Transfigurations (33 page)

It took my only fifteen or twenty minutes to clean the Asadi meat-sibling, to cut away the hide, the lights, the head. When I

was finished, I cradled the denatured meat of his corpse in my arms and carried it back to the helicraft.

Inside the Dragonfly I passed the sleeping couple's bunk and opened the refrigeration locker in the cargo section. As I was hanging the dressed-out carcass beside the other well-trimmed packages of meat. Elegy's head and shoulders rose from the anonymous contours of Jaafar's bedding.

"Ben?" she whispered. "What're you doing?"

"Showing mercy," I said in a normal speaking voice. "Showing mercy and demonstrating my practical side as well. This is the genuine article I'm stowing here. Elegy, the genuine article."

Something about her silence suggested that she understood.

"What about you?" I asked her. "What're you doing?"

"Spiting you," she said aloud. 'There's really no other way to describe it, I'm afraid."

"But why?"

"For failing to believe in what we're doing. For failing to believe in my reconstructions of the Asadi past."

That boggled me. Jaafar awoke and sat up in the bedclothes like a man revived from bitter death. He looked surprised but not particularly grateful.

"Do you believe in them?" I asked Elegy.

"In part."

"It's not that I don't believe them," I said quickly, maybe cutting her off. "It's just that I've almost ceased to care. One day. Elegy, I'd like to know why humanity has such a hunger to disillusion itself."

"My father's out here," Elegy responded, as if that explained everything.

"Good morning, Jaafar," I said.

"Good morning. Dr. Benedict," he managed coolly enough.

I closed and bolted the refrigeration locker. Suddenly aware of the foul stickiness of my hands and forearms, I quickly washed up at the vacuum sink, toweled myself drj', and left the helicraft without another word.

Outside, the first thing I saw was Kretzoi standing upright at the

nest where Cy had Iain and peering down into it with his arms extended before him like man with two broken wrists. When he turned to look at me, his eyes reflected the waning moonlight and his posture suggested a helpless hostility. I dropped my gaze and ducked into the tent. Dawn was painfully slow to arrive.

"Damn it, Krelzoi!" Elegy said sharply. "Hold still. We want to get there an hour after they do, exactly one hour, and you're not making this easy."

Jaafar and I were attempting to position a chunk of meat on the primate's back, using the belt straps to secure it, and Kretzoi was twisting from side to side to see what we were doing. The meat was cold, its fat the consistency of candle wax. Kretzoi's nervous shruggings made the package slide in our hands and coat the fur on his back with sticky globules of grease.

"What's the matter with you?" Elegy asked. "We did this yesterday in the helicraft, remember?"

Kretzoi swung away from Jaafar and me so quickly that the meat slipped free of its straps and tumbled to the hard-packed dirt near our tent. Jaafar bent in groaning disgust to retrieve it, and in silent disgust rethreaded the greasy belts so that we could try yet again.

"Kretzoi!" Elegy exclaimed.

The primate made a series of sullen, sloppy signals with his hands.

"What?" I asked. "What's his problem?"

"He says you've got to get the package on his back so that he can undo it by himself. Otherwise, he says, we might as well stay home."

"His problem," said Jaafar astutely, "is that he doesn't appreciate Dr. Benedict's having shown Bojangles's meat-sibling the ultimate mercy. Nor does he appreciate having Dr. Benedict's hands on him."

Kretzoi confirmed this assessment with another abrupt but sloppy sign. Then he squatted so that Jaafar, who had finally got

the meat strapped and reasonably well dusted off, could position it on his back. I stepped aside and stared intently through the Wild in the direction of the Asadi clearing. "Try to take it off," I heard Elegy tell Kretzoi, and out of the comer of my eye I saw the primate unbuckle the package and lower it gracefully to the ground with the exposed loop of the other belt. Then Jaafar, having again restrung the meat, lodged the package high on Kretzoi's shoulders while I reflected, altogether sardonically, that I was out of favor with an ape. . . .

'Two other problems," I said.

Elegy squinted at me in the coppery morning sunlight. At her throat and beneath her arms, sweat had already darkened the olive-green dapplings of her jumpsuit's camouflage. "What?" she asked me.

"We need a huri," I said, finally looking at her.

'That's one problem," she said. "What's the other?"

