Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  Today this changed. An hour before the fall of dusk, the old man staggered into the clearing under the burden of something damnably heavy. I was aware of the commotion at once. Like last time, every one of the Asadi fled to the edge of the jungle. I observed from my lean-to. My heart, dear Ben, thumped like a toad in a jar. The huri on the old man's shoulder scarcely moved;

  it appeared bloated and insentient, a rubber doll. During the whole of the old man's visit it remained in this virtually comatose state, upright but unmoving. Meanwhile, the aged Asadi—whom I've begun to regard as some sort of aloof and mysterious chieftain—paused in the center of the clearing, looked about, and then struggled to remove the burden from his back. It was slung over his shoulders by means of two narrow straps.

  Straps, Eisen: S-T-R-A-P-S. Made of vines.

  Can you understand how I felt? Nor did the nature of the old man's burden cause my wonder to fade. He was lowering to the ground the rich, brownish-red carcass of an animal. The meat glistened with the failing light of Denebola and its own internal vibrancy. The meat had been dressed, Eisen, and the old man was bringing it to the Asadi clearing as an offering to his people.

  He set the carcass on the dusty assembly floor and withdrew the straps from the incisions he'd made in the meat. Then, his hands and shoulders bloodstained, he stepped back five or six steps.

  Slowly, a few of the adult males began to stalk into the clearing. They approached the old man's offering with diffident steps, like thieves in darkened rooms. Their eyes were furiously changing colors. All but those of the old man himself. I could see him standing away from the meat, and his eyes—like unpainted china saucers—were the color of dull clay. They didn't alter even when several of the Asadi males fell upon the meat and began ripping away beautifully veined hunks. Then more and more of the Asadi males descended upon the carcass, and all about the fringes of the clearing the females and the young made tentative movements to claim their shares. I had to leave my lean-to to see what was going on. Ultimately, I couldn't see anything but bodies and manes and animated discord.

  Before most of the Asadi were aware, Denebola set.

  Awareness grew, beginning with the females and the young on the edges of the clearing and then burning inward like a grass fire. A few individuals flashed into the Wild. Others followed. Eventually, in a matter of only seconds, even the males contesting

  for the meat raised their bloody snouts and scented their predicament. In response, they bounded toward the trees, disappearing in innumerable directions, glimmering away like the dying light itself.

  And here is the strange part, the truly stranger part. The old man didn't follow his people back into the Synesthesia Wild, //e'5 sitting out there in the clearing right now!

  When all of the Asadi had fled, he found the precise spot where he'd placed his offering, hunkered down, lowered his buttocks, crossed his legs, and assumed sole ownership of that sacred piece of stained ground. The moons of Bosk Veld throw his shadow in three different directions, and the huri on his shoulder has begun to move a little. This is the first night since I came out here that I haven't been alone, base-camp buggers, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all. ...

  Personal Involvement: The Bachelor

  From the private journals of Egan Chaney: My meeting of the The Bachelor, as I called him almost from the beginning, represented an unprecedented breakthrough. It came on my 29th day in the field—although, actually, I had noticed him for the first time three days prior to his resolute approach and shy touching of my face. As far removed from a threat as a woman's kiss, that touch frightened me more than the first appearance of the old chieftain, more than the nightmare shape of the huri, more even than the chaos of rending and eating that followed the old man's gift of the flame-bright carcass. I'd been alone for weeks. Now, without much preamble, one of the Asadi had chosen to acknowledge my presence by ... by touching me!

  I must back up a bit—to the night the Asadi chieftain, against all custom, stayed in the clearing. My first realization that he intended to stay was a moment of minor terror, I'll confess, but the implications of his remaining overrode my fear. Wakeful and

  attentive, I sat up to study his every movement and to record whatever seemed significant.

  The old man didn't move. The huri grew restive as the night progressed, but it didn't leave the old man's shoulder. To be painfully brief, they stayed in the clearing all that night and all the following day, sitting on the stained ground, guarding the spot. Then, when twilight fell on that second day, they departed with all the rest.

  I despaired. How many days would I have to suffer through before something else unusual occurred?

