Transfigurations (30 page)

"He concluded that the Ik were a mirror of the corruption at humanity's heart—once you had stripped away the veneers of 'civilization.' He recoiled in disgust from the implications he drew. He forgot that to some extent the degradation of the Ik had been externally imposed. He forgot that his own cultural biases were undoubtedly shaping the philosophical thmst of the conclusions suggested by his field work. The TumbuU who laughed joyously with the Ituri pygmies was in this subsequent book a disillusioned and oddly embittered man—all because he had reached some dismaying conclusions about his entire species on the basis of his disgust with the Ik."

"Because that thing upstairs appalls me, I'm like this older and more cynical Tumbull? Is that what you're suggesting. Elegy?"

"You're like him because you're ignoring contexts, that's all I'm

saying. My father did the same thing, and like TumbuU he was trained in the exacting empirical methods of the cultural anthropologist. The Ik fell from grace because of changing ecological conditions and the meddlesomeness of a state trying in good faith to preserve its native wildlife. The Asadi have fallen from grace for reasons still opaque to us.

"But their nocturnal cannibalism isn't necessarily a sign of their present-day corruption; it could be evidence of an evolutionary recovery. The stronger is sacrificed to the weaker, out of both altruism and a grisly pragmatism. Since both infants receive the devotion and care of their mother, a bond of real affection is at work here, Ben. It's the only one that now seems to exist among the Asadi.

"Ritual cannibalism—probably because of population pressures and severe protein shortages at some point in their past—became the medium for this unique expression of tenderness. It undoubtedly began as a desperation measure. The intensification of production methods and subsequent increases in population led to ecological disruption, which led to food shortages and a loss of essential protein intake, and these in turn led to the adoption of infant cannibalism as a means for a select few to survive the ecological catastrophe. The old were probably always eaten, out of love as well as necessity.

"The planet has never had any herd animals, it seems, or any other kind of land-going creatures, for that matter, except those the Ur'sadi brought to Bosk Veld with them when they arrived here from another solar system. So they took their requirements of amino acids from either native plant forms or protein-rich plants whose seeds they'd carried here with them, and they intensified agricultural production to heighten yield. One result was that much of Bosk Veld was deforested. Some of the planet's veldts— today such conspicuous features of the topography—were once thick with trees. The sociological result, just as I've said, turned out to be the cannibalism of one or maybe even both of the infant

twins bom to the immigrant Ur'sadi females. Twin births were, and continue to be, the rule among the various evolutionciry lines of our present-day Asadi."

A wind scouring the Wild from the western ocean jostled the treetops, making the foliage sigh. Elegy shivered, clutched her knees self-protectingly. In a matter of mere minutes a front of towering storm clouds had blotted out the nighttime sky. The hand lamps provided our only illumination.

"It's going to rain," Elegy said. "We'd better get moving."

"Wait a minute. What's your time scale. Elegy? How long ago are you proposing all this happened?"

"Three to seven million years," she answered at once.

"Dear God, woman, you're certainly putting it back a ways. Why three to seven million years?"

"Because between seven and twelve million years ago," she said, going off on another tack altogether, "the Ur'sadi may have dropped off on Earth a small contingent of colonists-explorers. They did so with the idea that their representatives would successfully cooperate or compete with a number of our pres-entient terrestrial primates. In fact, the Ur'sadi may have genetically and biochemically altered these pioneer specimens so that selective interbreeding could take place. Their motive was as much altruism as self-preservation; they believed they could spare their primate counterparts on Earth some of the more wasteful and tragic consequences of a purely random evolution toward intelligence.

"But evolutionary factors and innate differences in the nature of the beasts they were dealing with did them in. There was an explosion of speciation among the terrestrial primates, followed by a number of outright extinctions of some of the 'higher' forms. Whatever of themselves the Ur'sadi had hoped to preserve on Earth was submerged and lost within a period, oh, of four to five million years. One thing that remains, though, is an exact correspondence of the amino-acid sequence for hemoglobin in

both their human relatives on Earth and their Asadi descendants here on BoskVeld." Elegy rose, wiped her hands on her thighs, and gazed up at the alarmingly booming canopy of leaves.

