Transfigurations (19 page)

"We'd better go," I said, "if Kretzoi still wishes to go. Jaafar's holding a Dragonfly for us at the port near the lorry pool." It was extremely important to me that Kretzoi have a choice in the matter—as, apparently, it was also to Elegy, who was regarding the creature with genuine anxiety.

But Kretzoi's long, muscular body moved out from under her hand and flowed toward the door on all fours. Before going through

154

I

into de Feo's territory, he paused, reared back, and made a beckoning sign at us with his right hand.

"He's ready," Elegy said in evident relief. She thanked Chiyoko for showing us the eyebook and allowing me to activate it.

"Altogether my pleasure," responded Chiyoko placidly. "However, I'm not sure his seeing it has done him any good."

We headed back through the museum to Mica Strike Street. De Feo acknowledged our passage with a word and a nod of the head, but didn't budge from his post to see us to the door. Ordinarily he escorted every visitor out, talking animatedly all the while and encouraging an early return visit. It wasn't hard to deduce what had discouraged him from such commonplace but courteous behavior that morning.

The helicraft—a modified Kommthor-Sikorsky Dragonfly with an irridescent red-orange fuselage for easy sighting from the air— stood ready on the central square of poly mac at Rain Forest Port.

It took us only twenty minutes to walk there from Christ's Promenade, but Jaafar was fidgeting impatiently in the dispatch shack when we arrived. We were better than an hour and a half late.

"I'm supposed to drive a Kommthor official in from Chancy Field at noon," he told us. "What took you so long, I wonder." The "I wonder" was there to keep his impatience from sounding crudely insubordinate.

I nodded toward the BenDragon Prime. "Did you outfit it as I asked?"

"Last night," Jaafar replied. "On my off-duty time."

I informed him that no one on a colony world is ever truly off duty and watched him roll that overripe chestnut on the palate of his mind. "How many days' supplies?" I demanded.

"A week's—for three." He glanced sidelong at Kretzoi, who was

peering out the dispatch-shack door toward the glinting and simmering helicraft.

"A week's?" Elegy said, startled.

"A hedge against accident," I said, knowing that she expected to drop Kretzoi off, observe him from afar for no more than a day or so, and then return in eight to ten days to see what he had managed to accomplish. After that she planned her own intensive campaign in the wild, maybe even attempting herself to go among the Asadi.

But I had grown impatient waiting for something—anything—to develop. What harm if we immersed ourselves in the jungle from the beginning? I had almost begun to feel that Elegy's Nyerere Foundation grant belonged in part to me, that I deserved some small say in its implementation.

"It's standard operating procedure when you overfly the wild," I repeated of the week's supplies aboard the helicraft. "A hedge against accident—^just like the Dragonfly's coloring."

Elegy looked at Jaafar for confirmation. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and maintained a noncommittal silence.

"We'd better go," I said.

Across the heat-deflecting surface of the polymac Elegy, Kretzoi, and I approached the sleek, evil-looking body of the BenDragon Prime. A moment or two later we were in the air, the forest revolving beneath us like a weird floral arrangement on a prodigious lazy Susan.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Wild

It goes on and on, the Calyplran Wild. You gaze down upon a canopy of interlocking flowers, leaves, and lianas, myriad greens and blues transmuted from instant to instant by Denebola's steadily streaming but variably constituted copper-colored light. The mantle of the forest canopy drops off to the west, drops and drops without ever giving way to some other recognizable feature. The veldt behind you is an illusion, and the ocean Calyptra, near whose eastern shore Frasier and the First Expedition discovered the ruins of an Ur'sadi pagoda, is apprehensible only as a surf noise that may in reality be the droning of your Dragonfly.

Once up in the air I was ready to rebequeath to Elegy my secretly purloined portion of her grant. No wonder none of us had found Chaney. No wonder even the renowned Geoffrey Sankosh had failed. A human being attempts to embrace eternity when he puts his arms around the alien bigness of the Wild.

In less than an hour, not long after midday, I banked the Dragonfly over the Asadi clearing and gave both Elegy and Kretzoi their first glimpse of the unfathomable creatures who trudged there. Elegy sucked in her breath at the sight of the Asadi, and Kretzoi, in almost imperceptible reprise of his behavior at the Archaeological Museum, lifted his hairy upper lip. The tips of his teeth gleamed dully.

"It's real," I said. "But since your father disappeared, Moses Eisen hasn't allowed anyone to stay out here doing field work—not for protracted periods, anyway."

"Kretzoi will take up where Egan Chaney left off," Elegy said.

