The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 20

The attendant was old. If it had been a human being, Jameson would have said it shuffled. By this time he was familiar enough with Cygnans to know that this one’s characteristic darting body movements were stiffer and slower than Tetrachord’s or Triad’s. Its mottled hide was duller, drier, less glossy. Did older Cygnans outlive their parasites, as terrestrial animals sometimes did? At any rate, there was no sluglike pest hanging from its belly, though Jameson thought he detected an old cicatrix where a tiny bloodsucking head might once have been embedded.

Its name—or at least the sound by which the other Cygnans addressed it—was a buzzing alteration of augmented fourths, so Jameson thought of the creature as Augie.

Augie was sidling warily into the room now on three legs, carrying a pan of greenish gruel in its forward pair of limbs and clutching a two-pronged electric prod in its free middle claw. Augie had never gotten over being afraid of Jameson.

Jameson backed off a little so as not to frighten the little creature. Augie set the pan down on the floor, back arched stiffly and eyestalks scanning in ragged circles. Retreating, the Cygnan got a foot tangled in the leathery double-ended poncho it wore for an apron. It hastily disentangled itself and skittered backward through the rolling disk that served as a door. The crescent opening closed with a thud.

Jameson could almost feel sympathy for the attendant. The poor creature had been saddled with responsibility for the monster from Earth for several days now. Triad and Tetrachord were off on one of their incomprehensible errands. Whenever they were gone, Jameson was kept locked up in a small adjoining chamber.

He looked sourly around at his surroundings. His cell was a narrow wedge crammed with Cygnan junk: dusty oddly shaped containers emptied of their original contents, heaps of pretzel-shaped transparent tubing, a broken three-armed perch. He’d dragged in as much of the looted human stores as was useful: clothing, packaged food, bedding, some miscellaneous furniture and utensils. He was dressed in clean coveralls that were too small for him; the name stitched over the breast pocket said Gifford. He had improvised a shower and sanitary facilities in the narrow corner, and when he was able to get into the main chamber he refilled his perforated jerrycans with water and emptied his makeshift chamber pots into the waste-disposal system. Augie wasn’t much on cleaning up.

Jameson was mute, too, without access to the Moog. Augie made no attempt to understand his whistled arpeggios.

Jameson sighed and took the pan of gruel over to the salvaged table he ate on. It seemed to be mostly shredded wingbean pods and undercooked hamster meat embedded in a starchy mush that the Cygnans had synthesized or adapted from their own chemistry. Sugars and starches must be as basic as DNA. He spooned it into himself as rapidly as possible. The stuff had practically no taste, for which he was grateful.

He was gulping the last few spoonfuls of the bland, glutinous mess when the kitten came over to rub against his leg and meow. He scratched its ears and crossed to the locker where he kept his dwindling supply of human foodstuffs. There was only one can of condensed milk left. With a sigh he opened it and poured some into a saucer.

The kitten lapped the milk up eagerly. It had filled out a little and its fur was no longer so ratty, but it was still pathetically thin. It was going to have to learn how to eat bits of hamster meat and the Cygnans’ synthetic concoctions. The animal at least had a name now: Mao—Chinese for “cat.”

He fished a fragment of pink flesh out of what was left of the gruel and extended it on a finger to Mao. The kitten took it into its mouth and chewed it ineffectually with needle teeth, then let it drop on the floor. Jameson massaged its nape, feeling the little fragile neck bones through the fur, then let it go back to its milk. He was washing up—he’d found that if he didn’t wash the pan himself, Augie gave him his next meal with food still caked to it—when he noticed a crack at one side of the door. Going over to inspect it, he found that Augie had been careless. The locking mechanism had failed to engage. Cautiously he rolled the door back a couple of inches and peered through.

The cluttered main chamber was silent. Augie was nowhere in sight.

Jameson didn’t even stop to think. He had been cooped up in his pen too long now. The Cygnans didn’t like him wandering around unsupervised. But that didn’t matter now. From watching his captors, he had some notion of how to tap the ship’s library through the computer console.

He rolled the door all the way back and stepped through. Mao hopped over the rim after him.

The place smelled musty. Little furry insect-creatures twittered in their cages. Jameson prowled to the far door and satisfied himself that it was shut tight. Out there, hundreds of Cygnans dashed about doing their obscure duties. Augie must be in one of the adjoining chambers, packing up. Lately Tetrachord and Triad had been moving equipment and cages elsewhere. The shelves of caged snacks were almost empty now.

