Transfigurations (25 page)

'The sign for 'afraid,'" Elegy excitedly mused. "Ordinarily you start with objects—'cup,' 'book,' 'chair,' 'eyes,' and so on— because you can define them by pointing. Bojangles has begun with an intangible, Ben, with an abstract emotion. That's incredible—it's spine-tingling."

"Maybe he selected randomly among the signs Kretzoi showed him," I proposed. "He's mimicking, after all, and he had to start somewhere."

"No, no," she countered. "Look at the monitor. Bojangles knows exactly what the sign means, just see if he doesn't."

In closeup, Bojangles's baboonish face: lips skinned back in the primate's characteristic fear rictus. Tenor and vehicle of the gestural metaphor conveyed together in a sick, scary grin.

"It's nothing supernatural," Elegy said huskily. "Kretzoi probably drew his own lips back when he made the appropriate sign. Did you notice?"

"No, I was watching Bojangles."

We used our playback monitor and confirmed that Kretzoi had indeed displayed the fear grin while making the sign for "afraid" or "frightened." My stomach's squadron of butterflies found roosting places and fluttered less energetically. But my hands were clammy.

"Nothing supernatural or occult," Elegy repeated. "Bojangles simply picked up on the facial expression and the hand sign together. God, though, wasn't it quick of him?"

The conversation at poolside continued, Kretzoi repressing his surprise at Bojangles's nimble-wittedness and reeling off so many vocabulary signs that it was clear he was going overboard. For definition's sake he pointed, pouted, shrugged, and played mime, Ameslan and digital dumb show getting bollixed up together like yam in a box of fishing tackle. Bojangles paid strict, even slavish heed.

Then he made the fear sign again.

"But he doesn't look frightened," Elegy observed. "Outside of sleep periods and grooming sessions he's as calm as we've seen him."

"It's a frightening thing, having the combined past and present literatures of Earth dumped on you in sign language in three minutes' time," I said, both fascinated and amused by Bojangles's supposed fear.

"Do you remember. Ben, at the museum, Kretzoi told us the Asadi eyebook had invoked in him a distuibing fear pattern?"

"I remember."

"Maybe, in both cases, the fear derives irom the head-to-head clash of two different cultural units at the level where compromises have to be reached. Their owti discrete systems of convening information and knowledge. 1 mean. Kretzoi"s emotional reaction to the eyebook program may have been a measure of his hopelessness in confronting so alien a system as the Asadi's. That system, being mechanical, refused to compromise."

"Then, why is Bojangles afraid? Kretzoi's beginning to show a little consideration. he"s slomng do\^"n. That's compromise for you, isn't it?"

In fact. Kretzoi was now forming signs like an elocution teacher pooching out the lips and curling the tongue to demonstrate precisely how a sound ought to be made; and Bojangles was watching with rapt studiousness. hardly a heart-tugging picture of fear.

Eleg}" said. "1 don't know why he's afraid, if he really is. Maybe because the compromise—if that's what it is—is taking place entirely within the terms of Kretzoi's s^^stem. Bojangles is having to set aside the polychromatic optical language that's the .\5adi heritage. That's a loss, it's really a kind of self-negation. \^'hy shouldn't he be afraid? \^'hat if you found youKelf among a tribe of extraterrestrials who insisted you communicate with them by. say. conscious control of the passing of intestinal gas."

1 laughed out loud. "Unless they offered to assist me, I don't think I'd be afraid." But suddenly the butterflies in my gut rose en masse and performed a clumsy vk-ing roll. "In Bojangles's case, Eleg>% I think you're taking too restricted a \new. He's not frightened by the Berlitz course Kretzoi's giving him."

"He doesn't seem to be," she confessed. "Maybe it's homesickness, and the sense of disorientation, and the newness of—" She gestured sweepingly at the gloomy interior of the hangar.

"Probably," I agreed.

And for nearly ten hours, with time-outs only for water and comfort breaks, Kretzoi and Bojangles played pedagogue and pupil. By midafternoon the two were exchanging information, groping toward interspecies understanding, and, in the process, amusing the hell out of each other. Elegy and I watched them with mounting wonder and a certain envious admiration.

"What did you learn, Kretzoi?"

Elegy interpreted the signs he made: "That the pagoda exists. That Bojangles himself has seen it and knows it exists."

