Astrid rode back with me to the office. She slid up close and tried to comfort me by wrapping her arms around my chest and holding me tight. Any other time, I would've followed up on such an obvious cue, but I was despondent. I had primed Shana-Kali with the proper pheromones, I had programmed her with their own gestures and commands. What else did the other elephants need?

As Astrid murmured comforting words, I could feel her chest vibrating against my back.

Vibrations.

"Ah!" I said. "The language of the elephants!" I slapped my leg. "Shana-Kali isn't saying anything to them!"

Astrid's lips were on the nape of my neck. "How smart of you! You're talking about the subsonic frequencies the elephants use, right?"

Elephants communicate in a sort of secret language below the threshold of the human ear. Shana-Kali wasn't giving off the right sounds, so the others felt threatened by her. I had a plan already, a plan that involved a sophisticated audio recording system and playback device...

Suddenly, my heart felt a lot lighter. I picked up Astrid's long legs and crossed them in front of me. She giggled, as Shana-Kali continued her steady tread across the grassland.

The final straw was the blood sacrifice.

The vocal programming had been a solid success. I'd set Shana-Kali up so that any subsonic rumblings from a nearby elephant worked as a command for her to begin her own bubbling refrain. I was a continuously repeating message that said to the other elephants, "I am happy, I am content, I wish to help."

I'd been out in the field with her almost every day for the past two weeks, and had no more problems with the other animals rejecting her. The animals were fine.

Ida, too, was ecstatic, and the other researchers were impressed. Even Robin, the arrogant American, had snorted and slapped Shana-Kali's side in approval.

But the mahouts and other Nepalese would come no nearer. This despite the fact I was there with them every day, I used the Bhojpuri commands with Shana-Kali, I made the obeisance to the elephant-headed god Ganesh as they did. The success of the project required I place Shana-Kali at Chatwain and move on. But if I had to act as mahout the rest of my life...

One morning I went into Shana-Kali's stall and saw three dark streaks painted on her broad side. I touched them and found blood. Not hers, for Shana-Kali had no more blood, and her nutrient fluid was a pale yellow color.

I stepped back and almost tripped on something on the floor. It was the headless body of a kid goat. I started to retch and almost tripped again, this time on the bloody head. A garland of flowers had been wrapped around the severed neck. Something snapped inside me then, and I went looking for Chandra.

He was in the computer room penciling notes as he watched the map of Chatwain on the wall screen. "Just monitoring the wild bison," he said as I came in. He was as crisp as ever.

I held the bloody thing out by one horn, its tongue lolling, its dead eyes glazed. Chandra finally lost a little of his composure; his eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. "What the hell do you make of this, Chandra?" I asked him, my voice raw. "Just what ironic and elegantly disdainful comment do you have for me now? I found this lying at Shana-Kali's feet. And someone had painted three stripes of blood across her flank. What is it? A joke, maybe? A joke from these backward Nepalese?"

His tone was low. "A--a propitiation, perhaps."

I put the thing down on an old sheet of fax. It felt like my breath was burning my lungs. "Ever since I got here, you've taken every chance to cause discord about my project. What is it about the whole matter that disturbs you so, Chandra. What?"

He shrugged, but I could see he was uneasy. "It is a novel idea introduced into a culture that is slow to take up new ideas. Is it not fascinating--"

I stepped up close. "That all, Chandra? Just an intellectual exercise for you? Oh, really? Let's see, you've got your doctorate in what? Zoology?"

"Comparative anatomy."

"Comparative anatomy. Uh-huh. Quite a westernized education. Yet you seem to be a very devout Hindu. Ever have any problems with that, Chandra? Any internal battles between science and superstition? Any conflict that you maybe enjoy seeing played out in the people around you?"

"Not--not at all," he sputtered.

Something inside me just ripped then. My scholarly distance deserted me. I touched my forefinger to a pool of the goat's blood. "Then you understand that this is just plasma and hemoglobin, don't you?" I showed him my gory fingers. "And when I do this, it means nothing." I dabbed the red stuff on his forehead, on the place marked by the tilaka.

Chandra gasped and flinched as though I'd hit him. He put a trembling hand up and touched the blood. "Oh, what have you done? What have you done? Marked me with the red of Kali, marked me as Hers--" He broke into a spate of frenzied Hindi as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed at his forehead.

"Not superstitious about such things are you, Chandra?" But I began to feel guilty.

"I am not a backwards man!" he snapped. "I am a cultured person, at ease with many intellectual subjects. I--"

He looked at the blood on his handkerchief, then seemed to wilt. "Yes. A part of me is uncomfortable with the dead being yet alive. I--I am ashamed that a voice in my heart will not listen to the logic of my mind."

I sighed, thinking of the letters that had almost been sent to an address in Tucson. "I know that voice, Chandra. I sometimes wonder whether all the education in the world would silence it."

Chandra looked at me, once again composed. "Why would you want to silence it?"