He went over to the fretted console and studied the wires and studs, trying to remember what Tetrachord had done to activate it. This was the first time he had been this close to it. Usually if he approached to within ten feet the Cygnans hissed at him and made threatening gestures.

He pressed the pearly stud that turned it on, then strummed one of the fingerboards at random. The screens lit up, and he was looking at a vast silvery hall where thousands of six-legged aliens clung to a pipe-rack forest of perches, watching an egg-shaped niche where a lone Cygnan, mirrored on all sides by a reflecting surface, twirled round on its hind legs, holding up four objects that looked like dumbbells with skeletal pyramids for weights. A couple of Cygnans in the foreground started to twist around toward the screen. Jameson hastily shut the console off.

What had he tuned into? A classroom lecture? A religious service? A performance of some sort? Had there been a monitor pickup of any kind? Could anyone in the audience have seen him?

He waited until his heart stopped pounding, then cautiously tried strumming the metal strings with the console off. If he put his ear to the frets he found he could hear a faint twang, like elfin tuning forks. The tuning system wasn’t anything so simple as a chromatic scale in quarter-tones. The triple strands of wires seemed to be arranged for Cygnan convenience, probably reflecting frequency of use, like a typewriter keyboard.

By trial and error he found the combination that he thought would get him into the children’s section of the library. It was a simple succession of Cygnan phonemes incorporating an interrogative and a sound meaning something like “young” or “new.” He’d heard Tetrachord vocalize it while trying to make some point clear to him. It had always got some nursery pictures or diagrams.

He practiced till he thought he had it right. Then, holding his breath, he turned on the machine and plucked the strings.

He was looking at a row of purple globes, glossy as eggplants, set in grooves along a floor littered with something that resembled green popcorn. The globes were plugged into the faces of an endless sawtooth partition that ran the length of a hall that dwindled to infinity.

He saw miniature Cygnans clinging to the enormous fruits, six or seven to a globe, their rasplike snouts buried in the skins, sucking out the juices. Adult Cygnans, aproned like Jameson’s own attendant, scurried up and down the aisle, rearranging the tiny creatures and occasionally pulling them free to tend to them. The adults gave Jameson the scale of what he was seeing. The miniature Cygnans were about the size of weasels. The purple things were as big as hippopotami.

Then one of the eggplants quivered and shifted its position. Jameson for the first time noticed the vestigial limbs, six flipperlike stumps, that sprawled out uselessly from their bloated bulks. The heads must be on the other side of the sawtooth partition, feeding mindlessly at an endless trough…

He managed to switch off the console before being sick on the floor.

A nursery! He’d tuned in a Cygnan nursery! Those nonsentient hulks must have been bred through countless generations to give blood and body fluids, the way humans had bred milk cows. They were nothing but brainless food factories.

Jameson tried to put his discovery in a rational light. He told himself that laying hens and feed-lot cattle and beef hamsters were practically vegetables, some of them barely ambulant. He reminded himself that people once had swallowed oysters alive, back in the days when it was still safe to eat oysters. But the sour taste in his mouth wouldn’t go away. He kept seeing an image of the oozing, abraded wound in the hide of one of the purple creatures when a Cygnan nurse had yanked a feeding tyke away.

When his stomach settled down, Jameson tried again. This time he got it right. The three-ring cluster of screens displayed what appeared to be a library index in simplified visual terms suitable for a being who had asked for information in babytalk.

On one screen a wheel of tiny glittering images rotated slowly against darkness. No, it wasn’t a wheel, it was a spiral, pulling bright little midges out of infinity.

A second screen showed the unwinding spiral edge-on. The little pictures marched on from the side of the screen in a widening funnel, feeding the outer rim.

The third screen was close-ups, one by one, of each image as it reached the point on the spiral where it disappeared.

Evidently even Cygnan children could look at all three screens at once and make sense out of the procession. The principle of organization was incomprehensible to Jameson. It all seemed random, in no particular order. But then, he told himself, a Cygnan would say the same thing about an alphabetized listing in a human dictionary.

Helplessly Jameson watched the images flow past. The subject headings were fascinating in themselves, but he was all too aware that he might be interrupted at any moment. There was a generalized botanical representation of fat blue leaves and salmon-colored fruits that would have driven Dmitri wild. It gave way to a disembodied Cygnan eye with the spiral galaxy in Andromeda, exactly as it was seen from Earth, reflected in its depths. Then there was a construction of shiny metal rods working away like a model steam engine. And a length of green rope patiently tying and untying itself into a recognizable square knot.

Jameson tried strumming the word Tetrachord had given him for “planet.” Immediately the spiral flow of midges speeded into a streaking blur and came to a stop. On the close-up screen was a swollen red ball against a background of unfamiliar constellations.

