Transfigurations (39 page)

"It took. Forever. I was done. In stages. My face. Went last. But always." The inevitable pause, lengthening painfully until he managed in one burst: "But always I knew."

This final word was Chaney's first to convey the weight of any real inflection or emphasis, and its effect on Elegy was immediate. "We've got to get him out of this shithole!" she exclaimed, digging her fingers into my collar bones. "We've got to cut him do^vTl and carry him out!"

The man in the chrysalis murmured, "Who."

"Your daughter, Egan. I've told you about her already. She came all this way to find you."

"Here."

I wiped my eyes, then tilted my head back to look at Elegy. It took us both a moment to realize that that single word was a question.

"Yes, I'm here," Elegy said quietly.

"Wrong sound," the voice from Chaney's mouth contradicted her. "It's a fever. That gives you. The lie." And, a moment later: "My body's. Burning. From inside out."

"You're not delirious," Elegy insisted, close to either anger or a crippling pathos. "I'm a grown woman. I've come a long, long road, and I'm standing here beside you. Father."

The black tongue tip made its customary journey around Chaney's mouth. "I'm stranded. Halfway. They detected in me. Intelligence. Like that of their Ur'sadi symbionts. Who brought them here." The man seemed to be warming up, gaining fluency. 'They also liked my blood. Found it compatible to their needs. But later it was somehow. Wrong. I'm not sure how. Too much like that of the protohominids. From whom we evolved."

Elegy seemed to be waiting for him to return to the subject of her presence, but Chancy had either forgotten the matter or else deliberately set it aside.

"Who told you these things?" I asked. "How do you know them?"

"The huri. I hear. In the ultrasonic registers. That happened early. Afterward they schooled me. In the semantic distinctions. Among the various pulses. I can hear and interpret. At all meaningful frequencies. Beyond a single megacycle. It's a language. I couldn't hear before."

"Do the huri communicate ultrasonically with the Asadi?"

Chaney's voice was definitely shedding its huskiness, as if the activity of speaking aloud were loosening his vocal cords. "Not so well as they used to. With their Ur'sadi ancestors. Each of the

ultrasonic pulses. Corresponds to a color. If you can interpret huri. You can also interpret. The Ur'sadi spectral language."

Vaguely chagrined that I kept grilling him even as the horror of his transfiguration drew my slinging tears, I asked, "The eye-books, Egan? What about them?"

"Eyebooks," Chancy acknowledged. "If I could see one. I could read it. The colors are all. In my head. The huri put them there. But I'm halfway, Ben, and I'm stranded."

"What went wrong?" Elegy suddenly asked. "What exactly?"

"It's the fever giving you the lie," her father responded enigmatically. "I'm neither fish nor fowl. No huri savior. The huri have intelligence. Only in the aggregate. It's taken them forever. To understand I'm not their savior. Nor are any of us." Chancy licked his lips. "Being what we are." Then, with a moan, he fell back into himself.

"Father!" Elegy cried, not in desperation but in an attempt to recall him to the present.

I spoke Chancy's Christian name a couple of times, but finally decided he was recycling emotionally and physically. In much the way that I had let the huri's viscous, metabolic antifreeze spill from his mouth, our brief colloquy with Chancy had also drained him. And so, for the moment, we let Elegy's father go. . . .

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Parturition

That was not a time of clear thinking for me. We had found Egan Chaney alive, but changed and apparently unrecoverable. The huri had attempted to transform him in the vain, perhaps even idiot, hope of recreating a specimen of the Asadi's ancient forebears, with whom, eons in the past, they had come to BoskVeld as symbiotic fellow travelers. In fact, the superorganism that the huri comprised may have been the motivating force behind that interstellar migration. They were manipulators and parasites, tiny slavemasters who fed on their chattels' bodies and minds. The Ur'sadi had been exemplars of intelligence, but the huri super-organism had used the individuals of that departed hominoid race as a Komm-galen uses the instruments of his surgery—as physical extensions of the will. Just such extensions of an external will had been the Ur'sadi in the motivational grip of the huri—except that

the Ur'sadi were living creatures with living, if ultrasonically subverted, wills of their own.

