The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 17

Jameson looked the pair of them over. They were just inside the door, sizing him up. The taller of the two, the one with the toasting fork, came to his shoulder. The alien was roughly the size of a Russian wolfhound standing on its hind legs. The other was a couple of inches shorter and more lightly built. A male and a female? It was impossible to tell. Their bodies were smooth and without gender. Like the other Cygnans he’d seen, they wore only their mottled hides, plus the ubiquitous tubular harnesses with the ovoid gadget bags. He could see no external sign of sex, except—

He overcame his repugnance and took a closer look at the dreadful thing attached to their bellies. It was the same palpitating horror that at first he’d taken for a secondary sex characteristic in his original captors during that dizzy hegira through the monkey-puzzle forest and across the industrial plain. He’d glimpsed a couple more of the things through the transparent suits of the Cygnans who’d done the lab workup on him. But this was the first time he’d had a clear view of one.

It was a parasite. No doubt about it.

It was a soft, feeble, beetle-shaped creature about the size of a newborn kitten, clinging to its host like a tick with six filamentlike legs. Its tiny head was embedded in the flesh, obviously drinking blood.

Jameson shuddered in disgust. Why did a race as technologically advanced as the Cygnans tolerate the filthy things? Their biological sciences were certainly advanced enough to eradicate something as obvious as an exoparasite, as they’d just proved to him.

He furrowed his brow. Could that leechlike thing represent some exotic form of symbiosis? If so, he failed to see what possible benefit the Cygnans could derive from the creatures.

It didn’t seem to be causing them any discomfort. It rode between their rearmost legs as if it belonged there, in a position designed to give it maximum protection. But then, as Dmitri once had remarked, successful parasites are always adapted to their hosts, sometimes in the most ingenious fashion—like the roundworm that lived only in the human appendix. It was the unsuccessful ones that caused discomfort.

The smaller Cygnan caught him staring and, with a gesture that he would have called modest in a human, lowered a middle limb to shield the parasite from view.

He tore his eyes away. The larger Cygnan was advancing on him. It held up the fork, showing it to him. Then it touched itself on the torso with it.

Jameson waited to see what would happen. Was this the prelude to some kind of attempt at communication? Up till now the Cygnans had treated him like a piece of meat.

Then the Cygnan touched Jameson lightly on the ribs, and he almost hit the ceiling. The pain was beyond belief—like the sting of a thousand hornets. It lasted for the merest fraction of a second. He would have fallen if it had not been so brief. As it was, he staggered for balance. He was blinded with tears.

The Cygnan had sprung back, out of reach.

By God, the thing was afraid of him!

Its companion chirped and warbled at it—telling it to be careful? It came back, circling him with abrupt little movements.

Jameson made himself stand perfectly still. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. His heart was palpitating. He could still feel the effects of that sting.

It couldn’t have been a neurotoxin like the synthetic wasp venom terrestrial police used in riot control. Alien biochemistry would be too tricky for the Cygnans. They couldn’t have been sure of a disabling dose. It had to have been an electric shock—thousands of volts.

The Cygnan raised the fork again. Jameson flinched, but he stood rigid, arms hanging at his sides.

The fork touched him again.

He felt only a mild tingle, nothing like the first time.

The Cygnan gestured with the fork. It waltzed halfway to the door and waited.

He was supposed to follow it.

Jameson’s mouth twisted bitterly. This was human-alien communication, all right. They had managed to tell each other something. It wasn’t very complicated. The Cygnan had shown him its cattle prod and told him to behave. And he had said that he would.

He shuffled obediently toward the door. His injured leg throbbed. He felt drained and lightheaded from his illness, and he longed fervently for a hot shower. The Cygnans fell in warily beside him.

He stopped. Dammit, this was no way for a man to behave. For all he knew, he was the only representative of the human race.

The Cygnans didn’t like his stopping. One of them sounded the pure tetrachord he’d heard before. The other raised its electric prod.

Jameson never had to stop to think about a musical tone. They were as palpable to him as material objects, each with its own identity. These had been an F and a B flat in the piccolo range. No, not quite a B flat. It was almost an augmented fourth, about a quarter-tone off.

