Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  'This is supposed to be Enos's," Elegy said, her voice almost indignant. "I'm sure it is."

  "Sure you're not lost?" I taunted her gently.

  A shimmer of doubt flashed in her eyes, like sheet lightning on an otherwise clear horizon. How could she expect to navigate expertly the byways and back alleys of an alien city she had never before set foot in? Maps and guidebooks, studied at a distance of so many abstract light-years, were poor substitutes for firsthand

  experience. Perhaps no substitute at all. Poor Elegy. She wavered, mistrusted her instincts.

  Then she said, "This place used to be Enos's, didn't it? Tell me the truth. I haven't gone wrong, have I?"

  "This used to be Enos's," I acknowledged. "You haven't gone wrong." The mole-snouted dog eyed us suspiciously from undog-gish eyes, then limped off down the street fronting the boarded-up restaurant.

  "What's happened to it, then?"

  "Enos and his family pulled up stakes eight or ten weeks ago and left for Amersavane with a newly arrived contingent of colonists. Colonial Administration helped equip them for the veldt by buying them out." I folded my arms and squinted back down the alley we'd come by. "It's all right. I wasn't hungry, anyway. It's a little late for breakfast."

  "But I got here, didn't I? I found the place."

  "You're not suggesting an analogy with our imminent search for your father, are you?"

  Elegy Gather turned toward me so that her silk poncho inscribed a graceful manta-wing undulation in the air. "I wasn't," she said. "Not consciously."

  "I hope not. Because in finding Enos's you've found nothing but the shell of your expectations and something you didn't expect to find at all."

  Elegy favored this Nestorian counsel with laughter. "It's a little early for such pessimism, isn't it, Ben?" All of a sudden I was Ben. Good, grey Ben. I didn't really mind.

  "It's six or so years too late for optimism," I rejoined.

  "Or twelve. Or twenty. Depending on your degree of fatality and your personal perspective, of course. A guidebook to Frasierville's back-alley eateries isn't exactly a monograph on sacred Asadi places and rituals. Guidebooks are forever going out of date."

  I said nothing. Brilliant morning sunlight flaked off the turrets of a nearby extrusion plant—as if Denebola itself were being whittled to a spear point. The Calyptran Wild, however, seemed either

  parsecs or centuries distant. A long way off.

  "You've got an office, don't you?" Elegy asked, taking my arm. "We have a prospectus to draw up and plans to make."

  My office was a miniature ecosystem of accidental design and haphazard self-perpetuation. On the days that I inhabited it—a ramshackle prefab from the days of Frasier's original Expedition— I was its most conspicuous life form. My secretary was a dictaphone device with communication relays and information-storage-and-retrieval components, and the placard on my desk read Thomas Benedict, Head I BoskVeld Ecological Research and Administration. A bureaucrat in an ersatz biome.

  The force of habit was my ecosystem's principal energy source, and its other major life forms included several droopy botanicals (which I only intermittently took care of), assorted and sundry protozoa and bacteria (I cheerfully assumed), and a bevy of pugnacious cockroaches (imported, I was sure, by probeship shuttles as tiny egg pods in the boots and baggage of a thousand incoming colonists). These last were predators that had not yet run me to ground. They left specklike droppings on my windowsills and rattled the crumpled paper in my trash cans, and I never did discover exactly what they fed on.

  When I introduced Elegy into this "environmental house," I half expected her to suggest that we return to the guest suite in the hospital to map out our plans. Instead, she thumped the old-fashioned air conditioner purring laboriously in one of the prefab's ports and pulled up a chair so that she could look through the picture window behind my desk. Just beyond the plasma-lamp barricade on Frasierville's eastern perimeter, I knew, she could see the flat, purple-veined palm leaves, evil-looking scarlet flowers, and irregularly corrugated boles of the trees in the Calyptran Wild. Once, like her father, I had done field work for extended periods amid that jungle's sense-distorting luxuriance.

  Swiveling in my chair, I said,"That's what you'll have to fight, Civ Gather, that and six years' utter wastage of Egan Chaney's spoor."

