Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  ring of the chandelier, flapping its wings at us. Meanwhile, a terrible organic stench boiled up from the catacombs beneath the pagoda, as did a geyser of spreading heat and a noise like angels at war.

  The hole in the floor was almost eight meters across, cut as if to permit an army to descend together underground, and the tetra-visaged statue supporting the block of flooring had the girth of a good-sized tree. The pillar had been hewn from a carnelian-colored rock with the texture of granite. The eyes of the statue— the two pairs that I could see, at any rate—were nothing but empty sockets, as if someone had long ago removed the stones or picked away the intricate lapidary work filling them. A tier of stone steps commencing at the lip of the hole's northern hemisphere led into the abyss. Peering into the hole from several meters away, I could see that beneath its rim was a pedestal—a thick stone sheath— from which the Asadi statue had risen and into which it would once again sink when it came time for the great circular floor section to fall counterclockwise back into place.

  The huri atop the elevated block of floor suddenly swooped down and affixed itself possessively to The Bachelor's mane. Immediately, The Bachelor's nervousness and uncertainty seemed to evaporate. As the huri tiptoed to a perch on his right shoulder, the Asadi turned calmly toward us.

  "Egan Chaney," Elegy said again, a four-syllable litany. "You know where he is—don't you?"

  The Bachelor's first response was a dead, grey stare. Then, pivoting, he strode to the lip of the hole and dropped one foot onto the first semicircular tier. He looked back at us in invitation, then descended several more steps and halted again.

  "Let's go," Elegy urged Kretzoi and me.

  "One of us stays behind," I said. "In fact, we'd probably be smart just to get the hell out of here."

  "You stay, then."

  "Make it Kretzoi and we're off."

  Elegy looked at Kretzoi and gestured wearily toward liie

  pagoda's tall, half-open door. "Wail out there for Jaafar," she said. "We'll be back as soon as we can, just as soon as we—" She stopped.

  The Bachelor was gone. The warring angels underground beckoned.

  As Kretzoi sidled obediently toward the door, casting accusatory, baffled glances our way, I touched Elegy's shoulder and led her toward the pit. Then, beneath the massive elevated wheel of the floor, we went apprehensively down the tier of steps. A monster with four faces watched us with a cold eyeless gaze. . . .

  The steps formed a horseshoe—an inverted, steeply terraced U—against the northern half of the pit. This horseshoe arrangement persisted to a depth of about four meters, whereupon we could continue to descend only by walking along the bottommost tier until we had reached a narrow set of steps corkscrewing widdershins downward from the eastern base of the U.

  Fortunately, we had The Bachelor going before us as a guide and enough pale, phosphorescent light to see him. Still, the going was hazardous, and I kept imagining that the wheel overhead was about to click stridently, rotate counterclockwise atop the countenances of the blind Asadi effigy, and grind into place like a colossal manhole cover, sealing us beneath the pagoda forever. That didn't happen, but each time I looked back up the well of the pit, the faces of the statue appeared to be turning and I was startled and discomfited anew—until I reminded myself that our own steady widdershins descent was responsible for the statue's apparent motion.

  More agile than I, Elegy now had the lead. I kept my hand on her shoulder and squinted into the abyss, whose contours and dimensions were perpetually changing—at first because the pit opened out into a vast Plutonian cavern, and then because the stone steps gave way to smooth concrete platforms that had been

  reinforced with steel or titanium. The Bachelor, his huri settled comfortably on his right shoulder, was negotiating the fifth or six platform beneath ours. I gripped Elegy's shoulder hard and indicated that I wanted to sit down. The heat had caused me to sweat through my clinging undergarment, and a bout of nausea seemed imminent.

  "We'll lose him," Elegy protested, peering downward—but she let me squat gracelessly at her side and put my head between my knees in an attempt to stave off my queasiness. Given five minutes, the treatment worked. I raised my head and tried to wipe the sweat from my face with the sleeve of my jumpsuit.

  "It's not The Bachelor we've lost," I told Elegy. "It's the huri— the huri's navigating for him, sending out ultrasonic pulses and constructing temporal and spatial holograms from their feedback."

