Tentatively pleased, I drew back and looked at her.
"Lust?" Elegy inquired with straightforward curiosity.
"Probably," I admitted. "With at least an equal measure of purely romantic feeling deriving from—well, the situation itself." I nodded upward through the windscreen at the jungle and the frond-veiled moon.
"All right, then. Come on." She jumped to the clearing's floor and ducked out of sight beneath the nylon awning supported by the helicraft. I got out of my chair and followed her.
Sitting cross-legged on the uninflated mattress she'd been struggling with earlier. Elegy nodded me to a place at her side while pushing determinedly at the heel of her right boot. "De Lambant's problem was lust unmixed with any feeling but the desire to subjugate and possess," she said, at last getting the boot off and beginning to work on the other.
"De Lambant?" I eased myself down.
"The Wasserldufers captain," Elegy reminded me. "I refused her, though, because she enjoyed implying that Kretzoi and I—" She stopped. "Maybe you can deduce the rest for yourself."
"I believe I can," I said.
"Once she asked me point-blank what it was like, and I told her thrilling beyond belief if you were surgically adapted for the experience—a response I thought might discourage any more overtures but which really just increased de Lambant's curiosity about both of us. As you know, my refusals eventually led to her nearly getting Kretzoi quarantined by your credulous Governor."
"You don't have to entertain me on that account. I'm not the sort
to hold grudges or seek a petty revenge. Elegy."
"Who said you were?" Both boots off, she smiled. "Are you going to take part or just watch?"
I drew up my feet and began keying open one of my boots.
"My mother, in an enlightened age, believed she could affirm the 'spiritual' portion of her makeup by ignoring what she considered the 'animal' portion," Elegy told me, peeling her jumpsuit down from her shoulders and revealing the brown half circles of her upper breasts. "Technically, she's still a virgin. Chaney honored her hands-off policy to the very end—I don't know, he may have believed exactly as she did. For that matter, the policy may have originated with him. In any case, I'm convinced that by striving so hard for the angelic and turning their backs on the animal, they never quite edged over into the fully human."
"I never knew that Chaney," I said. "He always seemed to me a man trying to define himself as best he could under circumstances that distorted his every definition. But he came closer than any of the rest of us. Elegy, and I admired him for the attempt."
Elegy was gracefully out of her clothes, and our tryst beneath the bright nylon awning seemed both to illustrate and to mock her story of her mother's division of human nature into spiritual and animal halves. Highfalutin words floating in gyres above the primitive lusts. The trick seemed to be to get them spiraling through each other in precision concert. But for the moment Elegy's hemispherical breasts had me hypnotized and unmanned. I stared at them with mute, little-boy pleasure and they stared unabashedly back.
"Go ahead and look," Elegy said indulgently. "They're a sexual signal at least as much as they're a maternal adaptation."
I knew what she was referring to—the supposition that the human female's breasts have evolved as they have in order to mimic the fleshy buttocks used aeons ago by female hominids to signal adult males of their readiness to mate. The gradual development of an upright posture and efficient bipedalism
selected for similar anatomical signals in front. Hence, hairless, rounded breasts in the female descendants of those still unplacea-ble ancestral hominids of ours. Not to mention the frontal self-mimicry of the red genital labia inherent in the protruding lips of our mouths and the ever-recurrent tendency of human females to paint them pink or scarlet. Originally, such disquieting evolutionary suppositions imply, we were designed to copulate belly to butt and to take our pleasure with the impersonal animal efficiency of baboons or chimpanzees. Maybe that's why women, at one time more thoroughly socialized in tenderness and nurture than males, often seem to find regressive variations on frontal intercourse degrading or animalistic. I don't know. All I know is that by inviting me to look without embarrassment on her naked breasts Elegy set off in me a free-associational nightmare of Asadi belly-to-butt gymnastics that embarrassed me mightily.
"What's the matter, Ben?" She was concerned rather than simply amused—although I think she could have easily burst out laughing, had she not held herself back—and that helped blanch the redness out of my face.