'The other's this: Eisen Zwei appeared to an Asadi congregation that had been behaving strangely for almost a week prior to his arrival. They'd split into two 'teams'—that's what your father called them—hugging opposite ends of the clearing and carr)'ing on like so many possessed medieval orphans. Kretzoi's arrival among the Asadi may not have the same impact as Eisen Zwei's for the simple reason that conditions aren't the same now."

Elegy was unperturbed by my reasoning. "Maybe Kretzoi's arrival will induce the appropriate behavior."

TTie strange behavior existed prior to Eisen Zwei's coming," I insisted. "You're ignoring the principal terms of the equation."

Elegy shrugged.

Then what about the huri?" I asked her.

"Jaafar," she said, glancing at the young man as he wiped his hands down his thighs to clean them of grease, "Jaafar, Ben wants to know about our huri. Would you get it, please?"

Jaafar turned and leaped into the Dragonfly. A moment later he was back, carrying a laminated bag in which there appeared to be sleeping the embryo of a crumpled demon.

"Substitutes for everything," said Elegy with broad self-

mockery. "For Eisen Zwei, for prime cut of Asadi, and now for my daddy's infamous and maybe even apocryphal huri. Apocryphal, that is, if you listen to skeptics. I don't, I guess. I wouldn't be here if I did." She unsnapped the bag and withdrew the repellent black folds of the mysterious "embryo" inside it. Then she shook out the folds, pulled a small metal pin at the base of the rubbery pleats, and watched in evident satisfaction as air rushed in to inflate the thing. In a moment she was holding a huri on the palm of her hand, supporting it against her breasts as if it were a hungry demon child. "1 had this made in Frasierville," she told me. "Didn't take 'em too long. They did it from the plans I gave 'em the day after you left the hangar to hole up in your private, dry-docked garbage scow."

"Thanks," I said. "Just who did it for you?"

"A pair of workers at the civki synthetics plant. Governor Eisen intervened for us again, you see." The artificial huri had serrated wings, henlike feet, and a face that was featureless except for the lip- or beak-resembling prominences surrounding its predatory mouth. "Puncture-proof, Ben, and the claws are made to grasp." She approached Kretzoi and affixed the mock-huri to his right shoulder, bending the vulcanized claws so that they clung tenaciously. "It won't fly, I'm afraid—but we'll have to live with that. My father's monograph indicates that in the clearing the huri seldom did anything but ride Eisen Zwei's shoulder or squat insentiently wherever it was placed."

Kretzoi pulled his head as far to the left as he could, eyeing the litde hitchhiker with distaste. I didn't much blame him, either. Eventually, he assumed a baboonish sitting posture, shut his eyes, and tried to pretend that the thing enthroned on his shoulder didn't exist.

"The Asadi 'teams' will take care of themselves once Kretzoi gets in there," Elegy assured me. "Wait and see. They probably simply consist of a number of Asadi mothers and several of their designated-survivor children. A daylight manifestation of the nest bond. Really, what so excites and flusters them is their anticipa-

tion of a chance to eat meat in the clearing in broad daylight."

"That still doesn't explain why some mothers go to one side, Elegy, and some to the other."

She ignored this. ''Jaafar, we've got to get moving. Expect us back in about thirty minutes for a second piece of meat—or Kretzoi, anyway."

Jaafar nodded obediently and climbed into the cockpit of the BenDragon Prime. Elegy and I helped each other secure our equipment, including our transceivers and one bulky but lightweight holocamera. Then Elegy chucked Kretzoi tenderly under the chin, reviving him to the business of the day, and the three of us set off together toward the Asadi clearing.

Kretzoi entered from the east, only a little over an hour after the Asadi had gathered there that morning. We were very careful about both the time and the direction of his entry.

Once he had gone in. Elegy and I stayed well back from the clearing's eastern boundary. However, we chose a spot permitting us only a partially obstructed view into the very center of the assembly ground, where we believed Kretzoi would have to play out the greatest portion of his role as a second Eisen Zwei. I got my camera pointed through a narrow tunnel in the vegetation and rocked back on my heels waiting for the show to begin. Both Elegy and I hoped that Kretzoi's appearance among the Asadi would divert their attention from our ill-concealed presence nearby. Which, thank God, it unquestionably did.

