When Bojangles wasn't focusing on Denebola's passage from skylight to skylight, Kretzoi managed—astonishingly enough—to establish something like a personal relationship with him. Elegy and I, in light of this, began to feel that the presence of a great many Asadi might have acted to inhibit meaningful intercourse— in all that term's appropriate connotations—among small numbers of individuals. We supposed this because Bojangles behaved almost congenially toward Kretzoi.
On his first day in the compound Kretzoi sat down so that Bojangles would see him immediately upon awakening. The result was a display neither of fear nor of aggression, but instead Bojangles's gradual uncurling to an awareness that in his strange captivity he was not alone. On that very first morning, we believed, he took Kretzoi for an Asadi. If he remembered that it was Kretzoi who had helped capture him, he bore no grudge—he permitted Kretzoi to touch him without displaying the characteristic fear grin of terrestrial primates, and, upon occasion, he sought to touch Kretzoi gently in turn, maybe as an abreaction of some long-dormant Asadi urge to deny the mechanisms of Indifferent Togetherness. On that first morning in the pool, for instance, he presented his back to Kretzoi in the manner of a baboon or chimpanzee seeking to be groomed. No one had ever witnessed grooming among the Asadi.
"Is that a breakthrough?" Elegy wanted to know.
"Maybe not to the location of the Asadi temple," I told her.
"Then again, maybe that's exactly what it is. Especially when you consider that it could be the beginning of genuine communication between the Asadi and another intelligent species not of their world."
Elegy's slow smile was beatific. "Another?" she said.
As we watched from our ramp, filming the episode with holographic equipment mounted the night before on four different extensible catwalks, Kretzoi began searching Bojangles's scraggly mane for vermin. In fact, the Asadi's vestigial assumption of the grooming posture implied that either recently or once in his species' enigmatic past his "people" had played host to one or several varieties of parasitic insect. In any case, Kretzoi groomed Bojangles, and Bojangles, appreciatively soothed, watched De-nebola roll across the sky.
Eventually Kretzoi tried to initiate a less one-sided form of communication. He tugged at Bojangles's arm, slapped and pinched him importunately. Bojangles resembled a bounce-back toy—punishment-prone but unflappable. After a good deal of bootless entreaty Kretzoi ran all the way around the pool, turned with outspread arms, and made the circuit in reverse. Then he squatted with his back to the compound's gates and looked up at us as if to say, I'm stymied.
"So much for interspecies communication," I whispered.
Elegy leaned over the catwalk rail and in their specialized dialect of Ameslan urged Kretzoi to return to action. Kretzoi shook his head, his mouth hanging loose and sacklike before him. A boonie. An ignorant, contemptible boonie.
Even Elegy's sympathy for Kretzoi evaporated. She stopped making hand signs and, heedless of the possible effect on Bojangles, raised her voice so that its echo reverberated eerily.
"You're doing fine, Kretzoi! You've done something no one else has ever been able to do!"
The echoes lapped at us like waves from a cold and distant sea.
"Now go back to him, I'm telling you—go back to Bojangles and let him do for you what you've already done for him! Go on, damn
it, you're doing fine! There's no one else on Bosk Veld who can do any better!"
Finally Kretzoi moved. He returned to Bojangles. But instead of plucking at his arm or gouging him in the chest, Kretzoi sat down with his back within reach of Bojangles's hands. Then he waited. Before too long the Asadi began absentmindedly stroking Kretzoi's mane. He never dropped his eyes from the skylights, but the contact, once made, was sustained for well over an hour, to both animals' mutual pleasure. Kretzoi eventually fell asleep.
"Maybe we're back in business," Elegy said.
"Or maybe we've simply got a bushed and temporarily zonked Kretzoi on our hands," I countered.
"Reciprocity, Ben. A beginning."
Subsequent events proved Elegy right. Although Bojangles did cease grooming Kretzoi, taking his eyes off Denebola just long enough to visit a corner of the pool he had designated his privy, that afternoon he permitted several interruptions of his sun worship. Having groomed and been groomed in turn, Kretzoi was able to distract Bojangles from his Denebola watching for minutes on end—sometimes by turning his head virtually upside down to look at Bojangles, sometimes by an inquisitive poke at the other's eye carapaces, sometimes by nibbling playfully at the Asadi's ears. To most of these exotic stimuli Bojangles responded favorably: He turned to Kretzoi and sought to touch him.
At one point in the afternoon Elegy said, "This suggests that if you just get them out of that infernal clearing, the Asadi may not be the brutal, single-minded demons we've come to view them. Their clearing is their hell, Ben—as if they've fallen from a state of grace, or believe they have, and so deliver themselves up to their punishment day after day without protest."
"Would you go voluntarily to such a Gehenna?"
"I didn't say they go voluntarily. I said they deliver themselves
up without protest. They're genetically and behaviorally programmed to do so, and their willingness to suffer 'hell on BoskVeld' must have survival value. A specific kind of pho-toperiodism has been the evolutionary result. They're safe by day on the Asadi assembly ground. They're safe by night in the Wild. Don't you think?" she concluded enthusiastically.
"Elegy, day or night, there aren't any predators on BoskVeld. There's some evidence for occasional cannibalism among the Asadi, though."
"What about the psychological predation of their own past? Don't you think the past's out there with them, even in their present-day slogging and trudging about? The past is their most remorseless predator. It's the avenging angel that's condemned them to their rain-forest hell."
