With the moon in six-o'clock position, the rosette of ships was also in six o'clock in its elliptical lunar orbit. It was shielded by both the moon and the bulk of the giant planet itself.

When the moon emerged from that cone of safety, to three-o'clock position, the ships were at the moon's nine o'clock. But since the moon was by that time tilting its twelve inward toward the giant, the ships were still in a trailing position. With the moon at twelve o'clock, leading the whole procession, the cl.u.s.ter of ships was safely behind it, at the moon's twelve o'clock. Another quarter turn for both orbiting systems put the moon at nine and the ships at three-still in the moon's radiation shadow.

The ships' orbits, he suspected, would have to be adjusted continually to match their period to the moon's rotation-especially as the ma.s.s of the primary shrank. But surely, maneuvering the five ships would require only a fraction of the total energy expenditure eaten up by moving a Jovian or superjovian!

It was beautifully simple and elegant! Jameson watched in admiration for long moments.

Even the deadly probe, with its radiation backlash, was never at the crossroads of the moon's...o...b..t at the two points where their paths intersected. Everything ticked along beautifully.

"I see," Jameson said. "Your ships are safe."

The two Cygnans whistled their approval. Tetrachord wiped the screens and dropped down on four legs. One of his upper limbs twined around Triad in an almost-human gesture of affection.

Jameson blared the sharp fanfare for attention. Startled, the Cygnans jerked their heads in his direction.

"What about Earth? My planet. Willit be safe when you leave this system?"

Consternation. Much twittering back and forth. Jameson had the impression that they had never thought about it, that it hadn't occurred to them to care.

Finally Tetrachord punched in an inquiry to the ship's computer, or whatever pa.s.sed for one aboard the Cygnan vessel. There were flashing images that made no sense to Jameson. They hadn't bothered to adjust the screen for human vision this time.

Tetrachord twisted around. His eyestalks stretched like taffy in Jameson's direction.

"Jameson," the creature said. "We will cross the orbit of your planet when we leave. We will pa.s.s close to your sun and swing around it to change direction."

Jameson got a crawly sensation down his spine. The Cygnan caravan would cross the Earth's...o...b..t twice.

"Just how close to Earth will you pa.s.s?" he asked.

There was no answer for a while. Jameson found he was holding his breath.

The Cygnans wouldn't have reached anything near light-speed by the time they crossed Earth's path, of course, so the deadly shower of X-rays that had announced their approach to the solar system would be no danger. But the probe's deadly drive would be on. That in itself might be enough to sterilize a hemisphere if it got too close and was pointed in the wrong direction. Then, too, there was Jupiter's own radiation belt, extending millions of miles into s.p.a.ce. The Cygnans themselves would be safe from charged particles in the zone swept clean by their moon, but Earth might not be so fortunate.

And there certainly would be tidal effects.

Jameson trembled at the thought of what might happen if a Jupiter-sized ma.s.s pa.s.sed too close to Earth.

Earthquakes, floods, perhaps even the breakup of the Earth's crust.

What if the Earth's...o...b..t were changed, moved a couple of million miles closer to the sun? Or pulled farther away? Or changed, like Pluto's, to a more elliptical orbit? Earth's climate could be permanently altered-an eternal ice age, with much of terrestrial life obliterated, or a water world, steaming under the melted polar caps!

Earth might even be plucked out of orbit to fall into the Sun.

"How close?" he repeated urgently.

"Jameson will be safe," Triad hummed soothingly. "We will take Jameson with us."

"Dammit!" he exploded. "That's not what I asked! What about theEarth? "

He stopped. He'd unthinkingly used human speech.

They didn't understand the words, but the violence of his outburst had startled them.

Triad pressed herself against her larger companion. The soft, rat-sized thing plastered to her abdomen reacted to her distress by digging in more firmly with its insectlike legs.

Tetrachord hissed reflexively at Jameson. His upper body stretched to become a foot taller.

Jameson stood facing the alien pair, fists clenched. The kitten had dropped off his lap and scurried away.

After a moment, Jameson's fists fell to his sides. The tension in the bodies of the two Cygnans gradually relaxed.

Jameson stooped over the keyboard of the Moog again and played out his question. "Where will the Earth be when you pa.s.s?"

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 tripart.i.te 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...o...b..t and moved jerkily Sunward. It dragged the yellow line of its...o...b..t 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 s.p.a.ce 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-p.r.o.nged 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 ap.r.o.n. 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 st.i.tched over the breast pocket saidGifford . He had improvised a shower and sanitary facilities in the narrow corner, and when he was able to get into the main chamber he refilled his perforated jerrycans with water and emptied his makeshift chamber pots into the waste-disposal system. Augie wasn't much on cleaning up.

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 ma.s.saged 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 cla.s.sroom 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 console off. If he put his ear to the frets; he found he could hear a faint tw.a.n.g, like elfin tuning forks. The tuning system wasn't anything so simple as a chromatic scale in quarter-tones. The triple strands of wires seemed to be arranged for Cygnan convenience, probably reflecting frequency of use, like a typewriter keyboard.

By trial and error he found the combination that he thought would get him into the children's section of the library. It was a simple succession of Cygnan phonemes incorporating an interrogative and a sound meaning something like "young" or "new." He'd heard Tetrachord vocalize it while trying to make some point clear to him. It had always got some nursery pictures or diagrams.

He practiced till he thought he had it right. Then, holding his breath, he turned on the machine and plucked the strings.

