Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

When the fever had passed, Jameson felt ravenous. Still shaky, he pounded on the door for attention. No one came. He waited it out for another twelve hours. Then the door opened. A Cygnan skittishly set something on the floor in front of him and fled.

He pounced on it. It was a prepared meal from his own ship’s galley, a thawing block of stew still in its original foil warming pan. He ignored the implications of that while he wolfed down the food, ice crystals and all. It was the first food he’d eaten in forty-eight hours.

He pushed the pan aside, satiated, and looked up. Two Cygnans were standing there, watching him. They were the first ones he’d seen without the transparent protective suits since he’d been taken out of his sterilized sack and isolated here. So he was at last out of quarantine! They were safe from his germs now—or he from theirs.

The two aliens were holding hands, Cygnan fashion. The middle pair. One of them was carrying a foot long implement in one of its primary limbs that resembled a two-pronged toasting fork with blunt tines.

The other Cygnan uttered a clear, chimelike sound composed of two tones. Jameson recognized it as a tetrachord: a perfect fourth. The first Cygnan let go of the other’s hand and high-stepped over the rim of the door, holding the forklike object in front of it like a weapon.

Jameson looked the pair of them over. They were just inside the door, sizing him up. The taller of the two, the one with the toasting fork, came to his shoulder. The alien was roughly the size of a Russian wolfhound standing on its hind legs. The other was a couple of inches shorter and more lightly built. A male and a female? It was impossible to tell. Their bodies were smooth and without gender. Like the other Cygnans he’d seen, they wore only their mottled hides, plus the ubiquitous tubular harnesses with the ovoid gadget bags. He could see no external sign of sex, except—

He overcame his repugnance and took a closer look at the dreadful thing attached to their bellies. It was the same palpitating horror that at first he’d taken for a secondary sex characteristic in his original captors during that dizzy hegira through the monkey-puzzle forest and across the industrial plain. He’d glimpsed a couple more of the things through the transparent suits of the Cygnans who’d done the lab workup on him. But this was the first time he’d had a clear view of one.

It was a parasite. No doubt about it.

It was a soft, feeble, beetle-shaped creature about the size of a newborn kitten, clinging to its host like a tick with six filamentlike legs. Its tiny head was embedded in the flesh, obviously drinking blood.

Jameson shuddered in disgust. Why did a race as technologically advanced as the Cygnans tolerate the filthy things? Their biological sciences were certainly advanced enough to eradicate something as obvious as an exoparasite, as they’d just proved to him.

He furrowed his brow. Could that leechlike thing represent some exotic form of symbiosis? If so, he failed to see what possible benefit the Cygnans could derive from the creatures.

It didn’t seem to be causing them any discomfort. It rode between their rearmost legs as if it belonged there, in a position designed to give it maximum protection. But then, as Dmitri once had remarked, successful parasites are always adapted to their hosts, sometimes in the most ingenious fashion—like the roundworm that lived only in the human appendix. It was the unsuccessful ones that caused discomfort.

The smaller Cygnan caught him staring and, with a gesture that he would have called modest in a human, lowered a middle limb to shield the parasite from view.

He tore his eyes away. The larger Cygnan was advancing on him. It held up the fork, showing it to him. Then it touched itself on the torso with it.

Jameson waited to see what would happen. Was this the prelude to some kind of attempt at communication? Up till now the Cygnans had treated him like a piece of meat.

Then the Cygnan touched Jameson lightly on the ribs, and he almost hit the ceiling. The pain was beyond belief—like the sting of a thousand hornets. It lasted for the merest fraction of a second. He would have fallen if it had not been so brief. As it was, he staggered for balance. He was blinded with tears.

The Cygnan had sprung back, out of reach.

By God, the thing was afraid of him!

Its companion chirped and warbled at it—telling it to be careful? It came back, circling him with abrupt little movements.

Jameson made himself stand perfectly still. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. His heart was palpitating. He could still feel the effects of that sting.

It couldn’t have been a neurotoxin like the synthetic wasp venom terrestrial police used in riot control. Alien biochemistry would be too tricky for the Cygnans. They couldn’t have been sure of a disabling dose. It had to have been an electric shock—thousands of volts.

The Cygnan raised the fork again. Jameson flinched, but he stood rigid, arms hanging at his sides.

The fork touched him again.

He felt only a mild tingle, nothing like the first time.

The Cygnan gestured with the fork. It waltzed halfway to the door and waited.

He was supposed to follow it.

Jameson’s mouth twisted bitterly. This was human-alien communication, all right. They had managed to tell each other something. It wasn’t very complicated. The Cygnan had shown him its cattle prod and told him to behave. And he had said that he would.

He shuffled obediently toward the door. His injured leg throbbed. He felt drained and lightheaded from his illness, and he longed fervently for a hot shower. The Cygnans fell in warily beside him.

He stopped. Dammit, this was no way for a man to behave. For all he knew, he was the only representative of the human race.

The Cygnans didn’t like his stopping. One of them sounded the pure tetrachord he’d heard before. The other raised its electric prod.

Jameson never had to stop to think about a musical tone. They were as palpable to him as material objects, each with its own identity. These had been an F and a B flat in the piccolo range. No, not quite a B flat. It was almost an augmented fourth, about a quarter-tone off.

He whistled it back to them. He couldn’t manage both tones simultaneously the way the Cygnans did, of course, but he did the best he could, first arpeggiating it, then alternating it in a rapid tremolo.

The large Cygnan lowered its prod. It fluted a rapid scale at him.

Jameson did an imitation. There weren’t too many notes for him to remember. It fell into a whole-tone pattern, like impressionistic music, with a cluster of those peculiar quarter-tones at the center.

The Cygnan corrected him. He’d been off a fraction of a tone at the end. It didn’t finish at the octave. It was a fraction sharp there, like a bagpipe scale. He repeated the sequence fairly creditably.

The two Cygians held a brief, reedy conference. Jameson couldn’t follow. It was too rapid and complicated, with all sorts of embellishments. He stood tensely waiting.

The large Cygnan turned to him again and made a sharp attention-getting sound. Then it touched itself on the mouth and the tip of its petaled tail and sounded the tetrachord again. It waited.

Jameson gave the chord back immediately, turning it into a tremolo. The Cygnans chirped at each other for a while. Then the smaller of the two came forward. It made the gestures which to a Cygnan indicated self, and trilled at him.

Jameson hesitated. The tetrachord had been easy. It was a handy, one-phoneme identification. Like, Jameson thought, a human saying “I.” But this was more complicated.

The second Cygnan repeated it for him until he got it straight. It started with an A-major triad, only a few vibrations off concert pitch. Harmonics, Jameson thought, must be universal wherever there were vibrating strings—or vibrating membranes. The third was slightly flatted, like a blues note. The two top notes then exploded into a parallel glissando, up a fifth, while the A held. Then back to the original bluesy chord.