And then the creature's long flexible head disappeared in an explosion of orange gore.
Jameson caught a frozen glimpse of Klein picking himself off the floor, where he'd thrown himself for a prone shot. Then he realized that Tetrachord's headless body was still running, and he remembered that a Cygnan's brain was somewhere below the neck, a swelling of that central ganglion. He shuddered, wondering what thoughts might be going on within the blind, deaf isolation of the body. Klein was in no hurry to fire his explosive darts again; perhaps he enjoyed watching the creature's agony. Tetrachord dropped to four legs, then six, the neural weapon clattering to the floor, running more and more jerkily, then lowering the long sleek body almost deliberately, the legs still twitching. A great gout of orange fluid, thick as syrup, was spurting from the tattered stem of the neck.
A sound like a steam whistle split the sudden hush, and Jameson saw a golden flash streak between the two lines of humans toward the safety of the cage. It was Triad, chittering with fear, her six legs peddling in a feathery blur.
Klein had lost his chance to fire at her. He swiveled around, his gun held stiff-armed, and for a moment Jameson feared that the man was insane enough to hose down the humans clustered at the cagefront, and some of his own people, with a stream of microflechettes. The moment passed, and Klein lowered the gun as the Cygnan oozed past the open gate and, flinching away from the humans, cowered against the wall, afraid to go farther.
Klein laughed. He strode to the cage and looked in. Jameson dropped to the ground. His eyes met Klein's.
“Stupid snakes!” Klein said. “Ruiz was right about one thing—their brains must have gotten frozen six million years ago. They don't look so tough now. We're going to make it, Jameson.”
“Listen, Klein,” Jameson said. “All right, escape if you can. But don't use the nukes.”
Klein didn't bother to reply. He motioned Jameson and the others away from the door with his gun, then rolled it shut all the way. There was a solid-sounding thunk, then a series of clicks as ratchets fell into place. Klein tried the door with a tug of his powerful arms. It held firm. He turned on his heel and walked away.
Jameson followed him with his eyes as he walked the length of the vestibule toward the headless Cygnan body. It had stopped twitching. Klein bent and picked up the neural weapon. He handed it to Chia, and the little procession, with its herded prisoners, moved past the rows of cages down the hall and disappeared around a bend.
A circle of people were gawking at the huddled Triad, keeping well out of reach of the rasping snout. It hadn't occurred to anybody to try to harm her. Jameson went over to her. It was up to him to try to retrieve the situation.
The other people let him through. They looked at him expectantly. Perhaps they were wondering what the Cygnans would do to them in the morning. He bent over. “Careful, Tod,” somebody said.
The Cygnan was shivering violently and uncontrollably. Her three eyestalks waved purposelessly around the central orifice at the tip of the flexible snout, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Jameson doubted that the creature had distinguished him from the other suddenly dangerous animals that surrounded her.
He tried her name three times before he got her attention. Then her long head quested toward him like an elephant's trunk and she whistled the three tones that meant “Ja-me-son.” It sounded a little like the call of a whippoorwill, and for some reason Jameson read pathos into it.
He looked her over carefully. She didn't appear to be hurt, but she was behaving strangely. A human being in the grip of some powerful and uncontrollable emotion might writhe the way she was now doing. Was it grief over the loss of her mate? Fear? What the hell was it that a Cygnan felt?
The rings of muscle were contracting in sequence down the whole length of her tubular body, like a species of peristalsis. She coiled and twisted with each successive wave, so that he was able to see her form all the way around.
The parasite was missing.
There was a lighter patch on her skin where it had clung, and he could see the six little wounds where it had dug in its feet. At the top of the oval patch, where the tiny head had been embedded, was an ulcerated sore.
Dmitri was kneeling beside him. “Is the creature sick?” he said. He cast a professional eye over the Cygnan. “Do you notice—there's a slight turgidity of surface tissue, especially around the mucosa of the eyes and mouth. That can't be normal.”
