The helicraft – a modified Kommthor-Sikorsky Dragonfly with an iridescent red-orange fuselage for easy sighting from the air – stood ready on the central square of polymac at Rain Forest Port.
It took us only twenty minutes to walk there from Christ’s Promenade, but Jaafar was fidgeting impatiently in the dispatch shack when we arrived. We were better than an hour and a half late.
‘I’m supposed to drive a Kommthor official in from Chaney Field at noon,’ he told us. ‘What took you so long, I wonder.’ The ‘I wonder’ was there to keep his impatience from sounding crudely insubordinate.
I nodded toward the BenDragon Prime. ‘Did you outfit it as I asked?’
‘Last night,’ Jaafar replied. ‘On my off-duty time.’
I informed him that no one on a colony world is ever truly off duty and watched him roll that overripe chestnut on the palate of his mind. ‘How many days’ supplies?’ I demanded.
‘A week’s – for three.’ He glanced sidelong at Kretzoi, who was peering out the dispatch-shack door toward the glinting and simmering helicraft.
‘A week’s?’ Elegy said, startled.
‘A hedge against accident,’ I said, knowing that she expected to drop Kretzoi off, observe him from afar for no more than a day or so, and then return in eight to ten days to see what he had managed to accomplish. After that she planned her own intensive campaign in the wild, maybe even attempting herself to go among the Asadi.
But I had grown impatient waiting for something – anything – to develop. What harm if we immersed ourselves in the jungle from the beginning? I had almost begun to feel that Elegy’s Nyerere Foundation grant belonged in part to me, that I deserved some small say in its implementation.
‘It’s standard operating procedure when you overfly the wild,’ I repeated of the week’s supplies aboard the helicraft. ‘A hedge against accident – just like the Dragonfly’s coloring.’
Elegy looked at Jaafar for confirmation. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and maintained a noncommittal silence.
‘We’d better go,’ I said.
Across the heat-deflecting surface of the polymac Elegy, Kretzoi, and I approached the sleek, evil-looking body of the BenDragon Prime. A moment or two later we were in the air, the forest revolving beneath us like a weird floral arrangement on a prodigious lazy Susan.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Wild
It goes on and on, the Calyptran Wild. You gaze down upon a canopy of interlocking flowers, leaves, and lianas, myriad greens and blues transmuted from instant to instant by Denebola’s steadily streaming but variably constituted copper-colored light. The mantle of the forest canopy drops off to the west, drops and drops without ever giving way to some other recognizable feature. The veldt behind you is an illusion, and the ocean Calyptra, near whose eastern shore Frasier and the First Expedition discovered the ruins of an Ur’sadi pagoda, is apprehensible only as a surf noise that may in reality be the droning of your Dragonfly.
Once up in the air I was ready to rebequeath to Elegy my secretly purloined portion of her grant. No wonder none of us had found Chaney. No wonder even the renowned Geoffrey Sankosh had failed. A human being attempts to embrace eternity when he puts his arms around the alien bigness of the Wild.
In less than an hour, not long after midday, I banked the Dragonfly over the Asadi clearing and gave both Elegy and Kretzoi their first glimpse of the unfathomable creatures who trudged there. Elegy sucked in her breath at the sight of the Asadi, and Kretzoi, in almost imperceptible reprise of his behavior at the Archaeological museum, lifted his hairy upper lip. The tips of his teeth gleamed dully.
‘It’s real,’ I said. ‘But since your father disappeared, Moses Eisen hasn’t allowed anyone to stay out here doing field work – not for protracted periods, anyway.’
‘Kretzoi will take up where Egan Chaney left off,’ Elegy said.
The BenDragon Prime carried us beyond the clearing and out into the shimmering airspace over the Wild itself. I banked us again and circled back for another look-see. It struck me during this second flyover that one thing about the Asadi had changed in six years – they were no longer completely insusceptible to evidence of the human presence on BoskVeld. Whereas once they had acknowledged our existence only by fleeing when one of us approached on foot (the exception, of course, being their reaction to Chaney’s methodical insinuation of himself into their little clearing), today they recognized the intrusion of our technology and were often open in their appraisal of and their hostility toward it.
As we came back over the assembly ground, I noticed that several of the Asadi had left off their intramural staring matches or brutal sexual gymnastics to watch the Dragonfly go by.
‘Where’d you make my father’s supply drops?’ Elegy asked.
I pointed through the cabin’s bubble to the immediate east. ‘Over that way. Chaney didn’t want the helicraft to disturb his subjects. I used to believe that I could land among the Asadi without disrupting their lives or threatening their sanity – if you assume them sane.’
‘But no more?’
‘But no more. Didn’t you see them watching us as we flew over?’
Elegy confessed that she had.
‘So that’s new,’ I told her. ‘And I’m half convinced it has something to do with your father’s having once been among them.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kretzoi make a series of hand signs for Elegy’s benefit.
‘He wants to know, Ben, if that’s going to make it harder for him to gain acceptance among them this afternoon.’
‘Tomorrow morning,’ I corrected the two of them. ‘Tomorrow dawn. We’d be idiots to try to introduce Kretzoi into their midst after buzzing them as we’ve just done. We’ll camp out tonight.’
‘Where?’ Elegy asked.
The Wild’s buckling, blue-green canopy knit itself together beneath us like a chlorophyl afghan.
‘Right here,’ I responded, lowering us vertically out of the sky through an opening in the foliage seemingly not much larger than a doughnut hole. ‘At your daddy’s
