladies."

"The Enemy Witness is a creature of honor," the girl said coldly. Much of her glow had faded when Herald's contact ceased, but Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

she retained some spirit and now regarded him as an ally, not an alien technician. "They burned my mother."

"Not we!" the Earl cried. "That was an act of dishonor. We executed the perpetrators. Now we seek to abate the problem positively, amicably."

Herald raised his two hands. "This is too much for me to comprehend in fragments. Allow me to speak with the Lady more gently."

"Yes! Yes!" the Sador cried. "I remain only because I must. I shall be silent, as I am supposed to be."

"Talk with me as long as you want," the Lady said to Herald. "Only hold my hand while you do. It drives away the fear."

Herald took her hand again. "This is because I am a healer." He led her to the couch, and they sat down together. "What is your given name?"

"Psyche." She smiled, and her face shone; the light blue complementing the gold. "Oh, I know you do this for money, Herald, but I wish you could stay with me always. Then the horror could never come near."

The horror of burning—or of possession? There was certainly something strange here, and it reminded him again uncomfortably of Smallbore's warning. What dread was he about to encounter? But he concealed his doubt. "When you are healed, you will not require such support," he told her. "Please tell me, in your own way, how this situation came about. I am an outsider, and there is much I do not know."

Without further ado, the Lady told her story.

"I was aged twelve years of Sol when the demon came to Kastle Kade. It possessed the body of my mother, the Duchess of Kade.

She was a striking woman, with fair tresses falling to her buttocks and a piercing orange gaze, her skin the delicate color of our world of derivation, Planet Kade. Men said she was the most beautiful human female of Keep, and that I would one year resemble her.

"But when the demon took her, she flashed fire. She took a laser sword and slew our steward, saying he had made improper advances to her. My father believed her, for otherwise he would have had to put her on trial. But I knew the steward was innocent; he had a mistress who would have slain him herself had he considered another woman. I think it was my mother who made the advances—and I know she would never have done it had she not been possessed. The demon, for what purpose we cannot grasp, had desired to compromise the man.

"Possession is a very real threat here on Planet Keep, for we have many powerful and malignant auras. We are a kind of prison planet. Political criminals and the incorrigible partisans of dangerous sects are Transferred here and given animal hosts. It was once thought to be impossible for a sapient to occupy a subsapient host, but modern techniques have made it possible. If the sentence is death, the prisoners are allowed to remain in their animal hosts until their auras fade entirely. If it is merely exile, they are recovered shortly before their auras expire, assuming their hosts have not been killed by other animals. Sometimes a Pretender will be renovated when the political situation on his home planet changes to favor him. It can take years for a high-Kirlian mind to fade.

"There is little proof of this, but circumstantial evidence suggests that some of these prisoners learn to control their animal hosts, perhaps by conditioning their inferior minds to obey directives that make life easier and safer for the animals. Our legends claim that a few of these high-aura entities are capable of Transferring spontaneously from their animal hosts to human hosts, and that they then condition the sapient minds in much the fashion as they did the subsapient minds. Since these entities are desperate schemers, often criminals, such possession leads to much mischief. This would have explained what happened to my mother. But my father would not hear of it. He has ever been blindly loyal to his own. He treated her with even greater deference than before; indeed, it seemed he preferred her this way, for she did have much enhanced personality and will.

"For two years my mother's machinations continued. I had been very close to her, but now I was not. There was no doubt her character had altered. She conspired almost openly to gain the crown itself. My father tried to restrain her from such treachery, but she had woven such a tangled web of deceit and promise that he had little effect. Perhaps the spirit that possessed her was fading, for there were brief moments when her old personality manifested itself and I could feel close to her again. In its desperation that spirit resorted to ever-harsher measures to obtain its objectives before it was rendered defunct by time and its alien host. Only the return to its natural body could restore it, and if that body were hidden from the knowledge of man, perhaps imprisoned in some oubliette far from the light of day, that return would be pointless until by political machination that body were freed. So the full power of the Throne of Keep might have been necessary to its purpose.

"Then my father was summoned for a conference with the King. The reason was not stated, but everyone knew it was to answer privately to a charge of treason. My father was known to be loyal to the King, so the matter was circumspectly handled. If he Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

should turn over his wife for trial, no onus would attach to him.

"My mother—I call her that, though I know she was no longer that—knew the peril she was in. She waited only until my father was safely on his way, then she departed for another castle, intent on further mischief. I wished there were something I could do to stop her and save him, but I was restricted to the castle. She had bribed and threatened our servants, and in his absence they obeyed her unwillingly but certainly.

"Then her party was ambushed, and she was captured by an outlaw band of knights with covered shields. They took her and burned her at the stake.

"When my father returned and discovered what had happened, he organized his forces for vengeance. Kade is the most powerful dukedom on the planet. Only the Duke of Qaval can marshal similar forces, and Qaval is far away. No one in this region could stand against Kade. But just before he marched, the outlaws were trapped by the Marquis of Maryland and slaughtered to a creature. Their heads were impaled on lances and set before Kastle Kade by way of apology for the act.

"I became Lady of the estate, and there was peace. It was whispered that my father, knowing of his wife's treachery, had permitted himself to be called away so that the execution could occur without his seeming sanction, and that the Marquis of Maryland had further acted to protect the reputation of Kade by preventing any possible interrogation of those who had done the King's business.

I do not think my father would lend himself to such deceit, but I do not know for sure. Perhaps it was planned without his knowledge, and he lacked the means to substantiate his suspicion, so held his tongue. But I am quite sure he would not suffer himself to be so manipulated a second time.

"A few months ago the mutterings began again. Now they said the demon had not died, but had somehow Transferred itself to a new host—to me. Perhaps this is the way of such possession: The alien aura can move only on the death of its prior host. My father never speaks now of my mother; I believe the King showed him such evidence of her treason as could not be denied, and that my father was returning to yield her up for trial when she was killed. But now he is freed from the onus of doing that, and will not admit that there was ever a shadow on the House of Kade. He knows that there is no demon in me, and he protects me more closely than he did my mother. He locks me in my room at night, that no one may even suspect me of mischief, but he does this from his great love for me. Perhaps the enemy did have cause against my mother, but they have no cause against me.

"Yet they have persisted, and when my father refused to let me be interrogated by their experts, they took up arms against him, a coalition controlled by Prince Circlet of Crown. The King did not actually commit himself. But before it came to battle, a compromise was reached: The leading Healer of the Cluster, one whose expertise could not be questioned by either faction, would be summoned to perform an exorcism in this castle, abolishing the demon. If he were successful, all would be well again. If not, I would be delivered to the King for interrogation and treatment. If that proved I was subject to demon Possession, I would be destroyed, for such potential hosts cannot be tolerated in our society."

She turned to face the Earl of Dollar. "Witness, have I omitted aught?"

Whirl spun his wheel in momentary confusion, taken aback by the sudden question. "Naught, Mistress," he said, embarrassed.

"You have spoken more than I preferred to have you know."

Herald considered this remarkable history, delivered so lucidly despite the aspect of innocence of the narrator. The young Lady of Kade was neither stupid nor ignorant!

"But I am that healer—and you are not possessed," he said.

She smiled. "I think I am possessed—by you."

Now he was on better ground. "There are perturbations of aura that occur in Transfer hosts," Herald said. "I have analyzed such cases many times. It is not an effect that is deleterious to the host, merely an involuntary signature left behind, the imprint of the visiting aura upon the host-aura. This occurs regardless of the comparative strength of the two auras, or who controls the body.

Your own aura has no such imprint. I speak as an expert in this regard: You have never been host to a foreign aura."

Psyche turned to the Sador. "How say you now, Witness?"

"I regret to say the expert is mistaken," Whirl declared.

Herald made a human shrug. "You are free to summon another exorcist. I doubt his verdict will differ."

"We are not free to do this," Whirl said. "By the covenant, your verdict governs. Yet you are mistaken. On your wheels be the Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

onus."

"In my Sphere of Slash, such a statement would constitute a challenge to laser combat," Herald said. "Still I am aware you mean no offense. How may I satisfy you as to the validity of my verdict?"

"Only remain long enough to perceive the nature of your error. Perhaps a few days will suffice."

"A few days! I intend to be home in Andromeda in hours!"

The Sador was unmoved. "Is it convenience that guides you—or truth?"

Herald sighed inwardly. This round, wheel-spinning creature had considerable force of personality! "I shall consult with the Duke."

