Transfigurations (31 page)

"Later," I went on, "the Asadi's ancestors came to BoskVeld and cut down all the trees but these. Hence, the veldts."

Elegy gave me a swift, appraising look over her cup. Kretzoi was in the Wild somewhere. Bojangles's half-eaten brother lay in his nest in the helicraft's cargo section. Only a few minutes before

joining us at table, Elegy had removed the tarp covering the nest.

"The Ur'sadi lived for severfJ million years on their own planet," I persisted, still watching Elegy, "without suffering any major evolutionary or cultural upheavals. With the fruits of a self-perpetuating and incredibly advanced technology, they lived in near-perfect social and moral equilibrium. Very intelligent, very temperate folk. Then they botched an evolutionary experiment in our solar system, leaving behind their hemoglobin's molecular structure as a calling card. A million or so years later they decided to come to BoskVeld to escape the expansion of their sun into a menacing red giant."

"Pure speculation," Elegy said. "Space opera."

"But you're its scenarist, aren't you? You're the author?"

Elegy said nothing. She sipped her juice and studied me as if I were a pet that has just demonstrated its untrustworthiness indoors.

"I'm synopsizing, Elegy; plagiarizing. You know that."

"I wasn't talking for the record!" she suddenly flared. "I certainly didn't expect to have you quoting me verbatim once we got out of that goddamn mangrove thicket and back into the light of day!"

Embarrassed, I looked at Jaafar, who immediately renewed his acquaintance with the honey bowl before him.

"Haven't you heard of ghost stories?" Elegy demanded. "Or tall tales? Or epic adventures? My father had. He used to package them up in visicom 'settes and send them to me when I was a little girl in the Tri-Mesa. Once a week they came. They made life in an E-cube bearable. I didn't confuse them with reality, either. They were full of marvelous notions, those stories—but you didn't have to believe in the marvelous notions, just entertain them for a while. So that you, in turn, could be entertained by your private pretense of belief."

"You were trying to entertain me last night?"

"Not just you," Elegy said. "Myself, mostly."

"I'd like you to finish your story, then. You didn't explain what

you thought happened to the Ur'sadi to bring them to ruin— beyond £ui intensification of production that depleted resources and a population explosion that made the burden even worse. How could such a stable, intelligent folk get themselves in such a bind?"

"We'd better check Bojangles's meat-sibling," Elegy said, nodding aft and putting down her cup.

"He'll be all right. He's survived this long without Bojangles's aid, or ours, or anyone else's. Come on. Elegy—the rest of your story."

"Please," Jaafar suddenly put in. "I would like to be ... to be entertained, too. Civ Cather."

"All right," Elegy said, leaning back and blowing a puff of air toward her forehead. "What I think happened is this:

"BoskVeld, despite being habitable to the Ur'sadi, wasn't by any means a 'carbon copy' of their home world. Denebola, too, posed problems for them. After they'd been here a millennium or more, it began radiating in unpredictable sunspot cycles disruptive of the sensitive workings of their eyes and their blood chemistry. The sunspot activity caused lymphocyte deficiencies, and these deficiencies, in turn, caused a variety of diseases the Ur'sadi had never experienced before. In addition, disturbances in BoskVeld's magnetic field—another result of the violent sunspot activity—played havoc with their eyesight. Their ability to communicate optically was subtly impaired. The same thing had happened to their representatives on Earth, of course, but not to such a pernicious degree."

"It wasn't the sun that did them in on Earth," I told Jaafar. "It was our devilish primate daddies."

Elegy favored me with a wan, semitolerant smile. "The Ur'sadi turned to genetic manipulation to save themselves. They equipped their circulatory systems with inheritable organic 'lymphostats.' The autopsy report, by the way, mentions this unusual adaptive feature in Bojangles's blood—or the vestiges of this feature, since Denebola is now in a protracted 'quiet' phase. And these freely

circulating lymphostats regulated the production of lymph cells in the Ur'sadi's blood, no matter what Denebola happened to be doing. Storming or smiling.

