Transfigurations (20 page)

A silence—as if we were subtemporally radioing another planet and had to endure a brief transmission lag. Into this silence I read the archaic Victorian and modem neocolonial social biases of Moses Eisen, as well as his very human chagrin at being so logically defied.

At last he said, "I just don't want to lose anybody else to the boonies. Civ Gather. Your father was plenty, I think."

"Nor do we want to lose Kretzoi to the Asadi, Governor Eisen," said Chaney's daughter.

'Til expect you and Dr. Benedict back in Frasierville in five days. Six at the very most. Good night, Giv Gather. Good night, Ben."

The radio clicked off, and we were alone again in the claustrophobic coziness of the Wild.

Asadi males, when they indulge their brief but vicious sexual appetites, mount from the rear. Almost all terrestrial primates also approach their partners from behind. It seems possible to conclude—a posteriori, if you will—that on whatever world it has evolved, the basic primate morphology demands this approach.

Moreover, in many primate social units the responsibilities of paternity are principally a matter of begetting rather than of nurture. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am, and daddy's duty's done. Did Asadi males play any part in the upbringing of their species' infants? Chimpanzee fathers do not, although upon occasion an older male sibling will take an inquisitive interest in his mother's most recent issue and later attempt to involve it in friendly, fraternal roughhouse. Closely spaced brothers often become fast friends as adults. Other males, however, are either only briefly curious or almost totally indifferent to new arrivals.

Among the Asadi—beyond Sankosh's film proving that birth did indeed occur on BoskVeld—we didn't even know to what extent the females were involved in the nurture of their offspring. Females as well as males had been seen to mount their partners from the rear, however, and large females climbed parodically aboard diminutive males at least as often as they themselves suffered such assaults. In the Calyptran Wild the sexual act always seemed as degrading and faceless as rape. It took place in public, on the assembly ground, and its social context resembled that of an altercation between masked strangers. On BoskVeld, as on Earth, genuine love between consenting adult primates of opposite sexes was even rarer than the private, face-to-face sexual embrace that is almost exclusively specific to humankind. . . .

Why do I inject this comparison/contrast of terrestrial and alien primate sexuality precisely here? Primarily because it was on my mind that night. I was trying, perhaps within a grandiosely encompassing frame, to interpret the meaning of what happened to Elegy and me after Moses's voice had faded off into the garble of interstellar static.

Face to face in the Dragonfly's cabin, we smiled at each other— as content in the triumph of the moment as we were comfortable in the knowledge that Moses had been embarrassed by the thought of our manifold chances for intimacy. Elegy's smile encouraged me, and I leaned toward her and brushed her lips with mine. I, the male, initiated this contact, keeping my eyes open to see what

effect it would have on her. Her eyes remained open, too. She watched as from an Olympian height, her gaze steady and penetrating even when we were nose to nose in the follow-through of my calculating kiss. My temples pounded, my hands began to sweat, and I felt fifteen again. Meanwhile, her face—illumined by the glow of the instrument panel—grew to oceanic dimensions and wavered in my vision like a mist. Then, still without closing her eyes, she returned the pressure of my lips.

Tentatively pleased, I drew back and looked at her.

"Lust?" Elegy inquired with straightforward curiosity.

"Probably," I admitted. "With at least an equal measure of purely romantic feeling deriving from—well, the situation itself." I nodded upward through the windscreen at the jungle and the frond-veiled moon.

"All right, then. Come on." She jumped to the clearing's floor and ducked out of sight beneath the nylon awning supported by the helicraft. I got out of my chair and followed her.

Sitting cross-legged on the uninflated mattress she'd been struggling with earlier. Elegy nodded me to a place at her side while pushing determinedly at the heel of her right boot. "De Lambant's problem was lust unmixed with any feeling but the desire to subjugate and possess," she said, at last getting the boot off and beginning to work on the other.

"De Lambant?" I eased myself down.

"The Wasserldufers captain," Elegy reminded me. "I refused her, though, because she enjoyed implying that Kretzoi and I—" She stopped. "Maybe you can deduce the rest for yourself."

"I believe I can," I said.

