landscape was tilting, moving past him. Long minutes later, the sharp edge of the landscape swam past and he was hovering above an identical plain with an identical incised groove stretching toward the vanishing point.
Jupiter dipped, then rose again above that strange, flat horizon. It was a great, reddish moon, filling the ship’s sky. It
The two creatures loafed along on their sticks, the sack stretched between them, until they found an entrance. This proved to be a squarish hatch the size of a barn door, with a perfectly ordinary-looking T-bar handle precisely in the center. The handle was surrounded by a circle of what looked like doorknobs.
They hovered a few feet above it, dangling Jameson ignominiously between them. The sheer mass of the tremendous ship was enough to produce a minute but noticeable gravitational tug; Jameson guessed that he weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of an ounce.
Then the Cygnans touched down, clinging lizard-like to the knobs with two or three spare feet.
Instantly, Jameson’s weight was reversed. He soared upward in his sack as if he were a captive balloon, while the Cygnans kept him moored with infuriating nonchalance. Again, the spin was slow enough to keep his pseudo-weight down to a few ounces, but his stomach did a flip-flop. What if the Cygnans let go?
One of them did. The other, its toes wrapped around knobs, stretched its sleek body toward the handle in the center. Jameson wondered how the creature proposed to open the door with the three of them clinging to it. Did it swing outward, inward, or slide open?
It did none of these. To Jameson’s mild astonishment, when the Cygnan pulled on the handle, the handle got longer. Then he realized that the door was riding downward on a central shaft, of which the handle was the end. Bottom was five feet down. The creatures stepped off the door, pulling Jameson unceremoniously with them. The door flew up on its shaft, falling into place in the opening with its own weight. It settled into place in the beveled frame. It seemed a careless way to seal a ship’s air in.
Clinging upside down to what was now the ceiling, the Cygnans scurried toward a circular door in a wall. This one opened like a bank vault. It didn’t go anywhere. Inside was a honeycomb of three-foot metal disks that looked like a wall of storage drums.
One of the creatures chose a lid and it popped open. Before Jameson knew what was happening, it slithered inside. The other Cygnan stuffed the sack into the opening and followed. Jameson was being hustled down a narrow, looping tube. It was transparent, and he could see other tubes branching out on all sides, each going to some unknown destination.
It was an efficient way to travel—for Cygnans. They reverted to their six-legged mode, hardly caring which direction was up. Jameson was getting some painful bumps, even through the spacesuit.
They emerged into an enormous space—a forest, stretching as far as the eye could see. No, not quite. About a mile away was a mile-high ridge, stretching on to infinity. This had to be, he realized, the underside of that tremendous canyon-size trench he had seen on the outside of the hull. The sky was a tent—two walls converging at an apex miles above. The sky was forested too, and each had its own central ridge.
He had time for a quick look at what he had taken for trees before they hoisted him aloft. It was a tangle of thick twisting boles, intertwined like a banyan tree, with thick blue-green foliage. If there were any vertical trunks, they were accidental. The growth seemed to spread out sideways, like some enormous creeping vine. He couldn’t tell if they were individual growths or one interconnected entity.
The Cygnans scurried up the nearest trunk like six-legged squirrels, taking Jameson with them. Soon they were about fifty feet up, and Jameson was getting dizzy. He knew that at his present weight a fall couldn’t hurt him, but all his instincts were screaming at him. The Cygnans passed the sack back and forth to each other, and from hand to foot, as they scampered along the tremendous branches, but always there seemed to be at least one clever little paw wrapped around the neck of the sack.
After about half a mile of being towed through the branches in this offhand fashion, Jameson found himself draped over a branch, dizzy and bruised. He lay there in his bag, not daring to move. His captors had evidently stopped to catch their breath—even Cygnans had to do that, it seemed—and to tear the plastic wrappings off their heads and beaverlike tails.
They let the torn plastic flutter down to the forest floor and tossed their globular air canisters down after it. Jameson was shocked in spite of himself. In the closed economy of a spaceship, littering was a capital sin.
