Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  "They didn't make a statue of me, Ben."

  "You stayed with The Bachelor. You didn't give 'em a chance to triangulate on you. What else can I say? I can't even pretend to understand everything we've encountered down here."

  We walked in silence beside the coruscating waters until, narrowing, they extended a snaky arm into a corridor bounded by neither a grid of dovecotes nor a wall of amethyst. The partitions here were ramparts of natural limestone, grey-green and wet-looking in the reflected sheen of the water. The Bachelor hugged the right-hand wall, and Elegy preceded me along this slender pathway.

  After a time, the lagoon—or, better, its armlike tributary—died in a tiny delta where so many diatoms and their snowflake skeletons had washed up that the glow was stark and uncanny. Beyond this delta, straight ahead of us, was what appeared to be another guano compound. But immediately before it, partially blocking the opening, stood a biosonically engineered sculpture that grabbed our attention by stilling our hearts. The statue's subject was a human being.

  "That's my father," Elegy whispered.

  I recognized it as Egan Chaney, too, although in retrospect I'm not sure how. Like the huri's recent sculpture of me, this one lacked individualizing detail. The body appeared clothed, but the drape of the clothing was merely suggested. The face had features, but the bioluminescence of the waste matter comprising the statue blurred and obscured them.

  Maybe it was the set of the bearded jaw or the martial rigidity of the posture that identified the statue for us. Or maybe it was our knowledge that it couldn't be anyone but Egan Chaney.

  A trail of diatoms and murky algal weeds to the base of the statue told us that lunar tides regularly moved the lagoon waters down here—without ever pulling them close enough to erode the statue itself.

  Elegy ran to the thing and shoved it in the chest. As if it had been made at least partially of carbonized sugar, it crumbled and broke apart, its torso and arms cascading down in a cinder storm. This dismemberment accomplished, Elegy kicked at the upright stumps of the statue's legs. They, too, shattered and went whirling across the floor.

  Unmoved by Elegy's violent display. The Bachelor stood to one side, his back still against the right-hand rampart of limestone. The huri, too, appeared indifferent, almost comatose atop The Bachelor's head.

  Elegy threw back her head and breathed an audible sigh of relief. "I was afraid," she began, "that it might literally be my father—his corpse, you know, plastered over with huri crap." She raised her head and swung a foot across the debris. "It wasn't, though. You can see it wasn't. Not unless they crystallized his remains."

  "He's in there. Elegy." I nodded toward the compound. "That's why they brought us this far—not to show us another biosonic sculpture."

  Queasy and frightened, I entered the little compound ahead of Elegy and found that it was not another guano dump at all. Instead, it was both a crypt and an incubator. In its center . . . well, my first impression was of a mummy canted from the floor at a forty-five-degree angle in a macrame hammock of glistening silk.

  I stared at the thing. "Your father. Elegy—not that other, but this." She was at my shoulder. We both stared.

  A great fan of milky silk filled the chamber, gendy cradling Egan Chaney's chrysalis. The threads at the top of the fan disappeared into, or fused molecularly with, the amethyst wall at the rear of the chamber; the threads converging below the chrysalis's feet ran tautly into a pit of dark but glittering water that may well have fed the lagoon behind us. Water or some more

  syrupy fluid oozed down the wall behind the chrysalis, disappearing noiselessly into the gravelike pit above which the hammock was suspended. Guy lines of silk—they resembled wings— supported the body on either side, running to left and right of the hammock and seeming almost to pass directly through the natural limestone of the compound. Meanwhile, beads of viscous water trembled in procession down the lines to the chrysalis's head and body.

  "We've got to get him down, Ben!" Elegy broke free of me and ducked beneath the webbing to the left of the pit. She looked like a shuttle weaving among a fan of milky threads. When she had finally reached her father's head, she took a knife from her belt and leaned purposefully out over the hammock.

  "You're liable to kill him!" I cried. "That's been his life-support system for God knows how long!"

  Elegy's face was acrawl with reflections from the water. "He's as good as dead now, Ben. For whom or what is he living?" She began cutting at one of the support lines raying upward to the chamber's rear wall.

  She wasn't thinking straight. If she did manage to cut her father loose, his chrysalis would plunge into the pit beneath him.

