‘Good morning,’ I said to Kretzoi’s interpreter as Kretzoi himself, after only a brief pause, resumed signaling with his hands.
‘She was a new mother and inexperienced,’ Elegy continued, unmindful of my greeting, ‘but after she had somehow made the intuitive leap to certain knowledge that her child would never move again, she tossed it aside and went off with the remainder of her troop to forage for food.’
Kretzoi stopped ‘talking,’ but his eyes remained fixed on the pale deliquescing bulk of the pietà.
‘Is there a moral in that?’ I asked. ‘And did Kretzoi really say “intuitive leap”?’
‘In free translation, yes, I think he did.’ Elegy was outfitted for the Wild: a beige jumpsuit with strips of perforated mesh along its legs, flanks, and midriff. Her dark hair was held back by a thong of hard red leather. ‘If there’s a moral, it may be that you have to get on with things.’
But it seemed to me that Kretzoi hovered between the amoral pragmatism of the baboon mother’s ‘getting on with things’ and the spiritual dignity of Mary’s static carven grief. Our prospective emissary to the Asadi, then, was a creature floating in evolutionary limbo. I wondered if Elegy knew what she had done in having him tailored so specifically for this mission. Obviously, she could have had nothing to do with his hybridization – for Kretzoi was a full-grown ‘chimpoon’ or ‘babanzee’ (to use the whimsical terminology of the new primate ethologists and crossbreeders) of at least sixteen to twenty years of age, and Elegy was therefore almost his contemporary. But at the Goodall-Fossey Extension Center near the Gombe Stream Reserve she was apparently given leave to select Kretzoi out of a small pool of experimental animals; and the way he looked now – mane, optical carapaces, pronounced bipedalism, coloring – was a direct expression of Elegy’s desire to find her father. How did she justify exploiting his anatomy in this fashion, especially when Kretzoi himself seemed to have at least as much intellectual awareness as some of the ‘human beings’ I had worked with there on BoskVeld and elsewhere?
But I held my tongue.
Down Mica Strike Street I led my charges, over its dully glittering veldt-turf flagstones, to the Museum of Indigenous Artifacts.
This single-story building is notable for its smooth, hard facade of interswirling umbers and earthy yellows, like some kind of enormous rectangular clay vessel coated with a protective glaze and baked in a giant-sized kiln. A pair of tall rubber plants stands sentinel at its entrance, and the prefabricated building across the street – a small chemical-assay facility – is so nondescript and inconsequential in comparison that you can walk down Mica Strike Street several times before noticing it at all. In fact, but for its glazed and colorful exterior, the museum itself provokes very little notice. If you have been there once, the only reason to go again, I’m afraid, is to ascertain that it still exists. I did this regularly, primarily because the special-collections room housed an interesting array of Egan Chaney memorabilia, including representative copies of our monograph and the last of the mysterious eyebooks.
Robards de Feo and Chiyoko Yoshiba were the cocurators of the Frasier Archaeological Museum, de Feo up front and Yoshiba in the special-collections department.
When we entered, I immediately regretted not having forewarned them by telecom or televid of our coming. Kretzoi’s appearance in the museum foyer caught de Feo completely by surprise, frightening him so badly that he fumbled something in his hands and narrowly missed dropping it to the floor. (It was a small stone effigy from the ruins of the only verifiable Ur’sadi structure in the Wild, a foundationless pagoda thoroughly excavated and described by Frasier and his First Expedition colleagues. A great many people supposed that Chaney had erected his illusory pagoda on the ruins of Frasier’s real one.) De Feo relaxed a little when he saw me behind Kretzoi, but his face stayed the color of a rotten turnip’s heart.
I introduced de Feo to both Elegy and Kretzoi and told him why we had come. He escorted us through the antechamber’s spindly display cases – attempted duplicates of those described in Chaney’s monologue – to the special-collections department, where Yoshiba, a heavy-set, middle-aged Japanese-Dutch woman with a remarkably serene and beautiful face, raised her thin eyebrows ironically and gestured us to several high-backed metal stools.
Kretzoi, discerning in a glance that he could not comfortably sit his stool, wandered into the center of the room and squatted. Hunkering, he regarded the three of us – de Feo had already returned to the front – with the same kind of bewildered attention he had given the pietà.
Elegy, meanwhile, gazed down into the glass cabinet in front of our stools. Several photographs of her father and a small fan of pages from one of Chaney’s private journals were on display under her hands.
‘This is his daughter?’ Yoshiba asked.
I nodded.
‘And she wants to see the last of the eyebooks?’
‘Please,’ I said.
‘Altogether my pleasure, she’s come such a long way.’ With that, Yoshiba went through an archway behind the cabinet and
