Chapter 15

Opera was about the furthest thing from my mind for most of the next day. Because that was the day that Asmedogh was finally ready to talk to me.

He'd seemed a bit more lively when I'd got home the night before, though still not back to his pre-surgical self. He still, for example, wasn't up to climbing onto my shoulder, as he had. But he was moving around, steadily now without the tremors and stumbles that had been besetting him, and it seemed that he'd had his fill of sleep for the moment. We actually sat up together on the couch for a while as I told him about my evening, the audition set for Sunday, a lot of stuff in which he probably had close to zero interest but to which he paid very courteous atten­tion.

I ran down fairly soon, though. Performance nights were always a bit tiring, and the last few days had been pretty ... well, eventful was too mild a word. I needed sleep myself. I offered to carry him upstairs if he wanted to join me in bed, but he declined. He would like a bit more food, if I'd be so good—still that almost formalized courtesy—and I obliged, refreshed his water again and rinsed out the shot glass before I put everything down for him. I made sure the door was cracked so he could come and go as he pleased for potty needs, and took myself to bed.

Sometime in the night he apparently made his own way up the stairs, because he was curled up on my bed, his tail—it really was easier to think of it that way—just touching me, when I awoke. I was oddly pleased he'd joined me. For a moment, in the middle of my morning toilette, I abruptly wondered if he'd come up to work on my mind some more while I slept defenseless, but soon dismissed the thought. It wasn't anything really rational, it was simply that I didn't feel any different. And the suspicions I'd begun to have a couple of days earlier, the ones about his motives and those of his putative fellows, were still intact and as active as ever; that was the deciding factor for me, since he'd have lessened or eliminated them if that was what he'd had in mind.

He was back on my shoulder—it took him a little effort, but he managed it—as I went downstairs, and I took my time about making coffee and my usual bagel and downing them. I set out only a small breakfast of more broccoli for him, and he didn't quite finish; apparently the midnight snack I'd left him had satisfied his appetite for the moment. Then I had the urge to move over to the couch, and that's where we spent the next three hours.

I'd been mistaken about the bear, it seemed; in fact, the bear saved his life. His ship had malfunctioned right in the middle of a low pass over the woods and had crashed, hard. It was the crash that had injured him, and he'd crawled out of the wreckage and been kind of marooned in the middle of nowhere special when the bear wandered past, perhaps drawn by the crash. He'd used the same distance technique he'd used later on me to bring it to him.

"Bear saw me not as you did, but as one of its young," he said, his voice presenting itself in my mind word by word just as if he were actually speaking. "It picked me up in its mouth, as it would its own young, and carried me for long. We traveled a great distance, much farther than I might have gone alone, especially that I was hurt."

"But why did it carry you this way?" I asked, curious. "Just accidental?"

"No. I had some small time alone, before bear came. In that time I decided that I must contact primary species of this world, only in such a way could I make signal that I was still alive and for others to come to rescue. All of electrics in ship had gone out, it was what made crash, so I could not signal before." And I got the same sense of anger about sloppy manufacture and testing that I might have felt myself if, say, I'd had the same experience in a defective car.

It was really odd to think of aliens bitching about their own careless workmanship as a human might feel, but the parallel was striking.