Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  Tradging in the wake of the mourners, incorrigibly hangdog in his pariahhood, was The Bachelor. Meanwhile, the twilight reverberated with the footfalls and leaf nudgings of a host of single-minded communicants.

  I saw the huri flying above the part of the procession where its master was being borne fonvard on the shoulder.s of the smaller Asadi. Avoiding branches, the huri turned an inadvertent cartwheel in the air, righted itself, and landed on Eisen Zwei's bony chest. Here it did a little preening dance, for all the world like an oil-coated rooster wooing a hen. Then the column snaked to the left, the Wild closed off my view of the marchers, and darkness began drifting in like black confetti.

  How long we trudged, I have no idea. An eternity of infinitesimal moments. I won't attempt to estimate. Say only, quite a long time. Finally our procession flowed into another clearing.

  There in the clearing, rising against the sky like an Oriental pagoda, loomed the broad and imper'ious mass of something built, something made. All three moons were up, and the solid black bulk of this structure was spotlighted in the antique-gold claret shed by the three moons together. Even before those of us at the end of the procession were out of the jungle, we could see the lofty, winglike roofs of this sudden artifact and its high, deep-violet windows. Was I the only one whose first inclination was to plunge back into the nightmare forest? I don't beUeve so.

  As we approached, members of both the inner and the outer columns began to sway from side to side, marching and swaying at once. The Bachelor's head, in fact, moved in wide arcs; his whole marching body trembled as if from the paroxysms of ague. If he had been punished for once leading me to this place, perhaps he trembled now from fear. On the other hand, if the Asadi wished this temple kept inviolate, wouldn't they somehow punish me if they discovered my presence?

  I almost bolted back the way the Asadi had led me, but the pagoda had captured my imagination and I resisted the impulse to run. However, I did have the good sense to climb a tree on the

  edge of the clearing fronting the pagoda. From this vantage I watched the proceedings in relative safety.

  Grey shadows moved in the deep shadow cast by the Asadi temple. And suddenly two violently green flames burned in the iron flambeaux on either side of the top step of the immense tier of stone steps leading to the temple's ornate doorway! The torchlight-ers—formerly the moving grey shadows—came back down the steps. Once again I was stunned with wonder and disbelief. This sophisticated use of both flambeaux and a starting agent I couldn't even guess at destroyed a multitude of my previous conclusions about the Asadi. Fire! They understood fire!

  By this time the four columns of Asadi had ranged themselves in parallel files before the stairway of the ancient pagoda, and six slightly built menials bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei—now an uncanny apple green in the torchlight—up the broad stone steps to the stone catafalque before the door. Here they set the corpse down and lined up behind him, staring out over their waiting kinspeople, facing the cruel ambivalence of the Wild, three on each side of the old man. Unaccustomed to such tawdry grandeur, I began to think that Placenol, or something more sinister, was flowing through my veins. Surely this was all hallucination!

  The moons cried out with their silent mouths. The flambeaux uttered bright screamings of unsteady light.

  But the ritual did not conclude. The night drew on, the moons rolled, and the four files of Asadi tribesmen shuffled in their places. Some stretched out their hands and fought with the tumbling moons just as Eisen Zwei had wrestled with Denebola, the sun. None left the clearing, though I felt that many would have liked to. Wrestling with their own fears, they waited. The pagoda and the corpse of their chieftain commanded them. I, in turn, was commanded by their awesome patience. Wedged like a spike into my tree, I watched as Melchior drifted down the sky toward the jungle. The Bachelor fidgeted, and the two iron torches began to gutter like spent candles.

  Dawn delayed.

  Two vacuums existed: the vacuum in Nature between the end of night and the beginning of day, and the vacuum in the peculiar hierarchy of the Asadi tribal structure. Night and death. Two vacuums in search of compensatory substance. When would dawn break? How would the Asadi designate their dead chieftain's successor?

  A commotion in the clearing! Looking down, I saw that the four neat files of Asadi had dissolved into a single disorganized mass of milling bodies. A chaos, an anarchy—as on their original assembly ground. How could a vacuum of "leadership" exist in such an arbitrary melange of unrelated parts? Only the pagoda had solidity, only the pagoda did not move.

