‘He had plenty of the last, didn’t he?’ his daughter said challengingly. ‘Who else has ever stayed out here longer?’
‘The longer you stay the more surely it’s consumed.’
Elegy said nothing. We got out. It was interesting to poke around the old supply drop. In our first ten minutes of rummaging we found an unused flare packet, good for signaling up to eighty kilometers away, so high did the flare rockets carry their charges, and a number of self-heating food canisters that Chaney had probably scattered about contemptuously just after my last delivery.
Kretzoi swung himself up into a tree and began brachiating away from the helicraft into the jungle, more like a gibbon or an orangutan than a chimp or a baboon. For the first time since his and Elegy’s arrival on BoskVeld he seemed at home, in his element, and I knew without being told that he was merely exercising the luxury of his freedom, that in a moment or two he would come swinging back toward us and deposit himself triumphantly on his haunches not far from either Elegy or me. Which is exactly what he did.
I dragged a nylon lean-to assembly out of the Dragonfly and began making camp, using the helicraft’s fuselage as our tent’s rear wall. Elegy set aside her awe and excitement long enough to help me.
Later, as night fell, we heard the Asadi dispersing into the Wild on every side, streaming past invisibly in the arabesque, three-dimensional maze of the rain forest. Where did they go? How did they avoid stumbling in upon us when we had taken such pains to conceal ourselves, even to the point of nearly thwarting the Dragonfly’s gaudy, iridescent paint job? Why couldn’t the Asadi remain together at night? What did they do, separately, in the dark? Those were questions that suddenly seemed new again.
None of us was really able to sleep that night. I used the time to record the accumulating episodes of our adventure, hoping, eventually, to knit together a fabric at least as cohesive as the overarching vegetable roof. Kretzoi huddled nervously on a patch of ground outside the lean-to. It amazed me anew to realize that he anticipated the morning in the same way that students anticipate the advent of a major examination in their academic specialty. To calm him, Elegy sat down behind him and began tenderly, caressingly, grooming his mane . . .
But Kretzoi needn’t have worried. The following morning he infiltrated the Asadi clearing with stunning ease, just as Egan Chaney once had; and Elegy and I, when we stooped beside the clearing, had trouble determining which Asadi was in reality Kretzoi and which were bonafide bubble-eyed aliens. But that was later.
That morning, at sunrise, the Wild began to fill with a noise like radio static – in truth, this was nothing more than the Asadi abandoning their solitary nests and heading homeward at great speed, brushing foliage aside and padding over the crumbling humus among the palms and lacy jungle hardwoods. Either running or brachiating, they flashed past our encampment.
‘Go!’ I told Kretzoi. ‘Now!’
‘Maybe he needs a weapon,’ Elegy suggested belatedly. ‘A stunner or a knife. Something.’
‘Nothing!’ I shouted in an angry whisper. ‘Kretzoi, get going!’
Off he went, without an instant’s hesitation, and by the time either Elegy or I knew that he was gone, we were alone in the rising dawn.
Elegy had tears in her eyes – whether out of fear that Kretzoi was lost to her forever or joy in the imminent fruition of her plan I couldn’t have said. Except for the tears, her face was blank and unreadable. We stood side by side and peered like voyeurs through the impenetrable curtains of the forest.
‘What now?’ she asked matter-of-factly.
‘We wait a time.’
‘What for? Shouldn’t we go after him, check to see that he’s not been torn limb from limb or had his mane cut off or maybe just gotten lost?’ But she framed her questions clinically rather than emotionally.
I told her we were waiting for the last stragglers to reach the clearing, that we didn’t want to encounter an Asadi on its way in, that once we ourselves arrived we would have to take care to prevent our discovery.
Elegy listened to this counsel calmly, acceptingly, and when we at last set off, she wove her way with such skill through the tangled foliage that I finally yielded the lead to her and whispered only a few minor course corrections to keep her on track. It took us approximately twenty minutes to come within hailing distance of the clearing. Glimpsed through strange geometries in the tropical lacework, the Asadi trudged or flitted unceasingly across this clearing.
‘Where is he?’ Elegy whispered.
We were crouched side by side beneath an umbrella of silvery roots cascading down from the limb of a rainthorn tree. I shook my head helplessly, and the umbrella swayed above us like a living thing.
‘I’ve got to get closer,’ Elegy told me after we’d been watching for a long time. ‘This is no good at all.’
Before I could protest, she moved away from me, duck-walking forward, one hand occasionally reaching out to maintain her balance, her head as still and upright as a periscope casing. I followed her. The red leather thong in her hair gleamed at me through the undergrowth like a migrating orchid. At last I was beside her again. Asadi went by so near to us I could hear their measured breathing and see the spinning colors in their eyes.
‘Listen, Elegy,’ I began – but she put her fingers to her lips and silenced me. Detection seemed almost inevitable. We were
