Elegy turned to me, her wrists bloody and her forearms a speckled burnt-umber color. ‘Could you get the straps out of that box, Ben? I want to fix this little package up right.’
From a box in the cargo section – a small teakwood trunk, really – I removed two wine-colored leather belts, one with a buckle, one with a cat-tongue overlap fastener of Velcro. At the butcher’s table I threaded the belts through the slits Elegy had cut in the beef haunch. Jaafar was struggling to force the blade of his knife through another marbled slab, and his face, contorted by the effort, resembled that of a hired Levantine cutthroat. We had cut four packages of meat from the two beef haunches.
Wiping her brow with her forearm, Elegy said, ‘Call Kretzoi in here, Ben.’
So, from the cargo section, I shouted, ‘Kretzoi, come in here! Hey, Kretzoi!’ and Elegy and Jaafar looked at me as if I had just belched during an especially lovely section of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
But Kretzoi leaped into the Dragonfly and swaggered with a pronouncedly baboonish gait to our makeshift slaughterhouse.
‘Kretzoi,’ Elegy said, approaching him, ‘try this hunk of meat on. We may have to adjust the straps.’
Quite composedly, the primate rocked back on his hindquarters and made a series of hand signs.
‘I’ll comb the “mess” out, Kretzoi. You can’t be your old fastidious self if you go through with this tomorrow, though. The mess goes with the job. That’s just the way it is.’
Elegy hefted the slab of meat by a copper belt buckle and swung the whole package around so that it thudded softly against Kretzoi’s back. She got his forelimbs through the straps and did a careful cinching job in front.
‘Stand up, Kretzoi. Stand up and walk. I want to see if that’s going to be all right.’
Kretzoi stood. With his forelimbs – his arms, rather – bent provisionally before him like someone whose wrists have just been broken, he performed a gimpy minuet. Animal, I thought; only an animal. But Elegy, satisfied, asked him if he were reasonably comfortable. He signaled that he was.
Jaafar and I took the slab off Kretzoi’s back. I unfastened both belts and replaced the meat in the refrigeration locker. The cold air whirling out took my breath away. We cached the other three dressed-out pieces with the first and saved back several small strips of meat for our evening meal. Protein and animal fat.
Thomas Benedict, carnivore.
Jaafar and I went out to the edge of the drop point to check Cy again. Elegy remained with Kretzoi under the awning, soaping the ‘mess’ out of his lovely red-gold fur and scraping away the tangled lather with a comb and a wire brush.
Cy seemed to be stirring. The creature’s truncated body hiccupped alarmingly; the eyes were no longer occluded by a film. Colors spun lazily inside his bottle-glass lenses – a spectral display reminiscent of a carousel whose operator can’t decide whether to run it at three-quarters throttle or shut it completely down. Jaafar lifted his syringe and placed the needle on a vein standing visible in the sparse hair of Cy’s throat.
‘Victim of love,’ he murmured, ready to drive the needle home.
I caught his hand. A twitch of Cy’s head had revealed something odd about the area around his brain stem. A small excavation, in fact. None of us had noticed it before. I gripped the creature’s mane and pushed his head all the way to the right, exposing the neat, almost homey hole.
Through this, it was clear, Bojangles or his mother had withdrawn the medulla oblongata, the cerebellum, and other tasty portions of the neocortical grey matter. They had trephined Cy in order to get at the tempting sweet-breads of his brain.
‘They probably left him his reptilian brain,’ I said; ‘his primitive R-complex and a good deal of the neocortical frontal lobes. That’s all he’s operating on, Jaafar. I doubt he’s in pain. The twitches are nervous responses to the return of a low level of consciousness.’
‘His eyes—’ Jaafar began.
‘They left him Bojangles’s area because they couldn’t get at it. Or maybe because they knew he’d need it to protract this fetid death-in-life state of his. His spectral displays are ritualized patterns. I’d bet they emanate from some kind of roundabout hookup between his R-complex and Bojangles’s area.’
Fiercely, Jaafar said, ‘Let him return, then, to the good, sweet dark,’ and he plunged the needle into the vein in Cy’s neck.
‘We’d do better just killing him. His spectral display’s a distress signal, more than likely – repeated, and repeated, and repeated again.’
‘Pfyu!’ Jaafar spat into the leaf cover at our feet; then he tossed the syringe into the Wild with a savage, underhand flip that slammed his hand into the bottom of Cy’s nest and jammed one of his fingers. He put the finger into his mouth and, turning back toward the Dragonfly in a crouch, sucked at the sudden hurt.
‘I didn’t expect,’ he said, speaking only half intelligibly around his finger, ‘to discover such sick-making things about these creatures.’ Then, as if it were an old-fashioned thermometer, he shook his finger in the air. ‘When we get back, I swear to you I am going to pull a Pettijohn and see if they can’t find me beautiful nightmares on the punishment worlds. It couldn’t be worse than these . . . these eat-your-own-issue boonies! Oh, no; indeed not.’
I walked him back to the tent awning.
Two hours later, at sunset, he ate his slices of solar-broiled beef with as fine an appetite as if he had never seen what he had seen. For that matter, so did I.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Following the