  "We've lost the huri, then. The result's the same." Elegy sat down beside me on the smooth cantilevered platfoim and began idly to rub my back. "You're drenched tiirough," she informed me, removing her hand to pick fastidiously at the cloth of her own jumpsuit. "So am I, for that matter."

  "They won't leave us up here," I said. "Otherwise, they'd have never admitted us in the first place."

  "They?"

  "Not The Bachelor and the huri. The huri and all its catacomb-pent relatives, that's the 'they' I'm talking about."

  Elegy didn't reply. As we sat in the high, hot dark, the sound of warring angels we had heard in the pagoda suddenly reasserted itself, and there wheeled before us in the divided cavern a vast, smoky cloud of huri—thousands upon thousands of them con-voluting in the air in a shape reminiscent of a single prodigious member of the species, a superorganism duplicating on an Olympian scale the morphology and movements of its constituent organisms. Like herrings or mackerals, the huri were schooling, and the superorganism they made had all the crude, airborne agility of The Bachelor's own huri. It wheeled and plunged with such a thunderclapping of wings that Elegy and I were left

  dumbfounded when a banking movement at our left hands carried the school altogether out of sight. The hurl were making a low circuit of the catacombs, but the stone column at our backs prevented our observing the entire orbit. The wind in the creatures' wake was the wind from a rotting forge bellows.

  "Dear God," Elegy said.

  'That's the 'they' I meant. Maybe we'd do better, though, to refer to the whole stinkin' crew as 'it'—one vast body, one vast mind."

  "And The Bachelor's huri?"

  "It's a monitor, a receptor/transmitter of the huri overmind. That's what each one of the creatures is, separated from the transcendent superorganism."

  "Ben, how the hell can you suppose they're anything but some kind of hairless alien chiropteran? That was a flock of Denebolan bats that just flew by, not a great sentient cloud worthy of worship."

  "What makes you so sure? Left-brain logic?"

  Elegy put her hand on my sweat-drenched back and held it there. She looked at me appraisingly, not without compassion. "Do you want to get out of here, Ben? I'll go with you if you do—and I'm not just looking for an excuse to abandon this nasty business, either."

  "Not now. Elegy. We've committed."

  She kissed me on the cheek, then ran her tongue through the stubble spiculing my jaw. 'You're my salt lick," she whispered, and we both burst out laughing.

  I stood, took Elegy's hand, and pulled her to her feet. Then she preceded me down the next three staggered platforms. As we got lower, the dimensions and the weird topographic furnishings of the chamber revealed themselves with striking clarity. Either our eyes had adjusted or the light beneath us had grown appreciably stronger during our descent. In either case, we saw that the chamber to the east was divided by honeycombed grids or walls of living amethyst like the windows in the pagoda. These grids or

  walls, laid out at varying angles to one another, were at least twice as tall as a full-grown Asadi, and they comprised an enormous labyrinth in the eastern half of the subterranean chamber. Although 1 had no way of knowing, I supposed that a similar labyrinth dominated the western half of the chamber as well.

  As we stared down, the huri superorganism wheeled ventrally into view above our right shoulders—a huri thunderhead crackling with pale phosphorescence and stirring the slow, hot air. Its tremendous bulk scraped the chamber's ceiling, altering the very consistency
of the light. Then it stooped and leveled out and rode like a bank of shredding black cirrocumulus toward the east, individual huri separating from the mass and gliding downward like grains of dark sleet. In fact, the superorganism—which kept reconstituting itself on a smaller scale as huri after huri broke free and plunged—sometimes seemed to be dropping not only living segments of itself but an erratic firefall of cinders.

  "What in Christ's name is that?" Elegy cried.

  At the moment, I wasn't absolutely sure. All I truly understood was that the superorganism was decaying before our eyes, hundreds of individual huri plummeting to hidden roosts in the labyrinth on the chamber floor. The cinders plummeting with them were . . . well, a special form of bioluminescence. The huri were defecating in concert. The grains of their excrement glowed because the huri sustained themselves on molds and fungi that glowed. Bioluminescence in, bioluminescence out. And if a degree of fire was lost in the digestive process, the huri absorbed it into themselves as a nutrient with brilliant side effects; namely, the hollow bones in their wings sometimes shone like gone-amok isotopes of plutonium.

