"Interpret it however you like. If you really think you're right, you'll be able to live with my contempt. But if you're interfering with me now to establish a sense of your own authority, or to worry aloud some abstract notion of higher morality, well, you'll deserve what you get. Worse yet, Ben, you'll know it."
I swore at her. "Get out of here," Elegy said evenly. "Wait for Jaafar at the base of the column. I'll join you there as soon as I'm finished."
I swore again, ritually. Then, obeying her, I duckwalked beneath the chrysalis's support lines and headed for the opening at the front of the compound. When I glanced back. Elegy was crouched beside her father's head like a worshiper in the tomb of some Egyptian or Mesoamerican god-king, her deity's face masked in tarnished bronze and lapis lazuli, the mummy itself winged in silk like an angel.
Curiously vivid and affecting, the scene stayed in my vision even as I negotiated my way past the subterranean lagoon, the hurl dovecotes, the walls festooned with molds, the guano compounds, and all the oozing amethyst dividers of the labyrinth. The memory clung like a burr. I couldn't shake it. By the time I reached the base of the column I was trembling uncontrollably. Half in awe of the tears streaming down my face and beading in my eyelashes, I eased myself cross-legged to the floor and waited.
It felt astonishingly good to cry—even if, astonishingly, it hurt like nothing else I had ever known.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Transfigured Lives
"Dr. Benedict," droned a voice in my ear. "Dr. Benedict, sir." It was Jaafar, on his throat radio, perched on a platform high above me, for our connection was reestablished now that we inhabited the same volume of space. I hadn't thought to call him before, nor, apparently, had he remembered the radio until better than halfway down the chamber's central tower. Elegy, I assumed, was too busy, too preoccupied, to respond, and I knew that the only decent thing to do was to tell Jaafar to stay put until she and I could join him aloft. Otherwise, he would make the trip down for nothing. It took me a few moments to compose myself, but I finally activated my radio and did the decent thing.
"Please, Dr. Benedict, what business is Civ Gather about?" "I'm not sure, Jaafar. We'll have to wait until she gets ready to come back and tell us. Just sit tight for a while."
"There's an Asadi ahead of me, sir. It led me down here."
"You mean Kretzoi, don't you? Surely you're able to tell the difference between Kretzoi and a real Asadi by now."
Jaafar waited three or four beats before responding. "Yes, sir. By now I'm capable in that way. This is not Kretzoi who leads me. /f's an Asadi, with empty eyes and a — how do you call it? — a ratty mane.
"The Bachelor!" I radioed in surprise. "Where's Kretzoi, then? You saw him, didn't you?"
"Oh, yes, sir. He's with the helicraft. I used him to point me to my landing in front of the pagoda."
"You were able to see it, then? The pagoda, I mean?"
"As large as a hammered thumb it showed from the air, sir. Larger, I guess one should acknowledge. It's very large indeed."
"What's The Bachelor doing now, Jaafar?"
"Who?"
"The Asadi. What's he doing? How did you happen to pick him up as a guide? And what in Allah's name made you want to follow him?"
"He wanted me to come. He emerged from the pagoda only a short time ago, indicating by movements that I should follow. Kretzoi told me — with his hands, you know — that Elegy and you had gone down beneath the floor. Civ Gather, I mean."
"Go ahead and say 'Elegy,' Jaafar. She's not military, you realize—you can call her anything you and she mutually approve."
Jaafar's voice was dubious: "Yes, sir."
"What's the Asadi doing now?"
"Listening to me talk on the radio. He's two platforms down, almost directly below me. It makes me dizzy to survey such bigness."
"Didn't it scare you, following him into a cavern this size?"
"Oh, very much."
'Then what made you do it?"
Jaafar was silent.
"Was it Elegy?" I asked him.
"/( was Elegy more than it was you, sir, " said Jaafar forthrightly.
"Touche. You have a decidedly medieval concept of chivalry, Jaafar. You know that, don't you?"
"/ would call it Persian rather than medieval. Even if the naming makes little objective difference in the description."
"Your prerogative, Jaafar. Be my guest."
