Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  A Time Between Times

  That evening, by sheer chance, I happened through the central lobby of the Chaney Field terminal at the same time a pair of Komm-service guards was escorting former E-5 Spenser Pettijohn to a detention area in one of the field's outbuildings.

  Moses Eisen had sat in summary judgment of the man on the second day after Bojangles's death, convicting him of the malign abduction of E-3 Filly Deuel, the forcible implication of E-3 Deuel in the commission of a high felony, the misappropriation and criminal use of Kommfleet weapons, and, most tellingly, the "malicious homicide" of a representative of a Komm-protected indigenous alien species.

  When I saw Pettijohn in the airfield lobby, I knew he was going off-planet to a GK-world with rehabilitative/punitive Long Sleep facilities. Provisionally sedated and mind-tamp'd, he already looked like a zombie. As Kretzoi, in Elegy's view, was one of the

  Asadi's "walking dead," Pettijohn was one of ours. When he approached between his guards, I stepped out of the way. The next time he awoke to life he would find himself on an unfamiliar world among strangers, an E-1 again, newly indentured and as stingingly raw as an April onion.

  Reborn.

  Fifty years of time-released, salutary nightmares lay ahead of him. Dreams that beneficially terrorize the immobile sleeper. Hypnopedagogic visions that insinuate a dawning ethical awareness through a series of varied reenactments of the crime itself. Painful neurological appeals to the heart and the head . . .

  Only within the past three decades had the process become economically feasible, and Pettijohn, by his murder of Bojangles, had made himself an heir to Kommthor's distressing mercy.

  I stood in awe of the killer as he passed—not for what he had done, but for the sweet, dread justice of what was about to befall him. Then I hurried through the terminal lobby into the twilight and found a driver to take me to my sleeping quarters in Frasierville.

  Although we had continued to share with Kretzoi our mezzanine accommodations in the probeship hangar. Elegy and I had not slept together since the Asadi's death. Our relationship was strained, only superficially cordial. Kretzoi's disaffection with human beings had something to do with this, as did, certainly, the lingering trauma of Pettijohn's killing of Bojangles. . . . Maybe Elegy and I had just been too close to each other for too long. Our faces were as familiar as a mismatched pair of shoes you can't bring yourself to throw away; our smells were as inextricably woven together as the strands of a wet hemp rope.

  The morning after Bojangles's death I had asked Moses to let me move back into town, but he had insisted that all three of us remain where we were until he assessed the reaction of Frasier-

  ville's population to the murder. Rumors would bruit the news about, he said, even if we tried to keep a lid on it; we were safer where Komm-service guards could keep a regular watch on us. I argued that they hadn't prevented Pettijohn and Deuel from finagling their way in and doing their worst—but Moses merely murmured, "Once wounded, twice wary," and that was the end of my request.

  Now, though, I was on my way home.

  The lights of Frasierville welcomed me, and even my ratty sleeping quarters, so in contrast to Moses's bedecked and arcaded "mansion," seemed luxuriously appointed. The fusty closed-in smell that greeted me was a perfume, and even the clamminess of my unmade bed exuded a delicious welcome. I was glad to be alone. I kicked around in the dark, tossing my clothes and listening to the inarticulate gurgle of the toilet in my debussy. I could even hear the Wild sighing, a mysterious whisper of growth and decay.

  I wasn't sure I wanted to go back out there. Bojangles's death had dampened my fervor. Kretzoi's regal contempt had soured me on his company. Elegy's formal politeness, in combination with her renewed faith in her own foresightedness in bringing Kretzoi to Bosk Veld, had taken the edge off my desire to accompany her into the Wild again. Besides, it was good to be alone with my imperfections. So good, I confess, that I spent four whole days lounging about intractably with them.

  "Wake up, Ben! You're holding us up, you wretched slugabed!" Elegy was on my tiny porch banging at the door and calling my name. She sounded her old impertinent self. Squinting, I opened the door and stared down at Jaafar Bahadori and Kretzoi coexisting in the front seat of a lorry-pool veldt-rover. Buddies. They had just arrived together from Chaney Field, all three of them. Elegy squeezed past me into the room, urging me to get dressed (I was

  wearing a sleeping jacket whose hem fell to midcalf) and surveying my quarters like a traveler who has unexpectedly stumbled upon the scene of a massacre.

