“Smash that thing!” Boyle yelled from the balcony. “See if you can get at it through the bubble!”
Half a dozen willing hands poked at the revolving device with bars through the resilient material, but they couldn't reach it. The blister dimpled just so far, then resisted.
“I feel so strange,” Maybury said.
Maggie, for no reason, began to feel edgy. It was like hearing a fingernail scrape along a blackboard, except that there wasn't any sound. Her teeth were on edge
All across the bridge people were starting to behave strangely. Somebody staggered and fell. A woman with a contorted face was squeezing her head with both hands. Then a man, his mouth open, began clenching his fists in front of his chest and trembling violently.
Somebody stumbled against her, as if off balance. It was Dmitri, his boyish face shiny with sweat. “They couldn't gas us,” he said between clenched teeth. “They don't know enough about terrestrial biochemistry yet. But any kind of a nervous system can be interfered with by modulated electromagnetic fields. They must have used their gadget before on all kinds of life.”
Maggie's vision was disappearing, as if her face were swelling up in the worse allergy attack she'd ever had. There was a ringing in her ears, drowning out Dmitri's words. There was a dreadful spine-crawling sensation and the illusion of rapid flickering through her entire body. Then she was suspended in a senseless horror, while her mind scrabbled round and round, trying to get out.
She was not aware of it when a horde of aliens oozed somehow through the transparent membrane without breaking it and stuffed her and the other helpless humans into airtight sacks. When her senses returned, she was floating in a giant soap bubble beside a metal cliff that seemed to stretch on forever. She was part of a chain of bubbles rising through the dark of space while a flock of shiny demons swam alongside, prodding them with broomsticks.
Jameson's ears popped. The air was thin, but rich in oxygen. It had an oily, industrial smell to it. But after what he'd been expecting, it was marvelous. He took deep, grateful breaths.
They had him pinned to the floor while they stripped off his pressure suit and skivvies. It was no good struggling. Too many of those three-fingered hands were holding him down, shifting their grips with blinding speed while they pulled off sleeves, undid fasteners, shucked him out of the rest of it. By the time he realized that an arm or leg was free, they'd peeled it down and imprisoned it again. In a few brief seconds he was naked and shivering with cold.
His belongings went into a sealed sack. He guessed that he was in biological quarantine. All of the Cygnans handling him were encased in transparent envelopes. He saw nothing resembling air filters; perhaps the entire envelope was permeable to gas molecules but not subviruses.
He tried to talk, but they ignored him, talking instead among themselves with all sorts of chirps and whistles and concertina humming. Once or twice, when his ear was fast enough to catch a fragment, he tried humming it back to them in perfect pitch, but the effort seemed to make no impression.
All at once they began probing him all over with rubbery fingers and little metal instruments that were cold on his bare skin. A three-fingered hand walked along his spine, tracing it. Another counted his ribs. Another probed elbows and kneecaps while they flexed his arms and legs. They forced his mouth open with a bellowslike instrument and shone a light into it. He gagged as a swab poked down his throat, but then it was over and they withdrew the bellows. The swab went into a little oval container.
Next came a tray of little pipettes with suction bulbs at one end. He struggled as they inserted these into every body orifice they could find, from nostrils to urethra. His struggles didn't do him a bit of good. They got their samples and whisked them away, leaving him sneezing, itching, and smarting.
There was a tricky moment when one of the Cygnans tried to force a slim metal tube into his navel, evidently under the impression that it opened. Jameson howled in protest. He had visions of being skewered. But after a moment the Cygnan gave up and contented itself with a swab.
They took their tissue sample in direct, brutal fashion. One of the Cygnans pinched the flesh of Jameson's thigh and sliced off a piece of meat as thick as a piece of bacon. Blood welled up and ran down his leg. The Cygnans seemed excited by this. There was a chorus of harmonica music, and they siphoned off several cc's of blood with a pipette. While he lay pinioned and bleeding, a Cygnan sprayed the wound with something that burned like fire. Almost instantly the spray hardened into a rubbery, transparent skin that sealed the wound and stopped the bleeding. Jameson was thankful the Cygnan's blade hadn't severed the femoral artery.
After several more tests, including running something like a metal detector over the surface of his body, the Cygnans gathered up their paraphernalia and left. The circular door rolled in its groove and thudded shut.
They left him in his cell without food or water for what seemed to be about twenty-four hours. He spent most of that time huddled in a ball, trying to keep warm. The Cygnans seemed to like low temperatures.
When the door rolled open again, three plastic-wrapped Cygnans entered the cell. The guard with the neural scrambler was with them. Jameson tried to pantomime his need for food and water, but they roundly ignored him. Before he knew what was happening, one of the Cygnans stabbed him in the belly.
He yelped and leaped backward. There was a raw circle about an inch in diameter just below his navel, studded with bright jewels of blood from a dozen pinpricks. He caught a glimpse of the instrument the Cygnan had used, something like half a golf ball with short needles projecting from the flat side. He'd been given injections of some kind.
The Cygnans left. An hour later he was feverish and getting sicker. He spent the next day feeling miserable. For a couple of hours he was delirious. But he had a blanket now, a square of some soft synthetic textured like overlapping orange scales that he was able to wrap around himself for warmth. Eventually his warder brought him a bowl of flat, tepid water, which he lapped up eagerly, getting down on his hands and knees, not daring to lift it to his lips for fear of spilling some of the precious liquid. There were no sanitary facilities. He used the far corner of the cell, feeling humiliated. Nothing was ever done about cleaning it up.
When the fever had passed, Jameson felt ravenous. Still shaky, he pounded on the door for attention. No one came. He waited it out for another twelve hours. Then the door opened. A Cygnan skittishly set something on the floor in front of him and fled.
He pounced on it. It was a prepared meal from his own ship's galley, a thawing block of stew still in its original foil warming pan. He ignored the implications of that while he wolfed down the food, ice crystals and all. It was the first food he'd eaten in forty-eight hours.
He pushed the pan aside, satiated, and looked up. Two Cygnans were standing there, watching him. They were the first ones he'd seen without the transparent protective suits since he'd been taken out of his sterilized sack and isolated here. So he was at last out of quarantine! They were safe from his germs now—or he from theirs.
The two aliens were holding hands, Cygnan fashion. The middle pair. One of them was carrying a foot long implement in one of its primary limbs that resembled a two-pronged toasting fork with blunt tines.
The other Cygnan uttered a clear, chimelike sound composed of two tones. Jameson recognized it as a tetrachord: a perfect fourth. The first Cygnan let go of the other's hand and high-stepped over the rim of the door, holding the forklike object in front of it like a weapon.
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 ubiquitou
s 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 spac
e, 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?
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