The screen asked him a question.

Jameson almost jumped out of his skin. Then he realized that the Cygnan voice had to be mechanical: recorded or computer-generated.

After a pause, the artificial voice queried him again. Crestfallen, Jameson realized that he couldn’t understand. He was used to talking to Tetrachord and Triad, period.

On a hunch, he strummed the word for “yes.”

The spiraling midges disappeared. He was peering at a strange landscape, identical on all three screens.

In the foreground was a city. Soaring towers reached into a lemon sky, stark shapes that no human mind had conceived. There were jagged shards of shiny black stone traced with networks of white threadlike exterior paths for climbing. There were angular shafts with jutting cantilevered branches. Three knife-edged spires leaned toward one another to meet at a common apex, their bases enclosing a triangular park landscaped with blue vegetation. Traffic moved in a thick stream around the buildings, three-wheeled vehicles shaped like upright eggs, changing direction without turning. The drivers, visible through the transparent bubbles, were Cygnans, clinging to a central pole, with passengers and baggage disposed around them in a circle.

Jameson’s breath quickened. This was no spaceship interior landscape. He was looking at what could only be the Cygnans’ home planet.

He stared greedily, trying to absorb details.

The buildings cast complicated shadows, washed-out fingers of color that stretched in all directions. It was day, but that yellow sky was almost filled with an enormous ruddy moon, a squashed moon that ballooned from horizon to zenith. There was a slice out of one side. Its outline was fuzzy, its face marbled.

The Cygnan observer panned across the landscape.

There were two suns, low on the horizon. The smaller of the two was a fiercely glaring blue-white hole in the sky. The other was a swollen red giant. But something was wrong with it. It bulged on one side.

As Jameson watched, the traffic in the roadways speeded up, like an animated cartoon. Soon he could see nothing but a blur. The shadows grew like spilled dye. Time-lapse.

The smaller sun moved toward its bloated companion. The red sun swallowed it with a gulp. The shadows merged and deepened.

A Cygnan voice was giving a commentary. Jameson strained to make sense out of the calliope squawks. There were too many abstractions. He caught the word for “mother”—at any rate, the generalized phrase for “progenitor” that seemed to figure so pervasively in Cygnan thought. Something about the Great Mother that swallows her … damn, what was that word? It had the root signifying a relationship. Offspring? No.

The scene changed. The white sun was emerging from the rim of the giant: But the giant itself was moving toward the darkening moon.

The scene changed again. It was night in that strange city. The moon hadn’t moved. It had gone dark, but you could see it as a monstrous silhouette, blotting out the stars. It was outlined by a rim of red fire.

The Cygnan commentator said something incomprehensible that contained the word for “eat.” The red sun emerged from the rim of fire, spilling blood across the moon. As it rose, it disgorged the white sun. The white sun fled from it, widening the gap, casting a brilliant light as it rose higher in the sky.

Jameson drew in his breath. The Cygnans, it seemed, had evolved on a satellite world that always kept the same face turned toward the gas giant that was its primary—a primary that itself circled a double star.

The Cygnan voice trilled ecstatically. Jameson couldn’t follow it. What strange sacraments of eucharist and resurrection would beings like the Cygnans have devised for themselves while they were struggling toward a scientific society?

He grinned wryly. Probably he was just listening to a straightforward astronomical commentary. The Cygnans, after all, called hydrogen something that translated as “mother-of-matter.”

The red sun ate the white sun again, and spat it out. Both rose higher in the sky. Now, as Jameson watched, they merged. The white sun moved across the swollen red disk, its radiance almost wiping it out, flooding the city with cheerful light.

The scene changed—night again, but a different sort of night. The moon was lit. Its monstrous presence loomed over the twisted towers, glowing like hot coals. But now it had a hole precisely in its center; the shadow of the Cygnan world, like the pupil of an enormous eye brooding at its creation.

Jameson was so riveted to the screen that he didn’t notice Augie enter the room. He realized it, too late, when the kitten sprang spitting from his lap and streaked for cover under a low fixture across the room.

The Cygnan attendant advanced on him, belly-low on five legs, holding an electric prod. It hissed at him, motioning him away from the console.

With despair, Jameson glanced at the unfolding scenes on the triple screen. Now a Cygnan lecturer was juggling colored balls in four of its splayed hands. Two of the balls glowed like Japanese lanterns: a big red one and a blue one. The voice was going to explain all about multiple eclipses to the kiddies. And Jameson was going to miss it. Damn!