"He will be in the trophy room," Psyche said, taking his arm like the Lady she was, and guiding him along. The Sador rolled after them unobtrusively. Herald noted that though the castle stairs were not fitted with ramps, the wheeled creature had no problem negotiating the steps. He was able to use his front and back wheels as stops while maneuvering with the side wheels. A wheel set crosswise to the direction of motion was quite effective as a brake, and Dollar was physically constructed so that two wheels were always sidewise, easy to drop into place.

The trophy room was filled. Cups, helmets, swords, lances, and other weapons lay on tables and under glass, and Shields of Arms covered the walls. The Achievements of families of far-flung Spheres were much in evidence. Even at a glance, Herald recognized several, and knew them to be authentic. This, more than anything else, demonstrated the power and galactic awareness of the Duke of Kade.

The Duke turned to face them, evincing some of the same tight mannerisms his daughter had. "Your verdict?" he asked Herald coldly.

"The Lady Kade is not now, and has never been, possessed by any foreign aura," Herald said. "I testify to this as an expert in aural matters, and will so report officially. I recommend that you verify this by obtaining an aural printout for computer analysis. My visit here has been an unnecessary expense for you."

If the Duke was gratified by this report, he did not show it. He turned to the Sador. "Witness?"

"Protest," the Earl said. "I do not question the expert's sincerity or competence; indeed, I have been extremely impressed by his power of aura. But he has examined the subject at a moment of quiescence and has not perceived the nature of the Possession.

Neither can this be verified by any machine printout. Were it an ordinary case, we should have had definitive evidence before this."

Kade placed his five-fingered blue hands behind him, linked, and paced in two small circles, forming the pattern of a lemniscate, the symbol of infinity used in mathematics and the Tarot. Unconscious symbolism, surely!

"Witness, you are aware that the expert was summoned at your behest, not mine, and was chosen by your group, not mine. I abstained entirely from the examination. Now he has ruled against you."

"I am aware. But in the performance of my duty as Witness, I must ask that the expert be retained until the Possession manifests."

"There is no Possession!" Kade shouted explosively. "He would have to remain until my daughter died of ancient age." But he calmed himself immediately, exerting the personal discipline of his station in this society. "Apology. It behooves me to see that the Witness is completely satisfied. Set us a period for Herald of Slash to remain. If he still acquits my daughter, then you must needs be satisfied."

"This depends on the time allotted," Whirl said dubiously. "I am certain that Possession will manifest, but uncertain when. It might occur within the hour, or as long as a Keep-month from now."

Herald's host spoke briefly, internally, sensing confusion. "A Keep-month is the period of revolution of our largest moon, which is ten Sol days or one point four Andromedan units."

/Thank you,/ Herald replied to him.

"Then we shall retain him for a month!" Kade was saying. "As far as I am concerned, Possession will never manifest. But a month it is—for your satisfaction."

"I cannot stay that time!" Herald protested. "I have other appointments—"

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"I shall reimburse you for your lost fees," Kade said dryly. "I believe I command sufficient resources to accommodate such a commitment."

" We shall reimburse him," Whirl said. "He remains at our behest. But he must accompany the Lady continuously, that the manifestation not be missed."

"Not at night, surely!" the Duke said.

"Night is the most likely occasion. He must be there."

Herald shook his head, aware of the possible complications this invoked. "This is not entirely a matter of fee or human propriety,"

he said. "I have commitments. Other creatures require my help. Some may die. I cannot allocate so much time to a single case."

"I shall pay their way here to see you!" the Duke cried, as if dealing with a spurious objection. Then, to Whirl: "My daughter is nubile. The presence of a man in her chamber at night would militate against her honor."

"I must be present," Whirl insisted. "I am the Witness. I assure you I have no dishonorable interest in—"

Herald suppressed a smile. "Witness, he refers to me. I am an alien creature, but I am at the moment in human form. I believe Solarians of opposite sex are not encouraged to share night facilities unless they are married."

"Precisely," Kade said. "My daughter's repute must be chaste, for potential marriage. The presence of a man in her room at night, however justified, would cast a shadow."

"Who would she marry, unless she were free of the demon?" Whirl asked. Then he quickly qualified himself. "Of the suspicion of Possession?"

"Would any of your scions be available as grooms, were she so freed?" Kade demanded.

"We do have human allies," the Sador said. "The Scion of Skot, for example. Historically the Klans of Skot and Kade were once united, serving with honor in the Second War of Energy. The young Solarian Skot may not be averse. Your daughter is mooted to be very pretty by the standards of your species, and an alliance between Klan Skot and the Dukedom of Kade would be politically—"

"Enough, Earl. You have made your point." The Duke returned to Herald. "You will remain here a month, and my daughter shall not leave your presence. The Enemy Witness shall stand chaperone. Your forthcoming appointments will be conducted to you, or granted the services of other healers, fee covered by Planet Keep. Satisfactory?"

Herald spread his human hands. "If this is so important to you—"

"It is a colossal waste of your time and my money," Kade said. "But less waste than war would be. I indulge this foolishness that the Enemy Witness be satisfied, that there be peace on our world, and the Lady Kade be untainted by any suspicion whatever."

"This is satisfactory," Whirl said reluctantly. "Please convey the nature of this compromise to the King."

"Instantly." And the Duke stalked off.

Herald turned to Psyche. "We did not ask your sentiment," he said. "Do you comprehend what this entails?"

"I wish you could stay longer," she said, with a smile of not-quite-childlike innocence.

They had a sumptuous meal of Sador steak dressed in pseudo-Terran gravy, green savor-bread, and wheelwasp wine. Herald discovered that his human host had a reasonably cultured perception of taste, and he enjoyed himself more than he had anticipated.

But afterward he had to retire to the privy to perform the Solarian function of relief that necessarily followed digestion. That would have been a messy business, had his host not been experienced.

"A client of yours has arrived," the Duke informed Herald as he emerged. "Hweeh of Weew awaits you in the library." He smiled with grim humor.

Herald remembered the entry in his schedule. Treatment for shock, and the Shield of Arms for a family within the Segment of Weew, Milky Way Galaxy. Routine. Odd that the entity should be brought here so promptly. He offered his arm in courtly fashion to Psyche, as she had to come with him, and together with Whirl they went to the library.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Around the walls of this room were shelves bearing great numbers of quaint old-fashioned Solarian printed books. Herald was sure that few contemporary Solarians could read the archaic symbols of these texts, but was just as sure that the Duke of Kade was among those who could. Education sometimes took strange forms!

A lump of gray protoplasm huddled on the floor. Herald looked at it, startled. "They mattermitted him!"

"He must be very important," Psyche said.

"Or very rich." He glanced at her. "Kastle Kade has a mattermission receiver?"

"No. He must have arrived at the castle of the King, and been shipped here by mailcoach while we ate."

Herald assessed the situation. "A Weew in shock should not be on the cold floor. I shall have to make him comfortable. Psyche—I mean, Lady Kade—"

"Psyche," she said, smiling.

"Psyche, please sit quietly in that chair. Whirl, make yourself comfortable but obscure. I do not object to an audience, but it is possible that my client will. Have either of you encountered a physical Weew before?"

Psyche shook her head no. "Only in Transfer," Whirl said.

"Then do not be alarmed at what passes. Weew are special creatures."

The two made themselves inconspicuous. Herald kneeled beside the lump. Slowly he extended his hand, touching its dull surface.

His aura focused, imbuing the creature, whose own aura was quite respectable: between 120 and 125, the uncertainty owing to distortion from shock. That deepened the mystery of why the Weew had not been Transferred. Since aura inevitably faded in a foreign host, albeit slowly, only high-intensity Kirlians could leave their natural bodies for extended periods. But this Weew's aura was well above that threshold.

Mattermission of physical bodies across galactic distances was so prohibitively expensive that it was an extreme rarity; many millions of molecular messages could be transmitted for the same price. Hweeh obviously should have been assigned to another healer, or allowed to wait until Herald could come to Segment Weew himself. Or the Weew could have been Transferred to a host on Planet Keep, as Herald himself had been. Transfer was the way to travel.

True, the host would have been thrown into Hweeh's state of shock, but Herald could have cured that as readily in a local host as in the Weew body. Shock was not a dangerous condition for a Weew; it was a natural defense mechanism. Treatment was as likely to be effective after a considerable delay as when immediate, and often the subject recovered spontaneously. So some entity in Segment Weew was inordinately anxious to have this creature functional, rapidly—and that was another signal for caution. Herald did not merely accept his fee for service blindly rendered; he acted for the benefit of his specific client. If an immediate recovery was not in Hweeh's interest, Herald would decline the case.

