Transfigurations (32 page)

First, they discovered they still had strong appetites for solid food and occasional socialization. Their bodies, after all, were

made to assimilate protein in the form of animal flesh as well as in nuts and other exotic forest products; and, photosynthesis or no photosynthesis, they still had to rendezvous occasionally to mate. So seldom did these sexual encounters occur at first, however, that twin births proved an especially adaptive feature of their reproductive strategy. More and more of the solitary proto-Asadi creatures were bom, and they slaked their meat hunger by preying upon the old, the sick, the feeble. The proto-Asadi became their own scavengers. Because of steadily mounting population pressures, bands coalesced in the Wild, and these bands, in turn, took to warring with one another in order to establish territorial elbow-room. They also took prisoners, whom they ultimately sacrificed not to any cruel omnipotent god but to the less-than-godly yearning in their bellies. Moreover, to satisfy their reborn cravings for fat and animal protein, they embarked upon periodic binges of infanticide. These practices combined to reduce population levels again—until, finally, a proto-Asadi contingent with enough dim intelligence to perceive what was happening to it stepped in to mark off an area of jungle in which cannibalism was taboo during the hours of their highest photosynthetic efficiency. This clearing was the forerunner of the Asadi assembly ground. By outright designation it gave the Asadi a center for their absurd communal activities and a refuge from their tendency to feast on one another.

Collateral species of Ur'sadi—bands that failed to submit to the hallowedness of this primeval clearing—were hunted down at night, killed, and eaten. When only a single species remained, the proto-Asadi themselves, its individuals settled into a social ritual parodying the goal-oriented cohesiveness of their departed forebears. They became survival machines, automatons. Their optical language degenerated into a medium for conveying either invective or raw, unstructured emotion. Their few identifiable "customs" were nothing more than neurological engrams for enforcing conformity and penalizing innovation.

Elegy, laying out one of the beef haunches and trimming away a long snake of fat with a pair of soundless butcher's shears,

compared the early Asadi to victims of prolonged sensory deprivation.

'They were the only animal species on the planet," she said, "of any intellectual development—even if they'd perverted it by isolating themselves from one another and then killing off those who conspicuously differed from them in behavior or appearance. In their original clearing the Asadi were like a man in a small black box or tiger cage underground. Their every physical response to the world was a reenactment of old and time-worn behaviors. They were at a remove from reality, just like the prisoner who can certify his existence only by biting his lip or clawing the inside of his thigh. That prisoner, you leave him alone long enough, finally goes insane. Well, that's what happened to the ecologically isolated Asadi—they grew into an overwhelming and seemingly irreversible community insanity. By default, Ben, their species was the measure of all things."

And when Asadi numbers again began to climb, the clearing teemed anew with impatient and angry animals.

"At which time," said Elegy, "the females began to select their more robust infants as objects of family cannibalism, and for the first time since the departure of their ancient Ur'sadi forebears, the possibility of love reentered the complex of Asadi emotions."

"Love," Jaafar scoffed, the old prejudice resurfacing. 'They love what they eat, is that it? Just as I 'love' honey, and hot fresh bread, and fried cephalopod tentacles. Spare me such love from a mother, though. Much better she should hate me inordinately but keep her teeth out of my liver and lights."

"I don't say the practice arose from an impulse of love," responded Elegy, putting down the butcher's shears and using the bone saw I handed her to cut a blood-red hunk of meat. "It probably arose as means of easing population pressures in the clearing. It also gave the Asadi the promise of protein in a familiar and appetizing guise. The nutritional value of the sacrificial child wasn't really important. What was important was that the female subtracted one twin from each double birth by giving herself and the weaker child the psychological blessing of meat ready to hand.

The cannibalism really didn't significantly improve the protein and fat content in the Asadi diet—it still doesn't—but it created an effective stabilizing factor in their population growth. It also reinforced the pattern of Twilight Dispersal by giving each adult Asadi a gruesome incentive to return at sunset to the Wild."

Her hands slick with grease, Elegy gave me a long strip of fat and a section of bone with meat still clinging to it. "Take these to Kretzoi, Ben."

