Transfigurations (29 page)

She gave me a puzzled look, then fell into quiet contemplation. After a while she said, "Ben, I don't think that happened."

I was a prisoner in my own house, trapped by the pathos Elegy

generated and the comic dishonor of my early-morning dishabille. It suddenly struck me that this was not where I wished to be.

"Elegy, you've forgotten one very important thing about your father's description of Eisen Zwei's various appearances in the Asadi clearing."

"The huri," Elegy said.

"The huri," I echoed her.

"I haven't forgotten at all," she said. "I really haven't. Eisen Zwei's batlike little familiar has been much on my mind, Ben. But do you happen to know a huri personally?"

My expression as neutral as I could make it, I stared at her.

"Scratch that," she said, standing up so quickly she had to grab my chair to keep it from falling. "I'm sorry, Ben. I realize no one's ever seen a huri except my father. Kretzoi tried to ask Bojangles about the creatures, but either the Asadi didn't understand the sign Kretzoi had to invent or else he didn't wish to discuss the subject. In any case, the existence of the huri remains conjectural."

"You believe in them, though?"

"As surely as children believe in magic animals and toy-toting old men with long white beards. And for the same reasons, too. My father once told me in earnest they exist, and my father didn't lie. What about you?"

"Likewise. But I'm not sure it was my father who told me. I'm getting too old to have ever had a father, don't you think?"

She approached me, put her arms around me. We embraced, my chin resting on the top of her head. I stared about the cluttered room in dismay, cursing myself for presiding with such brassy equanimity over the refuse heaps of my past and present selves. In comparable surroundings, I reflected glumly, only jackals or vultures would manifest anything even remotely like passion. But here I was yearning toward Elegy again; and, miracle of miracles, blind to the ruins about her, she was responding in kind.

After we had twisted together to my bed, though, she raised her head from the half-sloughed linen and gazed about briefly before

subsiding back into my pillow. When I tried to kiss her, she began to giggle. Hiccups. Tiny convulsions. Muffled Gatling-gun laughter.

"Elegy, what's the matter?"

Still convulsed, she finally managed, "I never thought . . . never thought I'd sink so low."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BojANGLEs's Brother

Twelve hours later I let the BenDragon Prime sink to a resting place in the Wild. Chaney's old drop point. Only this time there were four of us rather than three, and we had planned our arrival to coincide almost exactly with Denebola's setting. We were barely able to get our nylon awning into place before the Wild erupted in a percussive caroling of snapped twigs and rattling fronds. The Asadi were fleeing into the jungle and the gathering night as they had every sunset since, we sometimes supposed, time immemorial.

"Abstracting Bojangles from their number doesn't appear to have had any effect on their behavior," I told Elegy.

Elegy stood mute in the down-sifting dark, waiting. Kretzoi, too, seemed apprehensive and nervous. Once night had securely settled, we were going to leave Jaafar at the Dragonfly's radio and strike out through the jungle in search of one of the nests Bojangles had told Kretzoi we might be able to find.

In the past—specifically, in the years since Chaney's disappearance—we had never had any success on these quests. We had failed for the same reason that primatologists have still not compiled detailed studies of the drills and mandrills of post-Armageddon West Africa. The Asadi's nocturnal habitat is virtually impenetrable to ground-going observers, and the Asadi themselves, out of their clearing, are so retiring as to seem mere phantoms.

But now Elegy believed we could accomplish something, and her optimism derived from the fact that Kretzoi had learned a few things from Bojangles about Asadi behavior in the Wild.

When the stars at last came out, we said our farewells to Jaafar and set off. I carried a high-powered hand lamp with three beam intensities and a small tranq launcher. Elegy also had a hand lamp but, in addition, twenty meters of rope and a backpack full of assorted wilderness gear. We were each equipped with a "hearing-aid" radio receiver in our ears and a small, button-touch transmitter at our throats. Kretzoi carried nothing; he used the vines and tree limbs spotlighted by our lamps as a pathway through the forest, moving almost casually among the lower branches in order to keep from outdistancing us. Even so. Elegy and I often had a difficult time keeping pace.

Always, just as we were about to lose sight of him, Kretzoi slowed, or dropped to the jungle floor, or hung by one arm from a glistening branch, revolving there like a carcass on a furry hook. As soon as Elegy and I had nearly closed the distance, though, Kretzoi invariably went ghosting away again into the rank, humid copses of the Wild. And our lamps' beams went careering desperately after him, frail luminous extensions of ourselves.

