Transfigurations (2 page)

found several promising protohominid fossil sites in Ethiopia near Lake Shamo returned my interest and my attention to paleoanthropology.

Then I began to do well in school, but not exceptionally well. Just well enough not to be totally ashamed of myself when, my degrees newly in hand, I summoned the courage, or the brassi-ness, to apply for an auxiliary scientific post with the Third Denebolan Expedition then making ready at Kommthor Headquarters in Dar es Salaam.

Surprisingly, I was selected. I owed my selection, I knew, to my presence on the continent, an overgenerous letter of recommendation from a professor at the National University who had once met Moses Eisen in London, and, finally, the personal intervention of the woman who had turned me around in my studies. She visited Kommthor Headquarters on my behalf and pled my case with one of Captain Eisen's personnel officers. She did this, I somewhat belatedly came to realize, because she loved me and because my devil-may-care indifference to her love demanded not only an admonitory generosity on her part but a real effort to remove me from her life. Two birds with one stone. Off went Thomas Douglas Benedict to BoskVeld.

Once we had established our base camp, I began to hope for a chance to examine and date several specimens of pre-Asadi statuary discovered by Oliver Oliphant Frasier in the ruins of a temple near the Calyptran Sea. But my immediate superior, a woman named Chiyoko Yoshiba, took this duty right out of my hands by virtue of her greater experience. I might have helped her in the appraisal of these artifacts, I suppose, but my attitude, even at thirty-nine, was that of a know-it-all joove; and I alienated Yoshiba with my clumsy self-confidence, my intellectual jokes, and my unauthorized absences from base camp in the Dragonfly belonging to the paleoxenological cadre of which she was the head. Many, many times I went off flying over the veldt country or the jungle simply to get away from people more in control of their lives than I was of mine, usually in the vain hope of purging the

loneliness in my soul by getting better acquainted with myself. In retrospect, I can't say that I blame Yoshiba for disliking me. After Chaney's disappearance, though, we patched up our differences £md eventually made friends. . . .

Yoshiba soon discovered that every specimen of Asadi artwork or technology dug up from Frasier's ruins defied accurate dating. Techniques employing the carbon-14 method, potassium-argon comparisons, geomagnetic determinations, fission-track readings, and measurements of thermoluminescence all proved equally useless because they gave her contradictory results. It was impossible to find out how long ago the Asadi's ancestors—we'd begun calling them the Ur'sadi to distinguish them from their living but uncommunicative evolutionary spawn—had built their temples or what had brought about their swift and mysterious demise. I was of no help to Yoshiba or the other two paleoxenolo-gists because my own theories about Asadi prehistory were so obviously either cynical or facetious constructs meant to provoke laughter rather than to cast light. Also, I was frequently absent when the others had need of an additional pair of hands or a different perspective. The result was that Yoshiba, in disgust, finally asked Moses Eisen to reassign me, to get me out of her and her colleagues' hair.

Since it was impossible to send me home, Eisen transferred me to the personal bailiwick of Egan Chancy, the cultural-xenology unit. Chaney, interestingly, was the cultural-xenology unit. Eisen made me his pilot. I could not have been happier with the transfer.

Chaney was a cultural xenologist trained in Africa before the hostilities there disrupted most scientific endeavors on the continent for better than a decade. Even better, to my parochial way of thinking, he was a man with few friends on BoskVeld and no apparent ties to the home world. We were brethren, I felt. This was a delusion I didn't see through until several months after his disappearance—when I was compiling and annotating the monograph that made Chaney, me, and BoskVeld famous.

Although he kept copious written records and often used a tape

recorder to supplement the materials in his journals, Chaney seldom talked just to be talking. I did. Once we began sharing a dormitory section in the Third Expedition's base camp, I spent a lot of time detailing my personal history for him. I told him about growing up during the sixties and early seventies in the Dakota Territories of the Rural American Union. Chaney listened. I told him about the women who had loved or pretended to love me, and whom I had invariably found cause to bid farewell. Chaney listened. I talked about my desire to write a popular account of all three expeditions to BoskVeld, the successes and failures, the hopes and the heartbreaks, the trials and the tribulations, and so on ad nauseam, and Chaney merely listened. He listened with such intentness that it was not until he had disappeared that I realized I knew absolutely nothing about him.

