Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  [A period of silence, during which only the wind in the tropical vegetation and an ambiguous, intermittent rustling are audible.]

  Hello. Are you still there, still with me? The Bachelor just stood up, uncoiled from his crouch, and faced me like an enemy. I thought I was dead, I really did. I know that's a turnabout—you don't have to require consistency of me under these circumstances, do you? . . . But he didn't attack. He merely stared at me for a minute, then turned and walked across the open clearing toward the temple. He's climbing the steps right now, very slowly, a grey shape remarkably like the grey shape he killed.

  Every moon is up. The three of them ripple his shadow down the tier of steps behind him. Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior arrayed in virtual conjunction. The pagoda itself, in this light, scarcely has substance. It looks to have been built of water, water frozen not into cloudy masonry blocks of ice but into a transparent crystalline

  structure contiguous with the very atmosphere. How to say this? It seems to be merging with the jungle, Ben, Eisen, everyone. The pagoda is slipping out of of my vision like a scarf slipping from my hand, just that easily and casually.

  [Shouting]: Damn you! You can't leave me here in this gut-strewn glade! I'm coming after you! Do you hear me! I'm coming!

  IV. CHANEY: Where is it, Eisen? You said we could see it from this hemisphere, you said it was visible. But I'm standing here, standing out here in front of the Asadi's fading temple where there aren't any branches to block my view, and, damn you, Eisen, I don't see it! Just those blinding moons dancing up and down and a sky full of flaming cobwebs. Where's Sol? Where's our own sun? Nowhere. Nowhere that I can see.

  [Suddenly resolute]: I'm going back into the temple. Yes, by God, I am. The Bachelor's abandoned me out here. Twenty minutes I've been out here alone. I don't intend to die in this place. I killed his huri, and my suspicion is that he wants me to die for my deed. But is a man who kills a huri the sort to accept a passive death? I hope not, Ben. I've taken too much shit, heaved up too much of myself, to sit cross-legged under the trees and wait for either my own death or the onset of the corrupt hunger that would keep me alive. ... I won't eat his offering, and I won't stay out here in that poor butchered lady's company. I can't.

  There's a beautiful golden cord in the pagoda, a beautiful golden cord. That should do it. If the boonie's still too shaken up with his loss, his stinking bereavement, to lead me back to the clearing—the Asadi clearing—well, that plumb line ought to serve. I've worked with my hands, I can fashion a noose as well as any dumpling-hearted boonie. And then carry it through where he couldn't. . . .

  [The movement of feet in the dirt, Cheney's short-windedness as he climbs the temple's steps, the groaning utterance of a heavy door. From this point on, Chaney's each word has the brief after-echo, the

  telltale hollowness imparted by the empty volume of a large building's interior.]

  It's cold. You wouldn't believe how cold it is in here, Ben. Cold and dark. There's no light filtering through the high, jewellike windows, and the chandelier—the chandelier's out! My eyes aren't accustomed to ... //I bump.] Here's a cabinet. I've scraped my elbow. The shelves are down, and I scraped my elbow on one of the shelves. The cabinets give off their own faint light, a very warm faint light, and I'll be able to see a good deal better if I just stand and let my pupils adjust. [A scraping sound, somewhat glassy.*] Wait a minute. The bottom petals of this cabinet have been broken off, torn away. I'm standing in the shards. And I'm not the vandal, Ben. That little bump I gave the cabinet couldn't have done this. Someone had to work energetically at these shelves to break them away. The Bachelor, maybe? The Bachelor's the only one in here besides me. Did he want an axe to stalk me with? Did he need one of his ancestors' ornamental knives before he felt brave enough to take on the pink-fleshed Asadi outcast who killed his huri? [Shouting]: Is that it, boonie? You afraid of me now? [Echoes, crashing echoes. When they cease, Chaneys voice becomes huskily confidential]: I think that's it, Ben. I think that's why the globe lamps are out, why this place is so dark. The boonie wants to kill me. He's stalking me in the dark. . . . Well, that's fine, too. That's more heroic than the cord, an excellent death. I'll even grapple with him a little, if it comes to that. Beowulf and Grendel. It shouldn't take very long. The lady he killed felt almost nothing, I'm sure of that. [Shouting: Over here, boonie! You know where I am! Come on, then! I won't move!

