PART TWO
Daily Life: In-The-Field Report
From the Third Denebolan Expedition’s audio files: Once again, it’s evening. I’ve a lean-to now, and it protects me from the rain better than did the porous forest canopy. I’ve been here twenty-two days now. Beneath this mildewed flesh, my muscles crawl like the evil snakes that BoskVeld does not possess. I’m saturated with Denebola’s garish light. I’m Gulliver among the Yahoos.
But you don’t want to hear this.
You want facts, my conclusions about Asadi behavior, evidence that we’re studying a life form capable of 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 huggers. Let me give you an in-the-field report as an objective scientist, forgetting the hunches of my mortal self. The rest of this audio file will deal with the daily life of the Asadi: a day in the life of, a typical day in the life of. Except that I must cap my reporting of mundane occurrences by recounting an extraordinary event from just this afternoon. Also, I will compress time to suit my own artistic-cum-scientific purposes.
At dawn the Asadi return to their football fields. For twelve hours or so they mill about in the clearing doing whatever they care to do. Sexual activity and quirkish staring matches are the only sorts of behavior that I can in any way term “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, indifference gives way to a brutal hostility. Both partners behave as if they want to kill each other, and frequently this is nearly the result. (Births, if you’re wondering, must occur in the Wild, the female self-exiled and unattended.) And the staring matches feature brief bouts of fierce gesticulation and mane shaking. Eyes change color with astonishing rapidity, flashing through the entire visible spectrum and maybe beyond in just seconds.
An educated guess: these instantaneous changes of eye color are the Asadi equivalent of human speech. Three weeks of observation have convinced me that the adversaries in these staring matches control the internal chemical changes that trigger the changes in the succeeding hues of their eyes. In other words, patterns exist. The minds controlling these chemical changes can’t be primitive ones. These infinitely complex changes are willed. Old Oliver Oliphant was right: the Asadi have a “language.”
Still, for all the good it does me, they might as well have none. One day is 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. I hardly mind being outcast from participation in these. To some extent, I am hardly more of a pariah than any of the Asadi. We’re all, so to speak, outcast from life’s feast. . . .
Unlike every other society I’ve ever read about or seen, the Asadi lack meaningful communal gatherings, any festivals of solidarity or unique rituals of group consciousness. They even lack families. The individual is their society’s basic unit. In fact, they’ve institutionalized the processes of alienation. Their dispersal at dusk simply translates into physical distance the incohesiveness by which they live during the day. How do they continue to live as a people? For that matter, why do they do so?
As I said earlier, something extraordinary took place today, just 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 and his blind reptilian companion, the huri. Until today I’d never seen two Asadi eat together. As a human being from a Western background, I find the practice of eating alone disturbing. After all, I’ve been eating alone for more than three weeks, 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 has not inoculated me against this longing. Therefore, I’ve watched with interest, and total incomprehension, the Asadi sitting apart from their fellows and privately feeding as if, again, they are merely an alien form of chimpanzee or baboon.
Today this changed. An hour before dusk, the old man staggered into the clearing under the burden of something damnably heavy. A commotion ensued. As before, all the Asadi fled to the edge of the jungle. From my lean-to, I watched. My heart, dear Ben, thumped like a toad in a jar. The huri on the old man’s shoulder appeared bloated and insentient, like a rubber doll. During the old man’s entire visit it remained virtually comatose, upright but unmoving, while the aged Asadi—whom I now see as an aloof and mysterious chieftain—paused in the center of the clearing and tried to remove the burden from his back, which was slung over his shoulders by means of two narrow straps. Straps, Eisen: S-T-R-A-P-S. Made of vines. Can you understand how I felt? Nor did the nature of the old man’s burden neutralize my wonder. He was lowering to the ground the rich, blood-red carcass of an animal. The meat glistened with the failing light of Denebola and its own internal vibrancy. It had been dressed, and the old man was bringing it to the clearing as an offering to his people. He set the carcass down and pulled the straps from the incisions he’d made in the meat. Then, his back and hands bloodstained, he stepped away several steps.
Slowly, a few of the adult males stalked back into the clearing. They approached the old man’s offering diffidently, like thieves in a darkened room. Their eyes furiously changed colors, all but those of the old man, who stood apart from the meat. His eyes, like bone-china saucers, were the color of dull clay. They didn’t alter even when several Asadi males fell upon the meat and ripped off beautifully veined hunks. Then more and more of the males attacked the carcass, while, on the fringes of the clearing, females and youths started moving to claim their shares. I had to leave my lean-to to see a little better, and, ultimately, I saw little but Asadi bodies and manes in a discordant melee.
Then, before most of the Asadi recognized the fact, Denebola set.
Awareness grew, starting with the females and the young on the periphery and burning inward like a grass fire. A few creatures flashed into the Wild. Others followed. Eventually, in only seconds, even the males rending the meat lifted red snouts and scented their predicament. In an instant, they fled toward the trees, glimmered away like the dying light, and vanished into the foliage. And here’s the strange part: the old man did not follow his people into the Synesthesia Wild. He’s sitting out there in the clearing now! In the precise spot where he placed his offering, he has crossed his legs and assumed sole ownership of that sacred stained ground. The moons of BoskVeld throw his shadow in three different directions, and the huri on his shoulder now moves a little. This is the first night since my arrival here that I haven’t been alone, base-camp huggers, and, hey, I don’t like it at all. . . .