  Then, looking up, I saw the old man's huri floating high above this disorder, floating rather than flailing; a gyrfalcon rather than a pelican. It rode the prismatic, predawn breezes with uncommon grace, flew off so effortlessly that in a moment it had dwindled to a scrap of light far beyond the temple's central spire.

  Then the huri folded its wings behind it and plummeted dizzyingly down the roseate sky. I almost fell. My feet slipped through the fork that had supported me, and I was left dangling, arms above my head, over one edge of the pagoda's front yard. The anxiety-torn communicants were too caught up in their panic to notice me.

  Meanwhile, the huri rocketed earthward. It dived into the helpless crowd of Asadi and skimmed along their heads and shoulders with its cruel, serrated wings. Dipping in and out, it flapped, once again, like a torn window shade, all its ephemeral grace turned to crass exhibitionism (I don't know what else to call it) and unwieldy flutterings. But the creature did what it sought to do—it scarred the faces of several of the Asadi. A few tried desperately to capture the huri. Others, more reasonably, ducked out of its way or threw up their arms to ward it off. The huri didn't discriminate. It scarred all those who got in the way of its bladed wings, whether they attempted to catch it or to flee. The eyes of the harassed Asadi flashed through their individual spectral displays,

  and the heat from so many changes made the clearing phosphorescent with shed energy.

  The fact that The Bachelor's eyes remained cool and colorless subtracted very little from the heat of those thousand burning eyes. The Bachelor. I had nearly forgotten him. He stood apart from his panicked comrades and observed, neither grappling for nor fleeing from the huri. His eyes were clay white, mute, devoid of all intellect or passion. As for the huri, it flew up, flew down, performed a wobbly banking movement, and slashed with its murderous pinions at everything. Finally, it shot up through the shadow of the pagoda, wildly flapping, then pitched over and dived upon The Bachelor. It flew into his face. It bore him to the ground and battered him with countless malicious thrashings.

  To the last individual, the Asadi quieted, queued up randomly, and watched this penultimate act in their day-long ritual. It took me a moment to understand. Then I realized:

  The Bachelor was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect. Somehow it seemed an inevitable choice.

  My arms aching, I dropped from the tree onto the floor of the clearing. In front of me were the narrow backs of twenty or thirty Asadi. I couldn't see The Bachelor at all, though I could still hear the churning of the huri's wings and the altered breathing of the tribespeople.

  Suddenly a figure, insanely rampant, disrupted the smooth surface of the crowd and darted through a quickly closing gap of bodies to my right. The Bachelor had regained his feet, was trying to fight the huri off. The two of them thrashed their way up the tier of steps in front of the temple. Soon they were on the paving beside the catafalque where Eisen Zwei still lay. There on that sacred, high place The Bachelor surrendered to the inevitable.

  He went down on his knees, lowered his head, and ceased to resist. The huri, sensing its victory, made an air-pummeling circuit over the body of the dead chieftain, sawing devilishly at the faces of the corpsebearers and rippling like dry brown paper. At last it settled on The Bachelor's head. Beating its wings for

  balance, it faced the onlooking multitude, and me, with blind triumph.

  No one breathed. No
one acknowledged the dawn as it revealed the caustic verdigris coating the pagoda like an evil frost.

  Slowly, painfully slowly. The Bachelor got to his feet. He was draped in his own resignation, in the invisible garb of an isolation even more pronounced than that he had suffered as an outcast. He was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect.

  The huri dropped from The Bachelor's head to his shoulder, entwined its tiny fingers in the tufts of his butchered mane. Once again inanimate and scabrous, there it clung.

  Now the Ritual of Death and Designation was nearly over. Two of the six corpsebearers on the temple's highest tier moved to complete that ritual. They touched the head and feet of Eisen Zwei with the tips of the two great flambeaux, and instantly the old man's body raged with green fire and the raging flame leaped up the face of the temple as if to abet the verdigris in its more patient efforts to eat the building away.

