Be thankful for small favors, Elegy told me. She referred in particular to the fact that Bojangles listlessly drank all the water we set out for him, apparently absorbing most of it into the mitochondria of his body cells. He pissed infrequently, usually in the dribbling fashion of a human male with prostate or urethral difficulties. (A hose, as Moses prophesied with a degree of inadvertent irony, was more than adequate to the task of poolside sanitation. Elegy and I alternated custodial duties down there, usually after releasing Kretzoi each evening for food and rest.) But Bojangles’s readiness to quench his thirst seemed to be indicative of an involuntary will to live. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he wished to live or to die.
When Bojangles wasn’t focusing on Denebola’s passage from skylight to skylight, Kretzoi managed – astonishingly enough – to establish something like a personal relationship with him. Elegy and I, in light of this, began to feel that the presence of a great many Asadi might have acted to inhibit meaningful intercourse – in all that term’s appropriate connotations – among small numbers of individuals. We supposed this because Bojangles behaved almost congenially toward Kretzoi.
On his first day in the compound Kretzoi sat down so that Bojangles would see him immediately upon awakening. The result was a display neither of fear nor of aggression, but instead Bojangles’s gradual uncurling to an awareness that in his strange captivity he was not alone. On that very first morning, we believed, he took Kretzoi for an Asadi. If he remembered that it was Kretzoi who had helped capture him, he bore no grudge – he permitted Kretzoi to touch him without displaying the characteristic fear grin of terrestrial primates, and, upon occasion, he sought to touch Kretzoi gently in turn, maybe as an abreaction of some long-dormant Asadi urge to deny the mechanisms of Indifferent Togetherness. On that first morning in the pool, for instance, he presented his back to Kretzoi in the manner of a baboon or chimpanzee seeking to be groomed. No one had ever witnessed grooming among the Asadi.
‘Is that a breakthrough?’ Elegy wanted to know.
‘Maybe not to the location of the Asadi temple,’ I told her. ‘Then again, maybe that’s exactly what it is. Especially when you consider that it could be the beginning of genuine communication between the Asadi and another intelligent species not of their world.’
Elegy’s slow smile was beatific. ‘Another?’ she said.
As we watched from our ramp, filming the episode with holographic equipment mounted the night before on four different extensible catwalks, Kretzoi began searching Bojangles’s scraggly mane for vermin. In fact, the Asadi’s vestigial assumption of the grooming posture implied that either recently or once in his species’ enigmatic past his ‘people’ had played host to one or several varieties of parasitic insect. In any case, Kretzoi groomed Bojangles, and Bojangles, appreciatively soothed, watched Denebola roll across the sky.
Eventually Kretzoi tried to initiate a less one-sided form of communication. He tugged at Bojangles’s arm, slapped and pinched him importunately. Bojangles resembled a bounce-back toy – punishment-prone but unflappable. After a good deal of bootless entreaty Kretzoi ran all the way around the pool, turned with outspread arms, and made the circuit in reverse. Then he squatted with his back to the compound’s gates and looked up at us as if to say, I’m stymied.
‘So much for interspecies communication,’ I whispered.
Elegy leaned over the catwalk rail and in their specialized dialect of Ameslan urged Kretzoi to return to action. Kretzoi shook his head, his mouth hanging loose and sacklike before him. A boonie. An ignorant, contemptible boonie.
Even Elegy’s sympathy for Kretzoi evaporated. She stopped making hand signs and, heedless of the possible effect on Bojangles, raised her voice so that its echo reverberated eerily.
‘You’re doing fine, Kretzoi! You’ve done something no one else has ever been able to do!’
The echoes lapped at us like waves from a cold and distant sea.
‘Now go back to him, I’m telling you – go back to Bojangles and let him do for you what you’ve already done for him! Go on, damn it, you’re doing fine! There’s no one else on BoskVeld who can do any better!’
Finally Kretzoi moved. He returned to Bojangles. But instead of plucking at his arm or gouging him in the chest, Kretzoi sat down with his back within reach of Bojangles’s hands. Then he waited. Before too long the Asadi began absentmindedly stroking Kretzoi’s mane. He never dropped his eyes from the skylights, but the contact, once made, was sustained for well over an hour, to both animals’ mutual pleasure. Kretzoi eventually fell asleep.
‘Maybe we’re back in business,’ Elegy said.
‘Or maybe we’ve simply got a bushed and temporarily zonked Kretzoi on our hands,’ I countered.
‘Reciprocity, Ben. A beginning.’
Subsequent events proved Elegy right. Although Bojangles did cease grooming Kretzoi, taking his eyes off Denebola just long enough to visit a corner of the pool he had designated his privy, that afternoon he permitted several interruptions of his sun worship. Having groomed and been groomed in turn, Kretzoi was able to distract Bojangles from his Denebola watching for minutes on end – sometimes by turning his head virtually upside down to look at Bojangles, sometimes by an inquisitive poke at the other’s eye carapaces, sometimes by nibbling playfully at the Asadi’s ears. To most of these exotic stimuli Bojangles responded favorably: He turned to Kretzoi and sought to touch him.
At one point in the afternoon Elegy said, ‘This suggests that if you just get them out of that infernal clearing, the Asadi may not be the brutal, single-minded demons we’ve come to view them. Their clearing is their hell, Ben – as if they’ve fallen from a state of grace, or believe they have, and so deliver themselves up to their punishment day after day without protest.’
‘Would you go voluntarily to such a Gehenna?’
‘I didn’t say they go voluntarily. I said they deliver themselves up without protest. They’re genetically and behaviorally programmed to
