Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  I raised the mock-huri and shook it violently. Then, taking it by one tarry wing, I whirled it about over my head like a child flying some sort of strange toy aircraft. Dawn was almost upon us. Swinging the artificial huri, I advanced through the Asadi toward the pagoda. Elegy came with me. On every side, the beasts retreated from us in fear and bewilderment.

  The corpsebearers and torchlighters on the pagoda's highest tier observed our approach with puzzlement and alarm. To save themselves they would either have to flee or fight. Those seemed the only options available to them; and when the creatures failed to show any readiness to flee—we had just set foot on the bottom step and begun our ascent—I feared they would defend with their very lives both the pagoda and the body of their chieftain. I stopped.

  "What's the matter?" Elegy asked.

  "Are you ready to take on all eight of those fellows?"

  The amethyst eyes of the pagoda, streaming with a multifaceted ooze, stared down on us in macrocosmic parody of the indigo gazes of the Asadi attending Kretzoi's bier.

  Then I heard Elegy say, "Look."

  Half turning, I saw the Asadi behind us plunging back into the Wild in a thousand different places, one cifter the other. De-

  nebola's rising had triggered their dispersal, an inversion of the usual course of things. But the corpsebearers and torchlighters awaiting us on the temple's broad, high porch had not yet fled. Maybe they didn't intend to.

  Elegy and I resumed our climb. My arm aching, I continued to whirl the mock-huri above my head.

  On the temple's highest step the Asadi formed a phalanx eight individuals abreast. Bending aggressively forward, they stared down with eyes spinning out of indigo dullness into spectral displays of such angry intensity that their faces seemed to be on fire. A moment later they all began to fade, their bodies emptying of color, texture, and substance—so that through the outlines of their torsos and limbs Elegy and I could clearly see the catafalque behind them, the mossy, rearing facade of the pagoda, and the rough-hewn massiveness of the temple's doors.

  "Again," whispered Elegy, matter-of-fact and noncommittal.

  "Hallucination," I told her. "They're radiating a spectral pattern that polarizes or off-centers our ability to perceive them. They do it in concert for maximum effectiveness. It's a residual capability. The pagoda retains in its structure the essence of this power, and their resorting to it now. Elegy, means they're out of their boonie minds with fright!"

  I hurled the mock-huri with all my strength up the sweep of the tier, fell helplessly forward, and watched as the huri's wings stabilized its stumpy fuselage and sent it cruising like a crazy kamikaze intelligence into the alien phalanx—sixteen pinwheeling eyes above eight ghostly bodies.

  The eyes scattered, and the bodies beneath them were suddenly real again, every one of the shaggy Asadi stumbling down the steps in a direction that would spare it a confrontation with us. Casting aside their torches, they were gone into the Wild almost before we could blink.

  "Kretzoi!" Elegy shouted. She threw herself up the remaining steps to the summit and knelt beside the granite catafalque. The artificial huri, I noted, had struck the pagoda's doors and

  plummeted sidelong to one of the upper steps, where it balanced precariously. Wearily I climbed to the nasty thing and kicked it down the steps. Then I joined Elegy at Kretzoi's bier.

  The primate lay on his back with his knees bent and his sex exposed. He appeared either asleep or unconscious. Holding his receding chin between her thumb and forefinger, Elegy tenderly tilted his head first to this side and then to that, all the while crooning entreaties and prayers. I had to believe that the rhythmic, swaying progress of the Asadi columns through the Wild had hypnotized him, for Elegy was hard pressed to bring him back to our reality.

  "Let me try," I said.

  I eased Elegy aside and laid my ear to Kretzoi's chest. He was breathing as a hibernating animal breathes, all his bodily processes clocked down to the laggardly cadences of winter. I put my mouth over his wide hairy lips, covered his death's-head nostrils with my hand, and blew a violent puff of air deep into his lungs. He started as if he had been galvanized. I puffed again, tasting the unplaceable odors of his breath and immediately wiping my mouth dry. That done, I dragged Kretzoi off the catafalque and slammed his limp body against the temple's left-hand door. Holding him there with my hip and one trembling hand, I made a hammer of my other fist and struck him squarely on the sternum. Again, he twitched—like a frog administered an electric shock.

