Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  She unhesitatingly extended her hand, addressing me as Dr. Benedict. I refrained from avuncularly suggesting that she call me either Thomas or Ben. After all, I was several years younger than her father.

  "Who's supposed to be quarantined?" I asked her instead.

  "Gome along," she said, "and I'll show you."

  She took me deeper into the shuttle's tail section and then down a cramped helical stairway into the cargo bay. The bay's exterior doors were open by this time, and the lift operators in their lorries on the polymac were keying instructions into the mechanical stevedores rearranging the goods and equipment in the bay. The heat of the veldt poured in through the open doors.

  "This is where he had to ride," Elegy Gather told me, picking her way among the crates, transport cylinders, and naked machines packed against one another in the cargo section. We halted in front of a small pressurized closet against the port bulkhead. "Right here," she emphasized, "Gaged. As if he'd murdered somebody or plotted with known subversives to disrupt the authority of Glaktik Komm's legally appointed agents. Aren't you appalled? Aboard the Wasserldufer, Dr. Benedict, he shared my stateroom. My stateroom!"

  Chaney's daughter fiddled with the latch on the closet, sprang it expertly, and eased the rounded door aside.

  My first thought was that someone had kidnapped Elegy Gather's traveling companion and by some insidious legerdemain replaced him with—well, one of the stupid and brutal Asadi from our native Wild.

  I took a step or two backward.

  The creature in the pressurized cargo closet was revealed to me in hunched profile, squatting on the floor and clutching its knees like an autistic child. The tawny mane and the powerful, sinewy limbs of the beast, however, suggested a Calyptran origin.

  "Kretzoi," the young woman murmured. "Are you all right?"

  When the creature turned its head to look at us, I felt certain it was an Asadi. Its head seemed overlarge, but its eyes consisted of two circular lenses as thick and rippled-seeming as old-fashioned bottle glass. I expected to see the irises behind these lenses change colors in rapid, unpredictable sequence. Instead, behind the fitted lenses, I saw eyes like mine or Elegy Gather's—brown irises in a matrix of coagulated albumin. This, too, unsettled me.

  Kretzoi—to lend the creature Gather's distinguished name for him—blinked behind his artificial eye bubbles and made a rapid sign with his right hand. Then he let his hand fall limply aside.

  Ghaney's daughter signed to the creature in turn, even though he had apparently understood her spoken question. Then she learned inward as if to help Kretzoi out of his place of confinement.

  "He's hot and thirsty and cramped," Elegy Gather said. "Which isn't particularly surprising under the circumstances, is it?"

  "Giv Gather!" shouted a voice from aft.

  We turned and saw the weary steward staring down on us from the helical stairway in the shuttle's tail. He was ducking his head and contorting his neck in order to bring us into his line of sight, and I briefly feared he might fall. The fact that Ghaney's daughter had gone so far as to free a passenger bound for quarantine was such a shock to him that he paid no attention to where he was

  putting his feet and saved himself a concussion only by reaching out and grabbing the narrow handrail. Once down, though, he managed to get to us over the crowded cargo floor in a matter of seconds.

  "What are you doing?" he demanded of Elegy. "What do you think you're doing?"

  Kretzoi, out of his closet, ignored the steward but raised himself to a tentative standing position and looked about as if peering over a field of waist-high grass. Elegj' was touching his arm reassuringly, trying to persuade him merely by tactile suggestion to go with her back the way the steward had just come. Kretzoi continued to peer about warily, taking in everything at once, his doglike muzzle revolving toward the open bay doors to scent the humid rankness of the laborers on the polymac and then swinging back across the jumble of supplies to brush against Elegy's shoulder. He was half crouching, half standing, with his arms or forelimbs cocked at the elbows in front of him and his hands hcmging limp.

  Completely upright, he would have been as tall as the young woman who tried to direct him out of the cargo bay—as tall, I estimated, as many adult Asadi. His mane, I felt sure, was the result of some kind of sophisticated hormonal treatment, while the hard transparent carapaces shielding his eyes were undoubtedly nothing but surgical implants. His body fur was thin and, in contrast to his mane, silver-grey. I decided on the spot that Kretzoi was a hybrid terrestrial primate genetically altered or eugenically manipulated to yield an individual with the characteristics of both a Gombe Stream chimp and an Ishasha River baboon. Recently he had undergone the relatively minor physical "adjustments" that had grafted to these unusual hybrid characteristics the distinctive external features that would identify him to the Asadi social unit as one of its own.

