‘We’re going on over to Rain Forest Port to prepare the BenDragon Prime!’ Jaafar shouted from the veldt-rover. ‘Governor Eisen has given me permission to go, too, sir!’
The vehicle spun out, wheeled left around the southern corner of my quonset, and disappeared. Morning sunlight glittered in the jungle, and, when I shut the door, I faced back into an overmastering dimness.
‘It stinks in here,’ said Elegy’s voice from somewhere in front of me.
My eyes readjusted and I found her. ‘I’ve been burning epiphytes in my bathtub,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. You just reminded me of Jaafar. Good thing he didn’t come in. What’s this about his going with us, anyway?’
‘We may be able to use a little help this time,’ Elegy said seriously. ‘He knows how to handle a weapon, he can fly a Dragonfly, and he’ll stay on the radio for us. Besides, Ben, he’s being subtly harassed by persons unknown. They’ve ripped open his bunk closet and shredded his uniforms. They’ve posted threatening messages to his Komm-service box. Governor Eisen thinks he’ll be better off in the rain forest.’
‘Jaafar? In the rain forest?’
‘Jaafar made the suggestion, but Governor Eisen approved it and I wholly concur. What about you?’
‘Fine. I guess. But where’s E-3 Deuel these days? She being harassed, too?’
‘The day of Pettijohn’s trial Eisen sent her to SteppeChilde with a helicraft shipment. She’ll pull a duty tour out there. I think it’s the Governor’s way of punishing her for handling the situation less expertly than she should have.’
‘Elegy,’ I said abruptly. She looked at me with raised eyebrows, and I asked, ‘Do you really intend to send Kretzoi into the Asadi clearing in the guise of one of their chieftains?’
‘Not right at first. We have some things to do before that.’
‘But eventually?’
‘Yes. That’s why we’re going back.’
‘How do you intend to send him in there? Just as Eisen Zwei entered the clearing on the final three occasions before his death?’
‘As much like that as possible, yes.’
‘Carrying, each time, a dressed-out carcass with which to feed either the Asadi multitudes or himself?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What do you plan to use for meat, Elegy?’
‘Meat. What else? Governor Eisen has given us a couple of sections of imported beef from a recent shipment, and Jaafar’s outfitting BenDragon Prime with a refrigeration locker. If these substitutes don’t give Kretzoi the credibility he needs, we may simply have to use the genuine article.’
‘The genuine article?’
‘Before he was killed, Bojangles told Kretzoi what the Asadi eat when they return to the Wild at night and how it may be possible for us to find their nests. Sankosh lucked into his solitary moment of glory, Ben, but Kretzoi’s going to lead us to our discoveries on the basis of a certain knowledge.’
‘The Asadi are truly cannibals, then?’
Elegy took a tunic off the seat of the cane chair next to my bed, wrapped the tunic around the chair back, and sat down in the midst of all my dwelling’s sweet-and-sour debris. ‘Part time,’ she said. ‘Nocturnal cannibals. Moonlighters, if you like. Where else in the Calyptran Wild could they possibly find meat? My father came to understand their secret, you know.’
Elegy seemed smug again. I wanted to puncture her smugness. ‘We’ve never really considered the possibility that he may have been eaten,’ I said with swift irreverence.
She gave me a puzzled look, then fell into quiet contemplation. After a while she said, ‘Ben, I don’t think that happened.’
I was a prisoner in my own house, trapped by the pathos Elegy generated and the comic dishonor of my early-morning dishabille. It suddenly struck me that this was not where I wished to be.
‘Elegy, you’ve forgotten one very important thing about your father’s description of Eisen Zwei’s various appearances in the Asadi clearing.’
‘The huri,’ Elegy said.
‘The huri,’ I echoed her.
‘I haven’t forgotten at all,’ she said. ‘I really haven’t. Eisen Zwei’s batlike little familiar has been much on my mind, Ben. But do you happen to know a huri personally?’
My expression as neutral as I could make it, I stared at her.
‘Scratch that,’ she said, standing up so quickly she had to grab my chair to keep it from falling. ‘I’m sorry, Ben. I realize no one’s ever seen a huri except my father. Kretzoi tried to ask Bojangles about the creatures, but either the Asadi didn’t understand the sign Kretzoi had to invent or else he didn’t wish to discuss the subject. In any case, the existence of the huri remains conjectural.’
‘You believe in them, though?’
‘As surely as children believe in magic animals and toy-toting old men with long white beards. And for the same reasons, too. My father once told me in earnest they exist, and my father didn’t lie. What about you?’
‘Likewise. But I’m not sure it was my father who told me. I’m getting too old to have ever had a father, don’t you think?’
She approached me, put her arms around me. We embraced, my chin resting on the top of her head. I stared about the cluttered room in dismay, cursing myself for presiding with such brassy equanimity over the refuse heaps of my past and present selves. In comparable surroundings, I reflected glumly, only jackals or vultures would manifest anything even remotely like passion. But here I was yearning toward Elegy again; and, miracle of miracles, blind to the ruins about her, she was responding in kind.
After we had twisted together to my bed, though, she raised her head from the half-sloughed linen and gazed about briefly before subsiding back into my pillow. When I tried to kiss her, she began to giggle. Hiccups. Tiny convulsions. Muffled Gatling-gun laughter.
‘Elegy, what’s the matter?’
Still convulsed, she finally managed, ‘I never thought . . . never thought I’d sink so low.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bojangles’s Brother
Twelve hours later I let the BenDragon Prime sink to a resting place in the Wild. Chaney’s old drop point. Only this time there were four of us rather than three, and we had planned our arrival to
