Donald Moffitt - The Jupiter Theft

Perhaps it was the usual practice for Cygnans, with the peculiar anatomy of their planet’s life forms, to fetter their domestic animals through some analagous body cavity. It was a damned effective way to lead a human being around.

They had decided Jameson could no longer be trusted. He’d proved to be a dangerous animal, no longer fit to be a house pet. As with a puppy gone bad, they might feel some lingering affection for him, but they were regretfully taking him away all the same.

He trudged along behind the hand-holding pair, trying to keep the cord slack as much as possible. Augie, sans poncho, was slithering along behind him at a safe distance, holding the electric prod.

Around him the Cygnan city swarmed with mottled life. He was being led through something akin to a commercial district, with the Cygnan equivalent of shops and restaurants and perhaps theaters. Vividly colored angular structures soared crazily up to a luminescent approximation of a sky a quarter mile above. The faces of the buildings were alive with thousands of busy Cygnans, clinging to latticework perches that extended all the way up. The long tubular snouts turned in Jameson’s direction as he passed, and the twittering noise level went up as they caught sight of him and paused in their activities. The scurrying crowds parted to make way for the dangerous procession, and a swarm of the curious trailed in Jameson’s wake, keeping a respectful distance and piping questions at a sullenly silent Augie.

A little Cygnan the size of a beagle skittered up to him and was pulled back out of harm’s way by an adult, exactly as a human parent might snatch a curious child out of the way of a circus animal. Jameson lost his step, trying to avoid tripping over the thing, and was rewarded by a painful yank of the cord snubbed around his septum. There was a sickening sensation inside his head as a loop of the tether scraped the walls of the nasal cavity, and he had a fit of coughing and choking.

His feet stumbled along automatically. When the tears cleared from his eyes the path was emerging from the overhanging cliffsides of the vertical structures into a parklike stretch with pale blue lawns of packed fuzzballs and contorted shrubs like tangles of red spaghetti on either side.

Jameson looked across an open plaza spoked with transparent travel tubes clogged with Cygnans entering or leaving the area. The tubes snaked at every level through walls, through enormous aquarium tanks, through enclosed habitats, through cages.

Cages.

A frightful stench was in the air, a fetid compound of rotting straw and halogens, of barnyard odors and ammonia, as if a menagerie had been set down in a chemical factory. The place was noisy, too—a hubbub of screeches and bellows and clicks and yaps and howls.

Jameson could make out some of the creatures in the nearby cages. He saw a tall insectoid thing like a cluster of milky bubbles on a tripod. And a thing like a fluffy dishrag that flapped miserably along a filthy cage floor. A pair of tendriled sacs that dangled like hanging baskets from the wire roof of their enclosure. A shaggy pear-shaped cyclops that scratched itself with its single long arm.

Here and there across the plaza random groups of Cygnan sightseers paused to stare in Jameson’s direction, then turned their attention to the more interesting exhibits. Tetrachord made encouraging noises. When Jameson didn’t move, the Cygnan pulled gently at the nose tether and urged him like a trained bear across the graveled plaza into the main body of the zoo.

They stopped at what must have been Tetrachord and Triad’s living quarters at the back of a warehouse area. They rated an apartment all to themselves, a musty cubical—if “cubical” was the word for an interior space shaped like a crazily leaning polyhedron—crammed with peculiar objects on spoon-shaped shelves. Jameson recognized a couple of resting perches, side by side beneath —beneath?— a hanging trifoliate screen. On a raised platform nearby was a graduated set of what looked like miniature resting perches. It made Jameson think of doll furniture.

They made him wait in the center of the room. Tetrachord went to a cupboard and came back with three of the bulb-handled, shotgun-size neural weapons with the flaring muzzles. He handed two of them to Triad and Augie and kept the third for himself.

Jameson found that not at all comforting.

They left by the back way, and now they were in an exhibition hall, a huge place with interior spaces like a space-shuttle hangar. Everything looked newer and fresher here. A few Cygnan workers were applying shiny orange paint two and three-handed with bulb-handled brushes, or caulking glass tanks. Most of the cages were empty. There was no Cygnan traffic in the surrounding travel tubes.

A small scuttling creature in one of the nearer cages caught his attention. He managed to vector his armed escort over for a closer look, despite the drag at the back of his septum. He saw a little horny many-legged creature with one enormous claw almost as big as it was.

Jameson almost wept. A crab. A perfectly ordinary fiddler crab. One of the Cygnan probes must have scooped it up. It was the only link with Earth he had, except for the struggling kitten in his arms.

They hurried him past the cage, and then he was in a dim, cavernous hall whose walls were thick glass cliffsides, ten stories high. For some reason the Cygnans stopped. Whatever was in the tremendous tanks was unusual enough to interest even them.

The cloudy liquid within was obviously under enormous pressure. The air in the hall was noticeably chilly. Jameson strained his eyes in the murky red light.

Shapes were swimming about in the depths of the tank, great shadowed shapes as large as whales. Jameson felt a chill that was not due to the temperature.

Triad rapped on the glass with the bell of her weapon. There was a vast stirring within.

The gigantic creatures emerged from the depths of the tank, crowding the glass. Jameson had the impression of flat pancake shapes, more than a hundred feet across, undulating lazily to keep their trim. They were aware of him and the Cygnans. He felt them looking at him through the glass.

With a shock, Jameson realized that the creature filling his field of view was wearing some kind of harness, shiny leathery straps that were as broad as a roadway. It had limbs of sorts, too, scalloped projections of its outer rim, like the billowing shroud points of a parachute. It had them curled around a barb-tipped bone spear that was a hundred feet long.

With a shudder, Jameson wondered about the size of the animal whose skeleton had provided a one-piece artifact that long. It had to be some kind of a floating island with a kite framework of flexible bone.

There was a bone dagger, too, a honed triangular blade the size of a whaleboat with squiggly symbols inscribed on its flat side. And some kind of a pouch dangling from the harness, a catchall the size of a small barn.

Whatever this looming colossus was, it was intelligent. Primitive, but intelligent.

A hunter. A hunter whose quarry was bigger than it was.

It pressed against the glass, obviously looking him over. Jameson saw no evidence of anything resembling sense organs. No eyes, no flaps or tendrils. Perhaps it sensed with the surface of its entire mountainous body. Chemical senses. But what was it seeing him through the glass with? It could scarcely be infrared under the circumstances. Radar waves? Jameson supposed that even at the extremes of the electromagnetic spectrum an organism could provide definition by rapid and continuous scanning. Hunters needed keen senses.

“Where in the universe…?” Jameson breathed.

The Cygnans could not have understood him, but perhaps they were thinking their own thoughts. At his elbow, Tetrachord said: “So near. And now the Jamesons will never meet them.”