Transfigurations (36 page)

"You're trapped in your left brain," she informed me. "You're a prisoner of your 'rational' self. You're dying of a disease called formulaic digital logic—which doesn't prevent you from behaving like an animal in moments of intuitive sanity." Her anger was even more palpable than the blown-up huri in my hands.

"What are you talking about. Elegy?" I nodded toward the pagoda. "In no time at all they're going to be cremating Kretzoi alive and you're subjecting me to an off-the-wall character analysis."

"Your archaic jealousy's one of the few signs the disease may not be as far along as it sometimes appears."

"Elegy —"

"How many times have you and I . . . copulated?" she challenged me, settling on the final word with a deliberate but opaque irony.

I stared at her in disbelief, but my mind raced to compute, to tally, to come up with an answer. "Twelve or so. Less than fifteen."

"Which is it, Ben? Tell me exactly."

"Fourteen," I hazarded.

"Are you sure?" she pressed.

"Positive," I said in exasperation, believing Kretzoi mortally imperiled by our argument and our inattention.

"How many times must we copulate before you stop counting?"

"What?" I waved helplessly at the temple.

She grabbed my gesturing hand and pinioned it to the mock-huri clutched awkwardly against my chest. "Your left brain's keeping score," she whispered hatefully. "It counts off its ticks like a clock. There hasn't been a time we lay naked together, Thomas Benedict, you didn't start intellectualizing the experience from the perspective of an anthropologist, or a sociobiologist, or maybe even a fucking Komm-galen with a minor in psychosexual angst. Your mind's like a mirror on the ceiling. It records but doesn't participate. That's what's wrong with you."

"Much obliged," I raged. "Holy goddamn fucking obliged!"

"And that's why Jaafar and I had our way with each other last night, or the night before last, or whenever the hell it was!"

"Because he doesn't intellectualize the act?" I raged, glancing in harried disbelief back and forth between Elegy's face and the Asadi temple.

"Not in the least."

"Listen," I hissed, aching with both jealousy and chagrin, "I'll tell you what's wrong with me—if, incredibly enough, that's all that's on your mind."

"Go ahead."

"I've been living for six years in the shadow of a dead man. I've

made his work my own, I've pursued his ghost as if it were a grail, I've even allowed his doubly obsessed daughter to dictate the terms of that pursuit. That's what's wrong with me. I've put my identity in an equation with Egan Chaney's and then factored myseK totally out of the picture." I saw quite clearly that the two Asadi torchbearers were lifting the heavy iron flambeaux from their sconces and moving toward the bier on which Kretzoi lay. At last, half panicked, I stood up and stepped from our hiding place. "Maybe that's what's wrong with you, too, Elegy—you've lost yourself in your obsession to find a dead man! A dead man!"

I was naked in the clearing. My last angrily declaimed accusation had drawn the eyes of the Asadi. But for the jungle at my back, I was beset and surrounded.

Elegy shouted, "Goddamn it, Ben, do something!"

I raised the mock-huri and shook it violently. Then, taking it by one tarry wing, I whirled it about over my head like a child flying some sort of strange toy aircraft. Dawn was almost upon us. Swinging the artificial huri, I advanced through the Asadi toward the pagoda. Elegy came with me. On every side, the beasts retreated from us in fear and bewilderment.

The corpsebearers and torchlighters on the pagoda's highest tier observed our approach with puzzlement and alarm. To save themselves they would either have to flee or fight. Those seemed the only options available to them; and when the creatures failed to show any readiness to flee—we had just set foot on the bottom step and begun our ascent—I feared they would defend with their very lives both the pagoda and the body of their chieftain. I stopped.

"What's the matter?" Elegy asked.

"Are you ready to take on all eight of those fellows?"

The amethyst eyes of the pagoda, streaming with a multifaceted ooze, stared down on us in macrocosmic parody of the indigo gazes of the Asadi attending Kretzoi's bier.

Then I heard Elegy say, "Look."

Half turning, I saw the Asadi behind us plunging back into the Wild in a thousand different places, one cifter the other. De-

nebola's rising had triggered their dispersal, an inversion of the usual course of things. But the corpsebearers and torchlighters awaiting us on the temple's broad, high porch had not yet fled. Maybe they didn't intend to.

Elegy and I resumed our climb. My arm aching, I continued to whirl the mock-huri above my head.

