room was reproachfully neat, except for the notes, microfiche cards, and other assorted research materials scattered across the top of her dressing table. An expression 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. Everyone 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 way the way it was.

Elegy, Kretzoi, and I remained in Frasierville another month. We spent our time – at least Elegy and I did – drafting, manuscribing, 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 draft, manuscribe, and transmit their arguments as Elegy and I 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 the 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.

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Also By Michael Bishop

NOVELS

And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees

 (aka Beneath the Shattered Moons) (1976)

Stolen Faces (1977)

A Little Knowledge (1977)

Transfigurations (1979)

Eyes of Fire (1980)

Under Heaven’s Bridge (with Ian Watson) (1981)

No Enemy But Time (1982)

Who Made Stevie Crye? (1984)

Ancient of Days (1985)

Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas

 (aka The Secret Ascension) (1987)

Unicorn Mountain (1988)

Count Geiger’s Blues (1992)

Brittle Innings (1994)

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Catacomb Years (1979)

Blooded on Arachne (1982)

One Winter in Eden (1984)

Close Encounters With the Deity (1986)

At the City Limits of Fate (1996)

Blue Kansas Sky (2000)

Brighten to Incandescence: 17 Stories (2003)

The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective (2012)

Michael Bishop was born in 1945 in Lincoln, Nebraska. After receiving

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