"Even Ameslan prodigies can't discuss everything the cosmos
holds in a single day. And Kretzoi's exhausted, weak. He's on medication to suppress insulin production, and he's got a needle in his arm. Have mercy, Ben."
Kretzoi regarded me appraisingly, but not, I felt, wlhout sympathy. How strange. Sitting in judgment of me, a chimpoon with a urine-colored bag of glucose suspended over his head from an aluminum monopod.
"^Tiy don't we give him a day off?" I suggested.
Kretzoi shook his head, his mouth hanging open like a pouch.
'You could go dovsTi there with Bojangles," I told Eleg)-. "Kretzoi's taught him the finger talk; you could continue the lessons—make the sort of inquiries tliat might lead us direcdy to the temple."
Eleg)' squinted at me, then shook her head and looked away. "The only trouble with that is . . . Bojangles probably won't believe I'm an Asadi. I'm convinced he thinks Kretzoi's a kissin' cousin if not a prodigal sibling. Do you really want me to risk going in there tomorrow to see if I'm accepted as readily as Kretzoi's been?"' Elegy's eyes, opening wider and flaring like hot acetylene, again intercepted mine. "Maybe you'd like me to cut off my hair and pretend to be an Asadi outcast. That would gain me acceptance, more than likely, but it wouldn't make me a very popular confidante."
"I'm sorn.-," I said, meaning it.
"^^Tiat we're doing now is extremely important, Ben. We're learning things no one else has learned, ever. In t^vo days we've justified both my grant and our rashness in abducting an Asadi from the Wild."
"Patience," I counseled myself sagely. "Persistence."
Elegj's eyes torched me with flames of exasperated admiration. "God, you're just like a little boy."
"Not in everything, young lady. Not in ever.-thing." I ducked my head and went through the pTaniid's doorway to the mezzanine platform outside.
"Where you goin"?" Eleg)' called.
"For some air," I said. "To bum the weeds Bojangles turned up his nose at today. We all need a vacation from me, I think."
I went down the perforated metal steps and across the gloomy hangar floor to the recreation area. My own weariness was like a drug in my veins.
CHAPTER TEN
The Experiment Ends
The umbrellalike roots of the epiphytes smelled the worst. They burned along their nodulous ganglia like a tangle of gravid snakes hoisted over charcoal and prodded into writhing incandescence. The odor was a blend of curdled mayonnaise and mint-scented feces. All that made their burning bearable was the open veldt country sweeping away to the northeast of the knoll behind the hangar, that and the freshness of Bosk Veld's winds blowing across the pit. The stars looked like microscopic screw heads rotated into the hidden template of the universe. I stood on the knoll poking at the mass of coal-bright roots and staring toward the empurpled, northeastern horizon.
"Dr. Benedict!" a voice hailed me.
A figure with a high-powered hand lamp was approaching me from around the northwestern comer of the hangar. A solitary figure. He had nearly a hundred meters to go before we would be
close enough to converse in anything other than shouts. All I could do was watch the white-blue beam of his lamp stutter around the landscape until he arrived. Usually, it crossed my mind, Komm-service guards patrolled in pairs.
It was the young Iranian, Jaafar Bahadori. Over one shoulder he carried a lightning-emblazoned laser half rifle, exactly the sort of weapon with which our hangar's legendary muralist had etched his erotic masterpiece. Jaafar's boots, I noticed, were of the stalking variety favored during field maneuvers and commando assaults.
'That stinks," he said by way of greeting.
"I didn't know you had to pull guard duty, Jaafar. I thought you were safely ensconced in the lorry pool or over at Rain Forest Port."
"I am doing a friend a favor, sir."
"Someone talked you into taking his duty?"
"I talked her into letting me take it for her."
"Such altruism."
Jaafar nudged the burning epiphytes with his boot toe. "That really stinks. How is it you are standing it?" But he squatted near the pit as if to inhale the full unadulterated aroma and told me, "There's been some talk in her Komm-service barracks, says my good friend, about putting on night face and staging a commando raid on the hangar. Much of it is lorqual loquaciousness, as they say, mere silly drunk talk, but some of it is truly serious."
