Transfigurations (14 page)

"We're going to arrive well before the probeship's shuttlecraft," said our driver. He was a dark-complexioned young man whose name was embroidered in purple thread on the shoulder of his violet sleeve: Bahadori.

"Fine," said Eisen listlessly.

The shuttle field's colossal, and useless, probeship gantry had been visible to us for ten or twelve minutes already. Like a titanium cat's cradle, it reared up fifteen stories in the desert shimmer, defining the surrounding countryside by both its size and its geometric complexity: The veldt around it seemed to exist for the sole purpose of providing the gantry with a place to rest. Its interior struts glistened like the threads of a giant spiderweb, and the cylindrical passenger and cargo cars poised on the gantry-to-ground diagonals resembled dewdrops trembling in the webbing. A field of whilais, irrigated by vacuum pumps, grew behind the gantry and gentled the terrible but stunning monotony of the veldt. To the north, beyond the field's main landing strips, sat a colossal, and useless, probeship hangar. This building, which had been vandalized and inscribed with weird graffiti repeatedly over the past four years, looked like a vast but isolated slum. I was fascinated by it. Several times in recent months I had toured the hangar just to be by myself in its echoing emptiness.

Much nearer, a cluster of flat-roofed buildings with translucent green walls provided housing for the shuttle field's support personnel and temporary shelter for the new arrivals. Chaney Field, in fact, had become an important suburb of Frasierville. Many had had hopes that it would soon take its place in the hierarchy of Glaktik Komm as a bonafide light-probe port. Hence the folly of the unused gantry. Hence, too, the folly of the immense probeship hangar which was now in use principally as a warehouse for imported colony supplies.

"Whom else must you meet?" I asked Eisen as we neared the complex.

"A new group of colonists," he responded without looking at me. "And, as I understand it, a friend of Elegy Gather's whom I may wish to put in quarantine for a while."

"Quarantine!" I exclaimed.

"So the Wasserlaufer Ws captain informed me by radio last night."

"What the devil are you talking about?"

"Patience," said Eisen. "Have patience, Ben."

CHAPTER TWO

Jaafar, Elegy, and Kretzoi

Outside the terminal in the blistering midmoming heat we stood—Jaafar Bahadori and I—while Eisen awaited the shut-tlecraft's coming in the comfort of his air-conditioned Chaney Field office. He had invited us to join him without much enthusiasm, and we had politely declined in order to watch the shuttle put down on the landing strip.

Cracking his knuckles in anticipation, Bahadori shifted from foot to foot and peered into the pale recesses of sky above the Calyptran Wild. The wind blew in gusts past the field's green-glowing support buildings, setting up an eerie lament in the titanium lyre of the gantry.

At last the shuttle appeared: a huge white fuselage descending on the treetops to the northwest and banking into the wind to align itself with Chaney Field's main landing strip. It got dowTi quickly.

Then, distorted by heat haze, foreshortened by distance, the shutde bumped toward Bahadori and me at high, whining speed.

Despite having watched a hundred such shuttles land, I was always surprised by how ungainly they appeared on the ground. In the newer probeships the shuttles slot into the cargo nacelles underslung aft and so become merely another rriodular component of the whole—but, independent of their parent ships, they have all the grace and aesthetic appeal of wounded pelicans.

Baggage lorries and passenger vans departed the shade screens of the terminal and scooted competitively across the polymac. The shutde, meanwhile, began putting out its tubelike extensible ramps—a trio of them. Bahadori and I caught a ride on one of the passing baggage trucks. Then we jumped from its running board only ten or twelve meters from the shutde's central ramp.

Many of those disembarking were women—more women than men, in fact—and I knew that it was going to be no easy task finding Elegy Gather among all the attractive candidates. I understood, though, why the young Iranian had been so keen to greet the shuttle—he was nineteen or twenty and a long way from home. He blustered into the crowd surging out of the extensible tube opposite us and fought his way upstream like a randy salmon. I didn't see him again for another forty or fifty minutes.

As soon as Bahadori was gone, I started asking each young woman who approached if she were Elegy Gather. No luck. My candidates shook their heads, or smiled and raised their eyebrows in apology, or gave me haughty looks as if I had indecendy propositioned them. The men among whom they walked either grinned or pretended not to notice me.

