Transfigurations (24 page)

CHAPTER NINE

BOJANGLES

Bojangles didn't eat. Although Komm-service personnel brought him fodder from the Wild—succulent fronds, skeins of prodigal epiphytic roots, the pale egglike pods of the lorqual tree—nothing that we put before him tempted him. Each evening when Bojangles fell asleep, Kretzoi would bring out of the compound the wilted remains of that day's menu. I burned the noxious leftovers in a pit behind the hangar, offended by the smell but thankful for an opportunity to stand outside in the evening air. Sometimes, burning them, I would request another delivery of the Komm-service guards who patrolled the perimeters of the hangar and who dropped by at set times to see if there was anything we needed. So well did these guards suppress their curiosity about our "experiment" that I often wondered if they were human.

Be thankful for small favors. Elegy told me. She referred in particular to the fact that Bojangles listlessly drank all the water

we set out for him, apparently absorbing most of it into the mitochondria of his body cells. He pissed infrequently, usually in the dribbling fashion of a human male with prostate or urethral difficulties. (A hose, as Moses prophesied with a degree of inadvertent irony, was more than adequate to the task of poolside sanitation. Elegy and I alternated custodial duties down there, usually after releasing Kretzoi each evening for food and rest.) But Bojangles's readiness to quench his thirst seemed to be indicative of an involuntary will to live. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he wished to live or to die.

When Bojangles wasn't focusing on Denebola's passage from skylight to skylight, Kretzoi managed—astonishingly enough—to establish something like a personal relationship with him. Elegy and I, in light of this, began to feel that the presence of a great many Asadi might have acted to inhibit meaningful intercourse— in all that term's appropriate connotations—among small numbers of individuals. We supposed this because Bojangles behaved almost congenially toward Kretzoi.

On his first day in the compound Kretzoi sat down so that Bojangles would see him immediately upon awakening. The result was a display neither of fear nor of aggression, but instead Bojangles's gradual uncurling to an awareness that in his strange captivity he was not alone. On that very first morning, we believed, he took Kretzoi for an Asadi. If he remembered that it was Kretzoi who had helped capture him, he bore no grudge—he permitted Kretzoi to touch him without displaying the characteristic fear grin of terrestrial primates, and, upon occasion, he sought to touch Kretzoi gently in turn, maybe as an abreaction of some long-dormant Asadi urge to deny the mechanisms of Indifferent Togetherness. On that first morning in the pool, for instance, he presented his back to Kretzoi in the manner of a baboon or chimpanzee seeking to be groomed. No one had ever witnessed grooming among the Asadi.

"Is that a breakthrough?" Elegy wanted to know.

"Maybe not to the location of the Asadi temple," I told her.

"Then again, maybe that's exactly what it is. Especially when you consider that it could be the beginning of genuine communication between the Asadi and another intelligent species not of their world."

Elegy's slow smile was beatific. "Another?" she said.

As we watched from our ramp, filming the episode with holographic equipment mounted the night before on four different extensible catwalks, Kretzoi began searching Bojangles's scraggly mane for vermin. In fact, the Asadi's vestigial assumption of the grooming posture implied that either recently or once in his species' enigmatic past his "people" had played host to one or several varieties of parasitic insect. In any case, Kretzoi groomed Bojangles, and Bojangles, appreciatively soothed, watched De-nebola roll across the sky.

Eventually Kretzoi tried to initiate a less one-sided form of communication. He tugged at Bojangles's arm, slapped and pinched him importunately. Bojangles resembled a bounce-back toy—punishment-prone but unflappable. After a good deal of bootless entreaty Kretzoi ran all the way around the pool, turned with outspread arms, and made the circuit in reverse. Then he squatted with his back to the compound's gates and looked up at us as if to say, I'm stymied.

"So much for interspecies communication," I whispered.

Elegy leaned over the catwalk rail and in their specialized dialect of Ameslan urged Kretzoi to return to action. Kretzoi shook his head, his mouth hanging loose and sacklike before him. A boonie. An ignorant, contemptible boonie.

Even Elegy's sympathy for Kretzoi evaporated. She stopped making hand signs and, heedless of the possible effect on Bojangles, raised her voice so that its echo reverberated eerily.