"It's been awhile," I told her lamely. And the last time, I recollected gloomily, in a ball booth on Night Drag Boulevard with a middle-aged woman whose secret peccadillo was biting savagely into a cr^me-de-menthe nougat at the moment of orgasm. She only got to do that once. Once was enough.
"Don't worry," Elegy counseled me. "It's like riding a bicycle. You never forget how."
"People get too old to ride bicycles. Elegy."
"You haven't, have you?"
So I finished shedding my clothes, and with no one watching but my cool, astrally disembodied self and the Pock-Marked Man in Melchior, I discovered that I truly hadn't. . . .
I was still asleep at dawn. Elegy had to awaken me to say that 174
Kretzoi had departed for the Asadi clearing and that we had a full day ahead before he came back to report his progress.
Elegy behaved toward me as she always had, neither more doting nor more aloof than usual, the only difference being her freeness in touching me as we strolled about the camp or talked with each other in the helicraft. These touches gave me a sort of grinning pleasure (except that I suppressed the grins) and a ridiculously improved opinion of myself. At the same time, I began to worry about what failure would do to Elegy. Her single-minded desire to discover both the Asadi pagoda and the fate of Egan Chaney had sustained her for the last several years, and now that desire—that commitment—was irrevocably on the line.
We spent the morning writing and transcribing notes. During the afternoon I again raised the possibility that Kretzoi's monotonous labors among the Asadi might fail to turn up anything new or useful about them. This discussion led me to plot strategies for the future. I suggested a trek northward, in the supposed direction of the pagoda. I proposed that Kretzoi might eventually act as something of an agent provocateur. Perhaps if he suddenly began behaving in anomalous ways, he would prod the Asadi into rare but revealing behaviors of their own. The prime argument against this unorthodox tack. Elegy pointed out, was of course the risk to Kretzoi himself.
"We're going to have to do something," I told her in turn. "I don't expect the Asadi to spill their innermost psychological secrets to us in the next few days. They haven't in six years. Elegy, and your father learned as much as he did, I feel sure, only because he happened to go among them during a cycle in which they were preparing to designate a new absentee chieftain. And the time of his arrival was pure chance."
"He also had patience and persistence on his side."
"But I don't, Elegy. And although you and Kretzoi may, I really don't think those things are the open sesame you're looking for. Six years of patience and persistence have brought the rest of us up against a brick wall."
"You're forgetting this is only Kretzoi's second day in there. Yesterday we saw something no one else has apparently ever seen before, too."
'Touche," I said.
"Patience," Elegy counseled, as people, in those days, seemed to delight in counseling me. "Patience and persistence, Ben."
An hour before sunset, emptied of words and aerodynamically naked in the sticky heat of late afternoon. Elegy and I returned to our pallets beneath the Dragonfly's orange-and-white awning and made patient, persistent love. Then, like newlyweds expecting the arrival of a sensitive and lonely guest, we pulled on our clothes and chastely waited for Kretzoi.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Captive
Little of consequence happened in the following da
ys—if you discount the fact that Elegy and I continued to be lovers.
Each evening Kretzoi, progressively more disoriented and fatigued, came back to us for a meal and a rigorous debriefing session. After greedily devouring the packaged fruit and protein substitutes we had waiting for him, he would sit on his haunches in the hard, cold light of the Dragonfly's kliegs and make shadow pictures on the forest wall with his hands. Without Elegy's help I was unable to follow these exchanges. The signal system they employed—a special "dialect" of American Sign Language, or Ameslan, developed by the Goodall-Fossey primatologists—was still unintelligible to me, and I'd made only a halfhearted attempt to learn it. As a result. Elegy would translate Kretzoi's ramblings aloud and I would operate the recorders.
