Transfigurations (4 page)

Both the old man and his beastlike/manlike familiar had a furious unreality. They existed at a spiritual as well as a physical distance. I noted that the rest of the Asadi—those who surrounded and ignored me on the edge of the communion ground—behaved not as if they feared these sudden visitors, but rather as if they felt a loathsome kinship with them. This is difficult to express. Bear with me. Maybe another analogy will help. Let me say that the Asadi behaved toward their visitors as a fastidious child might behave toward a parent who has contracted a venereal disease. Love and loathing, shame and respect together.

The episode concluded abruptly when the old man rose from the ground, oblivious to the slow swelling and sedate flapping of his huri, and stalked back into the Wild, scattering a number of Asadi in his wake. (Huri, by the way, is a portmanteau word ior fury and harpy that I've just coined.)

Then everything went back to normal. The clearing filled again, and the ceaseless and senseless milling about resumed.

God, it's amazing how lonely loneliness can be when the sky contains a pair of jagged, nuggetlike moons and the human being inside you has surrendered to the essence of that which should command only your outward life. That's a mouthful, isn't it? What I mean is that there's a small struggle going on between Egan Chaney, cultural xenologist, and Egan Chancy, the quintessential man. No doubt it's the result more of environmental pressure than of my genetic heritage.

That's a little anthropological allusion, Moses. Don't worry

about it. You aren't supposed to understand it.

But enough. Today's atypical occurrence has sharpened my appetite for observation, temporarily calmed my internal struggle. I'm ready to stay here a year, if need be, even though the original plan was only for six months. Dear, dear God, look at those moons!

The Asadi Clearing: A Clarification

From the professional notebooks of Egan Chaney: My greatest collegiate failing was an inability to organize. I'm pursued by the specter of that failing even today. Consequently, a digression of sorts.

In looking over these quirkish notes for my formal ethnography, I see I may have given the reader the completely false idea that the Asadi clearing is a small area of ground, say fifteen by fifteen meters. Not so. As best I'm able to determine, there are approximately five hundred Asadi individuals. This figure includes mature adults, the young, and those intermediate between age and youth, although there are no "children" or "infants," surprisingly enough. By most demographic and anthropological estimates, five hundred is optimum tribal size.

Of course, during all my time in the Wild, I've never been completely sure that the same individuals return to the clearing each morning. It may be that some sort of monumental shift takes place in the jungle, one group of Asadi replacing another each day. But I doubt it. The Wild encompasses a finite (though large) area, after all, and I have learned to recognize a few of the more distinctive Asadi by sight. Therefore, five hundred seems about right to me: five hundred grey-fleshed creatures strolling, halting, bending at the waist and glaring at one another, eating, participating in loveless sex, grappling like wrestlers, obeying no time clock but the sun, their activities devoid of any apprehensible sequence or rationale. Such activity requires a little space, though, and their clearing provides it.

The reader may not cheerfully assume that the Asadi communion ground is a five-by-eight mud flat between a BoskVeld cypress and a malodorous sump hole. Not at all. Their communion ground has both size and symmetry, and the Asadi maintain it discrete from the encroaching jungle by their unremitting daily activity. I won't quote you dimensions, however, I'll merely say that the clearing has the rectangular shape, the characteristic slope, and the practical roominess of a twentieth-century football or soccer field. This is pure coincidence, I'm sure. Astroturf and lime-rendered hash marks are conspicuously absent.

A Dialogue of Self and Soul

From the private correspondence of Egan Chaney: The title of this exercise is from Yeats, dear Ben. The substance of the dialogue, however, has almost nothing to do with the Old Master's poem of the same name.

I wrote this imaginary exchange, in one of my notebooks while waiting out a particularly long night on the edge of the Asadi clearing (just off the imaginary thirty-yard line on the south end of the field, western sideline), and I intend for no one to read it, Ben, but you. Its lack of objectivity and the conclusions drawn by the participants make it unsuitable for any sort of appearance in the formal ethnography I've yet to write.*

But you, Ben, will understand that a scientist is also a human being and may perhaps forgive me. Because I've withheld my self from you in our many one-sided conversations (you dominate them, I realize, because my silence is a spur to others' volubility; they speak to fill the void), here I mean to show you the mind these silences conceal.

