Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  The cannibalism really didn't significantly improve the protein and fat content in the Asadi diet—it still doesn't—but it created an effective stabilizing factor in their population growth. It also reinforced the pattern of Twilight Dispersal by giving each adult Asadi a gruesome incentive to return at sunset to the Wild."

  Her hands slick with grease, Elegy gave me a long strip of fat and a section of bone with meat still clinging to it. "Take these to Kretzoi, Ben."

  I carried the offerings to the helicraft's door, spotted Kretzoi grooming himself beneath the tent awning, and tossed him both the ragged bone and the snaky, glistening rind. Kretzoi looked at me indifferently, then picked up the strip of fat as if it were a lei to be worn about his neck. I returned to the helicraft without waiting to see how he disposed of his meal.

  Elegy was still working, still talking to Jaafar.

  ". . . mothers learned it was more rewarding—both psychologically and nutritionally—to keep the sacrificial child alive as long as possible. To do this they had to expend energy and care; they had to search out, usually in full darkness, herbs and plants with which to heal and anesthetize the meat-sibling. The return in protein and fat wasn't large enough to justify so much labor. . . . Not unless you suppose, as I do, that Asadi mothers derive great satisfaction from caring for the Eaten One. For that matter, Asadi children, male as well as female, do, too. Those who are permitted to live are raised to cherish the meat-sibling, to eat of it only in the dark—and temperately, even then—and to nurture it at all other times. In four or five yccu-s, in fact, the meat-sibling becomes the possession and love object solely of the designated survivor—for the mother, by this time, passes out of her infertile lactation interval and becomes pregnant again. When this happens, she builds a new nest quite distant from the old one and begins a new family.

  "The designated survivor carries on as it has been taught. Until its mane is full, it remains both day and night with the Eaten One. Then it ventures by itself into the Asadi clearing and undergoes its initiation into the social life of its conspecifics. Indifferent

  Togetherness. And Indifferent Togetherness strengthens the new arrival's desire to flee back to its meat-sibling at sunset. In just this way, then, it surrenders its identity to a well-estabhshed pattern and becomes another lost marcher in the Procession of the Asadi Damned."

  With a long-handled, thick-bladed knife Elegy perforated one of the beef haunches and worked diligently to make the slits go all the way through the meat.

  "But the seeds of affection, of tenderness, of love," she said through gritted teeth, "have been sown among the Asadi, Jaafar, and if they can break out of their rut and survive another hundred thousand years or so—maybe much, much less—they may be able to redeem themselves from the fatiguing hell into which they've fallen.

  "Bojangles is evidence that—were we given the go-ahead to intervene—a delicate programming operation might be all that's necessary to put them right again. We could do it within a single Asadi generation. The only drawbacks to such a scheme I can see are that it violates GK regs and raises the possibility that the citizens of Frasierville and our colonists out on the veldts would have to share their planet with a species with a prior claim. And sometimes, Jaafar, human beings don't share very well."

  Elegy turned to me, her wrists bloody and her forearms a speckled burnt-umber color. "Could you get the straps out of that box, Ben? I want to fix this little package up right."

  From a box in the cargo section—a small teakwood trunk, really—I removed two wine-colored leather belts, one with a buckle, one with a cat-tongue overlap fastener of Velcro. At the butcher's table I threaded the belts through the slits Elegy had cut in the beef haunch. Jaafar was struggling to force the blade of his knife through another marbled slab, and his face, contorted by the effort, resembled that of a hired Levantine cutthroat. We had cut four packages of meat from the two beef haunches.

  Wiping her brow with her forearm. Elegy said, "Call Kretzoi in here, Ben."

  So, from the cargo section, I shouted, "Kretzoi, come in here! Hey, Kretzoi!" and Elegy and Jaafar looked at me as if I had just belched during an especially lovely section of Bach's Christmas Oratorio.

  But Kretzoi leaped into the Dragonfly and swaggered with a pronouncedly baboonish gait to our makeshift slaughterhouse.

  "Kretzoi," Elegy said, approaching him, "try this hunk of meat on. We may have to adjust the straps."

  Quite composedly, the primate rocked back on his hindquarters and made a series of hand signs.