What we principally learned was that the Asadi, with a certain
inarticulate skepticism, had accepted Kretzoi as one of their own. They allowed him to troop about the clearing, they engaged him in a couple of initial staring matches, and they invited him by angry gestures and whirling optical displays to take part in coitus. So far, because of his size and his maleness, he had escaped sexual assault. The inability of his eyes to pinwheel through a series of chemically motivated color changes had identified him unequivocally as a "mute," however, and despite the fact that human surgeons had given him the thick, tawny mane of an Asadi Brahman, Krelzoi's status among the Asadi was not high. His eyes, Kretzoi felt, disconcerted and even annoyed them—but he had not yet violated any of their ritual taboos and they tolerated his presence as they had once tolerated that of the clayey-eyed Bachelor who eventually befriended Egan Chaney. Although the Asadi had shaved The Bachelor's mane for leading Chaney to their temple, Kretzoi had neither any idea where this temple was (if it existed) nor anyone but us to lead there (should he somehow discover the way). The result was that Kretzoi saw stretching before him an eternity of Indifferent Togetherness in the Asadi clearing. Nothing could have dismayed Kretzoi more. Nor did either Elegy or 1 look upon this prospect with unmitigated delight.
What else did Kretzoi tell us in these debriefings?
Something curious and perhaps significant. Although he hadn't again experienced the rising queasiness of fear prompted in him by the eyebook we'd activated in the Archaeological Museum, his unwilling staring matches with Asadi antagonists had done odd things to his perception of time. More than once, caught unawares by a mesmerizing spectral display, Kretzoi had disengaged several minutes later to find that the sun had clocked off an hour or more's worth of arc overhead.
"Have you ever witnessed any of the Asadi going transparent?" Elegy asked Kretzoi after this revelation. "Have you ever noticed their bodies fading, losing outline and substance?"
Kretzoi crisply signaled No.
I suggested, "Given what he's just told us. Elegy, maybe
I
Kretzoi's the one who's been losing outline and substance. Maybe, as a result of these vampiric staring contests, he's the one who does a fade-out."
Ahhough Kretzoi appeared to have no conception of what I was implying, Elegy touched his shaggy wrist and asked, "What does it feel like—when you're hypnotized by the spectral displays, I mean?"
He stared off vacantly into the Wild for a moment, then made a desultory series of signs with one limp hand.
"That he's holding his own," Elegy translated for me. "That's it—that he's competing very well, indeed."
"But he can't hold his own," I said. "He doesn't have the anatomical equipment. All any of us can do is intercept the sensory output of those displays and try to interpret the data on an emotional level."
Kretzoi made another small flurry of half-formed signs.
"On an emotional level, Kretzoi says, he's too tired to 'talk' any longer. And he doesn't have anything else to tell us."
With that, after moving off wearily, he installed himself in an upright sitting position on Elegy's pallet, closed his eyes, and soon began making asthmatic sleep noises. This was our second-to-last night in the Wild before returning to Frasierville, and I had begun to feel like a blacking-factory owner slowly squeezing theyoie de vivre out of one of my poverty-ridden juvenile laborers. It was time to try something else.
Elegy yielded her pallet to Kretzoi that night and slept in the Dragonfly. I stayed awake, mulling our options and agonizing over both the legal and ethical ramifications of what I had in mind. There was one strategy I had purposely not broached to Elegy for fear she would veto it out of hand, counseling me again—maybe even angrily, preemptively—to the patience and persistence of that model field-worker, her father. I didn't want to risk her
unqualified refusal. Her possession of a Nyerere Foundation grant, with its built-in exemptions from various Kommthor directives and regulations, gave her a degree of official elbow room that I, as an employee of BoskVeld's Colonial Administration, didn't have. Watching Kretzoi sleep, then, and tasting the sour bile of my own frustration, I decided to act on Elegy's behalf, invoking the explicit powers of her grant.
One small klieg continued to shine outward from the helicraft's door. Dust motes swam on the peripheries of the brilliant white cone, and the tangled jungle receded into nonexistence behind it.
Crouching in front of Kretzoi, I prodded him awake. It took three gentle pokes to get a response, so exhausted and sleep-drugged was he.
"Elegy and I have just had a talk," I told him as soon as he had nervously oriented himself to my presence. 'Tomorrow's our last day before going back to Frasierville for a while."