One fellow, however, stopped and took my arm. "Go up the rear ramp," he told me, nodding. "Gather's back there now, trying to get something straightened out with a Komm-service steward."

This ramp was on the other side of the shuttle. I walked beneath the craft's bloated, silver-white belly, then entered the antiseptic-smelling tube leading upward to the passenger compartment.

"Who's going to guarantee his safety?" I heard a female voice

demanding evenly. "You? Governor Eisen? Who?"

The steward responded, "If it isnt quarantined, young woman, who's going to guarantee the lives of the inhabitants of BoskVeld?" This man, who was facing me from the rear of the passenger compartment, stood a good head and a half taller than his diminutive adversary. He looked, in his less-than-heartfelt belligerence, almost as old as I. My heart went out to him.

"Not it, " the young woman corrected him. "Kretzoi's an utterly unique intelligent being who deserves your respect. Have the decency to use the masculine pronoun." She paused to glance over her shoulder at me before resuming her argument with the steward. "And who do you mean by 'the inhabitants of BoskVeld,' anyway? The Asadi? If so, no one thought to quarantine the members of the First, Second, and Third Denebolan Expeditions before turning them loose like a ... a swarm of renegade bacteria." That wasn't the word she wanted, but she emphasized it nevertheless.

"I didn't mean the Asadi," the steward wearily parried. "I meant the human inhabitants of BoskVeld. The civkis, the colonists, the scientific and military support personnel. Would you care to be responsible for turning this planet into a ghost world?"

"Kretzoi had a clean bill of health before we left Dar es Salaam. Do you think he contracted a plague virus aboard the Wasserldufer? Do you think he's going to expose everyone here to some mysterious and lethal contagion?"

"Civ Gather, / don't think anything," the man tried to begin.

"Apparently not," the young woman declared, ignoring the real import of his inflection. "I wonder who does."

"I mean," the haggard steward began again, "that the decision isn't mine. It's Governor Eisen's. He wants to confine Krikorian— or whatever its name is—until your, ah, companion is thoroughly acclimated and at home. He also has the safety of others in mind."

"Acclimatize Kretzoi!" the young woman exclaimed. "Why, this is almost exactly the sort of climate he grew up in!"

I edged my way along the aisle until I was standing at the young

woman's shoulder. "Elegy Gather," I said, "I'm Thomas Benedict."

The steward's face betrayed relief and gratitude; he took the occasion to excuse himself and trudge past us toward the pilot's cabin.

The glance that Chaney's daughter had thrown me a moment earlier had imprinted only her eyes in my memory. They were as large and brown, and as potentially dangerous, as chestnuts in an unbanked fire. They radiated intelligence and indomitability. Her other features, by comparison, seemed soft and unprepossessing. Elegy Gather looked like a feminine, mulatto version of her father, compact and unadorned. The packaging promised nothing extraordinary, but her eyes transformed her deceptive plainness. Her eyes and her warm, no-nonsense voice.

She unhesitatingly extended her hand, addressing me as Dr. Benedict. I refrained from avuncularly suggesting that she call me either Thomas or Ben. After all, I was several years younger than her father.

"Who's supposed to be quarantined?" I asked her instead.

"Gome along," she said, "and I'll show you."

She took me deeper into the shuttle's tail section and then down a cramped helical stairway into the cargo bay. The bay's exterior doors were open by this time, and the lift operators in their lorries on the polymac were keying instructions into the mechanical stevedores rearranging the goods and equipment in the bay. The heat of the veldt poured in through the open doors.

"This is where he had to ride," Elegy Gather told me, picking her way among the crates, transport cylinders, and naked machines packed against one another in the cargo section. We halted in front of a small pressurized closet against the port bulkhead. "Right here," she emphasized, "Gaged. As if he'd murdered somebody or plotted with known subversives to disrupt the authority of Glaktik Komm's legally appointed agents. Aren't you appalled? Aboard the Wasserldufer, Dr. Benedict, he shared my stateroom. My stateroom!"

Chaney's daughter fiddled with the latch on the closet, sprang it expertly, and eased the rounded door aside.

