Transfigurations (27 page)

Pettijohn, however, simply stood beside us. His jowls had begun to glisten with sweat, and his eyes now resembled those of a thetrode addict.

"I'd like to take mine inside," he said sweetly, distantly.

"Why?"

"They bruise when you drop them like that, sir. They're fragile. The cell walls collapse. The nutrients spill out. It's simple common sense, if you think about it."

"Pettijohn, you're overestimating the frailty of these plants. I've studied several dozen varieties from the Wild, and there just don't happen to be that many goddamn shrinking violets among them."

"I'd like to take mine inside," Pettijohn insisted sweetly.

"That won't be necessary. You'll disrupt the progress of our experiment. You're disrupting it right now."

"I'd like to take mine inside."

"Give 'em to me," I said, with as much artificial patience as I could muster. "I'll do the dirty work you're too fastidious to do yourself."

Upon a warning flash of Pettijohn's cold, stoned eyes, E-3 Filly Deuel used the butt of her half rifle on my head. A whip cracked through the convolutions of my grey matter, and my eyes bulged like a hooked trout's. I fell sidelong, plunged in throbbing confusion but still vaguely conscious of the events unfolding around me.

Pettijohn cast aside his bundle of plants, stooped over me to find in my eyes a welcome (for him) but blessedly false (for me) deadness, and then threw himself against the compound's double gate. Even lying flat on my back, I could see that he was almost immediately successful in gaining entry. A section of the pool's pastel interior loomed as large in my mind and vision as the morning sky overhead.

"There's the woman!" I heard E-3 Filly Deuel shout. "She's running along that catwalk! Hurry, Spenser, damn you!"

"Shoot her!" Pettijohn commanded from the pool.

"With what?" Deuel countered shrilly. "With what, you great turd? All this thing will do is knock on doors and old men's heads! You wouldn't trust me with a fully operable rifle and you're lucky you didn't!"

"Then shut up!" Pettijohn called. "I'm going to do what I came to do, I'm doing it now, and you can just shut up!" He screamed piercingly, a warrior's cry, and a brutal droning noise—followed by a brief iteration in the quality of the light—filled the hangar. Afterward, a pervasive smell of ozone.

Pettijohn, I knew, had just discharged his own half rifle, the one he'd brought into the hangar slung infantry fashion over his shoulder. My nausea grew deeper, even more intolerably complicated.

Then, like great multifacted eyes with metal lids, the hangar's skylights closed, and the building was suddenly dark. I surrendered to the darkness. . . .

In our pyramid atop the movable mezzanine platform, I awoke on Kretzoi's bench. Someone had applied a thin gauze bandage to my right temple. The hangar had apparently opened its eyes, too, because light suffused the building's interior and illumined the triangular panes of our pyramid as if they were church windows. The face above mine belonged to Jaafar Bahadori.

"I told them you didn't need a hospital," he said.

I shifted my gaze to the left and tilted my head back: There was Kretzoi, staring out the pyramid's doorway in the direction of the swimming pool.

"Your Asadi is dying," Jaafar informed me tenderly. "It's on its way to the hospital in Frasierville, but no one, I think, holds out much hope. That Pettijohn performed some very vicious surgery with his half rifle."

"Your friend," I managed bitterly, "the one whose sentry duly you took last night—she helped the bastard."

"She didn't want to. Pettijohn brought her along as punishment for speaking to me. The rifle he gave her was a company discard. He made her pluck her name off her uniform sleeve because this morning's duty roster, which the civki security police check before they let anyone in, showed that E-3 Ludmilla Meddis and E-5 Krishna Mai were supposed to make the food delivery. Pettijohn impersonated Mai and forced Filly to impersonate the woman called Meddis."

I sat up. The pyramid tilted around me as I did, and Jaafar, standing to give me room, towered away toward the pyramid's apex. That struck me as odd—Jaafar was not very tall.

"She didn't want to help him, my Filly didn't."

Anger began pressing up beneath my numbness. "Then why did she?"

"He had a hand weapon concealed amid the plants in his arms. He would have shot her, sir, had she tried to refuse him. In the barracks, before they came out here, he half throttled her to death as a foretaste of what he would do if she didn't obey. The madman."

"She was wearing the optional scarf—" I began.

'To conceal the bruises," Jaafar finished. "They're terrible." His wince conveyed the gaudy painfulness of poor Filly Deuel's contusions.