  These, at least, were my on-the-spot deductions about Kretzoi's singular anatomy, and even as the Komm-service steward interposed himself between the three of us and the stairway at the rear

  of the shuttle, I began to formulate a dim idea of how Elegy Gather proposed to succeed where all other potential rescuers of her father had failed. She had brought her own spy and infiltrator. . . .

  All our dismayed and harried steward was thinking about, though, was the likelihood of Kretzoi's infecting the world with a deadly simian virus. He fisted both hands and held them like fragile porcelain eggs in the pit below his breastbone.

  "Very lax security," I told him. "Do you propose to put all three of us in quarantine? Make that all ybur of us—I'm afraid you've exposed yourself to the possibility of infection, too." As soon as these words were out, I regretted the smugness of my tone and the small irrational joy I was taking in baiting the man.

  His hands still fisted in his stomach, he responded with painful tact: "Would you at least do me the favor of waiting here until I can find out what the Governor wishes us to do now?"

  "In this heat?" Elegy demanded. "It's fortunate Kretzoi didn't die in this sweatbox your captain had him placed in."

  "Let us go upstairs to the passenger section," I urged the steward. "I promise we'll wait there until you can discover what to do with us."

  "Why are you worried about the heat?" the steward asked Elegy, ignoring my suggestion. "I thought this was 'almost exactly' the sort of climate your Kirkorian grew up in." He unlisted one hand and began clenching and unclenching his fingers as if seeking purchase on an invisible neck.

  "It's Kretzoi, not Kirkorian! He's named for the Hungarian paleontologist, not some Armenian figment of your curdled imagination!"

  "I'm Armenian myself," the steward said. "I don't see that— "

  Envisioning an absurdly heated exchange of genealogical insults, I told the man that we were going back up to the shuttle's passenger compartment—with Kretzoi—in order to free the steward to do his duty, whatever that might be. If he wished, he could find us there after consulting with his pilot and radioing the news

  of our intransigence to Moses Eisen in his air-conditioned office. In the meantime, we were going to take advantage of a little air conditioning ourselves and wait for some authoritative final word on our disposition. That said, I led Elegy Gather and her persecuted traveling companion through the cargo hold and up the stairway to a pair of comfortable aisle seats and a sweet pervasive coolness. Kretzoi squatted on the floor.

  Within five minutes Moses Eisen himself had boarded the shuttle. He approached us up the long aisle from the front of the craft, his eyes trying to adjust and his dappled coveralls giving him less the appearance of a Colonial Administrator than of a balding adventurer who had wandered by accident out of some reptile-infested backwater. He looked seedy.

  When he spotted Kretzoi sitting in an alert, baboonlike posture against Elegy's starboard aisle seat, as if silently imploring the young woman to groom and soothe him, Moses halted and stared. He obviously had no idea what to say, and my own inclination was
to laugh. At last the Governor of all BoskVeld, former captain of the Third Denebolan Expedition, eased himself into a row of portside seats just in front of mine and propped his chin on arms folded atop the cushion of a chair back. Now he resembled a small child attempting to survey surreptitiously all the other passengers around his own assigned in-flight island of shuttle space.

  "Elegy Gather," I said, making introductions, "this is Governor Moses Eisen. Governor Eisen, this is Kretzoi."

  "Pleased to meet you both," said Moses. It would be a heinous distortion of the truth to say he sounded sincere. He was just barely on the acceptable side of civil.

  "You're not really going to try to put Kretzoi in quarantine, are you?" asked Elegy. "That sweatbox downstairs was surely indignity enough for him to have to suffer." She groomed the back of Kretzoi's head, parting the tangles of his mane and drawing her

  fingers from crown to nape in graceful combing sweeps. Inside the lenses shielding them, I noticed, Kretzoi had shut his disconcertingly human eyes.

  "No," said Moses. "Not now."

