Piers Anthony - Cluster 5 - Viscous Circle

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Cluster 5 -- Viscous Circle -- Piers Anthony -- (1982)

(Version 2003.02.04)

Prolog

Three million years ago a galaxy-spanning civilization vanished, leaving

only scattered evidences of its operations, in the form of derelict Ancient

Sites and a strange pattern of surviving species. Some Sites are merely huge

earthworks, long eroded and overrun by vegetation and development; others

contain valuable artifacts of intense interest to scholars and technicians;

and some few are "live" with operative equipment, sometimes self-animating.

All contemporary cultures of the known universe eagerly seek such Sites within

their spheres of influence, as the technology of the Ancients was beyond

anything known today.

For example, all cultures now suffer from Spherical Regression, being

unable to maintain an advanced level of civilization at their perimeters. This

represents an inherent limit on their expansion, and is thus a considerable

annoyance. The Ancients seem not to have suffered this regression; they had

some secret that enabled them to maintain their civilization at its optimum

level throughout its entire region. Thus the discovery of a functioning

Ancient Site is generally the signal for a mad intercultural scramble, in

which the usual restraints of civilization hardly apply. Yet often the effects

of such discoveries are other than anticipated, and have galaxy- or cluster-

spanning ramifications.

Many of the technological innovations that have transformed contemporary

interspecies society derive from the knowledge of the Ancients as discovered

in their Sites. Two of the three major systems of transport and communication

are examples: Mattermission and Transfer. Mattermission is the virtually

instantaneous transmission of objects and creatures across interplanetary and

interstellar distances. However, this mode is so expensive in energy that it

can only be used on special occasions. Unrestricted use would result in the

deterioration of the substance of the galaxy in that vicinity, as the binding

atomic forces weaken. That is not healthy.

Transfer is the artificial shifting of the aura, or soul -- which

includes personal identity, consciousness, and memory -- from one person to

the body, or "host," of another. This system uses approximately one millionth

the energy of Mattermission and automatically equips the Transferee with the

language and background of the host, even when that host is a completely alien

creature. With Transfer, interspecies commerce is feasible, and larger Spheres

of Influence are practical. Empires can be formed and maintained.

An entire framework of Transfer has been developed, with many

specialists. The Society of Hosts assumes responsibility for the welfare of

hosts temporarily deprived of their auras. Its motto derives from Kipling:

"Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,/Lest we forget -- lest we forget!" The

Transferee who forgets his origin will fade into nonexistence. The military

has trained people with intense auras to be transfer agents, who transfer to

hosts among the cultures being spied on. The work is dangerous, since if the

alien host dies before the mission is concluded, the visiting aura dies with

it. But this is a notorious, dashing sort of employment with unique rewards.

Many seek it; few achieve it.

This is the story of one such agent.

Chapter 1: Mission

Ronald Snowden launched himself into the tube with his customary verve

and plunged like a cannonball through the rocky heart of the planetoid. Some

termed these orbiting chunks of material asteroids, he thought, but that was

wrong; they were not small stars, but small planets. As such they had become

quite useful to man, serving as way stations and isolated training camps and

mines for assorted substances. Why, even gravel for concrete would be

prohibitively expensive if lifted by the ton from the surface of a full

planet! In a planetoid belt, gravel was cheap; one had only to seine it from

space and float it to the construction site.

Ronald was a grown Solarian male verging on the nether side of prime,

but at the moment he was like a boy, complete with the tousling brown hair and

self-satisfied grin. He narrowed his gaze to make the details of the travel

tube blur, and thought of himself as a zooming rocket.

When he came to the residential region, he caught hold of a bar and

swung himself into the crosstube with the neatness of fine muscle tone and

experience. He enjoyed token gravity and hated to return to full weight. But

that was a necessary evil; if he ever allowed his system to atrophy in null-G,

he would be unable to set foot on a full-mass planet without horrendous and

possibly lethal complications.

