Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  street—a small chemical-assay facility—is so nondescript and inconsequential in comparison that you can walk down Mica Strike Street several times before noticing it at all. In fact, but for its glazed and colorful exterior, the museum itself provokes very little notice. If you have been there once, the only reason to go again, I'm afraid, is to ascertain that it still exists. I did this regularly, primarily because the special-collections room housed an interesting array of Egan Chaney memorabilia, including representative copies of our monograph and the last of the mysterious eyebooks.

  Robards de Feo and Chiyoko Yoshiba were the cocurators of the Frasier Archaeological Museum, de Feo up front and Yoshiba in the special-collections department.

  When we entered, I immediately regretted not having forewarned them by telecom or televid of our coming. Kretzoi's appearance in the museum foyer caught de Feo completely by surprise, frightening him so badly that he fumbled something in his hands and narrowly missed dropping it to the floor. (It was a small stone effigy from the ruins of the only verifiable Ur'sadi structure in the Wild, a foundationless pagoda thoroughly excavated and described by Frasier and his First Expedition colleagues. A great many people supposed that Chaney had erected his illusory pagoda on the ruins of Frasier's real one.) De Feo relaxed a little when he saw me behind Kretzoi, but his face stayed the color of a rotten turnip's heart.

  I introduced de Feo to both Elegy and Kretzoi and told him why we had come. He escorted us through the antechamber's spindly display cases—attempted duplicates of those described in Chaney's monologue—to the special-collections department, where Yoshiba, a heavy-set, middle-aged Japanese-Dutch woman with a remarkably serene and beautiful face, raised her thin eyebrows ironically and gestured us to several high-backed metal stools.

  Kretzoi, discerning in a glance that he could not comfortably sit his stool, wandered into the center of the room and squatted. Hunkering, he regarded the three of us—de Feo had already

  returned to the front—with the same kind of bewildered attention he had given the pieta.

  Elegy, meanwhile, gazed down into the glass cabinet in front of our stools. Several photographs of her father and a small fan of pages from one of Chaney's private journals were on display under her hands.

  "This is his daughter?" Yoshiba asked.

  I nodded.

  "And she wants to see the last of the eyebooks?"

  "Please," I said.

  "Altogether my pleasure, she's come such a long way." With that, Yoshiba went through an archway behind the cabinet and returned a moment later carrying a white velvet pouch with equally velvety navy-blue drawstrings. She withdrew the eyebook from the pouch and laid it on the cabinet directly in front of Elegy, who looked up smiling and reached toward the alien cassette with a cautious—indeed, a reverent—forefinger.

  "You're not permitted to activate its spectral display," Yoshiba warned gently. "We don't know how many more times it will work."

  "She's come such a long way," I reminded Yoshiba.

  "And I'd like Kretzoi to see it"—Elegy nodded meaningfully at her eerily attentive companion—"before he goes into the Wild today."

  "Come on, Chiyoko," I pleaded.

  The woman's serene, full-cheeked face betrayed neither suspicion nor sympathy. "For old time's sake, I suppose?" she asked me sardonically, then relented and said, "Very well—once." Not so much a concession as a restricted mandate. "You'll have to sign and date the register, Thomas. Nor do I think that the make-believe Asadi should perform the program activation."

  Elegy, I believe, started to protest this judgment as bigoted and discriminatory, but Yoshiba retreated through the archway again and came back with the register. I held my thumb in the first open square on the page, just long enough to draw my print out of the

  paper. Then I signed my name with a blunt-tipped stylus. Yoshiba promptly closed the register and transported it back to its resting place in the farther room. Then, once again at the display cabinet, she indicated by a nod that I could take the eyebook to Kretzoi and show him how it worked and what it had to reveal of Asadi communication methods.

  "If it fails to display again after this run-through," Yoshiba said matter-of-factly, "your signature will not save my position, Thomas."

  "We're a good deal closer to its power source than were the university technicians and specialists who lost theirs," I replied, hunkering down beside Kretzoi and holding the eyebook under his muzzle. "Not to worry, Chiyoko."