  "We're going on over to Rain Forest Port to prepare the BenDragon Prime!" Jaafar shouted from the veldt-rover. "Governor Eisen has given me permission to go, too, sir!"

  The vehicle spun out, wheeled left around the southern corner of my quonset, and disappeared. Morning sunlight glittered in the the jungle, and, when I shut the door, I faced back into an overmastering dimness.

  "It stinks in here," said Elegy's voice from somewhere in front of me.

  My eyes readjusted and I found her. "I've been burning epiphytes in my bathtub," I said.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. You just reminded me of Jaafar. Good thing he didn't come in. What's this about his going with us, anyway?"

  "We may be able to use a little help this time," Elegy said seriously. "He knows how to handle a weapon, he can fly a Dragonfly, and he'll stay on the radio for us. Besides, Ben, he's being subtly harassed by persons unknown. They've ripped open his bunk closet and shredded his uniforms. They've posted threatening messages to his Komm-service box. Governor Eisen thinks he'll be better off in the rain forest."

  "Jaafar? In the rain forest?"

  "Jaafar made the suggestion, but Governor Eisen approved it and I wholly concur. What about you?"

  "Fine. I guess. But where's E-3 Deuel these days? She being harassed, too?"

  "The day of Pettijohn's trial Eisen sent her to SteppeChilde with a helicraft shipment. She'll pull a duty tour out there. I think it's the Governor's way of punishing her for handling the situation less expertly than she should have."

  "Elegy," I said abruptly. She looked at me with raised eyebrows, and I asked, "Do you really intend to send Kretzoi into

  the Asadi clearing in the guise of one of their chieftains?"

  "Not right at first. We have some things to do before that."

  "But eventually?"

  "Yes. That's why we're going back."

  "How do you intend to send him in there? Just as Eisen Zwei entered the clearing on the final three occasions before his death?"

  "As much like that as possible, yes."

  "Carrying, each time, a dressed-out carcass with which to feed either the Asadi multitudes or himself?"

  "That's right."

  "What do you plan to use for meat. Elegy?"

  "Meat. What else? Governor Eisen has given us a couple of sections of imported beef from a recent shipment, and Jaafar's outfitting BenDragon Prime with a refrigeration locker. If these substitutes don't give Kretzoi the credibility he needs, we may simply have to use the genuine article."

  "The genuine article?"

  "Before he was killed, Bojangles told Kretzoi what the Asadi eat when they return to the Wild at night and how it may be possible for us to find their nests. Sankosh lucked into his solitary moment of glory, Ben, but Kretzoi's going to lead us to our discoveries on the basis of a certain knowledge."

  "The Asadi are truly cannibals, then?"

  Elegy took a tunic off the seat of the cane chair next to my bed, wrapped the tunic around the chair back, and sat down in the midst of all my dwelling's sweet-and-sour debris. "Part time," she said. "Nocturnal cannibals. Moonlighters, if you like. Where else in the Calyptran Wild could they possibly find meat? My father came to understand their secret, you know."

  Elegy seemed smug again. I wanted to puncture her smugness. "We've never really considered the possibility that he may have been eaten," I said with swift irreverence.

  Sh
e gave me a puzzled look, then fell into quiet contemplation. After a while she said, "Ben, I don't think that happened."

  I was a prisoner in my own house, trapped by the pathos Elegy

  generated and the comic dishonor of my early-morning dishabille. It suddenly struck me that this was not where I wished to be.

  "Elegy, you've forgotten one very important thing about your father's description of Eisen Zwei's various appearances in the Asadi clearing."

  "The huri," Elegy said.

  "The huri," I echoed her.

  "I haven't forgotten at all," she said. "I really haven't. Eisen Zwei's batlike little familiar has been much on my mind, Ben. But do you happen to know a huri personally?"

  My expression as neutral as I could make it, I stared at her.

  "Scratch that," she said, standing up so quickly she had to grab my chair to keep it from falling. "I'm sorry, Ben. I realize no one's ever seen a huri except my father. Kretzoi tried to ask Bojangles about the creatures, but either the Asadi didn't understand the sign Kretzoi had to invent or else he didn't wish to discuss the subject. In any case, the existence of the huri remains conjectural."

