Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  Once he had gone in. Elegy and I stayed well back from the clearing's eastern boundary. However, we chose a spot permitting us only a partially obstructed view into the very center of the assembly ground, where we believed Kretzoi would have to play out the greatest portion of his role as a second Eisen Zwei. I got my camera pointed through a narrow tunnel in the vegetation and rocked back on my heels waiting for the show to begin. Both Elegy and I hoped that Kretzoi's appearance among the Asadi would divert their attention from our ill-concealed presence nearby. Which, thank God, it unquestionably did.

  At first the milling Asadi seemed unaware that something unusual had happened. All I could see through the sight of my sleek tubular camera was their marching bodies, dusty manes, and bobbing snouts, for Kretzoi disappeared into their midst like a diver into dark water, and I feared that he would fail to resurface.

  "Where is he?" Elegy whispered, straining forward at my side, but in a moment she had her answer.

  Kretzoi was apparently plodding out a circuit contrary to those of the Asadi themselves. This circuit, along with the huri on his shoulder and the packet of thawing meat on his back, soon made the Asadi aware that someone unusual had just crashed their party. Almost as a single being, then, they withdrew from the middle of the field, leaving Kretzoi plainly visible* there. Soon, in fact, they lined the perimeters of the clearing.

  I aimed my camera into the heart of the assembly ground. Its whirring attracted no attention. The Asadi were too busy gaping at Kretzoi to mount charging displays on the alien technological artifact recording their behavior.

  Swaggering, employing a gait halfway between bipedalism and primate knuckle walking, Kretzoi entered the Center Ring and undid the buckle securing the meat to his left shoulder. Then he swung the packet free and set it on the ground.

  The sight of the meat emboldened the Asadi. They began edging inward toward it—but as soon as they did, Kretzoi hunkered down, removed the mock-huri from his shoulder, and set the rubber beastie atop the meat. For a moment he had to struggle to keep it from toppling over—but at last he got the huri to stand on its own, its claws buried like fork prongs in the deep-red flesh. Again the Asadi ebbed away.

  "You can smell their fear," Elegy whispered. "I swear, Ben, you can actually smell it."

  Kretzoi came knuckle walking uncertainly across the clearing toward us, looking less graceful and more chimpish than I had ever seen him. A moment later he was beside us in the Wild, having flushed a bevy of Asadi back into the clearing to avoid contact with him. The grease in his fur was already growing rancid; iv. fact, the "fear" Elegy smelled was emanating at least as much from Kretzoi as from the stunned Asadi.

  "We're going back for another piece of meat, Ben. Think you'll be all right while we're gone?'|

  "Fine. Just remember to have Kretzoi enter from the south next time." I cradled the unwieldy camera in my arms and prepared to find another position from which to shoot. "Hurry back."

  Off they went. The Wild closed around them like a great green mouth, and beneath braided yellow runners and the gravid pods of a tree called boawort I crept southward along the eastern perimeter of the clearing. Most of the Asadi remained crowded together about the edges of the assembly ground, very near me, quarreling with their eyes and sometimes cuffing one another. I moved so deliberately, to prevent my being discovered, that it took better than twenty minutes to navigate a distance I could have skipped in a tenth the time.

  I found a tree on the clearing's edge: a lattice-sail tree with well-spaced boughs for climbing and billowy, reticulate leaves for concealment. Securing my camera, I climbed to a vantage a good five meters above the ground. With luck I wouldn't have to move again, not even when Kretzoi and Elegy returned to the Dragonfly for a third packet of meat.

  And, yes, Kretzoi was even now reentering the clearing, shouldering aside the puzzled, frightened aliens near the southern end zone. I began filming, with no idea at all where Elegy might be. The Asadi ceased quarreling among themselves—to watch in nervous bafflement as Kretzoi staggered regally into the middle of their field, removed the package from his back, lowered it beside the first, and squatted to arrange the mock-huri astride both slabs together. That done, Kretzoi left the clearing again.

  A voice beside me whispered, "It's going well, isn't it?" "Lord, woman, what you doin'?" Elegy had climbed into the lattice-sail tree as I was filming, and the mild whirr of the camera, along with my own concentration on Kretzoi, had kept me from hearing her. I wrapped an arm around tlie bole separating us and stared keenly at her dark, grinning face. She gestured at the Asadi pushing and squirming beneath us.