He whistled it back to them. He couldn’t manage both tones simultaneously the way the Cygnans did, of course, but he did the best he could, first arpeggiating it, then alternating it in a rapid tremolo.

The large Cygnan lowered its prod. It fluted a rapid scale at him.

Jameson did an imitation. There weren’t too many notes for him to remember. It fell into a whole-tone pattern, like impressionistic music, with a cluster of those peculiar quarter-tones at the center.

The Cygnan corrected him. He’d been off a fraction of a tone at the end. It didn’t finish at the octave. It was a fraction sharp there, like a bagpipe scale. He repeated the sequence fairly creditably.

The two Cygians held a brief, reedy conference. Jameson couldn’t follow. It was too rapid and complicated, with all sorts of embellishments. He stood tensely waiting.

The large Cygnan turned to him again and made a sharp attention-getting sound. Then it touched itself on the mouth and the tip of its petaled tail and sounded the tetrachord again. It waited.

Jameson gave the chord back immediately, turning it into a tremolo. The Cygnans chirped at each other for a while. Then the smaller of the two came forward. It made the gestures which to a Cygnan indicated self, and trilled at him.

Jameson hesitated. The tetrachord had been easy. It was a handy, one-phoneme identification. Like, Jameson thought, a human saying “I.” But this was more complicated.

The second Cygnan repeated it for him until he got it straight. It started with an A-major triad, only a few vibrations off concert pitch. Harmonics, Jameson thought, must be universal wherever there were vibrating strings—or vibrating membranes. The third was slightly flatted, like a blues note. The two top notes then exploded into a parallel glissando, up a fifth, while the A held. Then back to the original bluesy chord.

He gave it a try. He had to substitute an arpeggiated chord for the triad, then make do with just the top note of the double glissando. It sounded like a crazy bird imitation, but the Cygnan seemed to accept it. Like, Jameson thought wryly, tolerating someone with a speech defect.

But when he tried transposing the little sequence to a different key, he met the Cygnan equivalent of a blank stare—a splaying out of the three eyestalks. Evidently the sounds had no meaning when the pitch was altered.

It reminded Jameson of his early mistakes in learning Chinese—the syllables whose meaning changed drastically when you used the wrong one of the four tones. “Chair” became “soap.” “Sell” became “buy.” Except in Chinese the tones were relative, and if you got a few of them wrong your intent could usually be deduced from the syllables themselves and the context. In Cygnanese, apparently, tones were specific phonemes. Only those rare freaks like Jameson, who happened to be blessed with absolute pitch, could ever hope to communicate with Cygnans, even in the most rudimentary fashion. To Cygnans, most humans would be dumb as animals.

It was Jameson’s turn.

He touched himself on the lips and—feeling a bit silly—on the rump, and said, slowly and distinctly: “Ja-me-son.”

They herded him down opalescent corridors with the electric prod turned off. “Corridors” wasn’t quite the word for these cramped tubes, though the purpose was the same. It was more like a series of translucent sewer pipes snaking through decks and angled bulkheads, bridging dizzying spaces with shadowy bustling activity glimpsed tantalizingly below.

The Cygnans seemed to have no concept of rooms arranged off passageways. Enclosures simply abutted one another, opening directly from space to space in a honeycomb maze. There were no branching arteries. Each length of tube seemed to have a specific destination. It struck Jameson as a peculiar way to utilize interior space, but then, perhaps Cygnans would have found human layouts incomprehensible.

He hunched down the low tunnel, the scaled orange blanket wrapped togalike around him. Ahead of him, the two scurrying Cygnans kept having to wait for him to catch up. The curved surface made awkward footing for him. Perhaps it was more natural for Cygnans, with their limbs jutting out at an angle that way.

He hurried after them, looking up the puckered orange lips of their tailpipes. Mouth and tip of tail; the Cygnans thought of themselves as being between the two points. Perhaps it made more sense than the human gesture of pointing to oneself or tapping oneself on the chest.

They were traveling side by side horizontally, holding one and sometimes two pairs of hands, pedaling with their outward-facing limbs while they kept each other braced against the lower quadrant of the walls. Every once in a while they nuzzled each other.

It would have been easier going, Jameson thought, if they’d traveled single file. But Cygnans seemed to like touching one another. He remembered the pair that had carried him through the ship.