  Not long, apparently. On my 26th day on the clearing's edge I saw The Bachelor. If I'd ever seen him before, I'd certainly never paid him any real attention, for The Bachelor was a completely unprepossessing specimen whom I judged to be three or four years beyond Asadi adolescence.

  Grey-fleshed and gaunt, he had a patchy silver-blue mane of so little length the others must surely consider him a virtual outcast. In fact, in all the time I knew him he never once took part in either coitus or the ritualized staring matches of the full-maned Asadi. When I first felt his eyes upon me. The Bachelor was on my imaginary twenty-yard line looking toward my lean-to from a pocket of his ceaselessly moving brethren. He had chosen me to stare at. That he didn't receive a cuffing for violating the one heretofore inviolable Asadi taboo confirmed for me the negligibility of his tribal status. It was he and I who were brethren, not he and the other Asadi.

  In one extremely salient particular The Bachelor didn't resemble the vast majority of Asadi at all: his eyes. These were exactly like the old man's—translucent but empty, enameled but colorless, fired in the oven of his mother's womb but as brittle-seeming as sun-baked clay. Never did The Bachelor's eyes flash through the rainbow spectrum as did the prismatic eyes of his conspecifics. They were always clayey and cold, a shade or two lighter than his flesh.

  And it was with these eyes, on my 26th day in the field, that The

  Bachelor took my measure. The noonday heat held us in a shimmering mirage, our gazes enigmatically locked.

  "Don't just stand there making google faces," I shouted, beckoning at him. "Come over here where we can talk."

  My voice had little effect on either The Bachelor or the teeming Asadi. Although a movement of the head indicated that he had heard my invitation. The Bachelor regarded me with no more, and no less, interest than before. Of course, he couldn't "talk" with me. My eyes don't have even the limited virtuosity of traffic lights, and since The Bachelor's never changed colors, he couldn't even "talk" with his own kind. He was, for all intents and purposes, a mute.

  When I called out to him, though, I believed his dead, grey eyes indicated a complete lack of intelligence. It didn't then occur to me that they might signal a physical handicap, just as dumbness in human beings may be the result of diseased or paralyzed vocfd cords. . . .

  "Come on over here," I urged him again.

  The Bachelor, still staring, didn't approach. He stared at me for the remainder of the afternoon. I tried to occupy myself with note-taking, then with a lunch of some of the rations Benedict had dropped, and finally with cursory observations of other Asadi. Anything to avoid that implacable gaze. It was almost a relief when dusk fell.

  But that evening my excitement grew as I realized that something truly monumental had happened: / had been acknowl-

  The next day The Bachelor paid me little heed. He wandered forlornly in and out of the slow, aimless files of his aimless kindred, and I was sorely disappointed he didn't demonstrate the same interest in me that he had the day before.

  On the 28th day he resumed his shameless staring. I was gratified, too, even though he now pursued a strategy different from that of the previous day: He moved tirelessly about the clearing, weaving in and out of the clusters of Asadi, but always

  staying close enough to the western sideline to be able to see me
. His eyes remained as dead as the insides of two oyster shells. I was fighting stomach cramps and bouts of diarrhea, and by late afternoon his stare had grown annoying again.

  I felt better the following morning, my 29th day. The light from glowering Denebola seemed softer, the tropical heat less debilitating. I left my lean-to and went out on the assembly ground.

  Bathed in the pastel emptiness of dawn, the Asadi came flying through the lianas and fronds of the Synesthesia Wild to begin another day of Indifferent Togetherness. Soon I was surrounded. Surrounded but ignored. Great ugly heads with silver, or blue, or clay-white, or tawny manes bobbed around me, graceless and unsynchronized.

  At last I found The Bachelor.

  Undoubtedly, he had had me in his sight all that morning—but, mof/ing with circumspection among his fellows, he had not permitted me to see him. And I had fretted over his apparent absence.

  Then Denebola was directly overhead. Our shadows were small dark pools around our feet, like fallen trousers. The Bachelor threaded his way through a dissolving clump of bodies and stopped not five meters from me, atremble with his own daring. I, too, trembled. Would The Bachelor fall upon and devour me as the Asadi males had fallen upon and devoured the old chieftain's gift of meat?