  "We induced the appropriate behavior," she said. "Two 'teams'—north and south, even if they've run together a little— and utter milling confusion in both populations." "You let Kretzoi go back to the Dragonfly alone?" "He knows the way. Jaafar'll take care of him, Ben." "And you're going to keep me company up here?"

  "I think so," she whispered. "When Kretzoi gels back this time, he's going to stay. That's why we're liable to be up here for a while. If events unfold as they do in my father's monograph, we may have to sit patient and pretty a good five or six days."

  "Five or six days?"

  "Don't you remember?"

  "I remember. Elegy—I helped put that snakebit monograph together. But I'm not about to become a permanent tenant of a lattice-sail tree just so Egan Chaney's dubious version of history can repeat itself!"

  "Shhh," Elegy cautioned. "Maybe Kretzoi's acting will speed things up. I've told him to try to get everything done today— everything within reason, that is. Patience, Ben."

  Gazing down, I had the distinct impression that several Asadi had become aware of us. One or two lifted their muzzles and sniffed the wind; three of four others cocked their heads, listening intently—but none looked directly at us or threatened assault.

  Elegy and I fell silent. Eventually Kretzoi returned, entering the clearing from the west, a packet of meat on his back and two pieces of nylon rope looped about his neck. What he did then was exactly what Eisen Zwei, according to the witness of Elegy's father, had done more than six years ago: He lifted the mock-huri to his shoulder, laced lengths of rope through the slabs of meat on the ground, and pulled one slab into the southern end zone, leaving the huri to guard it, and the other slab into the northern end of the field, stepping aside here to act himself as guardian. The aliens clacked their teeth, tugged furiously at their manes, writhed their arms in wordless entreaty. Never had I seen them so agitated. Finally, mercifully, Kretzoi stepped back and made a strangling noise deep in his throat.

  At this signal the Asadi all about the clearing, some so far away from Elegy and me it was difficult to distinguish among individuals, sat down and watched Kretzoi hobble back toward the center of the assembly ground. The meat he had brought them occupied most of their attention, but they refrained from falling upon and devouring it.

  "He's got to fetch the huri before they'll do anything," Elegy whispered. "See, he's coming back this way."

  Indeed, Kretzoi walked the length of the clearing, paused at the offering in the southern half of the field, and bent to retrieve the huri. Once it was astride his shoulder, Kretzoi returned to the center of the clearing and lifted his broken-seeming wrists toward the midday sun. Every Asadi eye was upon him, as was the telephoto lens of my holocamera; the just-perceptible whirring of the film was amplified in my head a thousand times. That no one could hear it but Elegy and me seemed so unlikely that for a brief moment I stopped filming.

  "Don't stop," Elegy said fiercely. "This is one of the things we came for, Ben."

  I sighted and began filming again. Kretzoi's face was turned directly toward Denebola—he probably had his eyes closed. He made a sobbing noise more protracted and higher-pitched than his previous call; and, in immediate response, the Asadi broke from their places around the clearing and swarmed like great hairy insects toward the pair of offerings. Sheer, brazen, scrabbling bedlam. Even seated high abov
e the arena of the Asadi's gladitorial insanity, I was filled with fear, discomfited by the thought that at any moment they might espy us and drag us into the general melee. But I kept filming.

  "Incredible," Elegy said aloud. "Absolutely incredible."

  There was no reason for her to whisper. Each Asadi had but one thing in mind: the procuring of a bit of flesh and its swift, slashing ingestion. To this end, the Asadi tore at one another, kicked, butted heads, clawed, pulled fur, flashed their teeth—all without any accompanying sound but the thunderous grinding of tooth enamel, a vivid, ubiquitous panting, and the thudding of their feet.

  The carcasses Kretzoi had dragged into opposite ends of the clearing were gone in a bloody twinkling. Like piranhas, Chaney had written. Well, in six years, that hadn't changed. None of the Asadi was injured irreparably, it seemed, but many did drag themselves away with broken bones and severely gaping wounds.