  "Why does it stop there?" she asked, staring intently into the foliage. "Why is it that half the planet's land mass is veldt and half s tropical rain forest and both regions abut each other without any real gradation?"

  "There's an abrupt discontinuity in soil types between the two biomes," I said, "and the rain clouds scudding in from the ocean, Calyptra, west of the Wild, seem generally to dump their moisture well before reaching the veldt. Lush forest growth continues to the edge of the veldt, we assume, because of the permeability and moisture-conducting capacity of the forest soil, a kind of—well, as odd as it may sound, a kind of porous laterite beneath two or three centimeters of amazingly rich humus. The variations in soil types and the differences in rainfall account for the topographic features of Bosk Veld."

  "Couldn't the permeable laterite and the humus you speak of be symptoms rather than causes of the planet's topographic division? Couldn't the soil pattern in the Wild result from the fact that a tropical rain forest has overlain it for so long?"

  "Theoretically, I suppose. I'm not sure it's very likely. Your reasoning suggests an ecological equivalent to artistic debates about the separation of style and content. More than likely, the two go hand in hand." I swiveled away from the window and looked at Elegy. "Why does the subject interest you at all? Does it really have anything to do with finding your father?"

  But she asked, "How many native animal species does BoskVeld boast?"

  "The Asadi are the principal one," I responded, as if saying a catechism. "Discounting a wide variety of marine forms we're only now beginning to study, some native insects, and a few vaguely reptilian land-going creatures. Why?"

  "How likely is it, then, that the Asadi originated here?"

  "The argument of an extra-Denebolan origin isn't a particularly new one. Civ Cather. In fact—"

  "I'd prefer that you call me by my first name."

  "All right," I said tentatively, without saying it. "In fact, Frasier himself was the first to propose it. He argued that the technologically advanced ancestors of the Asadi, from whom they supposedly devolved as solar and climatic conditions changed, must have come from another planetary system. Nobody has any idea which one, however, and the archaeological record here on BoskVeld isn't all that helpful. At times, to tell the truth, it's downright muddled and self-contradictory."

  "Is it possible that the Asadi's ancestors could have ter-raformed—maybe 'engineered' is a better word in this case— BoskVeld to suit their physiological and cultural needs? Hence, vacant prairie out there"—she gestured with her poncho—"and sheltering rain forest over here."

  "Anything's possible. Elegy. But probability is another matter, and I'd say you're roaming aimlessly around its edges."

  Elegy got up and circled my desk so that she was standing at my picture window gazing into the Wild. "Edges," she murmured ruminatively. "Edgewise. On edge. Edge-yoo-cated." Her voice grew louder: "I'm ready to get off the uncertain edge of this enterprise, Ben, and go straight into the jungle after my father."

  "Why?" I pushed myself and my chair away from the desk so that I could scrutinize Elegy's attractive but somewhat shelf-browed profile.

  "Because it's what I came here for," she declared almost defiantly.

  Sitting, I felt at a disadvantage—even more so when a cockroach scurried over my boot, then sculled beneath my desk and across the floor toward the other end of the prefab. After heaving myself out of my chair, I paced away from Elegy to assassinate this fellow inhabitant of my sleazy private ecosystem.

  "I still don't understand," I said, grinding my toe on the cockroach. "You don't even share your father's name. Elegy."

  "I do, how
ever, possess a goodly number of his genes."

  "And that's enough to commit you to a wholehearted but

  probably doomed attempt to uncover his bones?"

  "Not merely his bones, Dr. Benedict—his person."

  With the edge of my boot sole I scraped aside the crushed cju-apace of the cockroach. Then I looked at Chaney's daughter. She was nimbused by the light pouring in through my window, and, momentarily, it was as if I were holding a conversation with either a hologramic image or a ghost. The unreality of the young woman's presence disoriented and upset me.

  "You're not likely to find him mummified or turned conveniently to stone in a climate like the Wild's," I said.

  "That's not what I'd want, in any case. What would you say if I told you I have hopes of finding my father . . . alive?"

  "Dengue fever, maybe. I'd urge you to return to the hospital for metaboscanning and treatment."