The Cygnans stretched and preened themselves. They groomed one another as monkeys would, scratching away transparent flakes of what he took to be dead skin. Then he saw that what he had taken for a tail was actually three tails, a petaled structure that folded in on itself.
For a moment, as one of the creatures turned away, he had a glimpse of the orifice the petals enclosed, a moist, tender surface that was the same bright orange as the lining of the Cygnans mouth and the mucosa of their eyes. He had an impression of hairlike projections pointed inward, in the manner of a fish trap, and then the three petals closed up again.
Jameson studied his captors curiously. This was the first time he had had a really good look in strong light. They were naked except for tubular harnesses festooned with soft oval pouches. Their hides were clothing enough, a mottled pattern of golds and rusts that reminded him of something between a diamondback rattlesnake and a reticulated giraffe. Under other circumstances he might have found the pattern beautiful.
He was unable to decide on their sex. They seemed to have nothing resembling external sexual organs. Hidden between the two hindmost limbs where he was unable to get a clear view of it was something that might have been a secondary sexual characteristic like a breast or a cockscomb—a soft, palpitating ovoid the color of dried blood. It seemed squashy and vulnerable from its placement and the automatic manner in which the Cygnans seemed to shield it, and for some reason—though Jameson told himself he was being irrational—it disgusted him.
As the Cygnans continued to groom each other with their fingers and their vegetable-grater mouths, Jameson twisted in his sack to look at the life around him. He’d gradually become aware that the strange tangle of vegetation was alive with darting, twittering creatures. He could see an odd three-winged bird—or flying creature, at any rate—in brilliant, jewellike colors. Its three petallike wings, transparent membranes through which Jameson saw shadowed supporting spines, were arranged helicopter-fashion around its stubby neck, and at the bottom of its streamlined body were three delicate clawed feet. They were about the size of hummingbirds. One of them hovered in front of his face, looking at him, then fluttered off.
There was a squirrel-size creature that strikingly vindicated Dmitri’s theory. Its six limbs were definitely not paired. Instead, they were arranged in two radiating arrays, fore and aft. It had three eyes, spaced like the Cygnans’, around a central orifice. It wasn’t bothered by any sense of the upright, but scampered along the branches, its body giving a quarter turn or rotating entirely from time to time as it nibbled the fat bluish leaves. In spite of its bizarre configuration, Jameson found the creature delightful, with its busy movements and its bright goldfishlike colors.
It came too close. There was a flash of movement, and one of Jameson’s captors had the little creature trapped in a three-fingered hand. It chirped and twittered, squirming to get free. But the Cygnan held it out to its companion, as if offering it for inspection. The other Cygnan made an odd, nonhuman gesture—a sort of corkscrewlike drawing in of its long head. A refusal?
Then, to Jameson’s horror, the first Cygnan popped the little animal into its mouth, hind end first. The snout with its rasplike lining rotated around the tiny golden body. The creature shrieked, still alive. Inch by inch, the Cygnan sucked it in. By the time the head disappeared, the little eyes had become glassy and the circular mouth was open in a slack O. The Cygnan’s spined tubular tongue came out, made a circular swipe, and was gone.
Jameson made an effort not to be sick. Being sick in a space helmet was a disaster, and every spacefarer learned how to fight down nausea. He swallowed hard, tasting the bitter bile in his throat. So much for the theory that advanced civilizations had to be morally superior!
Abruptly the Cygnans snatched up the sack again and oozed along the twisting branches, passing Jameson back and forth between them like a basketball. They were heading for the edge of the forest, that acute corner where the overgrown sky came down to meet the land.
As feeble as the pseudo-gravity was, Jameson could feel the downhill tug. Of course! The ground would only be relatively “flat” near the central ridges. Visualize a triangle drawn inside a circle; “up” is always the center of the circle. It got steeper and steeper as they approached the artificial horizon. Jameson, despite the blurry motion,