Then we both shut up and waited. Elegy was not long in coming. She greeted me with a touch, her hand cold. Neither of us said anything. She preceded me to the first platform and began to climb. It was much harder than coming down: We had to belly our way to each new scaffold and then lift ourselves onto it with our arms. Wearying and time-consuming. It was mortifying to think The Bachelor had bounded up these steps so quickly and easily. But Jaafar—in a clear, chaste tenor—sang ancient Persian ballads to us as we climbed.
It was already late afternoon when we got back outside. The Bachelor had accompanied us for a good portion of the ascent, always several platforms above us, until the huri— his huri, we supposed—intercepted him near the catacombs' ceiling and apparently directed him by tunnels or passageways unknown to us through the thick central column and out of our lives. There arrived on the surface of the planet, then, only Elegy, Jaafar, and I.
Kretzoi greeted us. As I retrieved my holocamera from the pagoda's stone bier, his glee was such that he spun about in the clearing like a top. Then he ran up the steps and nearly knocked me over attempting to embrace me. Elegy he held against him for a long, quiet time. Finally the four of us retired to the shade of the Wild to recuperate from our ordeal. None of us slept. We were too haunted by events to close our eyes.
It was growing dark by the time we decided to leave. I insisted on piloting, despite my weariness. Beneath the invisible halo of
our rotors, we lifted off with gratifying swiftness. I circled the pagoda several times, man'eling at the magnificence of the structure. I kept waiting for it to cant its amethyst windows and blink out of existence—but it remained solid and distinct below us.
"You think you could find this place again?" I asked Jaafar.
"As it is now, sir, anyone could find it."
"K the temple does its disappearing act again, I mean?"
"Even then, I'd certainly think. We have the coordinates, you see, and the rain forest here has a most distinctive feel."
"That may be true, Jaafar, but I'd swear I've flown over this very region two dozen times in the last six years without ever having suspected the pagoda's presence. It's preposterous, undoubtedly, but I'm afraid we'll lose it again."
"Governor Eisen, I believe, thinks it too bad we can't lose our probeship hangar in such an effortless way."
Dog-tired, I took us out over the jungle, rechecked my instruments, and put us on a course for Frasierville.
Jaafar said, "I will never forget this place. Dr. Benedict. No one needs to worry that I will forget."
After a while I looked into the passenger compartment and saw Elegy grooming Kretzoi with languid, almost dreamy pensiveness. Kretzoi, to accommodate this methodical combing, kept his head down. I felt pretty sure he was half asleep. The look in Elegy's eyes was blank and unreadable. I wanted to shoot questions at her, dozens of questions, but knew the futility of trying even to gain her attention.
Forty minutes later I looked into the passenger section again.
Her head against the wall, her hands folded in her lap. Elegy was asleep. Kretzoi lay sprawled in front of her like a throw rug.
Jaafar turned to me sympathetically. "Wouldn't you yield the piloting to me, sir? You, too, could—" He gestured.
"No," I said, "thanks. This trip is mine."
'But—"
'It's the last one out of here I ever intend to make.'
Back in Frasierville, Elegy and Kretzoi safely installed in their original first-floor guest suite in the hospital, and Jaafar God only knows where, I slept for twenty-two straight ho
urs. If I dreamed, I don't remember any of my dreams. Those twenty-two hours, though they may have purged the poisons of sleep deprivation from my system, were otherwise a period in which not a scintilla of my consciousness had an existence anywhere in the universe. For those twenty-two hours I was totally excised from Creation.
Nonexistence, I learned, holds few terrors.
When I awoke, I felt that it had been only two or three minutes since the BenDragon Prime had set down on the polymac of Rain Forest Port. It was dark again, and I was lonely. Nightmares didn't assail me until my eyes were wide open and a melancholy animal hunger was grumbling in my gut. I chose not to feed it. It was impossible to eat with images of both Egan Chaney and the huri catacombs flashing against my mind's eye. For a while I slammed aimlessly about the homey squalor of my living quarters.
Then I put through a telecom to Moses Eisen and asked him if it was too late to visit him. He told me it wasn't.
