‘. . . care for it, Ben. Not a bit. She may have a grant, too – autonomous institutional funding freeing her from my control. Even her father didn’t have that. But what if she isn’t as fortunate as Geoffrey Sankosh? What if she melts out there in the Wild and then can’t reconstitute herself as a functional human being? I don’t like this a bit, Ben, and I’m not particularly disposed to like her, either.’
Still walking, he said, ‘Thank God, she’s not the only one I’m going out to the shuttle field to meet – her daddy’s memorial shuttle field, I suppose I should add. And thank God, you’re her escort and surrogate daddy for the day, maybe even for the duration of her stay, and it’s your bounden duty, Ben, to keep her out of my hair. Keep her out of trouble, too.’
We walked to the lorry pool three streets beyond my own living quarters. A Komm-service guard, recognizing Eisen, drove a veldt-rover out of the fenced-in compound and picked us up. Another attendant, a young woman in a violet enlisted-grade jumpsuit, swung the gate shut behind us and locked it with a metallic pop. Purring, our veldt-rover leaped away.
‘I’d almost made up my mind not to go this morning,’ Eisen said.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t think Egan Chaney had very much in common with the author of The Iliad. And I don’t think his interloping daughter is likely to have much in common with the excavator of Troy, old what’s-his-name.’
‘Neither do I, frankly. Is that all that’s bothering you?’
Eisen, the margins of his salt-and-pepper tonsure fluttering in the wind, regarded me with something like childish pique. ‘If I had my way, Ben, we’d move Frasierville to a coastal or a veldt location and leave the Asadi altogether to their own devices.’
‘But they warrant study. An intelligent ancestral species of the Asadi or an artifact-making collateral relative – the Ur’sadi – went extinct some time ago. But despite what Chaney babbled in his final tape about their being on the verge of autogenocide, the Asadi themselves seem evolutionarily stable at present.’
‘Then maybe we just ought to leave them alone.’
‘Thanks to you,’ I countered, ‘that’s pretty much what we’re doing. In any case, they’re a’ – I quoted to Eisen from the xenologists’ handbook that Chaney had helped to write before his arrival on BoskVeld – ‘“Komm-protected indigenous species possessing either fully developed self-awareness or its demonstrable potential.” That being so – even if they aren’t truly indigenous – we can’t kill one of their number to examine its brain, and in all the time we’ve been here we’ve never had the opportunity to recover one of their dead.’
‘Pity,’ said Eisen, smiling faintly. ‘I hope you don’t hold me accountable for that.’
Our driver negotiated the washed-out surface of Calyptran Perimeter Road – which old hands irreverently refer to as Aphasia Alley, so difficult is it to speak while jolting along its three-kilometer length – and then headed northeast on the white, polymer-bonded macadam of Egan Chaney Highway. The veldt swallowed us, and off to our right we saw the convoy destined for Amérsavane crawling through the morning’s dizzying veils of heat shimmer. You began to realize why the imperial British were so fond of pith helmets.
The veldt was vacant. A visitor could look in vain for impala, zebras, wildebeest, or gazelles. The African analogy worked only topographically, and the foliage clinging to the earth and tufting a thumb’s length above the surface in prickly beige or cream-colored flowers had no known counterpart in the Serengeti or the Ngorongoro Crater. Only a few tussocks of the many nondescript clusters flamed out in gaudy reds and oranges, and those, of course, caught and captivated the eye.
Traveling them, you wondered why the savannahs had spawned no animals to graze there. You wondered how the Asadi could have evolved on a world whose biota seemed so limited and niggardly. Prodigal is not a word you would have used to describe the Creative Animus that undertook the husbandry of BoskVeld’s plains and forests. Hence, the utter anomalousness of the Asadi. (As for the batlike huri that Chaney mentions in his journals and tapes, no one but him had ever seen a specimen of those elusive, nasty-sounding critters.) I sometimes found myself believing that forty million years in the future, when humanity had passed away from the universe at large, the bacteria we left behind on BoskVeld would have evolved into ethically self-aware hominids and that the Asadi would still be there on the planet to confute their logic and boggle their understanding . . .
‘We’re going to arrive well before the probeship’s shuttlecraft,’ said our driver. He was a dark-complexioned young man whose name was embroidered in purple thread on the shoulder of his violet sleeve: Bahadori.
‘Fine,’ said Eisen listlessly.
The shuttle field’s colossal, and useless, probeship gantry had been visible to us for ten or twelve minutes already. Like a titanium cat’s cradle, it reared up fifteen stories in the desert shimmer, defining the surrounding countryside by both its size and its geometric complexity: The veldt around it seemed to exist for the sole purpose of providing the gantry with a place to rest. Its interior struts glistened like the threads of a giant spiderweb, and the cylindrical passenger and cargo cars poised on the gantry-to-ground diagonals resembled dew-drops trembling in the webbing. A field of whilais, irrigated by vacuum pumps, grew behind the gantry and gentled the terrible but stunning monotony of the veldt. To the north, beyond the field’s main landing strips, sat a colossal, and useless, probeship hangar. This building, which had been vandalized and inscribed with weird graffiti repeatedly, over the past four years, looked like a vast but