  "I'll comb the 'mess' out, Kretzoi. You can't be your old fastidious self if you go through with this tomorrow, though. The mess goes with the job. That's just the way it is."

  Elegy hefted the slab of meat by a copper belt buckle and swung the whole package around so that it thudded softly against Kretzoi's back. She got his forelimbs through the straps and did a careful cinching job in front.

  "Stand up, Kretzoi. Stand up and walk. I want to see if that's going to be all right."

  Kretzoi stood. With his forelimbs—his arms, rather—bent provisionally before him like someone whose wrists have just been broken, he performed a gimpy minuet. Animal, I thought; only an animal. But Elegy, satisfied, asked him if he were reasonably comfortable. He signaled that he was.

  Jaafar and I took the slab off Kretzoi's back. I unfastened both belts and replaced the meat in the refrigeration locker. The cold air whirling out took my breath away. We cached the other three dressed-out pieces with the first and saved back several small strips of meat for our evening meal. Protein and animal fat.

  Thomas Benedict, carnivore.

  Jaafar and I went out to the edge of the drop point to check Cy again. Elegy remained with Kretzoi under the awning, soaping the

  "mess" out of his lovely red-gold fur and scraping away the tangled lather with a comb and a wire brush.

  Cy seemed to be stirring. The creature's truncated body hiccupped alarmingly; the eyes were no longer occluded by a film. Colors spun lazily inside his bottle-glass lenses—a spectral display reminiscent of a carousel whose operator can't decide whether to run it at three-quarters throttle or shut it completely down. Jaafar lifted his syringe and placed the needle on a vein standing visible in the sparse hair of Cy's throat.

  "Victim of love," he murmured, ready to drive the needle home.

  I caught his hand. A twitch of Cy's head had revealed something odd about the area around his brain stem. A small excavation, in fact. None of us had noticed it before. I gripped the creature's m£me and pushed his head all the way to the right, exposing the neat, almost homey hole.

  Through this, it was clear, Bojangles or his mother had withdrawn the medulla oblongata, the cerebellum, and other tasty portions of the neocortical grey matter. They had trephined Cy in order to get at the tempting sweet-breads of his brain.

  "They probably left him his reptilian brain," I said; "his primitive R-complex and a good deal of the neocortical frontal lobes. That's all he's operating on,-Jaafar. I doubt he's in pain. The twitches are nervous responses to the return of a low level of consciousness."

  "His eyes—" Jaafar began.

  "They left him Bojangles's area because they couldn't get at it. Or maybe because they knew he'd need it to protract this fetid death-in-life state of his. His spectral displays are ritualized patterns. I'd bet they emanate from some kind of roundabout hookup between his R-complex and Bojangles's area."

  Fiercely, Jaafar said, "Let him return, then, to the good, sweet dark," and he plunged the needle into the vein in Cy's neck.

  "We'd do better just killing him. His spectral display's a distress signal, more than likely—repeated, and repeated, and repeated again."

  "Pfyu!" Jaafar spat into the leaf cover at our feet; then he tossed the syringe into the Wild with a savage, underhand flip that slammed his hand into the bottom of Cy's nest and jammed one of his fingers. He put the finger into his mouth and, turning back toward the Dragonfly in a crouch, sucked at the sudd
en hurt.

  "I didn't expect," he said, speeiking only half intelligibly around his finger, "to discover such sick-making things about these creatures." Then, as if it were an old-fashioned thermometer, he shook his finger in the air. "When we get back, I swear to you I am going to pull a Pettijohn and see if they can't find me beautiful nightmares on the punishment worlds. It couldn't be worse than these . . . these eat-your-own-issue boonies! Oh, no; indeed not."

  I walked him back to the tent awning.

  Two hours later, at sunset, he ate his slices of solar-broiled beef with as fine an appetite as if he had never seen what he had seen. For that matter, so did I.

  CHAPTER HFTEEN

  Following the Script

  I woke during the night to realize that Elegy had left our awning tent and gone into the Dragonfly to share a bed with Jaafar. Although I could hear nothing but the wind in the forest, I knew they were in each other's arms. Would Jaafar call her "Civ Cather, my sweet Civ Cather" at the moment of climax? It seemed quite likely. I grinned in bitter amusement at the prospect.

