‘Weak and bewildered – not too surprisingly. After he came to, he spent most of his day crouched in the deep end, up against that wall there, staring at the skylights. He knows I’m up here, but he avoids looking this way. You’ve arrived in time to witness his reaction to his first sunset away from the Asadi clearing.’
‘Do you want to know how Kretzoi is?’
I looked at the hybrid primate, saw the clean bandage on his arm and the various places about his body where the hair had been shaved to permit the attachment of sensors. Poor Kretzoi. The victim of a whimsical precision plucking.
‘Hypoglycemia,’ Elegy said.
The word didn’t register. I blinked. Nothing more.
‘Low blood sugar,’ she explained. ‘When we arrived at the hospital last night, he fainted – actually fainted. A combination of the loss of blood and his hypoglycemic condition.’
‘And today he was well enough to be released?’
‘They treated his lacerations and gave him a unit of glucose. They also chemically inhibited his own insulin-producing capability in order to permit the natural glucose level to build back up. I don’t know what else they could have done, really. Besides, they were ready to have us both out of there. We made ’em even more nervous as patients than we did as guests.’
‘Glucose?’ I belatedly echoed her.
‘To restore the normal sugar-content levels of his blood.’ Elegy gave a sharp, sardonic laugh. ‘Very elementary. Even a “crit vet” knows the reason for that procedure, Ben.’
‘That’s what the paramedic gave Bojangles this morning,’ I said, randomly coining a name for our Asadi. ‘From a quick determination she made from a skin scraping. Glucose.’
‘That doesn’t seem terribly odd. Glucose is a pretty basic reservoir of potential energy in most carbon-based life forms, isn’t it? If your tranquilizer worked, why shouldn’t glucose prove effective, too?’
‘How similar to the Asadi are we?’ I asked aloud, not so much of Elegy as of the early-evening sky still brilliantly agleam in the panes of the hanger’s skylights. The immensity of the hangar and the cloudless grey-blue vault overarching it reduced all of us, in my mind’s eye, to proud but presumptuous specks. And then Denebola set.
‘Look,’ Elegy whispered, touching my arm.
Bojangles stood full up on the bottom of the empty pool. He lifted his snout to the skylights and sniffed bronchially. Then he performed a kind of spinning run that carried him out of the kidney-shaped pool and headlong into the soft-wall fence. Bojangles was unable to claw or bite his way through. Belted internally with microscopic polymer reticulations, the soft-wall skin didn’t even tear – just pinched, unfolded, and returned to its former mocking yellow smoothness. At last, spent, Bojangles lay down on the narrow margin of the pool and assumed a fetal position reminiscent of Kretzoi’s two nights before.
‘And what did you say he did all day?’ Elegy asked me.
‘Tried to track Denebola’s progress through the skylights. He kept staring up. You can see he didn’t eat any of the liana bark or foliage we tossed in to him earlier this afternoon.’
‘We’re fortunate he’s still alive, Ben.’
‘So is he, assuming he values life away from the Asadi clearing.’
‘We’ve doomed him, you know. He’s small, but he’s an adult, and adults of most parahuman species don’t take kindly to having their psyches rearranged at so late a date. He’ll quite likely die in our keeping.’ The unspoken implication was that my own impatience had subjected Bojangles to a gauntlet of unnecessary cruelties.
‘We had to get Kretzoi out,’ I defended myself. ‘They’ve diagnosed his condition as hypoglycemia, right? Suppose we’d stayed, Elegy. Suppose his condition had deteriorated to the point of his actually collapsing in the clearing.’
‘All right,’ Elegy said tonelessly.
And those two words, spoken in just that way, shut me up. The hangar was growing dark. I got up, squeezed past Elegy on the narrow extension ramp, and tottered between its rails to the northern mezzanine. Here, throwing four different light switches, I flooded the hangar with cold illumination. Far off to the east, beyond the recreation area, barrel upon barrel and crate upon crate of surplus materiel were arrayed in honeycomb patterns across the hangar’s floor. Shadows cob-webbed the distant recesses and catwalks as well, drooping like silver-edged parachutes or shrouds.
Kretzoi was signing something urgent to Elegy.
She turned to me and translated: ‘He wants to go down there now, Ben. He wants to introduce himself into the Asadi’s compound tonight.’
‘Why? They’re diurnal creatures, obviously. He won’t be able to do anything until tomorrow. If then.’
Kretzoi made several more succinct gestures.
‘He’d simply like to be ready,’ Elegy translated. ‘He believes that if – what are you calling him, Bojangles? – that if Bojangles awakens to find him there, it’ll be better than if we make a show of introducing him later on. I think he’s right. Bojangles has already suffered shocks aplenty.’
Grudgingly, wondering if Elegy hadn’t been putting words in Kretzoi’s hands, I consented. I had to. Elegy was, in truth, the director of our project. And grudgingly I escorted Kretzoi down to the hangar floor in order to admit him through the fence’s twin gates into the presence of our sleeping captive . . .
CHAPTER NINE
Bojangles
Bojangles didn’t eat. Although Komm-service personnel brought him fodder from the Wild – succulent fronds, skeins of prodigal epiphytic roots, the pale egglike pods of the lorqual tree – nothing that we put before him tempted him. Each evening when Bojangles fell asleep, Kretzoi would bring out of the compound the wilted remains of that day’s menu. I burned the noxious leftovers in a pit behind the hangar, offended by the smell but thankful for an opportunity to stand outside in the evening air. Sometimes, burning them, I would request another delivery of the Kommservice guards who patrolled the perimeters of the hangar and who dropped by at set times to see if there was anything we needed. So well did these guards suppress their curiosity about our ‘experiment’ that I often wondered if they were
