Transfigurations

by Michael Bishop

  the Ur'sadi were living creatures with living, if ultrasonically subverted, wills of their own.

  Having small bodies and only rudimentary hands, the huri had evolved a joint consciousness dependent not on any sort of inexplicable psychic or telepathic communion, but on a "language" of high-frequency pulses precisely attuned to the thermal variations arising from the Ur'sadi's private spectral displays. Perhaps the huri had once been the pets, or the blind gyrfalcons, or the totemic court animals of Ur'sadi masters. If they had, the huri had gradually appropriated the language of their masters— albeit in the medium of sound rather than light—so that ultimately they were able to unite as a single consciousness and enslave the very species that had first either enslaved or domesticated them. A turnabout of no mean proportions, but one that seemed to be indicated by everything Elegy and I had experienced over the last several hours.

  The breakdown in the ascendancy of the huri had come long after the migration to BoskVeld from a home world still unknown to us. Their power was first crippled when they permitted the Ur'sadi to engineer genetic changes in their eyes and bloodstreams to combat the quirkish solar activity of Denebola. The huri permitted these changes in order to insure the survival of their hosts, their instruments—but once the Ur'sadi had altered their blood, ostensibly to regulate the production of lymph cells as a defense against radiation-induced diseases, the huri found themselves sickening and occasionally even dying. They fed not only on the thallophytes imported from their home world (a planet long since engulfed by a solar catastrophe of its own), but also— periodically—on Ur'sadi blood; the change in its composition, although not technically of a basic chemically nature, was enough to incapacitate large numbers of the huri who fed upon it.

  When the Ur'sadi whose eyes were newly capable of photosynthesis began fleeing into BoskVeld's jungles, as much to escape the bemused and wounded huri as to separate themselves from their progenitors, the breakdown in huri control reached a

  critical point of no return: The enslaver/enslaved relationship that had existed for ages between the two species finally began to move toward total collapse.

  The huri depended a great deal on the centralization of the host population to maintain their control; and the Ur'sadi dispersal, which in their weakness the huri were unable to prevent, threatened to sabotage the principal unifying element of their transcendent consciousness. The huri themselves had to disperse. Most of them went after the fleeing renegades, into the jungles, where they were eventually able to regain a measure of control and so influence the construction of huge temple-memorials. These they had built against the day when the Ur'sadi inevitably found the means to abandon them. They foresaw their abandonment even as they struggled to prevent it. The grandeur of the wilderness pagodas, in fact, was a concession to the Ur'sadi spirit they had bridled for so long with ultrasonic reins. The huri kept control just long enough to get three or four of these structures built, whereupon the photosynlhesizing Ur'sadi, rekindling the fires of their own extinguished wills, broke free and set themselves on a devolutionary course none of them could have predicted.

  Meanwhile, the Ur'sadi in their original veldt settlement prepared to pull up stakes and leave. They had cast off the huri yoke by means of the self-protective alteration of their blood and the creation of a photosynlhesizing subspecies of themselves. The huri superorganism, believing its future must lie with those Ur'sadi altered to manufacture food from Denebolan sunlight, opted to follow the defectors. That decision both freed the original Ur'sadi and tormented them, for they feared a reimposition of the huri yoke and deplored the continued captivity of their altered children. They couldn't leave BoskVeld until they had taken care of these matters. Relying on sporadic spy reports about the monumental building projects in the Wild, exercising an inhuman patience, and in several instances even lending their physical and technological aid, they awaited the completion of the temples. After the huri took up residence in the completed pagodas, the

  Ur'sadi's photosynthesizing offspring dispersed again, this time into the jungles.

  Only then did the Ur'sadi act. They razed their own settlement on the veldt—a single settlement, not many as Elegy had once conjectured—and mounted separate attacks on the wilderness pagodas. These forays were swift, comprehensive, and pretty much effective. Their purpose was to destroy the huri for all time, eradicate any vestige of their memory, and bequeath the planet in perpetuity to the neo-Ur'sadi tribes that had diffused through the Wild in quest of solitary fulfillments of their own.