Jameson took a closer look and saw that Dmitri was right. There were other changes. The gold-and-russet pattern of her reticulated hide seemed brighter, more vivid in color. Jameson had the nagging feeling that some important datum was just beyond his grasp. Why, when the alarm went off, had the Cygnan run off helter skelter after her mate without thinking to arm herself?
“Triad,” he tried again, but the Cygnan was warbling to herself. The swollen eye polyps were waving at random again.
“Oh God, look!” a woman's voice said over by the bars.
“Go get a hoe or something,” someone else said, and there was the sound of running feet heading toward Kiernan's vegetable garden on the other side of the enclosure.
Jameson straightened up and went over to the gate. A dozen men and women were staring, fascinated, at something in the hall beyond.
“What's going on?” Jameson said.
“Look!” Beth Oliver said, her voice filled with loathing.
Jameson peered through the bars. A soft pulpy thing the size of a large frog was crawling painfully across the floor toward the cage. It was one of the Cygnan parasites. It had detached itself from Tetrachord's cooling body and was inching along blindly on its weak little legs.
“Its host is dead,” Hsieh said to Jameson. “It senses the presence of another Cygnan in here with us—like lice deserting a dead rat for the nearest warm body.”
The thing pulled itself along with snail slowness. Jameson could see that it had no head to speak of—just a long thin sucking tube that probed the air like an antenna.
“My father told stories of the prison camp in Khabarovsk, where they kept him after the Yakut liberation, before the Americans agreed to take in Russian refugees,” Dmitri said softly. “The prisoners were plagued by bedbugs—Sibérian bedbugs, the size of dog ticks. When spring came, after the first thaw, they got permission from the guards to leave their infested bedding and sleep on the bare ground, fifty feet from their huts. They settled down—it was still light—and they saw a horrible brown tide spilling out of the huts and covering the ground like a carpet, coming toward them. It was the bedbugs. They can sense the presence of human blood even at that distance. In jungle warfare in the last century, American troops used them to detect guerrillas. They carried bedbugs in a special box, open to the air on one side, and when the bedbugs smelled blood—only human blood—they made excited little cries that could be picked up by sensitive microphones in the boxes...”
Jameson looked over at the writhing Triad. “Dmitri, could that be some sort of toxic reaction?”
Dmitri thought it over. “Maybe. We know too little about Cygnan physiology. It's possible immune reaction could rid host of parasite, leave host sick with its own antibodies.”
The parasite had covered the distance to the bars. Everybody involuntarily pulled back out of its way as it squeezed itself through the bars.
“Ugh, disgusting!” Beth said.
“Too big to step on.” Omar laughed in his bass voice. “In bare feet, anyway.”
Up close you could see the russet-and-gold diamond pattern on the pulsating oval of the thing's body. “Protective coloration,” Dmitri said. “It evolved with its host. Beautiful adaptation!”
“Beautiful?” Beth said, sounding sick.
Despite its apparent lack of eyes or other sense organs, the parasite was making a beeline for the shivering Triad, who stared at it as if mesmerized. It dragged itself along on its threadlike legs, the obscene sucking tube extended.
“Here's the hoe!” somebody yelled. Wang came puffing u
p with the garden tool and handed it to Omar.
“I can't watch,” Beth said, turning away.
Omar raised the hoe to strike, when suddenly an ear-splitting whistle came from Triad, like the one she'd emitted when Tetrachord died.
Everybody turned to stare. Omar paused at the top of his swing to look around then braced his thick legs to bring the hoe down.
All at once everything clicked for Jameson. “Stop!” he yelled.
He hurled himself forward, one shoulder low, and caught Omar behind the knees. The two of them went tumbling end over end in the low gravity. The hoe went spinning out of Omar's grip.
Jameson picked himself up. “Sorry,” he said, and extended a hand to help Omar to his feet.
Omar dusted himself off. “What the hell was that all about?” he rumbled from somewhere inside his massive chest. He seemed more puzzled than angry.
Jameson turned to make sure the parasite was all right. It had covered another ten inches in its grublike progress toward Triad, who shrank against the cage wall in a shivering paralysis.
