Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  It wasn't until late the following afternoon that I told Elegy what I had done. We were sitting at the puUout table where we typed and transcribed our notes. The fan's hard plastic blades made a rhythmic and continuous popping noise.

  "It's illegal," Elegy said, avoiding for the moment the fact that I had gone behind her back. "The Asadi are a Komm-protected

  indigenous species. They may be within an evolutionary eyelash of full moral and intellectual self-awareness. That's why you've kept your hands off them this long, Ben."

  "Your grant gives us extraordinary privileges," I countered. "We have the right to step outside standing Komm regs if orthodox procedures fail to produce results."

  "It's my grant."

  "I've read it very thoroughly."

  "It's my grant. Dr. Benedict!" She studied me with outraged bafflement. Beads of perspiration formed a bridge of tiny diamonds above her upper lip. "Not yours," she emphasized more calmly. "Mine."

  "I know that."

  "The responsibility for fuckups and legal violations and squandered funds lies heavy on the head of the Nyerere Fellow, Dr. Benedict—not in the lap of overzealous surrogate daddies or washed-up colonial officials who've kicked away their own best chances."

  "Now you're playing rough."

  But her steady, reasonable tone contradicted the harshness of her words, the unbanked fire in her eyes. "A kiss to build a scheme on," she said. "You had this in mind our second night in here, didn't you? Even before, perhaps."

  "No," I answered, altogether truthfully. The pulse in my temples had begun to keep pace with the rhythmic popping of the fan.

  'Then why are you doing it?"

  "We need a breakthrough, Elegy."

  "This is only our sixth full day out here," she said. "My father spent the equivalent of more than four Earth-standard months out here before he witnessed the Ritual of Death and Designation."

  "If I remember correctly, you were in such a helluva hurry to achieve a breakthrough when you first arrived that Eisen had to order you to spend that night in Frasierville. True?"

  "There's a difference between enthusiasm and insanity. I was in

  a hurry to get started. You seem in a hurry to turn my grant inside out, to do exploratory surgery on the Asadi's souls."

  "If they have any. —But, yes, I'm in a hurry for that breakthrough. My hurry's come upon me gradually over the last six years."

  Elegy went to the door of the BenDragon Prime. She raised one arm along its casing and stared into the Calyptran Wilderness. "I don't know what my attitude toward you's going to be, Ben, if anything happens to Kretzoi."

  "Then I suppose we'll both find out at the same time, won't we?"

  Without turning her head Elegy responded tightly, "You've been on Bosk Veld too long. Dr. Benedict. Too damn long."

  In camouflage suits and light-absorbent facial makeup. Elegy and I made our way through the snaky lianas, hanging umbrella roots, and serrated fronds of the Wild. We each carried a tranq launcher and a backpack of netting with which to help Kretzoi subdue his chosen victim. There was no red leather thong in Elegy's hair, and our progress through the rain forest was so cautious and inchmeal that I wondered briefly if we could reach the clearing before sunset.

  Neither Elegy nor I spoke. We were afraid to give the Asadi even the smallest hint of our approach.

  The Asadi clearing was over a hundred meters long and about sixty wide. It was situated in the forest so that one "end zone," as Chancy liked to term them, lay to the north-northwest of the other. From the air the clearing looked like a red-brown label on an amorphous billowy garment of green, blue-green, and even shiny purple. In order to help Kretzoi capture an Asadi, Elegy and I were going to take up places on either side of the clearing. There was no telling where Kretzoi would be when the aliens' twilight exodus began, and if Elegy and I were squatting beside each other

  nearly a hundred meters from the struggle, our nets and our tranq launchers would be useless. Even if we separated and tried to cover different territories, Kretzoi still might tackle his victim at a point equidistant between the two of us, putting us both too far away to intervene effectively.

  At last, breaking our mutually imposed silence, I touched Elegy's arm and told her that I was going to stake out a position on the clearing's western perimeter. She nodded, and we separated.

