The Jupiter Theft Part 21

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 b.a.l.l.s in four of its splayed hands. Two of the b.a.l.l.s glowed like j.a.panese 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.d.a.m.n!

He slid off the seat and edged along the console wall, trying to put s.p.a.ce 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 cus.h.i.+on 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 thras.h.i.+ng around. Millions of gristly fingers were pawing indiscriminately at Jameson's wrists and ankles, doing no harm. Jameson s.h.i.+fted 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 skysc.r.a.pers 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 a.s.sembled in s.p.a.ce. 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 b.a.l.l.s hung side by side against raw s.p.a.ce, a cherry next to a peach.

The suns receded. He was looking out into deep s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+ft.

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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ning in s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce. It was an illusion, he knew. The thing-thenothing- 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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.

Chapter 21.

Tetrachord tugged gently at the leash. Jameson gagged as the loop of cord, threaded through his nostrils and dangling down his throat, tickled his pharynx. Then the moment of nausea pa.s.sed, and he ambled obediently down the concave sidewalk after the two aliens.

The kitten was in his arms. He'd managed to scoop the animal up before they led him off in disgrace. He d.a.m.n well wasn't going to leave it to Augie's tender mercies.

The tether wasn't too uncomfortable once he got used to it. Jameson once had been fed by a tube through his nose in the hospital, and he'd found that it looked worse than it felt. It made the back of his throat feel sore, that was all, and he didn't want to think about what would happen to his septum if he resisted the tug of the leash. But all the same, he was glad he hadn't been conscious when the cord was inserted, and he dreaded its removal.

Perhaps it was the usual practice for Cygnans, with the peculiar anatomy of their planet's life forms, to fetter their domestic animals through some a.n.a.lagous body cavity. It was a d.a.m.ned effective way to lead a human being around.

They had decided Jameson could no longer be trusted. He'd proved to be a dangerous animal, no longer fit to be a house pet. As with a puppy gone bad, they might feel some lingering affection for him, but they were regretfully taking him away all the same.

He trudged along behind the hand-holding pair, trying to keep the cord slack as much as possible.

Augie, sans poncho, was slithering along behind him at a safe distance, holding the electric prod.

Around him the Cygnan city swarmed with mottled life. He was being led through something akin to a commercial district, with the Cygnan equivalent of shops and restaurants and perhaps theaters. Vividly colored angular structures soared crazily up to a luminescent approximation of a sky a quarter mile above. The faces of the buildings were alive with thousands of busy Cygnans, clinging to latticework perches that extended all the way up. The long tubular snouts turned in Jameson's direction as he pa.s.sed, and the twittering noise level went up as they caught sight of him and paused in their activities. The scurrying crowds parted to make way for the dangerous procession, and a swarm of the curious trailed in Jameson's wake, keeping a respectful distance and piping questions at a sullenly silent Augie.

A little Cygnan the size of a beagle skittered up to him and was pulled back out of harm's way by an adult, exactly as a human parent might s.n.a.t.c.h a curious child out of the way of a circus animal. Jameson lost his step, trying to avoid tripping over the thing, and was rewarded by a painful yank of the cord snubbed around his septum. There-was a sickening sensation inside his head as a loop of the tether sc.r.a.ped the walls of the nasal cavity, and he had a fit of coughing and choking.

His feet stumbled along automatically. When the tears cleared from his eyes the path was emerging from the overhanging cliffsides of the vertical structures into a parklike stretch with pale blue lawns of packed fuzzb.a.l.l.s and contorted shrubs like tangles of red spaghetti on either side.

Jameson looked across an open plaza spoked with transparent travel tubes clogged with Cygnans entering or leaving the area. The tubes snaked at every level through walls, through enormous aquarium tanks, through enclosed habitats, through cages.

Cages.

A frightful stench was in the air, a fetid compound of rotting straw and halogens, of barnyard odors and ammonia, as if a menagerie had been set down in a chemical factory. The place was noisy, too-a hubbub of screeches and bellows and clicks and yaps and howls.

Jameson could make out some of the creatures in the nearby cages. He saw a tall insectoid thing like a cl.u.s.ter of milky bubbles on a tripod. And a thing like a fluffy dishrag that flapped miserably along a filthy cage floor. A pair of tendriled sacs that dangled like hanging baskets from the wire roof of their enclosure. A s.h.a.ggy pear-shaped cyclops that scratched itself with its single long arm.

