The Jupiter Theft

“Stop that!” he said, and snatched the hoe from the startled man. He tossed it down the slope as far as he could throw it. The Cygnan, in her private misery, shuddered. The sounds she was making were nonhuman, but to Jameson’s acclimatized ears they were piteous nevertheless.

Hating himself for what he was doing, he got down on one knee and said, in his broken-chord Cygnanese, “Triad, I talk. Do you hear?”

Dmitri broke off his lecture. He started forward. “Stay where you are,” Jameson said sharply. Dmitri stopped. The other people fell silent and watched Jameson.

The clustered eye polyps quivered and stretched in Jameson’s direction. It was like looking into three orange-rimmed inkwells.

“I hear, Ja-me-son,” the Cygnan trilled. “Give me the little brother.”

“Not yet. You must help me leave this place.”

“Jameson and his sisters are a wrongness in the sight of the mother-within-herself. You have stopped Tetrachord at the time of her (?)”

Jameson didn’t recognize the last ideogram, but Triad, despite her distress, had made an effort to put the rest of her message in terms he could understand. “Stopped” was the term for a damaged piece of machinery. “Wrongness” was the word for “mistake” that had cropped up so frequently during his language lessons.

“What is she saying?” Dmitri asked eagerly.

“She’s saying that we’re abominations in the sight of her deity because we murdered her mate,” Jameson said.

Beth made an indignant noise. “What about the people they killed? And the Jovians and the other life forms they’ve exterminated? I suppose that if we don’t have six legs, we don’t count!”

“No,” Jameson said. “We don’t.” He turned back to Triad. “The sisters who … stopped … Tetrachord are a wrongness to Jameson and his other sisters too.”

Another contractile spasm squeezed the Cygnan, squashing her. When it passed, the three eyestalks fixed on Jameson again, and the mouth centered among them opened like a pitcher plant. “Give me the little brother.”

“No. You must help me leave.”

“You are a wrongness. Like the other two-legs.”

Jameson had no time to decide what that meant, because the Cygnan was fumbling among her pouches. She extracted a short curving instrument that looked like a section of thick gold bracelet with little wheels set along its edges.

“Watch out!” somebody yelled. “It may be a weapon.”

“I don’t think so,” Jameson said. “I think it’s a key.”

Triad dragged herself over to the gate. The humans made way for her. She clamped the gold bangle on the thick disk that contained the lock mechanism. The curves matched, and the wheels fit into a pair of grooves that ran around the outer rim.

She whistled, a complex roulade of chromatic phrases, and the section of bracelet crept along the grooves under its own power, or power provided from within the lock mechanism. It disappeared under the edge of the disk, and the whole wagon-wheel-sized assembly lifted. The gate slid open smoothly.

Jameson reached underneath and retrieved the device. “For opening cages from the inside,” he said. “The animals could never figure out how to use it.”

Everybody had shrunk away from the opening as if it were dangerous. Nobody seemed anxious to leave. Jameson turned to Dmitri. “Put it down. Gently.”

Dmitri set the squamous little creature down on the floor of the cage. It humped its broad back. The sucking tube that was its head waved from side to side, seeking. It homed in on Triad and pulled itself along on its feeble legs, like an injured beetle.

Ruiz spoke up for the first time. Under the bandaged head, some color had returned to his lined face. “They couldn’t reproduce at their one-gravity acceleration, could they? No population growth until their ships are coasting or parked.”

Jameson nodded at him. “No. And if we ever get back home, we can tell them the Cygnans won’t be interested in settling on Earth, either.”

The tiny male had reached Triad. It crawled blindly over the surface of her body. Her hide twitched. As Jameson watched, the tightly wrapped petals of the structure that looked like her tail parted and unpeeled. They spread all the way open like a blooming orchid. The little parasite crept inside like a bee looking for nectar, squeezing past the inward-pointing spines that, like a lobster trap, would prevent it from ever leaving again.

Cygnans did mate for life. Even when their inamorata was dead.

The petals of the tail closed tight again. There was only a drop of thin orange serum trembling at the tip. The rippling contractions of Triad’s tubular body died away and stopped. The rings of muscle relaxed. She lay limp and unmoving.

Jameson rubbed his knuckles over his eyes. He felt tired. It had been a long day for everybody.

“Some of you pick her up and get her out of sight in one of those tents,” he said. “Go easy with her. And I’ll want a detail to get the body of the other Cygnan out of sight. I don’t know how long it will be before other Cygnans come to check, but if they don’t see anything obvious, it may buy us some time.”