But since you can't tell the players without a program, I

*Even though we shared a dormitory room for a time, Chaney "mailed" me the letter containing this dialogue. We never discussed his "letter." T. B.

herewith provide a program. The numbers on the backs of the players' metaphysical jerseys are Self and Soul.

Self = The Cultural Xenologist Soul = The Quintessential Man Manager(s): Egan Chaney

SELF: This is my eighteenth night in the Synesthesia Wild.

SOUL: I've been here forever. But let that go. What have you learned?

self: Most of my observations lead me to state emphatically that the Asadi are not fit subjects for "anthropological" study. They manifest no purposeful social activity. They do not use tools. They have less social organization than did most of the extinct earthly primates and hominids, and not much more than chimpanzees and baboons. Only the visit, three days ago, of the "old man" and his frightening companion indicates even a remote possibility I'm dealing with intelligence. How can I continue?

SOUL: You'll continue out of contempt for the revulsion daily growing in you. Because the Asadi are, in fact, intelligent—^just as Oliver Oliphant Frasier said they were.

SELF: But how do I know that, damn it? How do I know what you insist is true is really true? Blind acceptance of Frasier's word?

SOUL: There are signs, Chaney. The eyes, for instance. But even if there weren't any signs, you'd admit that the Asadi are as intelligent, in their own way, as you or I. Wouldn't you, Egan?

SELF: I admit it. Their elusive intelligence haunts me.

SOUL: No, now you've misstated the facts—you've twisted things around horribly.

SELF: How? What do you mean?

SOUL: You are not the one who is haunted, Egan Chaney, for

you're loo rationed a creature to be the prey of poltergeist. / am the haunted one, the bedeviled one, the one ridden by every insidious spirit of doubt and revulsion.

SELF: Revulsion? You've used that word twice. Why do you insist upon it? What does it mean?

SOUL: That I hate the Asadi. I despise their every culturally significant—or insignificant—act. They curdle my essence with their very alienness. And because they do, you, too, Egan Chaney, hate them—for you're simply the civilized veneer on my primordial responses to the world. You're haunted not by the Asadi, friend, but by me.

SELF: While you, in turn, are haunted by them. Is that it?

soul: That's how it is. But although you're aware of my hatred for the Asadi, you pretend that that portion of my hatred which seeps into you is only a kind of professional resentment. You believe you resent the Asadi for destroying your objectivity, your scientific detachment. In truth, this detachment doesn't exist. You feel the same powerful revulsion for their alienness that works in me like a disease, the same abiding and deep-seated hatred. I haunt you.

self: With hatred for the Asadi?

SOUL: Yes. I admit it, Egan. Admit that even as a scientist you hate them.

SELF: No. No, damn you, I won't. Because we killed the pygmies, every one of them. How can I say, "I hate the Asadi, I hate the Asadi," when we killed every pygmy? —Even though, my God, I do. . . .

PART TWO

Daily Life: In-the-Field Report

From the professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: Once again, it's evening. I've a lean-to now, and it protects me from the rain much better than did the porous roof of the forest. I've been here twenty-two days now. Beneath this mildewed flesh my muscles crawl like the evil snakes BoskVeld doesn't possess. I'm saturated with Denebola's garish light. I'm Gulliver among the Yahoos.

This, however, isn't what you want to hear.

You want facts, my conclusions about the behavior of the Asadi, evidence that we're studying a life form capable of at least elementary reasoning and ratiocination. The Asadi have this ability, I swear it—but only slowly has the evidence for intelligence begun to accumulate.

Okay, base-camp buggers. Let me deHver myself of an in-tbe-field report as an objective scientist, forgetting the buncbes of my mortal self. Tbe rest of tbis tape will deal witb tbe daily life of tbe Asadi.

A day in tbe life of. A typical day in the life of.

Except that I'm going to cap my reporting of mundane occurrences with tbe account of an extraordinary event that took place just tbis afternoon. Also, I'm going to compress time to suit my own artistic/scientific purposes.