He slid off the seat and edged along the console wall, trying to put space between himself and the prod. If it touched him, he knew, he was done for.

The Cygnan prowled sideways, keeping parallel with him. It seemed to move sideways as easily and naturally as it moved forward. He’d often seen them move backward for short distances, too, without bothering to turn round, their eyestalks pointed rearward. That gave Augie a decided advantage in the stalking game.

Augie darted at him, feinting with the prod at Jameson’s legs, then darted backward again. The hexapodal creature was holding itself so low that its leathery poncho, half unlaced as usual, dragged on the floor.

Jameson scrambled backward, out of the way, tripping over a low pedestal. Augie immediately pressed the attack. The long, sleek alligator-shape launched itself at him like a harpoon. Desperately Jameson flung himself sideways. Perhaps human reflexes were a match for a Cygnan’s blurring speed after all—at least an elderly Cygnan like Augie. Jameson knew he would have stood no chance whatsoever if there had been more than one of them. But the electric fork just missed contact.

There was a sizzling sound and the smell of scorched plastic. The fork had embedded itself in the padded cushion of a perch. Without stopping to think, Jameson grabbed the handle of the prod just forward of Augie’s grip.

Instantly four or five rubbery paws were grabbing at him. Jameson ignored them. He yanked with all his strength. The Cygnan’s grip was as weak as a child’s. Jameson had the prod. No time to figure out how to use it! He flung the blasted thing away as hard as he could.

Then the Cygnan twisted away like an eel, going after the prod. Jameson made a grab for the clubbed tail and yanked the creature back. Augie uttered a strangled klaxonlike squawk. It turned sinuously, bending double, and struck at him with its long head.

He felt a pain that burned like fire. The creature had managed to get the tip of its abrasive tongue into the meat of his upper arm. Jameson, still keeping a grip on the tail, grabbed with his free hand for one of the fleshy eyestalks and forced the Cygnan’s head back. Augie was thrashing around. Millions of gristly fingers were pawing indiscriminately at Jameson’s wrists and ankles, doing no harm. Jameson shifted position and knelt on the Cygnan’s thick tail. Augie gave a terrible squawk again and shuddered convulsively before going limp.

Jameson had it by two eyestalks now, with his weight on its tail. He seemed to have injured the creature or made it sick. The petals at the tip of the tail were parted slightly, and there was a thick yellow exudate oozing out.

Augie was trembling. It was being careful not to move, to avoid damage to its eyes. Jameson gave a little tug to emphasize the point, then let go with one hand. He reached down, feeling for the poncho’s laces, and pulled a length off. Working quickly, he muzzled the Cygnan, winding the cord around its snout. It was harder than he expected. The Cygnan didn’t have a normal jaw that could be clamped shut, like a terrestrial animal. It could still peel back the edges of its mouth at any point past the encircling cord. Jameson had to do the whole snout up like a mummy, and even then the Cygnan was able to spread the tip apart like a rosebud and show a half inch of that rasplike tongue.

Jameson’s arm was bleeding. There was a little round pit in it about a quarter inch deep. He had a feeling that if he hadn’t jerked away so quickly, it would have gone all the way through to the bone.

With the Cygnan’s head trussed up, Jameson moved swiftly to immobilize the rest of it. Still keeping a grip on an eyestalk with one hand, he pulled the creature’s leathery poncho around backward, trapping its limbs. Then, two-handed, he laced it up in back like a straitjacket.

The Cygnan squirmed helplessly in its wrappings, making angry sounds. Jameson dragged the writhing bundle to a corner, out of the way. Even then it tried to strike at him with its half inch of protruding tongue, but Jameson was able to keep himself out of reach. He took a moment to rip the sleeve off his borrowed coveralls and bandage his arm.

The show was still going on in the trifolium viewer. How much had he missed? The part about the complicated eclipses might have told him something useful about the Cygnans’ abandoned home. Ruiz would have been able to do wonders with a few clues about the nature of the double-star system they had emerged from. But Jameson didn’t dare try to turn the sequence back. He was afraid he’d lose it altogether and never find it again.

He was looking at a vast panorama of industrial effort. On a barren plain lit by the baleful light of that sky-filling moon, hundreds of thousands of Cygnans were toiling like ants. Great mining machines like thousand-foot metallic earthworms burrowed into the soil. On the arched horizon there was the bright flare of a rocket taking off.

With a start, Jameson recognized what he had taken at first for a squat pyramid sticking up out of the soil. It was the peak of those three skyscrapers that leaned together. Cygnans with barrel-wheeled bulldozers and beetlelike backhoes were digging them out. Other Cygnans were cutting away the metal framework and bearing it off. Jameson caught his breath. How many thousands of years had it taken for that city to be buried?

