Transfigurations (17 page)

standards of the latter-day West. Until the BaMbuti relocation, you see, they had never lived in close proximity to each other for more than a week or two at a time, usually at seasonal intervals of three of four months. They preferred it that way."

"You had an absentee father, then?"

"I had a succession of sohcitous fathers in the Tri-Mesa, short-term uncles and surrogate daddies. And until the last pygmy died and he severed all contact with my mother and me, I had either Egan Chaney's genuine presence or his cassette-recorded image as a fatherly model. Twice a week—without fail while we were living in the Tri-Mesa—a cassette addressed exclusively to me would arrive at our E-cube. I'd hurry to click it into the player to see what fairy tale or exotic myth or stumblebum joke my father was enacting for me this time. There wasn't one I didn't enjoy, and most of them, without being preachy, had a kind of quiet moral to impart. In fact, when we left the Tri-Mesa for Japura Camp, I asked my mother if the cassettes would stop coming now and she said Yes and I was both indignant and chagrined.

"'You'll have your father in person,' my mother told me. 'Why do you think you'll still require the holotapes?'

"I didn't know—but when we got to the camp, via a final sweltering trip along the Japura in a ramshackle motor launch, I discovered that I really didn't have my father in person at all. He was too preoccupied with saving the last BaMbuti to favor me with anything more intimate than an occasional weary smile, altogether in passing, and my mother was finding her time similarly monopolized.

"I dug in the mud, shot feather darts endlessly out of a blowgun into improvised targets, or tagged along after the mestizos from Lago Parica who kept our camp going. The pygmies I saw only rarely, and I knew they were dying—dying in spite of everything Egan Chancy and Celestine Gather could do. . . . It's a measure of my mood, Ben, that I'd begun to think it served the sad, poisoned buggers right."

Just then an inquiry from SteppeChilde—a veldt colony to the

far northeast—was patched through my computer from the relay at Chaney Field. I tapped out the communication code indicating preemptive priority business. There was nothing I could tell BoskVeld's impatient SteppeChildren that demanded an immediate response, and Elegy seemed, at the moment, more perilously in need of my ear and my unspoken sympathy.

"When we'd been in the jungle nearly half a year and it was clear the BaMbuti were bound for extinction, Egan Chaney proposed that my mother preserve tissue samples from the last three shell-shocked pygmies. He thought it might be possible to clone replacements for them when we could get back to facilities permitting that exacting procedure.

'The other nine or ten diminutive Africans had been given Viking funerals on the Japura, cast adrift at night in oil-soaked canoes and cremated in cindery bonfires above the river. I remember those funerals very well, Ben—I can still see the reflections of the flames in the dark water and hear the provocative crackling of their bones. There was some fear, you see, that the pygmies had been contaminated by unknown biological agents during the African Armageddon. Even burial seemed an insufficient precaution against the spread of their undiagnosable and wholly conjectural disease. Hence, Viking funerals. I can remember that 1 enjoyed these festive boat burnings immensely. They were events, every one of them.

"Anyway, my mother—even though she had both the equipment and the know-how to take the tissue samples my father wanted— felt ethically compelled to refuse. There was a quarrel, one that I overheard because I happened to be in my mother's tent in a cot draped with mosquito netting. They woke me up quarreling. My father kept repeating the phrase 'the death of diversity,' muttering it over and over like an incantation, while my mother framed arguments that seemed to me, groggy as I was, young as I was, rational and humane.

"First, my mother told Chaney, it might be that the cloned pygmies would carry in their genes the inheritable malignancy to

which their parental donors had fallen prey. Who knew what kinds of insidious microscopic warfare the kols and autoks were waging in Central Africa? Second, she said, supposing the clones grew to healthy adulthood, what kind of life would they have? The Ituri was a radioactive swamp, and the pygmies' entire cultural milieu had been obliterated irretrievably—as irretrievably as some crippled whore's dreams of paradise. And third, the BaMbuti deserved to die out with as much dignity as they had lived. Japura Camp, my mother finally declared, had been from first to last a praiseworthy but foredoomed exercise in altruism. Why the hell couldn't Egan Chaney throw in the towel without first waving it over his head like a battle flag?"

