Transfigurations (13 page)

It wasn't until the next day, when I checked my mailbox in the radio room, that I found what Eisen had told me to look for. Knowing that there had been no probeship deliveries or private light-probe transmissions, I checked my box merely out of habit. And I found the note from Chaney. The only comfort it gave me

was the comfort of knowing my friend had not decided to commit suicide—that he had successfully fought off a subtle but steadily encroaching madness.

Eisen disagreed with me in this assessment, believing that Chaney had committed suicide as surely as if he had taken poison or put a bullet through his brain.

Read the note he left behind, however. It expresses a peculiar sort of optimism, I think, and if you don't see the slender affirmative thread running through it, well, I would suggest that you go back and read the damn thing again. Because even if Chaney has committed suicide, he has died for something he believed in.

Chaney's Farewell

I'm going back to the Asadi clearing, Ben. But don't come after me, I won't let you bring me back. I've reached a perfect accommodation with myself. Probably I'll die. Without your supply drops, that seems certain, doesn't it?

But I belong among the Asadi, not as an outcast and not as a chieftain—but as one of the milling throng. I belong there even though that throng is stupid, even though it persists in its self-developed immunity to instruction. I'm one of them. I feel for them.

Like The Bachelor, Ben, I'm a great slow moth. A tiger moth. And the flame I choose to pursue and die in is the same flame that slowly consumes every one of the Asadi. Don't forget me, Ben, but don't come after me, either.

Good health to you, Egan

CHAPTER ONE

Moses Eisen

After rereading Death and Designation Among the Asadi for the umpteenth time, I slept only a little. Denebola's rising spread a radiance through Frasierville that automatically dimmed the streetlamps and set their vanadium-steel poles glinting like silverware in the hands of hungry pioneers. Maybe it was the noise of their flashing that sliced through my dreams and woke me up.

In my austere little debussy I relieved myself and drew enough water through the vacuum tap to slap away the numbness in my cheeks and crow's-feet. The mirror showed me a man whose every encounter with his mattress leaves him imprinted as if by a waffle iron. I dressed hurriedly and banged down the steps to hunt up Moses Eisen.

Eisen now lives with his wife and two children, both Bosk Veld-bom, in a house whose grounds jut into the Calyptran Wild like a barren peninsula. Three-quarters of the house lie below the

surface. An unpainted wood verandah fronts the ground-level roof, and a ventilation tower rises above the jungle canopy behind the verandah. By default, this residence constitutes our planet's "Governor's Mansion"—for three years ago Kommthor elevated Eisen from the captaincy of the Third Denebolan Expedition to the post of interim administrative head of the BoskVeld Colony. When we were engaged in matters of official import, then, I was supposed to call him Governor Eisen and refrain from indecorous displays of intimacy.

That had never been hard. Eisen had no aptitude for either small talk or jokes, and although old hands were able to barge in upon him without risking a stiff rebuke or an imperious stare, they could never accuse Eisen of trying to make them feel themselves a part of the family. Usually, weather permitting, he came outside to receive callers; and in the four and a half years since Civi Korps engineers had excavated his home from the rain forest's crumbling humus, I had set foot inside it exactly twice—for small but formal parties commemorating the births of his and Rebecca's children. I envied Eisen his family, but not his status or his disposition.

I walked down the little forest-locked peninsula to his house and mounted the steps to its deck. Dressed in dappled coveralls and smelling of an astringent homemade cologne (or "pore opener"), Eisen was somewhat testily awaiting me.

"You're late," he said by way of greeting. "I thought I was going to have to send someone after you."

We were going out to Chaney Field together. One of Eisen's duties was to greet all incoming colonists and support personnel, a duty he performed with grudging conscientiousness.

Late or not, I had to stand beside Eisen on his gallery as Denebola poured its copper light into our eyes from far beyond Frasierville's eastern perimeter. He seemed in no hurry to make up for the tardiness of which I was supposedly guilty. Instead, he nodded over his shoulder at the forest sighing and photosynthesiz-ing at our backs.

"How long has it been since anyone did extensive field work

among the Asadi?" he asked me, knowing the answer as well as I. The question—I was certain—had specific reference to the arrival of Chaney's daughter.

