I wandered away from the table and squatted at poolside, transfixed both by their conversation and the snaky fissure running across the bottom of the pool’s deep end.
‘The Asadi regard Kretzoi,’ I heard Elegy tell Moses, ‘at least on a subconscious basis, but maybe even on a sociological level, as one of their walking dead. That’s why, at first, Bojangles kept telling Kretzoi he was afraid.’
‘All right,’ Moses said again.
‘That means we may be able to induce in them, all of the Asadi, not only a “passive repugnance” of Kretzoi but a “worshipful terror.” Weren’t those the terms you used? Why must we send him among the Asadi as a lowly Sudra, is what I’m asking, when we could just as easily send him into their midst as a supernatural Brahman?’
I looked at the figures in dim tableau at poolside. Moses Eisen was leaning back contemplatively in his hardwood chair. Elegy had insinuated the fingers of one hand into the golden pelage of Kretzoi’s mane. The primate, meanwhile, sat beneath her touch with the regal composure of a lion.
‘So that’s what we’re going to do,’ I heard Elegy say with youthful assurance. ‘Kretzoi’s going to impersonate an Asadi king.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Time Between Times
That evening, by sheer chance, I happened through the central lobby of the Chaney Field terminal at the same time a pair of Komm-service guards was escorting former E-5 Spenser Pettijohn to a detention area in one of the field’s outbuildings.
Moses Eisen had sat in summary judgment of the man on the second day after Bojangles’s death, convicting him of the malign abduction of E-3 Filly Deuel, the forcible implication of E-3 Deuel in the commission of a high felony, the misappropriation and criminal use of Kommfleet weapons, and, most tellingly, the ‘malicious homicide’ of a representative of a Komm-protected indigenous alien species.
When I saw Pettijohn in the airfield lobby, I knew he was going off-planet to a GK-world with rehabilitative/punitive Long Sleep facilities. Provisionally sedated and mind-tamp’d, he already looked like a zombie. As Kretzoi, in Elegy’s view, was one of the Asadi’s ‘walking dead,’ Pettijohn was one of ours. When he approached between his guards, I stepped out of the way. The next time he awoke to life he would find himself on an unfamiliar world among strangers, an E-1 again, newly indentured and as stingingly raw as an April onion.
Reborn.
Fifty years of time-released, salutary nightmares lay ahead of him. Dreams that beneficially terrorize the immobile sleeper. Hypnopedagogic visions that insinuate a dawning ethical awareness through a series of varied reenactments of the crime itself. Painful neurological appeals to the heart and the head . . .
Only within the past three decades had the process become economically feasible, and Pettijohn, by his murder of Bojangles, had made himself an heir to Kommthor’s distressing mercy.
I stood in awe of the killer as he passed – not for what he had done, but for the sweet, dread justice of what was about to befall him. Then I hurried through the terminal lobby into the twilight and found a driver to take me to my sleeping quarters in Frasierville.
Although we had continued to share with Kretzoi our mezzanine accommodations in the probeship hangar, Elegy and I had not slept together since the Asadi’s death. Our relationship was strained, only superficially cordial. Kretzoi’s disaffection with human beings had something to do with this, as did, certainly, the lingering trauma of Pettijohn’s killing of Bojangles . . . Maybe Elegy and I had just been too close to each other for too long. Our faces were as familiar as a mismatched pair of shoes you can’t bring yourself to throw away; our smells were as inextricably woven together as the strands of a wet hemp rope.
The morning after Bojangles’s death I had asked Moses to let me move back into town, but he had insisted that all three of us remain where we were until he assessed the reaction of Frasierville’s population to the murder. Rumors would bruit the news about, he said, even if we tried to keep a lid on it; we were safer where Komm-service guards could keep a regular watch on us. I argued that they hadn’t prevented Pettijohn and Deuel from finagling their way in and doing their worst – but Moses merely murmured, ‘Once wounded, twice wary,’ and that was the end of my request.
Now, though, I was on my way home.
The lights of Frasierville welcomed me, and even my ratty sleeping quarters, so in contrast to Moses’s bedecked and arcaded ‘mansion,’ seemed luxuriously appointed. The fusty closed-in smell that greeted me was a perfume, and even the clamminess of my unmade bed exuded a delicious welcome. I was glad to be alone. I kicked around in the dark, tossing my clothes and listening to the inarticulate gurgle of the toilet in my debussy. I could even hear the Wild sighing, a mysterious whisper of growth and decay.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back out there. Bojangles’s death had dampened my fervor. Kretzoi’s regal contempt had soured me on his company. Elegy’s formal politeness, in combination with her renewed faith in her own foresightedness in bringing Kretzoi to BoskVeld, had taken the edge off my desire to accompany her into the Wild again. Besides, it was good to be alone with my imperfections. So good, I confess, that I spent four whole days lounging about intractably with them.
‘Wake up, Ben! You’re holding us up, you wretched slugabed!’
Elegy was on my tiny porch banging at the door and calling my name. She sounded her old impertinent self. Squinting, I opened the door and stared down at Jaafar Bahadori and Kretzoi coexisting in the front seat of a lorry-pool veldt-rover. Buddies. They had just arrived together from Chaney Field, all three of them. Elegy squeezed past me into the room, urging me to get dressed (I was wearing a sleeping jacket whose hem fell to midcalf) and surveying my quarters like a traveler who has