"A commando raid?" I exclaimed. "What for?"
"To capture the Asadi and put it to death. A war game, you see. Boredom is rife these days, she says. Her barracks-mates' last maneuvers were three months ago, and carrying vegetables out of the Wild every morning for your alien has given some of them nasty ideas. They don't like to play at catering service for your . . . well, your—"
"Boonie?" I suggested.
"Yes, sir. For a boonie." Jaafar stood and gazed up at the sky— a moon was rising. "I have a partner on the other side of the building, sir. I told him he could patrol that side and go googly
over the lovely laser scrawls if he'd just give me time to make my circuit. I had been pretending a limp until I got clear of him, you see, and so he thinks I'm slow."
"Is your partner one of the conspirators?"
"I don't know. He doesn't talk to me very much. He did not wish to talk to you, either. He was very happy, this one, to let me come around here and fill my nostrils with this . . . this . . . this terrible effluvium," he concluded, pleased with himself.
"Why hasn't your friend reported the mutinous talk?"
"Oh, no. Impossible. She's a daughter of the Martial Arm, Planetary Command. Her loyalty to her comrades-in-arms prevents her."
"What about her loyalty to Colonial Administration, Jaafar? Maybe her priorities are badly scrambled."
"Aren't I here? Didn't she let me come in her place tonight, knowing I would do the necessary?" Jaafar seemed to think these rhetorical questions settled the matter. "It's time for me to go, sir."
'They'd be crazy to try anything so foolish," I said to Jaafar's back. The barrel of his half rifle topped his shoulder like an evil smokestack.
He turned. "Some of them, she says, are truly crazy." With that he went off halt-footed down the knoll, getting in practice for the partner who believed him temporarily lame. "Good night. Dr. Benedict." The words were partially muffled by a long, warm gust off the veldt. The crinkling epiphytes smoldered in their pit. After watching them a time, I went back into the hangar.
"Do you believe him?"
"Do I believe there's been talk in the barracks of a lynching party, or do I believe they really mean to throw it?"
Elegy made a moue of distaste at my semantic fussiness. "The
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latter, of course. Do you really think they'll do it?"
"The talk I'm certain of, Elegy—it's typical barracks talk. But the other's dicy. Jaafar's friend is right, though. Some of the Martial Arm's planetbound E-graders are hotbrows, even with off-duty tranqs, thetrodes, and lorqual to keep 'em cool. They don't like it here, but they're indentured for life. If they rev themselves into it, they might risk courts-martial or even a big half-C of Punitive Sleep."
"Just to get Bojangles?"
"Apparently."
'Then there's danger to Kretzoi, too. I wouldn't trust them to distinguish between an Asadi and an imported replica, especially if it's dark and they're all spring-wound like cuckoo clocks."
"Do you want to get out of here?"
"Where would we go? This is the perfect place for the sort of work we're trying to do, Ben. Why don't you call Governor Eisen? Tell him what you've learned. Surely he'll send out a special unit to protect both us and the hangar—for at least the next few nights, anyway."
"That special unit would probably be partially comprised of some of the very guards who've been volleying about the notion of a raid."
"Fine. Let 'em know someone in authority knows what they've been plotting. That by itself might be enough to kee
p 'em honest. We'd be stupid to take the chance their in-barracks bravado isn't going to spill over into a real working out of their fantasies. There's too much at stake to hope they're all just swaggering in their socks, Ben."
"If I tell Moses, there'll be restrictions and punishments among the Komm-service guards and even more resentment of our presence out here."
Elegy's So-what? expression was as direct, eloquent, and humbling as a kick in the coccyx. "Let 'em resent us. They already do, anyway. What's a bit more? The restrictions, the punishments—dear God, Ben, it's only what they deser'e for their loose
talk and their contemptible disregard of their true duty!"
She crossed the bright interior of the pyramid and sat down by Kretzoi, who was asleep on his cold metal bench. She stroked the big primate's mane and stared at me angrily.
Everything she had said was straightforward and irrefutable. I descended from the mezzanine, crossed the hangar floor to a glassed-in closet housing a televid unit, and put through a call to Moses's home.