  "Stop it!" Elegy cried. And, in truth, I don't know whether I was trying to revive Kretzoi or neutralize my long-pent anxiety and frustration. Maybe I was doing both. Kretzoi was the Asadi I had not been able to get my hands on a moment earlier, and I didn't want to let him go.

  "Ben!" Elegy cried again, grabbing my arm. "Stop it!"

  I shrugged her away, but relinquished my grip on Kretzoi. Amazingly, he didn't slide down the door. Inside their clear polymer carapaces his human eyes came open, focusing on me with slow-dawning recognition and cold disdain.

  As Kretzoi's consciousness returned, he pressed himself de-

  fiantly against the door at his back—with the result that the door groaned inward on its hinges and revealed to both Elegy and me a tall, narrow slice of the pagoda's interior. Kretzoi fell quickly to all fours and bounded aside.

  "Ben," Elegy said tentatively.

  "What?"

  "You did well just then, Thomas Benedict. You were working intuitively for a change. That was your 'not-I' performing, you know—your right brain."

  "Then I hardly desere any credit, do I?"

  Elegy laughed, and there on the top step of the high Asadi altar her laughter sounded incongruously merry and sweetly apropos. "Of course you do. It's your 'not-I,' isn't it?" She stepped forward and took my arm. 'The honor's yours if you want it," she said, gesturing at the lofty crack between the temple doors. "You've waited as long as I have, I guess, and I'll be damned if it matters to me who goes in there first. . . . Kretzoi, sit!"

  The animal was edging toward the opening, but at her command he stopped and looked at her inquiringly.

  I felt a sudden piquant affection for Kretzoi, an affection bom of shame and an ineffable backassward respect. My own unworthi-ness, in contrast, was almost strong enough to choke me.

  "Let the hairy ape go first," I said. "There's always the nasty chance the first one in won't come out at all."

  Somehow Elegy perceived that I was joking. "In which case none of us will," she said. "Go ahead, Ben."

  I unstrapped my camera and laid it on the catafalque. Then I activated the radio at my throat. "Jaafar," I said, "we've found the pagoda and we're going in. Bring the Dragonfly to this clearing, if you can."

  Jaafar's response Wcis swift and static-free: "Very good, Dr. Benedict. I certainly will." . That was the end of the conversation. I wiped my hands on my thighs and moved to push even wider ajar the door that Kretzoi had already set groaning inward.

  Elegy's voice halted me: "Inside, we're going to find the 'dead man' in whose shadow we've both been living. And that discovery's going to liberate us both."

  "All right," I said, mouthing the words.

  "My prayer for you, Thomas Benedict, is that aftenvard you'll know what to do with your freedom." I started to speak, but she cut me off: "Move your butt, Benedict. Let's see what we've let ourselves in for."

  I led Elegy and Kretzoi into the pagoda. . . .

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Inside

  "Preternaturally cold." So Chaney had described the interior of the Asadi temple. The temperature was indeed several degrees below that of the Wild, but you could scarcely call the place "cold." More accurately, the pagoda was cool. This coolness undoubtedly traced to the height of the structure and the fact that a pervasive, silver-tinged gloom seemed to neutralize the jungle's heat. This gloom, meanwhile, derived its tarnished silver glow from the morning light seeping through the central dome and moving as if by
osmosis through the amethyst windows.

  "There's the stairway to the 'chandelier,'" Elegy said, not bothering to whisper. "Just like my father described it. And the globes of the metal ring, they've been replaced and hoisted back into position." A faint echo overlapped her each succeeding word.

  I stared up at the globes. Although possessed of a dull, mother-of-pearl luster they emitted very little light. They were each, I

  estimated, about the size of a Bronze Age shield rotated through a third dimension; they were also quite heavy-looking. I didn't want to be standing under one of them if it suddenly took a notion to fall.

  Huddled just inside the door, we saw many of the things Chaney describes in Death and Designation Among the Asadi —from the spindly display cabinets whose design the curators of the Museum of Indigenous Artifacts had attempted (unsuccessfully, we now saw) to reproduce from Chaney's descriptions, to the vast, glowing wall on which were hung the Ur'sadi eyebooks. We also experienced a number of things Chaney had neglected or not thought to mention.

