Transfigurations (35 page)

But no one retired.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Thus We Vindicate schliemann

"Dr. Benedict," a voice sounded in my ear. "Dr. Benedict, are you there? You, too, Civ Gather — are you there?"

It was Jaafar, speaking to us from the BenDragon Prime. He had held his peace all afternoon, but now that Denebola had set he wanted to know if we were still alive.

Elegy and I exchanged an ambivalent glance, having each forgotten about Jaafar. Now that events were progressing s'l rapidly, his reminding us of his presence elsewhere in the Wii^. seemed an unjustifiable distraction.

Before I could keep the words from coming out, I said, "Did he call you 'Civ Cather' last night?"

"Answer him," Elegy urged me angrily.

"Jaafar," I said, activating the transceiver at my throat, "we're fine, we're doing fine."

He wanted to know what was happening, why the Asadi had not come crashing back through the Wild now that the sun was down.

"We'll be in touch," I told him curtly. "Stay in touch with us, Jaafar, and we may soon take you to Chaney's pagoda." "Yes, sir," came the faint reply.

Below us in the clearing the Asadi had crept toward the crumpled form of Kretzoi, their ostensible chieftain. As daylight wearily disintegrated, I set my camera to record in the infrared frequencies.

What I saw and filmed was the younger and smaller Asadi moving inward to lift Kretzoi from his pallet and to bear him toward the north. They were bracketed on both sides by larger, more handsome animals with fuller and more strikingly colored manes—as if at last a covert caste system were making itself manifest in this moment of crisis and rare joint endeavor. Chaney had likened the smaller specimens to workers, their protectors in the two exterior columns of the march to warriors, and maybe the dichotomy had a biological basis, maybe it grew out of some self-protective Ur'sadi sociological instinct dormant for thousands of millennia. In any case, Kretzoi floated northward above the heads of the Asadi workers while the silver- and tawny-maned warriors trudged along in their guardian columns keeping a conscientious lookout for who-knows-what likely or unlikely enemy.

"Let's go," Elegy said, scrambling down the boughs of the lattice-sail. A moment later she was beckoning me from the edge of the assembly ground.

I followed, repeatedly banging the barrel of my camera against both my head and the bole of the tree. When I was safely down, the last members of the Asadi parade were just about to disappear into the dusky foliage.

"Listen," I said, "I'm not going to be able to do any more filming. It'll be all either of us can do just to keep up."

"Forget the filming. Look—right out there—that's our artificial huri, Ben!" She ran to the center of the clearing and picked up the pleated, evil-looking thing. The Asadi had been careful not to step on it, and it was as good as new, if a little dusty. "I'll carry this,"

Elegy exclaimed. "Come on." And she jogged on ahead of me, her head thrown back and one raised hand beckoning me again and again to follow her lead. Camera barrel banging, I did.

The Asadi procession maintained a stately even pace, swaying as a unit through spaces I would have thought impassable to a single individual. The Asadi made a highway where no human being would have ever been able to perceive anything but creeper-clogged arches and tangled knots of squid-orchids and rainthom. Elegy and I, though, found ourselves stepping through keyholes in the vegetation already unlocked by the Asadi's passage.

Chaney could not recall how long he had walked before the Asadi reached their ancient temple, but I made an effort to keep track. My best estimate is a little better than five hours, and my feeling is that we traversed a distance of some fifteen to twenty kilometers. In any case, by the time Elegy and I broke out of dense, clinging jungle and found the Asadi arrayed before a lofty shadow in the dark, we had outlasted the hour of midnight and worn down the leather sidesoles of our boots.

The three moons were up: Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior. They receded into space one behind the other, staggered against the night like lanterns hung at different levels. The foliage of the Wild, I knew, was straining after this conjunction just as the waters of Calyptra strain toward the moons at that dangerous hour of flood called tri-tide. It happens once every five or six days in BoskVeld's equatorial zone, but I was surprised to see the conjunction now and disturbed by the eeriness imparted to the night by the polarized lunar light and the murmurous tidal sloughing of the trees.

An accident, this conjunction; mere coincidence.

