The rings of muscle were contracting in sequence down the whole length of her tubular body, like a species of peristalsis. She coiled and twisted with each successive wave, so that he was able to see her form all the way around.
The parasite was missing.
There was a lighter patch on her skin where it had clung, and he could see the six little wounds where it had dug in its feet. At the top of the oval patch, where the tiny head had been embedded, was an ulcerated sore.
Dmitri was kneeling beside him. “Is the creature sick?” he said. He cast a professional eye over the Cygnan. “Do you notice—there’s a slight turgidity of surface tissue, especially around the mucosa of the eyes and mouth. That can’t be normal.”
Jameson took a closer look and saw that Dmitri was right. There were other changes. The gold-and-russet pattern of her reticulated hide seemed brighter, more vivid in color. Jameson had the nagging feeling that some important datum was just beyond his grasp. Why, when the alarm went off, had the Cygnan run off helter skelter after her mate without thinking to arm herself?
“Triad,” he tried again, but the Cygnan was warbling to herself. The swollen eye polyps were waving at random again.
“Oh God, look!” a woman’s voice said over by the bars.
“Go get a hoe or something,” someone else said, and there was the sound of running feet heading toward Kiernan’s vegetable garden on the other side of the enclosure.
Jameson straightened up and went over to the gate. A dozen men and women were staring, fascinated, at something in the hall beyond.
“What’s going on?” Jameson said.
“Look!” Beth Oliver said, her voice filled with loathing.
Jameson peered through the bars. A soft pulpy thing the size of a large frog was crawling painfully across the floor toward the cage. It was one of the Cygnan parasites. It had detached itself from Tetrachord’s cooling body and was inching along blindly on its weak little legs.
“Its host is dead,” Hsieh said to Jameson. “It senses the presence of another Cygnan in here with us—like lice deserting a dead rat for the nearest warm body.”
The thing pulled itself along with snail slowness. Jameson could see that it had no head to speak of—just a long thin sucking tube that probed the air like an antenna.
“My father told stories of the prison camp in Khabarovsk, where they kept him after the Yakut liberation, before the Americans agreed to take in Russian refugees,” Dmitri said softly. “The prisoners were plagued by bedbugs—Siberian bedbugs, the size of dog ticks. When spring came, after the first thaw, they got permission from the guards to leave their infested bedding and sleep on the bare ground, fifty feet from their huts. They settled down—it was still light—and they saw a horrible brown tide spilling out of the huts and covering the ground like a carpet, coming toward them. It was the bedbugs. They can sense the presence of human blood even at that distance. In jungle warfare in the last century, American troops used them to detect guerrillas. They carried bedbugs in a special box, open to the air on one side, and when the bedbugs smelled blood—only human blood—they made excited little cries that could be picked up by sensitive microphones in the boxes…”
Jameson looked over at the writhing Triad. “Dmitri, could that be some sort of toxic reaction?”
Dmitri thought it over. “Maybe. We know too little about Cygnan physiology. It’s possible immune reaction could rid host of parasite, leave host sick with its own antibodies.”
The parasite had covered the distance to the bars. Everybody involuntarily pulled back out of its way as it squeezed itself through the bars.
“Ugh, disgusting!” Beth said.
“Too big to step on.” Omar laughed in his bass voice. “In bare feet, anyway.”
Up close you could see the russet-and-gold diamond pattern on the pulsating oval of the thing’s body. “Protective coloration,” Dmitri said. “It evolved with its host. Beautiful adaptation!”
“Beautiful?” Beth said, sounding sick.
Despite its apparent lack of eyes or other sense organs, the parasite was making a beeline for the shivering Triad, who stared at it as if mesmerized. It dragged itself along on its threadlike legs, the obscene sucking tube extended.
“Here’s the hoe!” somebody yelled. Wang came puffing up with the garden tool and handed it to Omar.
“I can’t watch,” Beth said, turning away.
Omar raised the hoe to strike, when suddenly an ear-splitting whistle came from Triad, like the one she’d emitted when Tetrachord died.
Everybody turned to stare. Omar paused at the top of his swing to look around then braced his thick legs to bring the hoe down.
All at once everything clicked for Jameson. “Stop!” he yelled.
He hurled himself forward, one shoulder low, and caught Omar behind the knees. The two of them went tumbling end over end in the low gravity. The hoe went spinning out of Omar’s grip.
Jameson picked himself up. “Sorry,” he said, and extended a hand to help Omar to his feet.
Omar dusted himself off. “What the hell was that all about?” he rumbled from somewhere inside his massive chest. He seemed more puzzled than angry.
Jameson turned to make sure the parasite was all right. It had covered another ten inches in its grublike progress toward Triad, who shrank against the cage wall in a shivering paralysis.
Overcoming his repugnance, he bent and scooped it up in his hand. It was not slimy, as he had expected. It was warm and dry to the touch. It writhed and contracted in his palm, its threadlike legs clinging.
Triad made a faint wheezing sound. The others looked at Jameson with incomprehension or revulsion, except for Dmitri, whose face was expectant.
“This isn’t a parasite,” Jameson told them. “It’s the other half of the Cygnan race.”
“A parasitic male!” Dmitri said, turning the squirming creature over in his hand. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of it?”
Over at the sloping wall, a few of the braver young men were restraining Triad, who was making weak, uncoordinated attempts to get to Jameson and Dmitri. Most of the diminished human colony was there, including Janet Lemieux, who had left a sedated Boyle in the care of a couple of volunteers. Ruiz had already regained consciousness with the help of a stimulant she’d given him, and though he hadn’t yet tried to sit up, he was watching with lively interest.
“The Cygnans are all females,” Jameson said. “The ones we’ve been thinking of as Cygnans, I mean. What fooled me was the way they behave like courting couples. And the personality differences, and the fact that one was bigger and stronger than the other. If they’ve got to pair off to reproduce, I suppose it’s natural that a weaker would tend to gravitate toward a stronger.”
Dmitri nodded in agreement. “Not only natural—it’s a survival mechanism for the species.”
“What are you two talking about?” Liz cried plaintively.
Dmitri laughed with sheer enjoyment. “These little males are just nonsentient vegetables,” he said. “The Cygnans exchange them like engagement rings. Why didn’t I see it? It took a rocket jockey like Tod here to point it out to me.”
“But that thing in your hand doesn’t look anything like a Cygnan,” Omar objected. “It’s more like an insect.”
“Ah, but it does!” Dmitri said. “Same body structure—but the legs have atrophied because it needs them only for clinging, and the ‘head’ has regressed to its only function: to suck blood. No eyes, because a parasite doesn’t need them, and if I dissected it I would find no digestive organs, because it gets its meals predigested. But the gonads, you can be sure, are well developed, as they are in all parasites. It is perfectly adapted to its way of life.”