Now, almost like an intercut in a human film, he saw the Cygnans’ tremendous fleet being assembled in space. In the foreground was the triangular base of one of the environmental pods, miles across, with a swarm of service vehicles hovering around it. Perhaps a hundred miles farther out was the half-folded frame of an uncompleted ship, looking like the clawprint of an immense bird stamped against the curve of the gas giant that had been the Cygnans’ moon.

The scene spun to let him see the paired suns. They overlapped. The red sun was moving across the face of the white sun, so he knew that what he saw was not a trick of perspective.

The white sun was bigger.

During the ages it had taken for the Cygnan city to be buried, that sun had grown to perhaps twice its former size. Or else the red giant had shrunk. Or both.

This time the white sun was giving the red giant a bad case of indigestion. At what would have been full eclipse, Jameson saw a blinding white halo around the dull red disk of the giant. Then they began to pull apart. The red sun extruded a nipple. It swelled toward its brilliant companion. Skeins of fire stretched between the two.

The red giant shrank like a leaky balloon. The Cygnan observer had speeded things up again. How many Cygnan observers, over how many lifetimes? Hanging motionless beside it, the white sun bloated. It puffed up as he watched, dwarfing its diminishing mate.

Momentarily Jameson wondered how it was possible for him to see the stars in the same relative positions. If the screen was showing him a time-lapse version of eons of stellar evolution, then their minuet around each other would have speeded up to a whizzing blur, streaks of light across the void.

Then he realized that—of course!—the Cygnans were using their strobe trick to stop unwanted motion. The wobble must have been too rapid at this speed for even Cygnan synapses to handle, so the computer was doing it for the kiddies.

The process of engorgement seemed to have stopped. The glowing balls hung side by side against raw space, a cherry next to a peach.

The suns receded. He was looking out into deep space now. A profusion of stars burned against blackness. The Cygnans’ double star stayed in the mathematical center of the screen. Soon his eye could not separate them.

So, the migration had begun.

At what had to be at least a couple of light-years out, he began to wonder why the stars in his field of view weren’t changing color. Either the Cygnans weren’t yet traveling at anywhere near the speed of light, or the computer was compensating for red shift.

He was wrestling with that problem when the screen exploded.

A dazzling flash of light left him blinded. For an instant, through the haze, he saw a brilliant glare in the center of the screen. Supernova!

When his vision came back, the stars were rushing toward him as the screen zoomed to the limits of magnification. The library was about to show him something interesting.

The light went out like a dying light bulb and there was nothing except the engorged white star shining in space. The image must have been computer-enhanced. He could see a disk the size of a cotton ball.

The cotton ball began to wobble. The computer was manipulating the strobe effect—at a ratio of thousands of images to one—to show that it was dancing with … something!

Something invisible.

A background star became a smear of light and winked off. An instant later it reappeared and shrank to a point again. The stars immediately nearby were rippling, like objects seen through heat waves. By looking closely, Jameson could see that the rippling stars were lapping around a fairly well-defined circle where no background stars shone.

Something was bending light, swallowing it. The invisible something that was whirling in dervish circles around the white star that had fed on its substance.

There was only one thing in the universe that swallowed light.

Jameson watched in awe, hardly daring to blink, until his eyes were burning. The circling dance went on a long time—as long, it seemed to him, as the entire stellar sequence leading up to it had taken. He wished fervently that he had a watch so that he could time the relative duration. His eyes began to play tricks on him. The moving boundary where light splattered and disappeared seemed to become tangible: a black blot against the blackness of space. It was an illusion, he knew. The thing—the nothing—in the center of that blot could never be seen.

Now, with startling suddenness, the white star began to grow again. Its color changed to blue as it inflated to enormous size, bigger even than the red giant had been.

Blue supergiant! It had exhausted its hydrogen and become a helium star.

Now, in a blink, the black hole became visible—not the hole itself, but the terrible events in its accretion disk. For a moment of cosmic time there was a flash of hideous light as the Cygnan computer selectively shifted an X-ray source burning with the power of ten thousand suns to the visible spectrum.

The screens went blank.

Before Jameson could move, the room was filled with hissing Cygnans, Triad and Tetrachord among them. They saw the trussed-up Augie and set up a din that sounded like the shrill of a roomful of teakettles. There was a blur of flashing movement in Jameson’s direction. He flung up an arm to protect his face, then felt a searing flash of pain that wiped him out of existence.