They reached the end of the tube, a silvery disk with shadows seen through it. The Cygnans parted to let him between them, half clinging to the sides of the tube, and gave him a push.

He put out a hand involuntarily to catch himself, and it went through the center of the disk. The Cygnans prodded him again. He pushed his way into the material. It flowed around him, sealing itself off by shaping itself around his body. It tickled. He stepped through, and it closed itself off behind him.

He turned just in time to see two long Cygnan snouts emerging from the surface. It would have looked as if they were rising from a pool of quicksilver if the surface had been horizontal instead of vertical. The Cygnans flowed through, and the silvery surface was unbroken again.

He gathered he was in some kind of work area. There were things he recognized as sinks and counter tops, and haphazard stacks of storage containers in nonhuman shapes. Against one sloping wall was an electronic console studded with little pearly knobs and a keyboardlike arrangement. On closer inspection the keyboard turned out to be a row of little fretted necks, each strung with three parallel wires. Jameson tried to imagine four Cygnan forelimbs, each with three fingers, strumming it all at once. The instrument would convey information, not music. Like a computer teletype keyboard?

He saw nothing he could recognize as books, paper files, or writing instruments. How did Cygnans store data? A triangular cage with one of the little chittering creatures was balanced precariously on what Jameson took to be a Cygnan desk: a sort of oversize shoetree with a multitude of flat oval surfaces.

But Jameson had no eyes for any of it after he saw what was stacked against the far wall: a careless plunder of human artifacts from the Jupiter ship. He saw clothing, cooking utensils, upended chairs, a broken mirror, books and music cards, even an uprooted vacuum toilet. The Cygnans must have been all through the individual cabins and the recreation lounge. The lectern that doubled as a pulpit was lying on its side, and next to it was the portable Moog, its twin keyboards grinning with ivory teeth at the mess around it.

The two Cygnans had draped themselves across a pair of perches that sat in the middle of all the confusion. The perches were curving, polished hobbyhorses leaning outward from trumpet-bell pedestals. Each was equipped with three sets of crossbars and a chin rest. For a Cygnan, he supposed, it was as comfortable a way of distributing weight as a chair. Another perch faced the two. Jameson gave it a dubious glance, then sat cross-legged on the floor beside it, his blanket draped Indian-fashion around him.

The Cygnans twitched on their perches. The chin rest snaked around sideways so as not to obstruct the third eyestalk mounted beneath the Cygnan approximation of a jaw. But the thick shaft of the perch concealed the revolting thing on their lower bellies, and he was grateful that he wouldn’t have to look at it.

“Ja-me-son,” the larger Cygnan said.

It wasn’t exactly “Ja-me-son.” The Cygnans couldn’t manage consonants—unless one wanted to call those assorted hisses and pops consonants. Furthermore, they seemed unable to grasp the idea that an arrangement of phonemes could always have the same meaning regardless of pitch. Their first attempt to repeat Jameson’s name had simply mimicked his timbre and tone—a falling fourth—and they seemed puzzled when he repeated it with a different inflection. In the end they had given up and assigned him a name—the original falling fourth, with the added fillip of a rising fifth preceded by a grace note.

Jameson didn’t mind. He thought of them privately as “Tetrachord” and “Triad.” He had a speech defect too. He couldn’t form chords.

Finally they all got down to work. At the end of an hour, he’d figured out how the Cygnan language was formed and could manage a few words of it in a sort of babytalk.

By then, the Cygnans had accepted the convention that a hummed or whistled arpeggio was equivalent to sounding all the notes of a chord simultaneously. But Jameson could see that the concept was difficult for them. They would have to stop and think about the separate notes of the arpeggio and put them together in their heads. Then they’d try them out on each other until triumphantly, they had it—like a pair of illiterates spelling out words letter by letter—except that one letter might consist of half a dozen chords and connecting single notes, laboriously worked out one tone at a time.

It was just as difficult for Jameson. He needed constant repetition to pin down the more complex sequences, and he knew that there were subtleties—beyond the troublesome quarter-tones—that he was missing. It made for slow going.