  Now, the wheeling superorganism, greatly diminished on our left, was sculling westward out of view.

  I activated my radio: "Jaafar, can you hear me? Jaafar, can you hear me?" It seemed imperative to make contact with someone outside, even if he happened to be traversing great stretches of jungle in a Dragonfly. But Jaafar didn't respond.

  "We're loo far underground for that, Ben. Let's just hope he's able to find the pagoda—that it doesn't conceal itself as successfully again this morning as it's done these past six years."

  "Maybe it won't. The huri control the pagoda, Elegy, and we've diverted their attention. They know we're here."

  We gazed down. A good many of the honeycombed partitions constituting large sections of the labyrinth were draped with ruffled fungi or cottony spills of mold. These otherworldly thallophytes were antique gold, pale blue, death's-head white, and they shone with a radiant faintness that gave the whole scene a faery unreality. Moreover, broad compartments of the labyrinth were mounded with hills of lambent guano. Gardens of bioluminescent waste, landscaped and adorned with statuary.

  We continued downward, dropping from platform to platform. The cavern's temperature dropped with us, and the noise of beating wings eventually ceased. Because the huri had disappeared into the labyrinth's myriad plastic dovecotes, a terrible silence and stillness descended upon their fetid underworld.

  At last Elegy and I were down. The floor of the catacombs was aglow with the ghostly luminescence of the fungi and the amethyst walls. The column of stairs, scaffolds, and platforms by which we had reached the floor, however, disappeared into utter blackness above us. We were too far down to see its summit.

  The Bachelor awaited us. He stood in the mouth of a nearby corridor, the huri riding his shoulder with its wings spread and its chest outthrown.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Chrysalis

  The corridor was wide enough to accommodate four columns of Asadi marching abreast. How long had it been since that many Asadi—or, more likely, proto-Asadi—had tramped these hidden corridors? Ages, certainly.

  No thicker than a human hand span, the amethyst walls were just lucid enough to reveal inside them eccentric arrangements of tubes, lights, circuitry. A few walls were empty of anything but swirling glass, a few were packed with arcane equipment—but most alternated areas of empty crystal with areas of tightly organized and geometrically complex "plumbing." My only guess about the functions of the walls, aside from their utility as dividers, was that they comprised a sophisticated but far-from-compact computer network, with tie-ins to the pagoda overhead, the thallophytes growing in their plastic honeycombs, and the hurl nesting in their own specialized wall cells.

  The sections of wall not containing equipment were capable of subtly deforming and warping: Sometimes elongated or oblate "windows" opened in the glass, migrated a brief distance, and then closed up again. These short-lived windows permitted Elegy and me to see other parts of the labyrinth: nesting huri, pools of algae- and diatom-infested water, mossy fungi and molds, glowing heaps of guano.

  Sometimes the walls themselves opened out to reveal these things. At one point, in fact. Elegy and I found ourselves in a doorway fronting the wide expanse of a guano garden. The chamber contained a number of vaguely humanoid figures— statues, you had to call them—fashioned from the long-since-desiccated droppings of the huri.

  Most of these statues were better than half buried in the accumulated muck of millennia, only a torso or a snout or a raised arm visible above the hellishly radiant mounds. One or two figures, however, stood atop the slag, their bodies perfect but for the warts and tubercles of fairly recent fecal bombardments. All of the statues in the garden were of Asadi. Among them were seven or eight huri hobbling about almost aimlessly.

  Elegy tried to pull me down the corridor after The Bachelor, but I resisted.

  "Damn it, Ben, come on. You can't stay here."

  I shook her hand from my arm and stared into the garden, fascinated by the scene, curious about the statues. When the huri in the compound became collectively aware of our presence. Elegy renewed her efforts to rouse me.

  "If you make me," she threatened, whispering, "I'll leave you here." I didn't respond. "All right—keep the wretched little demons for your own, Ben. I've got more pressing things to do."