*
Personal Involvement: The Bachelor
From Egan Chaney’s private journals: Meeting the The Bachelor, as I called him from almost the start, was a huge breakthrough, on my twenty-ninth day in the field—though I had watched him for three days before he approached to touch my face. This touch, as far from a threat as a kiss, scared me more than did the first appearance of the old chieftain and his huri. It scared me even more than did the chaotic eating of his gift of a mysterious flame-bright carcass. I’d been alone for weeks. Now, with not much preamble, an Asadi acknowledged my presence by touching me!
I must back up a bit—to the night the Asadi chieftain, against all custom, stayed in the clearing. That unprecedented act briefly filled me with terror, but the implications of his staying overrode my fear. Wakefully attentive, I studied his every movement, to record anything that seemed significant. The old man didn’t move. As the night wore on, the huri grew restive but did not leave the old man’s shoulder. To be painfully brief, they stayed in the clearing all that night, all the following day, sitting on the stained earth, guarding the spot. Then, when twilight fell on that second day, they departed with all the rest. And I despaired. How many more days must I wait before another meaningful event occurred?
Not long, apparently. On my twenty-sixth day on the clearing’s edge I saw The Bachelor. If I had seen him before, I had never paid him close attention, for The Bachelor was a completely unprepossessing specimen maybe three or four years beyond adolescence. Grey-fleshed and gaunt, he had a patchy silver-blue mane so short that all the others must surely regard him as an outcast. Previously, he never once took part in coitus or the ritualized staring matches of the full-maned Asadi. When I first felt his eyes upon me, The Bachelor stood on my imaginary twenty-yard line looking toward my lean-to from a pocket of his ever-milling brethren. He had chosen me to stare at. That he didn’t get a cuffing for violating the one heretofore inviolable Asadi taboo confirmed for me the negligibility of his status.
It was he and I who were brethren, not he and the other Asadi.
In one salient particular, The Bachelor did not resemble the vast majority of Asadi at all: his eyes. These were just like the old man’s—clear but empty, enameled but colorless, fired in the oven of his mother’s womb but as brittle-looking as baked clay. Never did The Bachelor’s eyes flash through the rainbow spectrum as did the prismatic eyes of his conspecifics. They were always clayey and cold, a shade or two lighter than his flesh. And it was with these eyes, on my twenty-sixth day in the field, that The Bachelor took my measure. The noonday heat held us in its shimmer, our gazes locked, enigmatically.
“Don’t just stand there,” I shouted, beckoning. “Come here so we can talk.”
My voice had little effect on The Bachelor or his teeming kin. Although a lift of his chin suggested that he had heard me, he regarded me with no more, and no less, interest than before. How could he “talk” with me? My eyes lacked even the limited virtuosity of traffic lights, and because The Bachelor’s never changed colors, he could not “talk” even with his own kind. For all intents and purposes, he was a “mute.” When I called to him, though, I thought his dead, grey eyes bespoke a complete lack of intelligence. It had not occurred to me that they might signal a physical handicap, just as human dumbness may result from diseased or paralyzed vocal cords. . . .
“Come here,” I urged him again.
The Bachelor, still staring, did not move. He stared at me for the rest of the afternoon. I occupied myself with note-taking, a lunch of some of the rations Benedict had dropped, and also cursory observations of the other Asadi: anything to avoid his implacable gaze. It was almost a relief when dusk fell.
But that evening my excitement grew; something truly monumental had happened: I had been acknowledged. He had touched me.
The next day, The Bachelor paid me little heed. He wandered in and out of the aimless files of his aimless kindred, and his failure to demonstrate the same interest in me that he had shown yesterday made my spirits slump. On the twenty-eighth day, he resumed his shameless staring. I was gratified, even though he now pursued a brand-new strategy, moving tirelessly about the clearing, weaving in and out of the clusters of Asadi, but always staying close enough to the western sideline to be able to see me, his eyes, however, still as dead as the insides of two oyster shells. I was fighting stomach cramps and diarrhea, and by late afternoon his stare had grown annoying again.
I felt better the next morning, my twenty-ninth day. The light from glowering Denebola seemed softer, the tropical heat less debilitating. I left my lean-to to visit the assembly ground. Bathed in empty dawn pastels, the Asadi flew through the fronds and lianas of the Synesthesia Wild for another day of Indifferent Togetherness. Soon I was surrounded, and ignored. Great, shaggy heads with ashen, brown, clay-white, or tawny collars bobbed all about me, gracelessly unsynchronized, and at last I found The Bachelor. Undoubtedly, he’d had me in view all along, but, moving with circumspection among his fellows, he had not let me see him. And I’d fretted about his apparent absence.
Then Denebola hovered hot overhead.
