Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  "There's an Asadi aft," I reminded him over the outside speaker. "I thought that's why you hadn't already boarded."

  Still cupping his eyes, he shouted, "If I were afraid of Boonie Fever, I'd've put in for reassignment seven years ago." He turned, passed out of view, and came clambering aboard the BenDragon Prime so enthusiastically that his entry rocked the entire craft.

  Elegy and I met him in the rear, where Kretzoi was hunkering dazedly amid the ration kits and inflatable pillows littering the floor. Our Asadi, screened away in the tail section, had not moved in the last two hours—he resembled a small pile of animal pelts

  shoved against a bulkhead and left there to breed moths.

  "Sure it's not dead?" Moses asked.

  "No," I admitted.

  "^Tiat do you propose to do wth it if it isn't? I don't recall anything in Civ Gather's prospectus about capturing an Asadi."

  "The terms of my grant gave us that option," Elegy said, almost as if I had worked a psychic ventriloquism upon her. "You asked us our second night out, as a courtesy, to return to Frasierille today. Since we weren't getting terribly far with our preliminary methods, we invoked the direct-intercession clause of the grant. I don't think you'll have to worrv- about a Komm inquin.- into the legitimacy of what we did. Governor Eisen. TTie Nyerere Foundation's on extremely good terms with the big^^•igs of Glaktik Komm."

  "That still leaves the question of what to do with the critter," Moses said. "Frasienille doesn't have a zoo."

  "I want Kretzoi to work with him," Elegy declared. "As soon as he's had his wounds tended to and taken a rest."

  "Where?" Moses wanted to know. "I'm not happy about Ben's bringing the Asadi out of the ^'ild, but Fm willing to concede he showed a modicum of sa'VT landing out here instead of bang-smack in the middle of town."

  "^'hat about the probeship hangar?" I suggested. It was east of us in the dark, lit orJy by its o^s"n artificial battlements of red-orange paint. Phosphorescent paint. So far as I knew it had never been used as anything but an au.xiliar)' warehouse for goods eventually transshipped by helicraft or settlement cars to Amer-savane, SteppeGhilde, Prairie View, or one of the other veldt colonies. Other^dse, the hangar was of no use to anyone.

  "The probeship hangar?" Moses said musingly.

  "Yes, sir," I responded. "^'e'd be isolated from Frasienille, but we'd have plenty of room and almost immediate access to the civkis and Komm employees out here at Chaney Field."

  Surprisingly, he agreed.

  The Ghaney Field security force permitted me to taxi the BenDragon Prime in toward the translucent green support build-

  ings, and I spent that night in the terminal complex, lying awake on a cot in the antechamber to Moses's plush private office.

  Elegy and Kretzoi rode back into Frasierville with the Governor in order to admit Kretzoi to the hospital—not as a resident in the first-floor guest wing, but as a patient.

  As Moses's party drove off, I heard two young civkis outside the terminal joking that the Komm-galens at the hospital would be surprised to find that their Governor regarded them as little better than "crit vets." It had been a long time since I had heard that local epithet given such a vicious intonation. Even the civkis' youthful, ebullient laughter failed to gentle the nastiness of their repartee. If they found Kretzoi such a distasteful creature, what must they think of the Asadi we had just brought out of the Wild?

  For that night—still unsummonably zonked—the Asadi was confined in the debussy of Governor Eisen's upstairs suite. I had carried him there myself, marveling again at the softness of his matted fur and the almost reedlike flimsiness of his body. Moses had insisted that I lay the Asadi out on the floor of his majolica-tile shower stall and then lock the creature in with the sliding, shatterproof door. That way, the Governor told me, if our guest got caught short during the night, it would be quite easy to clean up his mess by a remote activation of the shower spray.

  My cot in the antechamber to Moses's office was only a few meters from the debussy, and one of the reasons 1 lay helplessly insomniac that night was that I kept waiting for the Asadi to wake up and begin violently protesting his internment. I don't know whether it was a relief or a torment to me that he never did.

  When I went into the debussy the following morning, I found that the Asadi had recovered consciousness. He was sitting motionlessly in the shower cage, a distorted two-dimensional blur behind the milky glass. Not even my purposely noisy entry had been enough to animate him.

