Transfigurations (21 page)

"Have you ever witnessed any of the Asadi going transparent?" Elegy asked Kretzoi after this revelation. "Have you ever noticed their bodies fading, losing outline and substance?"

Kretzoi crisply signaled No.

I suggested, "Given what he's just told us. Elegy, maybe

I

Kretzoi's the one who's been losing outline and substance. Maybe, as a result of these vampiric staring contests, he's the one who does a fade-out."

Ahhough Kretzoi appeared to have no conception of what I was implying, Elegy touched his shaggy wrist and asked, "What does it feel like—when you're hypnotized by the spectral displays, I mean?"

He stared off vacantly into the Wild for a moment, then made a desultory series of signs with one limp hand.

"That he's holding his own," Elegy translated for me. "That's it—that he's competing very well, indeed."

"But he can't hold his own," I said. "He doesn't have the anatomical equipment. All any of us can do is intercept the sensory output of those displays and try to interpret the data on an emotional level."

Kretzoi made another small flurry of half-formed signs.

"On an emotional level, Kretzoi says, he's too tired to 'talk' any longer. And he doesn't have anything else to tell us."

With that, after moving off wearily, he installed himself in an upright sitting position on Elegy's pallet, closed his eyes, and soon began making asthmatic sleep noises. This was our second-to-last night in the Wild before returning to Frasierville, and I had begun to feel like a blacking-factory owner slowly squeezing theyoie de vivre out of one of my poverty-ridden juvenile laborers. It was time to try something else.

Elegy yielded her pallet to Kretzoi that night and slept in the Dragonfly. I stayed awake, mulling our options and agonizing over both the legal and ethical ramifications of what I had in mind. There was one strategy I had purposely not broached to Elegy for fear she would veto it out of hand, counseling me again—maybe even angrily, preemptively—to the patience and persistence of that model field-worker, her father. I didn't want to risk her

unqualified refusal. Her possession of a Nyerere Foundation grant, with its built-in exemptions from various Kommthor directives and regulations, gave her a degree of official elbow room that I, as an employee of BoskVeld's Colonial Administration, didn't have. Watching Kretzoi sleep, then, and tasting the sour bile of my own frustration, I decided to act on Elegy's behalf, invoking the explicit powers of her grant.

One small klieg continued to shine outward from the helicraft's door. Dust motes swam on the peripheries of the brilliant white cone, and the tangled jungle receded into nonexistence behind it.

Crouching in front of Kretzoi, I prodded him awake. It took three gentle pokes to get a response, so exhausted and sleep-drugged was he.

"Elegy and I have just had a talk," I told him as soon as he had nervously oriented himself to my presence. 'Tomorrow's our last day before going back to Frasierville for a while."

Kretzoi made a one-handed inscription in the air, like a child jabbering objections to some arbitrary adult decree.

"I don't understand you," I whispered, shaking my head. "I won't be able to understand you, Kretzoi. All I want you to do is listen. Elegy's as worn down as you are, almost. We've got to let her sleep.""

Another rapidly executed sign.

"No," I quietly scolded him. "No more of that. I don't understand it, you see. Will you keep your peace and listen?"

One hand rose and twitched before Kretzoi could suppress the inclination to answer.

"I know you want to stay out here," I said with genuine sympathy. "You don't like what you're doing, but you're committed to it—and it's admirable you're willing to make such sacrifices for Elegy's sake."

Kretzoi's eyes shifted almost imperceptibly back into darkness. This time he had no response to make, no words to inscribe on the air.

"I suppose we could leave you out here, to keep from

interrupting the continuity of your presence among the Asadi—but I've told Elegy you need to come out for a while. You need a break, maybe even a comprehensive metaboscanning at the hospital. You're a valuable resource, Kretzoi, and we can't let your sense of commitment be your undoing. Do you understand?"

Although Kretzoi could make a number of subtle discriminations among moods and concepts, in some things he was almost painfully literal-minded. He rested his hands on his upjutting upper thighs and regarded me with a cryptic immobility.

"Do you understand?" I whispered again, at last realizing he was merely practicing perfect obedience. "Nod, Kretzoi. Or signal Yes."