But the Asadi swaying together in the clearing in front of absolutely nothing but open space and shadow (a shadow that should not have existed in such towering majesty) made me believe that perhaps it was Elegy, Kretzoi, and I who were being manipulated rather than the shrewd and unforthcoming Asadi.

"Do you see Kretzoi?" Elegy asked me.

"No, not yet." I pulled her around the outsized clearing to the east. A moment later we were looking inward from a spot where thick vegetation concealed us and we had an end-on view of each of the four Asadi ranks. The huge open space in front of the foremost rank stretched away to the north, to our right, for eighty to a hundred meters.

As we watched, a pair of Asadi, their manes silver-white in the moonglow, detached themselves from opposite ends of the front rank and approached the looming shadow ahead of them. The Asadi nearest us had sustained a wound in that afternoon's free-for-all over Kretzoi's meat offerings—its right arm was ripped open from elbow to wrist and coagulated blood glistened in the wound like a vein of caramel. I lifted my camera to film the scene.

"Don't," Elegy cautioned me. 'There's too much risk—we don't want to undermine what we've already accomplished." So I eased the camera behind me on its sling.

At that instant, as if they had turned at right angles to the moonlight, or absorbed so much of it that its residual sheen actually cloaked them, the two advancing Asadi slipped out of my vision, poof. Elegy clearly saw what I saw, and yet we each seemed to believe that the Asadi had merely edged themselves simultaneously into our common blind spot; as a result, their disappearance had nothing weird or unsettling about it. We expected to see them reemerge into our vision as soon as we shifted our heads or a passing cloud subtly altered the moonglow. It was the vitreous humor of our eyes that was at fault, we believed, and not the basic paradigms of reality. To our relief, subsequent events confirmed that nothing terribly supernatural had occurred.

The two Asadi warriors reappeared at the precise moment the Asadi pagoda itself jumped into existence for us.

When two green flames on either side of the temple's huge wooden doors burst into view, we saw what had previously been invisible to us. The pagoda stood where before there had been only shadow. After slipping into that shadow, our two Asadi warriors

had mounted the steps fronting the temple in order to light the iron flambeaux near its massive doors. Once lit, the green flames not only made the torchlighters visible again but drew the substance of the pagoda itself into a viable alignment with the strangely polarized light of the triple moons and the Wild's psychotronic polarization of our Asadi and human perceptual abilities. Some dormant energy inside the building had responded to the firing of the torches by negating the concealing polarizations of light and perception outside it. As a consequence, the temple had leaped into view like a television picture springing fullblown from a blank but highly sensitized screen. It happened almost like an explosion, but one with neither flash nor din.

The Asadi reacted by lifting their arms, shaking their heads, and falling back a step or two.

Elegy and I reacted by embracing and stooping to the ground together, as if a shower of sparks and debris might come cascading out of the air upon us. No chance of that, though. We were simply being given the chance to see what had existed in the clearing for the lifetime of the pagoda occupying it. We were seeing what Egan Chancy had seen before the light- and perception-polarizing powers of the structure, programmed into it a million or more years ago for enemies other than human investigators, had again plunged the temple into invisibility—as a direct consequence, apparently, of Chaney's trespass and The Bachelor's lunatic vandalism.

The pagoda was . . . well, magnificent. It combined the architectural qualities of several terrestrial styles from several historical epochs. Its central dome, of a weirdly translucent marble or travertine, recalled those on Islamic mosques, while a narrow spire rising from the dome might have been anything from a lightning rod to a radio antenna. The gem-shingled wings of the five successively smaller roofs, going from bottom to top, suggested the religious towers of Buddhist and Hindu Asia. From the outermost tips of all five wings hung reedlike tubes of several shapes and lengths, instruments through which the wind had once been free to concoct melodies that the temple had long since either

muted or stopped. The flutes and bassoons, I told myself, of Chaney's fevered "imagination." The stone tier rising to the Gothic doorway was Roman, while the panes of opaque violet glass set like monstrous but wafer-thin amethysts at intervals in the spaces between the top three roofs had no Earthly analogue at all. They did have the imperviousness of basilisk eyes, though, and they shimmered and changed in the moonlight as if a viscous colored liquid were oozing down their backsides in the pagoda's interior. The building, which had once been sleeping, was alive—alive and expectant.