Ronald popped into the residential cylinder. The volume of it spun about

him, since the entrance was in the axis. This, too, he liked; he drifted, as

it were, in the center of this miniature world. What self-centered

philosophies he might evolve to explain this phenomenon! I, Lord of all I

survey...

But he had business. He could not dally in idle indulgence, however

tempting it was. He was not lord of anything. He had no rank even among the

personnel of this station; he was just an employee. A rather special employee,

to be sure, but no more than that.

He drew the fins out from his sleeves and trouser legs, locked them in

place with practiced shakes of his limbs, then stroked through the warm, damp

air for the rim. Soon he was moving swiftly down, as the atmosphere helped him

along and centrifugal force bore him outward. He guided himself toward his

sector and his lot, banking sharply and running in the air to take the abrupt

one-gravity landing. In his exuberance he overshot, and knocked down a

cornstalk.

His wife shot out of the house as if jet propelled. She was a handsome

red-tressed woman whose esthetic countenance was marred at the moment by

anger. "You clumsy oaf!" she cried. "You trampled my garden again!"

Ronald was obviously at fault, yet he wished she had not been so quick

to take issue. She seemed not to be concerned whether he had suffered any

injury. She cared more at the moment for a cornstalk than for him.

They were four and a half years through their term marriage. In half a

year they would either renew for another five, or let it lapse. Their actual

decision would have to come before then, to enable the changeover, if it came,

to be smooth. Traditionally, promiscuous affairs were tolerated in the final

three months of a term, as people compared each other to the remaining

options. Generally the reality was considerably more staid than the tradition,

and serious couples never experimented at all. Still, the matter bore

consideration. Ronald had been conscious of the approaching deadlines, but not

thought seriously about them. Perhaps it was time to do that thinking.

Perhaps, in fact, Helen had already done so, and her attitude was showing it.

Yet he had to be fair. He had landed carelessly. He would have been just

as annoyed if she had broken any of his puzzle-sculptures or his three-headed

dog statuette memento. Their marriage should not be allowed to founder on

trifles; it should be settled rationally.

"I admit fault," he said. "Name my penance."

"Penance!" she snapped. "How can you fix a broken stalk? That corn is

done for! Besides, you haven't stowed your fins."

Ronald quickly snapped his arm fins back into his sleeves. The leg fins

closed automatically when he came in for landing; otherwise the procedure

would have been almost impossible. The designers of station clothing had

profited from decades and centuries of trial-and-error experience.

"If you knew how hard it is to grow corn out here in space..." Helen

resumed.

She would not let go of the trivial. Well, if that was the way it was,

that was the way it was. He would have to meditate on what kind of woman he

would prefer next time. Certainly not one who nagged a man about stalks! "I'm

sorry," he said, and stalked inside, conscious of an inappropriate pun. Stalk-

stalked. It wasn't funny.

Then, in the inexplicable way of the sex, she changed attitude. "You

must have an assignment. Of course you were distracted. Let me make you some

tea."

Ronald used no mind- or body-affecting drugs idly, tannic acid among

them. But it didn't matter; this wasn't real tea. Nothing available here on

the planetoid research station was non-nutritive or habit forming in any

physiological manner. Some people took coffee, cocoa, cola or wine as purely

social devices, since caffeine and alcohol and cocaine did not exist here.

Helen liked the associations of tea, so she brewed dainty cups of it on

special occasions. Sometimes, on cues known only to herself, she made

demitasse instead. It was her way of apologizing for a display of anger.

Ronald indulged her in the ritual, accepting tea, sanitized sugar, and

genuine reconstituted imitation cream in a pseudo-china cup on a decorated

saucer. Helen had a flair for serving that he had always appreciated; it was

her special indulgence, similar to his zooming through the low-gee tunnels,

and she was at her best when honoring these forms. He realized that tea had

historically been used as a social mechanism, giving form to encounters that

might otherwise become awkward. He recalled the joke: "I'm sorry I had to put

poison in your tea, dear." "That's all right; it was delicious." Then he

glanced at Helen with a muted flash of uncertainty. Poison? But of course that

was a foolish thought; she would never poison anyone, and in any event there

was no such chemical on the planetoid or in it. If she did not wish to stay

with him, she had only to wait six months.

