‘I know that.’
‘The responsibility for fuckups and legal violations and squandrered funds lies heavy on the head of the Nyerere Fellow, Dr Benedict – not in the lap of overzealous surrogate daddies or washed-up colonial officials who’ve kicked away their own best chances.’
‘Now you’re playing rough.’
But her steady, reasonable tone contradicted the harshness of her words, the unbaked fire in her eyes. ‘A kiss to build a scheme on,’ she said. ‘You had this in mind our second night in here, didn’t you? Even before, perhaps.’
‘No,’ I answered, altogether truthfully. The pulse in my temples had begun to keep pace with the rhythmic popping of the fan.
‘Then why are you doing it?’
‘We need a breakthrough, Elegy.’
‘This is only our sixth full day out here,’ she said. ‘My father spent the equivalent of more than four Earth-standard months out here before he witnessed the Ritual of Death and Designation.’
‘If I remember correctly, you were in such a helluva hurry to achieve a breakthrough when you first arrived that Eisen had to order you to spend that night in Frasierville. True?’
‘There’s a difference between enthusiasm and insanity. I was in a hurry to get started. You seem in a hurry to turn my grant inside out, to do exploratory surgery on the Asadi’s souls.’
‘If they have any. – But, yes, I’m in a hurry for that breakthrough. My hurry’s come upon me gradually over the last six years.’
Elegy went to the door of the BenDragon Prime. She raised one arm along its casing and stared into the Calyptran Wilderness. ‘I don’t know what my attitude toward you’s going to be, Ben, if anything happens to Kretzoi.’
‘Then I suppose we’ll both find out at the same time, won’t we?’
Without turning her head Elegy responded tightly, ‘You’ve been on BoskVeld too long, Dr Benedict. Too damn long.’
In camouflage suits and light-absorbent facial makeup, Elegy and I made our way through the snaky lianas, hanging umbrella roots, and serrated fronds of the Wild. We each carried a tranq launcher and a backpack of netting with which to help Kretzoi subdue his chosen victim. There was no red leather thong in Elegy’s hair, and our progress through the rain forest was so cautious and inchmeal that I wondered briefly if we could reach the clearing before sunset.
Neither Elegy nor I spoke. We were afraid to give the Asadi even the smallest hint of our approach.
The Asadi clearing was over a hundred meters long and about sixty wide. It was situated in the forest so that one ‘end zone,’ as Chaney liked to term them, lay to the north-northwest of the other. From the air the clearing looked like a red-brown label on an amorphous billowy garment of green, blue-green, and even shiny purple. In order to help Kretzoi capture an Asadi, Elegy and I were going to take up places on either side of the clearing. There was no telling where Kretzoi would be when the aliens’ twilight exodus began, and if Elegy and I were squatting beside each other nearly a hundred meters from the struggle, our nets and our tranq launchers would be useless. Even if we separated and tried to cover different territories, Kretzoi still might tackle his victim at a point equidistant between the two of us, putting us both too far away to intervene effectively.
At last, breaking our mutually imposed silence, I touched Elegy’s arm and told her that I was going to stake out a position on the clearing’s western perimeter. She nodded, and we separated.
Denebola’s last light was quivering in the foliage. I worked my way along the northern ‘end zone’ and down the clearing’s western boundary, careful not to alert the doggedly trudging Asadi to my presence but afraid that my nervousness would do just that. The smell drifting to me from the aliens’ bodies was both suety and sweet, like rancid fat boiled in syrup. But I kept going and crept to a biding place about thirty meters from the south end of the clearing.
It was strange – literally unearthly – how the Asadi, almost as a single conscious entity, registered the setting of their planet’s sun, the precise moment at which Denebola had fallen altogether beneath a ‘horizon’ that their rain-forest environment didn’t even permit them to see. You would have thought a switch in their heads had been depressed and locked into place, a switch that only sunrise the following morning had the power to release. One or two observers have suggested that a single Asadi registers this moment and that his resultant dash for the Wild triggers the fleeing response in his con-specifics. This explanation merely narrows the mystery to one undiscoverable individual; it doesn’t account for the mathematical accuracy of the Asadi perception that not a ray of Denebola’s light is any longer coming to them direct. Nor does it explain the observation that even in thunderstorms the Asadi dispersal takes place on its same sunset-dictated schedule. The response seems built in, innate. Triangulations made from the air on both the Asadi clearing and the line along which BoskVeld’s curvature sets a mathematically verifiable horizon in relation to the clearing – these meticulous surveys had demonstrated that full sunset and the Asadi’s twilight dispersal are almost invariably coincident events.
You began to believe that on BoskVeld there thrived an unforthcoming species of sun worshipers whose very genes coded them to a reverence for the Light. Each individual was clocked to the sun, attuned to its passage.
The moment came. The unending Asadi shuffle ended, and individual animals began sniffing the air and staring skyward. Then they broke. The sound of their feet padding for safety or concealment or God-knows-what in the thickets of the Wild erupted like a sudden tattoo of drums. Anonymous Asadi bodies crashed past me on all sides. I crouched lower and lower. At the
