‘You’re forgetting this is only Kretzoi’s second day in there. Yesterday we saw something no one else has apparently ever seen before, too.’
‘Touché,’ I said.
‘Patience,’ Elegy counseled, as people, in those days, seemed to delight in counseling me. ‘Patience and persistence, Ben.’
An hour before sunset, emptied of words and aerodynamically naked in the sticky heat of late afternoon, Elegy and I returned to our pallets beneath the Dragonfly’s orange-and-white awning and made patient, persistent love. Then, like newlyweds expecting the arrival of a sensitive and lonely guest, we pulled on our clothes and chastely waited for Kretzoi.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Captive
Little of consequence happened in the following days – if you discount the fact that Elegy and I continued to be lovers.
Each evening Kretzoi, progressively more disoriented and fatigued, came back to us for a meal and a rigorous debriefing session. After greedily devouring the packaged fruit and protein substitutes we had waiting for him, he would sit on his haunches in the hard, cold light of the Dragonfly’s kliegs and make shadow pictures on the forest wall with his hands. Without Elegy’s help I was unable to follow these exchanges. The signal system they employed – a special ‘dialect’ of American Sign Language, or Ameslan, developed by the Goodall-Fossey primatologists – was still unintelligible to me, and I’d made only a halfhearted attempt to learn it. As a result, Elegy would translate Kretzoi’s ramblings aloud and I would operate the recorders.
What we principally learned was that the Asadi, with a certain inarticulate skepticism, had accepted Kretzoi as one of their own. They allowed him to troop about the clearing, they engaged him in a couple of intial staring matches, and they invited him by angry gestures and whirling optical displays to take part in coitus. So far, because of his size and his maleness, he had escaped sexual assault. The inability of his eyes to pinwheel through a series of chemically motivated color changes had identified him unequivocally as a ‘mute,’ however, and despite the fact that human surgeons had given him the thick, tawny mane of an Asadi Brahman, Kretzoi’s status among the Asadi was not high. His eyes, Kretzoi felt, disconcerted and even annoyed them – but he had not yet violated any of their ritual taboos and they tolerated his presence as they had once tolerated that of the clayey-eyed Bachelor who eventually befriended Egan Chaney. Although the Asadi had shaved The Bachelor’s mane for leading Chaney to their temple, Kretzoi had neither any idea where this temple was (if it existed) nor anyone but us to lead there (should he somehow discover the way). The result was that Kretzoi saw stretching before him an eternity of Indifferent Togetherness in the Asadi clearing. Nothing could have dismayed Kretzoi more. Nor did either Elegy or I look upon this prospect with unmitigated delight.
What else did Kretzoi tell us in these debriefings?
Something curious and perhaps significant. Although he hadn’t again experienced the rising queasiness of fear prompted in him by the eyebook we’d activated in the Archaeological Museum, his unwilling staring matches with Asadi antagonists had done odd things to his perception of time. More than once, caught unawares by a mesmerizing spectral display, Kretzoi had disengaged several minutes later to find that the sun had clocked off an hour or more’s worth of arc overhead.
‘Have you ever witnessed any of the Asadi going transparent?’ Elegy asked Kretzoi after this revelation. ‘Have you ever noticed their bodies fading, losing outline and substance?’
Kretzoi crisply signaled No.
I suggested, ‘Given what he’s just told us, Elegy, maybe Kretzoi’s the one who’s been losing outline and substance. Maybe, as a result of these vampiric staring contests, he’s the one who does a fade-out.’
Although Kretzoi appeared to have no conception of what I was implying, Elegy touched his shaggy wrist and asked, ‘What does it feel like – when you’re hypnotized by the spectral displays, I mean?’
He stared off vacantly into the Wild for a moment, then made a desultory series of signs with one limp hand.
‘That he’s holding his own,’ Elegy translated for me. ‘That’s it – that he’s competing very well, indeed.’
‘But he can’t hold his own,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have the anatomical equipment. All any of us can do is intercept the sensory output of those displays and try to interpret the data on an emotional level.’
Kretzoi made another small flurry of half-formed signs.
‘On an emotional level, Kretzoi says, he’s too tired to “talk” any longer. And he doesn’t have anything else to tell us.’
With that, after moving off wearily, he installed himself in an upright sitting position on Elegy’s pallet, closed his eyes, and soon began making asthmatic sleep noises. This was our second-to-last night in the Wild before returning to Frasierville, and I had begun to feel like a blacking-factory owner slowly squeezing the joie de vivre out of one of my poverty-ridden juvenile laborers. It was time to try something else.
Elegy yielded her pallet to Kretzoi that night and slept in the Dragonfly. I stayed awake, mulling our options and agonizing over both the legal and ethical ramifications of what I had in mind. There was one strategy I had purposely not broached to Elegy for fear she would veto it out of hand, counseling me again – maybe even angrily, preemptively – to the patience and persistence of that model field-worker, her father. I didn’t want to risk her unqualified refusal. Her possession of a Nyerere Foundation grant, with its built-in exemptions from various Kommthor directives and regulations, gave her a degree of official elbow room that I, as an employee of BoskVeld’s Colonial Administration, didn’t have. Watching Kretzoi sleep, then, and tasting the sour bile of my own frustration, I decided to act on Elegy’s behalf, invoking the explicit powers of her grant.
One small klieg continued
