‘But why did he want to blind himself?’ I asked.
‘Figuratively, he was committing suicide. He was old and sick and weary of the rigors of his absentee chieftaincy. If blindness is an absolute metaphor for death, the Asadi who purposely puts out his eyes is symbolically killing himself. In Eisen Zwei’s case, according to Chaney’s monograph, actual biological death followed this metaphorical death by less than thirty hours. The metaphor hastened the reality, in fact – just as Eisen Zwei wished it to.’
Elegy’s face took on a sudden jaundiced glow. ‘Bojangles stared at the sun, or tried to, almost the entire first day we had him in here!’
‘Exactly.’ Moses cocked his finger at Elegy as if she had just solved an especially difficult equation. ‘His behavior wasn’t an involuntary manifestation of Asadi photoperiodism, but Bojangles’s own conscious attempt to kill himself. He wanted Denebola to burn his eyes out.’
‘It didn’t,’ I said.
‘That’s because the hangar’s skylights – to keep the temperature in here bearable – filter out most of the radiation in the yellow and green parts of the spectrum. An inadvertent result of this process was that Bojangles was unable to blind himself. Ironically, even though he didn’t eat the plants that were hauled in for him, his staring upward helped keep him alive. He was “feeding” in the red and violet parts of the spectrum, you see, and photosynthesizing all the nutrients he required from air, water, and sunlight. Even when he and Kretzoi started conversing and he gave up trying to blind himself, Bojangles was still deriving all the sustenance he required from Denebola’s filtered light.’
‘He wanted to kill himself,’ Elegy murmured.
‘That’s not hard to believe, is it?’ Moses asked her. ‘Look at this place we’re in. You can’t expect a creature who’s never seen anything like this hangar to adjust to an abrupt and unexpected confinement within it. Bojangles had spent his entire life in the Calyptran Wild. You tore him up by the roots and relocated him in an environment terrifyingly alien.’
‘But Bojangles had seen something like this hangar before, Moses.’ I walked along the edge of the pool toward the place where I had last seen Kretzoi lurking.
‘He had?’ Moses pushed himself away from the table and maneuvered his chair about so that he could see me. ‘What?’
‘The Asadi pagoda,’ Elegy whispered in a throaty way that carried. ‘Or the Ur’sadi temple, if you prefer.’ Then, in her normal voice: ‘Of course Bojangles may never have been inside the temple. So it’s entirely possible you’re correct, Governor Eisen – the hangar’s strangeness may have been enough to prompt him to try to blind himself. Suicide, if you like.’
‘Kretzoi!’ I called. ‘Kretzoi, come out here!’
He emerged reluctantly, walking on all fours like a baboon on open savannah. The fact that he could go upright as well as most human beings was lost in the disdainful animality of his approach.
Half to show my concern, half to bedevil him, I put my hand on Kretzoi’s mane and walked him back to the table.
‘Bojangles told you he’d seen the pagoda described in Chaney’s monograph. He told you that on his second day in here, didn’t he?’
Kretzoi nibbled at a tuft of hair on his shoulder, then smoothed it with his tongue.
‘Kretzoi, I’m talking to you. Bojangles told you he’d seen the pagoda. He told you a good deal more, too. Information you haven’t shared with us in the wake of his . . .’ I let my voice trail off.
‘Murder,’ Elegy finally said. ‘In the wake of his murder.’
At that, Kretzoi reared back and promptly made the Ameslan sign for ‘murder.’ Then he looked accusingly at each of his human interlocutors in turn.
‘This from a hybrid creature,’ I told Moses, ‘whose progenitors sometimes bashed open the skulls of infants to get at their brains.’
‘His genetic makeup is partially chimp, partially baboon,’ Elegy countered angrily, ‘but human beings also happen to be one of his “progenitors”! His intelligence was augmented and, apparently, so was his capacity for sensitizing himself to that voice in the neocortex we call conscience. The same thing should happen to you.’
Moses laughed. I exhaled audibly and held up my hands in mock – no, in genuine – surrender.
‘We’re going back into the Wild,’ Elegy enthusiastically told Moses, ignoring me. ‘No more field studies among the Asadi. No more windy speculation about origins and endings. We’re going to look for the temple, where all our answers assuredly lie.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Moses. ‘How are you going to find it? Geoffrey Sankosh, if you’ll recall, spent the better part of a year in there looking for that building and the remains of your father. And he didn’t find either.’
‘He didn’t have Kretzoi.’
‘Do you “have” Kretzoi, Civ Cather? And even if you do, what can he accomplish for you if you don’t remove another Asadi from the Wild for him to tutor in the basics of Ameslan?’
‘Look through the carapaces over his eyes, Governor.’
Moses hesitated.
‘Go on. Look at Kretzoi’s eyes and tell me what you see.’
Moses drew back from the creature and said, ‘I know what his eyes look like, Elegy. To some extent, like mine. Or like yours. They’re not the eyes of an Asadi.’
‘Unless you suppose they’re malformed in some basic way, Governor – as if congenitally lacking in a full complement of photosynthetic pigments. In the Wild, the Asadi accepted Kretzoi’s presence, but after they’d discovered his . . . his handicap, they treated him pretty much as my father said they treated The Bachelor. That is, they tolerated him among them, but they found his presence disturbing. The cause of their uneasiness was his eyes.’
‘All right,’ Moses said, waiting to be convinced of Kretzoi’s future usefulness but altogether skeptical of the