  Instead, The Bachelor steeled himself to the task he had set and began his approach. My shadow wrinkled a little under my feet. The grey head, the patchy silver-blue mane, the twin carapaces of his eyes—all moved toward me. Then the long grey arm rose toward my face and the perfectly humanoid hand touched the depression under my bottom lip, touched the most recent of my shaving cuts, touched me without clumsiness or malice.

  And I winced.

  A Running Chronology: Weeks Pass

  From the professional notebooks ofEgan Chancy: Day 29: After this unusual one-to-one contact with the Asadi (hereinafter referred to as The Bachelor), I did my best to find some method of meaningful communication. Words failed. So did signs in the dirt. Hand signals attracted and held his attention, but I have no training in the systematic use of American Sign Language or any of its several variants and so eventually gave this method up, too. I don't really believe it's a likely solution to our communication problems.

  Nevertheless, The Bachelor couldn't be dissuaded from following me about. On one occasion, when I left the clearing for lunch, he very nearly followed me into my lean-to. I was almost surprised when at dusk he left with the others, he had been so doggedly faithful all day. Despite this desertion, I'm excited about my work again. Tomorrow seems a hundred years off. . . .

  Day 35: Nothing. The Bachelor continues to follow me around, never any more than eight or nine paces away. His devotion is such that I can't take a pee without his standing guard at my back. He must think he's found an ally against the indifference of the others, who blithely ignore us. I've begun to weary of his attentions.

  Day 40: I'm ill again. The medicine Benedict dropped during an earlier bout of diarrhea is almost gone. It's raining. As.I write this, lying on my pallet in my lean-to, the odor of the Asadi's morose, grey dampness assaults me like a poison, intensifying my nausea. In and out they go, back and forth. . . .

  I have formulated the interesting notion that their entire way of life, in which I've had to struggle to see even one or two significant patterns, is itself the one significant and ongoing ritual of their

  species. Formerly, I had been looking for several minor rituals to help me explain this people. It may be that they are the ritual. As the poet said, "How tell the dancer from the dance?" But having formulated this new and brilliant hypothesis about the Asadi, I'm still left with the question. What is the significance of the ritual the Asadi themselves are? An existential query, of course.

  The Bachelor sits cross-legged in the dripping, steam-silvered foliage about five meters from my lean-to. His mane clings to his skull and shoulders like so many tufts of matted, cottony mold. Even though he's been dogging my footsteps for eleven days now, I can't get him to enter my shelter. He always sits outside and stares at me from beneath an umbrella of leaves. Even when it's raining. His reluctance to come under a manufactured roof may be significant. If only I could make the same sort of breakthrough with two or three others I've made with The Bachelor.

  Day 50: After the Asadi fled into the jungle last night, I trudged toward the supply pickup point where Benedict leaves my rations and medicine each week. The doses of Placenol I've been giving myself lately, shooting up the stuff like a junkie, have gotten bigger and bigger—but Eisen, at the outset of this farcical expedition, assured me that P-nol, in any quantity, is absolutely nonaddictive. What amazes me beyond this sufficiently amazing attribute of the drug, though, is the fact that Benedict's been dropping more and more of it each week, providing me with a supply almost exactly in tune with my increasing consumption.

  Or do I use more because he drops more?

  No, of course not. Everything goes into a computer at base camp. A program they ran weeks ago probably predicted this completely predictable upsurge in my "emotional" dependency on P-nol. At any rate, I'm feeling better; I've begun to function again.

  Trudging toward the pickup point, I felt a haunting uneasiness seeping into me from the fluid shadows of the rainthom trees. I heard noises. The noises persisted all the way to the drop point: faint, unidentifiable, and frightening. I believe, however, that The

  Bachelor lurked somewhere beyond the wide leaves and trailing vines where those noises originated. Once, in fact, I think I saw his dull eyes reflect a little of the sheen of the evening's first moon. I don't know.

  A typed note on the supply bundle: "Look, Dr. Chaney, you don't have to insist on 100% nonassociation with us base campers. You've been gone almost two months. Let us drop you a radio. A little conversation with genuine human beings won't destroy your precious ethnography, sir. You can use it in the evenings. If you want it, send up a flare tomorrow night before Balthazar has risen and I'll copter it out the next day."

