Transfigurations (26 page)

Elegy's So-what? expression was as direct, eloquent, and humbling as a kick in the coccyx. "Let 'em resent us. They already do, anyway. What's a bit more? The restrictions, the punishments—dear God, Ben, it's only what they deser\'e for their loose

talk and their contemptible disregard of their true duty!"

She crossed the bright interior of the pyramid and sat down by Kretzoi, who was asleep on his cold metal bench. She stroked the big primate's mane and stared at me angrily.

Everything she had said was straightforward and irrefutable. I descended from the mezzanine, crossed the hangar floor to a glassed-in closet housing a televid unit, and put through a call to Moses's home.

The Governor heard me out emotionlessly, his face pasty and impassive on the tiny screen. But he promised that within twenty minutes we'd have a six-guard contingent stationed around the hangar. This matter disposed of as if it weren't in the least extraordinary, Moses asked if we'd made any progress with our "trouble-making" Asadi. To show that his choice of words was intended humorously, he gave a wan smile. I told him that Kretzoi and Bojangles had become fast friends, but didn't mention the latler's startling adeptness at picking up Ameslan. Moses nodded amiably, assured me the talk in the barracks would be squelched, along with any conceivable possibility of a raid, and, saying he had a few pointed televid calls to make, almost apologetically broke our connection.

Easy. So easy.

I didn't begin to feel better about things, though, until, less than twenty minutes later, standing in one of the hangar's small southside doorways, I saw the headlights of two armored vans boring through the night across the salt-white brightness of the polymac. Civki security police, independent of the military guards who usually stand sentry duty at Chaney Field. Behind them, the pearly lights of the terminal building and the green-glowing panels of its support shacks. Because 1 didn't want to talk to the newly assigned police—who would take up their positions whether I greeted them or ducked inhospitably out of view—I closed the door and moved through the hangar securing dead bolts and checking the many other possible points of entry. Then I returned to Elegy and Kretzoi.

"You were gone quite a time," Elegy said.

"Everything's taken care of, though. Moses knows what's happening and we've got six laser-toting bodyguards strolling our estate."

"Good." The annoyance of a possible commando assault behind us. Elegy's relief was little greater than if we had just replaced a broken skylight through which the rain had been inconveniently falling. "I think Kretzoi's all right," she told me. "A urine test I administered a few minutes ago shows his blood-sugar levels are back to normal. The work with Bojangles hasn't exhausted him anything like his time in the Wild."

'Tomorrow—" I began.

'Tomorrow we'll let them resume, Ben. During all his time studying the Asadi, Egan Chaney never had a true informant—not even The Bachelor, who probably disclosed as much as he did only out of accident and a happy dim-wittedness. Now, though, we're developing an informant of our own. At the rate he appears able to learn Ameslan, in a week's time we may be transcribing answers to some of our questions directly from Bojangles's own hand signs. And it's Kretzoi's accomplishment, Ben."

"Three cheers for Kretzoi."

Elegy darted me an up-from-under look. "What's the matter? Feel slighted?"

"No, not really. At least I don't think so. It's just that I think we'd better move as fast as we can. Kretzoi's already managed to ask Bojangles about the Asadi temple. Elegy. If he can do that, he can do more tomorrow. Much more, believe me."

'That may have been sheer serendipity, the pagoda business. Kretzoi made a series of gestures imaginatively translating this hangar into the heart of the Wild and then demanding to know if Bojangles had ever seen anything like it out there. Bojangles made an intuitive leap and replied that he had."

'That's not serendipity, that's intelligence. I want to give Kretzoi a list of questions to ask Bojangles tomorrow, just to see how far he gets with them. . . . What objections can you have to that?"

"None," Elegy said almost sullenly, believing, like most

twenty-two-year-olds, that Time is an unestrangeable ally. "Make your list."

Time isn't an unestrangeable ally. It runs out on you. And this time, to my sorrow, it wasn't the youthful expectations of Elegy Gather that prevailed, but the actuarial pessimism of Thomas Benedict. Sometimes the cost of being right is heartbreakingly high.

