I woke during the night to realize that Elegy had left our awning tent and gone into the Dragonfly to share a bed with Jaafar. Although I could hear nothing but the wind in the forest, I knew they were in each other’s arms. Would Jaafar call her ‘Civ Cather, my sweet Civ Cather’ at the moment of climax? It seemed quite likely. I grinned in bitter amusement at the prospect.
An hour before sunrise, I dressed, shook down the kinks in my bones, and strolled to the edge of the Wild. Cy lay comatose, or very nearly so, in his relocated nest. In solemn moonlight I cut his throat and lifted him out, as a person removes a new garment from its wrappings in a shallow box. A few of the creature’s exposed intestines slipped free and dangled in the darkness like soft pendulums ticking off the minutes until dawn. I cut them loose and laid the carcass on the ground.
It took me only fifteen or twenty minutes to clean the Asadi meat-sibling, to cut away the hide, the lights, the head. When I was finished, I cradled the denatured meat of his corpse in my arms and carried it back to the helicraft.
Inside the Dragonfly I passed the sleeping couple’s bunk and opened the refrigeration locker in the cargo section. As I was hanging the dressed-out carcass beside the other well-trimmed packages of meat, Elegy’s head and shoulders rose from the anonymous contours of Jaafar’s bedding.
‘Ben?’ she whispered. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘Showing mercy,’ I said in a normal speaking voice. ‘Showing mercy and demonstrating my practical side as well. This is the genuine article I’m stowing here, Elegy, the genuine article.’
Something about her silence suggested that she understood.
‘What about you?’ I asked her. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘Spiting you,’ she said aloud. ‘There’s really no other way to describe it, I’m afraid.’
‘But why?’
‘For failing to believe in what we’re doing. For failing to believe in my reconstructions of the Asadi past.’
That boggled me. Jaafar awoke and sat up in the bedclothes like a man revived from bitter death. He looked surprised but not particularly grateful.
‘Do you believe in them?’ I asked Elegy.
‘In part.’
‘It’s not that I don’t believe them,’ I said quickly, maybe cutting her off. ‘It’s just that I’ve almost ceased to care. One day, Elegy, I’d like to know why humanity has such a hunger to disillusion itself.’
‘My father’s out here,’ Elegy responded, as if that explained everything.
‘Good morning, Jaafar,’ I said.
‘Good morning, Dr Benedict,’ he managed coolly enough.
I closed and bolted the refrigeration locker. Suddenly aware of the foul stickiness of my hands and forearms, I quickly washed up at the vacuum sink, toweled myself dry, and left the helicraft without another word.
Outside, the first thing I saw was Kretzoi standing upright at the nest where Cy had lain and peering down into it with his arms extended before him like man with two broken wrists. When he turned to look at me, his eyes reflected the waning moonlight and his posture suggested a helpless hostility. I dropped my gaze and ducked into the tent. Dawn was painfully slow to arrive.
‘Damn it, Kretzoi!’ Elegy said sharply. ‘Hold still. We want to get there an hour after they do, exactly one hour, and you’re not making this easy.’
Jaafar and I were attempting to position a chunk of meat on the primate’s back, using the belt straps to secure it, and Kretzoi was twisting from side to side to see what we were doing. The meat was cold, its fat the consistency of candle wax. Kretzoi’s nervous shruggings made the package slide in our hands and coat the fur on his back with sticky globules of grease.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Elegy asked. ‘We did this yesterday in the helicraft, remember?’
Kretzoi swung away from Jaafar and me so quickly that the meat slipped free of its straps and tumbled to the hard-packed dirt near our tent. Jaafar bent in groaning disgust to retrieve it, and in silent disgust rethreaded the greasy belts so that we could try yet again.
‘Kretzoi!’ Elegy exclaimed.
The primate made a series of sullen, sloppy signals with his hands.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘What’s his problem?’
‘He says you’ve got to get the package on his back so that he can undo it by himself. Otherwise, he says, we might as well stay home.’
‘His problem,’ said Jaafar astutely, ‘is that he doesn’t appreciate Dr Benedict’s having shown Bojangles’s meat-sibling the ultimate mercy. Nor does he appreciate having Dr Benedict’s hands on him.’
Kretzoi confirmed this assessment with another abrupt but sloppy sign. Then he squatted so that Jaafar, who had finally got the meat strapped and reasonably well dusted off, could position it on his back. I stepped aside and stared intently through the Wild in the direction of the Asadi clearing. ‘Try to take it off,’ I heard Elegy tell Kretzoi, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the primate unbuckle the package and lower it gracefully to the ground with the exposed loop of the other belt. Then Jaafar, having again restrung the meat, lodged the package high on Kretzoi’s shoulders while I reflected, altogether sardonically, that I was out of favor with an ape . . .
‘Two other problems,’ I said.
Elegy squinted at me in the coppery morning sunlight. At her throat and beneath her arms, sweat had already darkened the olive-green dapplings of her jumpsuit’s camouflage. ‘What?’ she asked me.
‘We need a huri,’ I said, finally looking at her.
‘That’s one problem,’ she said. ‘What’s the other?’
‘The other’s this: Eisen Zwei appeared to an Asadi congregation that had been behaving strangely for almost a week prior to his arrival. They’d split into two “teams” – that’s what your father called them – hugging opposite ends of the clearing and carrying on like so many possessed medieval orphans. Kretzoi’s arrival among the Asadi may not have the same impact as Eisen Zwei’s for the simple reason that conditions aren’t the same now.’
Elegy was unperturbed by my reasoning.