As the mighty aura suffused it, the lump turned brown, then red, glowing slightly. "Auditory," Herald murmured in Clustric, the common language of the civilizations of the Cluster. All sapients had to master it before indulging in interstellar commerce or receiving advanced educative degrees. "Sound. Sound. Sound. Sound."

The lump quivered. A projection developed, forming into a horn. "Sound," it honked in the same language.

Good. This was an educated creature, as he had suspected. Peon-entities hardly rated mattermission! "Thank you," Herald said. "In addition, visual. Sight. Sight."

The Weew body grew another projection. An eyeball formed in a socket on the end of a stalk. It twisted around, blinking.

"Very good," Herald continued encouragingly. "I am Herald the Healer, here to help you. Are you comfortable where you are?"

"I am Hweeh of Weew. I find the floor rigid and overly conductive of calories, with cracks."

"It is fitted stone, a poor insulator of heat. If you will form appendages, you may mount this resilient couch."

Hweeh extruded three pegs, lifted his body high, and dumped himself into the couch. "Much better," he said, letting the limbs retract and disappear into his torso.

"I am told you are in shock," Herald said. "Are you able to explain to me the nature of the occasion for your withdrawal?"

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

The eyestalk shuddered. "I do not remember. Is it a matter of importance?"

"I presume so, since your Sphere has taken considerable trouble to bring you to me."

"Perhaps it is described in the manifest." Hweeh writhed, and from his substance popped out a pellet. "Yes, here is one. Do you wish to imbibe it?"

"In this host, I am unable. Please digest it for me."

The pellet sank into Hweeh's mass. Herald knew the creature was dissolving it by means of generated acids, and absorbing the fluids it contained. The chemicals of its composition amounted to a refined Weew code. A given message could be brief or day-long. A number of other creatures of the Cluster had learned to assimilate and interpret these code-fluids, but very few Solarians had mastered this particular talent.

@@@@@, Hweeh said.

"I do not comprehend the Weew language in this host," Herald said. "Can you provide a Clustric translation? It need not be exact."

"Sorry. I can as readily provide a Quotes translation, if you wish. You appear to be in a Quote host."

So the Weew knew Solarian! He was really educated! "That would be excellent, Hweeh."

"I present the manifest," Hweeh said in quite passable Solarian Quotes. "Bearer is Hweeh of Planet Swees, Sphere Rweer, Segment Weew, Galaxy Milky Way. Hweeh is engaged in the occupation of research astronomy, specializing in Fringe-Cluster phenomena.

He is the Segment's finest practitioner of this discipline. He was found in shock amid the tools of his research. The final words recorded by his research computer were @The Space Amoeba is—@"

Hweeh's aura fluctuated wildly as he stopped reading. Herald whipped his hand out to touch the Weew's flushed flesh, but he was too late; the creature had gone into secondary shock.

"Damn!" Herald swore in Solarian idiom. "I have compounded his problem." The horn and eyeball sagged back into the graying mass. "I am sorry," Herald said, though he knew the creature could no longer hear him. But what counted was the healing power of his aura, softening the wound, causing the flesh to relax. "Rest, sleep, recuperate, estivate. I will be with you anon."

Only when he was sure Hweeh was resting quietly did Herald remove his hand. "I blundered. I should have anticipated that the manifest was not for his own perception."

He looked about. "You may speak now. The Weew has dissolved his ear; he cannot hear you."

"What is this 'Space Amoeba'?" Psyche inquired immediately.

"This I must now ascertain. I believe I have prevented him from suffering actual regression, but before I animate him again I must have more information. Does this library contain references on astronomy?"

"Oh, yes!" she said eagerly. "Kastle Kade has the best library on the planet, except for the King's royal archives." She tripped across the room to the far wall and touched a book. At once a holograph formed in a readout globe in the corner. Herald had not even noticed this before, or realized that these books were holo-keyed; this local culture was not quite as archaic as he had assumed.

The image showed the Milky Way Galaxy in all its splendor. Quickly the three-dimensional image expanded, the outer coils of the Galaxy moving out of view. The stars of Segment Etamin appeared—bright blue Rigel, red Betelgeuse, the three jewels of Orion's Belt, where the notorious Melody of Mintaka had lived. And of course Sador, and Etamin itself, nucleus of the Segment. Sol hardly showed, being a comparatively dim star, but in a geography of historical power, Sol would have loomed like a late supernova. Flint of Outworld had been a Solarian, subverting the nameless Slash sent to nullify him, and finally marrying her after both had died in the Hyades. Flint had put Etamin on the Cluster map and brought his species a notoriety that was largely undeserved. Savior of the Milky Way—as though the accident of sudden parity of Ancient science had had nothing to do with it! Thereafter, Solarians and Polarians had infiltrated the governing councils of Galaxy Milky Way, especially after the Second War of Energy. It was the continuing machinations of Solarian oppression that were felt most keenly by the downtrodden Spheres of Galaxy Andromeda.

That was one reason the Solarians were the butt of thinly veiled Andromedan humor, the pretense that all creatures of Sol were basically barbarians, even though that concept was one or two thousand years out of date. But this was not his concern for the moment.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"Look up the term 'Space Amoeba,' " Herald said. She adjusted the main control, and a new picture formed in the globe. The narrator's voice said: "Space Amoeba: a formation of Fringe-Cluster matter whose specific nature is conjectural. Emanating from a postulated point source, dust has spread out in a restricted pattern over the course of several decades to form a partially opaque cloud approximately one hundred light-years—thirty parsecs—in diameter. Uncertainties of measurement have made it suffer seemingly protein shifts of structure, from which its name derives; even its projected expansion is questioned by some authorities as its shape is not typical of the shell-remnants of supernovas. Limited radiospectrography suggests it is composed of solid particles admixed with diffuse gases. Formation is sparse, appearing only on the most specific and recent surveys. No evidence of nova activity in that region. Further definition must await direct investigation."

"Just the kind of thing a good research astronomer should be interested in," Psyche remarked. "It certainly seems obscure enough."

Herald peered at the vague image in the globe. It was hardly more than a smear, apparently a tenuous obfuscation of background galaxies. There was obviously not much to it, but the enhancement of its substance provided by the holograph retouch artist did make it seem to have branching lines of movement extending from the nucleus, like the fluxes of a living cell. So it had been dubbed the Space Amoeba, gaining an allure and mystery that hardly seemed justified by the facts.

"Where is it?" he asked.

Psyche checked. "Just off Furnace," she announced.

Furnace! But immediately he caught himself. His forced fiancée could have nothing to do with this. He could not afford to let subjective personal matters interfere with his job. He had to understand the astronomy, the research implications. What was there in the Amoeba that had sent this specialist into shock? Why should Segment Weew think it so urgent that Hweeh be healed rapidly?

Obviously they took the matter seriously.

"Are there any entities of Weew here on Keep?" Herald inquired aloud.

"There surely are, in Transfer," Whirl replied.

"I would like to interview a Weew scientist or other learned entity, if this can be arranged."

"It can be arranged," Psyche said happily. She was making herself useful, and it illuminated her. She crossed the room again, her tresses drawing back prettily as she traveled. There was something about the human form, at least as it was expressed by the nascently mature female, that had a peculiar appeal.

She spoke into a decorative communicator, styled to resemble a two-thousand-year-old Solarian vidphone. "Call to educated scientist of Weew, from Herald the Healer, Kastle Kade."

There was a silence of several seconds. Then the form of a Sador sapient appeared in the screen. Its wheel spun.

"Swees of Weew, in Transfer, vocation logistic mathematician retired, avocation specialty Bhyo literature of pre-Sphere century.

Segment doctorates in each subject. Will the Healer converse with me?"

Herald made a silent human whistle. When he asked for an educated Weew, that was exactly what he got!

"I am gratified that an entity of your qualifications has chosen to respond. Permit me to explain that I am—"

"It is well known that the greatest Healer of the Cluster is visiting our planet to resolve the alleged Possession of the heiress of Kade, and that he also specializes in heraldic definition." For a moment the Shield of Arms of the family of Swees of Weew flashed on the screen. "It is my privilege to assist you without the burden of further explanation on your part."