"You're doing fine, Kretzoi! You've done something no one else has ever been able to do!"

The echoes lapped at us like waves from a cold and distant sea.

"Now go back to him, I'm telling you—go back to Bojangles and let him do for you what you've already done for him! Go on, damn

it, you're doing fine! There's no one else on Bosk Veld who can do any better!"

Finally Kretzoi moved. He returned to Bojangles. But instead of plucking at his arm or gouging him in the chest, Kretzoi sat down with his back within reach of Bojangles's hands. Then he waited. Before too long the Asadi began absentmindedly stroking Kretzoi's mane. He never dropped his eyes from the skylights, but the contact, once made, was sustained for well over an hour, to both animals' mutual pleasure. Kretzoi eventually fell asleep.

"Maybe we're back in business," Elegy said.

"Or maybe we've simply got a bushed and temporarily zonked Kretzoi on our hands," I countered.

"Reciprocity, Ben. A beginning."

Subsequent events proved Elegy right. Although Bojangles did cease grooming Kretzoi, taking his eyes off Denebola just long enough to visit a corner of the pool he had designated his privy, that afternoon he permitted several interruptions of his sun worship. Having groomed and been groomed in turn, Kretzoi was able to distract Bojangles from his Denebola watching for minutes on end—sometimes by turning his head virtually upside down to look at Bojangles, sometimes by an inquisitive poke at the other's eye carapaces, sometimes by nibbling playfully at the Asadi's ears. To most of these exotic stimuli Bojangles responded favorably: He turned to Kretzoi and sought to touch him.

At one point in the afternoon Elegy said, "This suggests that if you just get them out of that infernal clearing, the Asadi may not be the brutal, single-minded demons we've come to view them. Their clearing is their hell, Ben—as if they've fallen from a state of grace, or believe they have, and so deliver themselves up to their punishment day after day without protest."

"Would you go voluntarily to such a Gehenna?"

"I didn't say they go voluntarily. I said they deliver themselves

up without protest. They're genetically and behaviorally programmed to do so, and their willingness to suffer 'hell on BoskVeld' must have survival value. A specific kind of pho-toperiodism has been the evolutionary result. They're safe by day on the Asadi assembly ground. They're safe by night in the Wild. Don't you think?" she concluded enthusiastically.

"Elegy, day or night, there aren't any predators on BoskVeld. There's some evidence for occasional cannibalism among the Asadi, though."

"What about the psychological predation of their own past? Don't you think the past's out there with them, even in their present-day slogging and trudging about? The past is their most remorseless predator. It's the avenging angel that's condemned them to their rain-forest hell."

"You've gone awfully damn metaphorical on me, Elegy." "All right. You mentioned cannibalism. That's a kind of predation too, isn't it? Maybe their gathering together in a common place during the day and then dispersing to the wind's twelve quarters at night are defense mechanisms against an innate tendency—bom of past genetic developments whose triggers we haven't yet guessed at—to prey on one another. The Asadi seem to be in a precarious evolutionary equihbrium between autogenocide and meaningless self-perpetuation. Indifferent Togetherness and Frenetic Dispersal are the modes by which they sustain life, Ben. The fact that they still live at all is the only real meaning their past has bequeathed them."

"You think Bojangles's a candidate for salvation?" Elegy glanced at me to see if I were baiting her, and decided her suspicion was groundless. "I don't know. But today, suddenly, he seems less alien, more comprehensible. That's comforting, isn't it? Nobody's comfortable with the truly alien, are they, even if they find it exciting and go out of their way to pursue it. Secretly, you know, primatologists are looking for similarities between themselves and their subjects. Differences are scrupulously noted and analyzed, yes, but it's the points of contact you live for." A

moment later she added, "I'm speaking for myself, of course. That's all I can do."

And Bojangles's amiable susceptibility to the japes of Kretzoi was comforting. We began to feel that the mystery of the Asadi was about to open to us like a flower.

