When its back compresses into a bow—driving its scorched spines against one another—one of its eyes lifts at a slant angle. It might be contemplating the heavens for the first time; a perqu’unti’s attention is more often directed to the surface of a river than to the surface of the sky. But let’s hypothesize that it has no more interest in heaven than the ordinary oyster or octopus.
Elphie is rapt. Alarm, or compassion, or cold clinical observation? No way of knowing. Still, she skitters forward in that marionette-twitch way she has. As if her limbs are being propelled and stilled simultaneously, by contradictory impulses.
Child and creature look at each other during the crocodrilos’s last moment. Its limbs have stopped thrashing. The spears jabbed into its throat and heart have found their targets. Blood spurts and seeps through its abdominal wounds and its flared, gougey nostrils. It makes no noise.
It knows little of human beings except, up until now, how to avoid them. But it has spotted Elphie going about her morning campaign. Something has compelled it to follow her even, as it turns out, to its death.
Of the nature of that compulsion no sound thesis can be advanced. Why are we drawn one to another, whoever it is? The bee to the blossom, the lover to the bosom of another, the comet on its orbit around the sun and the seasons on their immortal tracks, ever approaching eternity? One creature will find another one. An intellect, a heart, a heavenly form, a capacity for charity, a look, an attractive bouquet of organic odors. The perqu’unti, having happened upon Elphie, perhaps has seen something right in a world that hasn’t offered it evidence of rightness before.
Or maybe Elphie is broken enough, wicked enough, that the perqu’unti has merely been suffused with fellow feeling, one rogue for another.
That the child is green may only be incidental. Who knows if the crocodrilos is color-blind?
Or maybe the only color perceivable is green, and Elphie is the first human the perqu’unti has ever clearly seen.
It has died now. The Quadlings who killed it approach it with tenderness and sorrow, still on alert in case it is shamming. But it lies there, bleeding and smoking. They drag its carcass into the water to extinguish the flames, then turn to the chief to see what next.