Transfigurations (40 page)

The huri brings the Asadi. At unpredictable intervals. To look at the standing remains of that past." Chaney's tongue probed the membrane rimming his upper lip. "Which is finally. Inescapable."

I touched the man's shoulder. "Are you saying the Asadi's case is hopeless so long as there are huri alive on BoskVeld?"

'The Ur'sadi devolved. At least in part. To survive as an independent species. The threat of future enslavement hangs over them. Like a sword. And partially enslaves them. Now."

"And they did this to you," Elegy asked, "in hopes of enslaving you as they had once enslaved the ancient Ur'sadi?"

Chaney ignored his daughter's question. "Ben," he said. "I want you. To uncover my eyes."

I hesitated, and Chaney, encysted and bound as he was, registered my hesitation. His breathing altered subtly.

"I'll do it," Elegy said. She ducked beneath the several silken lines between her and Chaney and popped up beside his head. She had no knife now, only her hands and fingernails, but she grasped the shelf of caul above her father's upper lip and began peeling it carefully backward. This time, contrary to her experience with the film over Chaney's hand, her effort proved startingly successful.

The skin beneath the caul was as smooth as volcanic glass, blue-grey in the shifting light. Chaney's moustache and beard, as if they had been sprayed with an ultramarine dye and lacquered, revealed the same blue-grey glassiness.

"Does this hurt?" Elegy whispered.

"I. Don't. Feel. Anything."

As deliberately as the defusing of a bomb, the unveiling continued, and when Elegy at last eased the caul backward over Chaney's forehead, twisting it once and letting it dangle down behind his bandaged skull, we saw a pair of opalescent and nearly opaque lenses sunken into his face where his eyes should have been. Insofar as they were visible, the human eyes beneath tiiese carapaces resembled tiny mouths whose lips have been sewn together. Chaney was right: His transformation had not taken. The

vivid botching of his eyes synopsized and condemned the folly of the entire procedure. I blinked and looked away.

"Father—"

"You can see," he managed, "how it didn't take."

Elegy was as distraught as I had ever seen her. Her cheeks were wet. Her body trembled. She seemed to be discovering unrecognized villainies in herself as well as fresh horrors in the manipulative genius of the huri.

"Father," she said, weeping.

And Chaney heartlessly inquired, "Who."

"Your daughter," I told him angrily. "A woman who has striven for eleven years to accomplish what we've accomplished today."

And with a clipped and brutal clarity Chaney said, "I. Have. No. Daughter."

Elegy didn't recoil from this emphatic disavowal. She kissed her father on his altered lips. "I love you," she murmured defiantly. "I've loved you for as long as it's been possible for me to love you. Since the beginning. I never stopped, not even when you didn't deserve it and apparently no longer wanted it. That's why I've put such implicit faith in you, even going so far as to manipulate others—like Ben here—to find you again. All this. Father, I've done out of love and a desire to redeem myself in your eyes."

"In my eyes," Chaney echoed her.

"You know exactly what I mean, even in this pitiable and distant state! Don't you? Don't you. Father?" Elegy pushed herself away from Chaney and grabbed a handful of the lines fanning out past us toward the limestone wall at our backs. These she bunched in her fists and yanked as she spoke: "You loved me once. You loved my mother once. You loved the Ituri pygmies whom none of us had any power to save. So you know. What I'm saying. Don't you. Dont you?"

"Elegy!" I grabbed her hands. "Stop it! You sound like you're mocking him!"

"He knows I'm here," Elegy declared, releasing the runners of

bunched silk and wiping her face with the back of her hand.

"I. Know. You're. Here." The vibration of the chrysalis imparted a weird tremelo to Chaney's words.

Elegy knelt again beside the pit.

"I have no daughter," Chaney said. "Unless." The qualifier hung in the air like a scimitar, poised.

"Unless what?" she asked him.

"Unless she redeems herself." The pottery glaze over Chaney's features appeared to crack, the oddly human expression beneath it warping to betray a sense of unspeakable loss. "My eyes—blind or sighted—are of no consequence anymore." His lone was now almost conversational. "The Japura business broke me. And the Asadi. The Asadi put me under."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to kill me, Elegy." A breath so deep it was almost a moan. "That's why they led you down here."

