Transfigurations Read online

  Although the Asadi disapprove of my behavior, because I'm an outcast they can do nothing to discipline me without violating their own injunction against acknowledging a pariah's existence. As they depart each evening, a few of the older Asadi—those with streaks of white in their mangy collars—halt momentarily beside me and breathe with exaggerated heaviness. They don't look at me because that's apparently taboo. But I don't look at them, either. Ignoring them as if they were pariahs, I've been able to dispense with those senseless and wearying treks in and out of the clearing that so exhausted me in my first three days here.

  To absolve myself of what may seem a lack of thoroughness, I suppose I ought to mention that on my fourth and fifth nights here I attempted to follow two different Asadi specimens into the jungle—in order to determine where they slept, how they slept, and what occupies their waking time when they are away from the clearing. I wasn't successful, however.

  When evening comes, the Asadi disperse. This dispersal is

  complete: No two individuals remain together, not even the young with their parents. Each Asadi—I believe—finds a place of his or her own, one completely removed from that of any other member of the species. This practice runs counter to my experience with almost every other social group I've ever studied—although it's somewhat analogous to the solitary nest building of chimpanzees, as observed frequently in the Gombe Stream Reserve in East Africa. Female chimps, however, do sleep with their young. Perhaps, now that I think of it, Asadi females do, too. ... In any case, I was humiliatingly outdistanced by the objects of my pursuit. Nor can I suppose I'd have any greater success with different specimens, since I purposely chose to follow an aged and decrepit-seeming Asadi on the first evening and a small, scarcely pubescent creature on the second. Both ran with convincing strength, flashed into the trees as if still arboreal by nature, and then flickered from my vision and my grasp. . . .

  Two moons are up, burnt-gold and unreal. I'm netted in by shadows and my growing loneliness. Field conditions, to be frank, have seldom been so austere for me, and I've begun to wonder if the Asadi were ever intelligent creatures. Maybe I'm studying a variety of Denebolan baboon. Ole Oliver Oliphant Frasier, though, reported that the Asadi once had both a written language and a distinctive system of architecture. He wasn't very forthcoming about how he reached these conclusions—but the Synesthesia Wild, I'm certain, contains many secrets. Later I'll be more venturesome. But for the present I've got to try to understand those Asadi who are alive today. They're the key to their own and the distant Ur'sadi past.

  One or two final things before I attempt to sleep.

  First, the eyes of the Asadi: These are somewhat as Benedict described them in the imaginary dialogue I composed two weeks ago. That is, like the bottoms of thick-glassed bottles. Except that I've noticed the eye really consists of two parts: a thin transparent covering, which is apparently hard, like plastic, and the complex, membranous organ of sight that this covering protects. It's as if

  each Asadi is bom wearing a built-in pair of safety glasses.

  Frasier's impression of their eyes as "murky" is one not wholly supported by continued observation. What he saw as murkiness probably resulted from the fact that the eyes of the Asadi—behind the outer lens or cap—are almost constantly changing colors. Sometimes the speed with which a yellow replaces an indigo, and then a green the yellow, and so on, makes it difficult for a mere human being to see any particular color at all. Maybe this is the explanation for Frasier's perception of their eyes as "murky." I don't know. I'm certain, though, that this chameleonic quality of the Asadi's eyes has social significance.

  A second thing: Despite the complete absence of a discernible social order among the Asadi, today I may have witnessed an event of the first importance to my unsuccessful, so far, efforts to chart their group relationships. Maybe. Maybe not. Previously, no real order at all existed. Dispersal at night, congregation in the morning—if you choose to call that order. But nothing else. Random milling about during the day, with no set times for eating, sex, or their habitual bloodless feuds. Random plunges into the jungle at night. What's a humble Earthling to make of all this? A society held together by institutionalized antisocialness? What happened today leads me irrevocably away from that conclusion.

  Maybe.

