I walked down the little forest-locked peninsula to his house and mounted the steps to its deck. Dressed in dappled coveralls and smelling of an astringent homemade cologne (or ‘pore opener’), Eisen was somewhat testily awaiting me.
‘You’re late,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘I thought I was going to have to send someone after you.’
We were going out to Chaney Field together. One of Eisen’s duties was to greet all incoming colonists and support personnel, a duty he performed with grudging conscientiousness.
Late or not, I had to stand beside Eisen on his gallery as Denebola poured its copper light into our eyes from far beyond Frasierville’s eastern perimeter. He seemed in no hurry to make up for the tardiness of which I was supposedly guilty. Instead, he nodded over his shoulder at the forest sighing and photosynthesizing at our backs.
‘How long has it been since anyone did extensive field work among the Asadi?’ he asked me, knowing the answer as well as I. The question – I was certain – had specific reference to the arrival of Chaney’s daughter.
‘No one does it full time anymore, Moses. You haven’t permitted any of us to submerge ourselves in their culture since Egan disappeared.’ I’m sure I gave culture a disparaging inflection. Emotional identification with an alien species isn’t always possible, even for people trained to repress their ethnocentric prejudices in the interests of a clinical objectivity. Egan Chaney knew that as well as anyone.
The Governor revolved his noncommittal face toward me. ‘But you and others continue to go in there occasionally, don’t you?’
‘Sure,’ I acknowledged. ‘I do, sometimes, and so does Yoshiba when she gets the chance.’ But after Chaney’s defection, my interest in the Asadi rain forest was perhaps less in the Asadi themselves than in the ecological integrity of the rain forest as a biome. The fact that the only living organisms we had ever found in there were botanicals, insects, and the Asadi had made me, against my training, something of a xenologist. As had my work on Chaney’s tapes and notes.
‘To what end?’
‘Sir?’ I asked, intimidated by Eisen’s tone.
‘What real progress in our understanding of the Asadi has been made since Chaney left us? What specific achievements?’
‘Their behavior hasn’t altered fundamentally in the past six or seven years. We reaffirm Chaney’s basic findings. We note small changes in the size and makeup of the population in the Asadi clearing . . . We’re only in there by day, Moses, when we’re in there, and it’s tedious work. All our attempts at telemetered observation have been thwarted by the Asadi themselves. They won’t tolerate mechanical systems in the Wild. They disassemble such equipment when they discover it or hurl it about like male chimpanzees engaging in charging displays. This discovery, by itself, is probably the most significant one we’ve made in seven years – it suggests a hostile but systematic response to our attempts at long-distance surveillance.’
‘Couldn’t it just as easily suggest an instinctive dislike of things that don’t naturally belong in their jungle? It doesn’t require cognitive ability to recognize an intrusive wrongness, Ben. Back home, a sparrow seeing a piece of rope in its nest perceives the rope as a snake and refuses to land. You see, the wrongness registers.’
Tactfully, I admitted that the Asadi’s destruction of our telemetering equipment might well stem from its ‘wrongness’ rather than our subjects’ intelligent awareness that we were trying to record their life styles.
‘Is that it, then?’ Eisen asked. ‘One ambiguous discovery in six years?’
‘There’s Geoffrey Sankosh’s film,’ I responded wearily. ‘From that we’ve learned that the Asadi bear live young, whom they leave during the day in nests high above the forest floor. We also know that their young don’t come to the Asadi assembly ground until they’ve grown relatively imposing adult manes. As best we can tell, this takes more than seven years, maybe as many as twelve. Since the Third Expedition hasn’t been here twelve years, Moses, it’s hard to be much more accurate than that in estimating the age of initiation.’
‘The holographic film was shot by an outsider,’ Eisen murmured deprecatingly, squinting into the sun.
I hurried to counter the implications of this remark: ‘That’s because you didn’t have the authority to summon Sankosh back to Frasierville every night. The terms of his grant freed him to work independently of colonial authority, and he took full advantage of that freedom. Besides, he was lucky, Moses. If he had discovered the female already well advanced in her labor, he would never have been able to get his equipment into place in time to film the births. Had he arrived earlier, the female would have fled beyond him without a trace.’
Eisen was smiling reminiscently. ‘I’ve seen it six or seven times, that film. A marvelous accomplishment. Once I set my projection cylinder down there on the patio roof’ – pointing his chin at the expanse of leaf carpeting below the verandah – ‘and let little Reba watch it, too. The angle of apprehension was perfect. I’ve never seen her eyes so big.’
To that I didn’t respond.
Frasierville was beginning to stir. Doors flapped open, and ’bola-powered lorries hummed back and forth among the warehouses, import-processing plants, and the central solar station, a pagoda of tarnished mirrors. A caravan of newly indoctrinated colonists was departing for Amérsavane, the bitter-grass veldt country to the far southeast. Eisen and I watched its long train of veldt-rovers and settlement cars hitch jerkily along Dry Run Boulevard and out of sight beyond the power sails of the hospital.
‘At least Sankosh came back alive,’ Eisea finally said. ‘We didn’t have to send someone into the Wild to retrieve him.’
‘No, we didn’t,’ I agreed.
Eisen moved silently along the deck