After this had been going on for two hours or more, and I had checked in at least eight times with Jaafar (in scrupulous observance of the fifteen-minute interval we had agreed upon), Kretzoi suddenly dropped out of a thick-boled, mangrovesque hardwood and squatted among its curved, stiltlike roots without moving. Elegy and I went in to him by clambering over and

ducking under the root arches barricading the tree's gnarled foot. Shortly, all three of us were crouched shoulder to shoulder in the eerie, dryadic chapel of the mangrove, listening to the wind and computing the dimensions of our solitude.

"Is this the place?" Elegy whispered.

Why couldn't she talk aloud? The Asadi, if any were about, knew exactly where we were by the telltale brilliance of our hand lamps, which shone aslant through the mangrove bladelets above us.

Kretzoi turned and dug at the clumpy soil at the base of the tree. A handful of this dirt he held beneath his nostrils, like an inspector sniffing coffee beans. Then he patted the soil sample back into place and felt about the trunk of the alien mangrove in several different places. This done, he swung back and spoke with his hands.

"He says this is where Bojangles sometimes slept," Elegy interpreted.

"How does he know?" Like Elegy, I was whispering.

"Bojangles marked the place with his urine; he also gave Kretzoi explicit directions to this tree and a description of its surroundings." Elegy gripped the hybrid animal's shoulder. Then, as she made pidgin gestural commands with her free hand, she whispered, "Go up, Kretzoi. Find his nest—Bojangles's nest— and see what you can see."

Standing up, Kretzoi gripped one of the weird root arches bracketing the tree. He did a languorous flip, pulled himself onto the arch, and sprang nimbly into the tree itself. He melded with the leaf cover so seamlessly that neither the moon shining down nor our lamps shining up could distinguish him from the foliage.

I got up and made to join Kretzoi aloft, gripping the same root arch he had gripped. The bark was as smooth as sharkskin.

"What're you doing?" Elegy demanded.

"I'd like a firsthand look. This cuts out the need for an interpreter, too. Eliminates the middleman. No offense. Elegy."

"You'll break your idiot neck," she whispered savagely.

Two meters off the ground I was already dizzy. Elegy lifted her hand lamp and held it for me as I climbed. The mangrove had thick but resilient limbs at fairly regular intervals, and when the canopy of bladelets above me had become a treacherous carpet under my groping feet, I could still see the eye of Elegy's lamp burning whitely in the leaves, giving them a leprous incandescence. Once, when I slipped, a hand caught my wrist and pulled me to the safety of a right-angle limb. I clung to the tree's central trunk, breathing rapidly, as Kretzoi held me in place with one hand.

"Thanks," I whispered, feeling like an idiot whose idiot neck has just been mercifully spared.

My cheek pressed against smooth, silver bark, I peered out at the reeds, tufts of woven grass, assemblages of fitted twigs, and quilts of tropical flower petals comprising the Asadi nest can-tilevered between several branches to my right. By its smell I knew the nest for what it was. It smelled as Bojangles had on the day of his capture; it smelled like the Asadi in their clearing.

Kretzoi made a sign at me, which, still trying to compose myself, I waved off. Whereupon he released me, climbed higher, and draped himself over a bough so near Balthazar that the moon appeared but a single step beyond him. From this limb Kretzoi stared down into the nest. At last I leaned out cautiously to peek at what Kretzoi was confronting with neither flinch nor cry.

The nest contained something with eyes.

They coruscated in the moonlight, and they scared the residual bejesus out of me. They seemed disembodied, and vaguely saurian, and chillingly close to death. Closing my own eyes, I told Kretzoi in a whisper that I was ready to go down.

"You already knew what we'd find?"

"I had an idea," Elegy responded when Kretzoi and I again sat with her in the twisted root arches under the mangrove. "Bojangles

told Kretzoi, and Kretzoi told me. But I wanted it confirmed."

"That's an Asadi up there," I said. "It's still alive, but it's been reduced to little more than a head and a truncated torso."

"That's Bojangles's twin, his sibling, his 'meat-brother.'"

"Whom Bojangles has cannibalized to this horrifying stage of dismemberment and incipient rot?" I looked with unseeing eyes back up into the mangrove. "Sibling rivalry's played for keeps among the Asadi, isn't it?"