"Where?"

"Bojangles wouldn't tell him that. The penalty for revealing its location is—well, pariahhood. The mane is shaved, the betrayer ignored."

"What else, Kretzoi? What else?"

Our debriefing was taking place on the movable mezzanine where the three of us had established our sleeping quarters. A pyramid of white planvas sat atop the factory flooring of the mezzanine, providing a translucent interface between ourselves and the honeycombed storage areas of the hangar.

Inside this pyramid Kretzoi regarded me numbly from a bench that looked to have been made from an outsized erector set. Physically drained, he was taking a transfusion of glucose; he could sign with only one hand, his left, and that hand had suddenly stopped gesturing.

"Did you ask them how they feed, or why he isn't taking solid foods, or what role cannibalism plays in their—?"

"Whoa," Elegy said. "They've just started kindergarten and you're already giving Kretzoi a graduate-level exam."

"He's already found out about the Asadi temple," I protested, waving my arm and accidentally gouging the planvas wall. "Why not a few of these others?"

"Even Ameslan prodigies can't discuss everything the cosmos

holds in a single day. And Kretzoi's exhausted, weak. He's on medication to suppress insulin production, and he's got a needle in his arm. Have mercy, Ben."

Kretzoi regarded me appraisingly, but not, I felt, wlhout sympathy. How strange. Sitting in judgment of me, a chimpoon with a urine-colored bag of glucose suspended over his head from an aluminum monopod.

"\^Tiy don't we give him a day off?" I suggested.

Kretzoi shook his head, his mouth hanging open like a pouch.

'You could go dovsTi there with Bojangles," I told Eleg)-. "Kretzoi's taught him the finger talk; you could continue the lessons—make the sort of inquiries tliat might lead us direcdy to the temple."

Eleg)' squinted at me, then shook her head and looked away. "The only trouble with that is . . . Bojangles probably won't believe I'm an Asadi. I'm convinced he thinks Kretzoi's a kissin' cousin if not a prodigal sibling. Do you really want me to risk going in there tomorrow to see if I'm accepted as readily as Kretzoi's been?"' Elegy's eyes, opening wider and flaring like hot acetylene, again intercepted mine. "Maybe you'd like me to cut off my hair and pretend to be an Asadi outcast. That would gain me acceptance, more than likely, but it wouldn't make me a very popular confidante."

"I'm sorn.-," I said, meaning it.

"^^Tiat we're doing now is extremely important, Ben. We're learning things no one else has learned, ever. In t^vo days we've justified both my grant and our rashness in abducting an Asadi from the Wild."

"Patience," I counseled myself sagely. "Persistence."

Elegj's eyes torched me with flames of exasperated admiration. "God, you're just like a little boy."

"Not in everything, young lady. Not in ever.-thing." I ducked my head and went through the p\Taniid's doorway to the mezzanine platform outside.

"Where you goin"?" Eleg)' called.

"For some air," I said. "To bum the weeds Bojangles turned up his nose at today. We all need a vacation from me, I think."

I went down the perforated metal steps and across the gloomy hangar floor to the recreation area. My own weariness was like a drug in my veins.

CHAPTER TEN

The Experiment Ends

The umbrellalike roots of the epiphytes smelled the worst. They burned along their nodulous ganglia like a tangle of gravid snakes hoisted over charcoal and prodded into writhing incandescence. The odor was a blend of curdled mayonnaise and mint-scented feces. All that made their burning bearable was the open veldt country sweeping away to the northeast of the knoll behind the hangar, that and the freshness of Bosk Veld's winds blowing across the pit. The stars looked like microscopic screw heads rotated into the hidden template of the universe. I stood on the knoll poking at the mass of coal-bright roots and staring toward the empurpled, northeastern horizon.

"Dr. Benedict!" a voice hailed me.

A figure with a high-powered hand lamp was approaching me from around the northwestern comer of the hangar. A solitary figure. He had nearly a hundred meters to go before we would be

close enough to converse in anything other than shouts. All I could do was watch the white-blue beam of his lamp stutter around the landscape until he arrived. Usually, it crossed my mind, Komm-service guards patrolled in pairs.

It was the young Iranian, Jaafar Bahadori. Over one shoulder he carried a lightning-emblazoned laser half rifle, exactly the sort of weapon with which our hangar's legendary muralist had etched his erotic masterpiece. Jaafar's boots, I noticed, were of the stalking variety favored during field maneuvers and commando assaults.

