The Jupiter Theft

One of the creatures chose a lid and it popped open. Before Jameson knew what was happening, it slithered inside. The other Cygnan stuffed the sack into the opening and followed. Jameson was being hustled down a narrow, looping tube. It was transparent, and he could see other tubes branching out on all, sides, each going to some unknown destination.

It was an efficient way to travel—for Cygnans. They reverted to their six-legged mode, hardly caring which direction was up. Jameson was getting some painful bumps, even through the spacesuit.

They emerged into an enormous space—a forest, stretching as far as the eye could see. No, not quite. About a mile away was a mile-high ridge, stretching on to infinity. This had to be, he realized, the underside of that tremendous canyon-size trench he had seen on the outside of the hull. The sky was a tent—two walls converging at an apex miles above. The sky was forested too, and each had its own central ridge.

He had time for a quick look at what he had taken for trees before they hoisted him aloft. It was a tangle of thick twisting boles, intertwined like a banyan tree, with thick blue-green foliage. If there were any vertical trunks, they were accidental. The growth seemed to spread out sideways, like some enormous creeping vine. He couldn’t tell if they were individual growths or one interconnected entity.

The Cygnans scurried up the nearest trunk like six-legged squirrels, taking Jameson with them. Soon they were about fifty feet up, and Jameson was getting dizzy. He knew that at his present weight a fall couldn’t hurt him, but all his instincts were screaming at him. The Cygnans passed the sack back and forth to each other, and from hand to foot, as they scampered along the tremendous branches, but always there seemed to be at least one clever little paw wrapped around the neck of the sack.

After about half a mile of being towed through the branches in this offhand fashion, Jameson found himself draped over a branch, dizzy and bruised. He lay there in his bag, not daring to move. His captors had evidently stopped to catch their breath—even Cygnans had to do that, it seemed—and to tear the plastic wrappings off their heads and beaverlike tails.

They let the torn plastic flutter down to the forest floor and tossed their globular air canisters down after it. Jameson was shocked in spite of himself. In the closed economy of a spaceship, littering was a capital sin.

The Cygnans stretched and preened themselves. They groomed one another as monkeys would, scratching away transparent flakes of what he took to be dead skin. Then he saw that what he had taken for a tail was actually three tails, a petaled structure that folded in on itself.

For a moment, as one of the creatures turned away, he had a glimpse of the orifice the petals enclosed, a moist, tender surface that was the same bright orange as the lining of the Cygnans mouth and the mucosa of their eyes. He had an impression of hairlike projections pointed inward, in the manner of a fish trap, and then the three petals closed up again.

Jameson studied his captors curiously. This was the first time he had had a really good look in strong light. They were naked except for tubular harnesses festooned with soft oval pouches. Their hides were clothing enough, a mottled pattern of golds and rusts that reminded him of something between a diamondback rattlesnake and a reticulated giraffe. Under other circumstances he might have found the pattern beautiful.

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.