Kretzoi made a one-handed inscription in the air, like a child jabbering objections to some arbitrary adult decree.
"I don't understand you," I whispered, shaking my head. "I won't be able to understand you, Kretzoi. All I want you to do is listen. Elegy's as worn down as you are, almost. We've got to let her sleep.""
Another rapidly executed sign.
"No," I quietly scolded him. "No more of that. I don't understand it, you see. Will you keep your peace and listen?"
One hand rose and twitched before Kretzoi could suppress the inclination to answer.
"I know you want to stay out here," I said with genuine sympathy. "You don't like what you're doing, but you're committed to it—and it's admirable you're willing to make such sacrifices for Elegy's sake."
Kretzoi's eyes shifted almost imperceptibly back into darkness. This time he had no response to make, no words to inscribe on the air.
"I suppose we could leave you out here, to keep from
interrupting the continuity of your presence among the Asadi—but I've told Elegy you need to come out for a while. You need a break, maybe even a comprehensive metaboscanning at the hospital. You're a valuable resource, Kretzoi, and we can't let your sense of commitment be your undoing. Do you understand?"
Although Kretzoi could make a number of subtle discriminations among moods and concepts, in some things he was almost painfully literal-minded. He rested his hands on his upjutting upper thighs and regarded me with a cryptic immobility.
"Do you understand?" I whispered again, at last realizing he was merely practicing perfect obedience. "Nod, Kretzoi. Or signal Yes."
He signaled Yes. At the time, though, I wondered how much of what I was telling him was getting through. More than once on Christ's Promenade I had seen civkis blotto on theobromine or lorqual discoursing cozily with stray dogs. That image mocked me as I spoke to Kretzoi.
"All right, then. Tomorrow's your last full day in the Asadi clearing—at least for a while. If nothing world-shaking occurs, there's something we want you to do just before sunset, something very important and maybe a little difficult. Don't worry, though. We'll be there. Elegy and I, to help you. You're not going to be alone in this, not by any means.
"Before the dispersal of the Asadi into the Wild, Kretzoi, we want you to pick out a likely candidate for capture. We think it ought to be a male—the females may be nurturing infants in hidden nests and we don't want to endanger the lives of their young. So make it a male. And make it one of
the smaller ones. You're going to have to overpower him at sunset, just before he rushes off with the others. A young, small male, then. That's good because the specimen's youth may give him the flexibility to bounce back from the shock of being forcibly detained. Ideally, we'd take an infant out with us for its adaptive potential—but that's impossible. There aren't any in the clearing, none.
"Are you following what I'm saying?" I finally asked, an audible
hoarseness in my whisper. "This is very important, Kretzoi, you've got to keep it all straight. Signal Yes or No. Do you understand what we're asking of you?"
Kretzoi signaled that he understood.
"Do you think you can do it, then? It involves a certain clear risk to yourself. Suppose the other Asadi turn back to aid the one you've overpowered. Suppose the creature himself has enough strength to resist you. We've never tried anything like this before. I can't predict exactly what's going to happen. We want a healthy specimen, Kretzoi, but not a mighty mite. This depends very much on you. Do you think you can do it?"
Kretzoi indicated that he could do it. His optical carapaces reflected the brightness of our helicraft's tiny klieg, and the eyes inside them were pricked into alertness by what I had proposed.
I began to feel strangely ashamed of my ruse, as if I had betrayed rather than upheld a loved one. Kretzoi, I learned at that moment, was utterly without guile, or suspicion, or irony, or any of the other cerebrally duplicitous tendencies of human beings. Believing that I had talked with Elegy about capturing an Asadi, he intended to fulfill our requests of him as well as he was able.
"Try to go back to sleep," I urged him in my ugly-sounding, strangled whisper. "We only just made up our minds to do this, you see. Elegy would have outlined it all for you in the morning, but I told her she ought to try to sleep in." Obsessively even in the face of Kretzoi's silent but ready acceptance of everything I had said, I went on fabricating rationales for his convincing. . . .
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