Transfigurations (3 page)

CHANEY: That's where you come in, Ben. I'm going to carry in sufficient rations to see me through a week. But each week for several months you'll have to make a food-and-supply drop in the place you first set me down. I've already picked the spot. I know its distance and direction from the Asadi clearing. It'll be expensive, but the people in base camp—Eisen, in particular— have agreed that my work is necessary. You won't be forced to defend the drops.

BENEDICT: But why so often? Why once a week?

CHANEY: That's Eisen's idea, not mine. Since I told him I was going to refuse any sort of contact at all during my stay with the Asadi—any contact with you people, that is—he decided the weekly drop would be the best way to make certain, occasionally, I'm still alive.

BENEDICT: A weapon, Chaney?

CHANEY: No, no weapons. Besides food, I'll take in nothing but my notebooks, a recorder, some reading material, a medical kit, and maybe a little something to get me over the inevitable periods of depression.

benedict: a radio? In case you need immediate help?

CHANEY: No. I may get ill once or twice, but I'll always have the flares if things get really bad. Placenol, lorqual, and bourbon, too. But I insist on complete separation from any of the affairs of base camp until my stay among the Asadi is over.

BENEDICT: Why are you doing this? I don't mean why did Eisen decide we ought to study the Asadi so minutely. I mean, why are you, Egan Chaney, committing yourself to this ritual sojourn among an alien people? There are one or two others at base camp who might have gone if they'd had the chance.

chaney: Because, Ben, there are no more pygmies. . . .

—End of simulated dialogue on initial methods.

I suppose that I've made Benedict out to be a much more inquisitive fellow than he really is. All those well-informed questions! In truth, Ben is amazingly voluble about his background and his past without being especially informative. In that,

he is a great deal like me, I'm afraid. . . . But when you read the notes for this ethnography, Ben, remember that I let you get in one or two unanswered hits at me. Can the mentor-pupil relationship go deeper than that? Can friendship? As a man whose life's work involves accepting a multitude of perspectives, I believe I've played you fair, Ben. Forgive me my trespass.

Contact and Assimilation

From the private journals o/Egan Chaney: Thinking There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no ... I lay down beneath a tree resembling an outsized rubber plant and I slept. I slept without dreaming, or else I had a grotesque nightmare that, upon waking, I suppressed. A wrist alarm woke me.

The light from Denebola had begun to copper-coat the edges of the leaves in the Synesthesia Wild. Still, dawn had not quite come. The world was silent. I refused to let the Wild distort my senses. I did not wish to cut myself on the crimsons, the yellows, the orchid blues. Nor did I have any desire to taste the first slight treacherous breeze, nor to hear the dawn detonate behind my retinas.

Therefore, I shook myself awake and began walking. Beyond the brutal fact of direction, I paid no attention to my surroundings. The clearing where the Asadi would soon congregate compelled me toward it. That fateful place drew me on. Everything else slipped out of my consciousness: blazing sky, moist earth, singing fronds. Would the Asadi accept me among them as they negatively accept their outcasts? Upon this hope I had founded nearly five months of future activity. Everything, I realized, floundering through the tropical undergrowth, derived from my hope in an external sign of pariahhood; not a whit of my master strategy had I based on the genuine substance of this condition.

It was too late to reverse either my aims or the direction of my footsteps. You must let the doubt die. You must pattern the sound of your footfalls after the pattern of falling feet—those falling feet converging with you upon the clearing where the foliage parts and the naked Asadi assemble together like a convention of unabashed mutes. And so I patterned the sounds of my footfalls after theirs.

Glimpsed through rents in the fretworkings of leaves, an Asadi's flashing arm.

Seen as a shadow among other shadows on the dappled ground, the forward-moving image of an Asadi's maned head.

The Wild trembled with morning movement. I was surrounded by unseen and half-seen communicants, all of us converging.

And then the foliage parted and we were together on the open jungle floor, the Asadi clearing, the holy ground perhaps, the unadorned territory of their gregariousness and communion, the focal point of Asadi life. The awesome odor of this life—so much milling life—assailed me.

No matter. I adjusted.