"And this argument eventually led Chaney to sever all contacts with your mother and you?" I asked.

"In part," Elegy replied, staring sightlessly at the open monograph in her hands. "During the following week, the last three pygmies died, one at a time. My mother was in attendance on all but the very last, a grizzled old woman with dugs like goatskin wine sacks. She wasn't with this last one because I had taken sick the day before and she refused to leave my cotside to watch the old woman's inevitable demise. Instead, Chaney and a mestizo named Estanislau sat by the BaMbuti woman, and the next day, when I was suddenly quite well again, Estanislau reported that Chaney had wept all night, even biting a hunk of flesh from his forearm when it dawned on him they were keeping vigil over a corpse. Indeed, in the preparations for the old woman's funeral on the river Chaney showed up with a bright gauze bandage above his right wrist. My mother hadn't applied it, either, and he answered no one's questions about the wound it concealed."

"And you?" I asked. "What had been wrong with you?"

"Nothing, Ben. Nothing at all."

"Nothing?"

"Well, something, I guess. I had feigned being ill to keep my mother beside me on the final night, dimly aware that Chaney would suffer more than anyone because of my ruse—out of both

genuine worry for me and his heartfelt involvement with the old woman whose death he would make himself witness."

"You hoodwinked your mother to spite Chaney?"

"It wasn't terribly hard. She was primed by Japura Camp to see illness at the slightest symptom, and I complained of stomach cramps while holding bars of lye soap in my armpits to raise my temperature. The soap gave me a terrible rash that lasted for days, but I never told anyone about it. Just as Chaney never explained the wound on his forearm. Nevertheless, when we were safely back in Rio, the BaMbuti extinct and my father's hopes for somehow preserving their genetic heritage utterly dashed, he took me aside at the airport and said, 'I know what you did. Elegy, and one day you'll know, too.' I looked at him, Ben, and realized he did know. A fever that had nothing to do with lye soap concealed in my armpits spread through my chest and face, and, as things turned out, those were the last words he ever spoke to me. Mother and I returned to the Tri-Mesa, and Chaney disappeared without a trace from our lives. No visits, no cassettes, no word from him or anyone who knew him. Nothing.

"My doing," Elegy Cather concluded with quiet self-incrimination. "His disappearance from our lives was at least partially my doing."

"You probably ought to remember," I pointed out, half amused by her assumption of responsibility and half irritated by it, "Chaney was a grown man and you were a little girl of eleven."

"I realize that. But I had a pretty mature ethical awareness at that age, and all it took to trigger my guilt was Chaney's revealing to me that he knew what I had done. In one sense, it was a small thing, pretending to be sick. But in another, taking into account the relocation of the last BaMbuti and my father's depth of commitment to them, it was equivalent to a kind of murder. If you and others can't understand that, it's probably because you aren't me. You don't really feel how terrible it is to know you could have acted in some more noble and compassionate way, child or no child."

"I have an abstract grasp of what you're saying, Elegy." I watched her replace the monograph on its shelf and silently resented her for consigning me to a kindergarten for the morally obtuse. "So all that business about taking your father's monograph literally is just so much argle-bargle to disguise the fact you have an emotional need to find him, and find him alive?"

We were both surprised by my tone. "No," she said carefully. "I believe in the literalness of the monograph because I don't think my father—whether sane or absolutely bonkers—was hallucinating out there. He recorded what he saw."

I tried to turn the conversation away from my sudden crankiness. "What happened to your mother, Elegy?"

"She was unable to resume her practice in the Tri-Mesa because people were afraid to put themselves in her care. Stories circulated about her being subtly infected by a kol or autok virus, some horrible artificial pathogen with an unpredictable incubation period, and even the favorable ruling of the archipol's highest medical board wasn't enough to remove the stigma attaching to Celestine Gather in the popular mind. She was the doctor of pygmies who had lost every one of her patients, and who was probably fatally ill herself. Nothing undoes reason like the specter of an exotic and incurable disease. The furor eventually died, and my mother now holds a government medical post at a mall-garden clinic—but for three or four years we lived only a little better than the gutter prols, siphoning off the income of past investments and scraping by. Egan Chaney contributed nothing to my 'nurture,' as their contract had it, and on this point in particular my mother grew more and more bitter. Even so, she never attempted to trace him. It was only when Death and Designation was published that she wrote The Press of the National University in Kenya to ask that a percentage of the residuals be set aside for my education."