Having small bodies and only rudimentary hands, the huri had evolved a joint consciousness dependent not on any sort of inexplicable psychic or telepathic communion, but on a "language" of high-frequency pulses precisely attuned to the thermal variations arising from the Ur'sadi's private spectral displays. Perhaps the huri had once been the pets, or the blind gyrfalcons, or the totemic court animals of Ur'sadi masters. If they had, the huri had gradually appropriated the language of their masters— albeit in the medium of sound rather than light—so that ultimately they were able to unite as a single consciousness and enslave the very species that had first either enslaved or domesticated them. A turnabout of no mean proportions, but one that seemed to be indicated by everything Elegy and I had experienced over the last several hours.

The breakdown in the ascendancy of the huri had come long after the migration to BoskVeld from a home world still unknown to us. Their power was first crippled when they permitted the Ur'sadi to engineer genetic changes in their eyes and bloodstreams to combat the quirkish solar activity of Denebola. The huri permitted these changes in order to insure the survival of their hosts, their instruments—but once the Ur'sadi had altered their blood, ostensibly to regulate the production of lymph cells as a defense against radiation-induced diseases, the huri found themselves sickening and occasionally even dying. They fed not only on the thallophytes imported from their home world (a planet long since engulfed by a solar catastrophe of its own), but also— periodically—on Ur'sadi blood; the change in its composition, although not technically of a basic chemically nature, was enough to incapacitate large numbers of the huri who fed upon it.

When the Ur'sadi whose eyes were newly capable of photosynthesis began fleeing into BoskVeld's jungles, as much to escape the bemused and wounded huri as to separate themselves from their progenitors, the breakdown in huri control reached a

critical point of no return: The enslaver/enslaved relationship that had existed for ages between the two species finally began to move toward total collapse.

The huri depended a great deal on the centralization of the host population to maintain their control; and the Ur'sadi dispersal, which in their weakness the huri were unable to prevent, threatened to sabotage the principal unifying element of their transcendent consciousness. The huri themselves had to disperse. Most of them went after the fleeing renegades, into the jungles, where they were eventually able to regain a measure of control and so influence the construction of huge temple-memorials. These they had built against the day when the Ur'sadi inevitably found the means to abandon them. They foresaw their abandonment even as they struggled to prevent it. The grandeur of the wilderness pagodas, in fact, was a concession to the Ur'sadi spirit they had bridled for so long with ultrasonic reins. The huri kept control just long enough to get three or four of these structures built, whereupon the photosynlhesizing Ur'sadi, rekindling the fires of their own extinguished wills, broke free and set themselves on a devolutionary course none of them could have predicted.

Meanwhile, the Ur'sadi in their original veldt settlement prepared to pull up stakes and leave. They had cast off the huri yoke by means of the self-protective alteration of their blood and the creation of a photosynlhesizing subspecies of themselves. The huri superorganism, believing its future must lie with those Ur'sadi altered to manufacture food from Denebolan sunlight, opted to follow the defectors. That decision both freed the original Ur'sadi and tormented them, for they feared a reimposition of the huri yoke and deplored the continued captivity of their altered children. They couldn't leave BoskVeld until they had taken care of these matters. Relying on sporadic spy reports about the monumental building projects in the Wild, exercising an inhuman patience, and in several instances even lending their physical and technological aid, they awaited the completion of the temples. After the huri took up residence in the completed pagodas, the

Ur'sadi's photosynthesizing offspring dispersed again, this time into the jungles.

Only then did the Ur'sadi act. They razed their own settlement on the veldt—a single settlement, not many as Elegy had once conjectured—and mounted separate attacks on the wilderness pagodas. These forays were swift, comprehensive, and pretty much effective. Their purpose was to destroy the huri for all time, eradicate any vestige of their memory, and bequeath the planet in perpetuity to the neo-Ur'sadi tribes that had diffused through the Wild in quest of solitary fulfillments of their own.