"The Ur'sadi also moved to make extensive genetic alterations in their eyes. The most significant was to give their organs of sight and communication the ability to photosynthesize. Each individual optical cell was equipped with a chromoplast containing one or more photosynthetic pigments. Previously, as my father had incorrectly assumed was true of present-day Asadi, the optical cells had produced their spectral displays solely by means of minute, controlled chemical reactions. Now, though, the spectral displays employed the ancient chemical reactions along with the light-reflecting properties of the photosynthetic pigments added by the Ur'sadi geneticists. This tandem arrangement prevented a major rewiring of the brain—specifically of Bojangles's area—and it gave the Ur'sadi not only an immunity to Denebola's unpredictable radiation showers but a means of freeing themselves from their dependence on Bosk Veld's dwindling resources.

"The familiar pigments our Komm-galens found in Bojangles's optical chromoplasts, by the way, include chlorophyll, car-otenoids, and phycobilins. Substances that reflect light in either green or red wavelengths. But our surgeons also found BoskVeld-specific pigments capable of converting sunlight and water into energy—substances that radiate light in the blue, violet, and even brown frequencies. We don't even have ready-made names for them, Ben; they're new to us, just as Governor Eisen told us last week in the hangar. And it's these pigments—perhaps—that made the new Ur'sadi such efficient processors of Denebolan sunlight. So efficient they no longer had to depend on social cooperation for their survival. Each neo-Ur'sadi was a living factory capable of supporting itself anywhere on the planet—so long as it had access to sunlight and water."

Kretzoi suddenly appeared in the helicraft's doorway. Stalking on all fours, he proceeded past our table and into the cargo section. Once there, he sat back on his haunches and scrutinized Bojangles's meat-sibling.

"You think the ability to photosynthesize was a major cause of the Ur'sadi's collapse?" I tried to ignore Kretzoi, to disregard him in his bedside watch over our macabre guest.

"We ought to check him" Elegy said. "He probably ought to be outside. In direct sunlight. Where he can sustain himself."

"Elegy," I asked her quietly, "why the hell don't we simply let him die? Bojangles is gone, and that poor bastard back there's apparently got no affectionate family left to devour him. He's got no one to apply the medications he needs."

"He's got us," Elegy said. She rose and walked into the cargo section. I shook my head in acquiescent dismay. Then, along with Jaafar, I joined Elegy and Kretzoi aft. Shoulder to shoulder, the four of us stared down at our charge.

Today the most amazing thing about Bojangles's meat-sibling was not his gnawed and mutilated body, but the fact that his eyes were lethargically pinwheeling through a spectral display. Baby talk, maybe. Or maybe the incoherent babbling of one in delirium. Although the pattern made no sense to any of us, it gave us all the feeling that we were eavesdropping on someone's dying words.

I nicknamed the creature Cy; short for Osiris.

"Look at him," I said, even though we were all looking fixedly at him. 'This is your proof the Asadi are on the road to an evolutionary recovery from barbarism?"

"He's in pain," Elegy murmured to herself. "He's been seven or eight days without tending." Aloud she said, "Jaafar, hand me that kit, please."

Jaafar handed her a medical kit. From this Elegy extracted a syringe and a vial of the sedative we used in our tranq launchers. After diluting the substance with a measured quantity of water, she knelt over Cy and injected the sedative into a vein in his neck. The creature shuddered visibly; the rate of his optical baby talk accelerated nearly to the point of blurring.

Still squatting above Cy, Elegy said, 'This is a recovery, Ben. No matter what it looks like to you, it's a recovery. You see, the Ur'sadi had purposely avoided speciation within their ovm genetic pool by maintaining deliberate proximity to one another. They also

kept individuals moving back and forth from one adjacent colony to another to stress the psychological cohesiveness of the whole and to keep small pockets of divergent populations from springing up. Their ill-fated experiment on Earth had been one factor persuading them of the necessity of maintaining their genetic integrity no matter where they went. On BoskVeld, where things were proving especially hard for them, this policy seemed even more crucial. They had to emphasize solidarity—social, psychological, genetic—just to survive the hardships of their new world and its ornery sun." Elegy stopped stroking Cy's mane. "Let's get him outside. He's calming now. See his eyes?"

The creature's eyes had stopped displaying; a strange film occluded each concentric ring comprising his organs of sight. Jaafar and I then picked up the nest by the handles affixed to the tarp beneath it and struggled through the Dragonfly and out into the clearing.