He signaled Yes. At the time, though, I wondered how much of what I was telling him was getting through. More than once on Christ's Promenade I had seen civkis blotto on theobromine or lorqual discoursing cozily with stray dogs. That image mocked me as I spoke to Kretzoi.

"All right, then. Tomorrow's your last full day in the Asadi clearing—at least for a while. If nothing world-shaking occurs, there's something we want you to do just before sunset, something very important and maybe a little difficult. Don't worry, though. We'll be there. Elegy and I, to help you. You're not going to be alone in this, not by any means.

"Before the dispersal of the Asadi into the Wild, Kretzoi, we want you to pick out a likely candidate for capture. We think it ought to be a male—the females may be nurturing infants in hidden nests and we don't want to endanger the lives of their young. So make it a male. And make it one of the smaller ones. You're going to have to overpower him at sunset, just before he rushes off with the others. A young, small male, then. That's good because the specimen's youth may give him the flexibility to bounce back from the shock of being forcibly detained. Ideally, we'd take an infant out with us for its adaptive potential—but that's impossible. There aren't any in the clearing, none.

"Are you following what I'm saying?" I finally asked, an audible

hoarseness in my whisper. "This is very important, Kretzoi, you've got to keep it all straight. Signal Yes or No. Do you understand what we're asking of you?"

Kretzoi signaled that he understood.

"Do you think you can do it, then? It involves a certain clear risk to yourself. Suppose the other Asadi turn back to aid the one you've overpowered. Suppose the creature himself has enough strength to resist you. We've never tried anything like this before. I can't predict exactly what's going to happen. We want a healthy specimen, Kretzoi, but not a mighty mite. This depends very much on you. Do you think you can do it?"

Kretzoi indicated that he could do it. His optical carapaces reflected the brightness of our helicraft's tiny klieg, and the eyes inside them were pricked into alertness by what I had proposed.

I began to feel strangely ashamed of my ruse, as if I had betrayed rather than upheld a loved one. Kretzoi, I learned at that moment, was utterly without guile, or suspicion, or irony, or any of the other cerebrally duplicitous tendencies of human beings. Believing that I had talked with Elegy about capturing an Asadi, he intended to fulfill our requests of him as well as he was able.

"Try to go back to sleep," I urged him in my ugly-sounding, strangled whisper. "We only just made up our minds to do this, you see. Elegy would have outlined it all for you in the morning, but I told her she ought to try to sleep in." Obsessively even in the face of Kretzoi's silent but ready acceptance of everything I had said, I went on fabricating rationales for his convincing. . . .

It wasn't until late the following afternoon that I told Elegy what I had done. We were sitting at the puUout table where we typed and transcribed our notes. The fan's hard plastic blades made a rhythmic and continuous popping noise.

"It's illegal," Elegy said, avoiding for the moment the fact that I had gone behind her back. "The Asadi are a Komm-protected

indigenous species. They may be within an evolutionary eyelash of full moral and intellectual self-awareness. That's why you've kept your hands off them this long, Ben."

"Your grant gives us extraordinary privileges," I countered. "We have the right to step outside standing Komm regs if orthodox procedures fail to produce results."

"It's my grant."

"I've read it very thoroughly."

"It's my grant. Dr. Benedict!" She studied me with outraged bafflement. Beads of perspiration formed a bridge of tiny diamonds above her upper lip. "Not yours," she emphasized more calmly. "Mine."

"I know that."

"The responsibility for fuckups and legal violations and squandered funds lies heavy on the head of the Nyerere Fellow, Dr. Benedict—not in the lap of overzealous surrogate daddies or washed-up colonial officials who've kicked away their own best chances."

"Now you're playing rough."

But her steady, reasonable tone contradicted the harshness of her words, the unbanked fire in her eyes. "A kiss to build a scheme on," she said. "You had this in mind our second night in here, didn't you? Even before, perhaps."

"No," I answered, altogether truthfully. The pulse in my temples had begun to keep pace with the rhythmic popping of the fan.

'Then why are you doing it?"

"We need a breakthrough, Elegy."

"This is only our sixth full day out here," she said. "My father spent the equivalent of more than four Earth-standard months out here before he witnessed the Ritual of Death and Designation."

"If I remember correctly, you were in such a helluva hurry to achieve a breakthrough when you first arrived that Eisen had to order you to spend that night in Frasierville. True?"