The walk to his house—past the lamps bordering the rain forest and the silent quonsets arrayed against the fuzzy lights of town— lifted the nightmares from my immediate vision, without letting me forget the reality that had provoked them. I tried to fix Elegy in my mind's eye: Elegy as she had been in the catacombs, ordering me out of her presence and then kneeling in fierce devotion beside the ungodly thing her father had become. I wanted a strength like that, a strength like Elegy's.
When I arrived at the little peninsula of land from whose tip the Governor's mansion jutted up like a lighthouse beside an ocean of
trees, I found the place a conflagration of candles, torches, spots, deck-mounted fluorescents, and ground lamps. Moses had lit up his house like a bonfire. The gallery at the front gleamed qmid the intersecting arcs of several colored ground lamps, and the whole place shimmered. This, for Moses, was a fantastic display of opulence and courtesy. He usually let late-night visitors stumble to his door in the dark.
Moses was waiting for me. He looked spic and span in white coveralls and a pale-blue neck scarf. A pair of deck chairs sat in the middle of the verandah facing Frasierville, as if a conference of major import were soon to be held between their occupants. My step faltered. Moses beckoned me fonvard, and in a moment I climbed to the deck and suspiciously shook his hand.
"How are you, Ben?"
"Good," I mumbled. "Pretty good."
Only when he invited me to sit, and waited for me to compose myself comfortably in the chair, did I understand that he had arranged this entire scene—the lights, the chairs, even the immaculate tastefulness of his attire—out of genuine respect for me. Respect and friendship. My discomfort increased. This was going to be harder than I expected.
"Young Civ Gather was here earlier this afternoon," he said, finally allowing himself to sit.
"How is she?"
"Fine, I'd suppose. Quite subdued and intermittently very grave. She told me about your . . . your adventure." The way he spoke the word indicated he meant to imply that Eleg}' had told him the whole story.
"Kretzoi?" I asked.
"She didn't bring him. I think she feared he wouldn't be welcome here. That isn't the case, but I'm afraid that's what she feared."
"Quarantine," I said reminiscently. Then I laughed a little.
Moses shifted in his chair. "I congratulated her, you understand. I have to congratulate you, too. I want to, that is. You've
succeeded in something very important, and I'm glad you're back. Very glad."
"Me, too, Moses. Jubilant, in fact."
At that Moses laughed, surprising me. "You hardly sound it. I've never really encountered a jubilation in such a minor key before."
"Call it a realist's jubilation."
Nodding once, Moses granted me my point. Then he put his hands on his knees and gazed toward Frasierville. "You're the only one of the remaining members of the Third Denebolan Expedition, Ben, with whom I was ever able to establish any degree of rapport." He stopped, embarrassed.
"I know that. It served us reasonably well, didn't it?"
"Yes, it did. It does. That's why I wanted to explain to you Claktik Komm's decision in regard to—"
I cut him off. "Before you explain anything, Moses—owing me no explanations at all, you understand—I have a request to make. A very simple one. A very important one."
Moses waited.
"I'd like to go home," I said.
"Earth?"
"East Africa. Kenya. Nairobi. The National University." The names of these places squeezed my heart, and the ache spread through my chest. "I know some people there, Moses, and if God and Glaktik Komm approve my wishes, they'll still be alive when I get home."
"People?" The Governor's face betrayed a touching puzzlement, as if he'd never really considered the possibility that Earth might any longer harbor such an animal.
"Human beings," I said, laughing again. "Latter-day representatives oiHomo sapiens sapiens. Man the Wise the Wise." I had a sudden vision of Elegy in the catacombs. "I'm speaking gener-ically, you understand."
Moses smiled. "Oh, those. Yes, people."
"I've been here a long time, I'm close to deserving a little
special consideration, and I'd like you to initiate the personnel procedures approving my early release and my passage home. I ask you to do this out of your friendship for me, Moses, and out of my own awareness that I've nothing else to offer BoskVeld."
Moses's silence was a key to his agitation. Finally, he got up and strolled along the deck to the hooded doorway leading downward into the main living area of his house. He opened the massive door and pushed it inward. I saw some elegant wallpaper, some hardwood wainscoting, and a gleaming brass stair rail descending into light and coziness.
"Come in, Ben. David and little Reba are in bed. Come have a drink with Rebecca and me."