He was looking at a row of purple globes, glossy as eggplants, set in grooves along a floor littered with something that resembled green popcorn. The globes were plugged into the faces of an endless sawtooth part.i.tion that ran the length of a hall that dwindled to infinity.

He saw miniature Cygnans clinging to the enormous fruits, six or seven to a globe, their rasplike snouts buried in the skins, sucking out the juices. Adult Cygnans, ap.r.o.ned like Jameson's own attendant, scurried up and down the aisle, rearranging the tiny creatures and occasionally pulling them free to tend to them. The adults gave Jameson the scale of what he was seeing. The miniature Cygnans were about the size of weasels. The purple things were as big as hippopotami.

Then one of the eggplants quivered and shifted its position. Jameson for the first time noticed the vestigial limbs, six flipperlike stumps, that sprawled out uselessly from their bloated bulks. The heads must be on the other side of the sawtooth part.i.tion, feeding mindlessly at an endless trough...

He managed to switch off the console before being sick on the floor.

A nursery! He'd tuned in a Cygnan nursery! Those nonsentient hulks must have been bred through countless generations to give blood and body fluids, the way humans had bred milk cows. They were nothing but brainless food factories.

Jameson tried to put his discovery in a rational light. He told himself that laying hens and feed-lot cattle and beef hamsters were practically vegetables, some of them barely ambulant. He reminded himself that people once had swallowed oysters alive, back in the days when it was still safe to eat oysters. But the sour taste in his mouth wouldn't go away. He kept seeing an image of the oozing, abraded wound in the hide of one of the purple creatures when a Cygnan nurse had yanked a feeding tyke away.

When his stomach settled down, Jameson tried again. This time he got it right. The three-ring cl.u.s.ter of screens displayed what appeared to be a library index in simplified visual terms suitable for a being who had asked for information in babytalk.

On one screen a wheel of tiny glittering images rotated slowly against darkness. No, it wasn't a wheel, it was a spiral, pulling bright little midges out of infinity.

A second screen showed the unwinding spiral edge-on. The little pictures marched on from the side of the screen in a widening funnel, feeding the outer rim.

The third screen was close-ups, one by one, of each image as it reached the point on the spiral where it disappeared.

Evidently even Cygnan children could look at all three screens at once and make sense out of the procession. The principle of organization was incomprehensible to Jameson. It all seemed random, in no particular order. But then, he told himself, a Cygnan would say the same thing about an alphabetized listing in a human dictionary.

Helplessly Jameson watched the images flow past. The subject headings were fascinating in themselves, but he was all too aware that he might be interrupted at any moment. There was a generalized botanical representation of fat blue leaves and salmon-colored fruits that would have driven Dmitri wild. It gave way to a disembodied Cygnan eye with the spiral galaxy in Andromeda, exactly as it was seen from Earth, reflected in its depths. Then there was a construction of shiny metal rods working away like a model steam engine. And a length of green rope patiently tying and untying itself into a recognizable square knot.

Jameson tried strumming the word Tetrachord had given him for "planet." Immediately the spiral flow of midges speeded into a streaking blur and came to a stop. On the close-up screen was a swollen red ball against a background of unfamiliar constellations.

The screen asked him a question.

Jameson almost jumped out of his skin. Then he realized that the Cygnan voice had to be mechanical: recorded or computer-generated.

After a pause, the artificial voice queried him again. Crestfallen, Jameson realized that he couldn't understand. He was used to talking to Tetrachord and Triad, period.

On a hunch, he strummed the word for "yes."

The spiraling midges disappeared. He was peering at a strange landscape, identical on all three screens.

In the foreground was a city. Soaring towers reached into a lemon sky, stark shapes that no human mind had conceived. There were jagged shards of shiny black stone traced with networks of white threadlike exterior paths for climbing. There were angular shafts with jutting cantilevered branches. Three knife-edged spires leaned toward one another to meet at a common apex, their bases enclosing a triangular park landscaped with blue vegetation. Traffic moved in a thick stream around the buildings, three-wheeled vehicles shaped like upright eggs, changing direction without turning. The drivers, visible through the transparent bubbles, were Cygnans, clinging to a central pole, with pa.s.sengers and baggage disposed around them in a circle.

Jameson's breath quickened. This was no s.p.a.ceship interior landscape. He was looking at what could only be the Cygnans' home planet.

He stared greedily, trying to absorb details.

The buildings cast complicated shadows, washed-out fingers of color that stretched in all directions. It was day, but that yellow sky was almost filled with an enormous ruddy moon, a squashed moon that ballooned from horizon to zenith. There was a slice out of one side. Its outline was fuzzy, its face marbled.

The Cygnan observer panned across the landscape.

There were two suns, low on the horizon. The smaller of the two was a fiercely glaring blue-white hole in the sky. The other was a swollen red giant. But something was wrong with it. It bulged on one side.

As Jameson watched, the traffic in the roadways speeded up, like an animated cartoon. Soon he could see nothing but a blur. The shadows grew like spilled dye. Time-lapse.

The smaller sun moved toward its bloated companion. The red sun swallowed it with a gulp. The shadows merged and deepened.

A Cygnan voice was giving a commentary. Jameson strained to make sense out of the calliope squawks.

There were too many abstractions. He caught the word for "mother"-at any rate, the generalized phrase for "progenitor" that seemed to figure so pervasively in Cygnan thought. Something about the Great Mother that swallows her... d.a.m.n, what was that word? It had the root signifying a relationship.