  The note was signed by Benedict. But of course I don't want a radio. Part of this business is the suffering. I knew that before I came out here. I won't quit until things have begun to make a litde sense.

  Day 57 (Predawn): I haven't been asleep all night. Yesterday, just six or seven hours ago, I went into the jungle to retrieve Benedict's eighth supply drop. Another typed note on the bundle: "Dr. Chaney, Eisen says you're a pigheaded ninny. That you don't even know how to conjugate your own first name. It should have been Ego, he says, and not Egan. Have you started preaching neo-Pentecostal sermons to the trees? What a picture. Send up a flare if you want anything. Ben."

  On the way back to the clearing I heard noises again. The Synesthesia Wild echoed with the plunging greyness of an indistinct form—The Bachelor, spying on me, retreating clumsily before my pursuit. Even with a backpack of new supplies weighing me down, I determined to follow these suspicious tickings of leaf and twig. Although I never overtook my prey, I was able to keep up! It had to be The Bachelor. None of his fellows would have given me so much as a glimpse of the disturbed foliage in the wake of their disappearance. I went deeper and deeper into the Wild, farther away from the supply drop and the assembly ground. Two hours. Three.

  At last, panting with the sheer momentum of my pursuit, I broke

  into an opening among the trees. All at once I realized that the noises drawing me on had ceased. I was alone, and lost, and confused.

  Filling the clearing, rising against the sky like an Oriented pagoda, there loomed over me the broad and impervious mass of something built. The resonances of Time dwarfed me. Thunderstruck, I felt panic climbing hand over hand up the membranous ladder in my throat. Oliver Oliphant Frasier had studied the ruins of one of these structures, learning only that the Asadi may once have had a civilization of some consequence. I was staring at a huge, intact relic of that civilization. Amethyst windows. Stone carvings above the entablature. A dome. A series of successively smaller roofs as the eye went up the face of the structure. At last I turned, plu
nged back into the jungle, and raced wildly away, my backpack thumping.

  Where was I going? Back to the assembly ground, I hoped. Which way to run? I didn't know, but I didn't have to answer this question. Blindly, I moved in the direction of the suspicious tickings of leaf and twig that had resumed shortly after I fled the pagoda. The Bachelor again? I don't know. I saw nothing. But in three hours' time I had regained the safety of my lean-to. . . . Now I'm waiting for the dawn, for the tidal influx of Asadi. I'm exhilarated, and I haven't even touched my new supply of P-nol.

  Day 57 (Evening): They're gone again. But I've witnessed something important and unsettling. The Bachelor didn't arrive this morning with the others. Could he have injured himself in our midnight chase through the Wild? By noon I was both exhausted and puzzled—exhausted by my search for him and my lack of sleep, puzzled by his apparent defection. I came to my lean-to and lay down. In a little while I was sleeping, though not soundly. Tickings of twig and leaf made my eyelids flicker. I dreamed that a grey shape came and squatted on the edge of the clearing about five meters from where I lay. Like a mute familiar, the shape watched over me. . . .

  Kyur-AAACCCCK!

  Groans and thrashings about. Thrashings and hackings. The underbrush beside my lean-to crackled beneath the invasion of several heavy feet. Bludgeoned out of my dream by these sounds, I sat up and attempted to reorient myself to the world. I saw The Bachelor. I saw three of the larger and more agile males bearing him to the ground and pinioning him there. They appeared to be cooperating in the task of subduing him!

  Ignoring me with all the contemptuous elan of aristocrats, the three males picked up The Bachelor and bore him to the center of the clearing. I followed this party onto the assembly ground. As they had during the old chieftain's two unexpected visits, the Asadi crowded to the sidelines—but without disappearing into the jungle. They remained on the field, buffeting one another like rabid spectators at a World Cup event. I was the only individual other than the four struggling males in the center of the assembly floor, however, and I looked down at The Bachelor. His eyes came very close to changing colors, from their usual clay-white to a thin, thin yellow. But I couldn't help him, couldn't interfere.