  Kretzoi signaled a conclusion to the feast by sucking in his breath and calling his subjects to order. They obeyed readily. Even the injured turned their heads toward him. The victors, to whom had gone the spoils, sat back on their haunches and, wiping their muzzles with their hands, gave Kretzoi a keen and critical eye. Of all the milling Asadi, however, only a few had actually been fed.

  "A far cry from loaves and fishes," I told Elegy sotto voce. "Makes you wonder why they simply don't make Kretzoi their dessert."

  "No chance of that, Ben. Watch."

  "He going to eat the packet on his back? 'S what Eisen Zwei did, I know, but I swear Kretzoi hasn't got the appetite of that old man."

  "Shhh."

  Kretzoi did as the script of Chaney's monograph obliged him to do. He removed the third well-whittled carcass from his shoulders, placed it at his feet, and then sat down behind it to tear off ropy morsels. He ate slowly—but not, I felt sure, merely because Egan Chaney's script required him to: The heat and his own nervousness made it impossible for him to gulp the overample meal. He ate as he had to. And as he ate, the mock-huri clinging to his mane, the Asadi regarded Kretzoi with decorous, respectful envy. The noise of my camera suddenly seemed intrusive.

  "That's enough, Ben. A few of them seem to be tracking on the whirr. Save some film for later."

  I lowered the camera's barrel, swung it across my back on its leather sling.

  "Do you see what Kretzoi's eating, Ben?"

  "Meat—what else?"

  "It's Cy," Elegy whispered. "The carcass is small but it's almost entire. It's not a beef slab like the others."

  I swung the barrel of my camera around and sighted through the scope of its automatic enlarger. The meat Kretzoi was so soberly devouring was indeed the meat I had rendered that morning from

  Cy's corpse—darker in color than the beef, less sinewy, stranger. I returned the camera to my back and looked at Elegy.

  "I don't understand. This morning Kretzoi gave me the evil eye for ending that poor bugger's hopeless vegetable existence. Now he's cannibalizing the remains."

  "In Bojangles's stead," Elegy told me. "Can't you understand that?"

  "As if Cy were Kretzoi s meat-sibling? Is that what you mean?"

  "Exactly."

  My back and buttocks aching, I shifted nearer Elegy. "I still don't understand."

  "Listen, Ben, what Kretzoi's doing he does because I've asked him to. He knew he'd have to down the better part of a good-sized piece of meat as part of his impersonization of Eisen Zwei, but he wasn't entirely happy with the assignment."

  "He's fastidious."

  "He is, despite your tone. He's genuinely fastidious. In a way, Ben, you've inadvertently made his role in this charade easier for him—he's reaffirming his bond with Bojangles by eating the dressed-out carcass of Cy. He's not simply masquerading as an Asadi, he's not just playing a part—he's actively identifying with these creatures."

  "Which is fine. If it doesn't go too far."

  Elegy framed a contemptuous scowl, then looked back out into the clearing. Only her small, hard profile met my gaze. With the same noncommittal enduring patience as a coat rack holds coats, the lattice-sail tree held Elegy and me. For the next two hours— amazingly enough—we didn't exchange a single word. During this time Denebola moved into the western half of the sky and Kretzoi finished swallowing all but the gristle and bone of his adopted meat-sibling. Good-bye, Cy, good-bye. I was glad when the feast was over.

  Then: "Get your camera ready."

  I obeyed, and in the very next moment I was filming. Kretzoi lifted himself sluggishly from the ground and summoned the Asadi

  to attention by drawing a painful breath. Then he emptied the contents of his stomach in quick, sharp retches—like a slot machine paying out a series of jackpots. The artificial huri wobbled on his shoulder, but didn't fall. Afterward, dazed, Kretzoi stumbled away a few steps and collapsed into an exhausted crouch.

  "That's in the script," I said, "but is it deliberate? Kretzoi's several days ahead of schedule, isn't he?"'

  "He's doing his best to accomplish the entire program for us in a single day." Elegy's knuckles were white against the striated, blue-grey bark of the tree.

  "You think this is the beginning of the Ritual of Death and Designation?"

  "Looks like, Ben. Certainly looks like."

  I shifted again, leaning my back into a fan of boughs supporting an especially large reticulate sail, and arranged myself so that I could film without toppling headlong down.

