Transfigurations

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Transfigurations Page 11

by Michael Bishop


  I walked down the little forest-locked peninsula to his house and mounted the steps to its deck. Dressed in dappled coveralls and smelling of an astringent homemade cologne (or "pore opener"), Eisen was somewhat testily awaiting me.

  "You're late," he said by way of greeting. "I thought I was going to have to send someone after you."

  We were going out to Chaney Field together. One of Eisen's duties was to greet all incoming colonists and support personnel, a duty he performed with grudging conscientiousness.

  Late or not, I had to stand beside Eisen on his gallery as Denebola poured its copper light into our eyes from far beyond Frasierville's eastern perimeter. He seemed in no hurry to make up for the tardiness of which I was supposedly guilty. Instead, he nodded over his shoulder at the forest sighing and photosynthesiz-ing at our backs.

  "How long has it been since anyone did extensive field work

  among the Asadi?" he asked me, knowing the answer as well as I. The question—I was certain—had specific reference to the arrival of Chaney's daughter.

  "No one does it full time anymore, Moses. You haven't permitted any of us to submerge ourselves in their culture since Egan disappeared." I'm sure I gave culture a disparaging inflection. Emotional identification with an alien species isn't always possible, even for people trained to repress their ethnocentric prejudices in the interests of a clinical objectivity. Egan Chancy knew that as well as anyone.

  The Governor revolved his noncommittal face toward me. "But you and others continue to go in there occasionally, don't you?"

  "Sure," I acknowledged. "I do, sometimes, and so does Yoshiba when she gets the chance." But after Chaney's defection, my interest in the Asadi rain forest was perhaps less in the Asadi themselves than in the ecological integrity of the rain forest as a biome. The fact that the only living organisms we had ever found in there were botanicals, insects, and the Asadi had made me, against my training, something of a xenologist. As had my work on Chaney's tapes and notes.

  'To what end?"

  "Sir?" I asked, intimidated by Eisen's tone.

  "What real progress in our understanding of the Asadi has been made since Chaney left us? What specific achievements?"

  "Their behavior hasn't altered fundamentally in the past six or seven years. We reaffirm Chaney's basic findings. We note small changes in the size and makeup of the population in the Asadi clearing. . . . We're only in there by day, Moses, when we're in there, and it's tedious work. All our attempts at telemetered observation have been thwarted by the Asadi themselves. They won't tolerate mechanical systems in the Wild. They disassemble such equipment when they discover it or hurl it about like male chimpanzees engaging in charging displays. This discovery, by itseK, is probably the most significant one we've made in seven years—it suggests a hostile but systematic response to our

  HI

  attempts at long-distance surveillance."

  "Couldn't it just as easily suggest an instinctive dislike of things that don't naturally belong in their jungle? It doesn't require cognitive ability to recognize an intrusive wrongness, Ben. Back home, a sparrow seeing a piece of rope in its nest perceives the rope as a snake and refuses to land. You see, the wrongness registers."

  Tactfully, I admitted that the Asadi's destruction of our telemetering equipment might well stem from its "wrongness" rather than our subjects' intelligent awareness that we were trying to record their life styles.

  "Is that it, then?" Eisen asked. "One ambiguous discovery in six years?"

  "There's Geoffrey Sankosh's film," I responded wearily. "From that we've learned that the Asadi bear live young, whom they leave during the day in nests high above the forest floor. We also know that their young don't come to the Asadi assembly ground until they've grown relatively imposing adult manes. As best we can tell, this takes more than seven years, maybe as many as twelve. Since the Third Expedition hasn't been here twelve years, Moses, it's hard to be much more accurate than that in estimating the age of initiation."

  "The holographic film was shot by an outsider," Eisen murmured deprecatingly, squinting into the sun.

  I hurried to counter the implications of this remark: "That's because you didn't have the authority to summon Sankosh back to Frasierville every night. The terms of his grant freed him to work independently of colonial authority, and he took full advantage of that freedom. Besides, he was lucky, Moses. If he had discovered the female cJready well advanced in her labor, he would never have been able to get his equipment into place in time to film the births. Had he arrived earlier, the female would have fled beyond him without a trace."