The only thing I ever understood in those days was that both of us, Egan Chaney and Thomas Benedict alike, were lost and at sea. That made us brothers, and so what if he held his tongue while I talked?

After my walk around Frasierville on the night before Elegy Cather's arrival, I returned to my quarters and took a small book off my shelf. . . .

Death

and Designation

Among

the Asadi

Sundry Notes for an Abortive Ethnography

of the Asadi of BoskVeld,

Fourth Planet of the Denebolan System,

as Compiled from the Journals (Both Private and

Professional),

Official Reports, Private Correspondence, and Tapes

of

Egan Chancy,

Cultural Xenologist,

by his Friend and Associate,

Thomas Benedict

The Press of the National University of Kenya, Nairobi

PART ONE

Preuminaries: Reverie and Departure

From the private journals of Egan Chaney: There are no more pygmies. Intellectual pygmies perhaps, but no more of those small, alert, swaybacked black people, of necessarily amenable disposition, who lived in the dead-and-gone Ituri rain forests; a people, by the way, whom I do not wish to sentimentalize (though perhaps I may). Pygmies no longer exist; they have been dead or dying for decades.

But on the evening before the evening when Benedict dropped me into the singing fronds of the Synesthesia Wild * under three bitter moons, they lived again for me. I spent that last evening in

*This was Chaney's private and idiosyncratic term for the rain forest the rest of us called either the Calyptran Wilderness or the Wild. T. B.

base camp rereading Tumbull's The Forest People. Dreaming, I lived again with the people of the Ituri. I underwent nkumbi, the ordeal of circumcision. I dashed beneath the belly of an elephant and jabbed that monstrous creature's flesh with my spear. Finally, I took part in the festival of the molimo with the ancient and clever BaMbuti.

All in all, I suppose, my reading was a sentimental exercise. Tumbull's book had been the first and most vivid ethnography I had encountered in my undergraduate career; and even on that last night in base camp, on the hostile world of Bosk Veld, a planet circling the star Denebola, his book sang in my head like the forbidden lyrics of the pygmies' molimo, like the poignant melodies of BoskVeld's moons.

A sentimental exercise.

What good my reading would do me among the inhabitants of the Synesthesia Wild I had no idea. Probably none. But I was going out there; and on the evening before my departure, the day before my submersion, I lost myself in the forests of another time, knowing that for the next several months I would be the waking and wakeful prisoner of the hominoids who were my subjects. We have killed off most of the "primitive" peoples of Earth, but on paradoxical BoskVeld I still had a job.

And when Benedict turned the copter under those three antique-gold moons and flew it back to base camp like a crepitating dragonfly, I knew I had to pursue that job. But the jungle was bleak, and strange, and nightmarishly real; and all I could think was There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no

Methods: A Dialogue

From the professional notebooks ofEgan Chaney: I was not the first Earthling to go among the Asadi, but I was the first to live with them for an extended period. The first of us to encounter the Asadi

was Oliver Oliphant Frasier, the man who gave these hominoids their name—perhaps on analogy with the word Ashanli, the name of an African people who still exist, but more likely from the old Arabic word meaning lion, asad.

Oliver Oliphant Frasier had reported that the Asadi of Bosk Veld had no speech as we understood this concept, but that at one time they had possessed a "written language." He used both these words loosely, I'm sure, and the anomaly of writing without speech was one that I hoped to throw some light on. In addition, Frasier had said that an intrepid ethnographer might hope to gain acceptance among the Asadi by a singularly unorthodox stratagem. I will describe this stratagem by setting down here a conversation I had with my pilot and research assistant, Thomas Benedict. In actual fact, this conversation never took place—but my resorting to dialogue may be helpful at this point. Benedict, no doubt, will forgive me.

BENEDICT: Listen, Chaney, what do you plan on doing after I drop you all by your lonesome into the Wild? You aren't thinking of using the standard anthropological ploy, are you? You know, marching right into the Asadi hamlet and exclaiming, "I am the Great White God of whom your legends foretell"?