  [A forceful crack, followed by a tremendously amplified shattering sound, like a box full of china breaking.]

  *Just one of the many apparently unsimulatable sound effects that convince me of the authenticity of the tapes. How much of what Chaney reports is hallucination rather than reality, however, I'm not prepared to conjecture. T. B.

  My God! The pagoda's flooded with light now, flooded with light from the three globes in the great iron fixture that yesterday hung just beneath the dome. It's different now. Tiie iron ring's floating, almost two meters from the floor, it's humming oddly, you can hear the hum if you listen, and The Bachelor's inside the ring stabbing at one of the globes with a long-handled pick. . . . He's already chipped away a big mottled piece of its covering, and that piece has shattered on the floor. . . . All three globes are pulsing with energy, angry energy, they're filling the temple with electricity. A deadly chill. Anger . . . I'm sure they've generated the field that's keeping the iron ring afloat, the ring hovering like a circular prison around The Bachelor's shoulders. . . . The plumb line whips back and forth as he jabs, it's damn near entangled him, and he's caught inside the ring and keeps jabbing at the foremost globe with his pick. . . .

  [The jabbing sounds punctuate Chaney's headlong narrative. Apparently, another piece of the globe's covering falls to the floor and shatters.]

  What's he doing? Why the hell doesn't he duck out of there? Is he trapped in that field? I can see he's too damn busy to be worried about me, gang. Too damn busy to want to kill me. Instead, he seems to want to kill the pagoda, to destroy its energy source and free himself from the odd hold it has over him.

  I think his actions are having precisely the opposite effect, though. All the cabinets are open, all the shelves are down. I can see them. The temple seems to be alive again. Angry. Indignant. All it took was the dark and a little violence. . . . The foremost globe's split wide open; The Bachelor has knocked the crown off it, and spilling from that artificial caldera in the globe, erupting from it and flowing into the pagoda's central chamber with us, is a terrible, violet radiance! It's almost more than I can look at. . . . He persists, though. The ring is canting to one side, and his shaggy body is a flaming silhouette behind that hellish radiance! What does he think he's doing? . . . There's a smell in here, an odor that seems almost to be a concomitant of the light. It's like

  . . . like the smell when I ground out the guts of The Bachelor's huri. Terrible!

  [A fluttering which is distinctly audible over both Chaney's voice and the persistent tapping of The Bachelors pick.]

  Lord, they're driving him out of the lofty darkness of the dome—two or three enraged, murder-intent huri. Clumsy beasts a little larger than the one I killed. They're stooping on The Bachelor as a raptor stoops on a field mouse, diving upon him with their claws wide and their wings canted so as to slice him up maliciously each time they pass. He's trying to fight them off, waving the pick overhead, swinging it madly—but they perceive its presence and somehow compute the length and direction of its arc and thereby manage to elude its blows and inflict their anger physically upon The Bachelor. Despite their seeming clumsiness, he's no match for them, no match for them at all. . . .

  I'm getting out of of here, Ben. I'm going to go tumbling down the steps and out of this place while it's still within my power to do so. What a madhouse, what a sacred, colossal madhouse. Ole Oliver Oliphant should bless the solitary comfort of his grave for sparing him from this. BoskVeld crawls with a strangeness we don't want to be a part of. . . . Or perhaps it's a world beckoning to us across thresholds of insanity an
d terror for which our sweet lost Earth already has sufficient analogues. . . . Why commit ourselves to a madness the likes of which we've been tr}'ing for millennia to flee? . . . Don't listen to me. Who knows what I'm saying? I've got to get out of here. . . . I'm coming home, I'm coming home to you. To you, all of you, my kinsmen. . . .

  [Footfalls, a heavy wooden groaning, and then the unechoing silence of the night as Chaney emerges into the Wild.]

