Crouching in front of Kretzoi, I prodded him awake. It took three gentle pokes to get a response, so exhausted and sleep-drugged was he.
‘Elegy and I have just had a talk,’ I told him as soon as he had nervously oriented himself to my presence. ‘Tomorrow’s our last day before going back to Frasierville for a while.’
Kretzoi made a one-handed inscription in the air, like a child jabbering objections to some arbitrary adult decree.
‘I don’t understand you,’ I whispered, shaking my head. ‘I won’t be able to understand you, Kretzoi. All I want you to do is listen. Elegy’s as worn down as you are almost. We’ve got to let her sleep.’
Another rapidly executed sign.
‘No,’ I quietly scolded him. ‘No more of that. I don’t understand it, you see. Will you keep your peace and listen?’
One hand rose and twitched before Kretzoi could suppress the inclination to answer.
‘I know you want to stay out here,’ I said with genuine sympathy. ‘You don’t like what you’re doing, but you’re committed to it – and it’s admirable you’re willing to make such sacrifices for Elegy’s sake.’
Kretzoi’s eyes shifted almost imperceptibly back into darkness. This time he had no response to make, no words to inscribe on the air.
‘I suppose we could leave you out here, to keep from interrupting the continuity of your presence among the Asadi – but I’ve told Elegy you need to come out for a while. You need a break, maybe even a comprehensive metaboscanning at the hospital. You’re a valuable resource, Kretzoi, and we can’t let your sense of commitment be your undoing. Do you understand?’
Although Kretzoi could make a number of subtle discriminations among moods and concepts, in some things he was almost painfully literal-minded. He rested his hands on his upjutting upper thighs and regarded me with a cryptic immobility.
‘Do you understand?’ I whispered again, at last realizing he was merely practicing perfect obedience. ‘Nod, Kretzoi. Or signal Yes.’
He signaled Yes. At the time, though, I wondered how much of what I was telling him was getting through. More than once on Christ’s Promenade I had seen civkis blotto on theobromine or lorqual discoursing cozily with stray dogs. That image mocked me as I spoke to Kretzoi.
‘All right, then. Tomorrow’s your last full day in the Asadi clearing – at least for a while. If nothing world-shaking occurs, there’s something we want you to do just before sunset, something very important and maybe a little difficult. Don’t worry, though. We’ll be there, Elegy and I, to help you. You’re not going to be alone in this, not by any means.
‘Before the dispersal of the Asadi into the Wild, Kretzoi, we want you to pick out a likely candidate for capture. We think it ought to be a male – the females may be nurturing infants in hidden nests and we don’t want to endanger the lives of their young. So make it a male. And make it one of the smaller ones. You’re going to have to overpower him at sunset, just before he rushes off with the others. A young, small male, then. That’s good because the specimen’s youth may give him the flexibility to bounce back from the shock of being forcibly detained. Ideally, we’d take an infant out with us for its adaptive potential – but that’s impossible. There aren’t any in the clearing, none.
‘Are you following what I’m saying?’ I finally asked, an audible hoarseness in my whisper. ‘This is very important, Kretzoi, you’ve got to keep it all straight. Signal Yes or No. Do you understand what we’re asking of you?’
Kretzoi signaled that he understood.
‘Do you think you can do it, then? It involves a certain clear risk to yourself. Suppose the other Asadi turn back to aid the one you’ve overpowered. Suppose the creature himself has enough strength to resist you. We’ve never tried anything like this before. I can’t predict exactly what’s going to happen. We want a healthy specimen, Kretzoi, but not a mighty mite. This depends very much on you. Do you think you can do it?’
Kretzoi indicated that he could do it. His optical carapaces reflected the brightness of our helicraft’s tiny klieg, and the eyes inside them were pricked into alertness by what I had proposed.
I began to feel strangely ashamed of my ruse, as if I had betrayed rather than upheld a loved one. Kretzoi, I learned at that moment, was utterly without guile, or suspicion, or irony, or any of the other cerebrally duplicitous tendencies of human beings. Believing that I had talked with Elegy about capturing an Asadi, he intended to fulfill our requests of him as well as he was able.
‘Try to get back to sleep,’ I urged him in my ugly-sounding, strangled whisper. ‘We only just made up our minds to do this, you see. Elegy would have outlined it all for you in the morning, but I told her she ought to try to sleep in.’ Obsessively even in the face of Kretzoi’s silent but ready acceptance of everything I had said, I went on fabricating rationales for his convincing . . .
It wasn’t until late the following afternoon that I told Elegy what I had done. We were sitting at the pullout table where we typed and transcribed our notes. The fan’s hard plastic blades made a rhythmic and continuous popping noise.
‘It’s illegal,’ Elegy said, avoiding for the moment the fact that I had gone behind her back. ‘The Asadi are a Komm-protected indigenous species. They may be within an evolutionary eyelash of full moral and intellectual self-awareness. That’s why you’ve kept your hands off them this long, Ben.’
‘Your grant gives us extraordinary privileges,’ I countered. ‘We have the right to step outside standing Komm regs if orthodox procedures fail to produce results.’
‘It’s my grant.’
‘I’ve read it very thoroughly.’
‘It’s my grant,