At first the milling Asadi seemed unaware that something unusual had happened. All I could see through the sight of my sleek tubular camera was their marching bodies, dusty manes, and bobbing snouts, for Kretzoi disappeared into their midst like a diver into dark water, and I feared that he would fail to resurface.

"Where is he?" Elegy whispered, straining forward at my side, but in a moment she had her answer.

Kretzoi was apparently plodding out a circuit contrary to those of the Asadi themselves. This circuit, along with the huri on his shoulder and the packet of thawing meat on his back, soon made the Asadi aware that someone unusual had just crashed their party. Almost as a single being, then, they withdrew from the middle of the field, leaving Kretzoi plainly visible* there. Soon, in fact, they lined the perimeters of the clearing.

I aimed my camera into the heart of the assembly ground. Its whirring attracted no attention. The Asadi were too busy gaping at Kretzoi to mount charging displays on the alien technological artifact recording their behavior.

Swaggering, employing a gait halfway between bipedalism and primate knuckle walking, Kretzoi entered the Center Ring and undid the buckle securing the meat to his left shoulder. Then he swung the packet free and set it on the ground.

The sight of the meat emboldened the Asadi. They began edging inward toward it—but as soon as they did, Kretzoi hunkered down, removed the mock-huri from his shoulder, and set the rubber beastie atop the meat. For a moment he had to struggle to keep it from toppling over—but at last he got the huri to stand on its own, its claws buried like fork prongs in the deep-red flesh. Again the Asadi ebbed away.

"You can smell their fear," Elegy whispered. "I swear, Ben, you can actually smell it."

Kretzoi came knuckle walking uncertainly across the clearing toward us, looking less graceful and more chimpish than I had ever seen him. A moment later he was beside us in the Wild, having flushed a bevy of Asadi back into the clearing to avoid contact with him. The grease in his fur was already growing rancid; iv. fact, the "fear" Elegy smelled was emanating at least as much from Kretzoi as from the stunned Asadi.

"We're going back for another piece of meat, Ben. Think you'll be all right while we're gone?'|

"Fine. Just remember to have Kretzoi enter from the south next time." I cradled the unwieldy camera in my arms and prepared to find another position from which to shoot. "Hurry back."

Off they went. The Wild closed around them like a great green mouth, and beneath braided yellow runners and the gravid pods of a tree called boawort I crept southward along the eastern perimeter of the clearing. Most of the Asadi remained crowded together about the edges of the assembly ground, very near me, quarreling with their eyes and sometimes cuffing one another. I moved so deliberately, to prevent my being discovered, that it took better than twenty minutes to navigate a distance I could have skipped in a tenth the time.

I found a tree on the clearing's edge: a lattice-sail tree with well-spaced boughs for climbing and billowy, reticulate leaves for concealment. Securing my camera, I climbed to a vantage a good five meters above the ground. With luck I wouldn't have to move again, not even when Kretzoi and Elegy returned to the Dragonfly for a third packet of meat.

And, yes, Kretzoi was even now reentering the clearing, shouldering aside the puzzled, frightened aliens near the southern end zone. I began filming, with no idea at all where Elegy might be. The Asadi ceased quarreling among themselves—to watch in nervous bafflement as Kretzoi staggered regally into the middle of their field, removed the package from his back, lowered it beside the first, and squatted to arrange the mock-huri astride both slabs together. That done, Kretzoi left the clearing again.

A voice beside me whispered, "It's going well, isn't it?" "Lord, woman, what you doin'?" Elegy had climbed into the lattice-sail tree as I was filming, and the mild whirr of the camera, along with my own concentration on Kretzoi, had kept me from hearing her. I wrapped an arm around tlie bole separating us and stared keenly at her dark, grinning face. She gestured at the Asadi pushing and squirming beneath us.

"We induced the appropriate behavior," she said. "Two 'teams'—north and south, even if they've run together a little— and utter milling confusion in both populations." "You let Kretzoi go back to the Dragonfly alone?" "He knows the way. Jaafar'll take care of him, Ben." "And you're going to keep me company up here?"

"I think so," she whispered. "When Kretzoi gels back this time, he's going to stay. That's why we're liable to be up here for a while. If events unfold as they do in my father's monograph, we may have to sit patient and pretty a good five or six days."

"Five or six days?"