‘You hoodwinked your mother to spite Chaney?’
‘It wasn’t terribly hard. She was primed by Japurá Camp to see illness at the slightest symptom, and I complained of stomach cramps while holding bars of lye soap in my armpits to raise my temperature. The soap gave me a terrible rash that lasted for days, but I never told anyone about it. Just as Chaney never explained the wound on his forearm. Nevertheless, when we were safely back in Rio, the BaMbuti extinct and my father’s hopes for somehow preserving their genetic heritage utterly dashed, he took me aside at the airport and said, “I know what you did, Elegy, and one day you’ll know, too.” I looked at him, Ben, and realized he did know. A fever that had nothing to do with lye soap concealed in my armpits spread through my chest and face, and, as things turned out, those were the last words he ever spoke to me. Mother and I returned to the Tri-Mesa, and Chaney disappeared without a trace from our lives. No visits, no cassettes, no word from him or anyone who knew him. Nothing.
‘My doing,’ Elegy Cather concluded with quiet self-incrimination. ‘His disappearance from our lives was at least partially my doing.’
‘You probably ought to remember,’ I pointed out, half amused by her assumption of responsibility and half irritated by it, ‘Chaney was a grown man and you were a little girl of eleven.’
‘I realize that. But I had a pretty mature ethical awareness at that age, and all it took to trigger my guilt was Chaney’s revealing to me that he knew what I had done. In one sense, it was a small thing, pretending to be sick. But in another, taking into account the relocation of the last BaMbuti and my father’s depth of commitment to them, it was equivalent to a kind of murder. If you and others can’t understand that, it’s probably because you aren’t me. You don’t really feel how terrible it is to know you could have acted in some more noble and compassionate way, child or no child.’
‘I have an abstract grasp of what you’re saying, Elegy.’ I watched her replace the monograph on its shelf and silently resented her for consigning me to a kindergarten for the morally obtuse. ‘So all that business about taking your father’s monograph literally is just so much argle-bargle to disguise the fact you have an emotional need to find him, and find him alive?’
We were both surprised by my tone. ‘No,’ she said carefully. ‘I believe in the literalness of the monograph because I don’t think my father – whether sane or absolutely bonkers – was hallucinating out there. He recorded what he saw.’
I tried to turn the conversation away from my sudden crankiness. ‘What happened to your mother, Elegy?’
‘She was unable to resume her practice in the Tri-Mesa because people were afraid to put themselves in her care. Stories circulated about her being subtly infected by a kol or autok virus, some horrible artificial pathogen with an unpredictable incubation period, and even the favorable ruling of the archipol’s highest medical board wasn’t enough to remove the stigma attaching to Celestine Cather in the popular mind. She was the doctor of pygmies who had lost every one of her patients, and who was probably fatally ill herself. Nothing undoes reason like the specter of an exotic and incurable disease. The furor eventually died, and my mother now holds a government medical post at a mall-garden clinic – but for three or four years we lived only a little better than the gutter prols, siphoning off the income of past investments and scraping by. Egan Chaney contributed nothing to my “nurture,” as their contract had it, and on this point in particular my mother grew more and more bitter. Even so, she never attempted to trace him. It was only when Death and Designation was published that she wrote The Press of the National University in Kenya to ask that a percentage of the residuals be set aside for my education.’
‘And here you are,’ I finished for her.
‘Thanks to you,’ she acknowledged, smiling faintly. ‘It’s been a long, strange trip. And it still isn’t over.’
At mid-afternoon I walked Elegy back to the hospital. As I was bidding her farewell at the admissions desk, it occurred to me that six years ago her father had spent several weeks convalescing in the primitive infirmary that had then occupied the hospital’s site. I was struck again by how much Frasierville and BoskVeld had changed.
Later, I carried Elegy’s prospectus to Moses Eisen. He met me on the deck of his better-than-half-buried house and read through the report with what seemed to me like deliberate inattention. It was already twilight, and he still hadn’t had supper. Besides, he knew what the prospectus contained; by asking for it, he had merely been attempting to delay the inevitable. He had gained a day. That was all. Not much of a victory and therefore no cause for jubilation.
‘You intend to take her and that animal into the Asadi clearing tomorrow?’ Moses asked ruefully.
‘With your permission.’
‘I’ll have to put a stand-in in your office for you. It seems the folks in SteppeChilde and Amérsavane can’t live without your advice.’
‘Lord, Moses, we both know I’ve just been marking time until something like this happened. I’ve been expendable for six years.’
Moses glanced up from Elegy’s prospectus and grimaced so that crow’s-feet made overlapping tracks around his eyes. ‘Not to me, you haven’t,’ he said in an admonitory whisper.
‘Like hell,’ I responded, whether earnestly or banteringly I’m still not sure. ‘Bring Jonathan over from Colonial Administration. He’ll miss the gab, but he and the computer won’t have any trouble handling the colonists’ basic geological and land-use inquiries. When he’s stumped, the agrogs at Chaney Field’ll take up the slack. They
