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—Siberian 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 up 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