"There it is, Ben."

Elegy's voice conveyed no smugness, only wonder and childlike belief. The verdigris coating the temple's facade—coating, too, the bas-relief carvings running like bredework in the stories between the lower two roofs and the high entablature—in no way degraded the temple in her sight.

She eased herself out of my embrace and stood. "They're carrying him up to the funeral scaffold," she whispered, pointing, and as I, too, stood, I saw six of the smaller Asadi bearing Kretzoi up the temple's steps to a carven stone catafalque. Here the corpsebearers laid Kretzoi out with a care approaching reverence, then took up positions behind the bier and faced their shaggy, shuffling people.

For the Asadi had begun to do ritual combat with BoskVeld's moons, now no longer in perfect conjunction, Balthazar having moved retrograde to the other two and Caspar having outpaced Melchior to the west. Not all of the Asadi took part in this pantomimic warfare, just a sufficient number to make shadows dance in the clearing.

'The huri designates the chieftain's successor," I told Elegy, shaking off my awe. "And our huri's incapable of that. Our entire elaborate ruse breaks down at this point. Elegy."

"Let's see, Ben. Let's see."

We must have waited—yes—another two or three hours as Kretzoi stoically bore the inconvenience of his "death" and lay

unmoving on the catafalque. The moons were finally so far apart that two of them had fallen beneath the artificial horizon of the trees, Caspar west and Balthazar east. Melchior, more distant, dallied, but the Asadi dropped their snouts from its contemplation and began moving about the clearing just as they moved in their daylight clearing.

And it was now, Elegy and I both knew, that the dead chieftain's huri ought to come flapping above their heads in deadly earnest to decide a successor. It would dive into the throng and thrash an unsuspecting Asadi to its knees with merciless wing beats. The Asadi so chosen, usually a "mute," would have to separate itself from the others and keep body and soul together not only through limited photosynthesis, but also through the midnight cannibalization of its conspecifics and their hidden meat-siblings.

Elegy squatted and picked up the artificial huri she had carried with her from the other clearing. It was deflated now; a tiny, collapsed umbrella.

"You planning on throwing that among 'em, Elegy? As soon as it hits one, he'll know it's a—what would Eisen say?—a wrongness ."

Still squatting. Elegy ignored me. She pulled the metal pin lost somewhere in the huri's multifoliate pleats, and the creature bloomed in her hands.

"The other possibility," I went on, crouching beside her, "is that they'll accept whichever Asadi it strikes as their new chieftain—after which our torchbearers up there"—nodding emphatically in their direction—"will put the green flame to Kretzoi. Is that what you want?"

"Just shut up and watoh, Ben." Elegy handed the huri to me and I took it because I had no other choice.

We watched. The Asadi's movements grew sluggish, perfunctory. They'd been at it, this abortive ritual, for hours, and they were nearly as weary as we were. In fact. Elegy and I were still running on curiosity and adrenalin, whereas the aliens looked to have exhausted both. The flames in the heavy iron sconces on

either side of the pagoda's doors had guttered almost to extinction. . . .

A faint buzz sounded in my ears. "Elegy," said a voice imploringly, "Elegy, are you there?"

"He does know your first name, doesn't he?"

"Give him coordinates, Ben," Elegy commanded me with steely self-possession. "He may need them. We may need for him to have them."

I gave Jaafar the coordinates.

"Do you want me to come?" Jaafar's thin voice inquired. "Is there room for me to land the Dragonfly?"

"There's room for you to land," I responded, "but we don't want you to come. Besides, even with coordinates, you might have a helluva time finding this place. The pagoda disguises itself, and from the air the clearing probably presents an illusion of continuous jungle. Stay where you are."

"Until we call," Elegy qualified my command, and it was the first time in the Wild, away from the drop point, she had allowed herself to speak to Jaafar directly. Three words; no more. They ended the conversation, and Jaafar receded into the radio white noise of the rising dawn.

"Do you know what's wrong with you, Thomas Benedict?"

I looked at Elegy as if she had struck me. Good lord, I thought, staring at her in numb fascination.