  Eisen was smiling reminiscently. "I've seen it six or seven times, that film. A marvelous accomplishment. Once I set my

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  projection cylinder down there on the patio roof—pointing his chin at the expanse of leaf carpeting below the verandah—"and let little Reba watch it, too. The angle of apprehension was perfect. I've never seen her eyes so big."

  To that I didn't respond.

  Frasierville was beginning to stir. Doors flapped open, and 'bola-powered lorries hummed back and forth among the warehouses, import-processing plants, and the central solar station, a pagoda of tarnished mirrors. A caravan of newly indoctrinated colonists was departing for Amersavane, the bitter-grass veldt country to the far southeast. Eisen and I watched its long train of veldt-rovers and settlement cars hitch jerkily along Dry Run Boulevard and out of sight beyond the power sails of the hospital.

  "At least Sankosh came back alive," Eisen finally said. "We didn't have to send someone into the Wild to retrieve him."

  "No, we didn't," I agreed.

  Eisen moved silently along the deck and went down the steps at its opposite end. Obediently, and of necessity, I followed. He was halfway up the tree-lined peninsula of his yard before I could fall in comfortably beside him and pick up the gist of the monologue spilling from his lips.

  "... care for it, Ben. Not a bit. She may have a grant, too— autonomous institutional funding freeing her from my control. Even her father didn't have that. But what if she isn't as fortunate as Geoffrey Sankosh? What is she melts out there in the Wild and then can't reconstitute herself as a functional human being? I don't like this a bit, Ben, and I'm not particularly disposed to like her, either."

  Still walking, he said, "Thank God, she's not the only one I'm going out to the shuttle field to meet—her daddy's memorial shuttle field, I suppose I should add. And thank God, you're her escort and surrogate daddy for the day, maybe even for the duration of her stay, and it's your bounden duty, Ben, to keep her out of my hair. Keep her out of trouble, too."

  We walked to the lorry pool three streets beyond my own living

  quarters. A Komm-serice guard, recognizing Eisen, drove a veldt-rover out of the fenced-in compound and picked us up. Another attendant, a young woman in a violet enlisted-grade jumpsuit, swung the gate shut behind us and locked it with a metallic pop. Purring, our veldt-rover leaped away.

  "I'd almost made up my mind not to go this morning," Eisen said.

  "Why?"

  "I don't think Egan Chaney had very much in common with the author of The Iliad. And I don't think his interloping daughter is likely to have much in common with the excavator of Troy, old what's-his-name."

  "Neither do I, frankly. Is that all that's bothering you?"

  Eisen, the margins of his salt-and-pepper tonsure fluttering in the wind, regarded me with something like childish pique. "If I had my way, Ben, we'd move Frasierville to a coastal or a veldt location and leave the Asadi altogether to their own devices."

  "But they warrant study. An intelligent ancestral species of the Asadi or an artifact-making collateral relative—the Ur'sadi— went extinct some time ago. But despite what Chaney babbled in his final tape about their being on the verge of autogenocide, the Asadi themselves seem evolutionarily stable at present."

  "Then maybe we just ought to leave them alone."

  "Thanks t
o you," I countered, "that's pretty much what we're doing. In any case, they're a"—I quoted to Eisen from the xenologists' handbook that Chaney had helped to write before his arrival on BoskVeld—"'Komm-protected indigenous species possessing either fully developed self-awareness or its demonstrable potential.' That being so—even if they aren't truly indigenous—we can't kill one of their number to examine its brain, and in all the time we've been here we've never had the opportunity to recover one of their dead."

  "Pity," said Eisen, smiling faintly. "I hope you don't hold me accountable for that."

  Our driver negotiated the washed-out surface of Calyptran

  Perimeter Road—which old hands irreverently refer to as Aphasia Alley, so difficult is it to speak while jolting along its three-kilometer length—and then headed northeast on the white, polymer-bonded macadam of Egan Chaney Highway. The veldt swallowed us, and off to our right we saw the convoy destined for Amersavane crawling through the morning's dizzying veils of heat shimmer. You began to realize why the imperial British were so fond of pith helmets.