  Denebola's last light was quivering in the foliage. I worked my way along the northern "end zone" and down the clearing's western boundary, careful not to alert the doggedly trudging Asadi to my presence but afraid that my nervousness would do just that. The smell drifting to me from the aliens' bodies was both suety and sweet, like rancid fat boiled in syrup. But I kept going and crept to a hiding place about thirty meters from the south end of the clearing.

  It was strange—literally unearthly—how the Asadi, almost as a single conscious entity, registered the setting of their planet's sun, the precise moment at which Denebola had fallen altogether beneath a "horizon" that their rain-forest environment didn't even permit them to see. You would have thought a switch in their heads had been depressed and locked into place, a switch that only sunrise the following morning had the power to release. One or two observers have suggested that a single Asadi registers this moment and that his resultant dash for the Wild triggers the fleeing response in his conspecifics. This explanation merely narrows the mystery to one undiscoverable individual; it doesn't account for the mathematical accuracy of the Asadi perception that not a ray of Denebola's light is any longer coming to them direct. Nor does it explain the observation that even in thunderstorms the Asadi dispersal takes place on its same sunset-dictated schedule. The response seems built in, innate. Triangulations made from the air on both the Asadi clearing and the line along which BoskVeld's curvature sets a mathematically verifiable horizon in relation to the clearing—these meticulous surveys had demonstrated that full

  sunset and the Asadi's twilight dispersal are almost invariably coincident events.

  You began to believe that on BoskVeld there thrived an unforthcoming species of sun worshipers whose very genes coded them to a reverence for the Light. Each individual was clocked to the sun, attuned to its passage.

  The moment came. The unending Asadi shuffle ended, and individual animals began sniffing the air and staring skyward. Then they broke. The sound of their feet padding for safety or concealment or God-knows-what in the thickets of the Wild erupted like a sudden tattoo of drums. Anonymous Asadi bodies crashed past me on all sides. I crouched lower and lower. At the same time, I tried to find Kretzoi in the clearing. All I could see was bobbing heads and hairy backs—but the clearing was emptying rapidly and soon I'd be able to see nothing in there except the dust.

  I got up, moved forward, and revealed myself to ten or twelve swift, heedless stragglers who were instantly gone.

  Kretzoi was to my left, closer to me than to Elegy, and he was wrestling with a terrified Asadi male whose back he was riding with one foot dangling down as a brake against the other's efforts to free himself. It was comic, this wrestling match—except that blood streaked one of Kretzoi's forearms and suddenly he was hoot-screaming so loudly that the echo reverberated in the trees.

  At last Kretzoi bulled the small Asadi to the ground, and there the two of them thrashed and bucked like bloodthirsty lovers. Above the comic opera of their coupling, Kretzoi's aria of panic soared anguished and soprano.

  "Ben!" Elegy cried, almost in counterpoint. I saw her running forward from the eastern woods, the parallel silver rods of her tranq launcher glinting in her hand. A few strands of her weighted net had been pulled out of her backpack and down across her right breast so that she could grasp the ends and shake out the entire net almost instantly.

  At that moment, though, neither our tranq launchers nor our

  still tightly furled nets were of any use to us. Seeing the blood clotted in Kretzoi's wrist hair, Elegy cried his name and halted dead.

  1 was upon the two animals. You don't nee
d a tranq launcher, I told myself, holstering it. What you need is a water hose.

  The smell of both Kretzoi and the small Asadi male was overpowering, glandular. Suet and syrup steaming in the same pot. I reached into that musky confusion of pelage, though, and yanked back the only handle I could find—Kretzoi's unhurt arm. He howled, and I pulled him aside. The Asadi male scrabbled away several meters toward the Wild as I tried to free my tranq gun again and take aim.

  Youve lost him, Benedict, I told myself. My stomach slid sickeningly into the first coil of my upper intestines. Youve lost him. . . .

  Then, almost dreamily. Elegy's weighted net was spiraling down out of the air and enveloping the Asadi like a collapsing parachute. Tufts of hair protruded obscenely from the net's reticulations as the Asadi dragged it westward while clawing, biting, and frenziedly pirouetting. I tranq'd him with a single shot, and by the time he'd reached the Wild he was half asleep in his own sputum and piss. A downed Yahoo.

