Pettijohn cast aside his bundle of plants, stooped over me to find in my eyes a welcome (for him) but blessedly false (for me) deadness, and then threw himself against the compound’s double gate. Even lying flat on my back, I could see that he was almost immediately successful in gaining entry. A section of the pool’s pastel interior loomed as large in my mind and vision as the morning sky overhead.
‘There’s the woman!’ I heard E-3 Filly Deuel shout. ‘She’s running along that catwalk! Hurry, Spenser, damn you!’
‘Shoot her!’ Pettijohn commanded from the pool.
‘With what?’ Deuel countered shrilly. ‘With what, you great turd? All this thing will do is knock on doors and old men’s heads! You wouldn’t trust me with a fully operable rifle and you’re lucky you didn’t!’
‘Then shut up!’ Pettijohn called. ‘I’m going to do what I came to do, I’m doing it now, and you can just shut up!’ He screamed piercingly, a warrior’s cry, and a brutal droning noise – followed by a brief alteration in the quality of the light – filled the hangar. Afterward, a pervasive smell of ozone.
Pettijohn, I knew, had just discharged his own half rifle, the one he’d brought into the hangar slung infantry fashion over his shoulder. My nausea grew deeper, even more intolerably complicated.
Then, like great multifacted eyes with metal lids, the hangar’s skylights closed, and the building was suddenly dark. I surrendered to the darkness . . .
In our pyramid atop the movable mezzanine platform, I awoke on Kretzoi’s bench. Someone had applied a thin gauze bandage to my right temple. The hangar had apparently opened its eyes, too, because light suffused the buildings interior and illumined the triangular panes of our pyramid as if they were church windows. The face above mine belonged to Jaafar Bahadori.
‘I told them you didn’t need a hospital,’ he said.
I shifted my gaze to the left and tilted my head back: There was Kretzoi, staring out the pyramid’s doorway in the direction of the swimming pool.
‘Your Asadi is dying,’ Jaafar informed me tenderly. ‘It’s on its way to the hospital in Frasierville, but no one, I think, holds out much hope. That Pettijohn performed some very vicious surgery with his half rifle.’
‘Your friend,’ I managed bitterly, ‘the one whose sentry duty you took last night – she helped the bastard.’
‘She didn’t want to. Pettijohn brought her along as punishment for speaking to me. The rifle he gave her was a company discard. He made her pluck her name off her uniform sleeve because this morning’s duty roster, which the civki security police check before they let anyone in, showed that E-3 Ludmilla Meddis and E-5 Krishna Mai were supposed to make the food delivery. Pettijohn impersonated Mai and forced Filly to impersonate the woman called Meddis.’
I sat up. The pyramid tilted around me as I did, and Jaafar, standing to give me room, towered away toward the pyramid’s apex. That struck me as odd – Jaafar was not very tall.
‘She didn’t want to help him, my Filly didn’t.’
Anger began pressing up beneath my numbness. ‘Then why did she?’
‘He had a hand weapon concealed amid the plants in his arms. He would have shot her, sir, had she tried to refuse him. In the barracks, before they came out here, he half throttled her to death as a foretaste of what he would do if she didn’t obey. The madman.’
‘She was wearing the optional scarf—’ I began.
‘To conceal the bruises,’ Jaafar finished. ‘They’re terrible.’ His wince conveyed the gaudy painfulness of poor Filly Deuel’s contusions.
‘She slammed a rifle butt into my head, Jaafar.’
‘Only hard enough to knock you down. Happily you had the strength of mind to pretend unconsciousness when Pettijohn bent to examine you.’
‘Unconsciousness wasn’t a difficult thing to pretend just then, Jaafar.’
‘No, sir. The real thing caught up with you, I think, when the lights went out. Maybe, too, the power of suggestion was involved in that.’
Suddenly I felt the absence of Elegy, realized the overwhelming truth about Bojangles. The alien – our Asadi – was dying of wounds inflicted upon him by a Komm-service enlisted man whose intense personal hatred of the Other had overcome both his early indoctrination in the Komm regs and his fear of a long, nightmare-riven Punitive Sleep. Hatred and boredom. The two had worked together to rob Bojangles of his life.
I struck the edge of the metal bench with such violence that I sliced the heel of my hand. Crimson flooded the pale upholstery of my flesh and smeared the knee of my trousers.
I looked to Kretzoi for help. ‘What happened in there?’ I demanded of him. ‘What happened?’
With melancholy deliberateness Kretzoi started to shape a pantomime of the morning’s events.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t understand you.’
‘Young Civ Cather,’ Jaafar jumped in, ‘reached the controls operating the mechanical skylight covers and shut them all as fast as she could. She had no weapon with her on the catwalk, and that was all she could think to do. Very, very happily, it worked. Kretzoi and Filly reached Pettijohn before he could perform any more nastiness with his half rifle. Utter darkness, you see. That one’ – he indicated Kretzoi – ‘took a giant chunk from the madman’s upper chest and unsocketed his right arm. Didn’t you hear the bastard screaming, sir?’
‘I didn’t hear him,’ I confessed, surprised that Jaafar had pronounced ‘bastard’ with no more emphasis than he would have given ‘uncle,’ or ‘xenologist,’ or ‘wife.’
Kretzoi was looking toward the recreation area again, remembering the things that had happened there and shrugging off my hastily withdrawn invitation to narrate the story for me. He didn’t appear to be physically hurt. But I regretted having cut him off so imperiously. Bojangles was dying, and Kretzoi had more than an abstract understanding of this fact.
I reached beneath the bench and found the same first-aid kit from which Jaafar had scrounged a bandage for my head.