  Suddenly I was frightened.

  How was I going to get him out? I didn't want to tranq him again, even had that option appeared an easy one to execute— which it didn't. Nor did I simply want to slide back the door and offer to shake hands.

  Because it was still early, I returned to the antechamber where my cot was and sat down on its rumpled bedding to wait for help. Outside, the morning bustle of Chaney Field lifted its already monotonous drone, lulling me into a state of apathy almost totally untainted by fear.

  Then I heard a small—a downright modest—thump in Moses's luxurious debussy. My fear came back. This was the only sound that had emanated from the debussy all that morning, and when I finally worked up enough courage to go back in, I found that my problem had solved itself. The Asadi, after having briefly revived, had collapsed again. I slid back the ripple-glass door and stared at his slender, crumpled body. When Moses came, we had no trouble getting the creature out—although by this time I had begun to fear that he would die.

  That afternoon, with Elegy and Kretzoi still in Frasierville, Moses permitted me to relocate some of my personal effects in the probeship hangar north of the terminal building. He even accompanied me out there. We carried the Asadi in the air-conditioned cargo section of one of the airfield's armored vans. A Komm-service paramedic, riding with our captive in the back, fed him glucose intravenously on the dicy say-so of a portalab analysis of a tissue sample taken from the sole of his right foot. She also insisted on administering along with the glucose what she termed "an extremely mild sedative" in order to insure that her patient didn't awaken en route. It was impossible to scold her for a misbegotten apprehension—I remembered how fearful of the creature I had been that morning.

  The probeship hsmgar was a monolithic slum. That description, even in retrospect, seems very nearly perfect. The building was longer and wider than the Asadi clearing, but, crisscrossed wth swaths of luminous paint, it had a tarry-looking exterior that took it altogether out of the natural order of things. Doors as large as rainforest thunderheads rumbled aside on metal tracks on the north and south flanks of the building, while smaller doors—for people—punctuated the hangar's length like the spaces between a comb's teeth, so numerous were they. Across the lower right-hand comer of the hangar's southern wall swept the beginnings of an embarrassingly erotic mural, laser etched at midnight by a bored Komm-service guard who was summarily court-martialed and reassigned to another colony planet. Satyr. Maiden. Stag. Two years before, a perfunctory attempt to fill and smooth the laser scars had been abandoned before the guard's artwork succumbed utterly, and now—even though nobody remembered his name— the man was a legend in Frasierville's Komm-service barracks as well as in most of the major pleasure houses on Night Drag Boulevard.

  Inside, volumes of space. Automatically self-polarizing skylights permitted the passage of light while aiding in the maintenance of a consistent internal temperature (approximately 30°C, fairly warm). We weren't going to have air conditioning, Moses had said, but at least we probably wouldn't fall victim to heat stroke, either. Three catwalks made of metal dock plates and extensible steel platforms went around the hangar's interior at different but adjustable heights. In addition, one end of the facility boasted a recreation area for the higher-ranking probeship engineers (the ones who had never made it to Bosk Veld, and never would), with carpeted pathways running among tubs of artificial botanicals and simulated teakwood flower boxes. A kidney-shaped swimming pool nestled at an off-center confl
uence of the meandering carpets—but a structural defect kept the pool from holding water and Moses had never given anyone authorization to repair it.

  The probeship hangar embarrassed Moses. Everything about it

  recalled for him the folly of Bosk Veld's rising expectations after Glaktik Komm's decision to colonize. Only the fact that the hangar's floor and mezzanines provided Chaney Field with a good deal of needed storage space had prevented Moses from having the building razed. The gantry, I sometimes thought, he allowed to stand as a symbol of popular gullibility—but the hangar, well, it simply gave him a headache.

  Using a stretcher, the paramedic and I carried the Asadi into the recreation area, where we lowered our burden to the green all-purpose carpeting near the swimming pool.

  The young woman, looking about critically, said, "This place is sort of a cross between a tropical paradise and a veldt-rover factory, isn't it?"

  Moses thanked her for her help and told her she could return to the van, which, after canting the Asadi to the floor and collapsing the stretcher under her arm, she did with almost overobedient cheerfulness.