"Once she asked me point-blank what it was like, and I told her thrilling beyond belief if you were surgically adapted for the experience—a response I thought might discourage any more overtures but which really just increased de Lambant's curiosity about both of us. As you know, my refusals eventually led to her nearly getting Kretzoi quarantined by your credulous Governor."

"You don't have to entertain me on that account. I'm not the sort

to hold grudges or seek a petty revenge. Elegy."

"Who said you were?" Both boots off, she smiled. "Are you going to take part or just watch?"

I drew up my feet and began keying open one of my boots.

"My mother, in an enlightened age, believed she could affirm the 'spiritual' portion of her makeup by ignoring what she considered the 'animal' portion," Elegy told me, peeling her jumpsuit down from her shoulders and revealing the brown half circles of her upper breasts. "Technically, she's still a virgin. Chaney honored her hands-off policy to the very end—I don't know, he may have believed exactly as she did. For that matter, the policy may have originated with him. In any case, I'm convinced that by striving so hard for the angelic and turning their backs on the animal, they never quite edged over into the fully human."

"I never knew that Chaney," I said. "He always seemed to me a man trying to define himself as best he could under circumstances that distorted his every definition. But he came closer than any of the rest of us. Elegy, and I admired him for the attempt."

Elegy was gracefully out of her clothes, and our tryst beneath the bright nylon awning seemed both to illustrate and to mock her story of her mother's division of human nature into spiritual and animal halves. Highfalutin words floating in gyres above the primitive lusts. The trick seemed to be to get them spiraling through each other in precision concert. But for the moment Elegy's hemispherical breasts had me hypnotized and unmanned. I stared at them with mute, little-boy pleasure and they stared unabashedly back.

"Go ahead and look," Elegy said indulgently. "They're a sexual signal at least as much as they're a maternal adaptation."

I knew what she was referring to—the supposition that the human female's breasts have evolved as they have in order to mimic the fleshy buttocks used aeons ago by female hominids to signal adult males of their readiness to mate. The gradual development of an upright posture and efficient bipedalism

selected for similar anatomical signals in front. Hence, hairless, rounded breasts in the female descendants of those still unplacea-ble ancestral hominids of ours. Not to mention the frontal self-mimicry of the red genital labia inherent in the protruding lips of our mouths and the ever-recurrent tendency of human females to paint them pink or scarlet. Originally, such disquieting evolutionary suppositions imply, we were designed to copulate belly to butt and to take our pleasure with the impersonal animal efficiency of baboons or chimpanzees. Maybe that's why women, at one time more thoroughly socialized in tenderness and nurture than males, often seem to find regressive variations on frontal intercourse degrading or animalistic. I don't know. All I know is that by inviting me to look without embarrassment on her naked breasts Elegy set off in me a free-associational nightmare of Asadi belly-to-butt gymnastics that embarrassed me mightily.

"What's the matter, Ben?" She was concerned rather than simply amused—although I think she could have easily burst out laughing, had she not held herself back—and that helped blanch the redness out of my face.

"It's been awhile," I told her lamely. And the last time, I recollected gloomily, in a ball booth on Night Drag Boulevard with a middle-aged woman whose secret peccadillo was biting savagely into a cr^me-de-menthe nougat at the moment of orgasm. She only got to do that once. Once was enough.

"Don't worry," Elegy counseled me. "It's like riding a bicycle. You never forget how."

"People get too old to ride bicycles. Elegy."

"You haven't, have you?"

So I finished shedding my clothes, and with no one watching but my cool, astrally disembodied self and the Pock-Marked Man in Melchior, I discovered that I truly hadn't. . . .

I was still asleep at dawn. Elegy had to awaken me to say that 174

Kretzoi had departed for the Asadi clearing and that we had a full day ahead before he came back to report his progress.

Elegy behaved toward me as she always had, neither more doting nor more aloof than usual, the only difference being her freeness in touching me as we strolled about the camp or talked with each other in the helicraft. These touches gave me a sort of grinning pleasure (except that I suppressed the grins) and a ridiculously improved opinion of myself. At the same time, I began to worry about what failure would do to Elegy. Her single-minded desire to discover both the Asadi pagoda and the fate of Egan Chaney had sustained her for the last several years, and now that desire—that commitment—was irrevocably on the line.

