Elegy had made the same private intuitive leap. Extending her hand toward the Asadi, she spoke to it:
‘You can see what we are. You’ve met another like us. We believe he’s here – that other one whom we resemble.’ She passed her hand back and forth between herself and me, excluding Kretzoi.
The Bachelor merely stared, his eyes inanimate and grey.
‘Egan Chaney,’ Elegy said more loudly. Understanding that she might be trying to bridge an unbridgeable chasm, Elegy conversed rapidly with Kretzoi in Ameslan and urged the primate to intercede for us.
Kretzoi obeyed. But as he approached The Bachelor, the huri grew more and more agitated, lifting its wings and expanding its tiny, oyster-colored chest. All the while it scrabbled back and forth between The Bachelor’s shoulders. Its activity confounded and alarmed Kretzoi, who finally halted and began making hand signs that the huri’s own unceasing movements seemed to render pointless.
The Bachelor wasn’t Bojangles. We weren’t going to bridge the chasm separating us with Ameslan or anything like it.
But Kretzoi persisted. Ignoring the huri’s frantic dance of annoyance, he crept forward, hunkered, spoke with his hands, crept forward again, hunkered, and so on – until he was virtually genuflecting at The Bachelor’s feet.
Kretzoi’s last approach so intimidated the huri that it threw itself into the air and disappeared with almost insulting swiftness into the vault of the temple, somewhere high above the ring of energy globes.
Abandoned to his own devices, The Bachelor panicked. He cuffed Kretzoi glancingly across the snout and attempted to run over him – past the wall of eyebooks and down the eastern corridor of the pagoda. He failed because Kretzoi, after recoiling from the unexpected blow, ran him to ground just abreast of Elegy and me. Almost indistinguishable, the two of them rolled about in the mouth of the eastern corridor.
‘Kretzoi!’ Elegy barked, and before I could stop her she was straddling the two animals, shifting her feet to keep from being toppled and pulling determinedly on Kretzoi’s mane.
I joined her, and we got them apart. The Bachelor – my knee in the hollow above his left hip, my hands pressing his face against the flagstones – lay trembling but acquiescent beneath me. Kretzoi, meanwhile, shook free of Elegy’s angry grasp, retreated several meters into the corridor, and, moodily, began grooming himself.
‘Damn,’ Elegy mumbled to herself. The murmurous ‘voices’ of the pagoda disguised their source by frequently ceasing and then abruptly resuming. The place was alive, and we were intruders in its sanctuary . . .
From out of nowhere the huri dove upon me in a long, erratic sweep. A wing tip brushed my hair, after which the beast wobbled away down the eastern corridor, executed an amazing midair turn, and came gliding back toward us. I fell across The Bachelor, saw Elegy drop to her knees, and watched the huri go teeter-tottering above us, only to fall to rest on the floor of the central chamber. Here it tiptoed about with its wings spread, ultrasonically berating us, emitting high-pitched echolocation pulses in order to define us in space.
Visually blind, the huri ‘saw’ us in three dimensions. It did so by means of a continuous biosonic scan and a brain so sensitive to the reflections and reradiations of its high-frequency pulses that its lack of vision was no handicap at all. The huri, I felt sure, possessed a sophisticated bioholographic neurological complex that made Elegy, Kretzoi, and me as palpable to it as three blocks of stone under a sculptor’s hands. Strutting cryptically and bombarding us with orientation pulses that we could neither see nor feel, the creature held us at bay.
Kretzoi, on all fours, made a threatening move toward the huri – but Elegy put up her hand to restrain him. Whispering, I explained that the blind huri was not blind at all. ‘It “sees” your hand,’ I told Elegy. ‘It “sees” Kretzoi poised to spring. We’re each one of us a three-dimensional auditory image with frequency, amplitude, and phase.’
Elegy lowered her hand.
‘And the pulses the huri emits to create temporal and spatial holograms of us,’ I went on, still holding The Bachelor down, ‘may also be either signals to its fellows or commands to the living machinery of the pagoda. Maybe both.’
‘All right,’ said Elegy. ‘And what does that mean?’
I took my knee from The Bachelor’s hip and eased myself to a standing position, thus releasing my prisoner. ‘I don’t really know – but look up there.’
The Bachelor lay immobile at my feet, even though I had let go of him. Meanwhile, the wide iron ring supporting the temple’s energy globes began to descend through the center of the helical stairway. The globes themselves grew brighter, and the entire vast apparatus produced a choral humming sound as the ring descended. The torus appeared to be completely free-floating, perhaps with a mechanism for the gyroscopic negation of gravity at spin in its interior – a mechanism that might also have been responsible, I reflected, for the ring’s strange humming. Just as the huri was no doubt responsible for its descent.
At last The Bachelor moved. He rolled over and got to his feet as gingerly as I had. Then he walked past Elegy toward the pagoda’s central chamber, limping almost imperceptibly. Before he could reach the huri, however, the ring halted a little over two meters from the floor and hovered there like a gigantic tiara set with three enormous glowing jewels. A painful brightness illumined the chamber, and the huri danced spastically in its sheen.
Then a section of the floor began to move. A grating sound filled the pagoda, a protracted groan punctuated by several deafening clicks. The moving section of floor was circular, about two and a half times the diameter of the torus floating above it. It clocked to the right and kept moving clockwise until it had screwed itself free of the surrounding flagstones. Then, on a carven stone stem resembling an Asadi with four huge, blind faces, this circular block
