Transfigurations (18 page)

"I'd imagine they just ran down, wouldn't you?"

"I guess I would, primarily because that's the consensus of the men and women who were trying to unravel their secret. I'd also point out that Earth is an awfully long way from the source that initially charged and powered the eyebooks."

"Where's the remaining one, then? The sixth?"

"In the special-collections room of the Frasier Archaeological Museum of Indigenous Artifacts, just off Christ's Promenade, near the Administrative Kommplex. It's a single-story structure of only seven or eight rooms."

"I know right where it is."

"Of course you do."

"What are the chances of our taking the eyebook into the Wild with us? I want Kretzoi to have a chance to see it."

"Nonexistent," I said. "What are the chances of hanging King Tut's corpse in your closet as a conversation piece?"

"We'll have to go over there, then."

"With Kretzoi?"

"He's the one who'll be facing a battery of spectrum-displaying Asadi eyes when he enters the clearing. I think he should have some foretaste—or foresight, I guess—of what he'll encounter. In Dar es Salaam we had no access to any of the imported eyebooks."

"All right," I said. "I'll meet you on the Promenade in forty minutes."

Christ's Promenade derived its name from the immense thermoplastic pieta given to BoskVeld's Colonial Administration four years ago by the cultural-arts commission of Glaktik Komm. The statue sat on a tiered granite pedestal in the center of the Administrative Kommplex square. When Denebola topped the modular onion domes of the archive buildings east of the square, the statue seemed to liquefy and evaporate, the grief of the Mother of God shimmering as elusively as a heat mirage above the veldt. At night, under a moon or three, the pieta focused and redirected the alien lunar light so that the luminous architraves of the various government buildings and the Promenade's streetlamps were all but engulfed by the glow. Day or night, the effect was disturbing. You forgot that the statue's presence was considered decorative and historically instructive rather than sacred. You forgot that the civkis who walked past the pieta every day and gazed out their windows upon it during their meal or meditation breaks were wholly blas6 in its beholding. Nearly everyone else, though, fell victim to the involuntary genuflection of his or her awe.

When I entered Christ's Promenade forty minutes after talking with Elegy, I saw her and Kretzoi in the mouth of Mica Strike Street staring at the massive, icelike monument. In turn, a number of curious or startled pedestrians were staring at them. Elegy and her shaggy, hybrid primate looked very small and out of place, and I felt a sudden swelling of shame at my reluctance to approach and

greet them. To many of those on the square, encountering an Asadi on Christ's Promenade must have seemed as outrageous and unlikely as sitting down to a breakfast of bagels with the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. The disbelief and repugnance on several faces almost made a coward of me—but at last I sucked in my breath and crossed the open court below the statue.

Kret2oi, without taking his weirdly capped eyes from the piet^, was talking with Elegy in rapid sign language, his stance the tentative upright stance of a vigilant baboon.

"It reminds him of something he saw in the Gombe Stream Reserve before being transferred for surgery and genetic alteration to Dar es Salaam," the young woman told me even before I had asked. "He once saw a male chimpanzee catch a baboon juvenile and dash out its life by swinging it against a tree. Usually the corpse is quickly dismembered and the skull cracked open so that the chimp can eat the limbs and brain. On this occasion, though, Kretzoi watched as several males of the baboon troop mounted a screaming counteroffensive on the murderer. It was more a pride-salvaging bluff than anything else, but the result was that the surprised chimp dropped the dead juvenile and lost it to the quick hands of the baboons. There was more screaming and bush shaking, but eventually the dead animal's mother reclaimed the corpse. She took it off into the bushes clutching its twisted body to her abdomen. Then she spent a brief half hour or so mourning it— as the Mother of God in that statue is mourning her broken Son."

"Good morning," I said to Kretzoi's interpreter as Kretzoi himself, after only a brief pause, resumed signaling with his hands.

"She was a new mother and inexperienced," Elegy continued, unmindful of my greeting, "but after she had somehow made the intuitive leap to certain knowledge that her child would never move again, she tossed it aside and went off with the remainder of her troop to forage for food."

Kretzoi stopped "talking," but his eyes remained fixed on the pale deliquescing bulk of the piet^.

"Is there a moral in that?" I asked. "And did Kretzoi really say 'intuitive leap'?"