At dawn tbe Asadi return to their football fields. For approximately twelve hours they mill about in tbe clearing doing whatever they care to do. Sexual activity and quirkish staring matches are the only sort of behavior that can in any way be called "social"— unless you believe milling about in a crowd qualifies. Their daylight way of life I call Indifferent Togetherness.

But when the Asadi engage in coitus, their indifference dissolves and gives way to a brutal hostility. Both partners behave as if they desire to kill each other, and frequently tbis is nearly the result. (Births, in case you're wondering, must take place in the Wild, the female self-exiled and unattended.) As for the staring matches, they're of brief duration and involve fierce gesticulation and mane shaking. The eyes change color with astonishing rapidity, flashing through the entire visible spectrum, and maybe beyond, in a matter of seconds.

I'm now prepared to say these instantaneous changes of eye color are tbe Asadi equivalent of human speech. Three weeks of observation have finally convinced me that tbe adversaries in these staring matches control tbe internal chemical changes that trigger the cbfmges in the succeeding hues of their eyes. In other words, patterns exist. Tbe minds that control these chemical changes cannot be primitive ones. The alterations are willed, and they're infinitely complex.

Ole Oliver Oliphant was right. The Asadi have a "language."

Still, for all tbe good it does me, they might as well have none. One day's agonizingly like another. And I can't blame my

pariahhood, for the only things even a well-adjusted Asadi may participate in are sex and staring. It doesn't pain me overmuch to be outcast from participation in these. To some extent, I'm not much more of a pariah than any of these creatures. We're all, so to speak, outcast from life's feast. . . .

Unlike every other society I've ever read about or seen, the Asadi don't even have any meaningful communal gatherings, any festivals of solidarity, any unique rituals of group consciousness. They don't even have families. The individual is the basic unit of their "society." What they have done, in fact, is to institutionalize the processes of alienation. Their dispersal at dusk simply translates into physical distance the incohesiveness by which they live during the day. How do the Asadi continue to live as a people? For that matter, why do they do so?

Enough questions. As I mentioned earlier, something extraordinary took place today. It happened this afternoon, and, I suppose, it's still happening. As before, this strange event involves the old man who appeared in the clearing over a week ago. It also involves the huri, his blind reptilian companion.

Until today I'd never seen two Asadi eat together. As an Earthman from a Western background, I find the practice of eating alone a disturbing one. After all, I've been eating alone for over three weeks now, and I long to sit down in the communal mess with Benedict and Eisen, Morrell and Yoshiba, and everyone else at base camp. My training in strange folkways and alien cultural patterns hasn't weaned me away from this longing. As a result, I've watched with interest, and a complete lack of comprehension, the Asadi sitting apart from their fellows and privately feeding—as if, again, they were merely an alien variety of chimpanzee or baboon.

Today this changed. An hour before the fall of dusk, the old man staggered into the clearing under the burden of something damnably heavy. I was aware of the commotion at once. Like last time, every one of the Asadi fled to the edge of the jungle. I observed from my lean-to. My heart, dear Ben, thumped like a toad in a jar. The huri on the old man's shoulder scarcely moved;

it appeared bloated and insentient, a rubber doll. During the whole of the old man's visit it remained in this virtually comatose state, upright but unmoving. Meanwhile, the aged Asadi—whom I've begun to regard as some sort of aloof and mysterious chieftain—paused in the center of the clearing, looked about, and then struggled to remove the burden from his back. It was slung over his shoulders by means of two narrow straps.

Straps, Eisen: S-T-R-A-P-S. Made of vines.

Can you understand how I felt? Nor did the nature of the old man's burden cause my wonder to fade. He was lowering to the ground the rich, brownish-red carcass of an animal. The meat glistened with the failing light of Denebola and its own internal vibrancy. The meat had been dressed, Eisen, and the old man was bringing it to the Asadi clearing as an offering to his people.

He set the carcass on the dusty assembly floor and withdrew the straps from the incisions he'd made in the meat. Then, his hands and shoulders bloodstained, he stepped back five or six steps.