‘Let’s go!’ Elegy shouted. ‘Back to Jaafar and the BenDragon Prime!’
From out of her backpack she materialized a tarp with a crimped, self-sealing edge. This she applied to the top of the Asadi nest – almost as if she were covering a gigantic pie with a piece of tinfoil. Rain began pooling in the tarp’s depression and rills, then gathering and spilling to the ground. Four plastic handles spaced about the circumference of an additional tarp – this one slung beneath the nest – gave us a means of sharing the burden.
Gripping these handles, Kretzoi, Elegy, and I set off through the gnarled root arches of the mangroves and into the dense, streaming foliage all about them.
We trudged for thirty minutes, rested briefly, took up our burden again, trudged another demoralizing half hour or so in the thickening mud, stopped a second time. We continued in this way until the rain had dwindled to a mist indistinguishable from our own prolific sweat. When we were less than an hour from Jaafar, whose off-trail words of cheer kept breaking into our struggle, we finally allowed ourselves a decent interval of rest before the final push. As we rested, the rain stopped completely. This development gave us enough heart to start moving again.
Seven hours after we had left the drop point, we came back into the tiny clearing so exhausted and muddy-brained that Jaafar had to undress Elegy and me and put us to bed. Kretzoi, I was later told, slept on his side on a narrow dry spot under the helicraft’s tail section.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Love of Cannibals
‘You probably have Asadi blood flowing in your veins,’ I told Jaafar at our high-noon breakfast the following day.
Although aware that I was joking, Jaafar had no good idea how he was supposed to react. ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked me gravely, a spoonful of reconstituted honey halfway to his lips.
‘Because Elegy believes we all do. Our hemoglobin is Asadi hemoglobin. And vice versa. Blood’s thicker than the hydraulic pressures of evolution, it seems.’
Jaafar looked at Elegy for denial or confirmation. She was noncommittally sipping her juice.
‘Later,’ I went on, ‘the Asadi’s ancestors came to BoskVeld and cut down all the trees but these. Hence, the veldts.’
Elegy gave me a swift, appraising look over her cup. Kretzoi was in the Wild somewhere. Bojangles’s half-eaten brother lay in his nest in the helicraft’s cargo section. Only a few minutes before joining us at table, Elegy had removed the tarp covering the nest.
‘The Ur’sadi lived for several million years on their own planet,’ I persisted, still watching Elegy, ‘without suffering any major evolutionary or cultural upheavals. With the fruits of a self-perpetuating and incredibly advanced technology, they lived in near-perfect social and moral equilibrium. Very intelligent, very temperate folk. Then they botched an evolutionary experiment in our solar system, leaving behind their hemoglobin’s molecular structure as a calling card. A million or so years later they decided to come to BoskVeld to escape the expansion of their sun into a menacing red giant.’
‘Pure speculation,’ Elegy said. ‘Space opera.’
‘But you’re its scenarist, aren’t you? You’re the author?’
Elegy said nothing. She sipped her juice and studied me as if I were a pet that has just demonstrated its untrustworthiness indoors.
‘I’m synopsizing, Elegy; plagiarizing. You know that.’
‘I wasn’t talking for the record!’ she suddenly flared. ‘I certainly didn’t expect to have you quoting me verbatim once we got out of that goddamn mangrove thicket and back into the light of day!’
Embarrassed, I looked at Jaafar, who immediately renewed his acquaintance with the honey bowl before him.
‘Haven’t you heard of ghost stories?’ Elegy demanded. ‘Or tall tales? Or epic adventures? My father had. He used to package them up in visicom ’settes and send them to me when I was a little girl in the Tri-Mesa. Once a week they came. They made life in an E-cube bearable. I didn’t confuse them with reality, either. They were full of marvelous notions, those stories – but you didn’t have to believe in the marvelous notions, just entertain them for a while. So that you, in turn, could be entertained by your private pretense of belief.’
‘You were trying to entertain me last night?’
‘Not just you,’ Elegy said. ‘Myself, mostly.’
‘I’d like you to finish your story, then. You didn’t explain what you thought happened to the Ur’sadi to bring them to ruin – beyond an intensification of production that depleted resources and a population explosion that made the burden even worse. How could such a stable, intelligent folk get themselves in such a bind?’
‘We’d better check Bojangles’s meat-sibling,’ Elegy said, nodding aft and putting down her cup.
‘He’ll be all right. He’s survived this long without Bojangles’s aid, or ours, or anyone else’s. Come on, Elegy – the rest of your story.’
‘Please,’ Jaafar suddenly put in. ‘I would like to be . . . to be entertained, too, Civ Cather.’
‘All right,’ Elegy said, leaning back and blowing a puff of air toward her forehead. ‘What I think happened is this:
‘BoskVeld, despite being habitable to the Ur’sadi, wasn’t by any means a “carbon copy” of their home world. Denebola, too, posed problems for them. After they’d been here a millennium or more, it began radiating in unpredictable sunspot cycles disruptive of the sensitive workings of their eyes and their blood chemistry. The sunspot activity caused lymphocyte deficiencies, and these deficiencies, in turn, caused a variety of diseases the Ur’sadi had never experienced before. In addition, disturbances in BoskVeld’s magnetic field – another result of the violent sunspot activity – played havoc with their eyesight. Their ability to communicate optically was subtly impaired. The same thing had happened to their representatives on Earth, of course, but not to such a pernicious degree.’
‘It wasn’t the sun that did them in on Earth,’ I told Jaafar. ‘It was our devilish