  This afternoon an aged Asadi whom I'd never seen before stumbled into the clearing. His mane was grizzled, his face wizened, his hands shriveled, his grey body bleached to a filthy cream. But so agile was he in the Wild that no one detected his presence until his strangely clumsy entry into the clearing. Then, everyone fled from him. Unconcerned, he sat down in the center of the Asadi gathering place and folded his long, sparsely haired legs. By this time, all his conspecifics were in the jungle staring back at him from the edge of the clearing. Only at sunset had I ever before seen the Asadi desert the clearing en masse.

  But I haven't yet exhausted the strangeness of this old man's visit. You see, he came accompanied.

  He came with a small, puq^lish-black creature perched on his shoulder. It resembled a winged lizard, a bat, and a deformed homunculus all at once. But whereas the old man had great round eyes that changed color extremely slowly, if at all, the creature on his shoulder had not even a pair of empty sockets. It was blind, blind by virtue of its lack of qny organs of sight. It sat on the aged Asadi's shoulder and manipulated its tiny hands compulsively, tugging at the old man's mane, then opening and closing them on empty air, then tugging once again at its protector's grizzled collar.

  Both the old man and his beastlike/manlike familiar had a furious unreality. They existed at a spiritual as well as a physical distance. I noted that the rest of the Asadi—those who surrounded and ignored me on the edge of the communion ground—behaved not as if they feared these sudden visitors, but rather as if they felt a loathsome kinship with them. This is difficult to express. Bear with me. Maybe another analogy will help. Let me say that the Asadi behaved toward their visitors as a fastidious child might behave toward a parent who has contracted a venereal disease. Love and loathing, shame and respect together.

  The episode concluded abruptly when the old man rose from the ground, oblivious to the slow swelling and sedate flapping of his huri, and stalked back into the Wild, scattering a number of Asadi in his wake. (Huri, by the way, is a portmanteau word ior fury and harpy that I've just coined.)

  Then everything went back to normal. The clearing filled again, and the ceaseless and senseless milling about resumed.

  God, it's amazing how lonely loneliness can be when the sky contains a pair of jagged, nuggetlike moons and the human being inside you has surrendered to the essence of that which should command only your outward life. That's a mouthful, isn't it? What I mean is that there's a small struggle going on between Egan Chaney, cultural xenologist, and Egan Chancy, the quintessential man. No doubt it's the result more of environmental pressure than of my genetic heritage.

  That's a little anthropological allusion, Moses. Don't worry

  about it. You aren't supposed to understand it.

  But enough. Today's atypical occurrence has sharpened my appetite for observation, temporarily calmed my internal struggle. I'm ready to stay here a year, if need be, even though the original plan was only for six months. Dear, dear God, look at those moons!

  The Asadi Clearing: A Clarification

  From the professional notebooks of Egan Chaney: My greatest collegiate failing was an inability to organize. I'm pursued by the specter of that failing even today. Consequently, a digression of sorts.

  In looking over these quirkish notes for my formal ethnography, I see I may have given the reader the completely false idea that the Asadi clearing is a small area of ground, say fifteen by fifteen meters. Not so. As best I'm able to determine, there are approximately five hundred Asadi individuals. This figure includes mature adults, the young, and those intermediate between age and youth, although there are no "children" or "infants," surprisingly enough. By most demograp
hic and anthropological estimates, five hundred is optimum tribal size.

  Of course, during all my time in the Wild, I've never been completely sure that the same individuals return to the clearing each morning. It may be that some sort of monumental shift takes place in the jungle, one group of Asadi replacing another each day. But I doubt it. The Wild encompasses a finite (though large) area, after all, and I have learned to recognize a few of the more distinctive Asadi by sight. Therefore, five hundred seems about right to me: five hundred grey-fleshed creatures strolling, halting, bending at the waist and glaring at one another, eating, participating in loveless sex, grappling like wrestlers, obeying no time clock but the sun, their activities devoid of any apprehensible sequence or rationale. Such activity requires a little space, though, and their clearing provides it.