The BenDragon Prime carried us beyond the clearing and out into the shimmering airspace over the Wild itself. I banked us again and circled back for another look-see. It struck me during this second flyover that one thing about the Asadi had changed in six years—they were no longer completely insusceptible to evidence of the human presence on BoskVeld. Whereas once they had acknowledged our existence only by fleeing when one of us approached on foot (the exception, of course, being their reaction to Chaney's methodical insinuation of himself into their little clearing), today they recognized the intrusion of our technology and were often open in their appraisal of and their hostility toward it.

As we came back over the assembly ground, I noticed that several of the Asadi had left off their intramural staring matches or brutal sexual gymnastics to watch the Dragonfly go by.

"Where'd you make my father's supply drops?" Elegy asked.

I pointed through the cabin's bubble to the immediate east. "Over that way. Chaney didn't want the helicraft to disturb his subjects. I used to believe that I could land among the Asadi without disrupting their lives or threatening their sanity—if you assume them sane."

"But no more?"

"But no more. Didn't you see them watching us as we flew

Elegy confessed that she had.

"So that's new," I told her. "And I'm half convinced it has something to do with your father's having once been among them."

Out of the comer of my eye I saw Kretzoi make a series of hand signs for Elegy's benefit.

"He wants to know, Ben, if that's going to make it harder for him to gain acceptance among them this afternoon."

"Tomorrow morning," I corrected the two of them. 'Tomorrow dawn. We'd be idiots to try to introduce Kretzoi into their midst after buzzing them as we've just done. We'll camp out tonight."

"Where?" Elegy asked.

The Wild's buckling, blue-green canopy knit itself together beneath us like a chlorophyl afghan.

"Right here," I responded, lowering us vertically out of the sky through an opening in the foliage seemingly not much larger than a doughnut hole. "At your daddy's old supply drop." The Dragonfly stuttered, stopping in midair several times as 1 maneuvered it down. Meanwhile, lianas and exotic flowers twined together around us as the sky closed up overhead. "This is the spot from which Chaney first walked into their clearing," I said when we had all ceased vibrating. 'This is the spot where I weekly replenished his supplies of Placenol and moral courage."

"He had plenty of that last, didn't he?" his daughter said challengingly. "Who else has ever stayed out here longer?"

'The longer you stay the more surely it's consumed."

Elegy said nothing. We got out. It was interesting to poke around the old supply drop. In our first ten minutes of rummaging we found an unused flare packet, good for signaling up to eighty kilometers away, so high did the flare rockets carry their charges, and a number of self-heating food canisters that Chaney had probably scattered about contemptuously just after my last delivery.

Kretzoi swung himself up into a tree and began brachiating away from the helicraft into the jungle, more like a gibbon or an oremgutan than a chimp or a baboon. For the first time since his

and Elegy's arrival on BoskVeld he seemed at home, in his element, and I knew without being told that he was merely exercising the luxury of his freedom, that in a moment or two he would come swinging back toward us and deposit himself triumphantly on his haunches not far from either Elegy or me. Which is exactly what he did.

I dragged a nylon lean-to assembly out of the Dragonfly and began making camp, using the helicraft's fuselage as our tent's rear wall. Elegy set aside her awe and excitement long enough to help me.

Later, as night fell, we heard the Asadi dispersing into the Wild on every side, streaming past invisibly in the arabesque, three-dimensional maze of the rain forest. Where did they go? How did they avoid stumbling in upon us when we had taken such pains to conceal ourselves, even to the point of nearly thwarting the Dragonfly's gaudy, iridescent paint job? Why couldn't the Asadi remain together at night? What did they do, separately, in the dark? Those were questions that suddenly seemed new again.

None of us was really able to sleep that night. I used the time to record the accumulating episodes of our adventure, hoping, eventually, to knit together a fabric at least as cohesive as the overarching vegetable roof. Kretzoi huddled nervously on a patch of ground outside the lean-to. It amazed me anew to realize that he anticipated the morning in the same way that students anticipate the advent of a major examination in their academic specialty. To calm him. Elegy sat down behind him and began tenderly, caressingly, grooming his mane. . . .

But Kretzoi needn't have worried. The following morning he infiltrated the Asadi clearing with stunning ease, just as Egan

Chaney once had; and Elegy and I, when we stooped beside the clearing, had trouble determining which Asadi was in reality Kretzoi and which were bonafide bubble-eyed aliens. But that was later.

That morning, at sunrise, the Wild began to fill with a noise like radio static—in truth, this was nothing more than the Asadi abandoning their solitary nests and heading homeward at great speed, brushing foliage aside and padding over the crumbling humus among the palms and lacy jungle hardwoods. Either running or brachiating, they flashed past our encampment.

