My suppositions about Kretzoi, formed at hazard in the cargo bay of the probeship shuttle, were for the most part confirmed. He was a hybrid primate who had undergone a series of surgical adaptations to make him resemble the Asadi, and Elegy intended to have him coptered into the Wild, to the Asadi clearing itself, there to act as her personal agent-in-place.
‘He’s going to require supply drops,’ I said, ‘just as Chaney did.’
‘Perhaps not. We’ve adopted to Kretzoi’s gut and intestinal tract a colony of protozoa capable of breaking down cellulose; they’re dormant now, but a single meal of bark or hardwood will activate them and evoke the programmed symbiotic response. And if you look closely at Kretzoi’s teeth, you’ll see they’re fashioned to make stripping and chewing the Wild’s most common plants a relatively easy task. He’ll eat what the Asadi eat. Or so we hope.’
‘For how long?’
‘Not long at all, if things go right. Just long enough for him to learn the location of the Asadi pagoda and to lead us directly there. I’m not anxious to sit forever behind the lines waiting for that revelation, you know.’
As we worked, I had to answer several long-distance inquiries from the veldt about optimum times and methods for sowing whilais in unbroken savannah soils of varying pH measurements. Other such inquiries I patched through to the agrogeneticists house of Chaney Field. Carryover projects from previous days I dealt with hastily and peevishly, either setting them aside or feeding them back into the computer for further notation and editing. My attention was fixed on Elegy Cather and her passionate commitment to her self-imposed quest.
‘The last time I saw Egan Chaney,’ she said when we had finished drawing up our prospectus, ‘I was eleven years old, and we’d been living on the northern bank of the Japurá River in what used to be western Brazil. After the deforestation of the Congo, during the last days of the African Armageddon, a small group of blacks and whites had worked together to evacuate from the Ituri a dozen members of the BaMbuti people with whom my father was so obsessed. These were the last pygmies, Ben, old and sterile and utterly joyless in their forced relocation to a rain forest half a world away from the one in which they’d been born. There was no hope that they would take hold in the New World and replenish their numbers to their pre-Armageddon strength, but if they stayed in the cratered and poisoned ruins of the Ituri, my father and his colleagues knew, they would die just that much sooner. They’d be gone from the face of the earth as surely as trilobites, pterodactyls, and the Irish elk. Scarred and sickened, then, the BaMbuti survivors were rounded up against their will – for their own good, and the world’s too, as Egan Chaney saw it – and airlifted out of the Congolese battle zones to another continent and a tropical reservation in an immaculate clearing along the Japurá.’
Elegy paused in this recitation and removed a book from one of the metal shelves suspended precariously from the prefab’s ceiling. She turned the book in her hands – the first Swahili edition of Death and Designation Among the Asadi, one of fifteen or twenty different editions of the monograph I kept on display in my office.
‘Did my father ever speak to you of the Japurá Episode?’ the young woman suddenly asked me.
‘Never,’ I responded. ‘The only comments about the BaMbuti he made here on BoskVeld, Elegy, are in the monograph you’re holding.’
‘And he never spoke of my mother or me?’
‘We all assumed him a bachelor – with the possible exception of Moses, who must have known something of his private life before assigning him on as the Third Expedition’s xenologist.’
‘Do you want to know what happened in Japurá Camp, then?’
‘Please.’
‘The pygmies – six or seven old women and about that many aged men – began dying. Homesickness, nostalgia, disorientation. I don’t know exactly what they were dying of, except that it wasn’t anything you could cure with a hypodermic or oral antibiotics. And my mother, who was a doctor, tried to minister to the BaMbuti with medicines as my father, the anthropologist, tried to minister to them with mercy. My mother’s name was Celestine Cather, and to join Egan Chaney at Japurá Camp in an enterprise she probably recognized as quixotic, she uprooted the two of us from our life in the Tri-Mesa Archipol in the Colorado River Sector of the old Rural American Union. She threw over her practice there. You see, even though their “marriage” was based on intermittent intellectual companionship, Chaney had appealed to her for help. They had a no-strings understanding in regard to everything in their relationship but the nurture of their daughter.’ Elegy put both hands on her face and held them there as if to test the reality of her flesh. ‘My mother once told me that she and Chaney had never slept together. Not once.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘I was an in vitro baby – conceived of the union of displaced and literally disembodied sexual cells, carried through gestation by mechanical proxy, and born of a merry virgin crystalline canal in an utterly sanitized laboratory.’ Elegy laughed at this parodic catalogue, but her laughter was ambiguous.
‘You feel personally diminished by the circumstances of your birth?’ I hazarded.
She dropped her hands. ‘No, not in the least. That isn’t what I was trying to imply at all – only that Egan Chaney and Celestine Cather had a very strange relationship, even by the comprehensive standards of the latter-day West. Until the BaMbuti relocation, you see, they had never lived in close proximity to each other for more than a week or two at a time, usually at seasonal intervals of three of four months. They preferred it that way.’
‘You had an absentee father, then?’
‘I had a succession of solicitous fathers in the Tri-Mesa, short-term uncles and
