“Ah.”
“Anyway, you’ve seen him, Now can we begin? You understand,” he went on, “that I don’t have any governmental authority. I can’t make any legal deals.”
“Of course.”
“I can only act as a mediator.”
“I think it’ll do.”
“This shouldn’t enter into it,” Barron said, looking at his knuckles, “but you, you personally, have made enormous difficulties for the government. Just enormous. It would be completely within their rights just to seize you and try you, or…”
“Or toss me down there. I know that. I think that what I have to offer will outweigh any vengeful feelings.”
“Sten Gregorius.”
“Yes. Where he is now, who his people are, the evidence against them, everything.”
“We don’t have much reason to believe you know all of that.”
“My information regarding him” — he gestured toward the yard below the window — “was accurate enough.”
“It put us to a lot of trouble. Unnecessary trouble.”
“Well?”
“You might be merely planning to confuse us, tell lies….”
“I’ve voluntarily put myself in your hands this time,” Reynard said. “I’m helpless. I know that if I mislead you now, the full weight of your authority will fall on me, I’m sure also that you have, well, experimental methods of extracting truths. The research arm.”
“That’s an odious slander.”
“Is it?”
“We wouldn’t let you renege, that’s true enough,” said Barron testily.
“It’s all I meant.”
“And what you want in exchange. It doesn’t seem enough. Not for such a betrayal.”
Reynard turned to the window again and looked out. “Perhaps you feel more deeply about betrayal than I do.” Barron had to lean out over the desk now to catch his hoarse whisper. “The answer is that I’m at the end of my powers. I’ve eluded your government so far because of a large fortune I managed to assemble working for Gregorius. That’s gone now. I’m old, not well, I’ve spent my life in motion, but I can’t run anymore. Eventually I’d be cornered, taken —” He paused, staring down into the yard. “Rather than have that happen, I’d prefer to trade the last of what I have for peace. For time to die peacefully in.” He turned to Barron, “Remember,” he said. “I’m not a man. I am the only, the first and last of me there will ever be. You know I’m sterile. I have no loyalties. Only advantages.”
Barron didn’t speak for a moment; the affectless voice had seemed to paralyze him. Then he cleared his throat, opened his briefcase and looked inside, closed it. Himself again. “So,” he said briskly, “in exchange for immunity, and a pension or the like — we’ll negotiate details — you’re willing to give evidence that Sten Gregorius and yourself planned the murder of Gregorius; that USE had nothing to do with it; that the murderers weren’t USE agents; that Sten Gregorius is still conspiring against the Federal provisional government in the Northern Autonomy. Nashe?”
“Nashe, I hear, is dead.”
“Then what you have to say about her can’t hurt her.”
“There’s the other thing I require,” Reynard said.
“Yes.”
“The leo.”
Barron straightened. “Yes, I think that’s odd.”
“Do you?”
“It’s also probably impossible. He’s committed several crimes; he’s very dangerous.”
Reynard made a noise that might have been a laugh. “Look at him,” he said. “I think you’ve broken his spirit. At least.”
“The criminal charges…”
“Come now,” Reynard said almost sharply. “You’ve said yourself he’s not a prisoner. An experimental subject only. Well. Put an end to the experiment.”
“He’s still dangerous. It would be like… like…” He seemed to search unused places for a forgotten image. “Like releasing Barabbas to the populace.”
Reynard said nothing. Barron supposed he had spoken over the creature’s head. “He’s part of the conspiracy, in any case,” he said.
“A very small part,” Reynard said. “He never understood it. He was used, first to help me, then to distract your attention. He worked well enough.”
“He and his kind have gotten completely bound up together in the public mind with Sten Gregorius. That may have been an accident….”
“No accident. It was due to your stupidity in persecuting the leos so — so artlessly. Sten took up their cause. It was ready-made. By you.” He limped toward the desk where Barron still sat, and Barron drew back as though he were being approached by something repugnant. “Maybe I can put this so that you can see the advantage to you. You’re planning a reservation somewhere for the leos, a kind of quarantine.”
“In the Southeastern Autonomy.”
“Well then. Once Sten is in your hands, and the leo has gone voluntarily to this reservation, the union will evaporate.”
“He would never go voluntarily,” Barron said. “These beasts never do anything voluntarily except make trouble.”
“Let me talk to him. I could persuade him. He listens to me. I’ve been his adviser, his friend.” No irony. This was presented as an argument only. Barron marveled: no thin skin of pretense was drawn over this creature’s amorality. It made him easy to deal with, Only—
“Why,” he said, “do you insist on this? It can’t be just to make things easier for us.”
Reynard sat on the edge of a metal folding chair. Barron wondered if he was at a loss. It seemed unlikely. He moved his hands on the head of his stick. His long feet just touched the floor. “Do you go to zoos?” he said at last.
“When I was a kid. In my opinion, zoos…”
“You might have noticed,” Reynard went on, “that according to a curious human logic, the cages are proportionate in size to the creatures they contain. Small cages for small animals — weasels, foxes — big ones for big animals. In old zoos, anyway.”
“Well?”
“People go to zoos. They pity the lions, noble beasts, caged like that, with hardly room to move. In fact the lion is relatively comfortable, He’s a lazy beast and exerts himself only when he must — if he doesn’t have to, he rests. Other animals — foxes, notably — have a natural urge for movement. In the wild, they may cover miles in a night. They pace endlessly in their little cages. All night, when the zoo is closed, they pace — two body lengths this way, two that way. For hours. They probably go mad quite quickly. A madness no one notices.
“To put it baldly: I would do anything to avoid the cage. I hope you grasp that, He — down there — probably doesn’t care. So long as he has a cage suited to his dignity.”
“The reservation.”
“It’s the least I can do for him,” Reynard said, again with no irony. “The very least.”
Barton stood and went to the window. The leo still sat; his eyes appeared to be closed, Was he sleeping? Maybe the fox was right. Barton had felt, though he had ignored, a certain pity for the leos who would be committed to quarantine. Left over from guilt over the Indian reservations, perhaps. But the Indians were, after all, men. Maybe the USE plan, besides being the only practicable one, was the kindest too.
“All right,” he said. “When do you want to talk to him? I make no promises. But I agree in principle.”
“Now,” Reynard said.
Face upward into the weak sun, Painter watched brilliance expand and deliquesce on his eyelids. Entranced by hunger, he had entered into a fugue of sleep, memory, waking, rough dream.
Coalescing in sunlight, fat, strong; taste of blood from cut lips, a haze of fury, then some victory — ancientest childhood. Sun and darkness, warmth of light and then warmth of flesh in lightlessness, amid other bodies.