Transfigurations (7 page)

Eisen Zwei lowered the burden from his back. But now, instead of stepping away and permitting a few of the braver males to advance, he took the huri from his shoulder and set it upon the bleeding lump of meat. The huri's blind head did not move, but even from where I stood I could see its tiny fingers rippling with slow but well-orchestrated malice. Then this hypnotic rippling ceased, and the huri sat there looking bloated and dead, a scabrous plaything.

Without a farewell of any sort, Eisen Zwei turned and stalked back into the Synesthesia Wild. Foliage clattered from the efforts of several Asadi to get out of his way. No one else moved.

Denebola, fat and mocking, crossed a small arc of sky and made haloes dance in a hundred inaccessible grottos of the Wild. An hour had passed, and Eisen Zwei returned! He had simply left the huri to guard his first offering. Yes, first. For the old chieftain had come back with still another carcass slung across his bony shoulders. He set it down beside the first. The huri animated itself just long enough to shift its weight and straddle the two contiguous pieces of meat. Then the old Asadi departed again.

An hour later he returned with a third piece of meat—but this time he entered the clearing from the west, about twenty meters up

from my lean-to. I realized that he had first entered from the east, then from the south. A pattern is developing, I told myself. Now he'll depart once more and reenter from the north. Many peoples on Earth ascribe mystical characteristics to the four points of the compass, and I was excited by the possibility of drawing a meaningful analogy.

But Eisen Zwei remained on the assembly floor, shattering my hopes. (In fact, as on my 22nd night in the Wild, he still has not left. Under the copper-green glow of Melchior the old chieftain and his huri squat on the blood-dampened ground waiting for the dawn's first spiderwebbings of light.) Instead, he made one complete circuit around the clearing, walking counterclockwise from his point of entrance. The huri did not move.

This done, Eisen Zwei rejoined his familiar at midfield.

Here, the second stage of this new and puzzling ritual commenced. Without unloosening the third carcass from his back, E.Z. bent and picked up the huri and put it on his shoulder. Kneeling, he tied straps through the two pieces of meat over which the huri had kept watch. Next, he began to drag these marbled chunks of brown and red through the dirt. He dragged the first into the southern half of the clearing, unslipped the strap by which he had pulled it, and set the huri down once more as his guardian. This procedure he duplicated in the northern half of the clearing, except that here he necessarily stood guard over the second offering himself. The final carcass he still bore on his back.

Eisen Zwei stepped away from the second offering. Deep in his throat he made a noise that sounded like a human being trying to fight down a sob. This noise, I suppose I should add, is the first and so far the only example of voiced communication, discounting vague growls and involuntary moans, I've heard among the Asadi. The huri responded to Eisen Zwei's plaintive "sobs"—undoubtedly a signal—by hopping off the object of its guardianship and then scrabbling miserably through the dust toward the old man, its rubbery wings dipping and twisting. (I've almost decided the huri is incapable of flight. Perhaps its wings represent an anatomical

holdover from an earlier stage of its evolution.) When both E.Z' and his wretched huri had reached their sacred patch of ground at midfield, the old man picked up the beast and let it close its tiny hands over his discolored mane.

Then the wizened old chieftain extended his arms, tilted his head back, and, staring directly at the sun, made a shuddering inhalation of such piteous depth it seemed either his lungs would burst or his heart break. The clearing echoed with his sob.

At once, the Asadi poured out of their hiding places onto the assembly ground—not simply the adult males, but individuals of every sex and age. Even now, however, in the midst of this lunging riot, the population of the clearing divided into two groups, each one scrimmaging furiously, intramurally, in its own cramped plot of earth. Manes tossed, and eyes pinwheeled with inarticulate color. The hunger of the Asadi made low sad music over the Wild, like summer thunder.

Slashing at and sometimes half maiming one another, the Asadi quickly devoured the two carcasses. Like piranhas, I thought.

Then E.Z., inhaling mightily, moaned again, and the confusion ceased. Every lean grey snout turned toward him. The dying went off to die alone, if any were in fact at the point of death. I saw no one depart, but neither did I see anyone lying helplessly injured in the dirt. The Asadi waited. The Bachelor and I waited.

The third and final act of today's baroque ritual: Eisen Zwei lowered the last carcass from his back, sat down beside it, and, in full view of his bemused tribespeople, ate the monstrous thing piece by piece. He gave the huri nothing, and the huri, inert but clinging, did not protest this selfish oversight. Meanwhile, terribly slowly, Eisen Zwei ate.