  The veldt was vacant. A visitor could look in vain for impala, zebras, wildebeest, or gazelles. The African analogy worked only topographically, and the foliage clinging to the earth and tufting a thumb's length above the surface in prickly beige or cream-colored flowers had no known counterpart in the Serengeti or the Ngorongoro Crater. Only a few tussocks of the many nondescript clusters flamed out in gaudy reds and oranges, and those, of course, caught and captivated the eye.

  Traveling them, you wondered why the savannahs had spawned no animals to graze there. You wondered how the Asadi could have evolved on a world whose biota seemed so limited and niggardly. Prodigal is not a word you would have used to describe the Creative Animus that undertook the husbandry of BoskVeld's plains and forests. Hence, the utter anomalousness of the Asadi. (As for the batlike huri that Chaney mentions in his journals and tapes, no one but him had ever seen a specimen of those elusive, nasty-sounding critters.) I sometimes found myself believing that forty million years in the future, when humanity had passed away from the universe at large, the bacteria we left behind on Bosk Veld would have evolved into ethically self-aware hominids and that the Asadi would still be there on the planet to confute their logic and boggle their understanding. . . .

  "We're going to arrive well before the probeship's shuttlecraft," said our driver. He was a dark-complexioned young man whose name was embroidered in purple thread on the shoulder of his violet sleeve: Bahadori.

  "Fine," said Eisen listlessly.

  The shuttle field's colossal, and useless, probeship gantry had been visible to us for ten or twelve minutes already. Like a titanium cat's cradle, it reared up fifteen stories in the desert shimmer, defining the surrounding countryside by both its size and its geometric complexity: The veldt around it seemed to exist for the sole purpose of providing the gantry with a place to rest. Its interior struts glistened like the threads of a giant spiderweb, and the cylindrical passenger and cargo cars poised on the gantry-to-ground diagonals resembled dewdrops trembling in the webbing. A field of whilais, irrigated by vacuum pumps, grew behind the gantry and gentled the terrible but stunning monotony of the veldt. To the north, beyond the field's main landing strips, sat a colossal, and useless, probeship hangar. This building, which had been vandalized and inscribed with weird graffiti repeatedly over the past four years, looked like a vast but isolated slum. I was fascinated by it. Several times in recent months I had toured the hangar just to be by myself in its echoing emptiness.

  Much nearer, a cluster of flat-roofed buildings with translucent green walls provided housing for the shuttle field's support personnel and temporary shelter for the new arrivals. Chaney Field, in fact, had become an important suburb of Frasierville. Many had had hopes that it would soon take its place in the hierarchy of Glaktik Komm as a bonafide light-probe port. Hence the folly of the unused gantry. Hence, too, the folly of the immense probeship hangar which was now in use principally as a warehouse for imported colony supplies.

  "Whom else must you meet?" I asked Eisen as we neared the complex.

  "A new group of colonists," he responded without looking at me. "And, as I understand it, a friend of Elegy Gather's whom I may wish to put in quarantine for a while."

  "Quarantine!" I exclaimed.

  "So the Wasserlaufer Ws captain informed me by radio last night."

  "What the devil are you talking about?"

  "Patience," said Eisen. "Have patience, Ben."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jaafar, Elegy, and Kretzoi

  Outside the terminal in the blistering midmoming heat we stood—Jaafar Bahadori and I—while Eisen awaited the shut-tlecraft's coming in the comfort of his air-conditioned Chaney Field office. He had invited us to join him without much enthusiasm, and we had politely declined in order to watch the shuttle put down on the landing strip.

  Cracking his knuckles in anticipation, Bahadori shifted from foot to foot and peered into the pale recesses of sky above the Calyptran Wild. The wind blew in gusts past the field's green-glowing support buildings, setting up an eerie lament in the titanium lyre of the gantry.

  At last the shuttle appeared: a huge white fuselage descending on the treetops to the northwest and banking into the wind to align itself with Chaney Field's main landing strip. It got dowTi quickly.

  Then, distorted by heat haze, foreshortened by distance, the shutde bumped toward Bahadori and me at high, whining speed.