  But the huri had had their neo-Ur'sadi slaves equip the largest of these temples with light- and perception-polarizing minerals quarried from areas near the shores of Calyptra and then toted inland by small groups of porters ultrasonically programmed to resist detection. These materials came to only one site in the Wild (the one beneath which Elegy and I were huddled beside the transfigured form of her father), but they accumulated so slowly that several decades passed before the great amelhystlike windows were precision ground, hoisted into their moorings, and activated so that the excavation and furnishing of the catacombs beneath the pagoda could proceed undetected, too. Thus, the largest of the wilderness temples disappeared one twilight midway through the huri's century-long building program. Although the temple was then conspicuous by its absence—once the Ur'sadi had perceived its absence—they eventually came to believe the huri had dismantled it for purposes of their own, perhaps because it was too damn big to be realized according to plan. In reality, then, the Ur'sadi attacks on the other huri pagodas in the Wild were little more than the demolition of enormous architectural decoys erected, adorned, and furnished for the sole puipose of focusing and thereby diffusing the Ur'sadi's wrath.

  After which, reasonably well pleased with themselves, the Ur'sadi fled to the stars. The huri remained underground, and the neo-Ur'sadi, at last almost completely free of their host role, began their melancholy decline toward the ritualized cannibalism and

  photoperiodically dictated life-style of the maned Asadi beasts they were to become. . . .

  Waiting for Chaney to come around again, crouched beside Elegy in the dark, I recited for her the complex ciiain of reasoning and deductive historiography you have just read. My purpose was at least as much to keep Elegy's mind off her father's unknowable agony as to sort out and illuminate the mysteries of an unknowable past.

  "It makes a good story," Elegy said when I was finished. In the prison of iridescent cables raying out from Chaney's cocoon, she smiled at me. "Do you believe it, Ben?"

  Telling it, I had almost come to. "The facts—"

  "The facts are diverse and open to multiple interpretations," Elegy broke in. "Not only that, Ben, in many instances they're not facts at all, but suppositions arising from our bewilderment. They're seductive because we'd rather concoct an explanation than admit or live with our ignornace."

  "Goddamn it. Elegy, who's getting analytical and superrational now? All I really wanted to do was—"

  "It's enough for me that I've found my father."

  Understanding that, I shut down the nagging little homunculus within me who wanted Elegy's gratitude. Nevertlieless, I began to wonder what—exactly—we had found. Had Chaney really spoken to us already? Would he speak to us again? I was ready to leave.

  Then, as if from the cavernous basement of his soul, Chaney repeated, "Nor are any of us. Being what we are." He was surfacing at the place in his free-associational monologue where earlier he had chosen to go under.

  Elegy and I stood up, silk cables taut across our arms and torsos where we leaned into them. The caul covering Chaney's head shimmered wetly, a thing both fascinating and painful to see.

  A strange sound escaped Chaney. Then it came again, confounding us. We exchanged glances.

  "He's laughing," I said.

  "Laughing," Chaney acknowledged. "I'm laughing." His laughter was a metallic-sounding ratcheting that reminded me of a chain being dragged across a surface of tin or aluminum.

/>   "Why are you laughing?" Elegy asked him.

  "Eyebooks," Chaney said.

  "The eyebooks," Elegy prompted. "I've got several with me. We took them from the great wall in the pagoda."

  The torn membrane at Chaney's mouth fluttered. "The huri have told me. That most of them are garbage. The Ur'sadi programmed them. With epithets and fear. They knew for wiiat. Those eyebooks were intended. And they released. To huri posterity. Only the hatred they felt. For their—" the final word was awhile in coming—"enslavers."

  "If the Ur'sadi deprived their enslavers of knowledge," I reminded Chaney, "they also deprived their Asadi children of knowledge they might have recovered one day."

  "Not so long as the huri themselves exist," Chaney responded with some fluency. "And they still exist. Don't they, Ben."

