‘Did you ask them how they feed, or why he isn’t taking solid foods, or what role cannibalism plays in their—?’
‘Whoa,’ Elegy said. ‘They’ve just started kindergarten and you’re already giving Kretzoi a graduate-level exam.’
‘He’s already found out about the Asadi temple,’ I protested, waving my arm and accidentally gouging the planvas wall. ‘Why not a few of these others?’
‘Even Ameslan prodigies can’t discuss everything the cosmos holds in a single day. And Kretzoi’s exhausted, weak. He’s on medication to suppress insulin production, and he’s got a needle in his arm. Have mercy, Ben.’
Kretzoi regarded me appraisingly, but not, I felt, without sympathy. How strange. Sitting in judgment of me, a chimpoon with a urine-colored bag of glucose suspended over his head from an aluminum monopod.
‘Why don’t we give him a day off?’ I suggested.
Kretzoi shook his head, his mouth hanging open like a pouch.
‘You could go down there with Bojangles,’ I told Elegy. ‘Kretzoi’s taught him the finger talk; you could continue the lessons – make the sort of inquiries that might lead us directly to the temple.’
Elegy squinted at me, then shook her head and looked away. ‘The only trouble with that is . . . Bojangles probably won’t believe I’m an Asadi. I’m convinced he thinks Kretzoi’s a kissin’ cousin if not a prodigal sibling. Do you really want me to risk going in there tomorrow to see if I’m accepted as readily as Kretzoi’s been?’ Elegy’s eyes, opening wider and flaring like hot acetylene, again intercepted mine. ‘Maybe you’d like me to cut off my hair and pretend to be an Asadi outcast. That would gain me acceptance, more than likely, but it wouldn’t make me a very popular confidante.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, meaning it.
‘What we’re doing now is extremely important, Ben. We’re learning things no one else has learned, ever. In two days we’ve justified both my grant and our rashness in abducting an Asadi from the Wild.’
‘Patience,’ I counseled myself sagely. ‘Persistence.’
Elegy’s eyes torched me with flames of exasperated admiration. ‘God, you’re just like a little boy.’
‘Not in everything, young lady. Not in everything.’ I ducked my head and went through the pyramid’s doorway to the mezzanine platform outside.
‘Where you goin’?’ Elegy called.
‘For some air,’ I said. ‘To burn the weeds Bojangles turned up his nose at today. We all need a vacation from me, I think.’
I went down the perforated metal steps and across the gloomy hangar floor to the recreation area. My own weariness was like a drug in my veins.
CHAPTER TEN
The Experiment Ends
The umbrellalike roots of the epiphytes smelled the worst. They burned along their nodulous ganglia like a tangle of gravid snakes hoisted over charcoal and prodded into writhing incandescence. The odor was a blend of curdled mayonnaise and mint-scented feces. All that made their burning bearable was the open veldt country sweeping away to the northeast of the knoll behind the hangar, that and the freshness of BoskVeld’s winds blowing across the pit. The stars looked like microscopic screw heads rotated into the hidden template of the universe. I stood on the knoll poking at the mass of coal-bright roots and staring toward the empurpled, northeastern horizon.
‘Dr Benedict!’ a voice hailed me.
A figure with a high-powered hand lamp was approaching me from around the northwestern corner of the hangar. A solitary figure. He had nearly a hundred meters to go before we would be close enough to converse in anything other than shouts. All I could do was watch the white-blue beam of his lamp stutter around the landscape until he arrived. Usually, it crossed my mind, Komm-service guards patrolled in pairs.
It was the young Iranian, Jaafar Bahadori. Over one shoulder he carried a lightning-emblazoned laser half rifle, exactly the sort of weapon with which our hangar’s legendary muralist had etched his erotic masterpiece. Jaafar’s boots, I noticed, were of the stalking variety favored during field maneuvers and commando assaults.
‘That stinks,’ he said by way of greeting.
‘I didn’t know you had to pull guard duty, Jaafar. I thought you were safely ensconced in the lorry pool or over at Rain Forest Port.’
‘I am doing a friend a favor, sir.’
‘Someone talked you into taking his duty?’
‘I talked her into letting me take it for her.’
‘Such altruism.’
Jaafar nudged the burning epiphytes with his boot toe. ‘That really stinks. How is it you are standing it?’ But he squatted near the pit as if to inhale the full unadulterated aroma and told me, ‘There’s been some talk in her Kommservice barracks, says my good friend, about putting on night face and staging a commando raid on the hangar. Much of it is lorqual loquaciousness, as they say, mere silly drunk talk, but some of it is truly serious.’
‘A commando raid?’ I exclaimed. ‘What for?’
‘To capture the Asadi and put it to death. A war game, you see. Boredom is rife these days, she says. Her barracks-mates’ last maneuvers were three months ago, and carrying vegetables out of the Wild every morning for your alien has given some of them nasty ideas. They don’t like to play at catering service for your . . . well, your—’
‘Boonie?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, sir. For a boonie.’ Jaafar stood and gazed up at the sky – a moon was rising. ‘I have a partner on the other side of the building, sir. I told him he could patrol that side and go googly over the lovely laser scrawls if he’d just give me time to make my circuit. I had been pretending a limp until I got clear of him, you see, and so he thinks I’m slow.’
‘Is your partner one of the conspirators?’
‘I don’t know. He doesn’t talk to me very much. He did not wish to talk to you, either. He was very happy, this one, to let me come around here and fill my nostrils with this . . . this