"No one does it full time anymore, Moses. You haven't permitted any of us to submerge ourselves in their culture since Egan disappeared." I'm sure I gave culture a disparaging inflection. Emotional identification with an alien species isn't always possible, even for people trained to repress their ethnocentric prejudices in the interests of a clinical objectivity. Egan Chancy knew that as well as anyone.

The Governor revolved his noncommittal face toward me. "But you and others continue to go in there occasionally, don't you?"

"Sure," I acknowledged. "I do, sometimes, and so does Yoshiba when she gets the chance." But after Chaney's defection, my interest in the Asadi rain forest was perhaps less in the Asadi themselves than in the ecological integrity of the rain forest as a biome. The fact that the only living organisms we had ever found in there were botanicals, insects, and the Asadi had made me, against my training, something of a xenologist. As had my work on Chaney's tapes and notes.

'To what end?"

"Sir?" I asked, intimidated by Eisen's tone.

"What real progress in our understanding of the Asadi has been made since Chaney left us? What specific achievements?"

"Their behavior hasn't altered fundamentally in the past six or seven years. We reaffirm Chaney's basic findings. We note small changes in the size and makeup of the population in the Asadi clearing. . . . We're only in there by day, Moses, when we're in there, and it's tedious work. All our attempts at telemetered observation have been thwarted by the Asadi themselves. They won't tolerate mechanical systems in the Wild. They disassemble such equipment when they discover it or hurl it about like male chimpanzees engaging in charging displays. This discovery, by itseK, is probably the most significant one we've made in seven years—it suggests a hostile but systematic response to our

HI

attempts at long-distance surveillance."

"Couldn't it just as easily suggest an instinctive dislike of things that don't naturally belong in their jungle? It doesn't require cognitive ability to recognize an intrusive wrongness, Ben. Back home, a sparrow seeing a piece of rope in its nest perceives the rope as a snake and refuses to land. You see, the wrongness registers."

Tactfully, I admitted that the Asadi's destruction of our telemetering equipment might well stem from its "wrongness" rather than our subjects' intelligent awareness that we were trying to record their life styles.

"Is that it, then?" Eisen asked. "One ambiguous discovery in six years?"

"There's Geoffrey Sankosh's film," I responded wearily. "From that we've learned that the Asadi bear live young, whom they leave during the day in nests high above the forest floor. We also know that their young don't come to the Asadi assembly ground until they've grown relatively imposing adult manes. As best we can tell, this takes more than seven years, maybe as many as twelve. Since the Third Expedition hasn't been here twelve years, Moses, it's hard to be much more accurate than that in estimating the age of initiation."

"The holographic film was shot by an outsider," Eisen murmured deprecatingly, squinting into the sun.

I hurried to counter the implications of this remark: "That's because you didn't have the authority to summon Sankosh back to Frasierville every night. The terms of his grant freed him to work independently of colonial authority, and he took full advantage of that freedom. Besides, he was lucky, Moses. If he had discovered the female cJready well advanced in her labor, he would never have been able to get his equipment into place in time to film the births. Had he arrived earlier, the female would have fled beyond him without a trace."

Eisen was smiling reminiscently. "I've seen it six or seven times, that film. A marvelous accomplishment. Once I set my

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projection cylinder down there on the patio roof—pointing his chin at the expanse of leaf carpeting below the verandah—"and let little Reba watch it, too. The angle of apprehension was perfect. I've never seen her eyes so big."

To that I didn't respond.

Frasierville was beginning to stir. Doors flapped open, and 'bola-powered lorries hummed back and forth among the warehouses, import-processing plants, and the central solar station, a pagoda of tarnished mirrors. A caravan of newly indoctrinated colonists was departing for Amersavane, the bitter-grass veldt country to the far southeast. Eisen and I watched its long train of veldt-rovers and settlement cars hitch jerkily along Dry Run Boulevard and out of sight beyond the power sails of the hospital.

"At least Sankosh came back alive," Eisen finally said. "We didn't have to send someone into the Wild to retrieve him."

"No, we didn't," I agreed.

