Elegy had tears in her eyes—whether out of fear that Kretzoi was lost to her forever or joy in the imminent fruition of her plan I couldn't have said. Except for the tears, her face was blank and unreadable. We stood side by side and peered like voyeurs through the impenetrable curtains of the forest.
"What now?" she asked matter-of-factly.
"We wait a time."
"What for? Shouldn't we go after him, check to see that he's not been torn limb from limb or had his mane cut off or maybe just gotten lost?" But she framed her questions clinically rather than emotionally.
I told her we were waiting for the last stragglers to reach the clearing, that we didn't want to encounter an Asadi on its way in, that once we ourselves arrived we would have to take care to prevent our discovery.
Elegy listened to this counsel calmly, acceptingly, and when we at last set off, she wove her way with such skill through the tangled foliage that I finally yielded the lead to her and whispered only a
few minor course corrections to keep her on track. It took us approximately twenty minutes to come within hailing distance of the clearing. Glimpsed through strange geometries in the tropical lacework, the Asadi trudged or flitted unceasingly across this clearing.
"Where is he?" Elegy whispered.
We were crouched side by side beneath an umbrella of silvery roots cascading down from the limb of a rainthom tree. I shook my head helplessly, and the umbrella swayed above us like a living thing.
"I've got to get closer," Elegy told me after we'd been watching for a long time. "This is no good at all."
Before I could protest, she moved away from me, duckwalking forward, one hand occasionally reaching out to maintain her balance, her head as still and upright as a periscope casing. I followed her. The red leather thong in her hair gleamed at me through the undergrowth like a migrating orchid. At last I was beside her again. Asadi went by so near to us I could hear their measured breathing and see the spinning colors in their eyes.
"Listen, Elegy," I began—but she put her fingers to her lips and silenced me. Detection seemed almost inevitable. We were crouched in a shallow crumbling pit from which the huge bamboo-ridged bole of a tree grew up, and what cover we had was really little more than a swatch of falling shade.
Close up, the Asadi seemed to be performing some kind of nightmarish Sisyphean labor. The rock they pushed up the hill every day, only to have it roll crushingly back down upon them, was their commitment to an endless daytime sociability in their jungle clearing. At the same time, they were—by human standards—devastatingly alone in their commitment to this life. Interactions beyond brutal, random coitus and ferocious bouts of staring were rare. Indifferent Togetherness Chaney had rightly tagged the unifying principle of the Asadi social order, but I had never felt that principle so keenly as I did that afternoon. I pitied
Kretzoi his initiation into such an irrational system, and I wondered briefly if he might not be better off faihng to gain the Asadi's acceptance and actually suffering some grievous physical punishment at their hands.
"There he is," Elegy whispered excitedly. "There." She pointed at an Asadi slouching along the clearing's perimeter, heading south amid a number of lackadaisical Asadi, and at first all I could tell about him was that he looked like all the others.
"No. I don't think so."
"Yes," Elegy insisted, gripping my arm and turning her head so that she could read my expression. "He's perfect. He's one of them." When she looked back at the Asadi, she corroborated her own testimony by failing at first to pick out the one she had labeled Kretzoi. "Damn. I've lost him. . . . No. There he is. Look, Ben, that one right there."
A tawny mane amid the silver, silver-blue, and thick orange-gold ones. A body somewhat less gnarled and scarred than the others.
"You're right. Elegy. We've seen him. Now let's get out of here."
She wouldn't budge. Then, suddenly, she stood up and took an incautious step forward.
"Elegy!" I cried, half aloud.
Her movement and my voice betrayed us to the Asadi. Their procession halted abreast of us, six or seven Asadi bunching up in file and then disengaging from one another in order to fall to all fours and appraise us with madly pinwheeling eyes. I grabbed Elegy's arm and pulled her back. One of the large silver-blue Asadi males lunged tentatively at us, staying well within the clearing and erecting the hairs on his back and upper arms. Elegy shook off my hand.
"Get out of there," I advised her fiercely. "The least you're likely to lose is your hair."