  V. CHANEY [exhilarated]: God, look at them go off! I'm unloading my backpack. I'm lobbing them toward old Sol, wherever the debbil he at. Another Independence Day! My second one. [Four or five successive whooshing sounds.] I'm coming home, I'm coming home. To you, Ben. To you, Eisen. To Morrell, Yoshiba, and Jonathan. You won't be able to say I didn't perform

  my duties with a flair. [Laughter.] God, look at them stain the sky, look at 'em smoke, look at 'em bum away the reek of Asadi self-delusion and the stench of huri arrogance!

  No, by God, we don't destroy every race we come across. Maybe the pygmies, maybe we did it to the pygmies—but the Asadi, bless 'em, they're doing it to themselves, they've been doing it to themselves for aeons. With help, perhaps. With assistance from their weird, imported familiars from beyond this solar system. It's not ourselves at fault, though. No one can say it's us.

  But, God, look at that clean phosphorescent sky! I only wish I knew which direction Sol was in; I'd like to see it. Eisen, you said we could see it. Where? Tell me where. I'd like to see it like a shard of ice glittering in the center of those brilliant, beautiful, flaming cobwebs. . . .

  Last Things

  Thomas Benedict speaking: We saw the flares and picked Chaney up. Moses Eisen was with me in the copter. We had come out extremely early on the morning of Day 140 in order to complete Chaney's customary supply drop and then to circle the Asadi clearing with the thought of making a naked-eye sighting of our colleague. Captain Eisen had ordered this course of action when it became apparent that Chaney wasn't going to communicate with us of his own accord. Eisen wished to apprise himself of Chaney's condition, perhaps by landing and talking to the man. He wanted Chaney to return to base camp. If it had not been for these unusual circumstances, then, Chaney's flares might have gone off for no audience but an empty sky. As it was, we saw only the last two or three flares he set off and had to reverse the direction of our copter to make the rendezvous.

  By the time we reached him, Chaney was no longer the exhilarated adventurer that the last section of his monologue paints him. He was a tired and sick man who did not seem to recognize

  us when we set down and who came aboard the copter bleary-eyed and unshaven, his arms draped across our shoulders.

  By removing his backpack we came into possession of the recorder that he had used for the last two days and the eyebooks he had supposedly picked up in the Asadi temple. And that night I went back to the Asadi clearing alone to retrieve the remainder of his personal effects.

  Back at base camp, however, we committed Chaney at once to the care of Doctors Williams and Tsyuki and saw to it that he had a private room in the infirmary. During this time, as I've already mentioned, he wrote "The Ritual of Death and Designation." He claimed, in more than one of our conversations, that we had picked him up not more than four or five hundred meters from the pagoda which he describes in this brief paper. He made this claim even though we were unable on several trips over a large area of the Wild to discover a clearing large enough to accommodate such a structure. Not once in all of our talks, however, did he ever claim that he had been inside the pagoda. Only in the confiscated tape does one encounter this bizarre notion; you have just read the edited transcript of the tape and can decide for yourself how much credence to give its various reports. One thing is certain: The eyebooks that Chaney brought out of the Calyptran Wild with him do exist. And they had to come from somewhere.

  The eyebooks are a complete puzzle. They look exactly as Chaney describes them in the tape, and they all work. The cassettes are seamless plastic, and the only really efficient way we've been able to get inside one is to break the bulb—the glass eyelet—and probe through the opening with an old-fashioned watch tool. We've found nothing inside the cassettes on which their dizzying spectral patterns could have been programmed and no readily apparent energy source to power such a rapid presentation of spectral patterns. Morrell has suggested that the programs exist in the molecular structure of the hard plastic casing themselves, but even this intriguing hypothesis resists confirmation. To date, computer analysis of the eyebooks' color

  displays have established no basis for "translation" out of the visual realm and into the auditory. We lack a Rosetta stone, and because we do, the eyebooks remain an enigma.

  As for Chaney, he apparently recovered. He would not discuss the tape that I once—only once—confronted him with, but he did talk about putting together a book-length account of his findings.

  "The Asadi have to be described," Chaney once told me. "They have to be described in detail. It's essential we get down on paper every culture we find out here. On paper, on tape, on holographic storage cubes. The pen's mightier than the sword, and paper's more durable than flesh."