"And here you are," I finished for her.

"Thanks to you," she acknowledged, smiling faintly. "It's been a long, strange trip. And it still isn't over."

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At mid-aftemoon I walked Elegy back to the hospital. As I was bidding her farewell at the admissions desk, it occurred to me that six years ago her father had spent several weeks convalescing in the primitive infirmary that had then occupied the hospital's site. I was struck again by how much Frasierville and BoskVeld had changed.

Later, I carried Elegy's prospectus to Moses Eisen. He met me on the deck of his better-than-half-buried house and read through the report with what seemed to me like deliberate inattention. It was already twilight, and he still hadn't had supper. Besides, he knew what the prospectus contained; by asking for it, he had merely been attempting to delay the inevitable. He had gained a day. That was all. Not much of a victory and therefore no cause for jubilation.

"You intend to take her and that animal into the Asadi clearing tomorrow?" Moses asked ruefully.

"With your permission."

"I'U have to put a stand-in in your office for you. It seems the folks in SteppeChilde and Amersavane can't live without your advice."

"Lord, Moses, we both know Fve just been marking time until something like this happened. I've been expendable for six years."

Moses glanced up from Elegy's prospectus and grimaced so that crow's-feet made overlapping tracks around his eyes. "Not to me, you haven't," he said in an admonitory whisper.

"Like hell," I responded, whether earnestly or banteringly I'm still not sure. "Bring Jonathan over from Colonial Administration. He'll miss the gab, but he and the computer won't have any trouble handling the colonists' basic geological and land-use inquiries. When he's stumped, the agrogs at Chaney Field'll take up the slack. They always do for me."

"I expect you and Gather back two evenings from now."

"We'll see," I said. "It's impossible to know what the situation may require of us."

After saluting informally, I listened to my toes make a tap-dancing sound down the wooden steps of Moses's verandah. As I strolled up the naked peninsula of his yard, the plasma lamps encircling Frasierville began coming on, glowing like pale-green melons atop their vanadium poles. I looked back and saw Moses staring lugubriously after me, a stick-figure silhouette in the steadily encroaching shadow of the forest and the night.

CHAPTER FOUR

A Visit to the Museum

Back in my own quarters I put through a telecom to Jaafar Bahadori's Komm-service barracks. During the course of our uneasy opening chitchat, I tried to assuage his wounded feelings with an explanation of Kretzoi's origins. Surprisingly, he came around rather quickly and asked me several insightful questions about Elegy's and my intentions with regard to Kretzoi and the Asadi. That gave me my opportunity to ask him to prepare a helicraft for us for the following day.

"The three of us are going into the Wild," I told the young enlisted man. "Outfit the BenDragon Prime and stock her with supplies."

"Yes, sir," he responded. Then: "Ah, an adventure."

"I suppose so," I said. "An adventure." Whereupon I said a crisp good night, broke our connection, and lay down atop the scrambled layerings of papers and dirty clothes on my bed. About

two minutes later, it seemed, it was morning, and the telecom unit was buzzing again.

Elegy came on the line. I had no televid unit in my sleeping quarters, but I envisioned her as looking vibrant and alert. That was certainly the way she sounded.

"Would it be possible for you to bring an eyebook with you?" she wanted to know. "One of those my father supposedly found in the Asadi pagoda and brought out of the Wild with him."

"All but one of them were taken off-planet to computer research facilities at various Earth institutions," I answered. "The idea was to crack the mystery of their operation and the significance of their spectral patterns. As I understand it. Elegy, molecular physicists, communication specialists, radioscopic technicians, spectrum analysts—just a whole bunch of folks—have alike all gone down for the ten count. If you'll remember, the bulb of one of the eyebooks was broken here on BoskVeld soon after Chaney brought it out. Three of the four eyebooks shipped home to Earth have ceased displaying—it's as if they got tired of being probed and picked at."