The number of possible phonemes in the Cygnan language was staggering. They were based on the absolute pitch of a tone—not relative pitch, like the rising and falling tones of Chinese. The Cygnans had a useful range of two and a half octaves, and they could divide each twelve-tone octave into quarter-tones.

That made 120 phonemes to start with.

Just the single notes!

But a phoneme might be a single note, any combination of two notes, or any combination of three notes.

How many different two-note combinations were there? Jameson worked it out in his head. More than seven thousand of them.

Jameson became discouraged at that point. He didn’t bother to figure out how many different three-note combinations there were. Or what happened when you figured in all the extra little slides and turns that Cygnans seemed to use the way humans used double consonants. It was depressingly clear that the number was astronomical. Compared with the paltry few dozen phonemes available in human languages, the richness of the Cygnan language must be beyond belief!

Perhaps, Jameson speculated with a sudden rush of awe, the Cygnans could even convey visual information with their language directly, in the same way dolphins could show one another the shape and depth of a bay by sonar imitation.

Actual pictures, built up of digital bits formed of sound, transmitted as naturally as breathing from Cygnan to Cygnan! Not descriptions, such as: “I see a creature with only four limbs and no tail, about so big.” But: “I see a creature that looks like this.”

In human terms, Jameson thought, how many thousands of words would it take to teach someone, say, a tune by Beethoven? How much simpler just to hum it. And a tune, compared with visual material, was a straightforward linear piece of information containing relatively few bits.

He tried not to worry about it. The most rudimentary sort of pidgin Cygnan would have to do. After all, he consoled himself, South Sea islanders had managed to trade with the first British mariners using a few dozen basic nouns and modifiers. It hadn’t been necessary for them to learn the language of Shakespeare.

Slowly, painfully, tone by tone, hoping the two Cygnans’ patience would last, Jameson acquired the first dozen words of a vocabulary that consisted mostly of parts of the body and a few objects in the room. Next he tried an abstraction. What did the Cygnans call their race? What class of creatures, he asked them, included both Tetrachord and Triad?

He made the sounds of their names, followed by the Cygnan-style inclusive gesture, and ending with the little trill he had come to recognize as a Cygnan interrogative. He was rewarded with a burst of harmony. In five minutes he learned to repeat this as arpeggios, and the Cygnans warbled their approval.

An aproned assistant arrived at that point to put another of the pyramidal cages on the desk. The Cygnan apron, worn lengthwise, was anchored by a loop over head and tail, with a scalloped leathery flap hung down either side.

Jameson thought he’d clinch it. Before the assistant could leave, he made the inclusive gesture for all three of the Cygnans and repeated his question.

There was a lot of agitated chirping. Then Tetrachord and Triad both turned to him and gave him an entirely different word.

Jameson wiped the sweat off his forehead with a forearm. What was going wrong? He decided to attack it from a different angle. What did the Cygnans call humans?

“Ja-me-son,” he said in the three-note figure that signified his name. Then he made the inclusive gesture and whistled, “Ja-me-son, Ja-me-son,” followed by the interrogative trill.

What are many Jamesons called? He waited.

He got his own name back firmly, once, There is no such thing as a class of Jamesons. He tried again, and got his name back with the cascade of dropping thirds that they always used to correct him with. A mistake. Evidently such a thing as many Jamesons was a conceptual impossibility.

Doggedly he tried again. Numbers, then. Numbers were basic. He held up a finger. “One.” He extended another. “Two.” He added a third. “Three.” Then he trilled the Cygnan interrogative.

He waited. Nothing.

He tried again. “One…”

The smaller Cygnan, Triad, was showing signs of becoming restless. She—why did he think of this one as she?—turned to Tetrachord and tootled at him. Tetrachord tootled back. Then he slithered off his perch and picked up the electric prod. He gestured toward the door with it.

It was time for Jameson to go back to his cage.

He rose to his feet reluctantly. He hadn’t made much progress. Would he get another chance? Cygnans didn’t seem to be long on patience. Or curiosity.

If only he could speed up the process of communication.

He allowed them to herd him halfway to the door before he stopped. Then he became stubborn, earning himself a mild tingle from the prod.

Moving slowly so as not to alarm them, he started toward the untidy stack of human goods over at the far wall. They did nothing to stop him. He was able to reach the Moog.