Great grey-fleshed creatures, their heads heavy with violent drapings of fur, milled about me, turned about one another, came back to me, sought some confirmation of my essential whatness. I could do nothing but wait. I waited. My temples pulsed. Denebola shot poniards of light through the trees. Hovering, then moving away, averting their murky eyes, the Asadi—individual by individual, I noticed—made their decision and that first indispensable victory was in my grasp: / was ignored!

Xenology: In-the-Field Report

From the professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: I have been here two weeks. Last night I picked up the second of Benedict's food drops. It's fortunate they come on time, arriving on the precise coordinates where Ben first set me down. The Asadi do not eat as we do, and the Synesthesia Wild provides

me with foodstuffs neither in the way of edible vegetation nor in that of small game animals. I cannot tolerate the plants. As our biochemists in base camp predicted, most of them induce almost immediate vomiting. Or their furry bitterness dissuades me from swallowing them. A few may be edible, or a few may have juices pleasing to the palate—Frasier, after all, discovered the tree from which we have distilled the intoxicant called lorqual—but I'm no expert at plant identification. Far from it. As for animals, there simply are none. The jungle is stagnant with writhing fronds. With the heat, the steam, the infrasonic vibrancy of continual photosynthesis. Rainwater I can drink. Thank God for that, even though I boil it before considering it truly potable.

I have reached a few purely speculative conclusions about the Asadi.

With them nothing is certain. Their behavior, though it must necessarily have a deep-seated social/biological function, does not make sense to me. At this stage—I keep telling myself—that's to be expected. But I persist. I ask myself, "If you can't subsist on what Bosk Veld gives you, how do the Asadi?" My observations in this area have given me the intellectual nourishment to combat despair. Nothing else on BoskVeld has offered a morsel of consolation. In answer to the question, "What do the Asadi eat?" I can respond quite truthfully, "Everything I do not."

They appear to be herbivorous. In fact, they eat wood. Yes, wood. I have seen them strip bark from the rubber trees, the rainthorn, the alien mangroves, the lattice-sail trees, and ingest it without difficulty or qualm. I have watched them eat pieces of the very hearts of young saplings, wood of what we would consider prohibitive hardness even for creatures equipped to process it internally.

Three days ago I boiled down several pieces of bark, the sort I've seen so many of the young Asadi consume. I boiled it until the pieces were limply pliable. I managed to chew the bark for several minutes and finally to swallow it. Checking my stool nearly a day later, I found that this "meal" had gone right through me. Bark

consists of cellulose, after all. Indigestible cellulose. And yet the Asadi eat wood and digest it. How?

Again, I have to speculate. I believe the Asadi digest wood in the same manner as earthly termites; that is, through the aid of bacteria in their intestines, protozoa that break down the cellulose. A symbiosis, Benedict might say, being versed, as he is, in biological and ecological theory . . .

This is later. Tonight I have to talk, even if it's only to a microphone. With the coming of darkness the Asadi have disappeared again into the jungle, and I'm alone.

For the first three nights I was here, I too returned to the Wild when Denebola set. I returned to the place where Benedict had dropped me, curled up beneath the overhanging palm and lattice-sail leaves, slept through the night, and then joined the dawn's inevitable pilgrimage back to this clearing. Now I remain here through the night. I sleep on the clearing's edge, just deep enough into the foliage to find shelter. I go back into the jungle only to retrieve my food drops.

Although the Asadi disapprove of my behavior, because I'm an outcast they can do nothing to discipline me without violating their own injunction against acknowledging a pariah's existence. As they depart each evening, a few of the older Asadi—those with streaks of white in their mangy collars—halt momentarily beside me and breathe with exaggerated heaviness. They don't look at me because that's apparently taboo. But I don't look at them, either. Ignoring them as if they were pariahs, I've been able to dispense with those senseless and wearying treks in and out of the clearing that so exhausted me in my first three days here.

To absolve myself of what may seem a lack of thoroughness, I suppose I ought to mention that on my fourth and fifth nights here I attempted to follow two different Asadi specimens into the jungle—in order to determine where they slept, how they slept, and what occupies their waking time when they are away from the clearing. I wasn't successful, however.