  "You believe in them, though?"

  "As surely as children believe in magic animals and toy-toting old men with long white beards. And for the same reasons, too. My father once told me in earnest they exist, and my father didn't lie. What about you?"

  "Likewise. But I'm not sure it was my father who told me. I'm getting too old to have ever had a father, don't you think?"

  She approached me, put her arms around me. We embraced, my chin resting on the top of her head. I stared about the cluttered room in dismay, cursing myself for presiding with such brassy equanimity over the refuse heaps of my past and present selves. In comparable surroundings, I reflected glumly, only jackals or vultures would manifest anything even remotely like passion. But here I was yearning toward Elegy again; and, miracle of miracles, blind to the ruins about her, she was responding in kind.

  After we had twisted together to my bed, though, she raised her head from the half-sloughed linen and gazed about briefly before

  subsiding back into my pillow. When I tried to kiss her, she began to giggle. Hiccups. Tiny convulsions. Muffled Gatling-gun laughter.

  "Elegy, what's the matter?"

  Still convulsed, she finally managed, "I never thought . . . never thought I'd sink so low."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BojANGLEs's Brother

  Twelve hours later I let the BenDragon Prime sink to a resting place in the Wild. Chaney's old drop point. Only this time there were four of us rather than three, and we had planned our arrival to coincide almost exactly with Denebola's setting. We were barely able to get our nylon awning into place before the Wild erupted in a percussive caroling of snapped twigs and rattling fronds. The Asadi were fleeing into the jungle and the gathering night as they had every sunset since, we sometimes supposed, time immemorial.

  "Abstracting Bojangles from their number doesn't appear to have had any effect on their behavior," I told Elegy.

  Elegy stood mute in the down-sifting dark, waiting. Kretzoi, too, seemed apprehensive and nervous. Once night had securely settled, we were going to leave Jaafar at the Dragonfly's radio and strike out through the jungle in search of one of the nests Bojangles had told Kretzoi we might be able to find.

  In the past—specifically, in the years since Chaney's disappearance—we had never had any success on these quests. We had failed for the same reason that primatologists have still not compiled detailed studies of the drills and mandrills of post-Armageddon West Africa. The Asadi's nocturnal habitat is virtually impenetrable to ground-going observers, and the Asadi themselves, out of their clearing, are so retiring as to seem mere phantoms.

  But now Elegy believed we could accomplish something, and her optimism derived from the fact that Kretzoi had learned a few things from Bojangles about Asadi behavior in the Wild.

  When the stars at last came out, we said our farewells to Jaafar and set off. I carried a high-powered hand lamp with three beam intensities and a small tranq launcher. Elegy also had a hand lamp but, in addition, twenty meters of rope and a backpack full of assorted wilderness gear. We were each equipped with a "hearing-aid" radio receiver in our ears and a small, button-touch transmitter at our throats. Kretzoi carried nothing; he used the vines and tree limbs spotlighted by our lamps as a pathway through the forest, moving almost casually among the lower branches in order to keep from outdistancing us. Even so. Elegy and I often had a difficult time keeping pace.

  Always, just as we were about to lose sight of him, Kretzoi slowed, or dropped to the jungle floor, or hung by one arm from a glistening branch, revolving there like a carcass on a furry hook. As soon as Elegy and I had nearly closed the distance, though, Kretzoi invariably went ghosting away again into the rank, humid copses of the Wild. And our lamps' beams went careering desperately after him, frail luminous extensions of ourselves.

  After this had been going on for two hours or more, and I had checked in at least eight times with Jaafar (in scrupulous observance of the fifteen-minute interval we had agreed upon), Kretzoi suddenly dropped out of a thick-boled, mangrovesque hardwood and squatted among its curved, stiltlike roots without moving. Elegy and I went in to him by clambering over and

  ducking under the root arches barricading the tree's gnarled foot. Shortly, all three of us were crouched shoulder to shoulder in the eerie, dryadic chapel of the mangrove, listening to the wind and computing the dimensions of our solitude.

  "Is this the place?" Elegy whispered.

  Why couldn't she talk aloud? The Asadi, if any were about, knew exactly where we were by the telltale brilliance of our hand lamps, which shone aslant through the mangrove bladelets above us.

