“What a filthy thing!” Beth said.
“Filthy?” Dmitri said, in genuine puzzlement. “Perhaps to us. To the Cygnans, perfectly natural. Nature always provides rewards to encourage reproduction—rewards in the form of pleasure, or at least release from compulsion.” He nodded toward the struggling Triad, whose body contractions had grown rhythmic and violent. “That poor creature is in torment.”
“But a parasitic mate!” Liz said. “Isn’t that a bit farfetched?”
“There are any number of terrestrial examples,” Dmitri said. “Trichosomoides crassicauda. It’s a parasitic worm, like the Cygnans’ distant ancestors. The male lives as a parasite within the uterus of its own mate. Edryolychnus. It’s a deep-sea fish, very ugly. The male’s a tiny appendage that attaches itself to the female early in life. Its eyes and other sense organs atrophy. Its blood vessels fuse with hers. I could go on.”
“Strange way to perpetuate a species,” Omar said.
“No stranger than ours. Males aren’t very important in the scheme of things. They’re just a mechanism for exchanging gametes. Female spiders eat their mates when they’ve finished their job. This thing in my hand is a gene package, not a lover. A Cygnan’s emotional equivalent of a mate is the other female she trades males with.”
Jameson became thoughtful. “Dmitri, how would it work biologically?”
Dmitri looked around happily. “There’s an almost precise, terrestrial analogy. A mite that’s parasitic on moths: Lasioseius lacunosus. About one egg in twenty hatches as a male. The male is born first. That’s so it can be an obstetrician for its sisters. It helps in the birth of the females by pulling them out of the mother’s body. It lives as an ecoparasite with the mother for a brief time—it can’t survive removal itself. But before its sisters leave home, it impregnates them.”
“But the Cygnan male doesn’t impregnate its own sister?” Jameson said.
“No, it simply becomes a parasite on her. Let’s say it works like this. Suppose the Cygnans have multiple births, or hatchings, or buddings, or whatever. The male can’t survive on its own, any more than Lasioseius lacunosus can. It must immediately hook itself into the bloodstream of one of its much larger sisters or die. The attachment of a first male probably stimulates production of a hormone or chemical trigger that prevents the other male siblings from implanting themselves—”
“The way an ovum becomes impervious to other sperm after the first one reaches it,” Janet said, looking up from her work of bandaging Ruiz’s head.
“Yes, yes,” Dmitri said impatiently. “At any rate, it’s the fittest that tend to survive.”
“The courtship mechanism…” Jameson prompted.
Dmitri nodded. “What you call ‘courtship’ is two females pairing of and eventually exchanging their parasitic males. It must be as charged with emotion for them as sex is for humans. The exchange is an evolutionary survival mechanism which prevents inbreeding. Presumably there’s a hormone or body-chemistry block which ordinarily prevents a parasite from impregnating its sister-host. The courtship ritual, on the other hand, must release pheromones—repare the endocrine systems of both the hosts and the parasites to accept the switch, just as a foreplay prepares both human sexes for sex.”
Jameson’s eyes strayed toward Triad. The involuntary contractions of her body looked as if they were causing her physical pain. With each wave her rubbery body compressed by a third, then stretched out again like taffy. He was unable to imagine what she was feeling but clearly she was in the grip of a powerful biological imperative.
Her own tiny brother was already within the body of the dead Tetrachord, presumably dead or dying itself. The other half of the exchange must have been interrupted by the alarm. The squirming thing in Dmitri’s hand was animated by its own biological imperative. If it failed to make contact with Triad soon, then the union of Tetrachord and Triad would produce no young.
Did Cygnans mate for life?
One of the Struggle Brigade stalwarts, a sinewy fellow with close-set eyes and bristly black hair brushed forward over his forehead, had retrieved the hoe and was prodding Triad with the handle. Jameson reached him in three swift strides.
“Stop that!” he said, and snatched the hoe from the startled man. He tossed it down the slope as far as he could throw it. The Cygnan, in her private misery, shuddered. The sounds she was making were nonhuman, but to Jameson’s acclimatized ears they were piteous nevertheless.
Hating himself for what he was doing, he got down on one knee and said, in his broken-chord Cygnanese, “Triad, I talk. Do you hear?”
Dmitri broke off his lecture. He started forward. “Stay where you are,” Jameson said sharply. Dmitri stopped. The other people fell silent and watched Jameson.
The clustered eye polyps quivered and stretched in Jameson’s direction. It was like looking into three orange-rimmed inkwells.
“I hear, Ja-me-son,” the Cygnan trilled. “Give me the little brother.”
“Not yet. You must help me leave this place.”
“Jameson and his sisters are a wrongness in the sight of the mother-within-herself. You have stopped Tetrachord at the time of her (?)”
Jameson didn’t recognize the last ideogram, but Triad, despite her distress, had made an effort to put the rest of her message in terms he could understand. “Stopped” was the term for a damaged piece of machinery. “Wrongness” was the word for “mistake” that had cropped up so frequently during his language lessons.
“What is she saying?” Dmitri asked eagerly.
“She’s saying that we’re abominations in the sight of her deity because we murdered her mate,” Jameson said.
Beth made an indignant noise. “What about the people they killed? And the Jovians and the other life forms they’ve exterminated? I suppose that if we don’t have six legs, we don’t count!”
“No,” Jameson said. “We don’t.” He turned back to Triad. “The sisters who … stopped … Tetrachord are a wrongness to Jameson and his other sisters too.”
Another contractile spasm squeezed the Cygnan, squashing her. When it passed, the three eyestalks fixed on Jameson again, and the mouth centered among them opened like a pitcher plant. “Give me the little brother.”
“No. You must help me leave.”
“You are a wrongness. Like the other two-legs.”
Jameson had no time to decide what that meant, because the Cygnan was fumbling among her pouches. She extracted a short curving instrument that looked like a section of thick gold bracelet with little wheels set along its edges.
“Watch out!” somebody yelled. “It may be a weapon.”
“I don’t think so,” Jameson said. “I think it’s a key.”
Triad dragged herself over to the gate. The humans made way for her. She clamped the gold bangle on the thick disk that contained the lock mechanism. The curves matched, and the wheels fit into a pair of grooves that ran around the outer rim.
She whistled, a complex roulade of chromatic phrases, and the section of bracelet crept along the grooves under its own power, or power provided from within the lock mechanism. It disappeared under the edge of the disk, and the whole wagon-wheel-sized assembly lifted. The gate slid open smoothly.
Jameson reached underneath and retrieved the device. “For opening cages from the inside,” he said. “The animals could never figure out how to use it.”
Everybody had shrunk away from the opening as if it were dangerous. Nobody seemed anxious to leave. Jameson turned to Dmitri. “Put it down. Gently.”