My list was long. Damn long. It began wth relatively simple questions about obsenable .\sadi behavior, proceeded to matters about which we had been fruitlessly speculating for six or seven years, and concluded with a series of inquiries about the Asadi past and its influence on their present-day lives. I touched on feeding habits, social relationships, the Asadi "chieftaincy," the batlike huri, and so on for a total of nearly sLxty questions, many with overlapping areas of concern. I might have gone on manuscribing all night, but EIeg\- touched my hand and made me stop.

"Select the ten most important ones," she said, "so that I can relay those to Kretzoi in the morning."

"They're all important."

"I won't have time to brief him on sistv', though, and even if I somehow managed, interrupting his sleep to do it, it's not very likely he'd have time to ask them all tomorrow. How do you expect him even to remember so many?"

So I vsinnowed, snipped, and collapsed my questions until there were ten, and the next morning, well before sunrise. Elegy sat dowTi in front of Kretzoi and shaped them for him as he took his breakfast.

In the swimming-pool compound the day began exactly as had the previous one, with Bojangles marching ritually about the interior perimeter of the fence and back and forth through the empty pool itself. Kretzoi sat with his back to the compound's

gates, his wrists on his knees and his hands hanging limply between.

But Bojangles soon began swaying playfully from side to side, finally spinning himself out of his march and bringing himself up short in front of Kretzoi—where he leaned forward and stared unflinchingly at our shaggy field agent.

Kretzoi looked away. A stare is a threat signal among Earth primates. During his time in the Asadi clearing, one of Kretzoi's most difficult adjustments had been learning to meet the eyes of the aliens who wished to engage him in their habitual staring contests. The stress of locking eyes with the Asadi, in fact, may have accounted, in part, for his lapses of strength and his hypoglycemic vertigo. When the Asadi decided he wasn't worth taking on as a staring partner, his stress levels fell—even if his body never wholly regained its former homeostatic condition. But the Evil Eye, as exemplified by the stare, still retained its ability to discomfit Kretzoi; and even during the previous day's gestural tete-a-tete with Bojangles, he had made a point of frequently averting his gaze. You don't face down the Evil Eye.

In this respect, as well as many others, the Asadi had evolved differently. Their staring matches were not merely threat displays and acts of aggression; they were also televid chats, poetry readings, bull sessions, songfests, lectures. An Asadi could communicate on a complex informational level with another member of his species only if he looked him directly in the eyes. A few theorists suggested that the Asadi inhabited their clearing only during the day because only during daylight could they meaningfully exchange information. Vocal communication works at a distance; it carries in the dark as well as it does in the daylight. Gestures and other visual signals, however, depend on proximity and visibility for their effectiveness, and night neutralizes them as surely as does a blindfold. Hence, argued these theorists, the sunset dispersal of the Asadi and their evolutionary triumph over the typical primate phobia of the face-on stare.

Maybe.

At any rate, Kretzoi looked away from Bojangles, and kept his face averted until the Asadi lightly slapped his chest and made the Ameslan signs for "ugly-silent-lazy-friend." Kretzoi responded. Bojangles broke in. And soon the two were gabbing gesturally at great speed. It was too swift and complicated for me, hand-jive gossip at a high level of informational exchange. The conversation also had ongoing pedagogical significance, for Kretzoi continued to augment the Asadi's rapidly growing repertoire of signs.

"They're going like torrential sixty," I told Elegy. "I think they could have handled all my questions, don't you?"

Elegy scrutinized the monitors noncommittally. "We're lucky we've got a hologramic record, Ben. I'm not keeping up very well on my own."

And I exulted, confident we had come through where so many others, including Egan Chaney and earlier temporal projections of myself, had all had to settle for partial answers or no answers at aU.

A pounding interrupted these self-congratulatory musings. My heart leaped numbly. Kretzoi and Bojangles stopped conversing and lifted their snouts toward the source of these repetitive, echoing thuds.

"What the hell is that?" 1 whispered.

"The door's locked," Elegy told me. "It's our morning delivery." Of plants from the Wild, she meant.

She cleared one of our four small monitors and activated the controls of an exterior camera so that we could see the visitors at our door. Foreshortened by the camera's overhead lens into macrocephalic dwarves, two Komm-service guards stood seeking entrance to the hangar, each carrying an armful of plants. They each bore weapons, too.