  But Chaney didn't do his book. Three months he stayed with us, copying his notes, working in the base-camp library, joining us only every sixth or seventh meal in the general mess. He kept to himself, as isolated among us as he had been in the Asadi clearing. And, I suppose, he must have done a lot of thinking, a lot of somber, melancholy, fatalistic thinking.

  He did something else that few of us paid much attention to. He grew a beard and refused to have his hair cut.

  Later we understood why.

  One morning we couldn't find Egan Chaney anywhere in base camp. By evening he still had not returned. Eisen sent me to the dormitory quarters we shared and told me to go through Chaney's belongings to see if I could determine his whereabouts from an explicit note or a random scrawl—anything he might have left behind in farewell. Already, you see, we were beginning to believe Chaney had defected to the Wild.

  "I really don't think he'll be back," Eisen told me. He was right about that, but he was wrong in supposing that Chaney would have left his farewell amid the clutter of our dormitory room.

  It wasn't until the next day, when I checked my mailbox in the radio room, that I found what Eisen had told me to look for. Knowing that there had been no probeship deliveries or private light-probe transmissions, I checked my box merely out of habit. And I found the note from Chaney. The only comfort it gave me

  was the comfort of knowing my friend had not decided to commit suicide—that he had successfully fought off a subtle but steadily encroaching madness.

  Eisen disagreed with me in this assessment, believing that Chaney had committed suicide as surely as if he had taken poison or put a bullet through his brain.

  Read the note he left behind, however. It expresses a peculiar sort of optimism, I think, and if you don't see the slender affirmative thread running through it, well, I would suggest that you go back and read the damn thing again. Because even if Chaney has committed suicide, he has died for something he believed in.

  Chaney's Farewell

  I'm going back to the Asadi clearing, Ben. But don't come after me, I won't let you bring me back. I've reached a perfect accommodation with myself. Probably I'll die. Without your supply drops, that seems certain, doesn't it?

  But I belong among the Asadi, not as an outcast and not as a chieftain—but as one of the milling throng. I belong there even though that throng is stupid, even though it persists in its self-developed immunity to instruction. I'm one of them. I feel for them.

  Like The Bachelor, Ben, I'm a great slow moth. A tiger moth. And the flame I choose to pursue and die in is the same flame that slowly consumes every one of the Asadi. Don't forget me, Ben, but don't come after me, either.

  Good health to you, Egan

  CHAPTER ONE

  Moses Eisen

  After rereading Death and Designation Among t
he Asadi for the umpteenth time, I slept only a little. Denebola's rising spread a radiance through Frasierville that automatically dimmed the streetlamps and set their vanadium-steel poles glinting like silverware in the hands of hungry pioneers. Maybe it was the noise of their flashing that sliced through my dreams and woke me up.

  In my austere little debussy I relieved myself and drew enough water through the vacuum tap to slap away the numbness in my cheeks and crow's-feet. The mirror showed me a man whose every encounter with his mattress leaves him imprinted as if by a waffle iron. I dressed hurriedly and banged down the steps to hunt up Moses Eisen.

  Eisen now lives with his wife and two children, both Bosk Veld-bom, in a house whose grounds jut into the Calyptran Wild like a barren peninsula. Three-quarters of the house lie below the

  surface. An unpainted wood verandah fronts the ground-level roof, and a ventilation tower rises above the jungle canopy behind the verandah. By default, this residence constitutes our planet's "Governor's Mansion"—for three years ago Kommthor elevated Eisen from the captaincy of the Third Denebolan Expedition to the post of interim administrative head of the BoskVeld Colony. When we were engaged in matters of official import, then, I was supposed to call him Governor Eisen and refrain from indecorous displays of intimacy.

  That had never been hard. Eisen had no aptitude for either small talk or jokes, and although old hands were able to barge in upon him without risking a stiff rebuke or an imperious stare, they could never accuse Eisen of trying to make them feel themselves a part of the family. Usually, weather permitting, he came outside to receive callers; and in the four and a half years since Civi Korps engineers had excavated his home from the rain forest's crumbling humus, I had set foot inside it exactly twice—for small but formal parties commemorating the births of his and Rebecca's children. I envied Eisen his family, but not his status or his disposition.