'That stinks," he said by way of greeting.

"I didn't know you had to pull guard duty, Jaafar. I thought you were safely ensconced in the lorry pool or over at Rain Forest Port."

"I am doing a friend a favor, sir."

"Someone talked you into taking his duty?"

"I talked her into letting me take it for her."

"Such altruism."

Jaafar nudged the burning epiphytes with his boot toe. "That really stinks. How is it you are standing it?" But he squatted near the pit as if to inhale the full unadulterated aroma and told me, "There's been some talk in her Komm-service barracks, says my good friend, about putting on night face and staging a commando raid on the hangar. Much of it is lorqual loquaciousness, as they say, mere silly drunk talk, but some of it is truly serious."

"A commando raid?" I exclaimed. "What for?"

"To capture the Asadi and put it to death. A war game, you see. Boredom is rife these days, she says. Her barracks-mates' last maneuvers were three months ago, and carrying vegetables out of the Wild every morning for your alien has given some of them nasty ideas. They don't like to play at catering service for your . . . well, your—"

"Boonie?" I suggested.

"Yes, sir. For a boonie." Jaafar stood and gazed up at the sky— a moon was rising. "I have a partner on the other side of the building, sir. I told him he could patrol that side and go googly

over the lovely laser scrawls if he'd just give me time to make my circuit. I had been pretending a limp until I got clear of him, you see, and so he thinks I'm slow."

"Is your partner one of the conspirators?"

"I don't know. He doesn't talk to me very much. He did not wish to talk to you, either. He was very happy, this one, to let me come around here and fill my nostrils with this . . . this . . . this terrible effluvium," he concluded, pleased with himself.

"Why hasn't your friend reported the mutinous talk?"

"Oh, no. Impossible. She's a daughter of the Martial Arm, Planetary Command. Her loyalty to her comrades-in-arms prevents her."

"What about her loyalty to Colonial Administration, Jaafar? Maybe her priorities are badly scrambled."

"Aren't I here? Didn't she let me come in her place tonight, knowing I would do the necessary?" Jaafar seemed to think these rhetorical questions settled the matter. "It's time for me to go, sir."

'They'd be crazy to try anything so foolish," I said to Jaafar's back. The barrel of his half rifle topped his shoulder like an evil smokestack.

He turned. "Some of them, she says, are truly crazy." With that he went off halt-footed down the knoll, getting in practice for the partner who believed him temporarily lame. "Good night. Dr. Benedict." The words were partially muffled by a long, warm gust off the veldt. The crinkling epiphytes smoldered in their pit. After watching them a time, I went back into the hangar.

"Do you believe him?"

"Do I believe there's been talk in the barracks of a lynching party, or do I believe they really mean to throw it?"

Elegy made a moue of distaste at my semantic fussiness. "The

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latter, of course. Do you really think they'll do it?"

"The talk I'm certain of, Elegy—it's typical barracks talk. But the other's dicy. Jaafar's friend is right, though. Some of the Martial Arm's planetbound E-graders are hotbrows, even with off-duty tranqs, thetrodes, and lorqual to keep 'em cool. They don't like it here, but they're indentured for life. If they rev themselves into it, they might risk courts-martial or even a big half-C of Punitive Sleep."

"Just to get Bojangles?"

"Apparently."

'Then there's danger to Kretzoi, too. I wouldn't trust them to distinguish between an Asadi and an imported replica, especially if it's dark and they're all spring-wound like cuckoo clocks."

"Do you want to get out of here?"

"Where would we go? This is the perfect place for the sort of work we're trying to do, Ben. Why don't you call Governor Eisen? Tell him what you've learned. Surely he'll send out a special unit to protect both us and the hangar—for at least the next few nights, anyway."

"That special unit would probably be partially comprised of some of the very guards who've been volleying about the notion of a raid."

"Fine. Let 'em know someone in authority knows what they've been plotting. That by itself might be enough to keep 'em honest. We'd be stupid to take the chance their in-barracks bravado isn't going to spill over into a real working out of their fantasies. There's too much at stake to hope they're all just swaggering in their socks, Ben."

"If I tell Moses, there'll be restrictions and punishments among the Komm-service guards and even more resentment of our presence out here."