  Elegy dismounted her stool and came around behind the two of us. To Yoshiba, almost as a rebuke, she said, "In any case, we'll bring you several more. My father took only a few out of the Asadi pagoda with him. Others remain, maybe as many as 150,000."

  Chiyoko laughed and lifted the velvet pouch by its drawstrings. "I'd better begin cutting material for more of these, hadn't I? Maybe I'd better file an import requisition, in fact."

  I pressed my thumb over the right half of the rectangular tab beneath the bulb on the cassette.

  The eye immediately began displaying. Colors swept in crazy sequence out of the Asadi crackerbox on my palm. I looked at Kretzoi and saw this rainbow rampage reflected in the lenses of his eye coverings. A staccato, ragtime piccolo parade of brilliant primaries, cunning blind pauses, and pyrotechnic shadings between the primaries. Kretzoi, tilting his head, peered at the flashing bulb and began to quake.

  "Maybe you'd better shut it off," Chiyoko advised, but to preserve the eyebook's motivating energies rather than to spare Kretzoi his strange St. Vitus tremors—of which Chiyoko seemed totally unaware.

  I put my thumb over the left half of the cassette's control tab, and as suddenly as it had begun, the spectral display ceased. The

  bulb in the wafer's center might just as well have been the glazed-over eye of a dead fish. Chiyoko took the eyebook from me and deposited it carefully in its velvet pouch. When I looked back at Elegy, she was kneeling in front of Kretzoi with a hand on his still-trembling shoulder.

  "Could you read the pattern?" she asked. He seemed not to hear her, and she repeated the question.

  Kretzoi made a sign that plainly meant No.

  "What, then?" she demanded. "What happened to you?"

  This time Kretzoi revolved a degree or two toward Elegy and began making hand signs with a deliberate, desperate verve.

  Elegy translated for Chiyoko and me: "He says he read the eyebook's emotional content—not its specific message, not its philosophical or narrative import, but its ... its emotional content." This disturbed her. "He says the spectral sequence evoked in him a deepening pattern of—well, of/ear."

  Kretzoi looked away from Elegy and "grinned," briefly exposing his altered teeth and mottled gums. The grin, in Old World monkeys, is a sign not of joy or potential aggression but of fear, and Kretzoi's grin was as involuntary as his hand signs had been deliberate. He seemed embarrassed and ashamed.

  "Perhaps he's afraid to go to the Asadi clearing," Chiyoko said.

  Elegy shot the woman an annoyed glance, but kept her hand on the animal's shoulder and asked quietly,"Are you, Kretzoi?"

  He turned his wrist outward from his body so that his knuckle-dragging hand briefly exposed its palm. A shrug. His face remained averted, but his long upper lip finally dropped, eclipsing the fearful grin.

  "We'd better go," I said, "if Kretzoi still wishes to go. Jaafar's holding a Dragonfly for us at the port near the lorry pool." It was extremely important to me that Kretzoi have a choice in the matter—as, apparently, it was also to Elegy, who was regarding the creature with genuine anxiety.

  But Kretzoi's long, muscular body moved out from under her hand and flowed toward the door on all fours. Before going through

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  into de Feo's territory, he paused, reared back, and made a beckoning sign at us with his right hand.

  "He's ready," Elegy said in evident relief. She thanked Chiyoko for showing us the eyebook and allowing me to activate it.

  "Altogether m
y pleasure," responded Chiyoko placidly. "However, I'm not sure his seeing it has done him any good."

  We headed back through the museum to Mica Strike Street. De Feo acknowledged our passage with a word and a nod of the head, but didn't budge from his post to see us to the door. Ordinarily he escorted every visitor out, talking animatedly all the while and encouraging an early return visit. It wasn't hard to deduce what had discouraged him from such commonplace but courteous behavior that morning.

  The helicraft—a modified Kommthor-Sikorsky Dragonfly with an irridescent red-orange fuselage for easy sighting from the air— stood ready on the central square of poly mac at Rain Forest Port.

  It took us only twenty minutes to walk there from Christ's Promenade, but Jaafar was fidgeting impatiently in the dispatch shack when we arrived. We were better than an hour and a half late.