"The meat-sibling is simply a twin until the two juvenile Asadi are old enough to warrant their mother's making a determination about which is the more robust, which has better sustained itself through optical photosynthesis. Mother's milk and photosynthetic nutrients are all the infants feed on for the first two or three years of their lives, you see."

"And the more robust animal is automatically designated the cannibal, the weaker its perpetual victim?"

Elegy and Kretzoi exchanged a brief flurry of hand signs. "It may be the other way around," she said, looking back at me. "Kretzoi isn't sure. Bojangles gave some indication that the stronger becomes the meat-sibling—because it's better able to sustain the continuous depredations of the next several years."

"How can it survive them a week, much less a number of years?" I asked edoud, my voice rising out of a whisper into almost Chaneyesque indignation at the infuriating alienness of the Asadi.

"The Asadi mother uses ready-to-hand herbal coagulants to stanch the bleeding of the meat-sibling and other herbal drugs to anesthetize her sacrificial child to the day-by-day feasting of its weaker sibling and herself. In fact, long periods go by when the sacrificial child is permitted to recuperate, even given a chance to regenerate limbs and organs already partially consumed. This is a reptilian characteristic that the Asadi have apparently retained. . . . Then the love feast begins again, quite tenderly and touchingly, an act of reverence and solicitude you'll never see enacted in the Asadi clearing—because, on the assembly ground, tribal allegiance takes precedence over private family ties and Indifferent Togetherness is the order of the day."

"You're saying the ritual cannibalism of the meat-sibling by its twin and its mother derives from a love impulse?"

"Why not?" Elegy shifted positions, supporting herself on one outstretched arm and gesturing modestly with her free hand. "For the most part, cannibalism among the Asadi takes place at night, when they can't photosynthesize. The dispersal that occurs every sunset, then, frees a few individual Asadi to rendezvous with other creatures with whom they share family ties. In some cases, at least.

"The old and the prematurely bereaved, I'd imagine, simply retire into the woods to sleep or to look for dying or dead tribesmen. These last, once discovered, are probably greedily cannibalized. Then their bones are buried. They aren't given the care the Asadi female and her cannibal offspring lavish on the sacrificial child because, ordinarily, an immediate family tie doesn't exist between the eater and the eaten. And because, even when drugged, the old and sick can't withstand a nightly cannibalism over a protracted period.

"But the Asadi child who is being eaten and sustained, in order to be eaten and sustained again, engenders nothing but devotion in its mother and its cannibal sibling; they prize and cherish it, they rush to it at sunset—not only to feed from its body but to tend its wounds and raise its threshold of apprehensible pain by giving it herbal anodynes. They also feed it nuts and other protein-rich sources of plant matter—but in paste form, pre-chewed so that it will be easily ingestible by the semiconscious victim of their love.

"Look, Ben, what you saw up there frightened and revolted you. It would have me, too, if I'd gone up there. At first, in fact, I'm probably not going to be of much use when we take it out of the tree in order to carry it back to the Dragonfly. But—"

"Back to the Dragonfly!" I exclaimed.

Startled by my voice, Kretzoi moved away and took up lodging in an adjacent root-arch chapel partially concealed from our view. Elegy watched him go with a finger laid across her lips, to shush and calm me.

"Ben, you're reacting to this out of its proper context; you're passing ethnocentric judgments. If you'd—"

"I want to know what you mean by saying we're going to carry that thing up there back to the BenDragon Prime."

"Do you remember my father's fondness for the twentieth-century anthropologist Colin Tumbull, the author of The Forest People? In that book Tumbull rejoiced in the lives of the Ituri pygmies, who at the time he went among them were still a viable but pristine society."

"What's this got to do with the Asadi and their nocturnal cannibalism?"

"Tumbull in later years went among an East African people called the Ik," Elegy said, ignoring my question. "He wrote a scathing book about them called The Mountain People. The state regime of that period had forbidden the Ik to hunt, even though they'd never before been agriculturists and lived in an arid and infertile region of the country. The result was that in their individual struggles to stave off hunger and survive, the Ik came to treat one another with cruelty and derision. All fellow feeling was lost; they behaved toward their compatriots only as private selfishness and the main chance dictated. Tumbull was appalled.