"This is generous," Herald said, slightly miffed by the evident publicity his effort had received. He did not regard himself as such a celebrity! "This does not concern the heiress of Kade, but a client of your own Segment. Could you tell me whether a specialist in astronomy would be subject to shock merely by what he observed in research?"

"Oh, is Hweeh there already?"

"You know about that too?" Herald asked, astonished.

"He hails from the planet I was named after, Swees, so naturally I am interested. But to answer your substantive question: No, such an entity would hardly be shocked in that manner. Hweeh is our leading research astronomer, noted for a number of conceptual breakthroughs. I have had occasion to review certain backup mathematics in connection with his work in the past, and regard him as a first-class mind. I understand he is high-Kirlian; perhaps that accounts for his abilities."

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"Were that the case, I would be a genius-entity," Herald said. "Alas, I am not. Would Hweeh be likely to be shocked by mere reference to the single term @Space Amoeba@?"

"Ah, you render it in Weew inflection! I am not conversant with that term, but I hardly think so. The only thing that could shock a research astronomer would be a concept of such surprise and magnitude as to represent a Galactic threat. But I hardly think such a thing is likely to occur in that specialty."

Galactic threat... "But if such a threat should exist, why would he not simply advise his Segment government, or the Galactic Council?"

Swees paused, his wheel spinning reflectively. "I really do not know. I conjecture that the threat might be so immediate or pervasive as to be incapable of resolution. That, at least, is what would send me into shock. But surely he could have discovered no threat that has not existed for many centuries. No, I rather think that some personal factor is in operation. If he had monetary or romantic problems—"

"Then why should his Segment hasten to mend him, even undertaking the expense of mattermission?"

Swees reflected again. "An intriguing riddle that offers no immediate answer. Perhaps, then, there is a threat, and only his insight can clarify its nature. Is this Space Amoeba by chance a living entity? Perhaps a viral mutation—"

"I doubt it," Herald said. "It is a diffuse particle-and-gas formation in deep space beyond Furnace, photographed decades ago. He was studying it when he went into shock, and its mere mention returns him to that state."

"Then I think it would be wise to ascertain whatever he knows, rapidly," Swees said. "Perhaps it is a false alarm, but an astronomer of his repute certainly should know his concepts! I cannot imagine what threat he sees, but I am not versed in his specialty. Perhaps this is just as well, for if I understood the exact concept I also might go into shock. Shall I call you if I have further insight?"

"Please do," Herald said. "I appreciate your discussion. I shall be here for a local month."

"It has been a pleasure." Swees faded out.

Herald turned to Whirl and Psyche. "You have necessarily witnessed my treatment of another client. I request that you not discuss this matter with others. I must allow Hweeh to rest now, but there will be another session."

"It is fascinating!" Psyche said. "Both the mystery and your mode of treatment. You do not merely lay on hands, you study your case like any doctor. You are such a competent, entity. I hardly feel worthy of your attention."

"There may be a parallel between the two cases," the Sador remarked.

"Oh, do you think the Weew is possessed too?" Psyche asked brightly. "Should he be burned at the stake?"

"Your irony is painful to me, Lady, as you intend," Whirl said gravely. "Nevertheless, I reply: Possession might most readily account for his condition."

"He is not possessed," Herald said. "He has suffered conceptual shock, and I am now satisfied that his case warrants my attention.

The two cases are parallel, in the mystery surrounding them and in the belief by others that a serious threat exists whose focus is in these entities."

"I wrong you, Earl," Psyche said contritely. "I apologize and beg forgiveness. There is a parallel."

"Forgiven, gracious Lady," Whirl said. "We are in an unkind situation."

Perceiving that apology by the Lady, Herald felt a brief tingle of emotion. He tried to analyze it, but it faded. The subject of possible execution had treated the Enemy Witness with momentary courtesy; it was a nicety of manner, of no other significance.

"Shall we return to the Duke?" he inquired.

In the evening Herald was shown to Psyche's suite, along with Whirl.

"I have taken the liberty of installing an extra bed, and of curtaining off my daughter's bed," the Duke said grimly. "The Witness, who is nonhuman, may station himself by the door, in this way being assured that no one enters or departs alone, without himself causing impropriety. He may observe my daughter as he wishes, to verify that no 'Possession' occurs. Are these arrangements Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

satisfactory?"

"Quite," Whirl said.

"You may take turns using the sanitary facilities," the Duke continued. "They have been modified to accommodate the Sador as well as the Solarian form. The servants will appear promptly on, and only on, signal."

"I have no complaint," Herald said.

Kade marched out, his suppressed ire manifest in his gait.

"I'm glad you're here," Psyche confided. "It gets so lonely. At least Mother used to talk to me—when she was my mother."

Herald found the press-line on his tunic and tore it open. Psyche made a little shriek and averted her gaze. "Oh, I forget about the clothing convention among Solarians," Herald said. "Apology. Most Cluster sapients, including my own species, do not employ decorative habiliment."

"Solarians do change apparel for sleep," Whirl explained. "But they normally do this in privacy. The sanitary chamber may be used."

"Thank you," Herald said. "I regret my ignorance of night custom. Normally I do not remain so long in a single host, and I neglected to survey the host-mind for such details. May I use the chamber now?"

"Please do," Psyche said, concealing herself behind her curtain, though she remained fully clothed.

Herald was determined to handle the matter on his own this time, instead of drawing on the resources of his host. He had to rehearse all his prior experience in humanoid functions to figure out how to avail himself of the sanitary facilities, but in due course he succeeded, and he emerged clean, in pajamas and with new confidence. Hereafter he would be more competent!

Psyche then went demurely into the chamber, and Herald paused to question the Sador. "Most species improve with exertion. Is this true of Solarians?"

"It is true," the Witness said. "When human creatures make ready for combat, they perform exercises, and soon their muscle tone improves and they become able to achieve greater feats."

"What feats are most useful to them?"

"The ability to run, to move rapidly by foot, seems to be chief among these. Also to carry heavy burdens, and to be able to strike hard and accurately with the hands, or with weapons controlled by the hands."

"So if I should run around this room and carry heavy objects, my physical condition will improve," Herald said.

"That is my understanding."

"Thank you. Witness." Herald picked up a solid chair and lumbered in a circle around the room. Very soon the weight of the chair seemed to become greater, and his feet were coming down hard on the floor. He was puffing air in and out of his lungs with uncomfortable force, a side effect he had not anticipated. But he kept on going.

"What are you trying to do?" his host demanded in his brain, alarmed.

/I am improving this body,/ Herald replied. /If I am to remain in it for ten days, I want it fit./

"Brother!" the host exclaimed. "A fitness freak!"

/You have objection?/

"No, actually I don't. I always figured I should exercise more. But it's uncomfortable, and if it's okay with you, I'll just bug out for the duration."

Meaning: The host would disassociate his consciousness from the activities of the body, not returning unless specifically called.

That way he would experience none of the sensations Herald brought about. That was a good idea. /Very well, host. Bug out. Sweet dreams./ And a presence faded. There really wasn't anywhere the host-mind could go except to sleep, but the effect was similar to departure.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Now Herald was staggering, as the muscles refused to respond fully. This was not the fault of the absent host-mind, but a simple function of fatigue. His arms were sending messages of discomfort bordering on pain to his human brain. He was in danger of lurching into a wall, and his breath was rasping through his mouth noisily. He wished he could bug out too. But he had suspected that exercise would not be easy.

Psyche emerged from the sanitary chamber, fresh and clean and sweet-smelling in her slender nightie. It resembled her tunic but was more sheer, making her look thinner somehow, though actually she possessed those feminine attributes that made her, as her father put it, nubile. Her human mouth opened in alarm, and her small mammalian bosom heaved. "Herald! What's the matter?"

Herald, rounding a turn, tried to respond. But he lost his balance and crashed into the wall, dropping the chair. Psyche rushed to help him. "Oh, you're hurt!" she cried.

But her strength was insufficient to support him. Herald slid to the floor, still panting too vigorously to speak intelligibly, and she was carried down with him. She tried to extricate her arm, but succeeded mainly in tearing open his pajama shirt. She leaned over him, her nightie twisted about, falling open at the top. "Where do you hurt? What can I do?" she cried with touching concern.

The bedroom door crashed open. The Duke of Kade stood there, sword drawn. Suddenly Herald knew he was in trouble.

"And I thought it was an enemy raid," Kade said with infinite disgust. "Stand, miscreant, that I may run you through."