  "I've had all my shots," she said, laughing. "Kretzoi, too." She sat down in my chair, and the light gentled and transfigured her features, making her again a creature of flesh and blood.

  I approached the desk. "After six years? Not bloody likely. Elegy. How can you even justify such a hope to yourself?"

  "Even though my father believed that by returning to the Asadi he was signing a warrant of self-execution, he had a friend out there. A friend."

  "The Bachelor?" I asked incredulously.

  "The Bachelor," she affirmed, "who became the Asadi chieftain or dominant male upon the death of Eisen Zwei."

  I shook my head. "No one's seen The Bachelor since your father's disappearance. And we've had a few people in the Wild doing daytime field work—nothing so intensive as when Egan was in there, admittedly, but enough to confirm or deny The Bachelor's continued existence, I'd wager."

  'Then maybe they're together, Ben."

  "More than likely, they're both dead. That's a pretty unappealable, and unappealing, form of togetherness. Wouldn't you say?"

  "Alive or dead, well, that's what Kretzoi and I are here to find out."

  After that, we worked to prepare the formal prospectus that Eisen had demanded of us at Chaney Field. Elegy knew exactly what she intended to do and how she wished to go about it, and, as a consequence, the document we contrived together was apparently little more than an abridged reprise of her application for the Nyerere Foundation grant that had brought her to Bosk Veld. It came to about two and a half pages of double-spaced text, neatly paragraphed and speedily printed in triplicate by the computer console atop my desk.

  My suppositions about Kretzoi, formed at hazard in the cargo bay of the probeship shuttle, were for the most part confirmed. He was a hybrid primate who had undergone a series of surgical adaptations to make him resemble the Asadi, and Elegy intended to have him coptered into the Wild, to the Asadi clearing itself, there to act as her personal agent-in-place.

  "He's going to require supply drops," I said, "just as Chaney did."

  "Perhaps not. We've adapted to Kretzoi's gut and intestinal tract a colony of protozoa capable of breaking down cellulose; they're dormant now, but a single meal of bark or hardwood will activate them and evoke the programmed symbiotic response. And if you look closely at Kretzoi's teeth, you'll see they're fashioned to make stripping and chewing the Wild's most common plants a relatively easy task. He'll eat what the Asadi eat. Or so we hope."

  "For how long?"

  "Not long at all, if things go right. Just long enough for him to leam the location of the Asadi pagoda and to lead us directly there. I'm not anxious to sit forever behind the lines waiting for that revelation, you know."

  As we worked, I had to answer several long-distance inquiries from the veldt about optimum times and methods for sowing whilais in unbroken savannah soils of varj'ing pH measurements. Other such inquiries I patched through to the agrogeneticists

  housed at Chaney Field. Carryover projects from previous days I dccJt with hastily and peevishly, either setting them aside or feeding them back into the computer for further notation and editing. My attention was fixed on Elegy Gather and her passionate commitment to her self-imposed quest.

  "The last time I saw Egan Chaney," she said when we had finished drawing up our prospectus, "I was eleven years old, and we'd been living on the northern bank of the Japura River in what used to be western Brazil. After the deforestation of the Congo, during the last days of the African Armageddon, a small group of blacks and whites had worked together to evacuate from the Ituri a dozen members of the BaMbuti people with whom my father was so obsessed. These were the last pygmies, Ben, old and sterile and utterly joyless in their forced relocation to a rain forest half a world away from the one in which they'd been bom. There was no hope that they would take hold in the New World and replenish their numbers to their pre-Armageddon strength, but if they stayed in the cratered and poisoned ruins of the Ituri, my father and his colleagues knew, they would die just that much sooner. They'd be gone from the face of the earth as surely as trilobites, pterodactyls, and the Irish elk. Scarred and sickened, then, the BaMbuti survivors were rounded up against their will—for their own good, and the world's too, as Egan Chaney saw it—and airlifted out of the Congolese battle zones to another continent and a tropical reservation in an immaculate clearing along the Japura."

  Elegy paused in this recitation and removed a book from one of the metal shelves suspended precariously from the prefab's ceiling. She turned the book in her hands—the first Swahili edition oi Death and Designation Among the Asadi, one of fifteen or twenty different editions of the monograph I kept on display in my office.