Eisen moved silently along the deck and went down the steps at its opposite end. Obediently, and of necessity, I followed. He was halfway up the tree-lined peninsula of his yard before I could fall in comfortably beside him and pick up the gist of the monologue spilling from his lips.

"... care for it, Ben. Not a bit. She may have a grant, too— autonomous institutional funding freeing her from my control. Even her father didn't have that. But what if she isn't as fortunate as Geoffrey Sankosh? What is she melts out there in the Wild and then can't reconstitute herself as a functional human being? I don't like this a bit, Ben, and I'm not particularly disposed to like her, either."

Still walking, he said, "Thank God, she's not the only one I'm going out to the shuttle field to meet—her daddy's memorial shuttle field, I suppose I should add. And thank God, you're her escort and surrogate daddy for the day, maybe even for the duration of her stay, and it's your bounden duty, Ben, to keep her out of my hair. Keep her out of trouble, too."

We walked to the lorry pool three streets beyond my own living

quarters. A Komm-ser\ice guard, recognizing Eisen, drove a veldt-rover out of the fenced-in compound and picked us up. Another attendant, a young woman in a violet enlisted-grade jumpsuit, swung the gate shut behind us and locked it with a metallic pop. Purring, our veldt-rover leaped away.

"I'd almost made up my mind not to go this morning," Eisen said.

"Why?"

"I don't think Egan Chaney had very much in common with the author of The Iliad. And I don't think his interloping daughter is likely to have much in common with the excavator of Troy, old what's-his-name."

"Neither do I, frankly. Is that all that's bothering you?"

Eisen, the margins of his salt-and-pepper tonsure fluttering in the wind, regarded me with something like childish pique. "If I had my way, Ben, we'd move Frasierville to a coastal or a veldt location and leave the Asadi altogether to their own devices."

"But they warrant study. An intelligent ancestral species of the Asadi or an artifact-making collateral relative—the Ur'sadi— went extinct some time ago. But despite what Chaney babbled in his final tape about their being on the verge of autogenocide, the Asadi themselves seem evolutionarily stable at present."

"Then maybe we just ought to leave them alone."

"Thanks to you," I countered, "that's pretty much what we're doing. In any case, they're a"—I quoted to Eisen from the xenologists' handbook that Chaney had helped to write before his arrival on BoskVeld—"'Komm-protected indigenous species possessing either fully developed self-awareness or its demonstrable potential.' That being so—even if they aren't truly indigenous—we can't kill one of their number to examine its brain, and in all the time we've been here we've never had the opportunity to recover one of their dead."

"Pity," said Eisen, smiling faintly. "I hope you don't hold me accountable for that."

Our driver negotiated the washed-out surface of Calyptran

Perimeter Road—which old hands irreverently refer to as Aphasia Alley, so difficult is it to speak while jolting along its three-kilometer length—and then headed northeast on the white, polymer-bonded macadam of Egan Chaney Highway. The veldt swallowed us, and off to our right we saw the convoy destined for Amersavane crawling through the morning's dizzying veils of heat shimmer. You began to realize why the imperial British were so fond of pith helmets.

The veldt was vacant. A visitor could look in vain for impala, zebras, wildebeest, or gazelles. The African analogy worked only topographically, and the foliage clinging to the earth and tufting a thumb's length above the surface in prickly beige or cream-colored flowers had no known counterpart in the Serengeti or the Ngorongoro Crater. Only a few tussocks of the many nondescript clusters flamed out in gaudy reds and oranges, and those, of course, caught and captivated the eye.

Traveling them, you wondered why the savannahs had spawned no animals to graze there. You wondered how the Asadi could have evolved on a world whose biota seemed so limited and niggardly. Prodigal is not a word you would have used to describe the Creative Animus that undertook the husbandry of BoskVeld's plains and forests. Hence, the utter anomalousness of the Asadi. (As for the batlike huri that Chaney mentions in his journals and tapes, no one but him had ever seen a specimen of those elusive, nasty-sounding critters.) I sometimes found myself believing that forty million years in the future, when humanity had passed away from the universe at large, the bacteria we left behind on Bosk Veld would have evolved into ethically self-aware hominids and that the Asadi would still be there on the planet to confute their logic and boggle their understanding. . . .