  I looked to the top of the amethyst wall and saw The Bachelor's huri roosting there. It attended our colloquy witiiout appearing to take any genuine interest in what we did or said.

  'They continue to exert," Chaney was saying, "a kind of vampiric power. Over mute and feeble Asadi. Like The Bachelor. Like Eisen Zwei. Like how many previous chieftains. Since the Asadi began."

  Chaney stopped, almost breathless, and his pause lengthened until it seemed I would again have a chance to fabricate and recite several chapters of Asadi history.

  At last, though, Chaney picked up the dropped stitch himself: "The chieftain's huri terrifies his people. It recalls for them their cannibalism. Stirs memories of a nobler but more troubled past.

  The huri brings the Asadi. At unpredictable intervals. To look at the standing remains of that past." Chaney's tongue probed the membrane rimming his upper lip. "Which is finally. Inescapable."

  I touched the man's shoulder. "Are you saying the Asadi's case is hopeless so long as there are huri alive on BoskVeld?"

  'The Ur'sadi devolved. At least in part. To survive as an independent species. The threat of future enslavement hangs over them. Like a sword. And partially enslaves them. Now."

  "And they did this to you," Elegy asked, "in hopes of enslaving you as they had once enslaved the ancient Ur'sadi?"

  Chaney ignored his daughter's question. "Ben," he said. "I want you. To uncover my eyes."

  I hesitated, and Chaney, encysted and bound as he was, registered my hesitation. His breathing altered subtly.

  "I'll do it," Elegy said. She ducked beneath the several silken lines between her and Chaney and popped up beside his head. She had no knife now, only her hands and fingernails, but she grasped the shelf of caul above her father's upper lip and began peeling it carefully backward. This time, contrary to her experience with the film over Chaney's hand, her effort proved startingly successful.

  The skin beneath the caul was as smooth as volcanic glass, blue-grey in the shifting light. Chaney's moustache and beard, as if they had been sprayed with an ultramarine dye and lacquered, revealed the same blue-grey glassiness.

  "Does this hurt?" Elegy whispered.

  "I. Don't. Feel. Anything."

  As deliberately as the defusing of a bomb, the unveiling continued, and when Elegy at last eased the caul backward over Chaney's forehead, twisting it once and letting it dangle down behind his bandaged skull, we saw a pair of opalescent and nearly opaque lenses sunken into his face where his eyes should have been. Insofar as they were visible, the human eyes beneath tiiese carapaces resembled tiny mouths whose lips have been sewn together. Chaney was right: His transformation had not taken. The

  vivid botching of his eyes synopsized and condemned the folly of the entire procedure. I blinked and looked away.

  "Father—"

  "You can see," he managed, "how it didn't take."

  Elegy was as distraught as I had ever seen her. Her cheeks were wet. Her body trembled. She seemed to be discovering unrecognized villainies in herself as well as fresh horrors in the manipulative genius of the huri.

  "Father," she said, weeping.

  And Chaney heartlessly inquired, "Who."

  "Your daughter," I told him angrily. "A woman who has striven for eleven years to accomplish what we've accomplished today."

  And with a clipped and brutal clarity Chaney said, "I. Have. No. Daughter."

  Elegy didn't recoil from this emphatic disavowal. She kissed her father on his altered lips. "I love you," she murmured defiantly. "I've loved you for as long as it's been possible for me to love you. Since the beginning. I never stopped, not even when you didn't deserve it and apparently no longer wanted it. That's why I've put such implicit faith in you, even going so far as to manipulate others—like Ben here—to find you again. All this. Father, I've done out of love and a desire to redeem myself in your eyes."

  "In my eyes," Chaney echoed her.

  "You know exactly what I mean, even in this pitiable and distant state! Don't you? Don't you. Father?" Elegy pushed herself away from Chaney and grabbed a handful of the lines fanning out past us toward the limestone wall at our backs. These she bunched in her fists and yanked as she spoke: "You loved me once. You loved my mother once. You loved the Ituri pygmies whom none of us had any power to save. So you know. What I'm saying. Don't you. Dont you?"