"Go!" I told Kretzoi. "Now!"

"Maybe he needs a weapon," Elegy suggested belatedly. "A stunner or a knife. Something."

"Nothing!" I shouted in an angry whisper. "Kretzoi, get going!"

Off he went, without an instant's hesitation, and by the time either Elegy or I knew that he was gone, we were alone in the rising dawn.

Elegy had tears in her eyes—whether out of fear that Kretzoi was lost to her forever or joy in the imminent fruition of her plan I couldn't have said. Except for the tears, her face was blank and unreadable. We stood side by side and peered like voyeurs through the impenetrable curtains of the forest.

"What now?" she asked matter-of-factly.

"We wait a time."

"What for? Shouldn't we go after him, check to see that he's not been torn limb from limb or had his mane cut off or maybe just gotten lost?" But she framed her questions clinically rather than emotionally.

I told her we were waiting for the last stragglers to reach the clearing, that we didn't want to encounter an Asadi on its way in, that once we ourselves arrived we would have to take care to prevent our discovery.

Elegy listened to this counsel calmly, acceptingly, and when we at last set off, she wove her way with such skill through the tangled foliage that I finally yielded the lead to her and whispered only a

few minor course corrections to keep her on track. It took us approximately twenty minutes to come within hailing distance of the clearing. Glimpsed through strange geometries in the tropical lacework, the Asadi trudged or flitted unceasingly across this clearing.

"Where is he?" Elegy whispered.

We were crouched side by side beneath an umbrella of silvery roots cascading down from the limb of a rainthom tree. I shook my head helplessly, and the umbrella swayed above us like a living thing.

"I've got to get closer," Elegy told me after we'd been watching for a long time. "This is no good at all."

Before I could protest, she moved away from me, duckwalking forward, one hand occasionally reaching out to maintain her balance, her head as still and upright as a periscope casing. I followed her. The red leather thong in her hair gleamed at me through the undergrowth like a migrating orchid. At last I was beside her again. Asadi went by so near to us I could hear their measured breathing and see the spinning colors in their eyes.

"Listen, Elegy," I began—but she put her fingers to her lips and silenced me. Detection seemed almost inevitable. We were crouched in a shallow crumbling pit from which the huge bamboo-ridged bole of a tree grew up, and what cover we had was really little more than a swatch of falling shade.

Close up, the Asadi seemed to be performing some kind of nightmarish Sisyphean labor. The rock they pushed up the hill every day, only to have it roll crushingly back down upon them, was their commitment to an endless daytime sociability in their jungle clearing. At the same time, they were—by human standards—devastatingly alone in their commitment to this life. Interactions beyond brutal, random coitus and ferocious bouts of staring were rare. Indifferent Togetherness Chaney had rightly tagged the unifying principle of the Asadi social order, but I had never felt that principle so keenly as I did that afternoon. I pitied

Kretzoi his initiation into such an irrational system, and I wondered briefly if he might not be better off faihng to gain the Asadi's acceptance and actually suffering some grievous physical punishment at their hands.

"There he is," Elegy whispered excitedly. "There." She pointed at an Asadi slouching along the clearing's perimeter, heading south amid a number of lackadaisical Asadi, and at first all I could tell about him was that he looked like all the others.

"No. I don't think so."

"Yes," Elegy insisted, gripping my arm and turning her head so that she could read my expression. "He's perfect. He's one of them." When she looked back at the Asadi, she corroborated her own testimony by failing at first to pick out the one she had labeled Kretzoi. "Damn. I've lost him. . . . No. There he is. Look, Ben, that one right there."

A tawny mane amid the silver, silver-blue, and thick orange-gold ones. A body somewhat less gnarled and scarred than the others.

"You're right. Elegy. We've seen him. Now let's get out of here."

She wouldn't budge. Then, suddenly, she stood up and took an incautious step forward.

"Elegy!" I cried, half aloud.

Her movement and my voice betrayed us to the Asadi. Their procession halted abreast of us, six or seven Asadi bunching up in file and then disengaging from one another in order to fall to all fours and appraise us with madly pinwheeling eyes. I grabbed Elegy's arm and pulled her back. One of the large silver-blue Asadi males lunged tentatively at us, staying well within the clearing and erecting the hairs on his back and upper arms. Elegy shook off my hand.

"Get out of there," I advised her fiercely. "The least you're likely to lose is your hair."

I had a vivid memory of the way the Asadi, upon accidentally

discovering our equipment, had savagely wrecked a holocamera and a recording device installed one night in a tree near their clearing. . . .