  "Did my father ever speak to you of the Japura Episode?" the young woman suddenly asked me.

  "Never," I responded. "The only comments about the BaMbuti he made here on Bosk Veld, Elegy, are in the monograph you're holding."

  "And he never spoke of my mother or me?"

  "We all assumed him a bachelor—with the possible exception of Moses, who must have known something of his private life before assigning him on as the Third Expedition's xenologist."

  "Do you want to know what happened in Japura Camp, then?"

  "Please."

  "The pygmies—six or seven old women and about that many aged men—began dying. Homesickness, nostalgia, disorientation. I don't know exactly what they were dying of, except that it wasn't anything you could cure with a hypodermic or oral antibiotics. And my mother, who was a doctor, tried to minister to the BaMbuti with medicines as my father, the anthropologist, tried to minister to them with mercy. My mother's name was Celestine Gather, and to join Egan Chancy at Japura Camp in an enterprise she probably recognized as quixotic, she uprooted the two of us from our life in the Tri-Mesa Archipol in the Colorado River Sector of the old Rural American Union. She threw over her practice there. You see, even though their 'marriage' was based on intermittent intellectual companionship, Chaney had appealed to her for help. They had a no-strings understanding in regard to everything in their relationship but the nurture of their daughter." Elegy put both hands on her face and held them there as if to test the reality of her flesh. "My mother once told me that she and Chaney had never slept together. Not once."

  I raised my eyebrows.

  "I was an in vitro baby—conceived of the union of displaced and literally disembodied sexual cells, carried through gestation by mechanical proxy, and bom of a merry virgin crystalline canal in an utterly sanitized laboratory." Elegy laughed at this parodic catalogue, but her laughter was ambiguous.

  "You feel personally diminished by the circumstances of your birth?" I hazarded.

  She dropped her hands. "No, not in the least. That isn't what I was trying to imply at all—only that Egan Chaney and Celestine Cather had a very strange relationship, even by the comprehensive

  standards of the latter-day West. Until the BaMbuti relocation, you see, they had never lived in close proximity to each other for more than a week or two at a time, usually at seasonal intervals of three of four months. They preferred it
that way."

  "You had an absentee father, then?"

  "I had a succession of sohcitous fathers in the Tri-Mesa, short-term uncles and surrogate daddies. And until the last pygmy died and he severed all contact with my mother and me, I had either Egan Chaney's genuine presence or his cassette-recorded image as a fatherly model. Twice a week—without fail while we were living in the Tri-Mesa—a cassette addressed exclusively to me would arrive at our E-cube. I'd hurry to click it into the player to see what fairy tale or exotic myth or stumblebum joke my father was enacting for me this time. There wasn't one I didn't enjoy, and most of them, without being preachy, had a kind of quiet moral to impart. In fact, when we left the Tri-Mesa for Japura Camp, I asked my mother if the cassettes would stop coming now and she said Yes and I was both indignant and chagrined.

  "'You'll have your father in person,' my mother told me. 'Why do you think you'll still require the holotapes?'

  "I didn't know—but when we got to the camp, via a final sweltering trip along the Japura in a ramshackle motor launch, I discovered that I really didn't have my father in person at all. He was too preoccupied with saving the last BaMbuti to favor me with anything more intimate than an occasional weary smile, altogether in passing, and my mother was finding her time similarly monopolized.

  "I dug in the mud, shot feather darts endlessly out of a blowgun into improvised targets, or tagged along after the mestizos from Lago Parica who kept our camp going. The pygmies I saw only rarely, and I knew they were dying—dying in spite of everything Egan Chancy and Celestine Gather could do. . . . It's a measure of my mood, Ben, that I'd begun to think it served the sad, poisoned buggers right."

  Just then an inquiry from SteppeChilde—a veldt colony to the

  far northeast—was patched through my computer from the relay at Chaney Field. I tapped out the communication code indicating preemptive priority business. There was nothing I could tell BoskVeld's impatient SteppeChildren that demanded an immediate response, and Elegy seemed, at the moment, more perilously in need of my ear and my unspoken sympathy.