The gesture was almost unprecedented. I gaped at Moses and the open doorway. What would it mean to refuse his hospitality? Not a negation of our friendship, surely. We had survived as friends for many years without ever once attempting to rake through the coals at the bottoms of each other's hearts. Moses—in his quiet, reclusive way—had made commitments much deeper than I ever had. I wasn't one of them, and, in truth, he owed me nothing.
"Moses, I haven't eaten. A drink would undo me. Let's stay on the verandah. This is a very comfortable chair."
The words sounded makeshift, false—but it was a matter of absolute necessity that I say them, afterward fervently hoping that Moses didn't take offense. They were not, after all, a rejection of him, but an affirmation of the remaining possibilities of my life.
"We could get you something to eat, Ben."
"Please, no. I'm going to fast for the next few days, purge my system. Hot water and citric acid." I suddenly realized that this was the truth, not a spur-of-the-moment apologia for my refusal to enter Moses's house. "After that, well—I'll probably ease back into shameless camivory."
Moses, bless him, laughed. He pulled his door to and rejoined me at the center of the verandah. Standing with his hands in his pockets, he rocked a little on the soles of his feet and stared at the moist, melon-green lights of Frasierville.
"Consider your request approved," he said. 'There's a probe-ship arriving within the week. Young Civ Cather and her primate friend will be aboard. No reason you shouldn't be one of the passengers, too."
I got to my feet, murmuring thanks. My hands went into my pockets in imitation of my friend and superior.
Then I began talking desultority about the need for an archaeological expedition to the Asadi pagoda. I mentioned that Chiyoko Yoshiba of the Museum of Indigenous Artifacts was probably the most likely person to head up such an expedition. Chiyoko was middle-aged and rather stout, that was all very true, but she had impeccable credentials, surprising stamina, and a skill at reconstruction and classification bordering on wizardry. Middle-aged, had I said? Shoot, she was only a year or two older than I. There was no reason Robards de Feo couldn't find a substitute for her at the Museum and Chiyoko herself imm
ediately undertake the mounting of—
"Wait a minute," Moses put in, touching me. "The huri in the pagoda—beneath it, rather—constitute a possible obstacle to these plans. After Elegy left here this afternoon, I had Farber in Communications send a light-probe message to Kommthor. The message detailed what the two of you encountered in the Wild. It also outlined some of your speculations about the huri/Asadi relationship and its history."
"You've received a reply?" I asked, my heart thudding.
"Farber relayed it to me about an hour before you called."
"What?" I demanded. "What did it say?"
Moses stopped rocking and removed his hand from his right pocket; he still didn't look at me. "That if the huri did indeed once enslave and control the Asadi's intelligent Ur'sadi forebears—" He put his hands on the railing in front of him and grimaced as if trying to dislodge the tic in his left cheek.
"Go on," I urged him impatiently.
"It's obvious, isn't it? Kommthor's afraid the huri may pose a similar threat to humanity. They want the wilderness temple cordoned off and the entrance to the catacombs sealed. There
ATon t be any archaeological expeditions into the Wild. Moreover, Kommthor's considering the desirability and the feasibility of depositing a nuclear device in the huri labyrinth."
I stared at Moses in disbelief. "You're kidding."
"No, I'm not."
"Has Elegy heard about this—this grandiose executive madness?"
"No, she hasn't. And, Ben, it's no more mad than was the quarantining of the astronauts upon their return from extraterrestrial worlds. In the early days of the American space program, that was an eminently sane precautionary measure. Kommthor's decree against archaeological expeditions is precautionary in the same way."
I clomped off three or four meters, then clomped back. "That's possible, that's very possible—but Kommthor's decision to nuke the huri would be a preemptive measure of the highest, humanity-first arrogance. Preemptive, not precautionary! God, Moses, it's the diction and vocabulary of the Big Lie. Elegy and I don't even know if our reconstructions of huri/Asadi evolution are in any way on target. Can we ever know? We're talking about twelve million years of evolution, and we're doing so as finite beings with a limited if occasionally rather breathtaking mental capacity and clairvoyance. I'd kill myself, Moses, if I thought Kommthor had actually annihilated an entire alien species solely on the basis of Elegy's and my unverified speculations. I'd literally kill myself."
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