I had a vivid memory of the way the Asadi, upon accidentally
discovering our equipment, had savagely wrecked a holocamera and a recording device installed one night in a tree near their clearing. . . .
But instead of retreating or standing stock-still and hoping to be spared. Elegy grasped the limb of a tree and, hooting threateningly, rattled the fronds with such animation that not an Asadi on BoskVeld could have remained unaware of her presence. The silver-maned male hurriedly backed off, and several nearby Asadi did likewise. The tribe's mute remainder gazed toward us in immobile surprise and perplexity.
"If I had a pair of garbage-can lids," Elegy said aloud, glancing back at me, "I could give 'em all heart attacks."
"You've given me one," I said angrily. "Maybe Kretzoi, too,"
"We really should go, shouldn't we?" Elegy acknowledged.
I didn't say anything. I crept forward, touched her elbow, and eased her away from the tree whose fronds she'd just deployed in our defense. I noticed that the eyes of the nearest Asadi were radiating colors as quickly and as dizzyingly as had the eyebook in the Archaeological Museum—with the result that the Asadi's physical selves were dimmed by the racing spectral patterns and made to appear as transparent and colorless as water. The creatures in the foreground, in fact, seemed all eyes. Their bodies were ghostly outlines, nothing more.
Illusion, I told myself, backpedaling the two of us discreetly into the forest. A trick of the light; a brief, irrational perception bom of crisis and fear.
Indeed, as we got deeper into the Wild and farther from the clearing, the nearest creatures' bodies took on substance again, fur and pigmentation emerging from wherever they had disappeared to.
"Did you see them fade?" I asked Elegy as we turned and fled toward the drop point and our encampment.
"I saw it—I'm not sure I believe it."
The Asadi didn't attempt to pursue. Either Elegy had frightened
them too badly or their commitment to the clearing was too strong. Maybe both.
Scraped, and bruised, and drenched in our own sweat, we reached the drop point, having run or trotted nearly the entire distance. Elegy began grinning like a maniac and pounding on the Dragonfly's fuselage in a primitive outburst of joy and triumph. I slid beneath the awning of our tent and lay flat on my back trying to breathe. My exhaustion and Elegy's pounding were so well synchronized they almost comprised a jingle, unmerciful pulse.
"He's in!" Boom, boom! "He's in!" Boom, boom! "He's in!" Boom, boom! And so on unto, it seemed, the very collapse of Time.
"Have pity," I managed feebly after this had been going on for ages. "Elegy, have pity."
"Sorry, Ben." The pounding stopped and Elegy knelt above me with a warm and beatific expression. Leaning forward and reiterating what I already knew, she whispered, "Kretzoi—he's in."
"Boom, boom," I replied.
Later, recovered from our run, I turned on a fan in the Dragonfly and used my hand typer to transcribe several pages of notes. While I was working, Elegy climbed into the helicraft and interrupted me. She sat down in the cone of wind blowing from the fan and waited patiently for an opening. I looked up.
"He's in—but he could be in there for months, maybe even years, without a significant break in their behavior."
"That's right," I said. The bloom was off the rose.
"Do you think their seeming to fade means anything?"
"Only that it gives me an idea why your daddy
liked to call this place the Synesthesia Wild. For him, trapped in this jungle, colors made noises, sounds had a tactile quality, smooth was sweet and
rough was spicy. Or maybe we were just hallucinating."
"But has this ever happened to you before? My father doesn't mention anything quite like it—their fading, I mean—in his monograph."
"Nothing exactly like it has happened to me before," I admitted. "Or, so far as I know, to any of Chaney's part-time successors. But they didn't stand on the edge of the clearing and rattle branches at the Asadi, either."
"You think we were hallucinating?"
"It's possible. A function of the Wild, Asadi hysteria, and our own fear. Who knows?"
"Do you think Kretzoi will hallucinate, then?"
"If he does, Elegy, I'd guess that having been accepted as one of them, he'll participate in the group psychoses of the Asadi. He won't draw undue attention to himself by suffering conspicuously solitary mind trips."
Elegy stared at me thoughtfully.
"That's supposed to be comforting," I assured her. "It may be that their discovering us on the edge of their clearing triggered in the Asadi a process that triggered in us a tendency to see the thing which is not."