"In free translation, yes, I think he did." Elegy was outfitted for the Wild: a beige jumpsuit with strips of perforated mesh along its legs, flanks, and midriff. Her dark hair was held back by a thong of hard red leather. "If there's a moral, it may be that you have to get on with things."

But it seemed to me that Kretzoi hovered between the amoral pragmatism of the baboon mother's "getting on with things" and the spiritual dignity of Mary's static carven grief. Our prospective emissary to the Asadi, then, was a creature floating in evolutionary limbo. I wondered if Elegy knew what she had done in having him tailored so specifically for this mission. Obviously, she could have had nothing to do with his hybridization—for Kretzoi was a full-grown "chimpoon" or "babanzee" (to use the whimsical terminology of the new primate ethologists and crossbreeders) of at least sixteen to twenty years of age, and Elegy was therefore almost his contemporary. But at the Goodall-Fossey Extension Center near the Gombe Stream Reserve she was apparently given leave to select Kretzoi out of a small pool of experimental animals; and the way he looked now—mane, optical carapaces, pronounced bi-pedalism, coloring—was a direct expression of Elegy's desire to find her father. How did she justify exploiting his anatomy in this fashion, especially when Kretzoi himself seemed to have at least as much intellectual awareness as some of the "human beings" I had worked with there on BoskVeld and elsewhere?

But I held my tongue.

Down Mica Strike Street I led my charges, over its dully glittering veldt-turf flagstones, to the Museum of Indigenous Artifacts.

This single-story building is notable for its smooth, hard facade of interswirling umbers and earthy yellows, like some kind of enormous rectangular clay vessel coated with a protective glaze and baked in a giant-sized kiln. A pair of tall rubber plants stands sentinel at its entrance, and the prefabricated building across the

street—a small chemical-assay facility—is so nondescript and inconsequential in comparison that you can walk down Mica Strike Street several times before noticing it at all. In fact, but for its glazed and colorful exterior, the museum itself provokes very little notice. If you have been there once, the only reason to go again, I'm afraid, is to ascertain that it still exists. I did this regularly, primarily because the special-collections room housed an interesting array of Egan Chaney memorabilia, including representative copies of our monograph and the last of the mysterious eyebooks.

Robards de Feo and Chiyoko Yoshiba were the cocurators of the Frasier Archaeological Museum, de Feo up front and Yoshiba in the special-collections department.

When we entered, I immediately regretted not having forewarned them by telecom or televid of our coming. Kretzoi's appearance in the museum foyer caught de Feo completely by surprise, frightening him so badly that he fumbled something in his hands and narrowly missed dropping it to the floor. (It was a small stone effigy from the ruins of the only verifiable Ur'sadi structure in the Wild, a foundationless pagoda thoroughly excavated and described by Frasier and his First Expedition colleagues. A great many people supposed that Chaney had erected his illusory pagoda on the ruins of Frasier's real one.) De Feo relaxed a little when he saw me behind Kretzoi, but his face stayed the color of a rotten turnip's heart.

I introduced de Feo to both Elegy and Kretzoi and told him why we had come. He escorted us through the antechamber's spindly display cases—attempted duplicates of those described in Chaney's monologue—to the special-collections department, where Yoshiba, a heavy-set, middle-aged Japanese-Dutch woman with a remarkably serene and beautiful face, raised her thin eyebrows ironically and gestured us to several high-backed metal stools.

Kretzoi, discerning in a glance that he could not comfortably sit his stool, wandered into the center of the room and squatted. Hunkering, he regarded the three of us—de Feo had already

returned to the front—with the same kind of bewildered attention he had given the pieta.

Elegy, meanwhile, gazed down into the glass cabinet in front of our stools. Several photographs of her father and a small fan of pages from one of Chaney's private journals were on display under her hands.

"This is his daughter?" Yoshiba asked.

I nodded.

"And she wants to see the last of the eyebooks?"

"Please," I said.

"Altogether my pleasure, she's come such a long way." With that, Yoshiba went through an archway behind the cabinet and returned a moment later carrying a white velvet pouch with equally velvety navy-blue drawstrings. She withdrew the eyebook from the pouch and laid it on the cabinet directly in front of Elegy, who looked up smiling and reached toward the alien cassette with a cautious—indeed, a reverent—forefinger.