We spent the morning writing and transcribing notes. During the afternoon I again raised the possibility that Kretzoi's monotonous labors among the Asadi might fail to turn up anything new or useful about them. This discussion led me to plot strategies for the future. I suggested a trek northward, in the supposed direction of the pagoda. I proposed that Kretzoi might eventually act as something of an agent provocateur. Perhaps if he suddenly began behaving in anomalous ways, he would prod the Asadi into rare but revealing behaviors of their own. The prime argument against this unorthodox tack. Elegy pointed out, was of course the risk to Kretzoi himself.

"We're going to have to do something," I told her in turn. "I don't expect the Asadi to spill their innermost psychological secrets to us in the next few days. They haven't in six years. Elegy, and your father learned as much as he did, I feel sure, only because he happened to go among them during a cycle in which they were preparing to designate a new absentee chieftain. And the time of his arrival was pure chance."

"He also had patience and persistence on his side."

"But I don't, Elegy. And although you and Kretzoi may, I really don't think those things are the open sesame you're looking for. Six years of patience and persistence have brought the rest of us up against a brick wall."

"You're forgetting this is only Kretzoi's second day in there. Yesterday we saw something no one else has apparently ever seen before, too."

'Touche," I said.

"Patience," Elegy counseled, as people, in those days, seemed to delight in counseling me. "Patience and persistence, Ben."

An hour before sunset, emptied of words and aerodynamically naked in the sticky heat of late afternoon. Elegy and I returned to our pallets beneath the Dragonfly's orange-and-white awning and made patient, persistent love. Then, like newlyweds expecting the arrival of a sensitive and lonely guest, we pulled on our clothes and chastely waited for Kretzoi.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Captive

Little of consequence happened in the following days—if you discount the fact that Elegy and I continued to be lovers.

Each evening Kretzoi, progressively more disoriented and fatigued, came back to us for a meal and a rigorous debriefing session. After greedily devouring the packaged fruit and protein substitutes we had waiting for him, he would sit on his haunches in the hard, cold light of the Dragonfly's kliegs and make shadow pictures on the forest wall with his hands. Without Elegy's help I was unable to follow these exchanges. The signal system they employed—a special "dialect" of American Sign Language, or Ameslan, developed by the Goodall-Fossey primatologists—was still unintelligible to me, and I'd made only a halfhearted attempt to learn it. As a result. Elegy would translate Kretzoi's ramblings aloud and I would operate the recorders.

What we principally learned was that the Asadi, with a certain

inarticulate skepticism, had accepted Kretzoi as one of their own. They allowed him to troop about the clearing, they engaged him in a couple of initial staring matches, and they invited him by angry gestures and whirling optical displays to take part in coitus. So far, because of his size and his maleness, he had escaped sexual assault. The inability of his eyes to pinwheel through a series of chemically motivated color changes had identified him unequivocally as a "mute," however, and despite the fact that human surgeons had given him the thick, tawny mane of an Asadi Brahman, Krelzoi's status among the Asadi was not high. His eyes, Kretzoi felt, disconcerted and even annoyed them—but he had not yet violated any of their ritual taboos and they tolerated his presence as they had once tolerated that of the clayey-eyed Bachelor who eventually befriended Egan Chaney. Although the Asadi had shaved The Bachelor's mane for leading Chaney to their temple, Kretzoi had neither any idea where this temple was (if it existed) nor anyone but us to lead there (should he somehow discover the way). The result was that Kretzoi saw stretching before him an eternity of Indifferent Togetherness in the Asadi clearing. Nothing could have dismayed Kretzoi more. Nor did either Elegy or 1 look upon this prospect with unmitigated delight.

What else did Kretzoi tell us in these debriefings?

Something curious and perhaps significant. Although he hadn't again experienced the rising queasiness of fear prompted in him by the eyebook we'd activated in the Archaeological Museum, his unwilling staring matches with Asadi antagonists had done odd things to his perception of time. More than once, caught unawares by a mesmerizing spectral display, Kretzoi had disengaged several minutes later to find that the sun had clocked off an hour or more's worth of arc overhead.