  "I'd suggest you put him in the swimming pool and unroll one of those prefab soft-wall fences with the plug-in gates," Moses said. "That way, you'll have him confined and under control. If you want to, you can extend a ramp from the lowest catwalk and sit guard over him. A hose will take care of most of your sanitation problems."

  Moses, I thought, seemed almost obsessed with sanitation problems. He must have seen the amusement in my face.

  "Your Asadi stinks," he said defensively. "I'm just trying to get you settled in, under reasonably favorable circumstances. This isn't anything like quarantine, you know. It's more an adaptation to available resources."

  "It ought to do," I said placatingly.

  "How long do you intend to be here, anyway? You seem to have thrown over your initial prospectus."

  "I suppose that depends on the kind of 'work' Elegy wants Kretzoi to do with our friend here." I nudged the Asadi gently with my boot. "And on the results of that work."

  "Do you think you can keep him alive?"

  "We'll need an assortment of plants from the Wild to provide him the basics of the Asadi diet. After that . . . well, it's up to him."

  "I'll see to it you have what you need," Moses told me. "I'll also send in some people to help you get up that fence."

  Moses gave me an odd half wave, and left me alone with my Asadi in the immense, solitary hangar. I carried the creature down the steps of the empty swimming pool and deposited him gently on the bottom of the deep end.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later a crew of civki laborers came into the hangar, found a roll of soft-wall fencing, and installed it around the pool with a double gate near the shallow end and several swan-necked supports to keep it from falling. The fence was bright yellow—Sol-colored—so cheerful in its juxtaposition with the pastel-green interior of the pool that, looking down upon the scene from an extensible catwalk ramp, I simply had to smile.

  Elegy and Kretzoi joined me late that afternoon, long after the Asadi had recovered from his second drugging. They entered the hangar's recreation area from the south, saw me beckoning from my vantage overhead, and found a metal stairway by which to ascend to the first lofty mezzanine. I was taking notes at a desk assembled from a square of plastic dock plating, and when they had squeezed along the catwalk to places on either side of me, I nodded down at the pool.

  "How is he?" Elegy whispered.

  "Weak and bewildered—not too surprisingly. After he came to, he spent most of his day crouched in the deep end, up against that wall there, staring at the skylights. He knows I'm up here, but he avoids looking this way. You've arrived in time to witness his reaction to his first sunset away from the Asadi clearing."

  "Do you want to know how Kretzoi is?"

  I looked at the hybrid primate, saw the clean bandage on his arm and the various places about his body where the hair had been shaved to permit the attachment of sensors. Poor Kretzoi. The victim of a whimsical precision plucking.

  "Hypoglycemia," Elegy said.

  The word didn't register. I blinked. Nothing more.

  "Low blood sugar," she explained. "When we arrived at the hospital last night, he fainted—actually fainted. A combination of the loss of blood and his hypoglycemic condition."

  "And today he was well enough to be released?"

  'They treated his lacerations and gave him a unit of glucose. They also chemically inhibited his own insulin-producing capability in order to permit the natural glucose level to build back up. I don't know what else they could have done, really. Besides, they were ready to have us both out of there. We made 'em even more nervous as patients than we did as guests."

  "Glucose?" I belatedly echoed her.

  "To restore the normal sugar-content levels of his blood." Elegy gave a sharp, sardonic laugh. "Very elementary. Even a 'crit vet' knows the reason for that procedure, Ben."

  "That's what the paramedic gave Bojangles this morning," I said, randomly coining a name for our Asadi. "From a quick determination she made from a skin scraping. Glucose."

  "That doesn't seem terribly odd. Glucose is a pretty basic reservoir of potential energy in most carbon-based life forms, isn't it? If your tranquilizer worked, why shouldn't glucose prove effective, too?"

  "How similar to the Asadi are we?" I asked aloud, not so much of Elegy as of the early-evening sky still brilliantly agleam in the panes of the hanger's skylights. The immensity of the hangar and of the cloudless grey-blue vault overarching it reduced all of us, in my mind's eye, to proud but presumptuous specks. And then Denebola set.

  "Look," Elegy whispered, touching my arm.