  First, a feeling that the pagoda had unexplored recesses beyond the central chamber in which we stood.

  Second, an unsettling glandular smell as pervasive as the gloom inside the temple.

  And third, a distant fluting sound—a kind of hollow cooing reminiscent of wind blowing across the mouths of empty bottles, or maybe even of the rattle of rice-paper partitions during minor seismic tremors in an Oriental city.

  This last sensation seemed to suggest that the pagoda was occupied, that somewhere in its eastern or western extremities there dwelt creatures accustomed to the temple and secure in their knowledge of its layout and architecture. My curiosity had just about given way to fear. I could see the three of us captured and existing briefly as "meat-siblings" to the real Asadi chieftain, the one whom Kretzoi had merely impersonated. . . .

  "We want some more of those eyebooks," Elegy said, squelching my hope that she, too, might have reservations about continuing our trespass. "We ought to take all those on a single rod. Maybe by taking a complete sequence of fifty—or however many each rod holds—we'll improve our chances of deciphering the damn things. The sequence may be as important as the individual spectral pattern of each book."

  We crossed the pagoda's immense flagstone floor, circling to the

  left of the stairway spiraling upward to the energy globes in the iron "chandelier." Our footfalls echoed, and our breaths came as loud in our ears as if we were wearing oxygen masks.

  The wall of eyebooks glowed uncannily. It prickled with the two or three thousand glinting rods protruding like brush bristles toward us, each rod supporting a sequence of eyebooks secured by a small, ornately flanged wingnut. Elegy removed one of these fasteners and scooped an entire sequence of eyebooks off its rod. Then she bound them together with a piece of elastic and deposited them in a pocket on the thigh of her jumpsuit. The weight scarcely made the pocket sag.

  "Leave the others alone," she said. "There's no reason to take any more than we absolutely need. So far we haven't proved ourselves worthy of the first six my father brought out with him."

  "Fine," I said. "What now?"

  "I don't know. . . . Maybe we'd better ask/ijm." Elegy gestured at the stairway twisting down from the pagoda's dome.

  Descending the steps was an Asadi who, more than likely, had just witnessed our theft of the eyebooks. His appearance, seemingly from out of nowhere, was as heartstopping as the sudden self-manifestation of a ghost. Kretzoi, his hackles fanning out behind his head like a peacock's tail, assumed a belligerent bipedal stance.

  The Bachelor, I thought: It's none other than Chaneys Bachelor.

  At the bottom of the immense, looping staircase—which rose, as if without support, toward the inverted bowl of the dome—the Asadi paused and stared at us across the open flagstone flooring. Perched atop his left shoulder, shifting from foot to foot, its claws rhythmically digging, was a huri—a real huri. The huri's gathered wings appeared wrinkled and squamous, its body as moist and smooth as raw liver, its eyeless head as fleshy as a mushroom cap. It could not possibly see us, and yet it knew we were in the pagoda as certainly as did the Asadi whom I had already identified for myself as The Bachelor.

  Elegy had made the same private intuitive leap. Extending her hand toward the Asadi, she spoke to it:

  "You can see what we are. You've met another like us. We believe he's here—that other one whom we resemble." She passed her hand back and forth between herself and me, excluding Kretzoi.

  The Bachelor merely stared, his eyes inanimate and grey.

  "Egan Chancy," Elegy said more loudly. Understanding that she might be trying to bridge an unbridgeable chasm. Elegy conversed rapidly with Kretzoi in Ameslan and urged the primate to intercede for us.

  Kretzoi obeyed. But as he approached The Bachelor, the huri grew more and more agitated, lifting its wings and expanding its tiny, oyster-colored chest. All the while it scrabbled back and forth between The Bachelor's shoulders. Its activity confounded and alarmed Kretzoi, who finally halted and began making hand signs that the huri's own unceasing movements seemed to render pointless.

  The Bachelor wasn't Bojangles. We weren't going to bridge the chasm separating us with Ameslan or anything like it.

  But Kretzoi persisted. Ignoring the huri's frantic dance of annoyance, he crept forward, hunkered, spoke with his hands, crept forward again, hunkered, and so on—until he was virtually genuflecting at The Bachelor's feet.

  Kretzoi's last approach so intimidated the huri that it threw itself into the air and disappeared with almost insulting swiftness into the vault of the temple, somewhere high above the ring of energy globes.