  "I'm supposed to drive a Kommthor official in from Chancy Field at noon," he told us. "What took you so long, I wonder." The "I wonder" was there to keep his impatience from sounding crudely insubordinate.

  I nodded toward the BenDragon Prime. "Did you outfit it as I asked?"

  "Last night," Jaafar replied. "On my off-duty time."

  I informed him that no one on a colony world is ever truly off duty and watched him roll that overripe chestnut on the palate of his mind. "How many days' supplies?" I demanded.

  "A week's—for three." He glanced sidelong at Kretzoi, who was

  peering out the dispatch-shack door toward the glinting and simmering helicraft.

  "A week's?" Elegy said, startled.

  "A hedge against accident," I said, knowing that she expected to drop Kretzoi off, observe him from afar for no more than a day or so, and then return in eight to ten days to see what he had managed to accomplish. After that she planned her own intensive campaign in the wild, maybe even attempting herself to go among the Asadi.

  But I had grown impatient waiting for something—anything—to develop. What harm if we immersed ourselves in the jungle from the beginning? I had almost begun to feel that Elegy's Nyerere Foundation grant belonged in part to me, that I deserved some small say in its implementation.

  "It's standard operating procedure when you overfly the wild," I repeated of the week's supplies aboard the helicraft. "A hedge against accident—^just like the Dragonfly's coloring."

  Elegy looked at Jaafar for confirmation. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and maintained a noncommittal silence.

  "We'd better go," I said.

  Across the heat-deflecting surface of the polymac Elegy, Kretzoi, and I approached the sleek, evil-looking body of the BenDragon Prime. A moment or two later we were in the air, the forest revolving beneath us like a weird floral arrangement on a prodigious lazy Susan.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Wild

  It goes on and on, the Calyplran Wild. You gaze down upon a canopy of interlocking flowers, leaves, and lianas, myriad greens and blues transmuted from instant to instant by Denebola's steadily streaming but variably constituted copper-colored light. The mantle of the forest canopy drops off to the west, drops and drops without ever giving way to some other recognizable feature. The veldt behind you is an illusion, and the ocean Calyptra, near whose eastern shore Frasier and the First Expedition discovered the ruins of an Ur'sadi pagoda, is apprehensible only as a surf noise that may in reality be the droning of your Dragonfly.

  Once up in the air I was ready to rebequeath to Elegy my secretly purloined portion of her grant. No wonder none of us had found Chaney. No wonder even the renowned Geoffrey Sankosh had failed. A human being attempts to embrace eternity when he puts his arms around the alien bigness of the Wild.

  In less than an hour, not long after midday, I banked the Dragonfly over the Asadi clearing and gave both Elegy and Kretzoi their first glimpse of the unfathomable creatures who trudged there. Elegy sucked in her breath at the sight of the Asadi, and Kretzoi, in almost imperceptible reprise of his behavior at the Archaeological Museum, lifted his hairy upper lip. The tips of his teeth gleamed dully.

  "It's real," I said. "But since your father disappeared, Moses Eisen hasn't allowed anyone to stay out here doing field work—not for protracted periods, anyway."

  "Kretzoi will take up where Egan Chaney left off," Elegy said.

  The BenDragon Prime carried us beyond the clearing and out into the shimmering airspace over the Wild itself. I banked us again and circled back for another look-see. It struck me during this second flyover that one thing about the Asadi had changed in six years—they were no longer completely insusceptible to evidence of the human presence on BoskVeld. Whereas once they had acknowledged our existence only by fleeing when one of us approached on foot (the exception, of course, being their reaction to Chaney's methodical insinuation of himself into their little clearing), today they recognized the intrusion of our technology and were often open in their appraisal of and their hostility toward it.

  As we came back over the assembly ground, I noticed that several of the Asadi had left off their intramural staring matches or brutal sexual gymnastics to watch the Dragonfly go by.

  "Where'd you make my father's supply drops?" Elegy asked.

  I pointed through the cabin's bubble to the immediate east. "Over that way. Chaney didn't want the helicraft to disturb his subjects. I used to believe that I could land among the Asadi without disrupting their lives or threatening their sanity—if you assume them sane."

  "But no more?"