  Kretzoi turned and dug at the clumpy soil at the base of the tree. A handful of this dirt he held beneath his nostrils, like an inspector sniffing coffee beans. Then he patted the soil sample back into place and felt about the trunk of the alien mangrove in several different places. This done, he swung back and spoke with his hands.

  "He says this is where Bojangles sometimes slept," Elegy interpreted.

  "How does he know?" Like Elegy, I was whispering.

  "Bojangles marked the place with his urine; he also gave Kretzoi explicit directions to this tree and a description of its surroundings." Elegy gripped the hybrid animal's shoulder. Then, as she made pidgin gestural commands with her free hand, she whispered, "Go up, Kretzoi. Find his nest—Bojangles's nest— and see what you can see."

  Standing up, Kretzoi gripped one of the weird root arches bracketing the tree. He did a languorous flip, pulled himself onto the arch, and sprang nimbly into the tree itself. He melded with the leaf cover so seamlessly that neither the moon shining down nor our lamps shining up could distinguish him from the foliage.

  I got up and made to join Kretzoi aloft, gripping the same root arch he had gripped. The bark was as smooth as sharkskin.

  "What're you doing?" Elegy demanded.

  "I'd like a firsthand look. This cuts out the need for an interpreter, too. Eliminates the middleman. No offense. Elegy."

  "You'll break your idiot neck," she whispered savagely.

  Two meters off the ground I was already dizzy. Elegy lifted her hand lamp and held it for me as I climbed. The mangrove had thick but resilient limbs at fairly regular intervals, and when the canopy of bladelets above me had become a treacherous carpet under my groping feet, I could still see the eye of Elegy's lamp burning whitely in the leaves, giving them a leprous incandescence. Once, when I slipped, a hand caught my wrist and pulled me to the safety of a right-angle limb. I clung to the tree's central trunk, breathing rapidly, as Kretzoi held me in place with one hand.

  "Thanks," I whispered, feeling like an idiot whose idiot neck has just been mercifully spared.

  My cheek pressed against smooth, silver bark, I peered out at the reeds, tufts of woven grass, assemblages of fitted twigs, and quilts of trop
ical flower petals comprising the Asadi nest can-tilevered between several branches to my right. By its smell I knew the nest for what it was. It smelled as Bojangles had on the day of his capture; it smelled like the Asadi in their clearing.

  Kretzoi made a sign at me, which, still trying to compose myself, I waved off. Whereupon he released me, climbed higher, and draped himself over a bough so near Balthazar that the moon appeared but a single step beyond him. From this limb Kretzoi stared down into the nest. At last I leaned out cautiously to peek at what Kretzoi was confronting with neither flinch nor cry.

  The nest contained something with eyes.

  They coruscated in the moonlight, and they scared the residual bejesus out of me. They seemed disembodied, and vaguely saurian, and chillingly close to death. Closing my own eyes, I told Kretzoi in a whisper that I was ready to go down.

  "You already knew what we'd find?"

  "I had an idea," Elegy responded when Kretzoi and I again sat with her in the twisted root arches under the mangrove. "Bojangles

  told Kretzoi, and Kretzoi told me. But I wanted it confirmed."

  "That's an Asadi up there," I said. "It's still alive, but it's been reduced to little more than a head and a truncated torso."

  "That's Bojangles's twin, his sibling, his 'meat-brother.'"

  "Whom Bojangles has cannibalized to this horrifying stage of dismemberment and incipient rot?" I looked with unseeing eyes back up into the mangrove. "Sibling rivalry's played for keeps among the Asadi, isn't it?"

  "The meat-sibling is simply a twin until the two juvenile Asadi are old enough to warrant their mother's making a determination about which is the more robust, which has better sustained itself through optical photosynthesis. Mother's milk and photosynthetic nutrients are all the infants feed on for the first two or three years of their lives, you see."

  "And the more robust animal is automatically designated the cannibal, the weaker its perpetual victim?"

  Elegy and Kretzoi exchanged a brief flurry of hand signs. "It may be the other way around," she said, looking back at me. "Kretzoi isn't sure. Bojangles gave some indication that the stronger becomes the meat-sibling—because it's better able to sustain the continuous depredations of the next several years."