Overcoming his repugnance, he bent and scooped it up in his hand. It was not slimy, as he had expected. It was warm and dry to the touch. It writhed and contracted in his palm, its threadlike legs clinging.
Triad made a faint wheezing sound. The others looked at Jameson with incomprehension or revulsion, except for Dmitri, whose face was expectant.
“This isn't a parasite,” Jameson told them. “It's the other half of the Cygnan race.”
“A parasitic male!” Dmitri said, turning the squirming creature over in his hand. “Of course! Why didn't I think of it?”
Over at the sloping wall, a few of the braver young men were restraining Triad, who was making weak, uncoordinated attempts to get to Jameson and Dmitri. Most of the diminished human colony was there, including Janet Lemieux, who had left a sedated Boyle in the care of a couple of volunteers. Ruiz had already regained consciousness with the help of a stimulant she'd given him, and though he hadn't yet tried to sit up, he was watching with lively interest.
“The Cygnans are all females,” Jameson said. “The ones we've been thinking of as Cygnans, I mean. What fooled me was the way they behave like courting couples. And the personality differences, and the fact that one was bigger and stronger than the other. If they've got to pair off to reproduce, I suppose it's natural that a weaker would tend to gravitate toward a stronger.”
Dmitri nodded in agreement. “Not only natural—it's a survival mechanism for the species.”
“What are you two talking about?” Liz cried plaintively.
Dmitri laughed with sheer enjoyment. “These little males are just nonsentient vegetables,” he said. “The Cygnans exchange them like engagement rings. Why didn't I see it? It took a rocket jockey like Tod here to point it out to me.”
“But that thing in your hand doesn't look anything like a Cygnan,” Omar objected. “It's more like an insect.”
“Ah, but it does!” Dmitri said. “Same body structure—but the legs have atrophied because it needs them only for clinging, and the ‘head’ has regressed to its only function: to suck blood. No eyes, because a parasite doesn't need them, and if I dissected it I would find no digestive organs, because it gets its meals predigested. But the gonads, you can be sure, are well developed, as they are in all parasites. It is perfectly adapted to its way of life.”
“What a filthy thing!” Beth said.
“Filthy?” Dmitri said, in genuine puzzlement. “Perhaps to us. To the Cygnans, perfectly natural. Nature always provides rewards to encourage reproduction—rewards in the form of pleasure, or at least release from compulsion.” He nodded toward the struggling Triad, whose body contractions had grown rhythmic and violent. “That poor creature is in torment.”
“But a parasitic mate!” Liz said. “Isn't that a bit farfetched?”
“There are any number of terrestrial examples,” Dmitri said. “Trichosomoides crassicauda. It's a parasitic worm, like the Cygnans’ distant ancestors. The male lives as a parasite within the uterus of its own mate. Edryolychnus. It's a deep-sea fish, very ugly. The male's a tiny appendage that attaches itself to the female early in life. Its eyes and other sense organs atrophy. Its blood vessels fuse with hers. I could go on.”
“Strange way to perpetuate a species,” Omar said.
“No stranger than ours. Males aren't very important in the scheme of things. They're just a mechanism for exchanging gametes. Female spiders eat their mates when they've finished their job. This thing in my hand is a gene package, not a lover. A Cygnan's emotional equivalent of a mate is the other female she trades males with.”
Jameson became thoughtful. “Dmitri, how would it work biologically?”
Dmitri looked around happily. “There's an almost precise, terrestrial analogy. A mite that's parasitic on moths: Lasioseius lacunosus. About one egg in twenty hatches as a male. The male is born first. That's so it can be an obstetrician for its sisters. It helps in the birth of the females by pulling them out of the mother's body. It lives as an ecoparasite with the mother for a brief time—it can't survive removal itself. But before its sisters leave home, it impregnates them.”
“But the Cygnan male doesn't impregnate its own sister?” Jameson said.