  The Bachelor stood almost in the very blast of this configuration. I feared that he, too, would be consumed. But he was not. Nor was the huri. The fire died, Eisen Zwei had utterly disappeared, and the corpsebearers came back down the steps and joined the shaggy anonymity of their revitalized people.

  The Ritual of Death and Designation had ended.

  For the purposes of this ethnography I will minimize the significance of what then occurred and report it as briefly as I am able.

  Several of the Asadi turned and saw me in the pagoda's clearing. They actually looked at me. After having been ignored for over four months, I didn't know how to react to the signal honor of abrupt visibleness. Out of monumental surprise, I returned their stares. They began advancing upon me, hostility evident in the rapid blurring of colors that took place in their eyes. Behind me, the Synesthesia Wild. I turned to escape into it. Another small

  group of Asadi had insinuated themselves into the path of my intended escape, blocking my way.

  Among this group 1 recognized the individual whom I had given the name Benjy. Cognizant of nothing but a vague paternal feeling toward him, I sought to offer him my hand. His own nervous hand shot out and cuffed me on the ear. I fell. Dirt in my mouth, grey faces descending toward me, I understood that I ought to be terrified. But I spat out the dirt, the manes and faces retreated as quickly as they had come, and my incipient terror evaporated like alcohol in a shallow dish.

  Overhead, a familiar flapping.

  I looked up and saw the huri returning to The Bachelor's outstretched arm. He had released the creature upon his fellows in order to save me. An action illustrating the mind-boggling complexity of the relationship between the Asadi chieftain and the huri. Which of them rules? Which submits to command?

  At that moment I didn't very much care. Denebola had risen, and the Asadi had dispersed into the Wild, leaving me dwarfed and humbled in the presence of their self-sustaining pagoda and the reluctant chieftain who stared down from its uppermost tier. Although he remained aloof, before the day was out The Bachelor had led me back to the original assembly ground. Without his help, I ought to add, I never would have found it. 1 would be out there still today. . . .

  PART FOUR

  An Introduction To "Chaney's Monologue"

  Thomas Benedict speaking: I have put this paper together out of a complicated sense of duty. As one of the few people who had any substantial contact with Egan Chaney before his defection, I am perhaps also the only man who could have undertaken this task— despite my limited qualifications in the area of cultural xenology. But this is not really the place to discuss the strange/aif accompli of our collaborative monograph. Suffice it to say that I owed Chaney my dedication to this project.

  The section you have just read—"The Ritual of Death and Designation"—Chaney wrote in our base-camp infirmary while recuperating from exposure and a general inability to reorient himself to the society of human beings. In one of our conversations, as well as here in the monograph itself, he compared

  himself to Gulliver after his return from the land of the Houyhnhnms. At any rate, beyond Part Three of this monograph Chaney never wrote anything about the Asadi for publication, although immediately after his release from the infirmary I believe he intended to write a book about them. This monograph is the ghost of that unwritten book.

  After returning to the original assembly ground of the Asadi, Chaney stayed two more weeks in the Calyptran Wild. On Days 126 and 133 I made supply drops, but, just as Chaney had requested, I did not fly over the clearing in the vain hope of spotting him and thereby determining the state of his health. It was enough to verify his robustness, he told me, from the fact that each week when I coptered in his supplies I could note that he had dutifully picked them up and carried them off. The argument that he was not the only creature in the Wild capable of hauling away the goods intended for him impressed Chaney not at all.

  "I might as well be," he wrote on one of his infrequent notes left in a canister at the drop point. "The Asadi have all the initiative of malaria victims. More horrible than this, friend Ben, is the face-slapping truth that there is no one else out here. No one else at all."

  I am now the sole owner of the personal effects of Egan Chaney. These include his private journals and professional notebooks, a number of unfiled "official" reports, a series of in-the-field tapes, and a small bit of correspondence. Those records concerning the Asadi that I don't own myself I have access to as a result of my affiliation with the Third Denebolan Expedition as Chaney's pilot and aide. I tell you this only because I know for an inconiroverti-ble fact that during his last fourteen days in the Wild, either Chaney did not make a single entry in any of his journals or notebooks, or he so completely effaced these dubious entries that they may as well never have existed.