The Governor heard me out emotionlessly, his face pasty and impassive on the tiny screen. But he promised that within twenty minutes we'd have a six-guard contingent stationed around the hangar. This matter disposed of as if it weren't in the least extraordinary, Moses asked if we'd made any progress with our "trouble-making" Asadi. To show that his choice of words was intended humorously, he gave a wan smile. I told him that Kretzoi and Bojangles had become fast friends, but didn't mention the latler's startling adeptness at picking up Ameslan. Moses nodded amiably, assured me the talk in the barracks would be squelched, along with any conceivable possibility of a raid, and, saying he had a few pointed televid calls to make, almost apologetically broke our connection.
Easy. So easy.
I didn't begin to feel better about things, though, until, less than twenty minutes later, standing in one of the hangar's small southside doorways, I saw the headlights of two armored vans boring through the night across the salt-white brightness of the polymac. Civki security police, independent of the military guards who usually stand sentry duty at Chaney Field. Behind them, the pearly lights of the terminal building and the green-glowing panels of its support shacks. Because 1 didn't want to talk to the newly assigned police—who would take up their positions whether I greeted them or ducked inhospitably out of view—I closed the door and moved through the hangar securing dead bolts and checking the many other possible points of entry. Then I returned to Elegy and Kretzoi.
"You were gone quite a time," Elegy said.
"Everything's taken care of, though. Moses knows what's happening and we've got six laser-toting bodyguards strolling our estate."
"Good." The annoyance of a possible commando assault behind us. Elegy's relief was little greater than if we had just replaced a broken skylight through which the rain had been inconveniently falling. "I think Kretzoi's all right," she told me. "A urine test I administered a few minutes ago shows his blood-sugar levels are back to normal. The work with Bojangles hasn't exhausted him anything like his time in the Wild."
'Tomorrow—" I began.
'Tomorrow we'll let them resume, Ben. During all his time studying the Asadi, Egan Chaney never had a true informant—not even The Bachelor, who probably disclosed as much as he did only out of accident and a happy dim-wittedness. Now, though, we're developing an informant of our own. At the rate he appears able to learn Ameslan, in a week's time we may be transcribing answers to some of our questions directly from Bojangles's own hand signs. And it's Kretzoi's accomplishment, Ben."
"Three cheers for Kretzoi."
Elegy darted me an up-from-under look. "What's the matter? Feel slighted?"
"No, not really. At least I don't think so. It's just that I think we'd better move as fast as we can. Kretzoi's already managed to ask Bojangles about the Asadi temple. Elegy. If he can do that, he can do more tomorrow. Much more, believe me."
'That may have been sheer serendipity, the pagoda business. Kretzoi made a series of gestures imaginatively translating this hangar into the heart of the Wild and then demanding to know if Bojangles had ever seen anything like it out there. Bojangles made an intuitive leap and replied that he had."
'That's not serendipity, that's intelligence. I want to give Kretzoi a list of questions to ask Bojangles tomorrow, just to see how far he gets with them. . . . What objections can you have to that?"
"None," Elegy said almost sullenly, believing, like most
twenty-two-year-olds, that Time is an unestrangeable ally. "Make your list."
Time isn't an unestrangeable ally. It runs out on you. And this time, to my sorrow, it wasn't the youthful expectations of Elegy Gather that prevailed, but the actuarial pessimism of Thomas Benedict. Sometimes the cost of being right is heartbreakingly high.
My list was long. Damn long. It began wth relatively simple questions about obsenable .sadi behavior, proceeded to matters about which we had been fruitlessly speculating for six or seven years, and concluded with a series of inquiries about the Asadi past and its influence on their present-day lives. I touched on feeding habits, social relationships, the Asadi "chieftaincy," the batlike huri, and so on for a total of nearly sLxty questions, many with overlapping areas of concern. I might have gone on manuscribing all night, but EIeg- touched my hand and made me stop.
"Select the ten most important ones," she said, "so that I can relay those to Kretzoi in the morning."
"They're all important."
