Jameson did an imitation. There weren’t too many notes for him to remember. It fell into a whole-tone pattern, like impressionistic music, with a cluster of those peculiar quarter-tones at the center.
The Cygnan corrected him. He’d been off a fraction of a tone at the end. It didn’t finish at the octave. It was a fraction sharp there, like a bagpipe scale. He repeated the sequence fairly creditably.
The two Cygians held a brief, reedy conference. Jameson couldn’t follow. It was too rapid and complicated, with all sorts of embellishments. He stood tensely waiting.
The large Cygnan turned to him again and made a sharp attention-getting sound. Then it touched itself on the mouth and the tip of its petaled tail and sounded the tetrachord again. It waited.
Jameson gave the chord back immediately, turning it into a tremolo. The Cygnans chirped at each other for a while. Then the smaller of the two came forward. It made the gestures which to a Cygnan indicated self, and trilled at him.
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?
He saw nothing he could recognize as books, paper files, or writing instruments. How did Cygnans store data? A triangular cage with one of the little chittering creatures was balanced precariously on what Jameson took to be a Cygnan desk: a sort of oversize shoetree with a multitude of flat oval surfaces.
But Jameson had no eyes for any of it after he saw what was stacked against the far walclass="underline" a careless plunder of human artifacts from the Jupiter ship. He saw clothing, cooking utensils, upended chairs, a broken mirror, books and music cards, even an uprooted vacuum toilet. The Cygnans must have been all through the individual cabins and the recreation lounge. The lectern that doubled as a pulpit was lying on its side, and next to it was the portable Moog, its twin keyboards grinning with ivory teeth at the mess around it.
The two Cygnans had draped themselves across a pair of perches that sat in the middle of all the confusion. The perches were curving, polished hobbyhorses leaning outward from trumpet-bell pedestals. Each was equipped with three sets of crossbars and a chin rest. For a Cygnan, he supposed, it was as comfortable a way of distributing weight as a chair. Another perch faced the two. Jameson gave it a dubious glance, then sat cross-legged on the floor beside it, his blanket draped Indian-fashion around him.
The Cygnans twitched on their perches. The chin rest snaked around sideways so as not to obstruct the third eyestalk mounted beneath the Cygnan approximation of a jaw. But the thick shaft of the perch concealed the revolting thing on their lower bellies, and he was grateful that he wouldn’t have to look at it.
“Ja-me-son,” the larger Cygnan said.
It wasn’t exactly “Ja-me-son.” The Cygnans couldn’t manage consonants—unless one wanted to call those assorted hisses and pops consonants. Furthermore, they seemed unable to grasp the idea that an arrangement of phonemes could always have the same meaning regardless of pitch. Their first attempt to repeat Jameson’s name had simply mimicked his timbre and tone—a falling fourth—and they seemed puzzled when he repeated it with a different inflection. In the end they had given up and assigned him a name—the original falling fourth, with the added fillip of a rising fifth preceded by a grace note.