  An hour before sunrise, I dressed, shook down the kinks in my bones, and strolled to the edge of the Wild. Cy lay comatose, or very nearly so, in his relocated nest. In solemn moonlight I cut his throat and lifted him out, as a person removes a new garment from its wrappings in a shallow box. A few of the creature's exposed intestines slipped free and dangled in the darkness like soft pendulums ticking off the minutes until dawn. I cut them loose and laid the carcass on the ground.

  It took my only fifteen or twenty minutes to clean the Asadi meat-sibling, to cut away the hide, the lights, the head. When I

  was finished, I cradled the denatured meat of his corpse in my arms and carried it back to the helicraft.

  Inside the Dragonfly I passed the sleeping couple's bunk and opened the refrigeration locker in the cargo section. As I was hanging the dressed-out carcass beside the other well-trimmed packages of meat. Elegy's head and shoulders rose from the anonymous contours of Jaafar's bedding.

  "Ben?" she whispered. "What're you doing?"

  "Showing mercy," I said in a normal speaking voice. "Showing mercy and demonstrating my practical side as well. This is the genuine article I'm stowing here. Elegy, the genuine article."

  Something about her silence suggested that she understood.

  "What about you?" I asked her. "What're you doing?"

  "Spiting you," she said aloud. 'There's really no other way to describe it, I'm afraid."

  "But why?"

  "For failing to believe in what we're doing. For failing to believe in my reconstructions of the Asadi past."

  That boggled me. Jaafar awoke and sat up in the bedclothes like a man revived from bitter death. He looked surprised but not particularly grateful.

  "Do you believe in them?" I asked Elegy.

  "In part."

  "It's not that I don't believe them," I said quickly, maybe cutting her off. "It's just that I've almost ceased to care. One day. Elegy, I'd like to know why humanity has such a hunger to disillusion itself."

  "My father's out here," Elegy responded, as if that explained everything.

  "Good morning, Jaafar," I said.

  "Good morning. Dr. Benedict," he managed coolly enough.

  I closed and bolted the refrigeration locker. Suddenly aware of the foul stickiness of my hands and forearms, I quickly washed up at the vacuum sink, toweled myself drj', and left the helicraft without another word.

  Outside, the first thing I saw was Kretzoi standing upright at the

  nest where Cy had Iain and peering down into it with his arms extended before him like man with two broken wrists. When he turned to look at me, his eyes reflected the waning moonlight and his posture suggested a helpless hostility. I dropped my gaze and ducked into the tent. Dawn was painfully slow to arrive.

  "Damn it, Krelzoi!" Elegy said sharply. "Hold still. We want to get there an hour after they do, exactly one hour, and you're not making this easy."

  Jaafar and I were attempting to position a chunk of meat on the primate's back, using the belt straps to secure it, and Kretzoi was twisting from side to side to see what we were doing. The meat was cold, its fat the consistency of candle wax. Kretzoi's nervous shruggings made the package slide in our hands and coat the fur on his back with sticky globules of grease.

  "What's the matter with you?" Elegy asked. "We did this yesterday in the helicraft, remember?"

  Kretzoi swung away from Jaafar and me so quickly that the meat slipped free of its straps and tumbled to the hard-packed dirt near our tent. Jaafar bent in groaning disgust to retrieve it, and in silent disgust rethreaded the greasy belts so that we could try yet again.

  "Kretzoi!" Elegy exclaimed.

  The primate made a series of sullen, sloppy signals with his hands.

  "What?" I asked. "What's his problem?"

  "He says you've got to get the package on his back so that he can undo it by himself. Otherwise, he says, we might as well stay home."

  "His problem," said Jaafar astutely, "is that he doesn't appreciate Dr. Benedict's having shown Bojangles's meat-sibling the ultimate mercy. Nor does he appreciate having Dr. Benedict's hands on him."

  Kretzoi confirmed this assessment with another abrupt but sloppy sign. Then he squatted so that Jaafar, who had finally got

  the meat strapped and reasonably well dusted off, could position it on his back. I stepped aside and stared intently through the Wild in the direction of the Asadi clearing. "Try to take it off," I heard Elegy tell Kretzoi, and out of the comer of my eye I saw the primate unbuckle the package and lower it gracefully to the ground with the exposed loop of the other belt. Then Jaafar, having again restrung the meat, lodged the package high on Kretzoi's shoulders while I reflected, altogether sardonically, that I was out of favor with an ape. . . .