  At this point The Bachelor's huri arrowed past me into the chamber and alighted on Elegy's father without stirring a single thread. Then it opened its wings and worked its beak in warning, frightening Elegy badly enough that she crouched back out of the creature's way. The Bachelor himself loitered nervously near the entrance to the compound.

  "I want you to help me, Ben," said Elegy quietly, her eyes fixed on the huri as if it were a cobra preparing to strike.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  She beckoned with her knife hand.

  Thinking it might be best to engage the huri on two fronts, I eased myself into the fan of silk on the right side of the pit and wove my way inward until I was crouching opposite Elegy. The huri turned to face me, turned back to keep Elegy in view, and set

  the entire hammock quivering in its lacework harness. The shrill piping noises the huri was now making were all too audible, brief but ear-splitting bursts of sound.

  "Suppose the little bastard calls in reinforcements?" I asked Elegy in an even voice.

  "That's something we're just going to have to chance. . . . I'm, going to cut my father free of this, Ben—I'm going to midwife his resurrection."

  Elegy thrust the knife viciously forward, nearly skewering the huri. It skittered up Egan Chaney's chest to his head, and Elegy lunged at it again, pulling back just in time to keep from falling. The huri flapped once and wove a miraculous zigzag to the top of the rear wall, where it sat facing inward, piping its fainter and fainter protests but recording our every move with pulses in the steep ultrasonic.

  I stood, leaned forward, and steadied Egan Chaney's chrysalis. Elegy canted her knife blade and began digging at the cerements around her father's hips and bound hands. The silk—the extruded huri cable—comprising these wrappings was exceptionally tough; Elegy had to struggle to make a clean cut without plunging the knife into the body itself. At last, though, she made a neat incision and began peeling away the fiber around her father's right hand— not, oddly, in unending strings, but in scablike clumps that she lifted away easily and then dropped into the pit.

  Beneath these silken scales was a thin bluish membrane, like a birth caul. Almost at once Elegy began scraping at the exposed membrane on the back of her father's hand. When a piece about two centimeters square bunched up in front of her knife blade, both she and I realized the membrane had either replaced her father's human skin or interpenetrated it to such a depth that the two were virtually indistinguishable. Black blood oozed from the scraped area, in which veins were now visible.

  "It's impossible," Elegy said between her teeth, lifting her knife away. 'They've fixed it so we can't unwrap him, they've fixed it so—"

  Her voice broke, and with grimacing fury she flipped the knife into the pit. I worked my way around the foot of the tilted chrysalis to join her on the other side.

  As I did, the huri dropped from the wall and balanced itself on Chaney's head. Soon it was peeling back scales of silk with its claws and transferring these to its ugly, scissoring mouth.

  Elegy, seeing, started to shoo the creature away, but I restrained her, and in a few minutes the huri had uncovered her father's face. All that yet clung to his features was the bluish undercaul. We could see the man's nose, his stony beard, the sockets of his eyes. The huri tore a hole in the membrane where Chaney
's mouth was supposed to be and put its beak to the hole. It flapped to keep from falling.

  "Ben, goddamn you, let me go!" Elegy tried to wrench free, but I held her even more tightly. Our struggle swayed the cables around us. When she finally did escape me, the huri had returned to the top of the wall and her father was gargling a dark, syrupy liquid.

  Obligated by the fear that Chaney would strangle, I brushed past her, got caught in the huri web, tore at it, then ducked beneath the clinging strands and pulled the hammock far enough over that the fluid in Chaney's mouth was able to spill into the pit. Digging with my forefinger at the viscious substance in his mouth, I held the hammock in this position until my shoulders ached and Chaney seemed to be completely drained.

  This took several minutes, but Elegy joined me before I was finished and eased a little of the burden. Soon Chaney was breathing audibly, sucking the pale blue undercaul into his nostrils and then billowing it out again. With a fingernail I made a pair of gimlet holes in this membrane—Chaney's breathing grew regular, so systematic and sane that I half believed he had only been dozing in a peculiar sort of sleeping bag. I let go of the hammock and painfully straightened up.

  Stunned by the sound of Chaney's breathing, we waited a long time. The Bachelor deserted us altogether, leaving his huri as

  sentinel atop the wall. We didn't miss him because we had other things on our mind.

  "Go ahead," I urged Elegy. "Talk to him."

