Close up, the Asadi seemed to be performing some kind of nightmarish Sisyphean labor. The rock they pushed up the hill every day, only to have it roll crushingly back down upon them, was their commitment to an endless daytime sociability in their jungle clearing. At the same time, they were – by human standards – devastatingly alone in their commitment to this life. Interactions beyond brutal, random coitus and ferocious bouts of staring were rare. Indifferent Togetherness Chaney had rightly tagged the unifying principle of the Asadi social order, but I had never felt that principle so keenly as I did that afternoon. I pitied Kretzoi his initiation into such an irrational system, and I wondered briefly if he might not be better off failing to gain the Asadi’s acceptance and actually suffering some grievous physical punishment at their hands.
‘There he is,’ Elegy whispered excitedly. ‘There.’ She pointed at an Asadi slouching along the clearing’s perimeter, heading south amid a number of lackadaisical Asadi, and at first all I could tell about him was that he looked like all the others.
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Yes,’ Elegy insisted, gripping my arm and turning her head so that she could read my expression. ‘He’s perfect. He’s one of them.’ When she looked back at the Asadi, she corroborated her own testimony by failing at first to pick out the one she had labeled Kretzoi. ‘Damn. I’ve lost him . . . No. There he is. Look, Ben, that one right there.’
A tawny mane amid the silver, silver-blue, and thick orange-gold ones. A body somewhat less gnarled and scarred than the others.
‘You’re right, Elegy. We’ve seen him. Now let’s get out of here.’
She wouldn’t budge. Then, suddenly, she stood up and took an incautious step forward.
‘Elegy!’ I cried, half aloud.
Her movement and my voice betrayed us to the Asadi. Their procession halted abreast of us, six or seven Asadi bunching up in file and then disengaging from one another in order to fall to all fours and appraise us with madly pin-wheeling eyes. I grabbed Elegy’s arm and pulled her back. One of the large silver-blue Asadi males lunged tentatively at us, staying well within the clearing and erecting the hairs on his back and upper arms. Elegy shook off my hand.
‘Get out of there,’ I advised her fiercely. ‘The least you’re likely to lose is your hair.’
I had a vivid memory of the way the Asadi, upon accidentally discovering our equipment, had savagely wrecked a holocamera and a recording device installed one night in a tree near their clearing . . .
But instead of retreating or standing stock-still and hoping to be spared, Elegy grasped the limb of a tree and, hooting threateningly, rattled the fronds with such animation that not an Asadi on BoskVeld could have remained unaware of her presence. The silver-maned male hurriedly backed off, and several nearby Asadi did likewise. The tribe’s mute remainder gazed toward us in immobile surprise and perplexity.
‘If I had a pair of garbage-can lids,’ Elegy said aloud, glancing back at me, ‘I could give ’em all heart attacks.’
‘You’ve given me one,’ I said angrily. ‘Maybe Kretzoi, too.’
‘We really should go, shouldn’t we?’ Elegy acknowledged.
I didn’t say anything. I crept forward, touched her elbow, and eased her away from the tree whose fronds she’d just deployed in our defense. I noticed that the eyes of the nearest Asadi were radiating colors as quickly and as dizzyingly as had the eyebook in the Archaeological Museum – with the result that the Asadi’s physical selves were dimmed by the racing spectral patterns and made to appear as transparent and colorless as water. The creatures in the foreground, in fact, seemed all eyes. Their bodies were ghostly outlines, nothing more.
Illusion, I told myself, backpedaling the two of us discreetly into the forest. A trick of the light; a brief, irrational perception born of crisis and fear.
Indeed, as we got deeper into the Wild and farther from the clearing, the nearest creatures’ bodies took on substance again, fur and pigmentation emerging from wherever they had disappeared to.
‘Did you see them fade?’ I asked Elegy as we turned and fled toward the drop point and our encampment.
‘I saw it – I’m sure I believe it.’
The Asadi didn’t attempt to pursue. Either Elegy had frightened them too badly or their commitment to the clearing was too strong. Maybe both.
Scraped, and bruised, and drenched in our own sweat, we reached the drop point, having run or trotted nearly the entire distance. Elegy began grinning like a maniac and pounding on the Dragonfly’s fuselage in a primitive outburst of joy and triumph. I slid beneath the awning of our tent and lay flat on my back trying to breathe. My exhaustion and Elegy’s pounding were so well synchronized they almost comprised a single, unmerciful pulse.
‘He’s in!’ Boom, boom! ‘He’s in!’ Boom, boom! ‘He’s in!’ Boom, boom! And so on unto, it seemed, the very collapse of Time.
‘Have pity,’ I managed feebly after this had been going on for ages. ‘Elegy, have pity.’
‘Sorry, Ben.’ The pounding stopped and Elegy knelt above me with a warm and beatific expression. Leaning forward and reiterating what I already knew, she whispered, ‘Kretzoi – he’s in.’
‘Boom, boom,’ I replied.
Later, recovered from our run, I turned on a fan in the Dragonfly and used my hand typer to transcribe several pages of notes. While I was working, Elegy climbed into the helicraft and interrupted me. She sat down in the cone of wind blowing from the fan and waited patiently for an opening. I looked up.
‘He’s in – but he could be in there for months, maybe even years, without a significant break in their behavior.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. The bloom was off the rose.
‘Do you think their seeming to fade means anything?’
‘Only that it gives
