Elegy and I met him in the rear, where Kretzoi was hunkering dazedly amid the ration kits and inflatable pillows littering the floor. Our Asadi, screened away in the tail section, had not moved in the last two hours – he resembled a small pile of animal pelts shoved against a bulkhead and left there to breed moths.
‘Sure it’s not dead?’ Moses asked.
‘No,’ I admitted.
‘What do you propose to do with it if it isn’t? I don’t recall anything in Civ Cather’s prospectus about capturing an Asadi.’
‘The terms of my grant gave us that option,’ Elegy said, almost as if I had worked a psychic ventriloquism upon her. ‘You asked us our second night out, as a courtesy, to return to Frasierville today. Since we weren’t getting terribly far with our preliminary methods, we invoked the direct-intercession clause of the grant. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about a Komm inquiry into the legitimacy of what we did, Governor Eisen. The Nyerere Foundation’s on extremely good terms with the bigwigs of Glaktik Komm.’
‘That still leaves the question of what to do with the critter,’ Moses said. ‘Frasierville doesn’t have a zoo.’
‘I want Kretzoi to work with him,’ Elegy declared. ‘As soon as he’s had his wounds tended to and taken a rest.’
‘Where?’ Moses wanted to know. ‘I’m not happy about Ben’s bringing the Asadi out of the Wild, but I’m willing to concede he showed a modicum of savvy landing out here instead of bang-smack in the middle of town.’
‘What about the probeship hangar?’ I suggested. It was east of us in the dark, lit only by its own artificial battlements of red-orange paint. Phosphorescent paint. So far as I knew it had never been used as anything but an auxiliary warehouse for goods eventually transshipped by helicraft or settlement cars to Amérsavane, SteppeChilde, Prairie View, or one of the other veldt colonies. Otherwise, the hangar was of no use to anyone.
‘The probeship hangar?’ Moses said musingly.
‘Yes, sir,’ I responded. ‘We’d be isolated from Frasierville, but we’d have plenty of room and almost immediate access to the civkis and Komm employees out here at Chaney Field.’
Surprisingly, he agreed.
The Chaney Field security force permitted me to taxi the BenDragon Prime in toward the translucent green support buildings, and I spent that night in the terminal complex, lying awake on a cot in the antechamber to Moses’s plush private office.
Elegy and Kretzoi rode back into Frasierville with the Governor in order to admit Kretzoi to the hospital – not as a resident in the first-floor guest wing, but as a patient.
As Moses’s party drove off, I heard two young civkis outside the terminal joking that the Komm-galens at the hospital would be surprised to find that their Governor regarded them as little better than ‘cit vets.’ It had been a long time since I had heard that local epithet given such a vicious intonation. Even the civkis’ youthful, ebullient laughter failed to gentle the nastiness of their repartee. If they found Kretzoi such a distasteful creature, what must they think of the Asadi we had just brought out of the Wild?
For that night – still unsummonably zonked – the Asadi was confined in the debussy of Governor Eisen’s upstairs suite. I had carried him there myself, marveling again at the softness of his matted fur and the almost reedlike flimsiness of his body. Moses had insisted that I lay the Asadi out on the floor of his majolica-tile shower stall and then lock the creature in with the sliding, shatterproof door. That way, the Governor told me, if our guest got caught short during the night, it would be quite easy to clean up his mess by a remote activation of the shower spray.
My cot in the antechamber to Moses’s office was only a few meters from the debussy, and one of the reasons I lay helplessly insomniac that night was that I kept waiting for the Asadi to wake up and begin violently protesting his internment. I don’t know whether it was a relief or a torment to me that he never did.
When I went into the debussy the following morning, I found that the Asadi had recovered consciousness. He was sitting motionlessly in the shower cage, a distorted two-dimensional blur behind the milky glass. Not even my purposely noisy entry had been enough to animate him.
Suddenly I was frightened.
How was I going to get him out? I didn’t want to tranq him again, even had that option appeared an easy one to execute – which it didn’t. Nor did I simply want to slide back the door and offer to shake hands.
Because it was still early, I returned to the antechamber where my cot was and sat down on its rumpled bedding to wait for help. Outside, the morning bustle of Chaney Field lifted its already monotonous drone, lulling me into a state of apathy almost totally untainted by fear.
Then I heard a small – a downright modest – thump in Moses’s luxurious debussy. My fear came back. This was the only sound that had emanated from the debussy all that morning, and when I finally worked up enough courage to go back in, I found that my problem had solved itself. The Asadi, after having briefly revived, had collapsed again. I slid back the ripple-glass door and stared at his slender, crumpled body. When Moses came, we had no trouble getting the creature out – although by this time I had begun to fear that he would die.
That afternoon, with Elegy and Kretzoi still in Frasierville, Moses permitted me to relocate some of my personal effects in the probeship hangar north of the terminal building. He even accompanied me out there. We carried the Asadi in the air-conditioned cargo section of one of the airfield’s armored