Eventually I retired to the shade of my lean-to, emerging at fairly frequent intervals to check the goings-on in the clearing. By the second hour the Asadi had begun to move about within their separate territories. By the third hour these territories had merged, making it impossible to distinguish the two distinct "teams" of previous days. The old pattern of Indifferent Togetherness had

reasserted itself, except that now the Asadi moved with incredible sluggishness, suspiciously eyeing their chieftain and refusing to encroach on the unmarked circle containing him.

I noticed that The Bachelor had come down out of his tree, but I was unable to find him in the clearing. All I saw was E.Z., isolated by a revolving barricade of legs, peeling away the last oily strips of meat from his dinner and chewing them with an expression of stupid pensiveness. The huri flapped once or twice, but the old man still did not feed it.

Finally, sunset.

The Asadi fled, but Eisen Zwei—no doubt as surfeited as a python that has just unhinged its lower jaw to admit a fawn— slumped in his place and did not move.

Now a single alien moon dances in the sky, and I'm left with a question whose answer is so stark and self-evident I'm almost afraid to ask it: From what sort of creature did the old man obtain and dress out his ritual offerings? Huddled beneath the most insubstantial of roofs, I am unable to fend off the frightening ramifications of the Asadi way of death. . . .

Speculations on Cannibalism: An Extemporaneous Essay

From the unedited in-the-field tapes of Egan Chancy: It's a beautiful day, and if I hold my microphone out—I'm holding it out now, extending it toward the Asadi—all you'll be able to hear is five hundred pairs of feet slogging back and forth through a centimeter of hot dust. There. Hear that? Perhaps you don't. Nevertheless, Eisen, it's a beautiful day.

It's four days since your counterpart, Eisen Zwei, stirred things up with his disorderly three-course banquet. Since then, nothing.

I'm walking. I'm walking among the Asadi. They fail to see me even though I'm just as solid, just as real, as they are. Even the ones I've given names to—Campy, Werner, Gus, Oliver, and the others—refuse to grant me the simple fact of my existence. This is

hard, Ben. This is difficult to accept. Nonetheless, I continue to feel a paternal tenderness toward these few Asadi—Jane, Thelma, Dianne, Celestine, and the others—I've been able to recognize and name. . . .

I've just walked by Celestine. The configuration of her features gives her a gentle look, like a Quaker woman wearing a parka. Her seeming gentleness leads me to the topic of this commentary: How could a creature of Celestine's mien and disposition actually eat the flesh of one of her own kind? God help me if these aliens are intelligent and self-aware, base-camp buggers, because I'm walking among cannibals!

They encircle me. They ensorcel me. They fill me with a sudden dread, an awe such as the awe of one's parents that consumes the child who has just learned the secrets of conception and birth. Exactly thus, my dread of the Asadi, my awe of their intimate lives. . . .

Turnbull is missing. Do you remember him? I named him Tumbull because he was small, like the pygmies the first Turnbull wrote about, like the pygmies I worked among. . . . Now I can't find Turnbull. Little Turnbull, squat and sly, is nowhere among these indifferent, uncouth people. I'd have found him by now, I know I would. He was my pygmy, my little pygmy, and now these aloof bastards—these Asadi of greater height than Turnbull—have eaten him! Eaten him as though he were an animal! a creature of inferior status! a zero in a chain of zeroes as long as the diameter of time! IVIay God damn them for their impious rapacity!

[A lengthy pause during which only the shuffling of the Asadi can be heard.]

I think my shout unsettled some of them. A few of them flinched! But they don't look at me, these cannibals, and I don't know whether to be outraged or gratified. A cannibal may never go too far toward acknowledging the existence of another of his kind, so uncertain is his opinion of himself. A cannibal's always afraid he'll ascribe more importance to himself than he deserves. In doing so, he discovers—in a moment of hideous revelation— where his next meal is coming from. He always knows where it's

coining from, and he's therefore nearly always afraid.

