‘Kretzoi?’ I asked her when we were face to face.
‘He’s studying.’
‘Studying?’
‘Governor Eisen sent us a projection cube yesterday afternoon and a copy of Sankosh’s holofilm of the births of the Asadi twins. Kretzoi’s going to spend the day reviewing it. Research, I suppose you could say. Neither of us had seen the film before.’
‘The film lasts twelve, maybe fifteen minutes,’ I told Elegy. ‘He’ll wear it out.’
‘Intensive research.’ She laughed nervously and glanced around at the hospital personnel. ‘And I’m not ready to subject him to these people’s stares, frankly. Yesterday took its toll. Let’s let him recuperate.’
‘He’s likely to have it worse in the Wild. Human hostility is a pretty low hurdle in comparison to Asadi indifference.’
‘Let’s go,’ she said, apparently to deprive the interns and orderlies of the stimulant of our conversation. ‘I’ll show you how well I know Frasierville by taking you to Enos’s for breakfast.’
All at once, then, we were out in the sun-bright streets, where Elegy, recalling her Earthside preparations for life in BoskVeld’s capital, oriented herself like a native and led me away from the lofty aluminum sails of the hospital. We stalked together down a dusty little alley debouching eventually on a boarded-up cafe. The sign over the shop had been pulled down, and a stray dog – some pioneer’s gone-awry eugenic attempt at creating a hairless, mole-snouted canine burrower for dog days on the veldt – was licking a mauve stain on the sidewalk tiles.
‘This is supposed to be Enos’s,’ Elegy said, her voice almost indignant. ‘I’m sure it is.’
‘Sure you’re not lost?’ I taunted her gently.
A shimmer of doubt flashed in her eyes, like sheet lightning on an otherwise clear horizon. How could she expect to navigate expertly the byways and back alleys of an alien city she had never before set foot in? Maps and guidebooks, studied at a distance of so many abstract light-years, were poor substitutes for firsthand experience. Perhaps no substitute at all. Poor Elegy. She wavered, mistrusted her instincts.
Then she said, ‘This place used to be Enos’s, didn’t it? Tell me the truth. I haven’t gone wrong, have I?’
‘This used to be Enos’s,’ I acknowledged. ‘You haven’t gone wrong.’ The mole-snouted dog eyed us suspiciously from undoggish eyes, then limped off down the street fronting the boarded-up restaurant.
‘What’s happened to it, then?’
‘Enos and his family pulled up stakes eight or ten weeks ago and left for Amérsavane with a newly arrived contingent of colonists. Colonial Administration helped equip them for the veldt by buying them out.’ I folded my arms and squinted back down the alley we’d come by. ‘It’s all right. I wasn’t hungry, anyway. It’s a little late for breakfast.’
‘But I got here, didn’t I? I found the place.’
‘You’re not suggesting an analogy with our imminent search for your father, are you?’
Elegy Cather turned toward me so that her silk poncho inscribed a graceful manta-wing undulation in the air. ‘I wasn’t,’ she said. ‘Not consciously.’
‘I hope not. Because in finding Enos’s you’ve found nothing but the shell of your expectations and something you didn’t expect to find at all.’
Elegy favored this Nestorian counsel with laughter. ‘It’s a little early for such pessimism, isn’t it, Ben?’ All of a sudden I was Ben. Good, grey Ben. I didn’t really mind.
‘It’s six or so years too late for optimism,’ I rejoined.
‘Or twelve. Or twenty. Depending on your degree of fatality and your personal perspective, of course. A guidebook to Frasierville’s back-alley eateries isn’t exactly a monograph on sacred Asadi places and rituals. Guidebooks are forever going out of date.’
I said nothing. Brilliant morning sunlight flaked off the turrets of a nearby extrusion plant – as if Denebola itself were being whittled to a spear point. The Calyptran Wild, however, seemed either parsecs or centuries distant. A long way off.
‘You’ve got an office, don’t you?’ Elegy asked, taking my arm. ‘We have a prospectus to draw up and plans to make.’
My office was a miniature ecosystem of accidental design and haphazard self-perpetuation. On the days that I inhabited it – a ramshackle prefab from the days of Frasier’s original Expedition – I was its most conspicuous life form. My secretary was a dictaphone device with communication relays and information-storage-and-retrieval components, and the placard on my desk read Thomas Benedict, Head / BoskVeld Ecological Research and Administration. A bureaucrat in an ersatz biome.
The force of habit was my ecosystem’s principal energy source, and its other major life forms included several droopy botanicals (which I only intermittently took care of), assorted and sundry protozoa and bacteria (I cheerfully assumed), and a bevy of pugnacious cockroaches (imported, I was sure, by probeship shuttles as tiny egg pods in the boots and baggage of a thousand incoming colonists). These last were predators that had not yet run me to ground. They left specklike droppings on my windowsills and rattled the crumpled paper in my trash cans, and I never did discover exactly what they fed on.
When I introduced Elegy into this ‘environmental house,’ I half expected her to suggest that we return to the guest suite in the hospital to map out our plans. Instead, she thumped the old-fashioned air conditioner purring laboriously in one of the prefab’s ports and pulled up a chair so that she could look through the picture window behind my desk. Just beyond the plasma-lamp barricade on Frasierville’s eastern perimeter, I knew, she could see the flat, purple-veined palm leaves, evil-looking scarlet flowers, and irregularly corrugated boles of the trees in the Calyptran Wild. Once, like her father, I had done field work for extended periods amid that jungle’s sense-distorting luxuriance.
Swiveling in my chair, I said, ‘That’s what you’ll have to fight, Civ Cather, that and six years’ utter wastage of Egan Chaney’s spoor.’
‘Why does it stop there?’ she asked, staring intently into the foliage. ‘Why is it that half the planet’s land mass is veldt and half’s tropical rain forest and both
