"I hope," said Moses wryly, "you're not speaking for Civ Cather, too."
"She does that very well for herself, as you already know. And she wouldn't kill herself—she'd mount a retaliatory strike on Kommthor headquarters, even if she had to muster her own goddamn Martial Arm to do it!"
Moses finally looked at me, spreading his hands in a gesture that clearly meant. So there you are.
"She told you about her father?" I asked, changing tacks.
"Yes, she told me about Chaney."
"Everything?"
"I believe so. It wasn't easy for her, but she told me everything."
"Chaney's failed metamorphosis is evidence we're not susceptible to the motivational control of the huri, Moses. We're simply not very likely victims of their peculiar brand of parasitism. Chaney himself kept saying we weren't huri 'saviors.'"
"I understand that, Ben. I think even Kommthor understands that. But it may not always be so. Besides, Elegy told me that the huri immobilized you for a period, actually reached into your brain and jammed your own psychomotor equipment. That's control, Ben, and it's a frightening thing to contemplate on a planet-wide basis."
'They simply wanted to find out what I was. They cast my statue in order to get a grip on my identity."
"In order to see if you might not serve their purposes better than Chaney did, perhaps. But you were clearly the same sort of creature as Chaney and therefore of no current use to them as a host."
I threw up my hands. "That's exactly what I'm arguing, Moses. The huri pose no danger to us because we're exactly the sort of creature Chaney was. Their experiment with him was a pathetic failure."
"The key word is 'current.' They may not pose any danger to us now, but ultimately—tomorrow or a few thousand years in the future —they may. They may be able to adapt their role of psychic parasitism—or whatever it is—to us, to humanity, even if they still haven't managed to resubjugale the Asadi."
"Is that really what you think, Moses?"
"I don't see how you can rule out the possibility. But all I'm really trying to do is give you a basis for understanding Kommthor's position. What / think is immaterial." He looked at me with a strange mixture of sympathy and disapproval. "Do you still want to leave BoskVeld, Ben?"
"Yes—but I may stick around longer than a week."
Moses smiled. "You do that. It would please me—it would really please me—if you did that." He sounded disarmingly sincere.
"Where's Kretzoi?" I asked. It had taken me only a few minutes to walk to the hospital from Moses's gaudily spotlit mansion, and Elegy met me at the door to her suite with an affectionate hug but no passion.
"In surgery," she said. She wore loose khaki trousers and a lightweight grey pullover. The room was reproachfully neat, except for the notes, microfiche cards, and other assorted research materials scattered across the top of her dressing table. An expresssion of scholarly concentration was fading from her face, in just the way that a thumbprint on sunburned flesh invariably fades.
"In surgery?" I echoed her.
"Well, not exactly in surgery. They moved him to preop facilities in the other ground-floor wing. He'll be operated on in the morning."
"What for? I didn't realize anything was wrong with him. Is he suffering from some weird sort of hypoglycemia again?"
"Worse than that."
"What, then. Elegy? What's happening?"
"From the same thing my father was suffering from before I. • . before I stopped his suffering." She motioned me to a chair. "Oh, hell, Ben, we can't undo everything we did to Kretzoi—not without killing him, anyway—but in the morning they're going to take the plastic carapaces off his eyes and remove the alien protozoa from his gut. This last isn't really a surgical procedure; they're going to give him an emulsion that ought to do the trick, but it's a necessary part of the rehabilitative process, I think. Kretzoi's and mine, too."
"A Komm-galen's going to operate on Kretzoi?"
"Yes, to give him back to himself."
"How did this come about?"
"I made the request of Governor Eisen earlier this afternoon. He put through the papers authorizing the surgery and assigning a Komm-galen to do the work. Everj'one assures me she's very good. I've talked to her. She's not appalled to have a 'monkey' under her hands. I trust her."
"What about Kretzoi?"
"I asked him if he wanted this done, and he signaled, Yes, of course —as if he'd been patiently enduring his bondage until the day I came around and recognized it for what it was. We wept, Ben. Both of us together, even though he hasn't any tears to punctuate his emotions."
I nodded, struck by the rightness of the thing. "What about Jaafar? Do you know what he's doing?"
"Governor Eisen okayed a transfer to another GK colony world—to get him out from under the gun of harassment in the barracks."
"Jaafar wants to go?"
"I believe so. What would keep him here?"
"You," I said carefully.
Elegy laughed. "I'm leaving when the next probeship comes in. With Kretzoi. Dar es Salaam, and then back to the Gombe Stream Reserve."
I told her the details of the conversation I had just had with Moses. Then we talked a good long time. Just talked. We were no longer lovers. That was the way we both wanted it, and that was the way it was.
Elegy, Kretzoi, and I remained in Frasierville another month. We spent our time—at least Elegy and I did—drafting, man-uscribing, and preparing for light-probe transmission lengthy rebuttals to Kommthor's tentative proposal to set off a nuclear device in the catacombs beneath the Asadi pagoda. We urged
continued protection for the Asadi and advised the creation of an official instrumentality to preserve the pagoda itself. Our efforts didn't lift the military cordon that had been thrown about that building, but they played a large part in scuttling Glaktik Komm's plans to bomb the huri back to the stone age. They also gave us a degree of peace of mind.
Your descendants may live to curse your name, people have said.
That's a possibility I'm able to live with. Kommthor's agents have had the same chances to drait, manuscribe, and transmit their arguments as Elegy and 1 have, and opting to annihilate the huri remains within humanity's power until such time as we recognize their essential harmlessness or find ourselves performing their ultrasonic commands utterly without resistance. In my view, it's sanity versus melodrama—but the fact that I could be wrong is what keeps the music so sprightly and the dance so hazardously sweet.
Here in Nairobi, where I've lived since returning to Earth, I've just married a woman whose name, age, and description I don't intend to set down here. Elegy has met her, and approves. Next week the three of us, along with a mixed contingent from the National University and the Goodall-Fossey College of Primate Ethology, are going to Lake Turkana on a three-day fossil hunt. The lake shore, especially the narrow spit called Koobi Fora, has been worked to death over the last century or so, but sunset on the lake still has the power to translate a human witness better than four million years into the past of the species, and that sunset is one of the reasons we're going. I relish the prospect of staring into it with my new wife's hand in mine.
And, in the strange, doubtful hour before dawn, she and I will lie together anticipating sunrise. It's not so spectacular an event as sunset, perhaps, but it's just as dependable, and I've come to appreciate that quality in nature as well as in my fellows.
I
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Pages
Back Cover
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Transfigurations Page 35