But instead of retreating or standing stock-still and hoping to be spared. Elegy grasped the limb of a tree and, hooting threateningly, rattled the fronds with such animation that not an Asadi on BoskVeld could have remained unaware of her presence. The silver-maned male hurriedly backed off, and several nearby Asadi did likewise. The tribe's mute remainder gazed toward us in immobile surprise and perplexity.

"If I had a pair of garbage-can lids," Elegy said aloud, glancing back at me, "I could give 'em all heart attacks."

"You've given me one," I said angrily. "Maybe Kretzoi, too,"

"We really should go, shouldn't we?" Elegy acknowledged.

I didn't say anything. I crept forward, touched her elbow, and eased her away from the tree whose fronds she'd just deployed in our defense. I noticed that the eyes of the nearest Asadi were radiating colors as quickly and as dizzyingly as had the eyebook in the Archaeological Museum—with the result that the Asadi's physical selves were dimmed by the racing spectral patterns and made to appear as transparent and colorless as water. The creatures in the foreground, in fact, seemed all eyes. Their bodies were ghostly outlines, nothing more.

Illusion, I told myself, backpedaling the two of us discreetly into the forest. A trick of the light; a brief, irrational perception bom of crisis and fear.

Indeed, as we got deeper into the Wild and farther from the clearing, the nearest creatures' bodies took on substance again, fur and pigmentation emerging from wherever they had disappeared to.

"Did you see them fade?" I asked Elegy as we turned and fled toward the drop point and our encampment.

"I saw it—I'm not sure I believe it."

The Asadi didn't attempt to pursue. Either Elegy had frightened

them too badly or their commitment to the clearing was too strong. Maybe both.

Scraped, and bruised, and drenched in our own sweat, we reached the drop point, having run or trotted nearly the entire distance. Elegy began grinning like a maniac and pounding on the Dragonfly's fuselage in a primitive outburst of joy and triumph. I slid beneath the awning of our tent and lay flat on my back trying to breathe. My exhaustion and Elegy's pounding were so well synchronized they almost comprised a jingle, unmerciful pulse.

"He's in!" Boom, boom! "He's in!" Boom, boom! "He's in!" Boom, boom! And so on unto, it seemed, the very collapse of Time.

"Have pity," I managed feebly after this had been going on for ages. "Elegy, have pity."

"Sorry, Ben." The pounding stopped and Elegy knelt above me with a warm and beatific expression. Leaning forward and reiterating what I already knew, she whispered, "Kretzoi—he's in."

"Boom, boom," I replied.

Later, recovered from our run, I turned on a fan in the Dragonfly and used my hand typer to transcribe several pages of notes. While I was working, Elegy climbed into the helicraft and interrupted me. She sat down in the cone of wind blowing from the fan and waited patiently for an opening. I looked up.

"He's in—but he could be in there for months, maybe even years, without a significant break in their behavior."

"That's right," I said. The bloom was off the rose.

"Do you think their seeming to fade means anything?"

"Only that it gives me an idea why your daddy liked to call this place the Synesthesia Wild. For him, trapped in this jungle, colors made noises, sounds had a tactile quality, smooth was sweet and

rough was spicy. Or maybe we were just hallucinating."

"But has this ever happened to you before? My father doesn't mention anything quite like it—their fading, I mean—in his monograph."

"Nothing exactly like it has happened to me before," I admitted. "Or, so far as I know, to any of Chaney's part-time successors. But they didn't stand on the edge of the clearing and rattle branches at the Asadi, either."

"You think we were hallucinating?"

"It's possible. A function of the Wild, Asadi hysteria, and our own fear. Who knows?"

"Do you think Kretzoi will hallucinate, then?"

"If he does, Elegy, I'd guess that having been accepted as one of them, he'll participate in the group psychoses of the Asadi. He won't draw undue attention to himself by suffering conspicuously solitary mind trips."

Elegy stared at me thoughtfully.

"That's supposed to be comforting," I assured her. "It may be that their discovering us on the edge of their clearing triggered in the Asadi a process that triggered in us a tendency to see the thing which is not."

"I don't like that, Ben."

"Why not?"

"It has certain nasty implications about the accuracy of what my father saw in the Wild and reported in his ethnography."

"Not if you assume that as one of the Asadi—which, in his role as an outcast, Chaney paradoxically happened to be—he could hallucinate only what the Asadi hallucinated. In which case he reported, as accurately as it's given a human being to do, the subjective reality of the Asadi themselves. Or a portion of it, anyway."

"That's clever enough to be off-putting, Ben."