My first thought was that someone had kidnapped Elegy Gather's traveling companion and by some insidious legerdemain replaced him with—well, one of the stupid and brutal Asadi from our native Wild.

I took a step or two backward.

The creature in the pressurized cargo closet was revealed to me in hunched profile, squatting on the floor and clutching its knees like an autistic child. The tawny mane and the powerful, sinewy limbs of the beast, however, suggested a Calyptran origin.

"Kretzoi," the young woman murmured. "Are you all right?"

When the creature turned its head to look at us, I felt certain it was an Asadi. Its head seemed overlarge, but its eyes consisted of two circular lenses as thick and rippled-seeming as old-fashioned bottle glass. I expected to see the irises behind these lenses change colors in rapid, unpredictable sequence. Instead, behind the fitted lenses, I saw eyes like mine or Elegy Gather's—brown irises in a matrix of coagulated albumin. This, too, unsettled me.

Kretzoi—to lend the creature Gather's distinguished name for him—blinked behind his artificial eye bubbles and made a rapid sign with his right hand. Then he let his hand fall limply aside.

Ghaney's daughter signed to the creature in turn, even though he had apparently understood her spoken question. Then she learned inward as if to help Kretzoi out of his place of confinement.

"He's hot and thirsty and cramped," Elegy Gather said. "Which isn't particularly surprising under the circumstances, is it?"

"Giv Gather!" shouted a voice from aft.

We turned and saw the weary steward staring down on us from the helical stairway in the shuttle's tail. He was ducking his head and contorting his neck in order to bring us into his line of sight, and I briefly feared he might fall. The fact that Ghaney's daughter had gone so far as to free a passenger bound for quarantine was such a shock to him that he paid no attention to where he was

putting his feet and saved himself a concussion only by reaching out and grabbing the narrow handrail. Once down, though, he managed to get to us over the crowded cargo floor in a matter of seconds.

"What are you doing?" he demanded of Elegy. "What do you think you're doing?"

Kretzoi, out of his closet, ignored the steward but raised himself to a tentative standing position and looked about as if peering over a field of waist-high grass. Elegj' was touching his arm reassuringly, trying to persuade him merely by tactile suggestion to go with her back the way the steward had just come. Kretzoi continued to peer about warily, taking in everything at once, his doglike muzzle revolving toward the open bay doors to scent the humid rankness of the laborers on the polymac and then swinging back across the jumble of supplies to brush against Elegy's shoulder. He was half crouching, half standing, with his arms or forelimbs cocked at the elbows in front of him and his hands hcmging limp.

Completely upright, he would have been as tall as the young woman who tried to direct him out of the cargo bay—as tall, I estimated, as many adult Asadi. His mane, I felt sure, was the result of some kind of sophisticated hormonal treatment, while the hard transparent carapaces shielding his eyes were undoubtedly nothing but surgical implants. His body fur was thin and, in contrast to his mane, silver-grey. I decided on the spot that Kretzoi was a hybrid terrestrial primate genetically altered or eugenically manipulated to yield an individual with the characteristics of both a Gombe Stream chimp and an Ishasha River baboon. Recently he had undergone the relatively minor physical "adjustments" that had grafted to these unusual hybrid characteristics the distinctive external features that would identify him to the Asadi social unit as one of its own.

These, at least, were my on-the-spot deductions about Kretzoi's singular anatomy, and even as the Komm-service steward interposed himself between the three of us and the stairway at the rear

of the shuttle, I began to formulate a dim idea of how Elegy Gather proposed to succeed where all other potential rescuers of her father had failed. She had brought her own spy and infiltrator. . . .

All our dismayed and harried steward was thinking about, though, was the likelihood of Kretzoi's infecting the world with a deadly simian virus. He fisted both hands and held them like fragile porcelain eggs in the pit below his breastbone.

"Very lax security," I told him. "Do you propose to put all three of us in quarantine? Make that all ybur of us—I'm afraid you've exposed yourself to the possibility of infection, too." As soon as these words were out, I regretted the smugness of my tone and the small irrational joy I was taking in baiting the man.

His hands still fisted in his stomach, he responded with painful tact: "Would you at least do me the favor of waiting here until I can find out what the Governor wishes us to do now?"