  The reader may not cheerfully assume that the Asadi communion ground is a five-by-eight mud flat between a BoskVeld cypress and a malodorous sump hole. Not at all. Their communion ground has both size and symmetry, and the Asadi maintain it discrete from the encroaching jungle by their unremitting daily activity. I won't quote you dimensions, however, I'll merely say that the clearing has the rectangular shape, the characteristic slope, and the practical roominess of a twentieth-century football or soccer field. This is pure coincidence, I'm sure. Astroturf and lime-rendered hash marks are conspicuously absent.

  A Dialogue of Self and Soul

  From the private correspondence of Egan Chaney: The title of this exercise is from Yeats, dear Ben. The substance of the dialogue, however, has almost nothing to do with the Old Master's poem of the same name.

  I wrote this imaginary exchange, in one of my notebooks while waiting out a particularly long night on the edge of the Asadi clearing (just off the imaginary thirty-yard line on the south end of the field, western sideline), and I intend for no one to read it, Ben, but you. Its lack of objectivity and the conclusions drawn by the participants make it unsuitable for any sort of appearance in the formal ethnography I've yet to write.*

  But you, Ben, will understand that a scientist is also a human being and may perhaps forgive me. Because I've withheld my self from you in our many one-sided conversations (you dominate them, I realize, because my silence is a spur to others' volubility; they speak to fill the void), here I mean to show you the mind these silences conceal.

  But since you can't tell the players without a program, I

  *Even though we shared a dormitory room for a time, Chaney "mailed" me the letter containing this dialogue. We never discussed his "letter." T. B.

  herewith provide a program. The numbers on the backs of the players' metaphysical jerseys are Self and Soul.

  Self = The Cultural Xenologist Soul = The Quintessential Man Manager(s): Egan Chaney

  SELF: This is my eighteenth night in the Synesthesia Wild.

  SOUL: I've been here forever. But let that go. What have you learned?

  self: Most of my observations lead me to state emphatically that the Asadi are not fit subjects for "anthropological" study. They manifest no purposeful social activity. They do not use tools. They have less social organization than did most of the extinct earthly primates and hominids, and not much more than chimpanzees and baboons. Only the visit, three days ago, of the "old man" and his frightening companion indicates even a remote possibility I'm dealing with intelligence. How can I continue?

  SOUL: You'll continue out of contempt for the revulsion daily growing in you. Because the Asadi are, in fact, intelligent—^just as Oliver Oliphant Frasier said they were.

  SELF: But how do I know that, damn it? How do I know what you insist is true is really true? Blind acceptance of Frasier's word?

  SOUL: There are signs, Chaney. The eyes, for instance. But even if there weren't any signs, you'd admit that the Asadi are as intelligent, in their own way, as you or I. Wouldn't you, Egan?

  SELF: I admit it. Their elusive intelligence haunts me.

  SOUL: No, now you've misstated the facts—you've twisted things around horribly.

  SELF: How? What do you mean?

  SOUL: You are not the one who is haunted, Egan Chaney, for

  you're loo rationed a creature to be the prey of poltergeist. / am the haunted one, the bedeviled one, the one ridden by every insidious spirit of doubt and revulsion.

  SELF: Revulsion? You've used that word twice. Why do you insist upon it? What does it mean?

  SOUL: That I hate the Asadi. I despise their every culturally significant—or insignificant—act. They curdle my essence with their very alienness. And because they do, you, too, Egan Chaney, hate them—for you're simply the civilized veneer on my primordial responses to the world. You're haunted not by the Asadi, friend, but by me.

  SELF: While you, in turn, are haunted by them. Is that it?

  soul: That's how it is. But although you're aware of my hatred for the Asadi, you pretend that that portion of my hatred which seeps into you is only a kind of professional resentment. You believe you resent the Asadi for destroying your objectivity, your scientific detachment. In truth, this detachment doesn't exist. You feel the same powerful revulsion for their alienness that works in me like a disease, the same abiding and deep-seated hatred. I haunt you.

  self: With hatred for the Asadi?

  SOUL: Yes. I admit it, Egan. Admit that even as a scientist you hate them.

  SELF: No. No, damn you, I won't. Because we killed the pygmies, every one of them. How can I say, "I hate the Asadi, I hate the Asadi," when we killed every pygmy? —Even though, my God, I do. . . .