"To have us kill you?" Elegy exclaimed incredulously.

"The hurl superorganism doesn't want. My death. On its conscience. Or on the debit side of its ledger. Of interspecies relationships." Chaney's face was beginning to look human, despite the eyes. "Maybe it's a karmic reluctance on their part. But I'm dying. And they don't want to hasten my death. For fear of having to shoulder." Deep breath. "The blame."

"We'll get you out of here," Elegy said.

"No use. You can see I'm unredeemable. Unless."

"Unless I redeem you?"

"By redeeming yourself." Deep breath. "With your love."

Elegy twisted toward me in the cables and put her hands on my chest. "I want you to get out of here." She was pallid. In the same way your knuckles whiten when you clench something firmly, her pallor arose from resolution.

"He's trying to blackmail you," I told her. "You can't let yourself be swayed by anything he tells you know. Look at him."

"He's forgiving me. And himself, too. For the way he screwed up our lives after the Japura Episode."

"By letting you kill him?"

Elegy put her cold hands on my face and thrust my head back so that her eyes could laser mine with her resolve. "Are you capable of understanding what's happening here, Ben? Maybe you are. If you are, you'll let me do what I've come all this way to do. If you aren't . . . well, you're going to have to kill me to keep me from this."

"Maybe we could get him out," I protested. "That's what you yourself had in mind until he started this insidious love-me, kill-me business."

"Just how are we going to get him out? I wasn't considering how, or what for, and neither are you. Look back that way, Ben." Elegy pointed over the forward wall of the compound into the eerie gloom of the catacombs, at the immense central column by which we had descended from the pagoda. "Do you really think we can carry my father back up that thing, Ben? Just the two of us?"

That central column-cum-stairway was a landmark of towering prominence, visible despite the gloom shrouding its highest reaches. It climbed upward better than half a kilometer through the dark. We would never get Chaney up its switchbacking scaffolds and into the light of the day. If we did get him up, and if the Komm-galens in Frasierville somehow managed to prolong his life, he would be something less than either a human being or an Asadi.

Still, with help. Elegy and I might be able to manage that otherwise unlikely mission.

And the white-blue beam of an emergency torch, probing the catacombs from a set of scaffolds halfway up the column, suggested that help was reasonably close to hand. Jaafar had entered the pagoda and descended into the pit comprising the huri sanctuary.

"Jaafar's coming," I said, "and that gives us a chance."

Elegy shook her head. "That isn't the point, Ben. Maybe the three of us could lick the how of getting my father out, but the what for —Ben, you haven't even addressed that!" She struck me

in the chest hard enough to make my breastbone sting. "It's my grant, Ben. It's my father. And it's my decision. Leave me alone with him for five minutes. Go. Right now. Or don't ever expect to own a jot of my regard again."

"That's blackmail, too. Elegy—virtually the same kind your daddy's working on you."

"Interpret it however you like. If you really think you're right, you'll be able to live with my contempt. But if you're interfering with me now to establish a sense of your own authority, or to worry aloud some abstract notion of higher morality, well, you'll deserve what you get. Worse yet, Ben, you'll know it."

I swore at her. "Get out of here," Elegy said evenly. "Wait for Jaafar at the base of the column. I'll join you there as soon as I'm finished."

I swore again, ritually. Then, obeying her, I duckwalked beneath the chrysalis's support lines and headed for the opening at the front of the compound. When I glanced back. Elegy was crouched beside her father's head like a worshiper in the tomb of some Egyptian or Mesoamerican god-king, her deity's face masked in tarnished bronze and lapis lazuli, the mummy itself winged in silk like an angel.

Curiously vivid and affecting, the scene stayed in my vision even as I negotiated my way past the subterranean lagoon, the hurl dovecotes, the walls festooned with molds, the guano compounds, and all the oozing amethyst dividers of the labyrinth. The memory clung like a burr. I couldn't shake it. By the time I reached the base of the column I was trembling uncontrollably. Half in awe of the tears streaming down my face and beading in my eyelashes, I eased myself cross-legged to the floor and waited.