  "But no more. Didn't you see them watching us as we flew

  Elegy confessed that she had.

  "So that's new," I told her. "And I'm half convinced it has something to do with your father's having once been among them."

  Out of the comer of my eye I saw Kretzoi make a series of hand signs for Elegy's benefit.

  "He wants to know, Ben, if that's going to make it harder for him to gain acceptance among them this afternoon."

  "Tomorrow morning," I corrected the two of them. 'Tomorrow dawn. We'd be idiots to try to introduce Kretzoi into their midst after buzzing them as we've just done. We'll camp out tonight."

  "Where?" Elegy asked.

  The Wild's buckling, blue-green canopy knit itself together beneath us like a chlorophyl afghan.

  "Right here," I responded, lowering us vertically out of the sky through an opening in the foliage seemingly not much larger than a doughnut hole. "At your daddy's old supply drop." The Dragonfly stuttered, stopping in midair several times as 1 maneuvered it down. Meanwhile, lianas and exotic flowers twined together around us as the sky closed up overhead. "This is the spot from which Chaney first walked into their clearing," I said when we had all ceased vibrating. 'This is the spot where I weekly replenished his supplies of Placenol and moral courage."

  "He had plenty of that last, didn't he?" his daughter said challengingly. "Who else has ever stayed out here longer?"

  'The longer you stay the more surely it's consumed."

  Elegy said nothing. We got out. It was interesting to poke around the old supply drop. In our first ten minutes of rummaging we found an unused flare packet, good for signaling up to eighty kilometers away, so high did the flare rockets carry their charges, and a number of self-heating food canisters that Chaney had probably scattered about contemptuously just after my last delivery.

  Kretzoi swung himself up into a tree and began brachiating away from the helicraft into the jungle, more like a gibbon or an oremgutan than a chimp or a baboon. For the first time since his

  and Elegy's arrival on BoskVeld he seemed at home, in his element, and I knew without being told that he was merely exercising the luxury of his freedom, that in a moment or two he would come swinging back toward us and deposit himself triumphantly on his haunches not far from either Elegy or me. Which is exactly what he did.

  I dragged a nylon lean-to assembly out of the Dragonfly and began making camp, using the helicraft's fuselage as our tent's rear wall. Elegy set aside her awe and excitement long enough to help me.
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br />   Later, as night fell, we heard the Asadi dispersing into the Wild on every side, streaming past invisibly in the arabesque, three-dimensional maze of the rain forest. Where did they go? How did they avoid stumbling in upon us when we had taken such pains to conceal ourselves, even to the point of nearly thwarting the Dragonfly's gaudy, iridescent paint job? Why couldn't the Asadi remain together at night? What did they do, separately, in the dark? Those were questions that suddenly seemed new again.

  None of us was really able to sleep that night. I used the time to record the accumulating episodes of our adventure, hoping, eventually, to knit together a fabric at least as cohesive as the overarching vegetable roof. Kretzoi huddled nervously on a patch of ground outside the lean-to. It amazed me anew to realize that he anticipated the morning in the same way that students anticipate the advent of a major examination in their academic specialty. To calm him. Elegy sat down behind him and began tenderly, caressingly, grooming his mane. . . .

  But Kretzoi needn't have worried. The following morning he infiltrated the Asadi clearing with stunning ease, just as Egan

  Chaney once had; and Elegy and I, when we stooped beside the clearing, had trouble determining which Asadi was in reality Kretzoi and which were bonafide bubble-eyed aliens. But that was later.

  That morning, at sunrise, the Wild began to fill with a noise like radio static—in truth, this was nothing more than the Asadi abandoning their solitary nests and heading homeward at great speed, brushing foliage aside and padding over the crumbling humus among the palms and lacy jungle hardwoods. Either running or brachiating, they flashed past our encampment.

  "Go!" I told Kretzoi. "Now!"

  "Maybe he needs a weapon," Elegy suggested belatedly. "A stunner or a knife. Something."

  "Nothing!" I shouted in an angry whisper. "Kretzoi, get going!"

  Off he went, without an instant's hesitation, and by the time either Elegy or I knew that he was gone, we were alone in the rising dawn.