"I won't have time to brief him on sistv', though, and even if I somehow managed, interrupting his sleep to do it, it's not very likely he'd have time to ask them all tomorrow. How do you expect him even to remember so many?"
So I vsinnowed, snipped, and collapsed my questions until there were ten, and the next morning, well before sunrise. Elegy sat dowTi in front of Kretzoi and shaped them for him as he took his breakfast.
In the swimming-pool compound the day began exactly as had the previous one, with Bojangles marching ritually about the interior perimeter of the fence and back and forth through the empty pool itself. Kretzoi sat with his back to the compound's
gates, his wrists on his knees and his hands hanging limply between.
But Bojangles soon began swaying playfully from side to side, finally spinning himself out of his march and bringing himself up short in front of Kretzoi—where he leaned forward and stared unflinchingly at our shaggy field agent.
Kretzoi looked away. A stare is a threat signal among Earth primates. During his time in the Asadi clearing, one of Kretzoi's most difficult adjustments had been learning to meet the eyes of the aliens who wished to engage him in their habitual staring contests. The stress of locking eyes with the Asadi, in fact, may have accounted, in part, for his lapses of strength and his hypoglycemic vertigo. When the Asadi decided he wasn't worth taking on as a staring partner, his stress levels fell—even if his body never wholly regained its former homeostatic condition. But the Evil Eye, as exemplified by the stare, still retained its ability to discomfit Kretzoi; and even during the previous day's gestural tete-a-tete with Bojangles, he had made a point of frequently averting his gaze. You don't face down the Evil Eye.
In this respect, as well as many others, the Asadi had evolved differently. Their staring matches were not merely threat displays and acts of aggression; they were also televid chats, poetry readings, bull sessions, songfests, lectures. An Asadi could communicate on a complex informational level with another member of his species only if he looked him directly in the eyes. A few theorists suggested that the Asadi inhabited their clearing only during the day because only during daylight could they meaningfully exchange information. Vocal communication works at a distance; it carries in the dark as well as it does in the daylight. Gestures and other visual signals, however, depend on proximity and visibility for their effectiveness, and night neutralizes them as surely as does a blindfold. Hence, argued these theorists, the sunset dispersal of the Asadi and their evolutionary triumph over the typical p
rimate phobia of the face-on stare.
Maybe.
At any rate, Kretzoi looked away from Bojangles, and kept his face averted until the Asadi lightly slapped his chest and made the Ameslan signs for "ugly-silent-lazy-friend." Kretzoi responded. Bojangles broke in. And soon the two were gabbing gesturally at great speed. It was too swift and complicated for me, hand-jive gossip at a high level of informational exchange. The conversation also had ongoing pedagogical significance, for Kretzoi continued to augment the Asadi's rapidly growing repertoire of signs.
"They're going like torrential sixty," I told Elegy. "I think they could have handled all my questions, don't you?"
Elegy scrutinized the monitors noncommittally. "We're lucky we've got a hologramic record, Ben. I'm not keeping up very well on my own."
And I exulted, confident we had come through where so many others, including Egan Chaney and earlier temporal projections of myself, had all had to settle for partial answers or no answers at aU.
A pounding interrupted these self-congratulatory musings. My heart leaped numbly. Kretzoi and Bojangles stopped conversing and lifted their snouts toward the source of these repetitive, echoing thuds.
"What the hell is that?" 1 whispered.
"The door's locked," Elegy told me. "It's our morning delivery." Of plants from the Wild, she meant.
She cleared one of our four small monitors and activated the controls of an exterior camera so that we could see the visitors at our door. Foreshortened by the camera's overhead lens into macrocephalic dwarves, two Komm-service guards stood seeking entrance to the hangar, each carrying an armful of plants. They each bore weapons, too.
A heavy-jowled, olive-complexioned man and a pale woman with bright, hawklike eyes. The woman, against regulations, was using the butt of her half rifle to knock on the door. She wore a violet scarf around her neck, an optional piece of uniform for the idiosyncratically debonair. The set of her brow revealed her
distaste for the duty she was performing, and the slammings of her rifle butt against the door occasionally buffeted a skein of roots or a few flower cuttings out of the crook of her other arm.
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