On the temple's highest step the Asadi formed a phalanx eight individuals abreast. Bending aggressively forward, they stared down with eyes spinning out of indigo dullness into spectral displays of such angry intensity that their faces seemed to be on fire. A moment later they all began to fade, their bodies emptying of color, texture, and substance—so that through the outlines of their torsos and limbs Elegy and I could clearly see the catafalque behind them, the mossy, rearing facade of the pagoda, and the rough-hewn massiveness of the temple's doors.

"Again," whispered Elegy, matter-of-fact and noncommittal.

"Hallucination," I told her. "They're radiating a spectral pattern that polarizes or off-centers our ability to perceive them. They do it in concert for maximum effectiveness. It's a residual capability. The pagoda retains in its structure the essence of this power, and their resorting to it now. Elegy, means they're out of their boonie minds with fright!"

I hurled the mock-huri with all my strength up the sweep of the tier, fell helplessly forward, and watched as the huri's wings stabilized its stumpy fuselage and sent it cruising like a crazy kamikaze intelligence into the alien phalanx—sixteen pinwheeling eyes above eight ghostly bodies.

The eyes scattered, and the bodies beneath them were suddenly real again, every one of the shaggy Asadi stumbling down the steps in a direction that would spare it a confrontation with us. Casting aside their torches, they were gone into the Wild almost before we could blink.

"Kretzoi!" Elegy shouted. She threw herself up the remaining steps to the summit and knelt beside the granite catafalque. The artificial huri, I noted, had struck the pagoda's doors and

plummeted sidelong to one of the upper steps, where it balanced precariously. Wearily I climbed to the nasty thing and kicked it down the steps. Then I joined Elegy at Kretzoi's bier.

The primate lay on his back with his knees bent and his sex exposed. He appeared either asleep or unconscious. Holding his receding chin between her thumb and forefinger, Elegy tenderly tilted his head first to this side and then to that, all the while crooning entreaties and prayers. I had to believe that the rhythmic, swaying progress of the Asadi columns through the Wild had hypnotized him, for Elegy was hard pressed to bring him back to our reality.

"Let me try," I said.

I eased Elegy aside and laid my ear to Kretzoi's chest. He was breathing as a hibernating animal breathes, all his bodily processes clocked down to the laggardly cadences of winter. I put my mouth over his wide hairy lips, covered his death's-head nostrils with my hand, and blew a violent puff of air deep into his lungs. He started as if he had been galvanized. I puffed again, tasting the unplaceable odors of his breath and immediately wiping my mouth dry. That done, I dragged Kretzoi off the catafalque and slammed his limp body against the temple's left-hand door. Holding him there with my hip and one trembling hand, I made a hammer of my other fist and struck him squarely on the sternum. Again, he twitched—like a frog administered an electric shock.

"Stop it!" Elegy cried. And, in truth, I don't know whether I was trying to revive Kretzoi or neutralize my long-pent anxiety and frustration. Maybe I was doing both. Kretzoi was the Asadi I had not been able to get my hands on a moment earlier, and I didn't want to let him go.

"Ben!" Elegy cried again, grabbing my arm. "Stop it!"

I shrugged her away, but relinquished my grip on Kretzoi. Amazingly, he didn't slide down the door. Inside their clear polymer carapaces his human eyes came open, focusing on me with slow-dawning recognition and cold disdain.

As Kretzoi's consciousness returned, he pressed himself de-

fiantly against the door at his back—with the result that the door groaned inward on its hinges and revealed to both Elegy and me a tall, narrow slice of the pagoda's interior. Kretzoi fell quickly to all fours and bounded aside.

"Ben," Elegy said tentatively.

"What?"

"You did well just then, Thomas Benedict. You were working intuitively for a change. That was your 'not-I' performing, you know—your right brain."

"Then I hardly deser\e any credit, do I?"

Elegy laughed, and there on the top step of the high Asadi altar her laughter sounded incongruously merry and sweetly apropos. "Of course you do. It's your 'not-I,' isn't it?" She stepped forward and took my arm. 'The honor's yours if you want it," she said, gesturing at the lofty crack between the temple doors. "You've waited as long as I have, I guess, and I'll be damned if it matters to me who goes in there first. . . . Kretzoi, sit!"

The animal was edging toward the opening, but at her command he stopped and looked at her inquiringly.