I stood, too. "Elegy, have you ever heard of Occam's razor?"

"You don't have to believe me, Ben," she said conciliatorily, even though her eyes were fierce in their shadowy sockets. "You'd be crazy to believe me, in fact. How the hell do / know what happened twelve million years ago? How the hell does anybody know, for that matter?"

"Ideally, people make intelligent suppositions on the basis of concrete evidence and proven research techniques. Sometimes a strong imagination doesn't hurt. You just have to make sure it's not operating independently of the facts or in a complete absence of any empirical data."

But now Elegy was ignoring me, probably for good reason. She summoned Kretzoi back from his hiding place and put into his hands the rope she'd been carrying on her belt. With rapid hand signs she told Kretzoi she wanted him to go aloft and then lower to us the nest containing Bojangles's semiconscious meat-sibling. Alive with wind, the alien mangrove and all its graceful kin swayed and whickered.

Jaafar's voice sounded in my ear: "You'd better return to the drop point. Dr. Benedict. A rain, I think, is blowing up. Our Dragonfly is waltzing a little, sir."

"We're coming," I told him, activating the transmitter at my throat. Then, gesturing at the obediently climbing Kretzoi, I told Elegy, "He's liable to get shaken out of that damn thing. And he's probably going to need some help."

"Hold your hand lamp up for him, then."

I shone my lamp up through the virtually impenetrable foliage, not knowing where exactly Kretzoi happened to be or whether he truly had the skill to fashion a basket-sling from the nylon rope Elegy had given him. To allay my irritation, I said, "You've put the Asadi's ancestors on Earth between seven and twelve million

years ago, and here on BoskVeld between three and seven million. Is that right?"

"I don't know if it's right," Elegy responded indifferently, playing her lamp's beam from side to side among the chattering leaves, "but it's what I speculate. The Ur'sadi sent representatives to BoskVeld precisely because it was a virgin planet with no advanced evolutionary sequence of land-going fauna to alter or disrupt by their presence. Burgeoning speciation had undone their representatives on Earth, after all, so they opted for a world with a compatible botanical ecosphere and only a few primitive animal forms as potential competitors. Many of these they exterminated, for this time they were relocating portions of their population not from any altruistic research motive, but because deteriorating solar conditions in their own planetary system—"

"Made it imperative that they find a brave new world upon which to lay their burden down," I concluded for Elegy. Drops of rain began pattering down, staccato annotations of my impatience.

"Yes," Elegy said, shielding her face with her forearm. "They came to BoskVeld with their polychromatic optical language intact. They'd even invented an extrasomatic means of conveying the language—their eyebooks, I mean—maybe a million or more years before their ill-fated experiment on Earth. That experiment may have failed, in fact, because the processes of evolutionary speciation on Earth selected against the complicated optical equipment that had allowed the Ur'sadi to achieve mastery of both their own distant world and the corridors of interstellar space.

"Of the twin children born of Ur'sadi mothers who copulated with terrestrial primate males, only the child with eyes more nearly like its sire's managed to survive. And not all of these. Radiation was a factor. So was primate prejudice. Because copulation took place from the rear, the male protohominids servicing the Ur'sadi females didn't have to deal with the disconcerting appearance of their partners' alien eyes. But socialization requires many face-to-face contacts, and juvenile

primates with threatening Ur'sadi optical structures were killed long before they could reach maturity. The prospect of a visual 'language' for you and me died vriih them, Ben."

ICretzoi began hooting above us. So seldom had I heard him vocalize that at first I simply mistook the sound for some weird intensification of the storm.

"\^'hat does he want?" I cried.

"Keep your hand lamp focused on that spot right there, Ben!" Elegy grabbed my wTist and pointed the beam for me. "Ill try to light him a pathway on the other side of the trunk I"' She ducked beneath a root arch and took up a position almost immediately opposite mine.

I was in no hurn* to greet Bojangles's half-eaten brother. The longer Kxelzoi took to lower the nest the happier I'd be. I was even prepared to spend a night licking rainwater off my lips if that's what so long a reprieve required. For now—all too soon—the rain was coming down torrentially.