  Abandoned to his own devices. The Bachelor panicked. He cuffed Kretzoi glancingly across the snout and attempted to run over him—past the wall of eyebooks and down the eastern corridor of the pagoda. He failed because Kretozi, after recoiling from the unexpected blow, ran him to ground just abreast of Elegy and me. Almost indistinguishable, the two of them rolled about in the mouth of the eastern corridor.

  "Kretzoi!" Elegy barked, and before I could stop her she was straddling the two animals, shifting her feet to keep from being toppled and pulling determinedly on Kretzoi's mane.

  I joined her, and we got them apart. The Bachelor—my knee in the hollow above his left hip, my hands pressing his face against the flagstones—lay trembling but acquiescent beneath me. Kretzoi, meanwhile, shook free of Elegy's angry grasp, retreated several meters into the corridor, and, moodily, began grooming himself.

  "Damn," Elegy mumbled to herself. The murmurous "voices" of the pagoda disguised their source by frequently ceasing and then abruptly resuming. The place was alive, and we were intruders in its sanctuary. . . .

  From out of nowhere the huri dove upon me in a long, erratic sweep. A wing tip brushed my hair, after which the beast wobbled away down the eastern corridor, executed an amazing midair turn, and came gliding back toward us. I fell across The Bachelor, saw Elegy drop to her knees, and watched the huri go teeter-tottering above us, only to fall to rest on the floor of the central chamber. Here it tiptoed about with its wings spread, ultrasonically berating us, emitting high-pitched echolocation pulses in order to define us in space.

  Visually blind, the huri "saw" us in three dimensions. It did so by means of a continuous biosonic scan and a brain so sensitive to the reflections and reradiations of its high-frequency pulses that its lack of vision was no handicap at all. The huri, I felt sure, possessed a sophisticated bioholographic neurological complex that made Elegy, Kretzoi, and me as palpable to it as three blocks of stone under a sculptor's hands. Strutting cryptically and bombarding us with orientation pulses that we could neither see nor feel, the creature held us at bay.

  Kretzoi, on all fours, made a threatening move toward the huri—but Elegy put up her hand to restrain him. Whispering, I explained that the blind huri was not blind at all. "It 'sees' your hand," I told Elegy. "It 'sees' Kretzoi poised to spring. We're each one o
f us a three-dimensional auditory image with frequency, amplitude, and phase."

  Elegy lowered her hand.

  "And the pulses the huri emits to create temporal and spatial holograms of us," I went on, still holding The Bachelor down, "may also be either signals to its fellows or commands to the living machinery of the pagoda. Maybe both."

  "All right," said Elegy. "And what does that mean?"

  I took my knee from The Bachelor's hip and eased myself to a standing position, thus releasing my prisoner. "I don't really know—but look up there."

  The Bachelor lay immobile at my feet, even though I had let go of him. Meanwhile, the wide iron ring supporting the temple's energy globes began to descend through the center of the helical stairway. The globes themselves grew brighter, and the entire vast apparatus produced a choral humming sound as the ring descended. The torus appeared to be completely free-floating, perhaps with a mechanism for the gyroscopic negation of gravity at spin in its interior—a mechanism that might also have been responsible, I reflected, for the ring's strange humming. Just as the huri was no doubt responsible for its descent.

  At last The Bachelor moved. He rolled over and got to his feet as gingerly as I had. Then he walked past Elegy toward the pagoda's central chamber, limping almost imperceptibly. Before he could reach the huri, however, the ring halted a little over two meters from the floor £md hovered there like a gigantic tiara set with three enormous glowing jewels. A painful brightness illumined the chamber, and the huri danced spastically in its sheen.

  Then a section of the floor began to move. A grating sound filled the pagoda, a protracted groan punctuated by several deafening clicks. The moving section of floor was circular, about two and a half times the diameter of the torus floating above it. It clocked to the right and kept moving clockwise until it had screwed itself free of the surrounding flagstones. Then, on a carven stone stem resembling an Asadi with four huge, blind faces, this circular block of flooring rose toward the hovering ring and received the ring's weight on the tripodal arrangement of its energy globes. The huri, who had risen with the floor section, sat on it just outside the