  "Because you've been exposed to him yourself," I said. "Along with me, the steward. Civ Gather, and possibly the workers in their cargo lifts. It's either confinement for everyone or no one. Nothing else makes sense."

  "I'm aware of that. Dr. Benedict." His inflection and choice of words were so cold that I felt my face crimsoning with both anger and humiliation; embarrassment, too, maybe. Then, addressing Elegy, Moses said, "This is a stupid way to begin our acquaintance and one for which I apologize. The captain of the Wasser-laufer led me to believe your 'friend' was an experimental animal that had not been immunized against the various catarrhs and minor infections that newcomers to our world often contract, and my decision to quarantine was for the animal's benefit as much as for the citizens of BoskVeld's. It takes a couple of weeks for the full battery of immunizations to take effect, you see, and during that time your"—he struggled to find the appropriate expression— "your ward would have been vulnerable."

  "My 'ward'—I wish you'd call him Kretzoi—was immunized at the light-probe medical facilities outside Dar es Salaam, just as I was, sir, and I can't imagine how you could imagine his getting so many light-years through id-space without having first cleared the Komm-galens Earthside."

  "The captain of the Wasserldufer IX told me that . . . that Kretzoi had not been immunized, that there'd been a complicated mix-up before the departure of your shuttlecraft from Nyerere Field."

  "Blather-tripe!" Chaney's daughter exclaimed eloquently, ceasing to groom her companion and imparting a veneer of stricken bafflement to our poor Governor's otherwise imperious features. "When did Gaptain de Lambant tell you this?"

  "Yesterday afternoon," Moses responded cautiously, "soon after

  maneuvering the Wasserldufer into orbit."

  "How incredibly disappointing and petty," Elegy said, her voice scarcely more than a quiet hum. "My recompense for failing to give over my person. A little practical joke, in reward for my recalcitrance. I would have thought de Lambant above that sort of smallness." She shook her head.

  "Isn't Captain de Lambant a woman?" Moses asked, trying to orient himself and crimsoning only faintly in the attempt.

  "Yes, sir. Very much so. In the prime."

  "Well, then—" The Governor ran down, stymied and flustered. His jowls gleamed fiercely, and the top of his head might have been the globe of one of Frasierville's streetlamps. He had forgotten that although pairbonding by members of opposite sexes is commonplace everywhere, it truly dominates human relationships only on frontier worlds like BoskVeld. A great many vestigial assumptions about sex and procreation haunt the old man, and at last I did laugh at him, rather loudly.

  "Shut up, Ben!"

  "At least we're back on a first-name basis," I said, still laughing in spite of his warning.

  Moses cut his eyes away from me and looked at Elegy Gather. "In any case, you're here. Even though you're on a research grant permitting you a good deal of personal autonomy. Civ Cather, I hope you'll have sufficient wisdom to take the advice of old-timers like myself and Ben. The Calyptran Wild isn't going to go anywhere for a few thousand years yet, and there's a lot in Frasierville to see and learn."

  "My father isn't in Frasierville, however," said Elegy pointedly, "and I've studied so many street maps and holographic constructs and eyewitness histories of your capital that I feel—maybe a little cockily—that I already know it firsthand."

  This declaration did nothing to pacify Moses's fear that we would soon have another lost soul spooking us from undiscoverable recesses in the Wild. He turned his peevish gaze on Kretzoi, but addressed the young woman.

  "I take it—from your familiarity with Frasierville and the appearance of your quasi-simian friend here—that you intend to seek out the Asadi even before you unpack your bags."

  "Almost that soon. Yes, sir."

  "Look. You've waited quite a long time for this opportunity. You can wait two or three more days. Give Dr. Benedict a little time to outfit your expedition, find out something about your plans, and work up an official prospectus for my perusal and peace of mind. I don't like to say hello and good-bye to visitors to BoskVeld all on the same day."

  Elegy Gather inclined her head a degree or two to express her grudging consent. Then she resumed grooming Kretzoi's great tawny mane, and Moses and I silently watched her.

  After I had enticed him away from the three young civki sirens who had enchanted him in the Ghaney Field terminal, Bahadori drove us back to Frasierville. Elegy and 1 rode in the veldt-rover's wide backseat, on split and sagging imitation-leather upholstery of a faded carrot color, while Kretzoi kept poor Jaafar company up front.