  Before either Elegy or I could move to examine him, Kretzoi dashed forward and began pummeling the Asadi with his open hands. Bam, bam; bam, bam. Right through the twisted netting, as if he hoped to crack several ribs and reduce the alien's internal organs to holiday pudding.

  Elegy hurried to Kretzoi's side, squatted beside him, and draped an arm over his shoulder. He quieted immediately and looked at her. Standing apart from them, I felt, suddenly, the fearful nakedness of our presence there in the Asadi clearing. The twilight sweeping like impalpable snow into the empty clearing only heightened my uneasiness.

  "You'd better go back for the Dragonfly," Elegy told me. "It'll be dark soon, and you may have trouble finding the way."

  I plunged reluctantly back into the rain forest, conscious now that at every step I was perhaps walking beneath the nest or past the camouflaged burrow of an Asadi. They were out here with me, and I had no idea where they were. We never did.

  We had forgotten to take down the awning attached to the Dragonfly. I did that hurriedly, sloppily, wadding the nylon against my chest in a huge pie-dough lump and then heaving it into the helicraft's aft section. The twilight had taken on the color and the floating wispiness of bourbon dregs. I staggered about inside the Dragonfly either securing gear or kicking aside what I couldn't secure. Then I sat down inside the forward cabin and punched the long-dormant overhead rotors into life.

  The surrounding forest thrashed and whipped as if a storm had blown up. Despite my inclination to let the BenDragon Prime rip its way out of the drop point, I eased it upward like a man picking a coin out of a box with a pair of remote-control pincers. My hands stayed steady.

  Once fully airborne, I activated the spots on the Dragonfly's undercarriage and let them play giddily on the darkening canopy below. Almost immediately, it seemed, the Asadi clearing came tilling up at me out of the jungle, beckoning me to put down beside the three tiny figures huddled near its western boundary. In a flurry of revolving lights and upchumed dust, I landed as close to them as I could. Elegy was at the open door even before I could wedge myseK through to meet her. The helicraft's rotors were still spinning whickeringly above us.

  "How long will the tranquilizer keep the Asadi unconscious?" she shouted at me, turning back toward Kretzoi and our poor downed Yahoo. God, did she look young! Her face had an unearthly bronze sheen.

  "I don't know," I told her, running beside her, feeling the lead flowing moltenly in my gut and upper thighs. "I wasn't sure it would have any effect at all. Asadi biochemistry"—I paused to catch my breath, huffing and puffing gigantically—"it's probably a good deal different from that of terrestrial forms."

  Elegy caught my arm. "You didn't even know the tranqs would work?"

  "Not for sure, no. How could I? We've never done anything like this before. It's always been illegal, taboo."

  She looked at me searchingly, casting about for an appropriate response. "It's my grant," she finally declared. "Mine."

  We got the Asadi male into the helicraft and netted off the aft section so that if he awoke on our way home he would be imprisoned there. (While moving his limp, bony body, I noticed that the "irises" inside his transparent eye coverings were composed of a number of small concentric rings, each ring itself oddly subdivided and faceted. In the Asadi's unconsciousness they were all a v£UTiished oyster color, and it was hard to imagine them putting on a prismatic light show under any circumstances.) Elegy saw to Kretzoi's wound, cleaning it with an astringent bactericide and wrapping it in gauze. She also gave him, prosaically enough, a tetanus booster—despite his having had, at the light-probe port near Dar es Salaam, "all his shots."

  If Kretzoi had almost been quarantined upon his arrival on Bosk Veld, I suddenly thought, what's likely to be Eisen's reaction to the arrival of an unvaccinated and far from aseptic specimen of Asadi? Indigenous to BoskVeld or not, this new guest would create a commotion even more unpleasant than had the advent of Elegy Gather and Kretzoi. I hadn't even considered this disagreeable likelihood, not once during the time I was hatching our plan to bring an Asadi back alive, and now we were flying eastward toward the veldts and the melon-green lights of Frasierville—with an alien out cold in the rear of our Dragonfly. I was up front alone, and the sense of haunted isolation I had experienced that evening in the Asadi clearing settled upon me again, icily.