It felt astonishingly good to cry—even if, astonishingly, it hurt like nothing else I had ever known.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Transfigured Lives

"Dr. Benedict," droned a voice in my ear. "Dr. Benedict, sir." It was Jaafar, on his throat radio, perched on a platform high above me, for our connection was reestablished now that we inhabited the same volume of space. I hadn't thought to call him before, nor, apparently, had he remembered the radio until better than halfway down the chamber's central tower. Elegy, I assumed, was too busy, too preoccupied, to respond, and I knew that the only decent thing to do was to tell Jaafar to stay put until she and I could join him aloft. Otherwise, he would make the trip down for nothing. It took me a few moments to compose myself, but I finally activated my radio and did the decent thing.

"Please, Dr. Benedict, what business is Civ Gather about?" "I'm not sure, Jaafar. We'll have to wait until she gets ready to come back and tell us. Just sit tight for a while."

"There's an Asadi ahead of me, sir. It led me down here."

"You mean Kretzoi, don't you? Surely you're able to tell the difference between Kretzoi and a real Asadi by now."

Jaafar waited three or four beats before responding. "Yes, sir. By now I'm capable in that way. This is not Kretzoi who leads me. /f's an Asadi, with empty eyes and a — how do you call it? — a ratty mane.

"The Bachelor!" I radioed in surprise. "Where's Kretzoi, then? You saw him, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes, sir. He's with the helicraft. I used him to point me to my landing in front of the pagoda."

"You were able to see it, then? The pagoda, I mean?"

"As large as a hammered thumb it showed from the air, sir. Larger, I guess one should acknowledge. It's very large indeed."

"What's The Bachelor doing now, Jaafar?"

"Who?"

"The Asadi. What's he doing? How did you happen to pick him up as a guide? And what in Allah's name made you want to follow him?"

"He wanted me to come. He emerged from the pagoda only a short time ago, indicating by movements that I should follow. Kretzoi told me — with his hands, you know — that Elegy and you had gone down beneath the floor. Civ Gather, I mean."

"Go ahead and say 'Elegy,' Jaafar. She's not military, you realize—you can call her anything you and she mutually approve."

Jaafar's voice was dubious: "Yes, sir."

"What's the Asadi doing now?"

"Listening to me talk on the radio. He's two platforms down, almost directly below me. It makes me dizzy to survey such bigness."

"Didn't it scare you, following him into a cavern this size?"

"Oh, very much."

'Then what made you do it?"

Jaafar was silent.

"Was it Elegy?" I asked him.

"/( was Elegy more than it was you, sir, " said Jaafar forthrightly.

"Touche. You have a decidedly medieval concept of chivalry, Jaafar. You know that, don't you?"

"/ would call it Persian rather than medieval. Even if the naming makes little objective difference in the description."

"Your prerogative, Jaafar. Be my guest."

Then we both shut up and waited. Elegy was not long in coming. She greeted me with a touch, her hand cold. Neither of us said anything. She preceded me to the first platform and began to climb. It was much harder than coming down: We had to belly our way to each new scaffold and then lift ourselves onto it with our arms. Wearying and time-consuming. It was mortifying to think The Bachelor had bounded up these steps so quickly and easily. But Jaafar—in a clear, chaste tenor—sang ancient Persian ballads to us as we climbed.

It was already late afternoon when we got back outside. The Bachelor had accompanied us for a good portion of the ascent, always several platforms above us, until the huri— his huri, we supposed—intercepted him near the catacombs' ceiling and apparently directed him by tunnels or passageways unknown to us through the thick central column and out of our lives. There arrived on the surface of the planet, then, only Elegy, Jaafar, and I.

Kretzoi greeted us. As I retrieved my holocamera from the pagoda's stone bier, his glee was such that he spun about in the clearing like a top. Then he ran up the steps and nearly knocked me over attempting to embrace me. Elegy he held against him for a long, quiet time. Finally the four of us retired to the shade of the Wild to recuperate from our ordeal. None of us slept. We were too haunted by events to close our eyes.

It was growing dark by the time we decided to leave. I insisted on piloting, despite my weariness. Beneath the invisible halo of

our rotors, we lifted off with gratifying swiftness. I circled the pagoda several times, man'eling at the magnificence of the structure. I kept waiting for it to cant its amethyst windows and blink out of existence—but it remained solid and distinct below us.

"You think you could find this place again?" I asked Jaafar.