  I had no iron-clad notions about the young Iranian's mood, for he said nothing at all on either our trip across the sizzling polymac or our swing along the liver-jouncing length of Aphasia Alley. Nevertheless, the rigid set of his head and the impenetrability of his silence gave me to believe he considered himself the victim of a terrible insult. He had taken Kretzoi for a genuine Asadi, and he completed our trip back into town only by submerging his outrage in the corrosive acid of "duty." I resolved to explain nothing to him, however, until later—for I was no more inclined to talk than he was. Even Elegy, whose vivacity and spirit had seemed so unquenchable in the probeship shuttle, was silent.

  But as we rode, my silent wish for Jaafar was that in one of the enlisted-grade bars on Night Drag Boulevard that night he would

  find a wide-eyed female civki on his arm and a healthily requitable passion in his heart. My wish—sincere as it was—failed to get through to him telepathically, and his mood remained sour and uncommunicative. Only Kretzoi, of all of us, seemed unaffected by it.

  Eventually Jaafar dropped the three of us off at the hospital, where I went in to arrange guest accommodations for Elegy and Kretzoi in one of the first-floor wings. The two of them nearly bollixed this operation by following me inside to the admissions desk. As soon as the three of us appeared, an astonished Komm-galen tried, altogether peremptorily, to order us off the premises. I forestalled him with an official communication from Governor Eisen and a poker-faced testimonial to Kretzoi's complete mastery of human toilet facilities. Reluctantly, the man installed them in adjacent rooms down the appropriate corridor and retreated back to the admissions desk wearing a look of haggard, hunch-shouldered resignation.

  The Komm-galens didn't like it. Janitorial personnel were scandalized. And one of the residents of the guest wing slammed his door in our faces as we first strolled down the corridor in search of the Cather-Kretzoi suite. So be it, I told myself, thoroughly enjoying the experience. So be it. And after bidding them both good day, I left the hospital and walked leisurely back to my quonset and took a quiet lunch.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Once, Upon the Japura River

  I called for Elegy at the hospital the following morning, but waited for her at the first-floor admissions desk rather than going directly to her room. Int
erns and orderlies regarded me sourly, I thought, as if they'd been informed of the outrage I had helped effect against their institution. I didn't relish swaggering past them with Kretzoi in tow. The new day had sapped me of both my bravado and my humor. Nothing but business lay ahead, the dismaying and tedious logistics of adventure, and I feared what Elegy was going to make me do.

  In a moment she was coming toward me from her room, and Kretzoi was conspicuous by his absence. She wore cream-colored jodhpurs, lightweight calf-high boots, and a poncho of paisley silk that lifted and eddied with each step she took. Lovely.

  "Kretzoi?" I asked her when we were face to face.

  "He's studying."

  "Studying?"

  "Governor Eisen sent us a projection cube yesterday afternoon and a copy of Sankosh's holofilm of the births of the Asadi twins. Kretzoi's going to spend the day reviewing it. Research, I suppose you could say. Neither of us had seen the film before."

  "The film lasts twelve, maybe fifteen minutes," I told Elegy. "He'll wear it out."

  "Intensive research." She laughed nervously and glanced around at the hospital personnel. "And I'm not ready to subject him to these people's stares, frankly. Yesterday took its toll. Let's let him recuperate."

  "He's likely to have it worse in the Wild. Human hostility is a pretty low hurdle in comparison to Asadi indifference."

  "Let's go," she said, apparently to deprive the interns and orderlies of the stimulant of our conversation. "I'll show you how well I know Frasierville by taking you to Enos's for breakfast."

  All at once, then, we were out in the sun-bright streets, where Elegy, recalling her Earthside preparations for life in Bosk Veld's capital, oriented herself like a native and led me away from the lofty aluminum sails of the hospital. We stalked together down a dusty little alley debouching eventually on a boarded-up cafe. The sign over the shop had been pulled down, and a stray dog—some pioneer's gone-awry eugenic attempt at creating a hairless, mole-snouted canine burrower for dog days on the veldt—was licking a mauve stain on the sidewalk tiles.