CHANEY: Not exactly. As a matter of fact, I'm not going into the Asadi clearing until morning.

BENEDICT: Then why the hell do I have to copter you into the Wild in the middle of the goddamn night?

CHANEY: To humor a lovable eccentric. No, no, Ben. Don't revile me. The matter is fairly simple. Frasier said that the Asadi community clearing is absolutely vacant during the night; not a soul remains there between dusk and sunrise. The community members return to the clearing only when Denebola has grown fat and coppery on the eastern horizon.

BENEDICT: And you want to be dropped at night?

CHANEY: Yes, to give the noise of the Dragonfly a chance to fade and be forgotten, and to afford me the opportunity of walking into the Asadi clearing with the first morning arrivals. Just as if I belonged there.

BENEDICT: Oh, indeed yes. You'll be very inconspicuous, Chaney. You'll be accepted immediately—even though the Asadi are naked, have eyes that look like the murky glass in the bottoms of old bottles, and boast great natural collars of silver or tawny fur. Oh, indeed yes.

chaney: No, Ben, not immediately accepted.

benedict: But almost?

chaney: Yes, I think so.

BENEDICT: Hov/ do you plan on accomplishing this miracle?

Chaney: Well, Frasier called the stratagem I hope to employ "acceptance through social invisibility." The principle is again a simple one. I must feign the role of an Asadi pariah. This tactic gains me a kind of acceptance because Asadi mores demand that the pariah's presence be totally ignored; he's outcast not in a physical sense, but in a psychological one. Consequently, my presence in the clearing will be a negative one, an admission I'll readily make—but in some ways this negative existence will permit me more latitude of movement and observation than if I were an Asadi in good standing.

BENEDICT: Complicated, Chaney, very complicated. It leaves me with two burning questions. How does one go about achieving pariahhood, and what happens to the anthropologist's crucial role as a gatherer of folk material: songs, cosmologies, ritual incantations? I mean, won't your "invisibility" deprive you of your cherished one-to-one relationships with those Asadi members who might be most informative?

CHANEY: I'll take your last question first. Frasier told us that the Asadi don't communicate through speech. That in itseK pretty much limits me to observation. No need to worry about songs or incantations. Their cosmologies I'll have to infer from what I see. As for their methods of interpersonal communication, even should I discover what these are, I may not be physically equipped to use them. The Asadi aren't human, Ben.

BENEDICT: I'm aware. Frequently, listening to you, I begin to think speechlessness might be a genetically desirable condition.

All right. Enough. What about attaining to pariahhood?

CHANEY: We still don't know very much about which offenses warrant this extreme punishment. However, we do know how the Asadi distinguish the outcast from the other members of the community.

BENEDICT: How?

CHANEY: They shave the offender's collar of fur. Since all adult Asadi have these manes, regardless of sex, this method of distinguishing the pariah is universal and certain.

BENEDICT: Then you're already a pariah?

CHANEY: I hope so. I just have to remember to shave every day. Frasier believed that his hairlessness—he was nearly bald—was what allowed him to make those few discoveries about the Asadi we now possess. But he arrived among them during a period of strange inactivity and had to content himself with studying the artifacts of an older Asadi culture, the remains of a temple or a pagoda between the jungle and the sea. I've also heard that Frasier didn't really have the kind of patience that's essential for field work.

BENEDICT: Just a minute. Back up a little. Couldn't one of the Asadi be shorn of his mane accidentally? He'd be an outcast through no fault of his own, wouldn't he? An artificial pariah?

CHANEY: It's not very likely. Frasier reported that the Asadi have no natural enemies; that, in fact, the Synesthesia Wild seems to be almost completely devoid of any life beyond the Asadi themselves, discounting plants and insects and various microscopic forms. In any case, the loss of one's collar through whatever means is considered grounds for punishment. That's the only offense that Frasier pretty well confirmed. What the others are, as I said, we don't really know.

BENEDICT: If the jungles are devoid of living prey, what do the poor Asadi live on?

CHANEY: We don't really know that, either.

BENEDICT: Well, listen, Chaney, what do you plan to live on? I mean, even Malinowski condescended to eat now and again.