  She crouched beside the chrysalis again and reached out to touch it with her right hand. "Father," she said, "it's Elegy. It's your daughter—I've come all this way to find you."

  There was a brief hitch in Chancy's breathing, then the same, even, miraculous rhythm as before. After glancing bemusedly at me, Elegy tried again, repeating her name several times and assuring the transfigured man that she was actually beside him. Nothing. If Chancy was alive, he seemed alive beyond reach.

  "Do you think he can hear?" Elegy asked me. "Maybe the caul's a hindrance, maybe that syrup's gumming up his inner ears."

  "He's already heard you. Elegy."

  "But he's not responding. He might as well be dead." She dropped her arm, pivoted toward me on the balls of her feet. Then her eyes flared and she exclaimed, "Like hell!

  "/'m the problem, Ben. I'm too far removed from him in time and even in emotional attachment to establish my reality. He's in a subterranean vault beneath an Asadi temple on BoskVeld, and the daughter whom he last saw eleven years ago in a South American rain forest is trying desperately to kiss him awake." She slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand, not for emphasis but to rebuke herself for what she considered her stupidity. "At best, he's got to think me a dream, a disembodied voice without a single referent in the long dream of his adult life—before the Asadi did this to him."

  "You think I'll fare better than you have?"

  'Try, Ben. You were his only friend in Frasierville—in the Third Expedition's base camp, I mean. His last memories of human contact have to include you prominently. So, yes, you've got to give it a try."

  Elegy and I exchanged places. As she had done before me, I extended a hand and touched Egan Chancy's shoulder. Then, not believing in my power to resurrect Chancy where Elegy had

  already failed, I said, "Egan, this is Thomas Benedict. I'm here with you beneath the Asadi temple."

  Again, the telhale hitch in the transfigured man's breathing, a movement of the mouth. But no other response.

  I repeated my name. I told Chaney what had happened to him in the Wild six years ago. I rehearsed for him" the story of his disappearance from base camp. I narrated a little of Frasierville's recent history. I informed him that his daughter had indeed come all the way to BoskVeld from Dar es Salaam just to find him. I said that she was beside me at this moment. Then I repeated my stupid self-introduction and began the history lesson all over again—

  Whereupon the man in the silken chrysalis murmured, "Ben," One word. Like his own body, it had an alien husk on it, this word, and it trembled in the air.

  I leaned toward him. "Yes, it's Ben. You've been gone from us a long time. Do you remember where you are?"

  Elegy's hands gripped my shoulders from behind, and I glanced up to see her scrutinizing the chrysalis's inhuman head for some evidence of the beloved face she recalled from her girlhood. But time, distance, and a terrible metamorphosis had interposed many veils between that face and the face before her now, and she seemed to be having trouble making the connection.

  "Do you remember where you are?" I repeated.

  We waited. Finally, the thing that had been Egan Chaney murmured another word, one cryptic word: "Halfway."

  "Halfway?" I echoed him inanely. 'Tell us what you mean, Egan."

  "And I'll never," he confessed, almost before I had finished speaking. "Get. The remainder. Of the way."

  At my ear Elegy whispered, "He's talking about his physiological condition. He's trying to say that his alien metamorphosis hasn't taken. He's halfway between his humanity and some other state."

  I took Elegy's cue: "Egan, who did this to you? What were they trying to do? What went wrong?"

  "You're going too fast," Elegy admonished me.

  But Chaney's mind processed the questions in order, and his lips shaped the answers: "The huri did this. Through The Bachelor. They wanted to make"—Chaney's tongue, black in his mouth, licked at the tatters of caul surrounding it—"an Ur'sadi. Of me," he finally managed. "They wanted. To redeem the Asadi. Through a return to their past." Another long pause, "fvly metamorphosis. Into one of their ancestors. Was supposed. To do the trick. Everything. Went wrong."

  "It was The Bachelor who strung you up like this?"

  The black tip of Chaney's tongue protruded briefly, like a lizard's head emerging from a hole. "Paralysis. Came first. The huri did that. They—"

  "They did something to the psychomotor areas of your brain," I said, attempting to aid him. "They jammed those areas with ultrasonic pulses."

  "But they didn't. Steal my consciousness." His tongue made a leisurely circuit around his mouth, then disappeared again. "How long. Has it been." There was no note of interrogation in the words.

  "Six years," I told him again.

