when you pass?”
There was a pause while they digested his query. Finally Tetrachord said, “We do not know.”
“Find out,” Jameson said. There was no Cygnan word for “please.”
They exchanged some running cadenzas, too fast for Jameson to follow. Then Tetrachord, still with a couple of arms around Triad, turned to his electronic zither and twisted some frets. A rapid chirping came out of the console. Tetrachord chirped back at it. For some reason the Cygnan had not encoded the question to the ship’s computer. He’d asked someone.
Jameson couldn’t understand the reply. Colloquial Cygnan would always be beyond him.
After a delay, a picture formed on the tripartite screen—another nursery diagram, like the one he’d been shown of the Cygnan travel arrangements. This one showed a series of concentric triangles with a glowing yellow triangle in the center. The Sun and the orbits of the planets! Jameson gulped. Was that how the Cygnans saw circles? It hadn’t been so in the previous projection, but perhaps this was someone’s shorthand sketch or working diagram.
An irritated shrilling came from the console. A small green triangle appeared at the third place from the sun and moved back and forth along its track until it found a place and settled down. The orange triangle representing Jupiter jumped out of its orbit and moved jerkily Sunward. It dragged the yellow line of its orbit with it, opening the triangle into a four-sided evolute of ellipse. The evolute stretched as Jupiter intersected the inner solar system, traced a sharp V around the Sun, and headed out into the depths of space again.
Mercury and Venus jumped in their orbits. The white triangle representing Venus had been set spinning. But Earth had been spared.
“Your planet will be on the other side of the Sun,” Tetrachord said, unnecessarily.
Jameson eased himself down on the Moog’s stool. His knees were trembling. He became aware that he was drenched with sweat.
If he could believe the Cygnans—and if they didn’t decide, from some incomprehensible alien motive, to recompute their line of flight—Earth would be allowed to live.
As long as nothing delayed the Cygnan’s departure.
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
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