  I radioed Rain Forest Port, the helicraft facility within the city limits of Frasierville. "BenDragon Prime to RFP Deliverance," I

  said wearily into the speaker unit. "Come in, please."

  "RFP Deliverance, " a voice hissed at me almost immediately—

  it wasn't Jaafar's. "Go ahead, BenDragon Prime."

  "I won't be returning this copter to Rain Forest Port," I told the

  disembodied voice. "I'm going to land at Chaney Field. Notify

  Governor Eisen that we're on our way and inform him of my

  intentions."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the Chaney Field Hangar

  Approaching Chaney Field at night from the air, you find most of your attention drawn to the winking webwork of colored lights superimposed on the skeletal probeship gantry. This structure sits on the veldt like a great leafless Christmas tree, an anachronism and a reproach. The shuttle terminal and the flat-roofed support buildings southwest of the gantry, on the other hand, are delineated by strings of luminous pearls laid out in precise but elegant geometric patterns. The main thing about the entire complex, though, is that it looks lonely.

  Even before we had passed over Frasierville, radio operators at both Rain Forest Port and Chaney Field were trying desperately to solicit responses from me. Although their voices crackled with competitive purpose, I ignored them. By the time I was preparing

  to set down on Chaney Field's most far-flung and little-used landing strip, almost a kilometer from the terminal complex, they were hinting apologetically at my dismissal from Colonial Administration and threatening a preemptive laser bombardment—this last on the grounds that having no clearance to land, and adamantly refusing to explain our peculiar behavior, the pilot and passengers of BenDragon Prime were a potential menace to the safety of the personnel at Chaney Field.

  Moses, I knew, might well dismiss me from my post, but he would never authorize an attack on our Dragonfly—it contained the sacrosanct person of Elegy Cather, who was under his protection. The laser batteries surrounding the field would therefore remain poised but cold in their bunkers, and I could put us down on the polymac with almost certain impunity.

  That's what I did. Elegy joined me up front, bemusedly, and in less than three minutes we were witnessing the arrival of a contingent of armored lorries and security vans. Headlights roped us in with their crisscrossing beams, and a loudspeaker atop one of the vehicles conveyed the unnegotiable demand that we surrender ourselves.

  "This is Chaney Field," Elegy said, still bewildered. "Did you come out here because of the Asadi?"

  "You don't want me to try to get him a room at the hospital, do you?"

  "
If you'll remember, / didn't even want you to try to capture him. The one who may require hospitalization is Kretzoi. Isn't that a major reason we all came back?"

  The loudspeaker demanded again that we surrender ourselves.

  I activated our own outside speaker unit and informed the dutiful people holding us hostage that I was waiting for Moses Eisen. Although fully dark, it was still relatively early. Good. Moses wouldn't have to drag himself from his bed in order to confront us. . . . And within a matter of mere seconds, it seemed, a veldt-rover was speeding toward us from the terminal facility over the deserted runways.

  Moses leaped from the veldt-rover and strode into the overlapping circles of light just below the Dragonfly's cabin. Squinting, he gazed up at us.

  "I've brought an Asadi back with us," I told him over the outside speaker unit. "At the moment, he's unconscious. Tranq'd."

  "Everyone all right?" Moses shouted.

  Prepared for either a formal rebuke or an informal display of temper, I stared down speechlessly at my superior.

  "Is everyone all right?" he repeated.

  "Kretzoi's hurt," I told him. "He sustained cuts and lacerations to one arm while subduing our Asadi captive. He's fatigued, too— badly fatigued. Otherwise, we're fine, Elegy and I. Everyone's fine."

  "What made you land out here?" Moses shouted.

  "The Asadi," I offered tentatively. "I didn't think you'd appreciate my bringing it into Frasierville."

  "I don't much appreciate your bringing it out here, either. What are we supposed to do with it? You're in flagrant violation of Article Twelve of the GKR's, you know, and I'm less worried about the need to quarantine a native animal away from human population centers than I am about the breach of regulations." He cupped both hands around his eyes to cut the glare. "Do you mind if I come aboard?" he called. "I feel like I'm on criminal display out here."