Elegy suggested that we place the nest in a squat, broad-leafed tree on the edge of the drop point, and that's what we did. As we carried Cy into the Wild and lodged his nest at waist height in the tree. Elegy tried to complete for us her private reconstruction of the Ur'sadi/Asadi past.

Her main argument was that the first Ur'sadi to receive the ability to photosynthesize broke the ages-old prohibition against separating themselves from the indivisible whole. They formed self-sufficient sects and splinter groups. These retreated into the remaining forests of BoskVeld and purposely maintained themselves distinct from their forebears. Their rationale was that their forebears had gone a long way toward destroying their adopted world before creating the savior race they embodied. Then the schismatics, unified at first by the habit of cohesiveness within another context, as well as by their common purpose and physiology, built elaborate temples and monuments in the Wild— not as centers of redistributive feasts (after the pattern of many of the mounds and megaliths of human prehistory), for these neo-Ur'sadi had no compelling need to accumulate and redistribute foodstuffs, but instead as museums of what they considered

admirable in their past and as memorials to the ancient people who had created them. They stocked these temples with eyebooks stolen from their Ur'sadi settlements and with representative artifacts either manufactured in the Wild or carried out with them on their stealthy diaspora.

Constructed in approved Ur'sadi ways to withstand the erosive capacities of time and weather, these pagodas proved short-lived rallying points for the neo-Ur'sadi. They forsook not only the temples but the small forest communities around them in order to pursue a thousand separate individual quests for meaning. Their umbilical to the land severed by their new power to photosynthe-size, their ties to one another frayed and weakened by this same miraculous force, they scattered, willfully distancing themselves from kith and kind. In this way the seeds of speciation were sown among the Ur'sadi for the first time in millions of years: The selective pressures of environment came to bear once more on their evolution. By coming back into harmony with nature through their creators' desperate manipulation of their genes, these neo-Ur'sadi had irrevocably surrendered their destinies to nature. Ahead of them, unknown to them, lay approximately three million years of painful retreat from civilization.

"Meanwhile," Elegy said, once we'd moved beneath the orange-and-white awning in front of the BenDragon Prime, "Denebola's disruptive solar activity continued, and the original Ur'sadi, seeing what was happening to their unmannerly offspring, decided to leave. They razed their settlements and cleared away the debris. Then they doctored the surrounding landscape so that no one could find a scrap of evidence they'd ever even visited Bosk Veld."

"Why did they do that?" Jaafar asked. Sorting the various drugs in our medical kit, he held up vial after cut-glass vial for inspection.

"Because that's the Only possible explanation for our not having found a trace of their existence on the veldts," I told Jaafar. "Unless you're silly enough to suppose they were never here at all."

Elegy laughed. "Because they wanted to disguise the fact they'd

been here," she corrected me. "They wanted no part of their mutinous offspring. At the same time, though, they wanted to give them a chance to evolve as nature directed. They were bequeathing the planet to their ungrateful children, handing it over without strings or hindrance. . . . There's some evidence—in the partial ruins of the pagoda Frasier investigated, for example—they may have tried to carry off every last clue to their presence here by destroying the jungle temples of the neo-Ur'sadi. Something prevented them, though, and they had to leave Bosk Veld without making the break as cleanly as they would have liked. Today's Asadi betray their ancestors' presence here, and so do the eyebooks my father brought out of the Wild six years ago."

Under Elegy's guidance Jaafar prepared an anesthetic milder than the one she had earlier given Cy. We held this in reserve against the time the creature revived and again needed a painkiller. Periodically we traipsed to the edge of the clearing to check him. Each time we peered into his nest, his raw and mutilated appearance startled me anew.

Cy was a lesson in Asadi anatomy. His muscles gleamed in fiery knots, organs protruded lopsidedly, and scar tissue crazed his purplish-grey lower intestines like a network of varicose cabling. Because she feared the sedative she had given him was repressing his ability to photosynthesize. Elegy was anxious for him to come to.

Back in the Dragonfly, the three of us unfolded a metal table with a thick sealed-cork surface to use as a butcher's block. In the outdraft of the refrigeration locker we strugged to remove the beef haunches Moses had given us. Then, as we played at butcher. Elegy told us what she believed had happened to the Ur'sadi who scattered through the Wild after building temples to their past.