  The Asadi, as they had done at Eisen Zwei's nauseating prompting six years ago, came fonvard from the clearing's sidelines, approached Kretzoi in something like homage, and began taking away tiny morsels of regurgitated matter. They did this one after another, in so orderly a fashion they seemed lobotomized or drugged. Several of the first Asadi to pass through the center of the clearing carried their prizes into the jungle, there to eat in relative privacy or to stow their loot where it might not be easily discovered.

  Meanwhile, the late-comers comported themselves admirably; they touched the moist place in the dust, then touched their fingers to their lips. Even though Kretzoi's huri could not fly. even though Kretzoi was different from them in subtle ways beyond the evident inability of his eyes to pinwheel polychromatically, the Asadi treated him with deference, even honor. Throughout the entire ceremony, in fact, he was continuously visible—no Asadi trespassed upon the little circle of ground he had staked out for himself, and none entreated him to contribute something more to the solemn festival of their homage.

  "Now," Elegy whispered, "Kretzoi must die."

  I ceased filming, glanced at her in surprise.

  "Figuratively," she emended. "Theatrically, if you like."

  Whereupon Kretzoi, savagely abridging the Ritual of Death and Designation, began wrestling with BoskVeld's sun. He rose out of his crouch to do battle with Denebola, and as his hands tore at the flaring corona of the sun, as if trying to pull the alien star into ragged filaments of taffy, the Asadi took note and retreated again to opposite ends of the field. From these vantages they watched the hand-to-hand combat between the sun that fed them and the chieftain who fed them, and I realized, for the first time, that the significance of the combat lay in the Asadi chieftain's presumptuous challenge to Denebola as his people's most important, most generous provider.

  It was a combat no mortal Asadi could ever hope to win, of course, and any chieftain who entered upon it was in fact surrendering his eyesight and his life to the greater power of the sun. First, blindness; then, death—the first a metaphor for the second, and the second an inevitable consequence of the former. Meat was a mere mortal's gift, whereas the gift of Denebola to the photosynthesizing Asadi was the energy innate in sunlight: the virtually immortal fuel of solar systems, of galaxies, of the living, binding plasma of the cosmos itself.

  This speculation by no means explained the Asadi to me, but it suffused their lives and their behavioral patterns with a towering significance I had never before recognized. I was suddenly elated. The contrast between the grubby
physical spectacle below us and the redeeming philosophical import of that spectacle roared through me in combers of insight and perception. Had something similar happened to Egan Chaney before his ultimate return to the Wild? Maybe. "I belong among the Asadi," he had written, "not as an outcast and not as a chieftain—but as one of the milling throng."

  Filming Kretzoi's reenactment of old E.Z.'s challenge to Denebola, I experienced the bewildering conviction that I, too, w£is a brother to the Asadi. Our fraternity was written not merely in

  the identical amino-acid sequence of our hemoglobin, but in the even more compelling miracle by which the cosmos had given us life and self-awareness. Chaney had defected to the Wild, I finally understood, for reasons essentially ontological and hence religious. Did Elegy understand that? Did she know that in seeking out her father we were knocking at a door that opened into other dimensions, other continua, other modes of knowledge?

  "Let's hope he's keeping his eyes closed," she whispered.

  "He's got 'em shut," 1 responded. "Kretzoi's not crazy."

  At last, his act almost concluded, Kretzoi covered his head with his arms and slumped to the ground. He rolled so that his eyes stared sightlessly into the eastern portion of the Wild, his limbs tucked inside the rigid curve of his body. The mock-huri was thrown to the ground by his fall. It looked dead. Old E.Z.'s huri had flown, and I think both Elegy and I feared the remainder of the Ritual would fail to unravel as it ought because ours couldn't fly.

  But the Asadi, bless 'em, gave the make-believe huri a wide berth; made no move either to examine it or to grab it up and hurl it into the forest. Instead, they suddenly began acting in concert to bring about a desired end.

  A pair of aliens from each group came to the center of the field and lifted Kretzoi like pallbearers hoisting a casket. In the meantime, other Asadi gathered foliage from the Wild with wliich to make a pallet. Soon, so rapidly had the Asadi worked, Kretzoi was lying on a pile of rubber-tree fronds, his arms folded on his breast and his head tilted back as if to receive a final ambiguous blessing from the sun.