When evening comes, the Asadi disperse. This dispersal is

complete: No two individuals remain together, not even the young with their parents. Each Asadi—I believe—finds a place of his or her own, one completely removed from that of any other member of the species. This practice runs counter to my experience with almost every other social group I've ever studied—although it's somewhat analogous to the solitary nest building of chimpanzees, as observed frequently in the Gombe Stream Reserve in East Africa. Female chimps, however, do sleep with their young. Perhaps, now that I think of it, Asadi females do, too. ... In any case, I was humiliatingly outdistanced by the objects of my pursuit. Nor can I suppose I'd have any greater success with different specimens, since I purposely chose to follow an aged and decrepit-seeming Asadi on the first evening and a small, scarcely pubescent creature on the second. Both ran with convincing strength, flashed into the trees as if still arboreal by nature, and then flickered from my vision and my grasp. . . .

Two moons are up, burnt-gold and unreal. I'm netted in by shadows and my growing loneliness. Field conditions, to be frank, have seldom been so austere for me, and I've begun to wonder if the Asadi were ever intelligent creatures. Maybe I'm studying a variety of Denebolan baboon. Ole Oliver Oliphant Frasier, though, reported that the Asadi once had both a written language and a distinctive system of architecture. He wasn't very forthcoming about how he reached these conclusions—but the Synesthesia Wild, I'm certain, contains many secrets. Later I'll be more venturesome. But for the present I've got to try to understand those Asadi who are alive today. They're the key to their own and the distant Ur'sadi past.

One or two final things before I attempt to sleep.

First, the eyes of the Asadi: These are somewhat as Benedict described them in the imaginary dialogue I composed two weeks ago. That is, like the bottoms of thick-glassed bottles. Except that I've noticed the eye really consists of two parts: a thin transparent covering, which is apparently hard, like plastic, and the complex, membranous organ of sight that this covering protects. It's as if

each Asadi is bom wearing a built-in pair of safety glasses.

Frasier's impression of their eyes as "murky" is one not wholly supported by continued observation. What he saw as murkiness probably resulted from the fact that the eyes of the Asadi—behind the outer lens or cap—are almost constantly changing colors. Sometimes the speed with which a yellow replaces an indigo, and then a green the yellow, and so on, makes it difficult for a mere human being to see any particular color at all. Maybe this is the explanation for Frasier's perception of their eyes as "murky." I don't know. I'm certain, though, that this chameleonic quality of the Asadi's eyes has social significance.

A second thing: Despite the complete absence of a discernible social order among the Asadi, today I may have witnessed an event of the first importance to my unsuccessful, so far, efforts to chart their group relationships. Maybe. Maybe not. Previously, no real order at all existed. Dispersal at night, congregation in the morning—if you choose to call that order. But nothing else. Random milling about during the day, with no set times for eating, sex, or their habitual bloodless feuds. Random plunges into the jungle at night. What's a humble Earthling to make of all this? A society held together by institutionalized antisocialness? What happened today leads me irrevocably away from that conclusion.

Maybe.

This afternoon an aged Asadi whom I'd never seen before stumbled into the clearing. His mane was grizzled, his face wizened, his hands shriveled, his grey body bleached to a filthy cream. But so agile was he in the Wild that no one detected his presence until his strangely clumsy entry into the clearing. Then, everyone fled from him. Unconcerned, he sat down in the center of the Asadi gathering place and folded his long, sparsely haired legs. By this time, all his conspecifics were in the jungle staring back at him from the edge of the clearing. Only at sunset had I ever before seen the Asadi desert the clearing en masse.

But I haven't yet exhausted the strangeness of this old man's visit. You see, he came accompanied.

He came with a small, puq^lish-black creature perched on his shoulder. It resembled a winged lizard, a bat, and a deformed homunculus all at once. But whereas the old man had great round eyes that changed color extremely slowly, if at all, the creature on his shoulder had not even a pair of empty sockets. It was blind, blind by virtue of its lack of qny organs of sight. It sat on the aged Asadi's shoulder and manipulated its tiny hands compulsively, tugging at the old man's mane, then opening and closing them on empty air, then tugging once again at its protector's grizzled collar.