I carried the offerings to the helicraft's door, spotted Kretzoi grooming himself beneath the tent awning, and tossed him both the ragged bone and the snaky, glistening rind. Kretzoi looked at me indifferently, then picked up the strip of fat as if it were a lei to be worn about his neck. I returned to the helicraft without waiting to see how he disposed of his meal.

Elegy was still working, still talking to Jaafar.

". . . mothers learned it was more rewarding—both psychologically and nutritionally—to keep the sacrificial child alive as long as possible. To do this they had to expend energy and care; they had to search out, usually in full darkness, herbs and plants with which to heal and anesthetize the meat-sibling. The return in protein and fat wasn't large enough to justify so much labor. . . . Not unless you suppose, as I do, that Asadi mothers derive great satisfaction from caring for the Eaten One. For that matter, Asadi children, male as well as female, do, too. Those who are permitted to live are raised to cherish the meat-sibling, to eat of it only in the dark—and temperately, even then—and to nurture it at all other times. In four or five yccu-s, in fact, the meat-sibling becomes the possession and love object solely of the designated survivor—for the mother, by this time, passes out of her infertile lactation interval and becomes pregnant again. When this happens, she builds a new nest quite distant from the old one and begins a new family.

"The designated survivor carries on as it has been taught. Until its mane is full, it remains both day and night with the Eaten One. Then it ventures by itself into the Asadi clearing and undergoes its initiation into the social life of its conspecifics. Indifferent

Togetherness. And Indifferent Togetherness strengthens the new arrival's desire to flee back to its meat-sibling at sunset. In just this way, then, it surrenders its identity to a well-estabhshed pattern and becomes another lost marcher in the Procession of the Asadi Damned."

With a long-handled, thick-bladed knife Elegy perforated one of the beef haunches and worked diligently to make the slits go all the way through the meat.

"But the seeds of affection, of tenderness, of love," she said through gritted teeth, "have been sown among the Asadi, Jaafar, and if they can break out of their rut and survive another hundred thousand years or so—maybe much, much less—they may be able to redeem themselves from the fatiguing hell into which they've fallen.

"Bojangles is evidence that—were we given the go-ahead to intervene—a delicate programming operation might be all that's necessary to put them right again. We could do it within a single Asadi generation. The only drawbacks to such a scheme I can see are that it violates GK regs and raises the possibility that the citizens of Frasierville and our colonists out on the veldts would have to share their planet with a species with a prior claim. And sometimes, Jaafar, human beings don't share very well."

Elegy turned to me, her wrists bloody and her forearms a speckled burnt-umber color. "Could you get the straps out of that box, Ben? I want to fix this little package up right."

From a box in the cargo section—a small teakwood trunk, really—I removed two wine-colored leather belts, one with a buckle, one with a cat-tongue overlap fastener of Velcro. At the butcher's table I threaded the belts through the slits Elegy had cut in the beef haunch. Jaafar was struggling to force the blade of his knife through another marbled slab, and his face, contorted by the effort, resembled that of a hired Levantine cutthroat. We had cut four packages of meat from the two beef haunches.

Wiping her brow with her forearm. Elegy said, "Call Kretzoi in here, Ben."

So, from the cargo section, I shouted, "Kretzoi, come in here! Hey, Kretzoi!" and Elegy and Jaafar looked at me as if I had just belched during an especially lovely section of Bach's Christmas Oratorio.

But Kretzoi leaped into the Dragonfly and swaggered with a pronouncedly baboonish gait to our makeshift slaughterhouse.

"Kretzoi," Elegy said, approaching him, "try this hunk of meat on. We may have to adjust the straps."

Quite composedly, the primate rocked back on his hindquarters and made a series of hand signs.

"I'll comb the 'mess' out, Kretzoi. You can't be your old fastidious self if you go through with this tomorrow, though. The mess goes with the job. That's just the way it is."

Elegy hefted the slab of meat by a copper belt buckle and swung the whole package around so that it thudded softly against Kretzoi's back. She got his forelimbs through the straps and did a careful cinching job in front.

"Stand up, Kretzoi. Stand up and walk. I want to see if that's going to be all right."