  "Forever," his voice corrected me. "Gestating forever. They won't. Let me abort."

  Suddenly I was crying. The tears flowed copiously, and I let them come. "After the paralysis," I said, "you were bound and strung up?"

  "It took. Forever. I was done. In stages. My face. Went last. But always." The inevitable pause, lengthening painfully until he managed in one burst: "But always I knew."

  This final word was Chaney's first to convey the weight of any real inflection or emphasis, and its effect on Elegy was immediate. "We've got to get him out of this shithole!" she exclaimed, digging her fingers into my collar bones. "We've got to cut him do^vTl and carry him out!"

  The man in the chrysalis murmured, "Who."

  "Your daughter, Egan. I've told you about her already. She came all this way to find you."

  "Here."

  I wiped my eyes, then tilted my head back to look at Elegy. It took us both a moment to realize that that single word was a question.

  "Yes, I'm here," Elegy said quietly.

  "Wrong sound," the voice from Chaney's mouth contradicted her. "It's a fever. That gives you. The lie." And, a moment later: "My body's. Burning. From inside out."

  "You're not delirious," Elegy insisted, close to either anger or a crippling pathos. "I'm a grown woman. I've come a long, long road, and I'm standing here beside you. Father."

  The black tongue tip made its customary journey around Chaney's mouth. "I'm stranded. Halfway. They detected in me. Intelligence. Like that of their Ur'sadi symbionts. Who brought them here." The man seemed to be warming up, gaining fluency. 'They also liked my blood. Found it compatible to their needs. But later it was somehow. Wrong. I'm not sure how. Too much like that of the protohominids. From whom we evolved."

  Elegy seemed to be wai
ting for him to return to the subject of her presence, but Chancy had either forgotten the matter or else deliberately set it aside.

  "Who told you these things?" I asked. "How do you know them?"

  "The huri. I hear. In the ultrasonic registers. That happened early. Afterward they schooled me. In the semantic distinctions. Among the various pulses. I can hear and interpret. At all meaningful frequencies. Beyond a single megacycle. It's a language. I couldn't hear before."

  "Do the huri communicate ultrasonically with the Asadi?"

  Chaney's voice was definitely shedding its huskiness, as if the activity of speaking aloud were loosening his vocal cords. "Not so well as they used to. With their Ur'sadi ancestors. Each of the

  ultrasonic pulses. Corresponds to a color. If you can interpret huri. You can also interpret. The Ur'sadi spectral language."

  Vaguely chagrined that I kept grilling him even as the horror of his transfiguration drew my slinging tears, I asked, "The eye-books, Egan? What about them?"

  "Eyebooks," Chancy acknowledged. "If I could see one. I could read it. The colors are all. In my head. The huri put them there. But I'm halfway, Ben, and I'm stranded."

  "What went wrong?" Elegy suddenly asked. "What exactly?"

  "It's the fever giving you the lie," her father responded enigmatically. "I'm neither fish nor fowl. No huri savior. The huri have intelligence. Only in the aggregate. It's taken them forever. To understand I'm not their savior. Nor are any of us." Chancy licked his lips. "Being what we are." Then, with a moan, he fell back into himself.

  "Father!" Elegy cried, not in desperation but in an attempt to recall him to the present.

  I spoke Chancy's Christian name a couple of times, but finally decided he was recycling emotionally and physically. In much the way that I had let the huri's viscous, metabolic antifreeze spill from his mouth, our brief colloquy with Chancy had also drained him. And so, for the moment, we let Elegy's father go. . . .

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Parturition

  That was not a time of clear thinking for me. We had found Egan Chaney alive, but changed and apparently unrecoverable. The huri had attempted to transform him in the vain, perhaps even idiot, hope of recreating a specimen of the Asadi's ancient forebears, with whom, eons in the past, they had come to BoskVeld as symbiotic fellow travelers. In fact, the superorganism that the huri comprised may have been the motivating force behind that interstellar migration. They were manipulators and parasites, tiny slavemasters who fed on their chattels' bodies and minds. The Ur'sadi had been exemplars of intelligence, but the huri super-organism had used the individuals of that departed hominoid race as a Komm-galen uses the instruments of his surgery—as physical extensions of the will. Just such extensions of an external will had been the Ur'sadi in the motivational grip of the huri—except that