"You've gone awfully damn metaphorical on me, Elegy." "All right. You mentioned cannibalism. That's a kind of predation too, isn't it? Maybe their gathering together in a common place during the day and then dispersing to the wind's twelve quarters at night are defense mechanisms against an innate tendency—bom of past genetic developments whose triggers we haven't yet guessed at—to prey on one another. The Asadi seem to be in a precarious evolutionary equihbrium between autogenocide and meaningless self-perpetuation. Indifferent Togetherness and Frenetic Dispersal are the modes by which they sustain life, Ben. The fact that they still live at all is the only real meaning their past has bequeathed them."
"You think Bojangles's a candidate for salvation?" Elegy glanced at me to see if I were baiting her, and decided her suspicion was groundless. "I don't know. But today, suddenly, he seems less alien, more comprehensible. That's comforting, isn't it? Nobody's comfortable with the truly alien, are they, even if they find it exciting and go out of their way to pursue it. Secretly, you know, primatologists are looking for similarities between themselves and their subjects. Differences are scrupulously noted and analyzed, yes, but it's the points of contact you live for." A
moment later she added, "I'm speaking for myself, of course. That's all I can do."
And Bojangles's amiable susceptibility to the japes of Kretzoi was comforting. We began to feel that the mystery of the Asadi was about to open to us like a flower.
On his second full day in the swimming-pool compound Bojangles stopped staring wistfully, compulsively, after Denebola and got down to the business of exploring his immediate environment, which just happened to include Kretzoi. (Our camercis did, however, record his recurring panic at sunset—but this reaction diminished on each successive evening, until, finally, his only observable response was a rapid alternation of the common fear grin with the "threat face" often employed by Earthly rhesus monkeys: front and side teeth glinting nastily and the mouth full open to screech or howl. Bojangles, however, never made any sound at all.) At first, his forays around the pool's perimeter and interior made us think he w
as merely adapting the Asadi assembly-ground behavior to his new surroundings. We weren't dismayed by this development, though, because it was so striking a departure from the first day's intense sun worship that we believed even bigger surprises had to be in store.
We expected Bojangles to eat. In this he disappointed us. But he didn't disappoint us in his newfound readiness to jettison old Asadi behavioral patterns for exploratory ventures of his own.
Ninety-four minutes of marching around and through the empty pool—while Kretzoi sat bemusedly by the chrome ladder at its deep end—were all Bojangles required to survey his artificial clearing. Then he stopped, located Kretzoi, and hurried to him for what we supposed would be another session of mutual grooming. Even Kretzoi was of our opinion in this, for he reached to begin combing the other's fur—only to have Bojangles deflect his hands, catch them firmly at their wrists, and hold them before him.
Kretzoi's strength was sufficient to permit him to break the bold, but he didn't move. Then Bojangles voluntarily released his hands.
"This gets better and better," Elegy whispered.
Again, she was right. Kretzoi inscribed a simple gestural communication in the air. Bojangles, whose back was partially to us, leaned forward and stared not at Kretzoi's hands but deep into the protruding lenses over his eyes.
"Kretzoi's getting a spectral display," Elegy said. "We're picking it up on the third monitor, Ben."
This monitor, attached to the catwalk rail to the right of our desk, gave us a telephoto closeup of Bojangles's grimacing face. So sharp was the picture's resolution that I could even make out the individual colors in his pinwheeling eyes. But the message in those colors, however eloquent or Homeric, was all of a piece to me: pitiless Greek.
"Where does he get the energy for that kind of display?" I wondered aloud. "He hasn't eaten anything for a good sixty to seventy hours."
"What about the sun?" Elegy responded.
This was old speculation, an early theory of Moses Eisen's as a matter of fact, and the only thing wrong with it was that Komm decrees of, first, the Martial Arm and, later. Colonial Administration had never permitted us to put it to a test. Because Bojangles had gone so long without taking food, evidence for some sort of photo-driven organic battery in the optical equipment of the Asadi mounted inexorably. If this hypothesis had any validity, I knew, it might offer the beginnings of an explanation for the present absence of prey and predators on BoskVeld. The Asadi ate low on the food chain; also, they might share with green plants the ability to synthesize chemical energy from direct sunlight, thereby abstracting themselves from any crass dependence on carnivory. Why, then, did they sometimes choose to be cannibals?
Kretzoi suddenly shoved the Asadi in the chest, thrusting him away. He then made a series of angry gestural signatures.
"What's that all about?" I asked.
"He's telling Bojangles, You have Kretzoi hands, but I don't have Bojangles eyes. It's a rebuke. If they're going to communicate, he seems to be saying, it'll have to be by means of an anatomical common denominator."
"The hands?"
"So he's arguing. The trouble is he's outlining the necessity of employing Ameslan in Ameslan itself, which can only be—"
"Greek?"
"Yes, which can only be Greek to Bojangles." Elegy leaned forward to watch both the live action below and the screens of the four closed-circuit monitors on the catwalk's rail.
Kretzoi grabbed Bojangles's wrists, as if remembering that the Asadi had been the first to compare their hands and to imply a willingness to bridge the evolutionary chasm separating them. With only that to go on, then, Kretzoi pulled Bojangles off his butt and began forcibly twisting the Asadi's hands into some of the basic alphabetical and symbolic gestures of Ameslan.
Bojangles hunkered before Kretzoi in a rapture of studious incomprehension, allowing his hands to be manipulated like modeling clay, his eyes (according to Monitor No. 3) glowing a mute pale silver.
After ten or fiteen minutes of this he yanked one hand free and made the sign for "frightened."
"He's smarter than you are," Elegy whispered. "He's an absolute linguistic genius in comparison to you."
Frightened. The sign hung in the air, whether by a random concatenation of muscle responses or a deliberate attempt to frame that very message—well, my skepticism inclined me to the former view.
'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?"
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