‘Greek?’
‘Yes, which can only be Greek to Bojangles.’ Elegy leaned forward to watch both the live action below and the screens of the four closed-circuit monitors on the catwalk’s rail.
Kretzoi grabbed Bojangles’s wrists, as if remembering that the Asadi had been the first to compare their hands and to imply a willingness to bridge the evolutionary chasm separating them. With only that to go on, then, Kretzoi pulled Bojangles off his butt and began forcibly twisting the Asadi’s hands into some of the basic alphabetical and symbolic gestures of Ameslan.
Bojangles hunkered before Kretzoi in a rapture of studious incomprehension, allowing his hands to be manipulated like modeling clay, his eyes (according to Monitor No. 3) glowing a mute pale silver.
After ten or fifteen minutes of this he yanked one hand free and made the sign for ‘frightened.’
‘He’s smarter than you are,’ Elegy whispered. ‘He’s an absolute linguistic genius in comparison to you.’
Frightened. The sign hung in the air, whether by a random concatenation of muscle responses or a deliberate attempt to frame that very message – well, my skepticism inclined me to the former view.
‘The sign for “afraid,”’ Elegy excitedly mused. ‘Ordinarily you start with objects – “cup,” “book,” “chair,” “eyes,” and so on – because you can define them by pointing. Bojangles has begun with an intangible, Ben, with an abstract emotion. That’s incredible – it’s spine-tingling.’
‘Maybe he selected randomly among the signs Kretzoi showed him,’ I proposed. ‘He’s mimicking, after all, and he had to start somewhere.’
‘No, no,’ she countered. ‘Look at the monitor. Bojangles knows exactly what the sign means, just see if he doesn’t.’
In closeup, Bojangles’s baboonish face: lips skinned back in the primate’s characteristic fear rictus. Tenor and vehicle of the gestural metaphor conveyed together in a sick, scary grin.
‘It’s nothing supernatural,’ Elegy said huskily. ‘Kretzoi probably drew his own lips back when he made the appropriate sign. Did you notice?’
‘No, I was watching Bojangles.’
We used our playback monitor and confirmed that Kretzoi had indeed displayed the fear grin while making the sign for ‘afraid’ or ‘frightened.’ My stomach’s squadron of butterflies found roosting places and fluttered less energetically. But my hands were clammy.
‘Nothing supernatural or occult,’ Elegy repeated. ‘Bojangles simply picked up on the facial expression and the hand sign together. God, though, wasn’t it quick of him?’
The conversation at poolside continued, Kretzoi repressing his surprise at Bojangles’s nimble-wittedness and reeling off so many vocabulary signs that it was clear he was going overboard. For definition’s sake he pointed, pouted, shrugged, and played mime, Ameslan and digital dumb show getting bollixed up together like yarn in a box of fishing tackle. Bojangles paid strict, even slavish heed.
Then he made the fear sign again.
‘But he doesn’t look frightened,’ Elegy observed. ‘Outside of sleep periods and grooming sessions he’s as calm as we’ve seen him.’
‘It’s a frightening thing, having the combined past and present literatures of Earth dumped on you in sign language in three minutes’ time,’ I said, both fascinated and amused by Bojangles’s supposed fear.
‘Do you remember, Ben, at the museum, Kretzoi told us the Asadi eyebook had invoked in him a disturbing fear pattern?’
‘I remember.’
‘Maybe, in both cases, the fear derives from the head-to-head clash of two different cultural units at the level where compromises have to be reached. Their own discrete systems of conveying information and knowledge, I mean. Kretzoi’s emotional reaction to the eyebook program may have been a measure of his hopelessness in confronting so alien a system as the Asadi’s. That system, being mechanical, refused to compromise.’
‘Then, why is Bojangles afraid? Kretzoi’s beginning to show a little consideration, he’s slowing down. That’s compromise for you, isn’t it?’
In fact, Kretzoi was now forming signs like an elocution teacher pooching out the lips and curling the tongue to demonstrate precisely how a sound ought to be made; and Bojangles was watching with rapt studiousness, hardly a heart-tugging picture of fear.
Elegy said, ‘I don’t know why he’s afraid, if he really is. Maybe because the compromise – if that’s what it is – is taking place entirely within the terms of Kretzoi’s system. Bojangles is having to set aside the polychromatic optical language that’s the Asadi heritage. That’s a loss, it’s really a kind of self-negation. Why shouldn’t he be afraid? What if you found yourself among a tribe of extraterrestrials who insisted you communicate with them by, say, conscious control of the passing of intestinal gas.’
I laughed out loud. ‘Unless they offered to assist me, I don’t think I’d be afraid.’ But suddenly the butterflies in my gut rose en masse and performed a clumsy wing roll. ‘In Bojangles’s case, Elegy, I think you’re taking too restricted a view. He’s not frightened by the Berlitz course Kretzoi’s giving him.’
‘He doesn’t seem to be,’ she confessed. ‘Maybe it’s homesickness, and the sense of disorientation, and the newness of—’ She gestured sweepingly at the gloomy ulterior of the hangar.
‘Probably,’ I agreed.
And for nearly ten hours, with time-outs only for water and comfort breaks, Kretzoi and Bojangles played pedagogue and pupil. By midafternoon the two were exchanging information, groping toward interspecies understanding, and, in the process, amusing the hell out of each other. Elegy and I watched them with mounting wonder and a certain envious admiration.
‘What did you learn, Kretzoi?’
Elegy interpreted the signs he made: ‘That the pagoda exists. That Bojangles himself has seen it and knows it exists.’
‘Where?’
‘Bojangles wouldn’t tell him that. The penalty for revealing its location is – well, pariahhood. The mane is shaved, the betrayer ignored.’
‘What else, Kretzoi? What else?’
Our debriefing was taking place on the movable mezzanine where the three of us had established our sleeping quarters. A pyramid of white planvas sat atop the factory flooring of the mezzanine, providing a translucent interface between ourselves and the honeycombed storage areas of the hangar.
Inside this pyramid Kretzoi regarded me numbly from a bench that looked to have been made from an outsized erector set. Physically drained,