  'Two other problems," I said.

  Elegy squinted at me in the coppery morning sunlight. At her throat and beneath her arms, sweat had already darkened the olive-green dapplings of her jumpsuit's camouflage. "What?" she asked me.

  "We need a huri," I said, finally looking at her.

  'That's one problem," she said. "What's the other?"

  'The other's this: Eisen Zwei appeared to an Asadi congregation that had been behaving strangely for almost a week prior to his arrival. They'd split into two 'teams'—that's what your father called them—hugging opposite ends of the clearing and carr)'ing on like so many possessed medieval orphans. Kretzoi's arrival among the Asadi may not have the same impact as Eisen Zwei's for the simple reason that conditions aren't the same now."

  Elegy was unperturbed by my reasoning. "Maybe Kretzoi's arrival will induce the appropriate behavior."

  TTie strange behavior existed prior to Eisen Zwei's coming," I insisted. "You're ignoring the principal terms of the equation."

  Elegy shrugged.

  Then what about the huri?" I asked her.

  "Jaafar," she said, glancing at the young man as he wiped his hands down his thighs to clean them of grease, "Jaafar, Ben wants to know about our huri. Would you get it, please?"

  Jaafar turned and leaped into the Dragonfly. A moment later he was back, carrying a laminated bag in which there appeared to be sleeping the embryo of a crumpled demon.

  "Substitutes for everything," said Elegy with broad self-

  mockery. "For Eisen Zwei, for prime cut of Asadi, and now for my daddy's infamous and maybe even apocryphal huri. Apocryphal, that is, if you listen to skeptics. I don't, I guess. I wouldn't be here if I did." She unsnapped the bag and withdrew the repellent black folds of the mysterious "embryo" inside it. Then she shook out the folds, pulled a small metal pin at the base of the rubbery pleats, and watched in evident satisfaction as air rushed in to inflate the thing. In a moment she was holding a huri on the palm of her hand, supporting it against her breasts as if it were a hungry demon child. "1 had this made in Frasierville," she told me. "Didn't take 'em too long. They did it from the plans I gave 'em the day after you le
ft the hangar to hole up in your private, dry-docked garbage scow."

  "Thanks," I said. "Just who did it for you?"

  "A pair of workers at the civki synthetics plant. Governor Eisen intervened for us again, you see." The artificial huri had serrated wings, henlike feet, and a face that was featureless except for the lip- or beak-resembling prominences surrounding its predatory mouth. "Puncture-proof, Ben, and the claws are made to grasp." She approached Kretzoi and affixed the mock-huri to his right shoulder, bending the vulcanized claws so that they clung tenaciously. "It won't fly, I'm afraid—but we'll have to live with that. My father's monograph indicates that in the clearing the huri seldom did anything but ride Eisen Zwei's shoulder or squat insentiently wherever it was placed."

  Kretzoi pulled his head as far to the left as he could, eyeing the litde hitchhiker with distaste. I didn't much blame him, either. Eventually, he assumed a baboonish sitting posture, shut his eyes, and tried to pretend that the thing enthroned on his shoulder didn't exist.

  "The Asadi 'teams' will take care of themselves once Kretzoi gets in there," Elegy assured me. "Wait and see. They probably simply consist of a number of Asadi mothers and several of their designated-survivor children. A daylight manifestation of the nest bond. Really, what so excites and flusters them is their anticipa-

  tion of a chance to eat meat in the clearing in broad daylight."

  "That still doesn't explain why some mothers go to one side, Elegy, and some to the other."

  She ignored this. ''Jaafar, we've got to get moving. Expect us back in about thirty minutes for a second piece of meat—or Kretzoi, anyway."

  Jaafar nodded obediently and climbed into the cockpit of the BenDragon Prime. Elegy and I helped each other secure our equipment, including our transceivers and one bulky but lightweight holocamera. Then Elegy chucked Kretzoi tenderly under the chin, reviving him to the business of the day, and the three of us set off together toward the Asadi clearing.

  Kretzoi entered from the east, only a little over an hour after the Asadi had gathered there that morning. We were very careful about both the time and the direction of his entry.