‘You’re not permitted to activate its spectral display,’ Yoshiba warned gently. ‘We don’t know how many more times it will work.’
‘She’s come such a long way,’ I reminded Yoshiba.
‘And I’d like Kretzoi to see it’ – Elegy nodded meaningfully at her eerily attentive companion – ‘before he goes into the Wild today.’
‘Come on, Chiyoko,’ I pleaded.
The woman’s serene, full-cheeked face betrayed neither suspicion nor sympathy. ‘For old time’s sake, I suppose?’ she asked me sardonically, then relented and said, ‘Very well – once.’ Not so much a concession as a restricted mandate. ‘You’ll have to sign and date the register, Thomas. Nor do I think that the make-believe Asadi should perform the program activation.’
Elegy, I believe, started to protest this judgment as bigoted and discriminatory, but Yoshiba retreated through the archway again and came back with the register. I held my thumb in the first open square on the page, just long enough to draw my print out of the paper. Then I signed my name with a blunt-tipped stylus. Yoshiba promptly closed the register and transported it back to its resting place in the farther room. Then, once again at the display cabinet, she indicated by a nod that I could take the eyebook to Kretzoi and show him how it worked and what it had to reveal of Asadi communication methods.
‘If it fails to display again after this run-through,’ Yoshiba said matter-of-factly, ‘your signature will not save my position, Thomas.’
‘We’re a good deal closer to its power source than were the university technicians and specialists who lost theirs,’ I replied, hunkering down beside Kretzoi and holding the eyebook under his muzzle. ‘Not to worry, Chiyoko.’
Elegy dismounted her stool and came around behind the two of us. To Yoshiba, almost as a rebuke, she said, ‘In any case, we’ll bring you several more. My father took only a few out of the Asadi pagoda with him. Others remain, maybe as many as 150,000.’
Chiyoko laughed and lifted the velvet pouch by its drawstrings. ‘I’d better begin cutting material for more of these, hadn’t I? Maybe I’d better file an import requisition, in fact.’
I pressed my thumb over the right half of the rectangular tab beneath the bulb on the cassette.
The eye immediately began displaying. Colors swept in crazy sequence out of the Asadi crackerbox on my palm. I looked at Kretzoi and saw this rainbow rampage reflected in the lenses of his eye coverings. A staccato, ragtime piccolo parade of brilliant primaries, cunning blind pauses, and pyrotechnic shadings between the primaries. Kretzoi, tilting his head, peered at the flashing bulb and began to quake.
‘Maybe you’d better shut it off,’ Chiyoko advised, but to preserve the eyebook’s motivating energies rather than to spare Kretzoi his strange St Vitus tremors – of which Chiyoko seemed totally unaware.
I put my thumb over the left half of the cassette’s control tab, and as suddenly as it had begun, the spectral display ceased. The bulb in the wafer’s center might just as well have been the glazed-over eye of a dead fish. Chiyoko took the eyebook from me and deposited it carefully in its velvet pouch. When I looked back at Elegy, she was kneeling in front of Kretzoi with a hand on his still-trembling shoulder.
‘Could you read the pattern?’ she asked. He seemed not to hear her, and she repeated the question.
Kretzoi made a sign that plainly meant No.
‘What, then?’ she demanded. ‘What happened to you?’
This time Kretzoi revolved a degree or two toward Elegy and began making hand signs with a deliberate, desperate verve.
Elegy translated for Chiyoko and me: ‘He says he read the eyebook’s emotional content – not its specific message, not its philosophical or narrative import, but its . . . its emotional content.’ This disturbed her. ‘He says the spectral sequence evoked in him a deepening pattern of – well, of fear.’
Kretzoi looked away from Elegy and ‘grinned,’ briefly exposing his altered teeth and mottled gums. The grin, in Old World monkeys, is a sign not of joy or potential aggression but of fear, and Kretzoi’s grin was as involuntary as his hand signs had been deliberate. He seemed embarrassed and ashamed.
‘Perhaps he’s afraid to go to the Asadi clearing,’ Chiyoko said.
Elegy shot the woman an annoyed glance, but kept her hand on the animal’s shoulder and asked quietly, ‘Are you, Kretzoi?’
He turned his wrist outward from his body so that his knuckle-dragging hand briefly exposed its palm. A shrug. His face remained averted, but his long upper lip finally dropped, eclipsing the fearful grin.
‘We’d better go,’ I said, ‘if Kretzoi still wishes to go. Jaafar’s holding a Dragonfly for us at the port near the lorry pool.’ It was extremely important to me that Kretzoi have a choice in the matter – as, apparently, it was also to Elegy, who was regarding the creature with genuine anxiety.
But Kretzoi’s long, muscular body moved out from under her hand and flowed toward the door on all fours. Before going through into de Feo’s territory, he paused, reared back, and made a beckoning sign at us with his right hand.
‘He’s ready,’ Elegy said in evident relief. She thanked Chiyoko for showing us the eyebook and allowing me to activate it.
‘Altogether my pleasure,’ responded Chiyoko placidly. ‘However, I’m not sure his seeing it has done him any good.’
We headed back through the museum to Mica Strike Street. De Feo acknowledged our passage with a word and a nod of the head, but didn’t budge from his post to see us to the door. Ordinarily he escorted every visitor out, talking animatedly all the while and encouraging an early return visit. It wasn’t hard to deduce what had discouraged him from such commonplace but