But the Sador interposed himself between them, one side wheel spinning so rapidly it started to whine. He was less than half the height of the man, but that wheel faced the Duke, and it looked dangerous. "Hold, Kade, lest you violate the covenant without cause!"

The Duke paused, but his sword did not lower. "Earl, I have not before seen you as a creature of treachery."

"Then heed the truth," Whirl said. "Herald was exercising his host-body, and fell. The Lady sought to lift him, and could not. Both are innocent of malice or connivance."

"This is beyond belief," Kade said savagely. "Must I add your body to that of the molester?"

The molester! Herald saw that the Duke was serious, having jumped to a conclusion, and would not be swayed by reason. What could he say, before getting stabbed by that ill-justified sword? Was this the horror Smallbore had foreseen?

"Father!" Psyche screamed, finally extricating herself. "If the Witness spoke not the truth, he had but to stand aside in silence and let you break the covenant. Then would I be burned, and you with no recourse."

Kade's eyes swiveled to her. " You, my child—you vouch for the word of the Witness?"

"It needs no vouching," she said, drawing herself up into a pitiful yet somehow effective formality, facing her father. "Yet I do vouch. I would not have the honor of three honorable creatures sullied on my account. No one molested me, no one wronged you, no treachery occurred. The Witness has borne good witness."

Still Kade stood in silence, the point of his sword covering Herald with dismaying accuracy.

"Does the lord who would not believe evil of his wife, now refuse to believe good of his daughter?" Whirl demanded.

The Duke's muscles convulsed. His sword shook as sudden black rage transformed his features. In that instant he was a complete animal, body tensed for savage action, teeth bared.

Then the Sador's meaning penetrated: not an insult, but a plea for sanity. Herald knew then that whatever had caused the dissolution of the once-great Sphere of Sador, it had not been lack of courage or wit. Whirl had struck with words, far more accurately and effectively than would have been possible with any physical weapon.

Abruptly Kade sheathed his deadly sword. "My daughter I must believe. I apologize to you, Witness, and to you, Healer."

"Accepted," the Earl of Dollar said immediately, and his fighting wheel was stilled.

"Accepted!" Herald gasped.

Now the Duke focused on Herald. "If exercise you must, I shall instruct you in the techniques in the morning."

"Thank you," Herald said, hauling himself to his feet. But the Duke was already departing. He never lingered long for recriminations or explanations.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

They retired without further episode, and all was quiet. But before he slept Herald turned one thought over in his mind. Why hadn't Whirl, the Enemy Witness, simply stood aside and allowed the Duke of Kade in the heat of his misunderstanding to violate the covenant by killing Herald? Wouldn't that have served the purposes of the enemy very handily?

He could find only one answer: Whirl was an honest entity who sincerely believed in the case he had made, that the Lady Kade was intermittently possessed, and that this would in time be proven. Whirl wanted the truth to be known, just as the Duke wanted the enemy to be satisfied. Both were honorable entities. Neither would cheat. And that only heightened the dilemma, for both could not be right.

Child of Pleasure

& All is ready? &

X Research units report no political resistance. Survey shows our action units capable of destroying all sapient cultures with minimum damage to environment within three cycles. X

0 Action units are prepared to meet this deadline. 0

& It is necessary to review purpose. &

X What point? It will only delay our mission. X

0 In fact, may imperil our mission. More time provides the enemy opportunity to formulate resistance. There are a number of ancient sites in this Cluster remaining operative, and should their technology be employed against us— 0

& Error. You have permitted the means to become the end. Herein lies potential disaster. Do you not perceive why? & X Is there some trap we have not properly researched that could reverse the outcome? X

0 Some enemy military capacity we have underestimated? A secret weapon? 0

& Pay attention. There is a trap, and there is an enemy—but both are within our own formation. You have lost perception of our actual mission. It is not to overwhelm alien species or to seek new enemies or to promote higher technology; those Cluster species are very like ourselves. Only our science makes us superior, only our power. We cull the Cluster because we have a mission that transcends the personal convenience of ourselves and other species; we accomplish this because we have stability and perseverance others cannot match. But this power must not be abused, lest we destroy what we labor so diligently to promote. Do you remember what that is? &

X 0 Yes. 0 X

& State it. &

X 0 Soul sapience. 0 X

& Therefore we must be certain to identify all potentially soul-sapient species and salvage them. Since this is a very subtle quality in its incipient stage, we must proceed with utmost caution. Suppose we should discover that one of the myriad weed-species we have culled was the potential soul sapient? &

X 0 Horror! 0 X

& Precisely. Reverify your findings, itemizing each culture by its potential. Pay special attention to subspecies, such as those £ of Sphere Dash, Andromeda; their gross mass makes other forms of empire unpractical for them, encouraging soul sapience. It may be this potential that triggered the site malfunction. When you are satisfied, we shall move. & X It would be better to pick up more samples for direct physical examination. X

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

& No. Piecemeal mattermission of samples would be prohibitively expensive of energy, compromising our sterilization potential.

Only if the signs are threshold-positive will we take physical samples. & In the morning Herald found his muscles radiating pain. He had overextended them, and taken bruises. But the Duke insisted on drilling him in a formal series of calisthenics called squat-jumps, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and running-in-place. "This program will invigorate the entire body," Kade assured him.

Invigorate? At the end of it, Herald felt even worse than before. But at least he knew how to exercise without crashing into a wall or bringing a girl to the floor.

After breakfast—another sumptuous repast involving the cooked eggs of wheelbirds, diskcakes formed from ground grain, and sweet syrup derived from the digestive tracts of insects—Herald, Psyche, and Whirl settled themselves in the room assigned to Hweeh of Weew, who had become another house guest.

Herald put his hand on the gray mass. "Sound. Sound. Sound. Sound," he murmured, concentrating. Then, as the ear/speaker horn appeared: "Sight. Sight."

When Hweeh was ready, Herald continued: "I am Herald the Healer. I interviewed you yesterday. We were interrupted. I hope you are comfortable."

Hweeh quivered, testing for comfort. He was now in a large wooden bowl that the Duke's obliging household staff had provided.

"Yes, Healer. Most comfortable."

"I am here to treat you for shock. You are a most important research astronomer, and your Segment wants you back in service. I fear they are overworking you, causing you to suffer breakdown."

"By no means!" the Weew responded forcefully. "I am devoted to my work."

"Even though it takes you away from your family?"

I have no family. Only my work. Without my research slides and tables, I would have no life at all. I am eager to return."

So he was a creature dedicated to his profession, as Herald was to his own. Herald found himself liking this Weew.

"I am eager to have you return, Hweeh. But it is not enough merely to rouse you from shock; we must abate the cause of it. It seems that some facet of your research sent you into shock, and it is necessary that we nullify this before you are exposed to it again."

"Nothing in my research could shock me! What harm or horror can there be in material that has been on record for decades or even centuries or millennia?"

"I took the liberty of consulting with an entity of your Segment, Swees of Weew, a logistic mathematician now retired. He said much the same."

"Oh, yes, the scholar named after my home planet. I had him verify certain of my data once. A fine mind! I must chat with him some time."

"So it seems we have a mystery here that neither my kind nor your kind fathoms. Perhaps you saw something in your telescope—"

Hweeh made a shudder of mirth. "Sir, I use no telescope! I am a research astronomer. I would not know even how to turn on a living telescope, or how to aim it. And how could I see anything new? The images I might see in a scope would have taken a million years to reach me. My research holographs, made by survey teams scattered throughout the Cluster, and buttressed by periodic information from the Net, are mattermitted to my library. They are far more current than any direct view could be."

"So you are assured that nothing you might perceive through your research could shock you?"

Hweeh changed color briefly. "Oh, I would not make so encompassing a statement as that! Were I to perceive a Cluster-sized black hole developing, its advancing edge within a light-year of the Milky Way—"

"In that event, we would all go into shock, not to mention tidal disassembly and eventual compression into nothingness!" Herald said. "But nothing less than that...?"

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"Well, even a Galaxy-sized black hole, or a Segment-sized one, if it were close enough...."

"Yes, I daresay it would be an unnerving thing to reside adjacent to even the smallest, cutest black hole! In this you differ from no other sapient species. Yet you did go into shock. Is it likely that you did in fact perceive such a threat?"

"Hardly! Black holes do not manifest so abruptly in that manner. Few natural events do. Are you sure I was in shock? I might merely have been meditating."

"I am sure, sir," Herald said gravely.