"There's a difference between enthusiasm and insanity. I was in

a hurry to get started. You seem in a hurry to turn my grant inside out, to do exploratory surgery on the Asadi's souls."

"If they have any. —But, yes, I'm in a hurry for that breakthrough. My hurry's come upon me gradually over the last six years."

Elegy went to the door of the BenDragon Prime. She raised one arm along its casing and stared into the Calyptran Wilderness. "I don't know what my attitude toward you's going to be, Ben, if anything happens to Kretzoi."

"Then I suppose we'll both find out at the same time, won't we?"

Without turning her head Elegy responded tightly, "You've been on Bosk Veld too long. Dr. Benedict. Too damn long."

In camouflage suits and light-absorbent facial makeup. Elegy and I made our way through the snaky lianas, hanging umbrella roots, and serrated fronds of the Wild. We each carried a tranq launcher and a backpack of netting with which to help Kretzoi subdue his chosen victim. There was no red leather thong in Elegy's hair, and our progress through the rain forest was so cautious and inchmeal that I wondered briefly if we could reach the clearing before sunset.

Neither Elegy nor I spoke. We were afraid to give the Asadi even the smallest hint of our approach.

The Asadi clearing was over a hundred meters long and about sixty wide. It was situated in the forest so that one "end zone," as Chancy liked to term them, lay to the north-northwest of the other. From the air the clearing looked like a red-brown label on an amorphous billowy garment of green, blue-green, and even shiny purple. In order to help Kretzoi capture an Asadi, Elegy and I were going to take up places on either side of the clearing. There was no telling where Kretzoi would be when the aliens' twilight exodus began, and if Elegy and I were squatting beside each other

nearly a hundred meters from the struggle, our nets and our tranq launchers would be useless. Even if we separated and tried to cover different territories, Kretzoi still might tackle his victim at a point equidistant between the two of us, putting us both too far away to intervene effectively.

At last, breaking our mutually imposed silence, I touched Elegy's arm and told her that I was going to stake out a position on the clearing's western perimeter. She nodded, and we separated.

Denebola's last light was quivering in the foliage. I worked my way along the northern "end zone" and down the clearing's western boundary, careful not to alert the doggedly trudging Asadi to my presence but afraid that my nervousness would do just that. The smell drifting to me from the aliens' bodies was both suety and sweet, like rancid fat boiled in syrup. But I kept going and crept to a hiding place about thirty meters from the south end of the clearing.

It was strange—literally unearthly—how the Asadi, almost as a single conscious entity, registered the setting of their planet's sun, the precise moment at which Denebola had fallen altogether beneath a "horizon" that their rain-forest environment didn't even permit them to see. You would have thought a switch in their heads had been depressed and locked into place, a switch that only sunrise the following morning had the power to release. One or two observers have suggested that a single Asadi registers this moment and that his resultant dash for the Wild triggers the fleeing response in his conspecifics. This explanation merely narrows the mystery to one undiscoverable individual; it doesn't account for the mathematical accuracy of the Asadi perception that not a ray of Denebola's light is any longer coming to them direct. Nor does it explain the observation that even in thunderstorms the Asadi dispersal takes place on its same sunset-dictated schedule. The response seems built in, innate. Triangulations made from the air on both the Asadi clearing and the line along which BoskVeld's curvature sets a mathematically verifiable horizon in relation to the clearing—these meticulous surveys had demonstrated that full

sunset and the Asadi's twilight dispersal are almost invariably coincident events.

You began to believe that on BoskVeld there thrived an unforthcoming species of sun worshipers whose very genes coded them to a reverence for the Light. Each individual was clocked to the sun, attuned to its passage.

The moment came. The unending Asadi shuffle ended, and individual animals began sniffing the air and staring skyward. Then they broke. The sound of their feet padding for safety or concealment or God-knows-what in the thickets of the Wild erupted like a sudden tattoo of drums. Anonymous Asadi bodies crashed past me on all sides. I crouched lower and lower. At the same time, I tried to find Kretzoi in the clearing. All I could see was bobbing heads and hairy backs—but the clearing was emptying rapidly and soon I'd be able to see nothing in there except the dust.