"I don't like that, Ben."
"Why not?"
"It has certain nasty implications about the accuracy of what my father saw in the Wild and reported in his ethnography."
"Not if you assume that as one of the Asadi—which, in his role as an outcast, Chaney paradoxically happened to be—he could hallucinate only what the Asadi hallucinated. In which case he reported, as accurately as it's given a human being to do, the subjective reality of the Asadi themselves. Or a portion of it, anyway."
"That's clever enough to be off-putting, Ben."
I shrugged, looked at my hands. "You don't like it because it undermines the objective reality of your father's reports."
"All right, then. Do you really believe my father shared the group psychoses of the Asadi?"
"I don't know. It's almost impossible to verify, isn't it?"
"Except, maybe, through Kretzoi."
We sat facing each other in the cargo section of the BenDragon Prime, sharing the sultry windiness of the fan and thinking divergent thoughts.
"If," Elegy finally allowed, "the Asadi only do or hallucinate something significant while Kretzoi's among them. Otherwise, nothing. We'll be wasting our time and the Nyerere Foundation's money."
"That's supremely possible."
"Damn," Elegy said.
"In which case I'd suggest taking action outside the traditional tactics of mere observation and reportage."
"Like what?"
"Let's wait and see how things develop," I urged her quietly.
Her face took on an expression of mild pique. Without another word she got up, brushed past me and the rattling fan, and exited the helicraft into the tight little bowl of our clearing.
Denebola, somewhere, was sinking into the tepid waters of Calyptra, extinguishing itself in a vast caldron of brine. The Wild came alive in the settling darkness. The Asadi rushed from their assembly ground like children let out of school, and the forest's twilight trees, arrayed in ragged choirs against the coming night, began seething inwardly with the eerie music of glycolysis.
Kretzoi—almost as we had given up looking for him—came creeping back into camp and asked Elegy for something besides hardwood and bark to relieve his hunger. His eyes were distant and unutterably weary.
CHAPTER SIX
Lovers
Elegy gave Kretzoi a flask of water and an orangish puree of protein and potassium. He ate and drank languidly, then swung off a short distance into the Wild and prepared to make his first outdoor nest since arriving on the planet. Elegy and I finished our own small meal, and I went back into the helicraft to fetch a couple of stems of lorqual for an after-dinner drink. As I was opening the stems, the radio in the Dragonfly began making high-pitched summoning noises.
"You answer it," I told Elegy.
"Why?" She was closer to the helicraft's cabin than was I, but she had encumbered herself with the reptilian folds of an air mattress while I was fetching the drinks.
"Because it's Moses Eisen, and you'll do better with the old man than I would. Turn up the outside speaker, though— I don't want you to have to repeat the epithets he hurls at me."
"Won't the Asadi hear, too?" she protested.
'That's all right. I'm not particularly worried about what the Asadi think of me, Elegy." A witticism strictly from lorqual.
"Answer it yourself," Elegy said, parent to child.
Because she was clearly determined to refuse me, I stumbled into the Dragonfly and took Moses's radioed rebuke. He was self-possessed and rational in his anger, but he wanted to know why we had not come back to Frasierville that evening and how we proposed to explain our continued presence in the Wild. Kretzoi, Moses said, was supposed to be our in-the-field agent, and if he wasn't, what was the purpose of our having introduced him into the Asadi clearing, assuming of course that we had? Finally, still angry, he backed up and inquired sheepishly about the status of our mission. I told him where we stood. Justified in his initial gut appraisal of our duplicity, he again demanded to know why we were where we were. I began to feel a raw, inadvisable rebelliousness rising in my throat.
At which point Elegy slid into the Dragonfly's cabin and took the radio away from me. "We couldn't go off and leave Kretzoi without determining that the Asadi had accepted him," she said irrefutably.
"Your prospectus seems to indicate you believed his acceptance among them a foregone conclusion," accused Moses's distance-thinned voice.
"That was intentional, sir. But the certainties of theories and expectations have to be confirmed in practice. It would be ridiculous to permit Kretzoi to die because of the abstract optimism of a project paper."