"You will permit me the smallest, cutest skepticism?"

Herald smiled. A lively mind here, not without humor. Certainly not paranoid or confused.

Whirl of Dollar made a quiet buzzing signal. Herald glanced at him. "What is it, Witness?"

"I do not wish to interpose as this is not my business. But I am reminded of my prior conjecture, that there may be a parallel that could offer enlightenment. Not Possession, precisely, but—"

"Who is this?" Hweeh inquired.

"I interview you in a special circumstance," Herald explained. "It is necessary that I keep the company of two other entities. I regret this infringement of your privacy."

"No objection. I have no guilty secrets, unfortunately."

Herald had to smile again. "This is Whirl of Sador, the Earl of Dollar, here to witness my performance on Planet Keep. In the other chair is the Lady Psyche of Kade, another client. They will respect your confidence."

"What is this parallel the Sador sees?"

"You may answer him, Witness," Herald said.

"It is that in each case the subject is not aware of the manifestation, or chooses not to believe in it. The Lady Kade is ignorant of the actuality of our case against her, and the astronomer of Weew is not aware that he goes into shock at the mere utterance of—"

"Hold!" Herald cried.

"A certain phrase," Whirl concluded without pause. Psyche tittered.

"Do I do this?" Hweeh inquired, interested. "What is this phrase?"

"If he told you, you'd zonk out again," Psyche said.

"This has happened in your presence?"

"Yesterday," she assured him.

"I remember yesterday. I thought it was but a moment ago, and wondered why the interruption. And you also suffer a malady of this nature?"

"They say I am possessed," she said. "That an alien aura inhabits me irregularly. That is why the Healer came."

"Yes, I detect the parallel," Hweeh said. "I can appreciate your skepticism, since what is described is not the manner of hostaging.

It cannot be intermittent, unless there is Transfer apparatus in the vicinity. May I touch you, Lady?"

She glanced inquiringly at Herald, who was intrigued by this developing interaction between his clients. There seemed to be no harm in it, however. He nodded.

"Certainly," Psyche said. She rose gracefully and crossed to the Weew, extending her hand and resting it lightly on his surface.

"Lady, you are not possessed," Hweeh assured her. "My aura is only half that of the Healer, but it is five times yours. I question strongly whether you have ever been host to a foreign aura."

Herald maintained a discreet silence in the face of this confirmation of his diagnosis. It took an entity of high aura to appreciate the certainty of such a conclusion. There was really scant chance of error. The Witness would have to wheel on this!

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Sure enough, Whirl rolled forward. "May I touch you each in turn?"

"Certainly." "Yes." Hweeh and Psyche said together.

The Sador extended a wheel to contact the Weew first. "You do have a very strong aura, much more intense than mine. Then he touched Psyche. "But yours is less than mine. I agree that there is no Possession now, and regret that my aural expertise is not sufficient to verify past status. But my belief, and that of those whose interests I represent, is based on other criteria. I retain my position."

"Unfortunate that the Possession cannot be tested as readily as the shock-phase," Hweeh said. "There is much we have yet to learn about each. May I converse with the Lady?"

"If the Lady accedes," Herald said. "I admit to being frustrated in both cases at the moment. If the two of you do not feel your respective privacies are being infringed upon, speak of what you will. It should do no harm."

Psyche brought over her chair and sat beside Hweeh, resting her hand on him again. "This is very interesting," she said. "I have not had so much diversion and good feeling in two years. I never met a physical Weew before."

"I have perhaps been too much absorbed in my work," Hweeh replied. "I had forgotten how pleasant the touch of an innocent young entity could be. Tell me about yourself, if you will, and if you also will, incorporate in subtle fashion reference to the phrase that allegedly sends me into shock. Perhaps we can assist each other."

Herald glanced at Whirl, and caught the glint of the vanes of his communication wheel angled at him. Could the two subjects successfully interrogate each other?

"There is not much to say," Psyche said. "I have never left the planet of Keep, and seldom even Kastle Kade, since the affliction of my mother. Much of my experience has been imaginative. Why even my name means 'Soul'—but surely that would not interest an astronomer."

"Quite opposite, Lady. Your name unites you to my profession most directly, and tells me much about you."

Her eyes widened in one of her cute naive mannerisms. "Really? How so?"

"Modern astronomy is the study and theory of the manifestation of great space," Hweeh said. Again Herald glanced at Whirl, and again met the angled glint of acknowledgement. The Weew had used the term "Space" himself without suffering ill effect. "But research astronomy has a broader base. It also considers the reactions of sapient entities to views of space in past times. Thus I review the mythology of space as well as its geology."

"The geology of space!" Psyche said. "What a nice concept!"

"Indeed yes; this is one of the many fascinations of my work," Hweeh agreed. "But the mythology is as important, for it provides insights into the nature of the conceptualizations of many creatures. Your own kind, the Solarians, have a very rich astronomical symbolism, for example. The brighter stars were in your prehistory considered to be manifestations of divine entities, gods and goddesses, who lived and died in heroic scale. One of your Sol-system planets, Venus, seemed like a bright star to your primitives, and was called the Goddess of Beauty. One of her children was Cupid, the God of Love, and Cupid married Psyche, a mortal girl who must have been very like you. So you see, I know you through my studies."

"I am to marry Cupid?" she asked in wonder. "The God of Love?"

"Your namesake did. For you, perhaps it will be an extremely lovable man. Yet the love of Cupid and Psyche was not without peril."

"Oh, tell me!" she cried, clapping her hands girlishly.

"With pleasure. Seldom do I discover so willing an audience for technical matters in my specialty. Psyche was the daughter of a king, and so lovely that she outshone Venus herself. This made Venus jealous, for the emotions of the gods reflected those of their creators. She sent her son, Cupid, to pierce the breast of Psyche with his arrow of love, and make her love the most vile and miserable creature available. This was the goddess's way of punishing the mortal girl whose only fault was beauty. But when Cupid saw Psyche, he was as it were scratched by his own arrow and stricken by love himself.

"Psyche's mortal family knew nothing of this. But somehow no offers for her hand in marriage were made. When the king consulted an oracle to determine whom his daughter should marry, he was told—"

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"The Scion of Skot?" Psyche inquired with a twinkle.

But Hweeh was deep in his narrative and did not heed the interjection. "He was told to dress her in clothing of mourning and leave her on a mountain, where a fierce winged serpent would claim her for his bride. So with much regret the king did this. But Psyche was transported from the mountain to a pleasant valley where there was a magnificent palace. Here invisible servants catered to her every whim. But at night when she went to her bridal bed, it was dark and she could not see her husband at all. He did not feel like a winged snake—not in his entirety, at any rate—but as he departed before dawn, she could not be sure."

"But it was Cupid!" Psyche said. "Not a dragon, not a monster, not an amoeba, but the God of Love!"

"Yes," Hweeh agreed. "It—she—@@@@—" He slumped.

Herald launched himself at the bowl, trying to bring his aura into play before the Weew faded out, but he was too late.

"I did what he asked—and it sent him back into shock," Psyche said, the fingers of one hand touching her mouth. "I'm sorry."

"You did very well," Herald assured her. "You caught us all by surprise. I did not realize what you had said until he reacted. Now we know that it is the single word 'amoeba' that sets him off. That's progress."

"But will he be hurt?"

"No, this merely delays us again. I think it was inevitable. And we are learning. His mind is whole; it is only this one thing that knocks him out. When he wakes, he has sealed it off again, until a direct reference sends him back into shock. A highly specific complaint."

"What does it mean?" Psyche asked.

"I wish I knew," Herald admitted. "It is hard to avoid the suspicion that we are all in deadly danger from the Space Amoeba. Yet this is hardly credible."

"I do love a mystery!" Psyche said. "I used to wish Kastle Kade had a ghost or something."

"It has one," Whirl said.

She shrugged that off. "I hope I can hear the rest of the story of my name."

"You could look it up in one of your references," Herald pointed out. "An excellent library like the one you have should certainly have—"

"No, that would not be fair. It is his story."

Herald shrugged at this new girlishness. They left the room.

In the afternoon the Duke took them on a hunt. "One of the animals has gone berserk," he explained. "It has ravaged the demesnes of the Baron of Magnet, my vassal, and killed several of his servitors. It behooves me to rid my environs of this menace. I caution you not to seek participatory action, as the beast is imbued with Transfer aura and is dangerous."

