Viscous Circle by Piers Anthony Page A

he—"
    This was obviously extremely awkward for her to present. It occurred to him that in many Galactic cultures there were things that were socially acceptable in the doing, but not in the describing. Other things could be described, but not done. The gratuitous murder of a member of the same species was an example of the latter, while the detailed processes of procreation—yes. That was the barrier they encountered here. Perhaps he could assist her narration.
    "I assume this happened a long time ago," he said. "Both parties have long since disbanded, so there can be no offense in the memory of their history."
    "Yes," she agreed gratefully. "A long time ago. They later disbanded after full lives. Maybe their auras merged in the Viscous Circle, and they were sublimely happy for an eternity, and after that, sections of those auras fragmented off to join new Bands, and parts of both are in our own auras—" But that was getting too personal again, causing her to balk. Anything that made the analogy too plain was taboo.
    "Parts of earlier auras are in all of us," Rondl said, playing along with the mythology, which he found charming. "But they are spread so thin, as the result of centuries of viscosity and dilution in others, that nothing is recognizable now. All we have is their story, not their spirits."
    This enabled Cirl to continue. "It is flashed that when the time came, he—positioned himself so that—" She paused again, her color pulsing with embarrassment. It was amazing what magnetic fluctuations could do to surface hue. "So that his communication beam intersected her—" Yet again she paused, her flashes fuzzing with the supposed shame of the unutterable.
    An alien concept came to Rondl now: pornography . What was natural and necessary in life became, through the alchemy of social perception, indescribable. To him, he discovered when he thought about it, the evil lay not so much in the act, or in the depiction of it, as in the twisted attitudes of others who perceived it as unclean. Yet his own attitude had undergone a gradual transformation with experience. There had been a time, on a backward fringe world—but what was he thinking of? The memory evanesced with a fleeting picture of some alien creature with a triple-head extremity. Absolutely meaningless! "Some things are not to be expressed," he flashed. "I think I know of the phenomenon in other cultures."
    "True."
    "But many aliens are monsters." Triple-headed monsters? "We are not."
    "Yes," she agreed. And tried again. "So these two reversed their—"
    She could not complete it, but Rondl had caught on. There were, after all, only so many positions two Bands could assume with respect to each other. Position was the key!
    He positioned himself so that the output of his lens intersected the output of hers. This was no good for dialogue, as neither could assimilate the message of the other. The lenses placed backward did not communicate. Not intelligibly. But the mode turned out to be excellent for love.
    Rondl experienced an exceptional thrill as her flash passed through his reversed lens, and he knew that she was having a similar experience. The lens was dual-purpose, he realized now: one way for intellectual communication, the other way for love.
    "Love, love, love!" he broadcast, drawing nearer, orienting more perfectly to the light of Sun Dazzle while she oriented on Sun Eclat. And he felt her response, more wonderful than any intellectual thing could be: Love, love, love! There was communication, but of a nonintellectual, nonobjective nature. Love was not intellect, but feeling. The other side of the lens.
    Then Rondl stopped thinking and gave himself up entirely to feeling.
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    Chapter 6:
    War
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    Rondl floated before a class of twenty young Bands. All were attentive to his beam as it flashed across the enclosure and reflected from the curving wall. Could he get his message across?
    "This is the story of the