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.
‘It was Elegy more than it was you, sir,’ said Jaafar forthrightly.
‘Touché. You have a decidedly medieval concept of chivalry, Jaafar. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I 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 corning. 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, marveling 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.’
‘If 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 hours. 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