Kretzoi stood. With his forelimbs—his arms, rather—bent provisionally before him like someone whose wrists have just been broken, he performed a gimpy minuet. Animal, I thought; only an animal. But Elegy, satisfied, asked him if he were reasonably comfortable. He signaled that he was.

Jaafar and I took the slab off Kretzoi's back. I unfastened both belts and replaced the meat in the refrigeration locker. The cold air whirling out took my breath away. We cached the other three dressed-out pieces with the first and saved back several small strips of meat for our evening meal. Protein and animal fat.

Thomas Benedict, carnivore.

Jaafar and I went out to the edge of the drop point to check Cy again. Elegy remained with Kretzoi under the awning, soaping the

"mess" out of his lovely red-gold fur and scraping away the tangled lather with a comb and a wire brush.

Cy seemed to be stirring. The creature's truncated body hiccupped alarmingly; the eyes were no longer occluded by a film. Colors spun lazily inside his bottle-glass lenses—a spectral display reminiscent of a carousel whose operator can't decide whether to run it at three-quarters throttle or shut it completely down. Jaafar lifted his syringe and placed the needle on a vein standing visible in the sparse hair of Cy's throat.

"Victim of love," he murmured, ready to drive the needle home.

I caught his hand. A twitch of Cy's head had revealed something odd about the area around his brain stem. A small excavation, in fact. None of us had noticed it before. I gripped the creature's m£me and pushed his head all the way to the right, exposing the neat, almost homey hole.

Through this, it was clear, Bojangles or his mother had withdrawn the medulla oblongata, the cerebellum, and other tasty portions of the neocortical grey matter. They had trephined Cy in order to get at the tempting sweet-breads of his brain.

"They probably left him his reptilian brain," I said; "his primitive R-complex and a good deal of the neocortical frontal lobes. That's all he's operating on,-Jaafar. I doubt he's in pain. The twitches are nervous responses to the return of a low level of consciousness."

"His eyes—" Jaafar began.

"They left him Bojangles's area because they couldn't get at it. Or maybe because they knew he'd need it to protract this fetid death-in-life state of his. His spectral displays are ritualized patterns. I'd bet they emanate from some kind of roundabout hookup between his R-complex and Bojangles's area."

Fiercely, Jaafar said, "Let him return, then, to the good, sweet dark," and he plunged the needle into the vein in Cy's neck.

"We'd do better just killing him. His spectral display's a distress signal, more than likely—repeated, and repeated, and repeated again."

"Pfyu!" Jaafar spat into the leaf cover at our feet; then he tossed the syringe into the Wild with a savage, underhand flip that slammed his hand into the bottom of Cy's nest and jammed one of his fingers. He put the finger into his mouth and, turning back toward the Dragonfly in a crouch, sucked at the sudden hurt.

"I didn't expect," he said, speeiking only half intelligibly around his finger, "to discover such sick-making things about these creatures." Then, as if it were an old-fashioned thermometer, he shook his finger in the air. "When we get back, I swear to you I am going to pull a Pettijohn and see if they can't find me beautiful nightmares on the punishment worlds. It couldn't be worse than these . . . these eat-your-own-issue boonies! Oh, no; indeed not."

I walked him back to the tent awning.

Two hours later, at sunset, he ate his slices of solar-broiled beef with as fine an appetite as if he had never seen what he had seen. For that matter, so did I.

CHAPTER HFTEEN

Following the Script

I woke during the night to realize that Elegy had left our awning tent and gone into the Dragonfly to share a bed with Jaafar. Although I could hear nothing but the wind in the forest, I knew they were in each other's arms. Would Jaafar call her "Civ Cather, my sweet Civ Cather" at the moment of climax? It seemed quite likely. I grinned in bitter amusement at the prospect.

An hour before sunrise, I dressed, shook down the kinks in my bones, and strolled to the edge of the Wild. Cy lay comatose, or very nearly so, in his relocated nest. In solemn moonlight I cut his throat and lifted him out, as a person removes a new garment from its wrappings in a shallow box. A few of the creature's exposed intestines slipped free and dangled in the darkness like soft pendulums ticking off the minutes until dawn. I cut them loose and laid the carcass on the ground.