Cannibals—the civilized sort—are the most inwardly warring schizophrenics in all of Nature. On the one hand, Eisen, it requires a colossal arrogance to think oneself enough better than another member of one's own species to eat him. On the other, this same act demonstrates the abject self-abasement of the cannibal in his readiness to convert the flesh of his own kind into . . . well, let's be blunt about this, into shit. Grandiose haughtiness versus the worst sort of voluntary self-degradation. Have the Asadi incorporated these polar attitudes into the structure of their daily life? Does their indifference to one another result from the individual's esteem for himself? Could it be that the individual's lack of regard for his kind precipitates the practices of pariahhood and public humiliation? A schizophrenic society? Does the pattern of indifferent association during the day and compulsive scattering at night mirror the innate dichotomy of their souls? After all, who's more deluded than the cannibal? His every attempt to achieve union with his kind results in a heightened edienation from himself.

[Chaney's microphone picks up the incessant shuffling of Asadi feet and the low sighing of a breeze in the rainforest.]

Yes, yes, I know. This is all very bad anthropology. But I'm not really speaking anthropologically. I'm speaking metaphorically, and maybe I'm not tsJking about the Asadi at all. I realize full well, gang, that among human populations there are two types of cannibalism: exocannibalism and endocannibalism. I haven't forgotten all my training.

Exocannibalism, Ben, usually occurs in a context of continuing warfare between tribes that are dependent to some extent on agriculture for their livelihoods. They war, you see, to protect their sedentary way of life or to expand their holdings into areas where the soil hasn't been depleted by overuse. Enemies eat one another to steal their adversaries' strength and to gain power over them. In such a context, cannibalism is patriotic, and human flesh is invariably kosher.

The Asadi, not being agriculturists, and having no natural

enemies here in the Synesthesia Wild, are not adherents of exocannibalism. Instead, Ben, they practice endocannibalism. Is that cleeir?

What this means, in short, is that the Asadi regularly eat members of their own tribal unit, the only tribal unit on Bosk Veld. Usually, this form of cannibalism signifies an attempt on the part of the deceased's relatives and friends to incorporate the dead one's memories and spirit by a ritual ingestion of his flesh. Eating the dead under such circumstances, then, is an act of homage and a visible expression of the community's desire to insure the continuity of its life-style and its membership. Christians, by the way, participate in symbolic endocannibalism every time they celebrate Holy Communion. Eat this — drink this — in remembrance of Me.

Why, you may wonder, does the endocannabilism of the Asadi so offend and demoralize me? Because, God help me, I've begun regarding them as alien projections of my own consciousness, and, expecting better of myself, I expected better of them. Does that make sense? I'm afraid you'll think it doesn't. But, damn it, just when I'd begun to see glimmerings of something lofty in their makeups, old E.Z.—like some nineteenth-century Indian headman putting on a potlatch—comes dragging three carcasses into the clearing and unleashes the ravenous animal in every one of his goggle-eyed subjects! It's more than I can stand.

The Asadi ignore me. It's hot out here, and they ignore me. They go by, they go by, revolving about me like so many motorized pasteboard cutouts. And Turnbull's not among them, he doesn't revolve anymore, he's been butchered and consumed. Butchered and consumed, do you hear? With the same wanton self-centeredness that we used to poison the Ituri and rout out the people who lived there. Turnbull's dead, base-camp buggers, and There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no

PART THREE

The Ritual of Death and Designation

From the final draft of the one complete section ofEgan Chaney's otherwise unfinished ethnography:

DEATH

On Day 120 the old chieftain, whom I called Eisen Zwei, took ill. Because it had been several days since he had gorged himself during the general "feast," I then supposed that his sickness was unrelated to his earlier intemperance. I am still of this mind. For five days he had eaten nothing, although the other Asadi refused to observe his fast and began eating whatever herbs, roots, flowers, bark, and heartwood they came across. They ignored the old man,

and the old man's huri, much in the way they ignored The Bachelor and me.

Eisen Zwei's sickness altered this pattern. On the afternoon of the first day of his illness, he abruptly rose and made the horribly glottal, in-sucking noises he had used to summon his people to the meat six days before. I came running from my lean-to. The Asadi moved away from their old chieftain, stopped their shuffling and shambling, and stared with great platterlike eyes whose pinwheel-ing irises had stalled on a single color. A spastic rumbling replaced the old man's in-sucking noises, and he bent over at the waist, his arms above his head, to heave and heave again—until it seemed he would soon be vomiting into the dust the very lining of his bowels. Out of his mouth came the half-digested crimson oddments of his spectacular, six-day-old meal. Abashed by the sight, stung by the odor, I turned away. The heaving continued, and since the Asadi stared on, I turned back to observe their culture in action. Duty is a harsh mistress.