  A moment later Elegy abandoned me in disgust and followed The Bachelor.

  The huri in the garden congregated on a mound directly opposite me. Treading one another's backs, knocking wings, and scratching at the hardened guano underfoot, they eventually

  settled into an arrangement that satisfied them all. Then they began fusilading me with echolocation pulses of such pitch and force I could actually/ee/ them. Now I wanted to escape, to rejoin Elegy—but that option no longer remained. The huri's continuous, high-pitched piping had paralyzed me. Even though I tried, I was unable to move.

  Breaking away the guano crust to get at the pliable matter beneath, the huri began to shape a simulacrum of Thomas Benedict. In less than five minutes they had lifted a life-sized, three-dimensional effigy of me out of their own fluorescing waste, positioning it so that my double and I stood face to face—a feat that required a one-hundred-eighty-degree transposition of the biohologramic data they were receiving from their cerebral sonar. The statue stood higher than I did—it lacked identifying detail— but even in my paralysis I knew that it was meant to be me, and I felt that the huri had stolen some of my private essence in erecting it. . . .

  Then the fusilade of ultrasonic pulses ceased, my psychomotor cortices were returned to me, and the huri scrambled off across the mounds in different directions. While I stood there numbly collecting my wits, they rose into the air and powered themselves over the deliquescing walls.

  I turned to look in the direction Elegy had disappeared. The corridor ahead of me branched in an off-center V, and, frustrated, I murmured an expletive under my breath.

  Aloud I cried, "Elegy!"

  The entire subterranean complex rang. In answer, only a few moments later, a huri came swooping at me through the corridor from the right-hand branch of the fork. I threw up an arm to shield myself and pitched sidelong to the floor, which was as smooth and dark as obsidian. The huri, however, skimmed my head and landed atop the amethyst wall behind me. Then it skittered along the top of this wall toward the fork in the corridor, fluttered across the opening to the wall beyond, and resumed its tightrope walking. In this fashion it led me away from the compound in which several

  of its fellows had just memorialized me in bioluminescent shit.

  This was The Bachelor's huri, I realized, and it had come to reunite me with Elegy. We soon passed an entire wall of dovecotes in which other huri nesded like rubbery, headless fetuses. Only a short while before, they had been wheeling overhead in a noisy cloud.

  We also passed a section of honeycombed wall on which three or fo
ur wakeful huri were grazing. Like monstrous houseflies, they walked the vertical plane of the wall, scissoring with their beaks at a glowing tapestry of woolly gold fungus. Several empty cells in the wall revealed complicated networks of plastic tubing which I assumed to be conveyors of water and nutrients. The Bachelor's huri hopped single-mindedly along the wall, pausing occasionally to riddle me with ultrasonic birdshot. Finally, it lifted and flew again, disappearing over a wall into an open area containing a subterranean lagoon of considerable size.

  I stumbled into this clearing and found Elegy and The Bachelor standing like old friends by the water's edge.

  The surface of the lagoon was oily-seeming, but diatomaceous plants floated at various levels in the water, illuminating it to a depth of at least two or three meters. Far out on the lagoon, drifting facedown like alien water hyacinths, was a pair of huri. Appcirently they were drinking. Meanwhile, The Bachelor's huri settled out of the air onto his shoulder and Elegy came forward to embrace me.

  "You get to look as long as you wanted?" she asked me.

  "Longer," I said, and as The Bachelor led us along the margin of the lagoon I explained to her what had happened.

  "But why did they do that?" Elegy wanted to know. "What possible purpose could a statue like that serve?"

  "Maybe the huri are all sculptors manque. —Hell, I don't know. Elegy. It's possible they were identifying me spatially and temporally for the benefit of their sleeping relatives. Only a few stay awake at a time, it seems, and when they're not functioning together as a single mind, individual 'brain cells'—individual

  huri, that is—may have to record intrusions for those who'll awake later."

  "How does one of their statues identify an intruder temporally?"

  "By its position in one of the guano gardens, I guess. Haven't you ever heard of achaeological strata? The deeper you go, the further back in time are the antiquities you unearth. A statue that's completely exposed is a recent statue."