  PART TWO

  Daily Life: In-the-Field Report

  From the professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: Once again, it's evening. I've a lean-to now, and it protects me from the rain much better than did the porous roof of the forest. I've been here twenty-two days now. Beneath this mildewed flesh my muscles crawl like the evil snakes BoskVeld doesn't possess. I'm saturated with Denebola's garish light. I'm Gulliver among the Yahoos.

  This, however, isn't what you want to hear.

  You want facts, my conclusions about the behavior of the Asadi, evidence that we're studying a life form capable of at least elementary reasoning and ratiocination. The Asadi have this ability, I swear it—but only slowly has the evidence for intelligence begun to accumulate.

  Okay, base-camp buggers. Let me deHver myself of an in-tbe-field report as an objective scientist, forgetting the buncbes of my mortal self. Tbe rest of tbis tape will deal witb tbe daily life of tbe Asadi.

  A day in tbe life of. A typical day in the life of.

  Except that I'm going to cap my reporting of mundane occurrences with tbe account of an extraordinary event that took place just tbis afternoon. Also, I'm going to compress time to suit my own artistic/scientific purposes.

  At dawn tbe Asadi return to their football fields. For approximately twelve hours they mill about in tbe clearing doing whatever they care to do. Sexual activity and quirkish staring matches are the only sort of behavior that can in any way be called "social"— unless you believe milling about in a crowd qualifies. Their daylight way of life I call Indifferent Togetherness.

  But when the Asadi engage in coitus, their indifference dissolves and gives way to a brutal hostility. Both partners behave as if they desire to kill each other, and frequently tbis is nearly the result. (Births, in case you're wondering, must take place in the Wild, the female self-exiled and unattended.) As for the staring matches, they're of brief duration and involve fierce gesticulation and mane shaking. The eyes change color with astonishing rapidity, flashing through the entire visible spectrum, and maybe beyond, in a matter of seconds.

  I'm now prepared to say these instantaneous changes of eye color are tbe Asadi equivalent of human speech. Three weeks of observation have finally convinced me that tbe adversaries in these staring matches control tbe internal chemical changes that trigger the cbfmges in the succeeding hues of their eyes. In other words, patterns exist. Tbe minds that control these chemica
l changes cannot be primitive ones. The alterations are willed, and they're infinitely complex.

  Ole Oliver Oliphant was right. The Asadi have a "language."

  Still, for all tbe good it does me, they might as well have none. One day's agonizingly like another. And I can't blame my

  pariahhood, for the only things even a well-adjusted Asadi may participate in are sex and staring. It doesn't pain me overmuch to be outcast from participation in these. To some extent, I'm not much more of a pariah than any of these creatures. We're all, so to speak, outcast from life's feast. . . .

  Unlike every other society I've ever read about or seen, the Asadi don't even have any meaningful communal gatherings, any festivals of solidarity, any unique rituals of group consciousness. They don't even have families. The individual is the basic unit of their "society." What they have done, in fact, is to institutionalize the processes of alienation. Their dispersal at dusk simply translates into physical distance the incohesiveness by which they live during the day. How do the Asadi continue to live as a people? For that matter, why do they do so?

  Enough questions. As I mentioned earlier, something extraordinary took place today. It happened this afternoon, and, I suppose, it's still happening. As before, this strange event involves the old man who appeared in the clearing over a week ago. It also involves the huri, his blind reptilian companion.

  Until today I'd never seen two Asadi eat together. As an Earthman from a Western background, I find the practice of eating alone a disturbing one. After all, I've been eating alone for over three weeks now, and I long to sit down in the communal mess with Benedict and Eisen, Morrell and Yoshiba, and everyone else at base camp. My training in strange folkways and alien cultural patterns hasn't weaned me away from this longing. As a result, I've watched with interest, and a complete lack of comprehension, the Asadi sitting apart from their fellows and privately feeding—as if, again, they were merely an alien variety of chimpanzee or baboon.