A heavy-jowled, olive-complexioned man and a pale woman with bright, hawklike eyes. The woman, against regulations, was using the butt of her half rifle to knock on the door. She wore a violet scarf around her neck, an optional piece of uniform for the idiosyncratically debonair. The set of her brow revealed her

distaste for the duty she was performing, and the slammings of her rifle butt against the door occasionally buffeted a skein of roots or a few flower cuttings out of the crook of her other arm.

"Bojangles isn't going to eat," I told Elegy irritably. "I don't know why we're still bothering trying to supply him."

Elegy gestured at the monitor. "They re the ones who're supplying him, Ben. And whether Bojangles eats or not, you're going to have to go down there to open the door. There's no automatic release, unfortunately."

"Do we even want to let them in?"

"I don't, not really—but they're obeying orders and we'd better not alienate the ones who still have the good sense to do that."

So I went. The poundings came at about five-second intervals, the echoes reminding me of depth charges. Negotiating the catwalk, I saw that Kretzoi and Bojangles still hadn't resumed their dialogue. Their heads were tilted quizzically.

Once down, I reached the recreation area's door and cast aside its sequence of heavy metal bolts—only to find myself looking square at the drawn-back butt of the woman's half rifle.

"Today's food supply," she announced, expertly recradling her weapon. In the place on her sleeve where her name should have been there were only a few frayed tufts of purple thread. The man's embroidered name was right where it was supposed to be—but in Arabic characters I was unable to decipher. Although these anomalies registered, they didn't set off in me a chain reaction of increasingly more insightful suspicions.

As soon as they had entered the hangar, the young woman dropped her bouquet of vegetables into my arms, just as if 1 had asked for them, and closed and secured the door. Its bolts fired shut like a battery of pneumatic nutcrackers. My first thought was that this woman knew to take every conceivable security precaution to protect us. Hence, her conscientious bolting of the door.

"I'm Jaafar's friend," the raptor-eyed woman told me suddenly, confirming me in my opinion of her motives. "E-3 Filly Deuel."

"Technically," I told her, glancing at her sleeve, "you're out of

uniform, E-3 Deuel. Your name's no longer legible there."

"She only recently made her new rank," the man said in a well-modulated, faintly accented baritone. "Yesterday the blouse belonged to an E-3 who has also just gone up a grade. That's why Deuel hasn't stitched her own name in yet. You wouldn't report such a minor infraction of the GKR's, sir."

"What's your name?" I asked the man abruptly.

"E-5 Spenser Pettijohn."

"Pettijohn? Why have you rendered your name in Arabic characters, then? That's a right reserved for ethnic personnel, isn't it?"

"My mother was a Hindustani, sir, and before coming to BoskVeld I pulled a five-year tour on GK-world Qattara II in the Veil. I exercise the option by right of both ethnic derivation and past service, you see."

We stood appraising one another with an uneasiness I couldn't identify. Something seemed wrong. Deuel's face in particular betrayed a hint of repressed hysteria. Her lips were slightly open and her cheeks glowed. At that moment, I tentatively began to wonder if Pettijohn and Deuel were really Pettijohn and Deuel.

"Have you had any trouble, sir?" Pettijohn asked.

"Not yet."

"That's good." He gestured with his bouquet. "Why don't you let us take these to the Asadi? I know your previous deliveries were all made earlier in the morning, but last night's arrangements for a permanent detail here at the hangar played havoc with our schedule. If you'll show us the way, then, we'll drop these goodies off and get out of your hair."

My own arms laden, I led Deuel and Pettijohn into the recreation area, through a labyrinth of tubbed plants and carpeted pathways to the clearing where our bright-yellow fence made its kidney-shaped circuit around the swimming pool. Elegy watched us from the catwalk, but I kept my head down and instinctively avoided pointing out her position to the Komm-service guards.

Once beside the fence I unceremoniously heaved the roots.

flowers, and fronds in my hands up and over. They landed on the other side with an audible thump, ahhough a few cascaded back down the wall onto my feet. Deuel, more duty-conscious than she'd been outside the hangar, helped me pick them up.