‘But has this ever happened to you before? My father doesn’t mention anything quite like it – their fading, I mean – in his monograph.’
‘Nothing exactly like it has happened to me before,’ I admitted. ‘Or, so far as I know, to any of Chaney’s part-time successors. But they didn’t stand on the edge of the clearing and rattle branches at the Asadi, either.’
‘You think we were hallucinating?’
‘It’s possible. A function of the Wild, Asadi hysteria, and our own fear. Who knows?’
‘Do you think Kretzoi will hallucinate, then?’
‘If he does, Elegy, I’d guess that having been accepted as one of them, he’ll participate in the group psychoses of the Asadi. He won’t draw undue attention to himself by suffering conspicuously solitary mind trips.’
Elegy stared at me thoughtfully.
‘That’s supposed to be comforting,’ I assured her. ‘It may be that their discovering us on the edge of their clearing triggered in the Asadi a process that triggered in us a tendency to see the thing which is not.’
‘I don’t like that, Ben.’
‘Why not?’
‘It has certain nasty implications about the accuracy of what my father saw in the Wild and reported in his ethnography.’
‘Not if you assume that as one of the Asadi – which, in his role as an outcast, Chaney paradoxically happened to be – he could hallucinate only what the Asadi hallucinated. In which case he reported, as accurately as it’s given a human being to do, the subjective reality of the Asadi themselves. Or a portion of it, anyway.’
‘That’s clever enough to be off-putting, Ben.’
I shrugged, looked at my hands. ‘You don’t like it because it undermines the objective reality of your father’s reports.’
‘All right, then. Do you really believe my father shared the group psychoses of the Asadi?’
‘I don’t know. It’s almost impossible to verify, isn’t it?’
‘Except, maybe, through Kretzoi.’
We sat facing each other in the cargo section of the BenDragon Prime, sharing the sultry windiness of the fan and thinking divergent thoughts.
‘If,’ Elegy finally allowed, ‘the Asadi only do or hallucinate something significant while Kretzoi’s among them. Otherwise, nothing. We’ll be wasting our time and the Nyerere Foundation’s money.’
‘That’s supremely possible.’
‘Damn,’ Elegy said.
‘In which case I’d suggest taking action outside the traditional tactics of mere observation and reportage.’
‘Like what?’
‘Let’s wait and see how things develop,’ I urged her quietly.
Her face took on an expression of mild pique. Without another word she got up, brushed past me and the rattling fan, and exited the helicraft into the tight little bowl of our clearing.
Denebola, somewhere, was sinking into the tepid waters of Calyptra, extinguishing itself in a vast caldron of brine. The Wild came alive in the settling darkness. The Asadi rushed from their assembly ground like children let out of school, and the forest’s twilight trees, arrayed in ragged choirs against the coming night, began seething inwardly with the eerie music of glycolysis.
Kretzoi – almost as we had given up looking for him – came creeping back into camp and asked Elegy for something besides hardwood and bark to relieve his hunger. His eyes were distant and unutterably weary.
CHAPTER SIX
Lovers
Elegy gave Kretzoi a flask of water and an orangish purée of protein and potassium. He ate and drank languidly, then swung off a short distance into the Wild and prepared to make his first outdoor nest since arriving on the planet. Elegy and I finished our own small meal, and I went back into the helicraft to fetch a couple of stems of lorqual for an after-dinner drink. As I was opening the stems, the radio in the Dragonfly began making high-pitched summoning noises.
‘You answer it,’ I told Elegy.
‘Why?’ She was closer to the helicraft’s cabin than I was, but she had encumbered herself with the reptilian folds of an air mattress while I was fetching the drinks.
‘Because it’s Moses Eisen, and you’ll do better with the old man than I would. Turn up the outside speaker, though – I don’t want you have to repeat the epithets he hurls at me.’
‘Won’t the Asadi hear, too?’ she protested.
‘That’s all right. I’m not particularly worried about what the Asadi think of me, Elegy.’ A witticism strictly from lorqual.
‘Answer it yourself,’ Elegy said, parent to child.
Because she was clearly determined to refuse me, I stumbled into the Dragonfly and took Moses’s radioed rebuke. He was self-possessed and rational in his anger, but he wanted to know why we had not come back to Frasierville that evening and how we proposed to explain our continued presence in the Wild. Kretzoi, Moses said, was supposed to be our in-the-field agent, and if he wasn’t, what was the purpose of our having introduced him into the Asadi clearing, assuming of course that we had? Finally, still angry, he backed up and inquired sheepishly about the status of our mission. I told him where we stood. Justified in his initial gut appraisal of our duplicity, he again demanded to know why we were where we were. I began to feel a raw, inadvisable rebelliousness rising in my throat.
At which point Elegy slid into the Dragonfly’s cabin and took the radio away from me. ‘We couldn’t go off and leave Kretzoi without determining that the Asadi had accepted him,’ she said irrefutably.
‘Your prospectus seems to indicate you believed his acceptance among them a foregone conclusion,’ accused Moses’s distance-thinned voice.
‘That was intentional, sir. But the certainties of theories and expectations have to be confirmed in practice. It would be ridiculous to permit Kretzoi to die because of the abstract optimism of a project paper.’
‘He didn’t die, though, did he?’
‘No, but we had to be here to monitor his initiation into the clearing and his return this evening to my father’s old drop point.’
‘Tomorrow you and Dr Benedict will come home to Frasierville.’
Elegy looked at me
