All our dismayed and harried steward was thinking about, though, was the likelihood of Kretzoi’s infecting the world with a deadly simian virus. He fisted both hands and held them like fragile porcelain eggs in the pit below his breastbone.
‘Very lax security,’ I told him. ‘Do you propose to put all three of us in quarantine? Make that all four of us – I’m afraid you’ve exposed yourself to the possibility of infection, too.’ As soon as these words were out, I regretted the smugness of my tone and the small irrational joy I was taking in baiting the man.
His hands still fisted in his stomach, he responded with painful tact: ‘Would you at least do me the favor of waiting here until I can find out what the Governor wishes us to do now?’
‘In this heat?’ Elegy demanded. ‘It’s fortunate Kretzoi didn’t die in this sweatbox your captain had him placed in.’
‘Let us go upstairs to the passenger section,’ I urged the steward. ‘I promise we’ll wait there until you can discover what to do with us.’
‘Why are you worried about the heat?’ the steward asked Elegy, ignoring my suggestion. ‘I thought this was “almost exactly” the sort of climate your Kirkorian grew up in.’ He unfisted one hand and began clenching and unclenching his fingers as if seeking purchase on an invisible neck.
‘It’s Kretzoi, not Kirkorian! He’s named for the Hungarian paleontologist, not some Armenian figment of your curdled imagination!’
‘I’m Armenian myself,’ the steward said. ‘I don’t see that—’
Envisioning an absurdly heated exchange of genealogical insults, I told the man that we were going back up to the shuttle’s passenger compartment – with Kretzoi – in order to free the steward to do his duty, whatever that might be. If he wished, he could find us there after consulting with his pilot and radioing the news of our intransigence to Moses Eisen in his air-conditioned office. In the meantime, we were going to take advantage of a little air conditioning ourselves and wait for some authoritative final word on our disposition. That said, I led Elegy Cather and her persecuted traveling companion through the cargo hold and up the stairway to a pair of comfortable aisle seats and a sweet pervasive coolness. Kretzoi squatted on the floor.
Within five minutes Moses Eisen himself had boarded the shuttle. He approached us up the long aisle from the front of the craft, his eyes trying to adjust and his dappled coveralls giving him less the appearance of a Colonial Administrator than of a balding adventurer who had wandered by accident out of some reptile-infested backwater. He looked seedy.
When he spotted Kretzoi sitting in an alert, baboonlike posture against Elegy’s starboard aisle seat, as if silently imploring the young woman to groom and soothe him, Moses halted and stared. He obviously had no idea what to say, and my own inclination was to laugh. At last the Governor of all BoskVeld, former captain of the Third Denebolan Expedition, eased himself into a row of portside seats just in front of mine and propped his chin on arms folded atop the cushion of a chair back. Now he resembled a small child attempting to survey surreptitiously all the other passengers around his own assigned in-flight island of shuttle space.
‘Elegy Cather,’ I said, making introductions, ‘this is Governor Moses Eisen. Governor Eisen, this is Kretzoi.’
‘Pleased to meet you both,’ said Moses. It would be a heinous distortion of the truth to say he sounded sincere. He was just barely on the acceptable side of civil.
‘You’re not really going to try to put Kretzoi in quarantine, are you?’ asked Elegy. ‘That sweatbox downstairs was surely indignity enough for him to have to suffer.’ She groomed the back of Kretzoi’s head, parting the tangles of his mane and drawing her fingers from crown to nape in graceful combing sweeps. Inside the lenses shielding them, I noticed, Kretzoi had shut his disconcertingly human eyes.
‘No,’ said Moses. ‘Not now.’
‘Because you’ve been exposed to him yourself,’ I said. ‘Along with me, the steward, Civ Cather, and possibly the workers in their cargo lifts. It’s either confinement for everyone or no one. Nothing else makes sense.’
‘I’m aware of that, Dr Benedict.’ His inflection and choice of words were so cold that I felt my face crimsoning with both anger and humiliation; embarrassment, too, maybe. Then, addressing Elegy, Moses said, ‘This is a stupid way to begin our acquaintance and one for which I apologize. The captain of the Wasserläufer led me to believe your “friend” was an experimental animal that had not been immunized against the various catarrhs and minor infections that newcomers to our world often contract, and my decision to quarantine was for the animal’s benefit as much as for the citizens of BoskVeld’s. It takes a couple of weeks for the full battery of immunizations to take effect, you see, and during that time your’ – he struggled to find the appropriate expression – ‘your ward would have been vulnerable.’
‘My “ward” – I wish you’d call him Kretzoi – was immunized at the light-probe medical facilities outside Dar es Salaam, just as I was, sir, and I can’t imagine how you could imagine his getting so many light-years through id-space without having first cleared the Komm-galens Earthside.’
‘The captain of the Wasserläufer IX told me that . . . that Kretzoi had not been immunized, that there’d been a complicated mix-up before the departure of your shuttlecraft from Nyerere Field.’
‘Blather-tripe!’ Chaney’s daughter exclaimed eloquently, ceasing to groom her companion and imparting a veneer of stricken bafflement to our poor Governor’s otherwise imperious features. ‘When did Captain de Lambant tell you this?’
‘Yesterday afternoon,’ Moses responded cautiously, ‘soon after maneuvering the Wasserläufer into
