By the same token, the Cygnans seemed to have dispensed with anything resembling a docking hub. Perhaps they didn’t need one at this creeping rate of rotation, depending on their own agility and the feebleness of centrifugal force so close to the spine of the ship.
Jameson shriveled in the sack. Were they going to plunge into the miles-wide pit of the drive tube that was growing before his eyes? He saw a triangular chasm whose interior walls were blackened and pitted with the violent energies that had flung the Cygnans across ten thousand light-years.
Then with a casual flick of their broomsticks, the Cygnans altered course fractionally. The rim of the pit flashed by. Jameson, with nothing to hang onto, found himself falling past a sheer metal wall that stretched on forever.
They barely missed the outstretched arm of one of the jibs. Resolutely, Jameson kept his eyes open, but he found his gloved hands trying to clutch at nothingness. He had a flashing glimpse of the spar’s upper surface before he dropped below its horizon. This was a metal moonscape, pocked with craters and scarred with long furrows, the wounds of forgotten encounters with interstellar debris.
He looked upward as he fell below the knife edge of that strange skyline. The undersides of the spar hung above him like an ax blade fifteen miles long. These were the faces that fit into the canyon-size notch in one of the ship’s flat sides. There were no pockmarks. They were smooth and shiny enough to reflect the stars.
They fell what he judged to be another four or five miles before the laboring broomsticks were able to slow them to a halt. Jameson’s orientation changed. He was no longer falling down the side of an immense cliff. Now he was floating, weightless, above a vast metal plain, incised along its entire length by a triangular gorge. The landscape was tilting, moving past him. Long minutes later, the sharp edge of the landscape swam past and he was hovering above an identical plain with an identical incised groove stretching toward the vanishing point.
Jupiter dipped, then rose again above that strange, flat horizon. It was a great, reddish moon, filling the ship’s sky. It was the sky, or most of it: a vast arch stretching from side to side, showing only a fraction of its curvature, with a band of night on its border. Here, this close, you could see the violent turmoil of the planet’s atmosphere, a boiling sea of multicolored clouds rushing toward an invisible equator.
The two creatures loafed along on their sticks, the sack stretched between them, until they found an entrance. This proved to be a squarish hatch the size of a barn door, with a perfectly ordinary-looking T-bar handle precisely in the center. The handle was surrounded by a circle of what looked like doorknobs.
They hovered a few feet above it, dangling Jameson ignominiously between them. The sheer mass of the tremendous ship was enough to produce a minute but noticeable gravitational tug; Jameson guessed that he weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of an ounce.
Then the Cygnans touched down, clinging lizard-like to the knobs with two or three spare feet.
Instantly, Jameson’s weight was reversed. He soared upward in his sack as if he were a captive balloon, while the Cygnans kept him moored with infuriating nonchalance. Again, the spin was slow enough to keep his pseudo-weight down to a few ounces, but his stomach did a flip-flop. What if the Cygnans let go?
One of them did. The other, its toes wrapped around knobs, stretched its sleek body toward the handle in the center. Jameson wondered how the creature proposed to open the door with the three of them clinging to it. Did it swing outward, inward, or slide open?
It did none of these. To Jameson’s mild astonishment, when the Cygnan pulled on the handle, the handle got longer. Then he realized that the door was riding downward on a central shaft, of which the handle was the end. Bottom was five feet down. The creatures stepped off the door, pulling Jameson unceremoniously with them. The door flew up on its shaft, falling into place in the opening with its own weight. It settled into place in the beveled frame. It seemed a careless way to seal a ship’s air in.
Clinging upside down to what was now the ceiling, the Cygnans scurried toward a circular door in a wall. This one opened like a bank vault. It didn’t go anywhere. Inside was a honeycomb of three-foot metal disks that looked like a wall of storage drums.
One of the creatures chose a lid and it popped open. Before Jameson knew what was happening, it slithered inside. The other Cygnan stuffed the sack into the opening and followed. Jameson was being hustled down a narrow, looping tube. It was transparent, and he could see other tubes branching out on all sides, each going to some unknown destination.
It was an efficient way to travel—for Cygnans. They reverted to their six-legged mode, hardly caring which direction was up. Jameson was getting some painful bumps, even through the spacesuit.
They emerged into an enormous space—a forest, stretching as far as the eye could see. No, not quite. About a mile away was a mile-high ridge, stretching on to infinity. This had to be, he realized, the underside of that tremendous canyon-size trench he had seen on the outside of the hull. The sky was a tent—two walls converging at an apex miles above. The sky was forested too, and each had its own central ridge.
He had time for a quick look at what he had taken for trees before they hoisted him aloft. It was a tangle of thick twisting boles, intertwined like a banyan tree, with thick blue-green foliage. If there were any vertical trunks, they were accidental. The growth seemed to spread out sideways, like some enormous creeping vine. He couldn’t tell if they were individual growths or one interconnected entity.
The Cygnans scurried up the nearest trunk like six-legged squirrels, taking Jameson with them. Soon they were about fifty feet up, and Jameson was getting dizzy. He knew that at his present weight a fall couldn’t hurt him, but all his instincts were screaming at him. The Cygnans passed the sack back and forth to each other, and from hand to foot, as they scampered along the tremendous branches, but always there seemed to be at least one clever little paw wrapped around the neck of the sack.
After about half a mile of being towed through the branches in this offhand fashion, Jameson found himself draped over a branch, dizzy and bruised. He lay there in his bag, not daring to move. His captors had evidently stopped to catch their breath—even Cygnans had to do that, it seemed—and to tear the plastic wrappings off their heads and beaverlike tails.
They let the torn plastic flutter down to the forest floor and tossed their globular air canisters down after it. Jameson was shocked in spite of himself. In the closed economy of a spaceship, littering was a capital sin.
The Cygnans stretched and preened themselves. They groomed one another as monkeys would, scratching away transparent flakes of what he took to be dead skin. Then he saw that what he had taken for a tail was actually three tails, a petaled structure that folded in on itself.
For a moment, as one of the creatures turned away, he had a glimpse of the orifice the petals enclosed, a moist, tender surface that was the same bright orange as the lining of the Cygnans mouth and the mucosa of their eyes. He had an impression of hairlike projections pointed inward, in the manner of a fish trap, and then the three petals closed up again.
Jameson studied his captors curiously. This was the first time he had had a really good look in strong light. They were naked except for tubular harnesses festooned with soft oval pouches. Their hides were clothing enough, a mottled pattern of golds and rusts that reminded him of something between a diamondback rattlesnake and a reticulated giraffe. Under other circumstances he might have found the pattern beautiful.