I edged my way along the aisle until I was standing at the young woman’s shoulder. ‘Elegy Cather,’ I said, ‘I’m Thomas Benedict.’
The steward’s face betrayed relief and gratitude; he took the occasion to excuse himself and trudge past us toward the pilot’s cabin.
The glance that Chaney’s daughter had thrown me a moment earlier had imprinted only her eyes in my memory. They were as large and brown, and as potentially dangerous, as chestnuts in an unbanked fire. They radiated intelligence and indomitability. Her other features, by comparison, seemed soft and unprepossessing. Elegy Cather looked like a feminine, mulatto version of her father, compact and unadorned. The packaging promised nothing extraordinary, but her eyes transformed her deceptive plainness. Her eyes and her warm, no-nonsense voice.
She unhesitatingly extended her hand, addressing me as Dr Benedict. I refrained from avuncularly suggesting that she call me either Thomas or Ben. After all, I was several years younger than her father.
‘Who’s supposed to be quarantined?’ I asked her instead.
‘Come along,’ she said, ‘and I’ll show you.’
She took me deeper into the shuttle’s tail section and then down a cramped helical stairway into the cargo bay. The bay’s exterior doors were open by this time, and the lift operators in their lorries on the plymac were keying instructions into the mechanical stevedores rearranging the goods and equipment in the bay. The heat of the veldt poured in through the open doors.
‘This is where he had to ride,’ Elegy Cather told me, picking her way among the crates, transport cylinders, and naked machines packed against one another in the cargo section. We halted in front of a small pressurized closet against the port bulkhead. ‘Right here,’ she emphasized, ‘Caged. As if he’d murdered somebody or plotted with known subversives to disrupt the authority of Glaktik Komm’s legally appointed agents. Aren’t you appalled? Aboard the Wasserläufer, Dr Benedict, he shared my stateroom. My stateroom!’
Chaney’s daughter fiddled with the latch on the closet, sprang it expertly, and eased the rounded door aside.
My first thought was that someone had kidnapped Elegy Cather’s traveling companion and by some insidious legerdemain replaced him with – well, one of the stupid and brutal Asadi from our native Wild.
I took a step or two backward.
The creature in the pressurized cargo closet was revealed to me in hunched profile, squatting on the floor and clutching its knees like an autistic child. The tawny mane and the powerful, sinewy limbs of the beast, however, suggested a Calyptran origin.
‘Kretzoi,’ the young woman murmured. ‘Are you all right?’
When the creature turned its head to look at us, I felt certain it was an Asadi. Its head seemed overlarge, but its eyes consisted of two circular lenses as thick and rippled-seeming as old-fashioned bottle glass. I expected to see the irises behind these lenses change colors in rapid, unpredictable sequence. Instead, behind the fitted lenses, I saw eyes like mine or Elegy Cather’s – brown irises in a matrix of coagulated albumin. This, too, unsettled me.
Kretzoi – to lend the creature Cather’s distinguished name for him – blinked behind his artificial eye bubbles and made a rapid sign with his right hand. Then he let his hand fall limply aside.
Chaney’s daughter signed to the creature in turn, even though he had apparently understood her spoken question. Then she leaned inward as if to help Kretzoi out of his place of confinement.
‘He’s hot and thirsty and cramped,’ Elegy Cather said, ‘Which isn’t particularly surprising under the circumstances, is it?’
‘Civ Cather!’ shouted a voice from aft.
We turned and saw the weary steward staring down on us from the helical stairway in the shuttle’s tail. He was ducking his head and contorting his neck in order to bring us into his line of sight, and I briefly feared he might fall. The fact that Chaney’s daughter had gone so far as to free a passenger bound for quarantine was such a shock to him that he paid no attention to where he was putting his feet and saved himself a concussion only by reaching out and grabbing the narrow handrail. Once down, though, he managed to get to us over the crowded cargo floor in a matter of seconds.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded of Elegy. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
Kretzoi, out of his closet, ignored the steward but raised himself to a tentative standing position and looked about as if peering over a field of waist-high grass. Elegy was touching his arm reassuringly, trying to persuade him merely by tactile suggestion to go with her back the way the steward had just come. Kretzoi continued to peer about warily, taking in everything at once, his doglike muzzle revolving toward the open bay doors to scent the humid rankness of the laborers on the polymac and then swinging back across the jumble of supplies to brush against Elegy’s shoulder. He was half crouching, half standing, with his arms or forelimbs cocked at the elbows in front of him and his hands hanging limp.
Completely upright, he would have been as tall as the young woman who tried to direct him out of the cargo bay – as tall, I estimated, as many adult Asadi. His mane, I felt sure, was the result of some kind of sophisticated hormonal treatment, while the hard transparent carapaces shielding his eyes were undoubtedly nothing but surgical implants. His body fur was thin and, in contrast to his mane, silver-grey. I decided on the spot that Kretzoi was a hybrid terrestrial primate genetically altered or eugenically manipulated to yield an individual with the characteristics of both a Gombe Stream chimp and an Ishasha River baboon. Recently he had undergone the relatively minor physical ‘adjustments’ that had grafted to these unusual hybrid characteristics the distinctive external features that would identify him to the Asadi social until as one of its own.
These, at least, were my on-the-spot deductions about Kretzoi’s singular anatomy, and even as the Komm-service steward interposed himself between