"She slammed a rifle butt into my head, Jaafar."

"Only hard enough to knock you down. Happily you had the strength of mind to pretend unconsciousness when Pettijohn bent to examine you."

"Unconsciousness wasn't a difficult thing to pretend just then, Jaafar."

"No, sir. The real thing caught up with you, I think, when the lights went out. Maybe, too, the power of suggestion was involved in that."

Suddenly I felt the absence of Elegy, realized the overwhelming truth about Bojangles. The alien—our Asadi—was dying of

wounds inflicted upon him by a Komm-ser\ice enlisted man whose intense personal hatred of the Other had overcome both his early indoctrination in the Komm regs and his fear of a long, nightmare-riven Punitive Sleep. Hatred and boredom. The two had worked together to rob Bojangles of his life.

I struck the edge of the metal bench vrilh such violence that I sliced the heel of my hand. Crimson flooded the pale upholstery of my flesh and smeared the knee of my trousers.

I looked to Kretzoi for help. "\^ hat happened in there?" I demanded of him. "\^Tiat happened?"

With melancholy deliberateness Kretzoi started to shape a pantomime of the morning's events.

"No," I said. "I won't understand you."

"Young Civ Cather," Jaafar jumped in, "reached the controls operating the mechanical skylight covers and shut them all as fast as she could. She had no weapon with her on the catwalk, and that was all she could think to do. Very, very happily, it worked. Kretzoi and Filly reached Pettijohn before he could perform any more nastiness with his half rifle. Utter darkness, you see. That one"—he indicated Kretzoi—"took a giant chunk from the madman's upper chest and unsocketed his right arm. Didn't you hear the bastard screaming, sir?"

"I didn't hear him," I confessed, surprised that Jaafar had pronounced "bastard" with no more emphasis than he would have given "uncle," or "xenologist," or "wife."

Kretzoi was looking toward the recreation area again, remembering the things that had happened there and shrugging off my hastily withdra^s-n invitation to narrate the story for me. He didn't appear to be physically hurt. But I regretted having cut him off so imperiously. Bojangles was dying, and Kretzoi had more than an abstract understanding of this fact.

I reached beneath the bench and found the same first-aid kit bom which Jaafar had scrounged a bandage for my head. I wTapped a piece of gauze around the heel of my hand and held it there until the bleeding stopped.

Jaafar began to pace. "Filly shouted that everything was under control, you see, and although Civ Gather wasn't inclined to believe her, seeing what she had done to you, eventually she was persuaded to take a chance and throw back the skylight covers. After that, the civki police were admitted and the various damages assessed. Worst, you already know, was your Asadi. Yes, worst of all was your Asadi, and I arrived with Governor Eisen to—"

Wobbly in the knees and sick at heart, I stood up and approached Kretzoi. Jaafar finally hushed. Although he tried not to show it, he was more than mildly surprised when I reached out with my uninjured hand and began combing Kretzoi's mane. . . .

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Autopsy

Bojangles died in Frasierville. Elegy and I repressed our bewildered grief and urged Moses Eisen to ask Kommthor's permission to subject the body to both an autopsy and a full anatomical/biochemical computer analysis. It took three days, time during which Bojangles's corpse lay in a refrigerated chamber in Frasierville's hospital, but at last this permission came through—whereupon the body was enthusiastically attacked and dismantled. Three mechanic-surgeons and a glass-and-chromium array of transistorized medical equipment attended Bojangles's dismantling.

Elegy and I weren't permitted to watch any of these exacting procedures or to record for our own curiosity or use any of the initial laboratory results. Truth to tell, we didn't much care. We were like squeamish fathers, the sort who don't want to be on hand for the birth. Bojangles was dead, and the issue of his autopsists'

labors would be a long catalogue of anatomical and biochemical comparison/contrasts demonstrating the precise statistical degree of his alienness.

Your baby, the doctors would tell us, is different, folks. Pull down the blinds and prepare yourselves for an unsettling shock.

When Moses finally came to us with the preliminary results. Elegy and I were seated over an old hardwood table near the hangar's swimming pool. The soft-wall fence had come dovra the day after Pettijohn's attack on Bojangles, and we had spent the week since the Asadi's death talking desultorily about a new expedition into the Wild and playing card games.