Here and there across the plaza random groups of Cygnan sightseers paused to stare in Jameson's direction, then turned their attention to the more-interesting exhibits. Tetrachord made encouraging noises. When Jameson didn't move, the Cygnan pulled gently at the nose tether and urged him like a trained bear across the graveled plaza into the main body of the zoo.

They stopped at what must have been Tetrachord and Triad's living quarters at the back of a warehouse area. They rated an apartment all to themselves, a musty cubical-if "cubical" was the word for an interior s.p.a.ce shaped like a crazily leaning polyhedron-crammed with peculiar objects on spoon-shaped shelves. Jameson recognized a couple of resting perches, side by side beneath -beneath?-a hanging trifoliate screen. On a raised platform nearby was a graduated set of what looked like miniature resting perches. It made Jameson think of doll furniture.

They made him wait in the center of the room. Tetrachord went to a cupboard and came back with three of the bulb-handled, shotgun-size neural weapons with the flaring muzzles. He handed two of them to Triad and Augie and kept the third for himself.

Jameson found that not at all comforting.

They left by the back way, and now they were in an exhibition hall, a huge place with interior s.p.a.ces like a s.p.a.ce-shuttle hangar. Everything looked newer and fresher here. A few Cygnan workers were applying s.h.i.+ny orange paint two and three-handed with bulb-handled brushes, or caulking gla.s.s tanks. Most of the cages were empty. There was no Cygnan traffic in the surrounding travel tubes.

A small scuttling creature in one of the nearer cages caught his attention. He managed to vector his armed escort over for a closer look, despite the drag at the back of his septum. He saw a little h.o.r.n.y many-legged creature with one enormous claw almost as big as it was.

Jameson almost wept. A crab. A perfectly ordinary fiddler crab. One of the Cygnan probes must have scooped it up. It was the only link with Earth he had, except for the struggling kitten in his arms.

They hurried him past the cage, and then he was in a dim, cavernous hall whose walls were thick gla.s.s cliffsides, ten stories high. For some reason the Cygnans stopped. Whatever was in the tremendous tanks was unusual enough to interest even them.

The cloudy liquid within was obviously under enormous pressure. The air in the hall was noticeably chilly. Jameson strained his eyes in the murky red light.

Shapes were swimming about in the depths of the tank, great shadowed shapes as large as whales.

Jameson felt a chill that was not due to the temperature.

Triad rapped on the gla.s.s with the bell of her weapon. There was a vast stirring within.

The gigantic creatures emerged from the depths of the tank, crowding the gla.s.s. Jameson had the impression of flat pancake shapes, more than a hundred feet across, undulating lazily to keep their trim.

They were aware of him and the Cygnans. He felt them looking at him through the gla.s.s.

With a shock, Jameson realized that the creature filling his field of view was wearing some kind of harness, s.h.i.+ny leathery straps that were as broad as a roadway. It had limbs of sorts, too, scalloped projections of its outer rim, like the billowing shroud points of a parachute. It had them curled around a barb-tipped bone spear that was a hundred feet long.

With a shudder, Jameson wondered about the size of the animal whose skeleton had provided a one-piece artifact that long. It had to be some kind of a floating island with a kite framework of flexible bone.

There was a bone dagger, too, a honed triangular blade the size of a whaleboat with squiggly symbols inscribed on its flat side. And some kind of a pouch dangling from the harness, a catchall the size of a small barn.

Whatever this looming colossus was, it was intelligent. Primitive, but intelligent.

A hunter. A hunter whose quarry was bigger than it was.

It pressed against the gla.s.s, obviously looking him over. Jameson saw no evidence of anything resembling sense organs. No eyes, no flaps or tendrils. Perhaps it sensed with the surface of its entire mountainous body. Chemical senses. But what was it seeing him through the gla.s.s with? It could scarcely be infrared under the circ.u.mstances. Radar waves? Jameson supposed that even at the extremes of the electromagnetic spectrum an organism could provide definition by rapid and continuous scanning.

Hunters needed keen senses.

"Where in the universe...?" Jameson breathed.

The Cygnans could not have understood him, but perhaps they were thinking their own thoughts. At his elbow, Tetrachord said: "So near. And now the Jamesons will never meet them."