On his second full day in the swimming-pool compound Bojangles stopped staring wistfully, compulsively, after Denebola and got down to the business of exploring his immediate environment, which just happened to include Kretzoi. (Our camercis did, however, record his recurring panic at sunset—but this reaction diminished on each successive evening, until, finally, his only observable response was a rapid alternation of the common fear grin with the "threat face" often employed by Earthly rhesus monkeys: front and side teeth glinting nastily and the mouth full open to screech or howl. Bojangles, however, never made any sound at all.) At first, his forays around the pool's perimeter and interior made us think he was merely adapting the Asadi assembly-ground behavior to his new surroundings. We weren't dismayed by this development, though, because it was so striking a departure from the first day's intense sun worship that we believed even bigger surprises had to be in store.

We expected Bojangles to eat. In this he disappointed us. But he didn't disappoint us in his newfound readiness to jettison old Asadi behavioral patterns for exploratory ventures of his own.

Ninety-four minutes of marching around and through the empty pool—while Kretzoi sat bemusedly by the chrome ladder at its deep end—were all Bojangles required to survey his artificial clearing. Then he stopped, located Kretzoi, and hurried to him for what we supposed would be another session of mutual grooming. Even Kretzoi was of our opinion in this, for he reached to begin combing the other's fur—only to have Bojangles deflect his hands, catch them firmly at their wrists, and hold them before him.

Kretzoi's strength was sufficient to permit him to break the bold, but he didn't move. Then Bojangles voluntarily released his hands.

"This gets better and better," Elegy whispered.

Again, she was right. Kretzoi inscribed a simple gestural communication in the air. Bojangles, whose back was partially to us, leaned forward and stared not at Kretzoi's hands but deep into the protruding lenses over his eyes.

"Kretzoi's getting a spectral display," Elegy said. "We're picking it up on the third monitor, Ben."

This monitor, attached to the catwalk rail to the right of our desk, gave us a telephoto closeup of Bojangles's grimacing face. So sharp was the picture's resolution that I could even make out the individual colors in his pinwheeling eyes. But the message in those colors, however eloquent or Homeric, was all of a piece to me: pitiless Greek.

"Where does he get the energy for that kind of display?" I wondered aloud. "He hasn't eaten anything for a good sixty to seventy hours."

"What about the sun?" Elegy responded.

This was old speculation, an early theory of Moses Eisen's as a matter of fact, and the only thing wrong with it was that Komm decrees of, first, the Martial Arm and, later. Colonial Administration had never permitted us to put it to a test. Because Bojangles had gone so long without taking food, evidence for some sort of photo-driven organic battery in the optical equipment of the Asadi mounted inexorably. If this hypothesis had any validity, I knew, it might offer the beginnings of an explanation for the present absence of prey and predators on BoskVeld. The Asadi ate low on the food chain; also, they might share with green plants the ability to synthesize chemical energy from direct sunlight, thereby abstracting themselves from any crass dependence on carnivory. Why, then, did they sometimes choose to be cannibals?

Kretzoi suddenly shoved the Asadi in the chest, thrusting him away. He then made a series of angry gestural signatures.

"What's that all about?" I asked.

"He's telling Bojangles, You have Kretzoi hands, but I don't have Bojangles eyes. It's a rebuke. If they're going to communicate, he seems to be saying, it'll have to be by means of an anatomical common denominator."

"The hands?"

"So he's arguing. The trouble is he's outlining the necessity of employing Ameslan in Ameslan itself, which can only be—"

"Greek?"

"Yes, which can only be Greek to Bojangles." Elegy leaned forward to watch both the live action below and the screens of the four closed-circuit monitors on the catwalk's rail.

Kretzoi grabbed Bojangles's wrists, as if remembering that the Asadi had been the first to compare their hands and to imply a willingness to bridge the evolutionary chasm separating them. With only that to go on, then, Kretzoi pulled Bojangles off his butt and began forcibly twisting the Asadi's hands into some of the basic alphabetical and symbolic gestures of Ameslan.

Bojangles hunkered before Kretzoi in a rapture of studious incomprehension, allowing his hands to be manipulated like modeling clay, his eyes (according to Monitor No. 3) glowing a mute pale silver.

After ten or fiteen minutes of this he yanked one hand free and made the sign for "frightened."

"He's smarter than you are," Elegy whispered. "He's an absolute linguistic genius in comparison to you."

Frightened. The sign hung in the air, whether by a random concatenation of muscle responses or a deliberate attempt to frame that very message—well, my skepticism inclined me to the former view.