  We have only one complete report of any kind dealing with this final phase of Chaney's field work. It is a tape, a remarkable tape, and I believe Chaney would have destroyed it, too, had we not

  taken his recorder from him the instant we picked him out of the jungle.

  I have listened to this tape many times—in its entirety, I should add, since doing so is a feat requiring almost supernatural patience. On the one occasion I tried to discuss its contents with Chaney (several days after his release from the infirmary, when I believed he could handle the terror of the experience with a degree of objectivity), he protested that I had imagined those contents. He told me he had never recorded the least word in the tape's running account of The Bachelor's . . • "Metamorphosis?" he asked. "Is that the word you used?"

  I promptly played the tape for him. He listened to ten minutes of it, then got up and shut it off. His face had gone unaccountably lean and bewildered, and his hands trembled.

  "Ah," he said, not looking at me. "An elaborate practical joke, Ben. I made it up because there was nothing better to do."

  "The sound effects, too?" I asked incredulously.

  Still not looking at me, he nodded his head—even though the circumstance of his rescue belied this clumsy explanation, exploded it, in fact, into untenable shrapnel. Chaney remained mute on the subject. In all of his writings and conversations in those last three months among us, he never mentioned or even alluded to the sordid adventure of his final two nights. I present here a transcript, somewhat edited, of the tape in question.

  Chaney's Monologue: Two Nights IN THE Synesthesia Wild

  Preliminaries

  CHANEY [enthusiastically]: Hello all! What day is it? A day like any other day, except that you happen to be along for the ride. I'm going to be leading you on an expedition, you see. How often do I lead you on expeditions?

  80

  It's Day 138, I think, and yesterday The Bachelor returned to the clearing—the first time he's been back since the huri anointed him, so to speak, with the fecal salve of chieftainship. I'd almost given him up. But he came back into the clearing yesterday afternoon, the huri on his shoulder, and squatted in the center of the assembly ground just as old Eisen Zwei used to do. The reaction among his Asadi brethren was identical to the one they
always reserved for E.Z. . . . Everybody out of the clearing! Everybody out! ... It was old times again, gang, except that now the actor holding down center stage was a personal friend of mine. Hadn't he saved my life several times? Certainly he had.

  After the heat, the boredom, and the rainfalls, my lean-to leaking like a colander, I couldn't have been more gratified.

  Following the pattern Eisen Zwei established on one of his visits. The Bachelor spent the entire afternoon in the clearing, all of last night, and maybe an hour or so this morning. Then he got up to leave.

  I've been following him ever since. Denebola hovering overhead, I'd judge it to be about noon. The Bachelor permits me to follow him. Moreover, it's easy. I'm not even breathing hard. [Simulated heavy breathing.] I'm recording as we walk. If this were a terrestial wood, you could hear birdsong and the chitterings of insects. As it is, you'll have to content yourselves with the sounds of my footfalls and the rustlings of leaf and twig. . . . Here's a little rustle for you now.

  [The sound of a branch or heavy leaf slapping back. General background noises of wind and, far less audibly, distant running water.]

  The Bachelor is several meters ahead of me. You may not be able to hear him—he walks like one of James Fenimore's stealthy Indians. Pad, pad, pad. Like that, only softer. I don't care to be any closer than I am because the huri's riding The Bachelor's shoulder, clinging to his mane. It is not a winsome creature, base-camp buggers; no, indeed it's not. Since it hasn't any eyes, you can't tell whether it's sleeping—or awake and plotting a thousand villainies.

  That's why, jes' strollin' along, I'm happy back here.

  Let me impress you with my cleverness. [A heavy thump.] That's my backpack. I've brought provisions for three or four days. You see, I don't know how long we're going to be out here. I don't know where we're going. But in The Bachelor I trust. Up to a point, at least. This backpack also houses my recorder—Morrell's miniaturized affair, the one that has a capacity of two hundred forty hours. Or, as Benedict might phrase it if he knew me better, ten solid days of Chaney's uninterrupted blathering.