One of the prisoners of Keep, Herald realized, thus an animal with sapient cunning and criminal intent. Just the thing to lend adventure to this situation! Probably the nobles of the planet valued such prey, as it justified their position. If there were never any crises, there might cease to be any need for this feudal society and its warrior class.

They mounted steeds. The upper wheels of the Sador horses were shaped into seats, with holes for human legs, and the outer rim served as a rail to contain the upper body and provide handholds.

Psyche looked very refined in her riding habit, with its red jacket and white tight trousers. Her legs showed beneath the saddle wheel, extremely well formed. Herald was beginning to realize how much a simple tunic masked! Her fair hair was tied back in the fashion called a ponytail, changing the lines of her head and face. Like the mythological princess: lovely.

Whirl of Dollar was braced in his circular saddle by his own projecting wheels, and seemed to be quite stable. At first the sight of a six-wheeled creature astride a six-wheeled creature seemed odd to Herald but he quickly acclimatized. It was really no stranger than one quadruped astride another, which was how it had been on Planet Earth.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

The Duke and his men-at-arms carried lances—long poles with guards at the rear to protect the hands, and sharp points at the forward ends. They also had shields and wore light armor and helmets. This was a truly medieval expedition, with all its pomp and fanfare. There was even a servitor honking periodically on a musical horn.

Each shield, of course, bore its heraldic device, and this enabled Herald to recognize the participants instantly, much better than by face or form. The ramifications of Galactic intercourse had provided legitimacy for an extraordinary number of Achievements, so that even the lowliest servitors of Kastle Kade bore the proud Arms of distant planets.

They boarded the ferry and crossed the lake. The craft was bulky and slow, but it carried the full party of twenty mounted knights.

Water reptiles swam close, pacing the ferry: huge, long, toothy, sinuous things.

The Duke noted Herald's interest. "We keep Lake Donny stocked with the finest Solarian alligators, so that it shall not be forded or swum."

"You imported reptiles from Sphere Sol?" A colossal expense!

"A few reptile eggs were shipped by freezer ship with our ancestors a thousand years ago. We took good care of those eggs." The Duke looked out over the water, counting snouts. "Aren't they beautiful!"

"Um," Herald agreed faintly. Now he knew why no one swam in the beautiful lake!

The ferry's powerplant was intriguing yet practical: A dozen large Sador animals sat in harnesses around the sides, paddles affixed to their wheels. They were like so many rotary motors, propelling the craft vigorously forward. The paddles were designed so that the toothy reptiles could not get at the tender portions of the animals.

The party debarked at the North Landing, where the North Road wended its way through the deep forest west toward other castles of Keep. But a branch road coursed south around the west shore of the lake, toward the dam. They took this branch, and wheeled forth on the packed-dirt highway. The wheels of the horses propelled them with greater speed and endurance than sapient bodies could produce, and Herald clung to his saddle wheel tightly. The wind of motion whipped through his human hair, rapidly tugging it into disarray; but Psyche's ponytail remained distressingly neat.

The scenery was refreshing after a day shut up in the castle. The trees of Keep were Sadorian, probably seeded several thousand years before when Sphere Sador first colonized it. They were monstrous barrels with wheels projecting irregularly, their flat spokes angled to catch the sunlight. As the shadows changed, the wheels turned to maintain optimum position. But the lesser vegetation differed. There were fields of Sol-style grasses, probably imported to halt soil erosion and to provide the grains so beloved of Solarians. This was very much a planet of compromise: Sador and Sol. At leisure, be would have to review local history and discover exactly how this had come about. There must have been at least two Terraforming operations following several Sadorforming stages, as alien species of vegetation normally did not take readily to the soils and microbes and light of a local environment.

There were animals, too. Small wheeled things scooted off the road and hid in the grass, and in the distance were grazing herds of cattle, cutting swaths through the grass with their bottom wheels and sucking up the fragments. Their top wheels were used to blow away flies. Flies, of course, accompanied cattle wherever they went, and there were as many species of flies as there were of other creatures. Some flies had wings, some jets, some magnetism—but they were always a similar nuisance. Herald remembered the laser-flies of his homeworld in Sphere Slash with no particular fondness. And there were birds, hovering on their heli-wheels, snapping up these flies. No matter how mixed, the ecology was always in balance.

Almost halfway around Lake Danny they diverged from the road, going up a steep gravel rut into the western ridge of mountains.

Herald clung to his saddle-rail with both hands as his body tilted back and back; the incline was such he feared his mount would fall over backwards. But the other members of the party seemed unconcerned, and he knew the wheelers were extremely stable, so he concealed his alarm.

Up and up they went. At last the path leveled off and he glanced back. There, in the center of the lake, was Kastle Kade, marvelously scenic with its walls and embrasures and turrets and the flag of Kade flying from the pinnacle. But he shuddered at the narrow, excruciatingly steep path down to the water.

They proceeded along a ridge. It was cool up here, and a brisk breeze tugged at him, making him shiver for more than one reason.

He had never spent much time in the heights; his species of Slash rolled along on disks, and a long slope could be deadly. Here the path dropped away steeply on either side, and the barrel-trees crowded in close. There was really no danger of a long fall here, as any creature rolling down would soon fetch up against a tree trunk, but still it seemed precarious.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

Psyche drew abreast of him. There was just room for two horses on the path, no more. "This is the Ridge Road," she explained as her bright hair-tail whipped first one way and then another in the wind, as if struggling to be free. "Our cattle use it to get to the high pasture."

"Oh," Herald said in human idiom, for what that was worth. He noticed how the wind flattened her jacket against her front, making her twin young breasts stand out attractively. In his natural body, Herald would never have been concerned about such a detail. But in Transfer the standards of the host became, in large part, the standards of the Transferee, and this intensified with the passage of time. As a Slash he would have looked for precise lasers and clean disks in a female; as a human—well, Psyche was something special, despite her youth. Or perhaps because of it. The blooming of Solarian females seemed transitory, so that by middle age they had lost much of their sexual appeal. Certainly the older females of the Kastle Kade staff illustrated this condition; there was little about them to tempt any man in this respect. But a girl like Psyche....

In due course the path broadened into the high pasture, a generally cleared slope with a broad spread of tall Solarian grasses and multicolored flowers. Beyond it was a small castle: residence of the Baron Magnet.

The party drew up to this edifice, and were met outside it by a modest hunting group. One horse detached itself and rolled up. In its saddle rested a creature perfectly designed for it: a metallic sphere whose Shield of Arms was painted right on its surface. An entity from Sphere Magnet, of course, whose sapients had achieved prominence in the Second War of Energy. It moved and acted by using magnetic attractive and repulsive forces. Since Keep was not a high-metal planet, the Baron would be virtually helpless if thrown from the saddle. But of course his type was extremely tough, being metallic, and he had his retainers to assist him.

"Greeting, my Liege," the Baron said via a speaker set in his saddle. His magnetic waves of communication were not audible to human perceptions, of course.

"Greeting, Baron," the Duke replied. "Be introduced here to my party: the Lady Kade, my daughter"—Psyche nodded politely—"Herald the Healer of Andromeda"—Herald emulated the nod—"the Earl of Dollar."

The Baron lifted momentarily in his saddle. A metal ball detached itself from its pocket in the saddle and swung in orbit around the magnet ominously. "Dollar aligns with you, now?"

Whirl rotated his wheel. "Have no concern, Magnet. Sheathe your mace. I am the Enemy Witness, present by the covenant to observe the Lady."

Magnet settled down again. His ball dropped back into its pocket. "Oh, naturally." He seemed relieved to know that Dollar remained an enemy knight.

"If you will direct us to the most recent sighting, we shall rout out the monster," the Duke said.

"Please follow, Liege," the Baron said, riding off.

They soon left the pavement and crossed open countryside. The tall grasses brushed against the horses' wheels. Herald found the swishing sound pleasant to his human ears, though fine pollen was flying up in brief clouds to tickle his nose and discolor his uniform. Now they were going uphill, and the horses were laboring. When one of the sets of wheels grew tired, they simply rotated a quarter turn and used the other set, the top saddle-wheel turning just enough to keep the riders facing forward. The horses were remarkably sure-wheeled, never bumping or skidding, though this cross-country climb was necessarily slower than the highway roll had been.

Abruptly they stopped. "Here the beast attacked my cattle, devouring one cow," the Baron said. "There are the wheels and axles of the loss, and there is the spoor of the attacker."