She proffered him a little plate of delicate cookies. Ronald took one

and nipped at its rim. He knew it was thoroughly fortified with all manner of

nutrition, but it tasted just like vanilla wafer. She was really pulling out

the stops!

Helen looked a query at him, and Ronald had to tell about his mission.

"There's an unincorporated region about a hundred and fifty parsecs out, not

halfway to Mintaka. Of no interest to anyone except obscurity scholars, until

this moment. We picked up a galactic rumor that there is an Ancient Site

there."

"An Ancient Site!" she exclaimed, almost spilling her tea. Only the

grossest amazement could cause her to forget herself to that extent. "The

whole Galaxy will be charging into the area!"

"No, it's only a rumor. Been around for centuries, never verified.

Mirzam's checked it out more than once in the past couple hundred years, and

Mintaka ran a survey there last millennium, and even Sador in its heyday sent

a crew there. Now Bellatrix, the closest Sphere, has a station there, but if

they found any Ancient Site they never developed it. No one has been able to

find the thing, so the other sapients have concluded it's a false lead."

"All those other Spheres have existed longer than Sphere Sol," she said.

"How do we know better than they do?"

"Solarian snooping. There's a local species, sub-Spherical. They're sort

of spinning circles. All different colors. Like hollow-centered Frisbees. No

society; they just float about magnetically, somehow. We call them Ringers.

Seems someone transferred to a Ringer host, maybe a research nut, just to see

if it could be done, and there in this thing's quaint mind was the memory of

its visit to a kind of shrine where its ancestors learned to fly -- and when

that Transfer traveler came back, he realized that shrine must have been an

Ancient Site in excellent repair. So now we're pretty sure it's true; there is

a Site there. We don't know exactly where; that wasn't clear from the

secondhand memory. But it almost definitely exists. So now all we have to do

is find it, before any alien Spheres catch on to our hot new lead."

"Why didn't you put that Transfer traveler on a total readout and get

the specific data? There's always a lot more in the mind than can be

consciously recalled, especially when Transfer is involved."

"You're telling me? I'm in the business!" But Ronald was happy now,

telling his secret. "Couldn't. He wrote out his report, then went back to his

Ringer host on a scrambled setting; couldn't recall him. Guy must have been

addled, but his report seemed straight. So if it can be verified -- "

"An Ancient Site!" she repeated, awed. "All the key technological

breakthroughs of Galactic history have derived from Ancient Sites. Matter

transmission, Transfer of auras -- "

Ronald set down his cup. "I see you still remember your school lessons

of so long ago." When she did not dignify the slur on her age by reacting to

it, he continued. "So I'm to transfer to one of these Frisbee animals and

search for the site. If its location is in the creature's memory, I'll bring

the information back. Or someone else will; there are a dozen of us, male and

female, transferring in. Shouldn't take long to do it. Funny no other Sphere

ever thought of this simple expedient: ask the local animals."

Helen considered gravely. "Transfer is your thing; you're like a child

with a zap-gun when you get a chance to transfer."

"Naturally. That's why I signed." Though there had been some bad moments

during his breaking-in period. That three-headed dog...

"Each time you go, I wonder whether you'll make it back."

"You knew my business when you took the term marriage. Five years, or

till nonreturn do us part. I live for Transfer, and I can't think of a better

way to die, if die I must."

"So naturally you aren't swayed by the obvious risks. But I am."

"What risks? As missions go, this is routine."

"No mission involving an Ancient Site is routine!"

"Apart from that, of course. But we aren't supposed to go to the Site

itself, just ascertain where it is. So in that sense this is an ordinary

venture, with an ordinary alien element of challenge."

"Except that several alien Spheres with a lot more experience than ours

have failed to crack this riddle. You can bet they did not give up easily --

not with a preserved Ancient Site dangling as the prize. It can't be easy to

find."

"I told you: we're using Transfer to explore not space but the memories

of the natives."