But the huri had had their neo-Ur'sadi slaves equip the largest of these temples with light- and perception-polarizing minerals quarried from areas near the shores of Calyptra and then toted inland by small groups of porters ultrasonically programmed to resist detection. These materials came to only one site in the Wild (the one beneath which Elegy and I were huddled beside the transfigured form of her father), but they accumulated so slowly that several decades passed before the great amelhystlike windows were precision ground, hoisted into their moorings, and activated so that the excavation and furnishing of the catacombs beneath the pagoda could proceed undetected, too. Thus, the largest of the wilderness temples disappeared one twilight midway through the huri's century-long building program. Although the temple was then conspicuous by its absence—once the Ur'sadi had perceived its absence—they eventually came to believe the huri had dismantled it for purposes of their own, perhaps because it was too damn big to be realized according to plan. In reality, then, the Ur'sadi attacks on the other huri pagodas in the Wild were little more than the demolition of enormous architectural decoys erected, adorned, and furnished for the sole puipose of focusing and thereby diffusing the Ur'sadi's wrath.

After which, reasonably well pleased with themselves, the Ur'sadi fled to the stars. The huri remained underground, and the neo-Ur'sadi, at last almost completely free of their host role, began their melancholy decline toward the ritualized cannibalism and

photoperiodically dictated life-style of the maned Asadi beasts they were to become. . . .

Waiting for Chaney to come around again, crouched beside Elegy in the dark, I recited for her the complex ciiain of reasoning and deductive historiography you have just read. My purpose was at least as much to keep Elegy's mind off her father's unknowable agony as to sort out and illuminate the mysteries of an unknowable past.

"It makes a good story," Elegy said when I was finished. In the prison of iridescent cables raying out from Chaney's cocoon, she smiled at me. "Do you believe it, Ben?"

Telling it, I had almost come to. "The facts—"

"The facts are diverse and open to multiple interpretations," Elegy broke in. "Not only that, Ben, in many instances they're not facts at all, but suppositions arising from our bewilderment. They're seductive because we'd rather concoct an explanation than admit or live with our ignornace."

"Goddamn it. Elegy, who's getting analytical and superrational now? All I really wanted to do was—"

"It's enough for me that I've found my father."

Understanding that, I shut down the nagging little homunculus within me who wanted Elegy's gratitude. Nevertlieless, I began to wonder what—exactly—we had found. Had Chaney really spoken to us already? Would he speak to us again? I was ready to leave.

Then, as if from the cavernous basement of his soul, Chaney repeated, "Nor are any of us. Being what we are." He was surfacing at the place in his free-associational monologue where earlier he had chosen to go under.

Elegy and I stood up, silk cables taut across our arms and torsos where we leaned into them. The caul covering Chaney's head shimmered wetly, a thing both fascinating and painful to see.

A strange sound escaped Chaney. Then it came again, confounding us. We exchanged glances.

"He's laughing," I said.

"Laughing," Chaney acknowledged. "I'm laughing." His laughter was a metallic-sounding ratcheting that reminded me of a chain being dragged across a surface of tin or aluminum.

"Why are you laughing?" Elegy asked him.

"Eyebooks," Chaney said.

"The eyebooks," Elegy prompted. "I've got several with me. We took them from the great wall in the pagoda."

The torn membrane at Chaney's mouth fluttered. "The huri have told me. That most of them are garbage. The Ur'sadi programmed them. With epithets and fear. They knew for wiiat. Those eyebooks were intended. And they released. To huri posterity. Only the hatred they felt. For their—" the final word was awhile in coming—"enslavers."

"If the Ur'sadi deprived their enslavers of knowledge," I reminded Chaney, "they also deprived their Asadi children of knowledge they might have recovered one day."

"Not so long as the huri themselves exist," Chaney responded with some fluency. "And they still exist. Don't they, Ben."

I looked to the top of the amethyst wall and saw The Bachelor's huri roosting there. It attended our colloquy witiiout appearing to take any genuine interest in what we did or said.

'They continue to exert," Chaney was saying, "a kind of vampiric power. Over mute and feeble Asadi. Like The Bachelor. Like Eisen Zwei. Like how many previous chieftains. Since the Asadi began."

Chaney stopped, almost breathless, and his pause lengthened until it seemed I would again have a chance to fabricate and recite several chapters of Asadi history.

At last, though, Chaney picked up the dropped stitch himself: "The chieftain's huri terrifies his people. It recalls for them their cannibalism. Stirs memories of a nobler but more troubled past.