  Despite having watched a hundred such shuttles land, I was always surprised by how ungainly they appeared on the ground. In the newer probeships the shuttles slot into the cargo nacelles underslung aft and so become merely another rriodular component of the whole—but, independent of their parent ships, they have all the grace and aesthetic appeal of wounded pelicans.

  Baggage lorries and passenger vans departed the shade screens of the terminal and scooted competitively across the polymac. The shutde, meanwhile, began putting out its tubelike extensible ramps—a trio of them. Bahadori and I caught a ride on one of the passing baggage trucks. Then we jumped from its running board only ten or twelve meters from the shutde's central ramp.

  Many of those disembarking were women—more women than men, in fact—and I knew that it was going to be no easy task finding Elegy Gather among all the attractive candidates. I understood, though, why the young Iranian had been so keen to greet the shuttle—he was nineteen or twenty and a long way from home. He blustered into the crowd surging out of the extensible tube opposite us and fought his way upstream like a randy salmon. I didn't see him again for another forty or fifty minutes.

  As soon as Bahadori was gone, I started asking each young woman who approached if she were Elegy Gather. No luck. My candidates shook their heads, or smiled and raised their eyebrows in apology, or gave me haughty looks as if I had indecendy propositioned them. The men among whom they walked either grinned or pretended not to notice me.

  One fellow, however, stopped and took my arm. "Go up the rear ramp," he told me, nodding. "Gather's back there now, trying to get something straightened out with a Komm-service steward."

  This ramp was on the other side of the shuttle. I walked beneath the craft's bloated, silver-white belly, then entered the antiseptic-smelling tube leading upward to the passenger compartment.

  "Who's going to guarantee his safety?" I heard a female voice

  demanding evenly. "You? Governor Eisen? Who?"

  The steward responded, "If it isnt quarantined, young woman, who's going to guarantee the lives of the inhabitants of BoskVeld?" This man, who was facing me from the rear of the passenger compartment, stood a good head and a half taller than his diminutive adversary. He looked, in his less-than-heartfelt belligerence, almost as old as I. My heart went out to him.

  "Not it, " the young woman corrected him. "Kretzoi's an utterly unique intelligent being who deserves your respect. Have the decency to use the masculine pronoun." She paused to glance over her shoulder at me before r
esuming her argument with the steward. "And who do you mean by 'the inhabitants of BoskVeld,' anyway? The Asadi? If so, no one thought to quarantine the members of the First, Second, and Third Denebolan Expeditions before turning them loose like a ... a swarm of renegade bacteria." That wasn't the word she wanted, but she emphasized it nevertheless.

  "I didn't mean the Asadi," the steward wearily parried. "I meant the human inhabitants of BoskVeld. The civkis, the colonists, the scientific and military support personnel. Would you care to be responsible for turning this planet into a ghost world?"

  "Kretzoi had a clean bill of health before we left Dar es Salaam. Do you think he contracted a plague virus aboard the Wasserldufer? Do you think he's going to expose everyone here to some mysterious and lethal contagion?"

  "Civ Gather, / don't think anything," the man tried to begin.

  "Apparently not," the young woman declared, ignoring the real import of his inflection. "I wonder who does."

  "I mean," the haggard steward began again, "that the decision isn't mine. It's Governor Eisen's. He wants to confine Krikorian— or whatever its name is—until your, ah, companion is thoroughly acclimated and at home. He also has the safety of others in mind."

  "Acclimatize Kretzoi!" the young woman exclaimed. "Why, this is almost exactly the sort of climate he grew up in!"

  I edged my way along the aisle until I was standing at the young

  woman's shoulder. "Elegy Gather," I said, "I'm Thomas Benedict."

  The steward's face betrayed relief and gratitude; he took the occasion to excuse himself and trudge past us toward the pilot's cabin.

  The glance that Chaney's daughter had thrown me a moment earlier had imprinted only her eyes in my memory. They were as large and brown, and as potentially dangerous, as chestnuts in an unbanked fire. They radiated intelligence and indomitability. Her other features, by comparison, seemed soft and unprepossessing. Elegy Gather looked like a feminine, mulatto version of her father, compact and unadorned. The packaging promised nothing extraordinary, but her eyes transformed her deceptive plainness. Her eyes and her warm, no-nonsense voice.

 

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