But my mind wasn't on the storm or Kretzoi's efforts to ease down to us the Asadi nest. I was helplessly mulling everything Elegy had said and trjing to fit the jagged pieces together.

"What do you think happened to the Ur'sadi who arrived on BoskVeld, then?" 1 shouted at Chaney's daughter. "\^'hat, besides a depletion of resources, brought them do\sTi?'"

Her hair plastered to her forehead and water running from her jumpsuit. Elegy showed me her ill-lit, rain-blurred face. "What?" she called. "What did you say?"

Like a fool I repeated my questions.

"Not now, BenI It's impossible!" Her shoulders went up in an uncomprehending hunch. "Look—there's the nest! There's Kretzoi!" Her beam stabbed upward into the dripping, chattering mangrove bladelets; and I saw Kretzoi emerge from the higher limbs stiff-backed and straining, for in front of him, balanced across his matted thighs, was the huge, twggy disc of the Asadi nest.

Kretzoi had shaped a complicated cradle of rope to hold the nest, and the ends of the rope were wrapped in a harness around his neck and upper torso. As he came down through the mangrove, lowering himself branch by branch, the strain in his triceps and neck muscles seemed almost to be unbearable.

"Help him!" Elegy shouted as I watched Kretzoi's display of willful physical strength. "Ben, reach up and help him!"

After bolstering my hand lamp so that the beam still shone upward, I stretched to receive the prickly-slimy bottom of the Asadi nest. Surprise—it was as light as a big inflated doughnut of rubber or plastic. But only at first. Its lightness had to do with the fact that Kretzoi, even after I'd slipped my arms beneath it, was supporting the nest entirely by himself. Only when he had dropped all the way to the ground did I begin to experience the nest's full weight. I staggered back with it as Elegy helped Kretzoi free himself of the harness he had made.

There in my arms, a nightmare. The Asadi's lower viscera outlined themselves in the downpour as if in rippling neon. The creature had no limbs to speak of, although stubs where its arms should have been may have signaled the beginnings of an arcane regenerative process. The eyes were empty bubbles, glinting with oily highlights. I could feel myself on the edge of a breathtaking faint.

Then, suddenly, Elegy's thumb was pressing against my teeth, and before I could resist the violation, she had wedged something round and smooth—an anti-nausea tablet—into my mouth. I swallowed, and my queasiness began to subside.

"Let's go!" Elegy shouted. "Back to Jaafar and the BenDragon Prime!"

From out of her backpack she materialized a tarp with a crimped, self-sealing edge. This she applied to the top of the Asadi nest—almost as if she were covering a gigantic pie with a piece of tinfoil. Rain began pooling in the tarp's depression and rills, then gathering and spilling to the ground. Four plastic

handles spaced about the circumference of an additional tarp— this one slung beneath the nest—gave us a means of sharing the burden.

Gripping these handles, Kretzoi, Elegy, and I set off through the gnarled root arches of the mangroves and into the dense, streaming foliage all about them.

We trudged for thirty minutes, rested briefly, took up our burden again, trudged another demoralizing half hour or so in the thickening mud, stopped a second time. We continued in this way until the rain had dwindled to a mist indistinguishable from our own prolific sweat. When we were less than an hour from Jaafar, whose off-trail words of cheer kept breaking into our struggle, we finally allowed ourselves a decent interval of rest before the final push. As we rested, the rain slopped completely. This development gave us enough heart to start moving again.

Seven hours after we had left the drop point, we came back into the tiny clearing so exhausted and muddy-brained that Jaafar had to undress Elegy and me and put us to bed. Kretzoi, I was later told, slept on his side on a narrow dry spot under the helicraft's tail section.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Love Of Cannibals

"You probably have Asadi blood flowing in your veins," I told Jaafar at our high-noon breakfast the following day.

Although aware that I was joking, Jaafar had no good idea how he was supposed to react. "Why do you say that?" he asked me gravely, a spoonful of reconstituted honey halfway to his lips.

"Because Elegy believes we all do. Our hemoglobin is Asadi hemoglobin. And vice versa. Blood's thicker than the hydraulic pressures of evolution, it seems."

Jaafar looked at Elegy for denial or confirmation. She was noncommittally sipping her juice.