They made a large circle around the indicated spot. The tall grass was flattened to the ground, and there was a pile of animal wheels with dark stains upon them, as of dried blood. Sadorian entrails showed gruesomely between some of the spokes. There was no question about the violence of the death. Large, deep wheel tracks led away, up the hillside into the forest. Evidence enough!

"Flankers out," Kade ordered, and the human and Sador riders spread out to either side. "Lances ready." And the long spikes that had been pointing into the air dropped to parallel the ground. "Swords ready." And the Solarians loosened the blades in their sheaths, while the Sadors spun their forward wheels momentarily to show that their sharp spokes could function.

"Let's finish this by nightfall," Kade said. "Proceed."

The party began to move, following the trail. Birds flew up, disturbed by this intrusion. They were of pretty colors, some with each Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

wheel of separate hue, and they dodged back and forth very quickly. With wheels spinning on six sides, they had precise control.

Copterbugs approached, but were blown away by jets of forced air from the horses' resting wheels. These animals were versatile!

Once the initial thrill of the chase abated, the hunt became dull for Herald. With some thirty armed servitors flanking them, there seemed to be little actual danger, and as entertainment it quickly palled. There was nothing very sportsmanlike about this hunt despite the trimmings; that errant beast was about to be butchered.

Herald allowed his steed to lag, and Psyche and Whirl did likewise, while the Duke and Baron and troops pushed eagerly ahead.

They obviously enjoyed the chase! After a time they were out of sight. It didn't matter; there was no way to get lost amid the massed-wheel-tracks of the hunting party, and of course they would return this way.

"Does this really thrill you?" Herald asked Psyche.

"It is a big bore," she admitted. "But it is the duty of the nobles to cull the dangerous animals. We receive dispensations from contributing worlds to guarantee discipline here. And of course we have to round up the ones whose terms have expired if they don't come in for re-Transfer on their own. But I'm no huntress; I'd rather be back talking with Hweeh. I wonder what it can be about that Amoeba?"

"I hope to find out soon," Herald said. "Perhaps if we return to the castle in time—"

There was a horrendous roar from immediately behind them. The horses bolted in alarm—and all three riders were bucked out of their saddles, caught completely off-guard. Herald did a kind of turnabout in the air and landed hard on his posterior. Fortunately the ground was spongy, and his rear did not hurt much. Psyche landed neatly on her feet beside him, just as if this were her customary mode of dismounting; Whirl rolled over twice before getting righted.

The three horses were gone, wheeling at panicky speed up the slope. No help there.

The ground exploded. A cloud of dirt flew up, and from it emerged—a monster. The thing was huge and solid, with spiked treads and projecting teeth on its side wheels. It could obviously do a lot of damage in a short period.

Herald had no sword or shield; these remained attached to the saddle of his vanished horse. Psyche had both, but of course she was a helpless girl. Whirl....

"Retreat to yonder tree," Whirl cried, cutting between them and the monster. "I shall delay it."

"Don't try," Psyche cried back at him. "No one but a mounted warrior with lance can balk that thing!" She ran toward the tree, and Herald started to follow.

But the Earl held his position, his battle wheel whirling rapidly. Herald remembered how this creature had stood his ground against the wrathful Duke, and knew he was not going to retreat. But against the massively armored wheels of the monster this was suicidal.

Herald reversed and ran to join Whirl, though he had no weapon. "Fool! Make for the tree!" Whirl cried. "I cannot hold it long!"

"That's why I'm here!" Herald shouted back. " You go; I'll handle it somehow."

But now Psyche joined them. "You two are exactly like my father!" she screamed. "You won't retreat before a foe, though it kill you! Must I protect your lives with mine, as I protected your honor with mine before?"

"She's making sense," Herald said. "None of us can fight it—not singly, not together. But if we all run separately—"

"It will pick its choice and destroy that one," Whirl said. "I know not why it hesitates now."

Amazingly, the monster itself replied, in Clustric. "Which has the aura?" it demanded, its wheel-voice slurred almost into unintelligibility. "That one is mine!"

Then Herald understood. "It was a high-aura sapient. Now that it has faded almost to animal status, it thinks it can recover aura by consuming me! My aura roused it from its hiding place."

"It could have escaped the hunt if it had stayed in its hiding place," Psyche said. "The hunting party passed right over it, and we did too, never knowing! It is a most cunning beast."

"That is why it must be destroyed!" Whirl said.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

"If it is after my aura, it won't leave this area until I do," Herald said. "And I'm heading for that tree. Both of you run in other directions; it won't follow you."

"Precisely," the monster said, nudging toward Herald.

Psyche stepped forward, her light sword in her right hand, her decorative shield bravely raised on her left arm. "It shall not have you, Healer!" she cried, stabbing at it.

The monster crunched forward, its deadly wheel revving up. A spoke caught Psyche's blade and ripped it out of her hand. The bent sword flew in an arc as she shook her bruised hand with a little exclamation of pain.

Herald lunged forward, circled both arms about her slender waist, and half hurled her around and behind him. "Get out of here!" he bawled.

The monster charged, when Herald was off-balanced from his effort. And suddenly he realized another point of affinity: the monster was like a Slash, his own kind! A Slash was a tubular creature with disks around its girth that it used for slicing out pathways, cutting up food, and dismembering enemies. It also had laser lenses for longer-range action. In his natural body, Herald could have met this creature on even terms, perhaps more than even terms. A Slash was smaller, but the lasers could score with devastating effect before the disks struck. But this Solarian host was a poor excuse for a combat creature.

These things forged through his human brain at about the same velocity his human legs got oriented and propelled him the hell away from the monster. A gap opened between him and the pursuer. But it was strictly temporary; the monster had more power, and its wheels gave it more forward impetus. All too quickly it closed the gap again.

Whirl shot across, his little side wheels throwing up divots, moving to intercept the monster. "Get out of here!" Herald shouted, in the same tone he had used on Psyche. "Guard the Lady! I can take care of myself!" He needed no further proof of the little Earl's courage. Enemy he might be, but he took the covenant seriously, and was quite ready to give his life to protect those he guarded. It was another example of the kind of honor heraldry was supposedly based on, but that Herald had seldom encountered directly. He liked it very well, but not when it foolishly wasted lives.

"Yes, it is the Lady I must watch," Whirl agreed. "Forgive me, alien exorcist, that I must relinquish you to your fate." There was no intended irony in this.

But now Herald had to concentrate exclusively on the monster. He knew how to fight it, using his Slash reflexes, but that did not make the task simple. The Sador beast was as tall as he, and several times as massive; its bladed front wheel was as wide across as the full length of its body. But the liability of size was that it slowed maneuvering, and wheels were more readily balked than legs.

He could not outspeed the monster in a linear race, but he could foul it up in close acrobatics—maybe.

He felt the reverse breath of its savage front wheel, sucking the draft past him. An excellent way to catch prey, he realized: The wheel helped pull the pursuer forward while it sucked the fleeing animal back. Even if it didn't actually lift the prey off its feet, it helped slow and tire it. Small, subtle advantages could make the difference between failure and success.

How close could he afford to play it? Herald lost his nerve as be felt the hair of his head lifted by that breeze. He thrust out his right leg as though doing a squat jump, letting his body be hurled to the left. He twisted as he fell, and the monster rolled over the spot where he had been. Its massive side wheel crunched its track into the soil just beyond his feet.

The angled blade-spokes had light-receptors that were immediately aware of his new location. The monster did not turn; like the horses, it dropped its front and rear wheels and raised its side wheels. Now it was oriented on Herald again; the shift had taken only a moment.

But for that moment it was stationary; it could not shift wheels while traveling. It had had to brake to a stop, and now it had to get its mass going again. Herald's body could take off from a standing start faster than it could.

Herald was rolling as he thought. Unlike his Slash body, the Solarian form had to assume a vertical position before it could accelerate. He got his feet under him and launched himself toward the tree at right angles to the new orientation of the monster's driving wheels.

"Clever!" the monster roared as it shifted wheels again. Its Transfer aura might have faded, but much intelligence remained. It would not fall for the same trick again! Herald hoped he could reach the tree in time.

He saw that Psyche was already there, drawing herself up into its spreading upper wheels. Whirl was getting there.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthony

But Herald's ill-conditioned host-body was tiring rapidly, as it had during the exercise sessions. If only the host had seen fit to indulge in a physical development program himself! A strong human body should have maintained velocity easily, but this one was panting painfully. A few more days of exercise might have corrected that. Meanwhile the monster was gaining again.

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