Jaafar began to pace. ‘Filly shouted that everything was under control, you see, and although Civ Cather wasn’t inclined to believe her, seeing what she had done to you, eventually she was persuaded to take a chance and throw back the skylight covers. After that, the civki police were admitted and the various damages assessed. Worst, you already know, was your Asadi. Yes, worst of all was your Asadi, and I arrived with Governor Eisen to—’
Wobbly in the knees and sick at heart, I stood up and approached Kretzoi. Jaafar finally hushed. Although he tried not to show it, he was more than mildly surprised when I reached out with my uninjured hand and began combing Kretzoi’s mane . . .
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Autopsy
Bojangles died in Frasierville. Elegy and I repressed our bewildered grief and urged Moses Eisen to ask Kommthor’s permission to subject the body to both an autopsy and a full anatomical/biochemical computer analysis. It took three days, time during which Bojangles’s corpse lay in a refrigerated chamber in Frasierville’s hospital, but at last this permission came through – whereupon the body was enthusiastically attacked and dismantled. Three mechanic-surgeons and a glass-and-chromium array of transistorized medical equipment attended Bojangles’s dismantling.
Elegy and I weren’t permitted to watch any of these exacting procedures or to record for our own curiosity or use any of the initial laboratory results. Truth to tell, we didn’t much care. We were like squeamish fathers, the sort who don’t want to be on hand for the birth. Bojangles was dead, and the issue of his autopsists’ labors would be a long catalogue of anatomical and biochemical comparison/contrasts demonstrating the precise statistical degree of his alienness.
Your baby, the doctors would tell us, is different, folks. Pull down the blinds and prepare yourselves for an unsettling shock.
When Moses finally came to us with the preliminary results, Elegy and I were seated over an old hardwood table near the hangar’s swimming pool. The soft-wall fence had come down the day after Pettijohn’s attack on Bojangles, and we had spent the week since the Asadi’s death talking desultorily about a new expedition into the Wild and playing card games.
Moses tossed three or four laminated folders onto the table and pulled up a chair.
Behind him in the artificial shrubbery sat Kretzoi. It would be tempting to say that Kretzoi was mourning Bojangles’s death, but, more probably, he had simply surrendered to the ennui of our long confinement. His tendency to lurk in shadows and wander aimlessly through the tubbed botanicals was symptomatic of his boredom.
I tapped one of Moses’s folders. ‘Anything startling?’
Moses held his hands in his lap, below the surface of the table, and spoke to the skylights. ‘Several confirmations of past speculation. The Asadi have a carbon-based biochemistry, and, in almost all respects, they appear to be BoskVeld’s equivalent of terrestrial primates. That confirms past speculation, as I say, but it also happens to be startling.’
‘A far-flung example of independent evolution?’ Elegy offered.
‘Far-flung? Far-fetched? I don’t know which better describes the case,’ said Eisen, still gazing skyward. ‘Bojangles’s cells each contained twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. That’s one more pair than you’ll find in the cellular makeup of human beings. But it’s still remarkably close.’
‘White rats have twenty-two pairs,’ I told Moses with ill-concealed annoyance. ‘And there’s a friggin’ one-celled rhizopod with better than 850 pairs. The number of chromosomes doesn’t mean as much as the type and quality of the genetic information stored within each strand of DNA.’
‘What about this, then?’ Moses retorted, still without looking at me. ‘The DNA molecule comprising the Asadi chromosome has a structure almost identical to that of the human chromosome. In fact, the differences are often minuscule – simple displacements of one or two amino acids in the linear sequence of various kinds of protein molecules. Human beings and chimpanzees share an identical arrangement of the 141 amino adds comprising the alpha chain of the hemoglobin molecule – good evidence for a common ancestor somewhere back in the Miocene.’
‘So?’ I said. ‘The Asadi aren’t chimpanzees.’
Moses finally looked at me, his eyes alert and penetrating. ‘The alpha hemoglobin molecule in Bojangles’s blood tested out with the same 141 amino acids in precisely the same sequence.’
That rocked me, but I didn’t like to show it. ‘You’re proposing that chimps, human beings, and the Asadi all have a Ramapithe-can daddy from good ol’ Sunshine III?’
‘I’m not proposing anything!’ Moses flared, leaning toward me and unexpectedly catching my wrists on the tabletop. ‘I’m trying to detail for you and Civ Cather the results of nearly seventy-two continuous hours of analysis and speculation. I’m telling you what’s been discovered. Your flippancy merely demonstrates the degree of your own confusion, Dr Benedict. If you expect the Governor of BoskVeld to come to you with a personal briefing on this unpleasant topic, you’ve got to have the decency to hear him out with both civility and respect!’
Moses’s face collapsed. He slammed my wrists against the surface of the table, stumbled from his chair, and stalked resolutely toward the door by which Pettijohn and Deuel had entered our hangar nearly a week ago. In the sparse, self-parodying foliage of the recreation area, Kretzoi moved discreetly out of his path.
Stunned, I thought of an instructor in my undergraduate days whose favorite disciplinary strategy was to leave the room and wait for an apologetic student to come to his office with a general appeal that he return. When I saw Elegy hurrying across the carpet after Moses, the prophecy inherent in my recollection seemed to be fulfilling itself: Elegy and Moses talked briefly, then locked arms and came strolling back toward me. I stood to greet them, cowed more by Moses’s vulnerability than by his unusual display of strong emotion.
‘Moses,’ I began; ‘Moses—’
He waved his hand, freed himself from Elegy’s daughterly grasp, and sat down again. ‘I feel as old as God’s little brother,’