“No, it simply becomes a parasite on her. Let's say it works like this. Suppose the Cygnans have multiple births, or hatchings, or buddings, or whatever. The male can't survive on its own, any more than Lasioseius lacunosus can. It must immediately hook itself into the bloodstream of one of its much larger sisters or die. The attachment of a first male probably stimulates production of a hormone or chemical trigger that prevents the other male siblings from implanting themselves—”
“The way an ovum becomes impervious to other sperm after the first one reaches it,” Janet said, looking up from her work of bandaging Ruiz's head.
“Yes, yes,” Dmitri said impatiently. “At any rate, it's the fittest that tend to survive.”
“The courtship mechanism...” Jameson prompted.
Dmitri nodded. “What you call ‘courtship’ is two females pairing of and eventually exchanging their parasitic males. It must be as charged with emotion for them as sex is for humans. The exchange is an evolutionary survival mechanism which prevents inbreeding. Presumably there's a hormone or body-chemistry block which ordinarily prevents a parasite from impregnating its sister-host. The courtship ritual, on the other hand, must release pheromones—repare the endocrine systems of both the hosts and the parasites to accept the switch, just as a foreplay prepares both human sexes for sex.”
Jameson's eyes strayed toward Triad. The involuntary contractions of her body looked as if they were causing her physical pain. With each wave her rubbery body compressed by a third, then stretched out again like taffy. He was unable to imagine what she was feeling but clearly she was in the grip of a powerful biological imperative.
Her own tiny brother was already within the body of the dead Tetrachord, presumably dead or dying itself. The other half of the exchange must have been interrupted by the alarm. The squirming thing in Dmitri's hand was animated by its own biological imperative. If it failed to make contact with Triad soon, then the union of Tetrachord and Triad would produce no young.
Did Cygnans mate for life?
One of the Struggle Brigade stalwarts, a sinewy fellow with close-set eyes and bristly black hair brushed forward over his forehead, had retrieved the hoe and was prodding Triad with the handle. Jameson reached him in three swift strides.
“Stop that!” he said, and snatched the hoe from the startled man. He tossed it down the slope as far as he could throw it. The Cygnan, in her private misery, shuddered. The sounds she was making were nonhuman, but to Jameson's acclimatized ears they were piteous nevertheless.
Hating himself for what he was doing, he got down on one knee and said, in his broken-chord Cygnanese, “Triad, I talk. Do you hear?”
Dmitri broke off his lecture. He started forward. “Stay
where you are,” Jameson said sharply. Dmitri stopped. The other people fell silent and watched Jameson.
The clustered eye polyps quivered and stretched in Jameson's direction. It was like looking into three orange-rimmed inkwells.
“I hear, Ja-me-son,” the Cygnan trilled. “Give me the little brother.”
“Not yet. You must help me leave this place.”
“Jameson and his sisters are a wrongness in the sight of the mother-within-herself. You have stopped Tetrachord at the time of her (?)”
Jameson didn't recognize the last ideogram, but Triad, despite her distress, had made an effort to put the rest of her message in terms he could understand. “Stopped” was the term for a damaged piece of machinery. “Wrongness” was the word for “mistake” that had cropped up so frequently during his language lessons.
“What is she saying?” Dmitri asked eagerly.
“She's saying that we're abominations in the sight of her deity because we murdered her mate,” Jameson said.
Beth made an indignant noise. “What about the people they killed? And the Jovians and the other life forms they've exterminated? I suppose that if we don't have six legs, we don't count!”
“No,” Jameson said. “We don't.” He turned back to Triad. “The sisters who ... stopped ... Tetrachord are a wrongness to Jameson and his other sisters too.”
Another contractile spasm squeezed the Cygnan, squashing her. When it passed, the three eyestalks fixed on Jameson again, and the mouth centered among them opened like a pitcher plant. “Give me the little brother.”
“No. You must help me leave.”
“You are a wrongness. Like the other two-legs.”
Jameson had no time to decide what that meant, because the Cygnan was fumbling among her pouches. She extracted a short curving instrument that looked like a section of thick gold bracelet with little wheels set along its edges.
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