  Bojangles stood full up on the bottom of the empty pool. He

  lifted his snout to the skylights and sniffed bronchially. Then he performed a kind of spinning run that carried him out of the kidney-shaped pool and headlong into the soft-wall fence. Bo-jangles was unable to claw or bite his way through. Belted internally with microscopic polymer reticulations, the soft-wall skin didn't even tear—^just pinched, unfolded, and returned to its former mocking yellow smoothness. At last, spent, Bojangles lay down on the narrow margin of the pool and assumed a fetal position reminiscent of Kretzoi's two nights before.

  "And what did you say he did all day?" Elegy asked me.

  "Tried to track Denebola's progress through the skylights. He kept staring up. You can see he didn't eat any of the liana bark or foliage we tossed in to him earlier this afternoon."

  "We're fortunate he's still alive, Ben."

  "So is he, assuming he values life away from the Asadi clearing."

  "We've doomed him, you know. He's small, but he's an adult, and adults of most parahuman species don't take kindly to having their psyches rearranged at so late a date. He'll quite likely die in our keeping." The unspoken implication was that my own impatience had subjected Bojangles to a gauntlet of unnecessary cruelties.

  "We had to get Kretzoi out," I defended myself. "They've diagnosed his condition as hypoglycemia, right? Suppose we'd stayed. Elegy. Suppose his condition had deteriorated to the point of his actually collapsing in the clearing."

  "All right," Elegy said tonelessly.

  And those two words, spoken in just that way, shut me up. The hangar was growing dark. I got up, squeezed past Elegy on the narrow extension ramp, and tottered between its rails to the northern mezzanine. Here, throwing four different light switches, I flooded the hangar with cold illumination. Far off to the east, beyond the recreation area, barrel upon barrel and crate upon crate of surplus materiel were arrayed in honeycomb patterns across the hangar's floor. Shadows cobwebbed the distant recesses

  and catwalks as well, drooping like silver-edged parachutes or shrouds.

  Kretzoi was signing something urgent to Elegy.

  She turned to me and translated: "He wants to go down there now, Ben. He wants to introduce himself into the Asadi's compound tonight."

 
"Why? They're diurnal creatures, obviously. He won't be able to do anything until tomorrow. If then."

  Kretzoi made several more succinct gestures.

  "He'd simply like to be ready," Elegy translated. "He believes that if—what are you calling him, Bojangles?—that if Bojangles awakens to find him there, it'll be better than if we make a show of introducing him later on. I think he's right. Bojangles has already suffered shocks aplenty."

  Grudgingly, wondering if Elegy hadn't been putting words in Kretzoi's hands, I consented. I had to. Elegy was, in truth, the director of our project. And grudgingly I escorted Kretzoi down to the hangar floor in order to admit him through the fence's twin gates into the presence of our sleeping captive. . . .

  CHAPTER NINE

  BOJANGLES

  Bojangles didn't eat. Although Komm-service personnel brought him fodder from the Wild—succulent fronds, skeins of prodigal epiphytic roots, the pale egglike pods of the lorqual tree—nothing that we put before him tempted him. Each evening when Bojangles fell asleep, Kretzoi would bring out of the compound the wilted remains of that day's menu. I burned the noxious leftovers in a pit behind the hangar, offended by the smell but thankful for an opportunity to stand outside in the evening air. Sometimes, burning them, I would request another delivery of the Komm-service guards who patrolled the perimeters of the hangar and who dropped by at set times to see if there was anything we needed. So well did these guards suppress their curiosity about our "experiment" that I often wondered if they were human.

  Be thankful for small favors. Elegy told me. She referred in particular to the fact that Bojangles listlessly drank all the water

  we set out for him, apparently absorbing most of it into the mitochondria of his body cells. He pissed infrequently, usually in the dribbling fashion of a human male with prostate or urethral difficulties. (A hose, as Moses prophesied with a degree of inadvertent irony, was more than adequate to the task of poolside sanitation. Elegy and I alternated custodial duties down there, usually after releasing Kretzoi each evening for food and rest.) But Bojangles's readiness to quench his thirst seemed to be indicative of an involuntary will to live. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he wished to live or to die.