"He didnt die, though, did he?"
"No, but we had to be here to monitor his initiation into the clearing and his return this evening to my father's old drop point."
"Tomorrow you and Dr. Benedict will come home to Frasierville."
Elegy looked at me by the glow of the Dragonfly's instrument panel. When I shook my head, she smiled conspiratorially. "No,
sir. We have supplies for nearly a week, and we'll spend our days here recording and studying the reports Kretzoi gives us each evening when he returns to our camp. We're his moral support, you understand. The Asadi ritual of Indifferent Togetherness is truly fatiguing, and he's not used to it. It may take him awhile to adjust. Tonight, Governor Eisen, he could tell us only that the experience both terrified and exhausted him. At dawn he has to go back in. To desert him for even a day under such circumstances would be ethically reprehensible and scientifically counterproductive."
Then, to turn the tables on Moses, she asked a single precisely pertinent question: "Why are you so set on getting Dr. Benedict and me back to town when we can best do our work in the Wild?"
A silence—as if we were subtemporally radioing another planet and had to endure a brief transmission lag. Into this silence I read the archaic Victorian and modem neocolonial social biases of Moses Eisen, as well as his very human chagrin at being so logically defied.
At last he said, "I just don't want to lose anybody else to the boonies. Civ Gather. Your father was plenty, I think."
"Nor do we want to lose Kretzoi to the Asadi, Governor Eisen," said Chaney's daughter.
'Til expect you and Dr. Benedict back in Frasierville in five days. Six at the very most. Good night, Giv Gather. Good night, Ben."
The radio clicked off, and we were alone again in the claustrophobic coziness of the Wild.
Asadi males, when they indulge their brief but vicious sexual appetites, mount from the rear. Almost all terrestrial primates also approach their partners from behind. It seems possible to conclude—a posteriori, if you will—that on whatever world it has evolved, the basic primate morphology demands this approach.
Mor
eover, in many primate social units the responsibilities of paternity are principally a matter of begetting rather than of nurture. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am, and daddy's duty's done. Did Asadi males play any part in the upbringing of their species' infants? Chimpanzee fathers do not, although upon occasion an older male sibling will take an inquisitive interest in his mother's most recent issue and later attempt to involve it in friendly, fraternal roughhouse. Closely spaced brothers often become fast friends as adults. Other males, however, are either only briefly curious or almost totally indifferent to new arrivals.
Among the Asadi—beyond Sankosh's film proving that birth did indeed occur on BoskVeld—we didn't even know to what extent the females were involved in the nurture of their offspring. Females as well as males had been seen to mount their partners from the rear, however, and large females climbed parodically aboard diminutive males at least as often as they themselves suffered such assaults. In the Calyptran Wild the sexual act always seemed as degrading and faceless as rape. It took place in public, on the assembly ground, and its social context resembled that of an altercation between masked strangers. On BoskVeld, as on Earth, genuine love between consenting adult primates of opposite sexes was even rarer than the private, face-to-face sexual embrace that is almost exclusively specific to humankind. . . .
Why do I inject this comparison/contrast of terrestrial and alien primate sexuality precisely here? Primarily because it was on my mind that night. I was trying, perhaps within a grandiosely encompassing frame, to interpret the meaning of what happened to Elegy and me after Moses's voice had faded off into the garble of interstellar static.
Face to face in the Dragonfly's cabin, we smiled at each other— as content in the triumph of the moment as we were comfortable in the knowledge that Moses had been embarrassed by the thought of our manifold chances for intimacy. Elegy's smile encouraged me, and I leaned toward her and brushed her lips with mine. I, the male, initiated this contact, keeping my eyes open to see what
effect it would have on her. Her eyes remained open, too. She watched as from an Olympian height, her gaze steady and penetrating even when we were nose to nose in the follow-through of my calculating kiss. My temples pounded, my hands began to sweat, and I felt fifteen again. Meanwhile, her face—illumined by the glow of the instrument panel—grew to oceanic dimensions and wavered in my vision like a mist. Then, still without closing her eyes, she returned the pressure of my lips.
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