I shrugged, looked at my hands. "You don't like it because it undermines the objective reality of your father's reports."

"All right, then. Do you really believe my father shared the group psychoses of the Asadi?"

"I don't know. It's almost impossible to verify, isn't it?"

"Except, maybe, through Kretzoi."

We sat facing each other in the cargo section of the BenDragon Prime, sharing the sultry windiness of the fan and thinking divergent thoughts.

"If," Elegy finally allowed, "the Asadi only do or hallucinate something significant while Kretzoi's among them. Otherwise, nothing. We'll be wasting our time and the Nyerere Foundation's money."

"That's supremely possible."

"Damn," Elegy said.

"In which case I'd suggest taking action outside the traditional tactics of mere observation and reportage."

"Like what?"

"Let's wait and see how things develop," I urged her quietly.

Her face took on an expression of mild pique. Without another word she got up, brushed past me and the rattling fan, and exited the helicraft into the tight little bowl of our clearing.

Denebola, somewhere, was sinking into the tepid waters of Calyptra, extinguishing itself in a vast caldron of brine. The Wild came alive in the settling darkness. The Asadi rushed from their assembly ground like children let out of school, and the forest's twilight trees, arrayed in ragged choirs against the coming night, began seething inwardly with the eerie music of glycolysis.

Kretzoi—almost as we had given up looking for him—came creeping back into camp and asked Elegy for something besides hardwood and bark to relieve his hunger. His eyes were distant and unutterably weary.

CHAPTER SIX

Lovers

Elegy gave Kretzoi a flask of water and an orangish puree of protein and potassium. He ate and drank languidly, then swung off a short distance into the Wild and prepared to make his first outdoor nest since arriving on the planet. Elegy and I finished our own small meal, and I went back into the helicraft to fetch a couple of stems of lorqual for an after-dinner drink. As I was opening the stems, the radio in the Dragonfly began making high-pitched summoning noises.

"You answer it," I told Elegy.

"Why?" She was closer to the helicraft's cabin than was I, but she had encumbered herself with the reptilian folds of an air mattress while I was fetching the drinks.

"Because it's Moses Eisen, and you'll do better with the old man than I would. Turn up the outside speaker, though— I don't want you to have to repeat the epithets he hurls at me."

"Won't the Asadi hear, too?" she protested.

'That's all right. I'm not particularly worried about what the Asadi think of me, Elegy." A witticism strictly from lorqual.

"Answer it yourself," Elegy said, parent to child.

Because she was clearly determined to refuse me, I stumbled into the Dragonfly and took Moses's radioed rebuke. He was self-possessed and rational in his anger, but he wanted to know why we had not come back to Frasierville that evening and how we proposed to explain our continued presence in the Wild. Kretzoi, Moses said, was supposed to be our in-the-field agent, and if he wasn't, what was the purpose of our having introduced him into the Asadi clearing, assuming of course that we had? Finally, still angry, he backed up and inquired sheepishly about the status of our mission. I told him where we stood. Justified in his initial gut appraisal of our duplicity, he again demanded to know why we were where we were. I began to feel a raw, inadvisable rebelliousness rising in my throat.

At which point Elegy slid into the Dragonfly's cabin and took the radio away from me. "We couldn't go off and leave Kretzoi without determining that the Asadi had accepted him," she said irrefutably.

"Your prospectus seems to indicate you believed his acceptance among them a foregone conclusion," accused Moses's distance-thinned voice.

"That was intentional, sir. But the certainties of theories and expectations have to be confirmed in practice. It would be ridiculous to permit Kretzoi to die because of the abstract optimism of a project paper."

"He didnt die, though, did he?"

"No, but we had to be here to monitor his initiation into the clearing and his return this evening to my father's old drop point."

"Tomorrow you and Dr. Benedict will come home to Frasierville."

Elegy looked at me by the glow of the Dragonfly's instrument panel. When I shook my head, she smiled conspiratorially. "No,

sir. We have supplies for nearly a week, and we'll spend our days here recording and studying the reports Kretzoi gives us each evening when he returns to our camp. We're his moral support, you understand. The Asadi ritual of Indifferent Togetherness is truly fatiguing, and he's not used to it. It may take him awhile to adjust. Tonight, Governor Eisen, he could tell us only that the experience both terrified and exhausted him. At dawn he has to go back in. To desert him for even a day under such circumstances would be ethically reprehensible and scientifically counterproductive."

Then, to turn the tables on Moses, she asked a single precisely pertinent question: "Why are you so set on getting Dr. Benedict and me back to town when we can best do our work in the Wild?"