He turned it on. The little red light glowed. There were still a couple of dozen hours left in the batteries. Quickly he pulled out stops, trying for an approximation of the Cygnan voice. A touch of oboe. A flute. A bassoon with its wave frequency moved up to the treble range. A synthetic soprano voice saying “ah.”

The preparation took him a few seconds. He glanced over his shoulder. How much time would they allow him? Not enough time to reprogram the little computer that was the heart of the Moog; that would take hours. But he didn’t have to do anything very complicated to start with. He altered the tuning of the A to shift it slightly from concert pitch, and the Moog obligingly shifted the rest of the scale to go with it. Then he lowered all the C sharps a trifle and retuned a couple of the notes he wouldn’t be using for the demonstration, to provide the quarter-tone notes he would need.

He turned. Triad was coming toward him, hissing. Her rasplike tongue flickered in and out. His time was up.

Jameson put his hands on the keyboard and said her name in perfect Cygnanese. With, he hoped, hardly a trace of an accent.

He worked on the Moog while the assistant brought in their lunch. He didn’t care to think about the Cygnans’ lunch except to note that it didn’t seem to enjoy being eaten. His own lunch was another half-thawed block of food from his own ship’s freezer—this time a pie-sized portion of mincemeat stuffing intended for Christmas dinner.

The Moog had two five-octave keyboards. He compressed them into a single compass of two and one half octaves composed of quarter-tones. It fit the Cygnan vocal range perfectly.

He fiddled individually with what seemed to be some of the more important tones in the Cygnan vocabulary—the off-key B flat in Tetrachord’s name and the wrong-note bagpipe tone that finished off the octave, among others. But for most of it he simply had the computer chop up the normal equal-temperament octave into forty-eight pieces instead of twelve. He could retune other crucial notes one at a time as they came up while he was learning to talk Cygnan.

It took him another hour to alter the Moog’s memory so that it would replay some of the standard Cygnan sequences at the touch of a button—the interrogative trill and the cascade of minor thirds, and some of the turns and arabesques he’d been able to pin down so far. He had only to play them once through and tell the Moog to remember them. They were plugged into the bank of cheater buttons that were meant for slipbeat rhythms and computer-generated contrapuntal voices.

When he’d finished, not even Johann Sebastian Bach could have played recognizable human music on the Moog. It was a Cygnan speech synthesizer now, with lots of unused learning capacity.

His accomplishment earned him a reprieve. It made conversing a lot easier for the Cygnans, for one thing, and that rekindled their interest. They didn’t have to stop to figure out what Jameson meant when he interpolated a broken chord, and they didn’t have to repeat things for him endlessly; the Moog’s play-along attachment taped them the first time, and the Cygnans could go about their business while Jameson devoted himself to memorizing word lists.

They didn’t even make him return to his cage. Instead, they let him sleep in a small storage room adjacent to their office or workshop, or whatever it was, and work on his vocabulary while they were busy. During their frequent absences, he was allowed to wander through the workshop, as if he were a trusted pet. Among the looted human artifacts he found clothing and toilet articles, and soon he was able to get warm again and clean himself up. The aproned assistant brought him his meals at regular intervals: more frozen food from the freezer and, as time went on, unfamiliar stuff that the Cygnans evidently had learned to synthesize. Most of it was an unappetizing mush, but it didn’t make him sick. At least he wouldn’t starve when human supplies ran out.

To Jameson’s immense relief, learning the Cygnan language turned out to be easy. The structure, such as it was, was positional. He was able to get along fairly well simply by piling words on top of one another, as you could do in Chinese.

He remembered something one of his language teachers on Earth had told him: Sophisticated languages tend to dispense with grammar. Languages of primitive cultures, like Eskimo or Hottentot, have far more complex a structure than highly evolved languages like English or Chinese. The Cygnans, who had been wandering through space for untold millennia, must have a far older civilization than man.

Their language had been simplified. Given time, Jameson could have taught Mike Berry or any other competent amateur musician to play back Cygnan “words” by rote on the Moog’s modified keyboard, or punch in his programmed phrases. But Mike didn’t have absolute pitch, so he could never have understood the Cygnan’s replies.

The Cygnan language was simple, all right. But nobody in the crew except Jameson could possibly have understood it.