The Jupiter Theft

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.

He gave it a try. He had to substitute an arpeggiated chord for the triad, then make do with just the top note of the double glissando. It sounded like a crazy bird imitation, but the Cygnan seemed to accept it. Like, Jameson thought wryly, tolerating someone with a speech defect.

But when he tried transposing the little sequence to a different key, he met the Cygnan equivalent of a blank stare—a splaying out of the three eyestalks. Evidently the sounds had no meaning when the pitch was altered.

It reminded Jameson of his early mistakes in learning Chinese—the syllables whose meaning changed drastically when you used the wrong one of the four tones. “Chair” became “soap.” “Sell” became “buy.” Except in Chinese the tones were relative, and if you got a few of them wrong your intent could usually be deduced from the syllables themselves and the context. In Cygnanese, apparently, tones were specific phonemes. Only those rare freaks like Jameson, who happened to be blessed with absolute pitch, could ever hope to communicate with Cygnans, even in the most rudimentary fashion. To Cygnans, most humans would be dumb as animals.

It was Jameson’s turn.

He touched himself-on the lips and—feeling a bit silly—on the rump, and said, slowly and distinctly: “Ja-me-son.”

They herded him down opalescent corridors with the electric prod turned off. “Corridors” wasn’t quite the word for these cramped tubes, though the purpose was the same. It was more like a series of translucent sewer pipes snaking through decks and angled bulkheads, bridging dizzying spaces with shadowy bustling activity glimpsed tantalizingly below.

The Cygnans seemed to have no concept of rooms arranged off passageways. Enclosures simply abutted one another, opening directly from space to space in a honeycomb maze. There were no branching arteries. Each length of tube seemed to have a specific destination. It struck Jameson as a peculiar way to utilize interior space, but then, perhaps Cygnans would have found human layouts incomprehensible.

He hunched down the low tunnel, the scaled orange blanket wrapped togalike around him. Ahead of him, the two scurrying Cygnans kept having to wait for him to catch up. The curved surface made awkward footing for him. Perhaps it was more natural for Cygnans, with their limbs jutting out at an angle that way.

He hurried after them, looking up the puckered orange lips of their tailpipes. Mouth and tip of tail; the Cygnans thought of themselves as being between the two points. Perhaps it made more sense than the human gesture of pointing to oneself or tapping oneself on the chest.

They were traveling side by side horizontally, holding one and sometimes two pairs of hands, pedaling with their outward-facing limbs while they kept each other braced against the lower quadrant of the walls. Every once in a while they nuzzled each other.

It would have been easier going, Jameson thought, if they’d traveled single file. But Cygnans seemed to like touching one another. He remembered the pair that had carried him through the ship.

They reached the end of the tube, a silvery disk with shadows seen through it. The Cygnans parted to let him between them, half clinging to the sides of the tube, and gave him a push.

He put out a hand involuntarily to catch himself, and it went through the center of the disk. The Cygnans prodded him again. He pushed his way into the material. It flowed around him, sealing itself off by shaping itself around his body. It tickled. He stepped through, and it closed itself off behind him.

He turned just in time to see two long Cygnan snouts emerging from the surface. It would have looked as if they were rising from a pool of quicksilver if the surface had been horizontal instead of vertical. The Cygnans flowed through, and the silvery surface was unbroken again.

He gathered he was in some kind of work area. There were things he recognized as sinks and counter tops, and haphazard stacks of storage containers in nonhuman shapes. Against one sloping wall was an electronic console studded with little pearly knobs and a keyboardlike arrangement. On closer inspection the keyboard turned out to be a row of little fretted necks, each strung with three parallel wires. Jameson tried to imagine four Cygnan forelimbs, each with three fingers, strumming it all at once. The instrument would convey information, not music. Like a computer teletype keyboard?