I felt a sudden piquant affection for Kretzoi, an affection bom of shame and an ineffable backassward respect. My own unworthi-ness, in contrast, was almost strong enough to choke me.

"Let the hairy ape go first," I said. "There's always the nasty chance the first one in won't come out at all."

Somehow Elegy perceived that I was joking. "In which case none of us will," she said. "Go ahead, Ben."

I unstrapped my camera and laid it on the catafalque. Then I activated the radio at my throat. "Jaafar," I said, "we've found the pagoda and we're going in. Bring the Dragonfly to this clearing, if you can."

Jaafar's response Wcis swift and static-free: "Very good, Dr. Benedict. I certainly will." . That was the end of the conversation. I wiped my hands on my thighs and moved to push even wider ajar the door that Kretzoi had already set groaning inward.

Elegy's voice halted me: "Inside, we're going to find the 'dead man' in whose shadow we've both been living. And that discovery's going to liberate us both."

"All right," I said, mouthing the words.

"My prayer for you, Thomas Benedict, is that aftenvard you'll know what to do with your freedom." I started to speak, but she cut me off: "Move your butt, Benedict. Let's see what we've let ourselves in for."

I led Elegy and Kretzoi into the pagoda. . . .

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Inside

"Preternaturally cold." So Chaney had described the interior of the Asadi temple. The temperature was indeed several degrees below that of the Wild, but you could scarcely call the place "cold." More accurately, the pagoda was cool. This coolness undoubtedly traced to the height of the structure and the fact that a pervasive, silver-tinged gloom seemed to neutralize the jungle's heat. This gloom, meanwhile, derived its tarnished silver glow from the morning light seeping through the central dome and moving as if by osmosis through the amethyst windows.

"There's the stairway to the 'chandelier,'" Elegy said, not bothering to whisper. "Just like my father described it. And the globes of the metal ring, they've been replaced and hoisted back into position." A faint echo overlapped her each succeeding word.

I stared up at the globes. Although possessed of a dull, mother-of-pearl luster they emitted very little light. They were each, I

estimated, about the size of a Bronze Age shield rotated through a third dimension; they were also quite heavy-looking. I didn't want to be standing under one of them if it suddenly took a notion to fall.

Huddled just inside the door, we saw many of the things Chaney describes in Death and Designation Among the Asadi —from the spindly display cabinets whose design the curators of the Museum of Indigenous Artifacts had attempted (unsuccessfully, we now saw) to reproduce from Chaney's descriptions, to the vast, glowing wall on which were hung the Ur'sadi eyebooks. We also experienced a number of things Chaney had neglected or not thought to mention.

First, a feeling that the pagoda had unexplored recesses beyond the central chamber in which we stood.

Second, an unsettling glandular smell as pervasive as the gloom inside the temple.

And third, a distant fluting sound—a kind of hollow cooing reminiscent of wind blowing across the mouths of empty bottles, or maybe even of the rattle of rice-paper partitions during minor seismic tremors in an Oriental city.

This last sensation seemed to suggest that the pagoda was occupied, that somewhere in its eastern or western extremities there dwelt creatures accustomed to the temple and secure in their knowledge of its layout and architecture. My curiosity had just about given way to fear. I could see the three of us captured and existing briefly as "meat-siblings" to the real Asadi chieftain, the one whom Kretzoi had merely impersonated. . . .

"We want some more of those eyebooks," Elegy said, squelching my hope that she, too, might have reservations about continuing our trespass. "We ought to take all those on a single rod. Maybe by taking a complete sequence of fifty—or however many each rod holds—we'll improve our chances of deciphering the damn things. The sequence may be as important as the individual spectral pattern of each book."

We crossed the pagoda's immense flagstone floor, circling to the

left of the stairway spiraling upward to the energy globes in the iron "chandelier." Our footfalls echoed, and our breaths came as loud in our ears as if we were wearing oxygen masks.

The wall of eyebooks glowed uncannily. It prickled with the two or three thousand glinting rods protruding like brush bristles toward us, each rod supporting a sequence of eyebooks secured by a small, ornately flanged wingnut. Elegy removed one of these fasteners and scooped an entire sequence of eyebooks off its rod. Then she bound them together with a piece of elastic and deposited them in a pocket on the thigh of her jumpsuit. The weight scarcely made the pocket sag.