‘I expect you and Cather back two evenings from now.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible to know what the situation may require of us.’
After saluting informally, I listened to my toes make a tap-dancing sound down the wooden steps of Moses’s verandah. As I strolled up the naked peninsula of his yard, the plasma lamps encircling Frasierville began coming on, glowing like pale-green melons atop their vanadium poles. I looked back and saw Moses staring lugubriously after me, a stick-figure silhouette in the steadily encroaching shadow of the forest and the night.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Visit to the Museum
Back in my own quarters I put through a telecom to Jaafar Bahadori’s Komm-service barracks. During the course of our uneasy opening chitchat, I tried to assuage his wounded feelings with an explanation of Kretzoi’s origins. Surprisingly, he came around rather quickly and asked me several insightful questions about Elegy’s and my intentions with regard to Kretzoi and the Asadi. That gave me my opportunity to ask him to prepare a helicraft for us for the following day.
‘The three of us are going into the Wild,’ I told the young enlisted man. ‘Outfit the BenDragon Prime and stock her with supplies.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he responded. Then: ‘Ah, an adventure.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘An adventure.’ Whereupon I said a crisp good night, broke our connection, and lay down atop the scrambled layerings of papers and dirty clothes on my bed. About two minutes later, it seemed, it was morning, and the telecom unit was buzzing again.
Elegy came on the line. I had no televid unit in my sleeping quarters, but I envisioned her as looking vibrant and alert. That was certainly the way she sounded.
‘Would it be possible for you to bring an eyebook with you?’ she wanted to know. ‘One of those my father supposedly found in the Asadi pagoda and brought out of the Wild with him.’
‘All but one of them were taken off-planet to computer research facilities at various Earth institutions,’ I answered. ‘The idea was to crack the mystery of their operation and the significance of their spectral patterns. As I understand it, Elegy, molecular physicists, communication specialists, radioscopic technicians, spectrum analysts – just a whole bunch of folks – have alike all gone down for the ten count. If you’ll remember, the bulb of one of the eyebooks was broken here on BoskVeld soon after Chaney brought it out. Three of the four eyebooks shipped home to Earth have ceased displaying – it’s as if they got tired of being probed and picked at.’
‘I’d imagine they just ran down, wouldn’t you?’
‘I guess I would, primarily because that’s the consensus of the men and women who were trying to unravel their secret. I’d also point out that Earth is an awfully long way from the source that initially charged and powered the eyebooks.’
‘Where’s the remaining one, then? The sixth?’
‘In the special-collections room of the Frasier Archaeological Museum of Indigenous Artifacts, just off Christ’s Promenade, near the Administrative Kommplex. It’s a single-story structure of only seven or eight rooms.’
‘I know right where it is.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘What are the chances of our taking the eyebook into the Wild with us? I want Kretzoi to have a chance to see it.’
‘Nonexistent,’ I said. ‘What are the chances of hanging King Tut’s corpse in your closet as a conversation piece?’
‘We’ll have to go over there, then.’
‘With Kretzoi?’
‘He’s the one who’ll be facing a battery of spectrum-displaying Asadi eyes when he enters the clearing. I think he should have some foretaste – or foresight, I guess – of what he’ll encounter. In Dar es Salaam we had no access to any of the imported eyebooks.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll meet you on the Promenade in forty minutes.’
Christ’s Promenade derived its name from the immense thermoplastic pietà given to BoskVeld’s Colonial Administration four years ago by the cultural-arts commission of Glaktik Komm. The statue sat on a tiered granite pedestal in the center of the Administrative Kommplex square. When Denebola topped the modular onion domes of the archive buildings east of the square, the statue seemed to liquefy and evaporate, the grief of the Mother of God shimmering as elusively as a heat mirage above the veldt. At night, under a moon or three, the pietà focused and redirected the alien lunar light so that the luminous architraves of the various government buildings and the Promenade’s streetlamps were all but engulfed by the glow. Day or night, the effect was disturbing. You forgot that the statue’s presence was considered decorative and historically instructive rather than sacred. You forgot that the civkis who walked past the pietà every day and gazed out their windows upon it during their meal or meditation breaks were wholly blasé in its beholding. Nearly everyone else, though, fell victim to the involuntary genuflection of his or her awe.
When I entered Christ’s Promenade forty minutes after talking with Elegy, I saw her and Kretzoi in the mouth of Mica Strike Street staring at the massive, icelike monument. In turn, a number of curious or startled pedestrians were staring at them. Elegy and her shaggy, hybrid primate looked very small and out of place, and I felt a sudden swelling of shame at my reluctance to approach and greet them. To many of those on the square, encountering an Asadi on Christ’s Promenade must have seemed as outrageous and unlikely as sitting down to a breakfast of bagels with the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. The disbelief and repugnance on several faces almost made a coward of me – but at last I sucked in my breath and crossed the open court below the statue.
Kretzoi, without taking his weirdly capped eyes from the pietà, was talking with Elegy in rapid sign language, his stance the tentative upright stance of a vigilant baboon.
‘It reminds him of something he saw in the Gombe Stream Reserve before being transferred for surgery and genetic alteration to Dar es Salaam,’ the young woman told me even
