‘Three cheers for Kretzoi.’
Elegy darted me an up-from-under look. ‘What’s the matter? Feel slighted?’
‘No, not really. At least I don’t think so. It’s just that I think we’d better move as fast as we can. Kretzoi’s already managed to ask Bojangles about the Asadi temple, Elegy. If he can do that, he can do more tomorrow. Much more, believe me.’
‘That may have been sheer serendipity, the pagoda business. Kretzoi made a series of gestures imaginatively translating this hangar into the heart of the Wild and then demanding to know if Bojangles had ever seen anything like it out there. Bojangles made an intuitive leap and replied that he had.’
‘That’s not serendipity, that’s intelligence. I want to give Kretzoi a list of questions to ask Bojangles tomorrow, just to see how far he gets with them . . . What objections can you have to that?’
‘None,’ Elegy said almost sullenly, believing, like most twenty-two-years olds, that Time is an unestrangeable ally. ‘Make your list.’
Time isn’t an unestrangeable ally. It runs out on you. And this time, to my sorrow, it wasn’t the youthful expectations of Elegy Cather that prevailed, but the actuarial pessimism of Thomas Benedict. Sometimes the cost of being right is heartbreakingly high.
My list was long. Damn long. It began with relatively simple questions about observable Asadi behavior, proceeded to matters about which we had been fruitlessly speculating for six or seven years, and concluded with a series of inquires about the Asadi past and its influence on their present-day lives. I touched on feeding habits, social relationships, the Asadi ‘chieftaincy,’ the batlike huri, and so on for a total of nearly sixty questions, many with overlapping areas of concern. I might have gone on manuscribing all night, but Elegy touched my hand and made me stop.
‘Select the ten most important ones,’ she said, ‘so that I can relay those to Kretzoi in the morning.’
‘They’re all important.’
‘I won’t have time to brief him on sixty, though, and even if I somehow managed, interrupting his sleep to do it, it’s not very likely he’d have time to ask them all tomorrow. How do you expect him even to remember so many?’
So I winnowed, snipped, and collapsed my questions until there were ten, and the next morning, well before sunrise, Elegy sat down in front of Kretzoi and shaped them for him as he took his breakfast.
In the swimming-pool compound the day began exactly as had the previous one, with Bojangles marching ritually about the interior perimeter of the fence and back and forth through the empty pool itself. Kretzoi sat with his back to the compound’s gates, his wrists on his knees and his hands hanging limply between.
But Bojangles soon began swaying playfully from side to side, finally spinning himself out of his march and bringing himself up short in front of Kretzoi – where he leaned forward and stared unflinchingly at our shaggy field agent.
Kretzoi looked away. A stare is a threat signal among Earth primates. During his time in the Asadi clearing, one of Kretzoi’s most difficult adjustments had been learning to meet the eyes of the aliens who wished to engage him in their habitual staring contests. The stress of locking eyes with the Asadi, in fact, may have accounted, in part, for his lapses of strength and his hypoglycemic vertigo. When the Asadi decided he wasn’t worth taking on as a staring partner, his stress levels fell – even if his body never wholly regained its former homeostatic condition. But the Evil Eye, as exemplified by the stare, still retained its ability to discomfit Kretzoi; and even during the previous day’s gestural tête-à-tête with Bojangles, he had made a point of frequently averting his gaze. You don’t face down the Evil Eye.
In this respect, as well as many others, the Asadi had evolved differently. Their staring matches were not merely threat displays and acts of aggression; they were also televid chats, poetry readings, bull sessions, songfests, lectures. An Asadi could communicate on a complex informational level with another member of his species only if he looked him directly in the eyes. A few theorists suggested that the Asadi inhabited their clearing only during the day because only during daylight could they meaningfully exchange information. Vocal communication works at a distance; it carries in the dark as well as it does in the daylight. Gestures and other visual signals, however, depend on proximity and visibility for their effectiveness, and night neutralizes them as surely as does a blindfold. Hence, argued these theorists, the sunset dispersal of the Asadi and their evolutionary triumph over the typical primate phobia of the face-on stare.
Maybe.
At any rate, Kretzoi looked away from Bojangles, and kept his face averted until the Asadi lightly slapped his chest and made the Ameslan signs for ‘ugly-silent-lazy-friend.’ Kretzoi responded. Bojangles broke in. And soon the two were gabbing gesturally at great speed. It was too swift and complicated for me, hand-jive gossip at a high level of informational exchange. The conversation also had ongoing pedagogical significance, for Kretzoi continued to augment the Asadi’s rapidly growing repertoire of signs.
‘They’re going like torrential sixty,’ I told Elegy. ‘I think they could have handled all my questions, don’t you?’
Elegy scrutinized the monitors noncommittally. ‘We’re lucky we’ve got a hologramic record, Ben. I’m not keeping up very well on my own.’
And I exulted, confident we had come through where so many others, including Egan Chaney and earlier temporal projections of myself, had all had to settle for partial answers or no answers at all.
A pounding interrupted these self-congratulatory musings. My heart leaped numbly. Kretzoi and Bojangles stopped conversing and lifted their snouts toward the source of these repetitive, echoing thuds.
‘What the hell is that?’ I whispered.
‘The door’s locked,’ Elegy told me. ‘It’s our morning delivery.’ Of plants from the Wild, she