"You're not permitted to activate its spectral display," Yoshiba warned gently. "We don't know how many more times it will work."

"She's come such a long way," I reminded Yoshiba.

"And I'd like Kretzoi to see it"—Elegy nodded meaningfully at her eerily attentive companion—"before he goes into the Wild today."

"Come on, Chiyoko," I pleaded.

The woman's serene, full-cheeked face betrayed neither suspicion nor sympathy. "For old time's sake, I suppose?" she asked me sardonically, then relented and said, "Very well—once." Not so much a concession as a restricted mandate. "You'll have to sign and date the register, Thomas. Nor do I think that the make-believe Asadi should perform the program activation."

Elegy, I believe, started to protest this judgment as bigoted and discriminatory, but Yoshiba retreated through the archway again and came back with the register. I held my thumb in the first open square on the page, just long enough to draw my print out of the

paper. Then I signed my name with a blunt-tipped stylus. Yoshiba promptly closed the register and transported it back to its resting place in the farther room. Then, once again at the display cabinet, she indicated by a nod that I could take the eyebook to Kretzoi and show him how it worked and what it had to reveal of Asadi communication methods.

"If it fails to display again after this run-through," Yoshiba said matter-of-factly, "your signature will not save my position, Thomas."

"We're a good deal closer to its power source than were the university technicians and specialists who lost theirs," I replied, hunkering down beside Kretzoi and holding the eyebook under his muzzle. "Not to worry, Chiyoko."

Elegy dismounted her stool and came around behind the two of us. To Yoshiba, almost as a rebuke, she said, "In any case, we'll bring you several more. My father took only a few out of the Asadi pagoda with him. Others remain, maybe as many as 150,000."

Chiyoko laughed and lifted the velvet pouch by its drawstrings. "I'd better begin cutting material for more of these, hadn't I? Maybe I'd better file an import requisition, in fact."

I pressed my thumb over the right half of the rectangular tab beneath the bulb on the cassette.

The eye immediately began displaying. Colors swept in crazy sequence out of the Asadi crackerbox on my palm. I looked at Kretzoi and saw this rainbow rampage reflected in the lenses of his eye coverings. A staccato, ragtime piccolo parade of brilliant primaries, cunning blind pauses, and pyrotechnic shadings between the primaries. Kretzoi, tilting his head, peered at the flashing bulb and began to quake.

"Maybe you'd better shut it off," Chiyoko advised, but to preserve the eyebook's motivating energies rather than to spare Kretzoi his strange St. Vitus tremors—of which Chiyoko seemed totally unaware.

I put my thumb over the left half of the cassette's control tab, and as suddenly as it had begun, the spectral display ceased. The

bulb in the wafer's center might just as well have been the glazed-over eye of a dead fish. Chiyoko took the eyebook from me and deposited it carefully in its velvet pouch. When I looked back at Elegy, she was kneeling in front of Kretzoi with a hand on his still-trembling shoulder.

"Could you read the pattern?" she asked. He seemed not to hear her, and she repeated the question.

Kretzoi made a sign that plainly meant No.

"What, then?" she demanded. "What happened to you?"

This time Kretzoi revolved a degree or two toward Elegy and began making hand signs with a deliberate, desperate verve.

Elegy translated for Chiyoko and me: "He says he read the eyebook's emotional content—not its specific message, not its philosophical or narrative import, but its ... its emotional content." This disturbed her. "He says the spectral sequence evoked in him a deepening pattern of—well, of/ear."

Kretzoi looked away from Elegy and "grinned," briefly exposing his altered teeth and mottled gums. The grin, in Old World monkeys, is a sign not of joy or potential aggression but of fear, and Kretzoi's grin was as involuntary as his hand signs had been deliberate. He seemed embarrassed and ashamed.

"Perhaps he's afraid to go to the Asadi clearing," Chiyoko said.

Elegy shot the woman an annoyed glance, but kept her hand on the animal's shoulder and asked quietly,"Are you, Kretzoi?"

He turned his wrist outward from his body so that his knuckle-dragging hand briefly exposed its palm. A shrug. His face remained averted, but his long upper lip finally dropped, eclipsing the fearful grin.