Moses tossed three or four laminated folders onto the table and pulled up a chair.

Behind him in the artificial shrubbery sat Kretzoi. It would be tempting to say that Kretzoi was mourning Bojangles's death, but, more probably, he had simply surrendered to the ennui of our long confinement. His tendency to lurk in shadows and wander aimlessly through the tubbed botanicals was symptomatic of his boredom.

I tapped one of Moses's folders. "Anything startling?"

Moses held his hands in his lap, below the surface of the table, and spoke to the skylights. "Several confirmations of past speculation. The Asadi have a carbon-based biochemistry, and, in almost all respects, they appear to be BoskVeld's equivalent of terrestrial primates. That confirms past speculation, as 1 say, but it also happens to be startling."

"A far-flung example of independent evolution?" Elegy offered.

"Far-flung? Far-fetched? 1 don't know which better describes the case," said Eisen, still gazing skyward. "Bojangles's cells each contained twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. That's one more pair than you'll find in the cellular makeup of human beings. But it's still remarkably close."

"White rats have twenty-two pairs," I told Moses with ill-concealed annoyance. "And there's a friggin' one-celled rhizopod with better than 750 pairs. The number of chromosomes doesn't

mean as much as the type and quality of the genetic information stored within each strand of DNA."

"What about this, then?" Moses retorted, still without looking at me. "The DNA molecule comprising the Asadi chromosome has a structure almost identical to that of the human chromosome. In fact, the differences are often minuscule—simple displacements of one or two amino acids in the linear sequence of various kinds of protein molecules. Human beings and chimpanzees share an identical arrangement of the 141 amino acids comprising the alpha chain of the hemoglobin molecule—good evidence for a common ancestor somewhere back in the Miocene."

"So?" I said. "The Asadi aren't chimpanzees."

Moses finally looked at me, his eyes alert and penetrating. "The alpha hemoglobin molecule in Bojangles's blood tested out with the same 141 amino acids in precisely the same sequence."

That rocked me, but I didn't like to show it. "You're proposing that chimps, human beings, and the Asadi all have a Ramapithecan daddy from good ol' Sunshine III?"

"I'm not proposing anything!" Moses flared, leaning toward me and unexpectedly catching my wrists on the tabletop. "I'm trying to detail for you and Civ Gather the results of nearly seventy-two continuous hours of analysis and speculation. I'm telling you what's been discovered. Your flippancy merely demonstrates the degree of your own confusion. Dr. Benedict. If you expect the Governor of BoskVeld to come to you with a personal briefing on this unpleasant topic, you've got to have the decency to hear him out with both civility and respect!"

Moses's face collapsed. He slammed my wrists against the surface of the table, stumbled from his chair, and stalked resolutely toward the door by which Pettijohn and Deuel had entered our hangar nearly a week ago. In the sparse, self-parodying foliage of the recreation area, Kretzoi moved discreetly out of his path.

Stunned, I thought of an instructor in my undergraduate days

whose favorite disciplinciry strategy was to leave the room and wait for an apologetic student to come to his office with a general appeal that he return. When I saw Elegy hurrying across the carpet after Moses, the prophecy inherent in my recollection seemed to be fulfilling itself: Elegy and Moses talked briefly, then locked arms and came strolling back toward me. I stood to greet them, cowed more by Moses's vulnerability than by his unusual display of strong emotion.

"Moses," I began; "Moses—"

He waved his hand, freed himself from Elegy's daughterly grasp, and sat down again. "I feel as old as God's little brother," he said to the tabletop. "Kommthor's been giving me hell about the death of an Asadi at the hands of an E-5 with a history of xenophobic tendencies—even though Pettijohn's psychological profiles were apparently lost or misconveyed during his most recent transfer." Moses sighed.

"They've also been on my back about your invocation of the privileged-intervention clause of Elegy's grant," he added wearily. "In fact, they seem to fear that the whole damn cosmos is going to unravel because you went beyond the bounds of xenological convention in capturing a highly evolved and maybe even self-aware variety of alien. I'm exaggerating Kommthor's. position some, but not much. Worse, their response to our first light-probe communication about the Asadi's physiological gestalt indicates they may move very soon to invalidate the privileged-intervention clause of grants like Elegy's. They'd do so on the basis of the Golden Rule provision—suppose intelligent aliens decided to investigate you by means of capture and confinement.