He was unable to decide on their sex. They seemed to have nothing resembling external sexual organs. Hidden between the two hindmost limbs where he was unable to get a clear view of it was something that might have been a secondary sexual characteristic like a breast or a cockscomb—a soft, palpitating ovoid the color of dried blood. It seemed squashy and vulnerable from its placement and the automatic manner in which the Cygnans seemed to shield it, and for some reason—though Jameson told himself he was being irrational—it disgusted him.
As the Cygnans continued to groom each other with their fingers and their vegetable-grater mouths, Jameson twisted in his sack to look at the life around him. He’d gradually become aware that the strange tangle of vegetation was alive with darting, twittering creatures. He could see an odd three-winged bird—or flying creature, at any rate—in brilliant, jewellike colors. Its three petallike wings, transparent membranes through which Jameson saw shadowed supporting spines, were arranged helicopter-fashion around its stubby neck, and at the bottom of its streamlined body were three delicate clawed feet. They were about the size of hummingbirds. One of them hovered in front of his face, looking at him, then fluttered off.
There was a squirrel-size creature that strikingly vindicated Dmitri’s theory. Its six limbs were definitely not paired. Instead, they were arranged in two radiating arrays, fore and aft. It had three eyes, spaced like the Cygnans’, around a central orifice. It wasn’t bothered by any sense of the upright, but scampered along the branches, its body giving a quarter turn or rotating entirely from time to time as it nibbled the fat bluish leaves. In spite of its bizarre configuration, Jameson found the creature delightful, with its busy movements and its bright goldfishlike colors.
It came too close. There was a flash of movement, and one of Jameson’s captors had the little creature trapped in a three-fingered hand. It chirped and twittered, squirming to get free. But the Cygnan held it out to its companion, as if offering it for inspection. The other Cygnan made an odd, nonhuman gesture—a sort of corkscrewlike drawing in of its long head. A refusal?
Then, to Jameson’s horror, the first Cygnan popped the little animal into its mouth, hind end first. The snout with its rasplike lining rotated around the tiny golden body. The creature shrieked, still alive. Inch by inch, the Cygnan sucked it in. By the time the head disappeared, the little eyes had become glassy and the circular mouth was open in a slack O. The Cygnan’s spined tubular tongue came out, made a circular swipe, and was gone.
Jameson made an effort not to be sick. Being sick in a space helmet was a disaster, and every spacefarer learned how to fight down nausea. He swallowed hard, tasting the bitter bile in his throat. So much for the theory that advanced civilizations had to be morally superior!
Abruptly the Cygnans snatched up the sack again and oozed along the twisting branches, passing Jameson back and forth between them like a basketball. They were heading for the edge of the forest, that acute corner where the overgrown sky came down to meet the land.
As feeble as the pseudo-gravity was, Jameson could feel the downhill tug. Of course! The ground would only be relatively “flat” near the central ridges. Visualize a triangle drawn inside a circle; “up” is always the center of the circle. It got steeper and steeper as they approached the artificial horizon. Jameson, despite the blurry motion, noticed the tendency of the vegetable growths to point toward that center. As they advanced the gnarled trunks were leaning farther and farther backward.
Earth blended into sky with no visible break in the forest. Everything was intergrown in thick profusion. The Cygnans made a wild leap, trailing the light puff of the sack, and caught at the wall of branches opposite. All at once, instead of plunging downhill they were climbing toward another of the mile-high central ridges. The jungle they had just left behind became their sky.
Why hadn’t the Cygnans built on sensible circular plan, like human beings? Again, Jameson could merely guess that it simply didn’t matter to them. This flat-sided plan was more convenient to them in other ways. It simplified the engineering of the folding spar arrangement. Straight lines made for easier construction. And as for the gravity gradient, perhaps the Cygnans lived in three dimensions, like monkeys or birds. Or—the thought came to him—perhaps they lived along surfaces, like so many small, clinging terrestrial creatures.
With startling suddenness, the forest ended. Jameson was looking through the branches at a flat metal prairie studded with surrealistic structures. They were placed at random along the plain: silolike cylinders of shiny metal, skyscraper-size prismoids set with gemlike facets, flaring hyperboloids with barber-pole skirts, enormous lattices of translucent colored materials. They were connected by looping transparent tubes, like some crazy gigantic chemistry apparatus, and there were dark specks moving fittingly through the tubes.
Everything leaned.
As the geometric shapes retreated from the vast tent of the central ridge, they leaned farther and farther toward center, until, at the knife-edge crease where ground met sloping ceiling, structures hundreds of feet high were tilting drunkenly. The mad architecture continued along the metal sky until it disappeared into the mists.
For there was a vast tubular cloud running down the spine of the empty space above. As the mists swirled and parted, Jameson could catch glimpses of a gleaming pipe stretching the length of the no-gravity center of this artificial world. Condensation? Escaping gases? Jameson shuddered. One thing was clear. That pipe—wide as the Mississippi River—had something to do with the mighty drive that had carried the Cygnans across the universe. Humans kept such relatively feeble things as nuclear power plants out of sight, if possible! What manner of creatures were the Cygnans to live and work, unconcerned, in such proximity to their engine?
As the Cygnans jostled him along, he could see what supported the pipe: a row of slender metal pillars raised from the apex of the central ridge—from all three of the ridges. They didn’t look half massive enough to hold up the pipe. But then, he realized, it was in zero-g up there, and the pillars need do nothing but brace it lightly in place.
Jameson found himself being stuffed through a rubbery membrane into a circular port. The membrane closed behind him—he couldn’t tell how—and he was with his two keepers in a crazy rotating drum. They scuttled round its walls while a lens-shaped aperture widened into the shape made by two intersecting circles. Before it was quite a full circle they picked up Jameson’s sack and heaved him through. He struck another of the rubbery membranes. He expected to bounce back in time to be snipped in half by the closing edges, but in some mysterious fashion he oozed through and settled to the floor like a toy balloon.
He found himself in an immense warehouse of a place with acres of spongy floor. The ceiling hung distant and shadowy above. The walls leaned inward. Dim shapes bulked against the walls and in random piles all over the floor. These sacks and bales and queer pyramid-shaped boxes were stenciled with odd cursive symbols that, instead of following one another in straight lines like human script, wandered in random peaks and valleys up and down.
There was a sound like a maniac trying to play Bartok on the harmonica, and Jameson realized it had been made by one of the Cygnans. The other Cygnan answered with an incredibly rapid fragment of twelve-tone solfège.
Jameson came to full attention. There had been chords in all that quick passage-work, transitory but unmistakable, as if the Cygnans possessed multiple larynxes.
Whatever those brief cadenzas had meant, the Cygnans picked him up again and toted him to a cluster of what looked like manholes in the spongy floor. One of them lifted a lid, apparently at random, and, legs tucked in, dropped through. Another one of those damned tubes! Jameson was tossed in next, and the other Cygnan dove through after him, head first.