Now, with startling suddenness, the white star began to grow again. Its color changed to blue as it inflated to enormous size, bigger even than the red giant had been.
Blue supergiant! It had exhausted its hydrogen and become a helium star.
Now, in a blink, the black hole became visible—not the hole itself, but the terrible events in its accretion disk. For a moment of cosmic time there was a flash of hideous light as the Cygnan computer selectively shifted an X-ray source burning with the power of ten thousand suns to the visible spectrum.
The screens went blank.
Before Jameson could move, the room was filled with hissing Cygnans, Triad and Tetrachord among them. They saw the trussed-up Augie and set up a din that sounded like the shrill of a roomful of teakettles. There was a blur of flashing movement in Jameson’s direction. He flung up an arm to protect his face, then felt a searing flash of pain that wiped him out of existence.
Chapter 21
Tetrachord tugged gently at the leash. Jameson gagged as the loop of cord, threaded through his nostrils and dangling down his throat, tickled his pharynx. Then the moment of nausea passed, and he ambled obediently down the concave sidewalk after the two aliens.
The kitten was in his arms. He’d managed to scoop the animal up before they led him off in disgrace. He damn well wasn’t going to leave it to Augie’s tender mercies.
The tether wasn’t too uncomfortable once he got used to it. Jameson once had been fed by a tube through his nose in the hospital, and he’d found that it looked worse than it felt. It made the back of his throat feel sore, that was all, and he didn’t want to think about what would happen to his septum if he resisted the tug of the leash. But all the same, he was glad he hadn’t been conscious when the cord was inserted, and he dreaded its removal.
Perhaps it was the usual practice for Cygnans, with the peculiar anatomy of their planet’s life forms, to fetter their domestic animals through some analagous body cavity. It was a damned effective way to lead a human being around.
They had decided Jameson could no longer be trusted. He’d proved to be a dangerous animal, no longer fit to be a house pet. As with a puppy gone bad, they might feel some lingering affection for him, but they were regretfully taking him away all the same.
He trudged along behind the hand-holding pair, trying to keep the cord slack as much as possible. Augie, sans poncho, was slithering along behind him at a safe distance, holding the electric prod.
Around him the Cygnan city swarmed with mottled life. He was being led through something akin to a commercial district, with the Cygnan equivalent of shops and restaurants and perhaps theaters. Vividly colored angular structures soared crazily up to a luminescent approximation of a sky a quarter mile above. The faces of the buildings were alive with thousands of busy Cygnans, clinging to latticework perches that extended all the way up. The long tubular snouts turned in Jameson’s direction as he passed, and the twittering noise level went up as they caught sight of him and paused in their activities. The scurrying crowds parted to make way for the dangerous procession, and a swarm of the curious trailed in Jameson’s wake, keeping a respectful distance and piping questions at a sullenly silent Augie.
A little Cygnan the size of a beagle skittered up to him and was pulled back out of harm’s way by an adult, exactly as a human parent might snatch a curious child out of the way of a circus animal. Jameson lost his step, trying to avoid tripping over the thing, and was rewarded by a painful yank of the cord snubbed around his septum. There was a sickening sensation inside his head as a loop of the tether scraped the walls of the nasal cavity, and he had a fit of coughing and choking.
His feet stumbled along automatically. When the tears cleared from his eyes the path was emerging from the overhanging cliffsides of the vertical structures into a parklike stretch with pale blue lawns of packed fuzzballs and contorted shrubs like tangles of red spaghetti on either side.
Jameson looked across an open plaza spoked with transparent travel tubes clogged with Cygnans entering or leaving the area. The tubes snaked at every level through walls, through enormous aquarium tanks, through enclosed habitats, through cages.
Cages.
A frightful stench was in the air, a fetid compound of rotting straw and halogens, of barnyard odors and ammonia, as if a menagerie had been set down in a chemical factory. The place was noisy, too—a hubbub of screeches and bellows and clicks and yaps and howls.
Jameson could make out some of the creatures in the nearby cages. He saw a tall insectoid thing like a cluster of milky bubbles on a tripod. And a thing like a fluffy dishrag that flapped miserably along a filthy cage floor. A pair of tendriled sacs that dangled like hanging baskets from the wire roof of their enclosure. A shaggy pear-shaped cyclops that scratched itself with its single long arm.
Here and there across the plaza random groups of Cygnan sightseers paused to stare in Jameson’s direction, then turned their attention to the more interesting exhibits. Tetrachord made encouraging noises. When Jameson didn’t move, the Cygnan pulled gently at the nose tether and urged him like a trained bear across the graveled plaza into the main body of the zoo.
They stopped at what must have been Tetrachord and Triad’s living quarters at the back of a warehouse area. They rated an apartment all to themselves, a musty cubical—if “cubical” was the word for an interior space shaped like a crazily leaning polyhedron—crammed with peculiar objects on spoon-shaped shelves. Jameson recognized a couple of resting perches, side by side beneath—beneath?—a hanging trifoliate screen. On a raised platform nearby was a graduated set of what looked like miniature resting perches. It made Jameson think of doll furniture.
They made him wait in the center of the room. Tetrachord went to a cupboard and came back with three of the bulb-handled, shotgun-size neural weapons with the flaring muzzles. He handed two of them to Triad and Augie and kept the third for himself.
Jameson found that not at all comforting.
They left by the back way, and now they were in an exhibition hall, a huge place with interior spaces like a space-shuttle hangar. Everything looked newer and fresher here. A few Cygnan workers were applying shiny orange paint two and three-handed with bulb-handled brushes, or caulking glass tanks. Most of the cages were empty. There was no Cygnan traffic in the surrounding travel tubes.
A small scuttling creature in one of the nearer cages caught his attention. He managed to vector his armed escort over for a closer look, despite the drag at the back of his septum. He saw a little horny many-legged creature with one enormous claw almost as big as it was.
Jameson almost wept. A crab. A perfectly ordinary fiddler crab. One of the Cygnan probes must have scooped it up. It was the only link with Earth he had, except for the struggling kitten in his arms.
They hurried him past the cage, and then he was in a dim, cavernous hall whose walls were thick glass cliffsides, ten stories high. For some reason the Cygnans stopped. Whatever was in the tremendous tanks was unusual enough to interest even them.
The cloudy liquid within was obviously under enormous pressure. The air in the hall was noticeably chilly. Jameson strained his eyes in the murky red light.
Shapes were swimming about in the depths of the tank, great shadowed shapes as large as whales. Jameson felt a chill that was not due to the temperature.
Triad rapped on the glass with the bell of her weapon. There was a vast stirring within.
The gigantic creatures emerged from the depths of the tank, crowding the glass. Jameson had the impression of flat pancake shapes, more than a hundred feet across, undulating lazily to keep their trim. They were aware of him and the Cygnans. He felt them looking at him through the glass.