"And you think the other Spheres didn't?"

Ronald paused. "It does seem odd. They really should have thought of

that."

"I submit that they did -- and lost their Transfer agents."

"Lost them? Even if that were so, we did have a Solarian who made it

back, so -- "

"And stayed only long enough to make a note, maybe to explain things to

his relatives, then went back into Transfer covering his trail. He made sure

he would not be recovered. Does that suggest anything to you?"

"You think that was part of a pattern?" His wife had a disturbing

propensity to reason things out in ways he had not. This was one of the things

that made her worthwhile. "That all those aliens either died in Transfer or

chose to stay there, so no information ever got back?"

"You know no aura can be recalled from Transfer if it doesn't want to

go. In the old days they needed to build Transfer stations in alien territory

to ship agents back. Now they can recall specially trained and adapted agents

by using special equipment -- but only if those agents are ready and willing,

and trying to return. Sounds to me as if that first Solarian Transferee was

afraid they'd trace his location, mattermit a unit out there, and force him

back to his human host. So he made sure they couldn't. That's no ordinary

matter. Coupled with the failures of the other Spheres -- "

"I see you don't have much confidence in my desire to return to you."

There was a bitter edge to his voice; that matter of the cornstalk still

rankled.

"Touché. But I'd hate to have you want to return and be too befuddled by

something in the Ringer nature to make the attempt. I really am worried that I

won't see you again."

"And you with half a year remaining in the marital term," he said

mockingly. "I'll give you a release now, if you want to avoid the

inconvenience of -- "

"That is not necessary," she said sharply. Then she smoothed herself

visibly and took another tack. "Suppose the creature doesn't know where the

Site is? Suppose none of them do?"

"Then we'll simply have to look for it. We've got to locate that Site.

Sol's dominance of the Segment is at stake. System Etamin, with its Polarian-

Solarian cadre and its circle-thrust logic, is coalescing as the real nucleus

of human-oriented space. Sol will never regain her position unless she has the

power of the Ancients. We have to have that Site."

"For politics?" she inquired. "That's all it means? A game of one-

upmanship with Etamin to see which System shall carry the scepter?"

"The power of the Ancients means more than politics. But yes, that's the

essence."

She shook her head so that her hair flung out in a way he had always

liked. A woman was supposed to choose a man by his intellect, and a man to

choose a woman by her appearance. Ronald doubted that was always the case, but

Helen's appearance had certainly attracted him. "What's going to happen to the

creatures?"

"The Ringers? They don't matter."

"Don't matter! If someone transferred to one of them, the creature had

to be sapient. They must have rights -- "

"No they don't. The Ringers aren't listed in the Galactic Index. They

have no Sphere, no organization, no physical artifacts like spaceships.

Legally they're animals."

"How many species are in the same political vacuum? What about the

Magnets we use on the big sublight ships? You really believe they're animals

too?"

Ronald sighed inwardly. Helen was a creature of causes, and she had been

on the case of the Magnets for as long as he had known her. The Magnets

resembled nothing so much as self-motivated cannonballs, and were useful as

watchdogs aboard ships where real dogs would have trouble getting around. He

didn't want to work into another argument. "Helen, I don't set Spherical

policy. I can't be concerned about every stray creature that gets in Sol's

way. That Ancient Site is important!"

"And sapient lives aren't?" she inquired dangerously.

"We're not out to kill them, for God's sake! The Ringers have no use for

that Site; they don't even know what it is. We'll just ignore them, once we

know where the Site is."

"The way you ignore corn?"

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摘要：

Cluster5--ViscousCircle--PiersAnthony--(1982)(Version2003.02.04)PrologThreemillionyearsagoagalaxy-spanningcivilizationvanished,leavingonlyscatteredevidencesofitsoperations,intheformofderelictAncientSitesandastrangepatternofsurvivingspecies.SomeSitesaremerelyhugeearthworks,longerodedandoverrunbyveget...

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Piers Anthony - Cluster 5 - Viscous Circle

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