  "Elegy!" I grabbed her hands. "Stop it! You sound like you're mocking him!"

  "He knows I'm here," Elegy declared, releasing the runners of

  bunched silk and wiping her face with the back of her hand.

  "I. Know. You're. Here." The vibration of the chrysalis imparted a weird tremelo to Chaney's words.

  Elegy knelt again beside the pit.

  "I have no daughter," Chaney said. "Unless." The qualifier hung in the air like a scimitar, poised.

  "Unless what?" she asked him.

  "Unless she redeems herself." The pottery glaze over Chaney's features appeared to crack, the oddly human expression beneath it warping to betray a sense of unspeakable loss. "My eyes—blind or sighted—are of no consequence anymore." His lone was now almost conversational. "The Japura business broke me. And the Asadi. The Asadi put me under."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "I want you to kill me, Elegy." A breath so deep it was almost a moan. "That's why they led you down here."

  "To have us kill you?" Elegy exclaimed incredulously.

  "The hurl superorganism doesn't want. My death. On its conscience. Or on the debit side of its ledger. Of interspecies relationships." Chaney's face was beginning to look human, despite the eyes. "Maybe it's a karmic reluctance on their part. But I'm dying. And they don't want to hasten my death. For fear of having to shoulder." Deep breath. "The blame."

  "We'll get you out of here," Elegy said.

  "No use. You can see I'm unredeemable. Unless."

  "Unless I redeem you?"

  "By redeeming yourself." Deep breath. "With your love."

  Elegy twisted toward me in the cables and put her hands on my chest. "I want you to get out of here." She was pallid. In the same way your knuckles whiten when you clench something firmly, her pallor arose from resolution.

  "He's trying to blackmail you," I told her. "You can't let yourself be swayed by anything he tells you know. Look at him."

  "He's forgiving me. And himself, too. For the way he screwed up our lives after the Japura Episode."

  "By letting you kill him?"

  Elegy put her cold hands on my face and thrust my head back so that her eyes could laser mine with her resolve. "Are you capable of understanding what's happening here, Ben? Maybe you are. If you are, you'll let me do what I've come all this way to do. If you aren't . . . well, you're going to have to kill me to keep me from this."

  "Maybe we could get him out," I protested. "That's what you yourself had in mind until he started this insidious love-me, kill-me business."

  "Just how are we going to get him out? I wasn't considering how, or what for, and neither are you. Look back that way, Ben." Elegy pointed over the forward wall of the compound into the eerie gloom of the catacombs, at the immense central column by which we had descended from the pag
oda. "Do you really think we can carry my father back up that thing, Ben? Just the two of us?"

  That central column-cum-stairway was a landmark of towering prominence, visible despite the gloom shrouding its highest reaches. It climbed upward better than half a kilometer through the dark. We would never get Chaney up its switchbacking scaffolds and into the light of the day. If we did get him up, and if the Komm-galens in Frasierville somehow managed to prolong his life, he would be something less than either a human being or an Asadi.

  Still, with help. Elegy and I might be able to manage that otherwise unlikely mission.

  And the white-blue beam of an emergency torch, probing the catacombs from a set of scaffolds halfway up the column, suggested that help was reasonably close to hand. Jaafar had entered the pagoda and descended into the pit comprising the huri sanctuary.

  "Jaafar's coming," I said, "and that gives us a chance."

  Elegy shook her head. "That isn't the point, Ben. Maybe the three of us could lick the how of getting my father out, but the what for —Ben, you haven't even addressed that!" She struck me

  in the chest hard enough to make my breastbone sting. "It's my grant, Ben. It's my father. And it's my decision. Leave me alone with him for five minutes. Go. Right now. Or don't ever expect to own a jot of my regard again."

  "That's blackmail, too. Elegy—virtually the same kind your daddy's working on you."