Our shadows made dark pools around our feet, like fallen trousers. The Bachelor eased his way through an Asadi tangle and stopped perhaps two meters from me, atremble with his own daring. I trembled too. Would he attack and devour me as his fellow males had assaulted and devoured the old chieftain’s gift of meat?
No. The Bachelor steeled himself and approached. My shadow wrinkled under my feet. The grey head, the patchy silver-blue mane, the twin carapaces of his eyes—all moved toward me. Then his long grey arm rose and his humanoid hand touched the dimple under my bottom lip and the most recent of my shaving cuts, touches altogether free of malice.
And I flinched.
*
A Running Chronology: Weeks Pass
From Egan Chaney’s professional digital files
Day 29: After this rare one-to-one contact with a specific Asadi (whom I now designate The Bachelor), I tried to find a method of meaningful communication. Words failed. So did signs in the dirt. Hand signals held his attention, but, having no training in American Sign Language or its variants, I soon abandoned this method, too.
Still, I could not dissuade The Bachelor from following me about. Once, when I left the clearing for lunch, he nearly followed me into my lean-to. He had been so doggedly faithful all day that I was surprised when, at dusk, he left with the others. Despite this desertion, I am again excited about my work. Tomorrow seems a hundred years off. . . .
Day 35: Nothing. The Bachelor continues to follow me, never more than a few paces away. His devotion is such that I can’t even urinate without his standing guard at my back. He must think he now has an ally against the indifference of the others, who dully ignore us. Sadly, I’ve begun to weary of and resent his attentions.
Day 40: I’m ill again. The medicine that Benedict dropped during one of my bouts of diarrhea is almost gone. Rain rattles down. As I write, lying on a pallet in my lean-to, the acrid odor of the morose, grey dampness of the Asadi assails me like a poison, intensifying my nausea. In and out they go, back and forth. . . .
I am toying with the idea that their entire way of life, in which I’ve struggled to see just one or two meaningful patterns, is their only significant ongoing ritual. Formerly, I was looking for several minor rituals to help me explain them. It may be that they are the ritual. As the poet said, “How tell the dancer from the dance?” But having hit upon this maybe brilliant hypothesis about them, I am still left with the question, What is the significance of the ritual that the Asadi themselves are? An existential query, of course.
The Bachelor sits cross-legged in the dripping, steam-silvered foliage a few meters from my lean-to. His mane clings to his skull and back like tufts of matted, cottony mold. Even though he has dogged my steps for eleven days now, he will not come into my shelter. He squats outside staring at me from under an umbrella of leaves. Even when it rains, his reluctance to come under a fabricated roof may be significant. If only I could make the same sort of breakthrough with two or three others that I’ve made with The Bachelor.
Day 50: After the Asadi fled into the jungle last night, I trudged toward the pickup point where Benedict leaves my rations and medicine every week. The doses of Placenol I’ve given myself lately, shooting up the stuff like a junkie, get increasingly larger—but Eisen, early on, assured me that P-nol, in any quantity, is nonaddictive. What amazes me beyond this amazing attribute of the drug, though, is the fact that Benedict has dropped more and more of it each week, providing me with a supply in suspicious harmony with my increasing consumption.
Or do I use more because he drops more?
No, of course not: everything goes into a computer at base camp. A program they ran weeks ago probably predicted this wholly predictable upsurge in my “emotional” dependency on P-nol. At any rate, I’m feeling better: I’ve begun to function again.
Trudging toward the pickup point, I felt a peculiar unease seeping into me from the fluid shadows of the rainthorn trees. I heard noises, which persisted all the way to the drop point: faint, unidentifiable, frightening. I believe, however, that The Bachelor lurked somewhere beyond the leaves and lianas where those noises originated. Once, I may have seen his dull eyes reflect the sheen of the evening’s first moon.
A typed note on the supply bundle: “Look, Dr. Chaney, you don’t have to insist on 100% nonassociation with us base campers. You’ve been gone almost two months. Let us drop you a radio. Some talk with bona fide human beans won’t destroy your precious ethnography, sir. You can use it in the evenings. If you want it, send up a flare tomorrow night before Balthazar rises and I’ll helicraft it out the day after.” Benedict signed the note. But I don’t want a radio. Part of this business involves the suffering. I knew that before I came. I won’t quit until things begin to make sense. And then I’ll have to continue.
Day 57 (Predawn): I haven’t slept all night. Yesterday, maybe seven hours ago, I went into the jungle to retrieve Benedict’s eighth drop. Another note on the bundle: “Dr. Chaney, Eisen calls you a pigheaded ninny. Says you don’t know how to conjugate your own first name. It should be Ego, he says, not Egan. Have you started preaching holly-roller sermons to the trees? What a picture. Launch a flare if you want anything. Ben.”
On my way back to the clearing, I again heard noises. The Synesthesia Wild echoed with the greyness of an indistinct plunging form—The Bachelor, spying on me, retreating before me. Even with a freshly filled backpack weighing me down, I followed those suspicious tickings of leaf and twig. I never overtook my prey, but still kept up! It had to be The Bachelor. None of his fellows would have given me a glimpse of even the sad disturbed foliage in the wake of their vanishing. I drove deeper into the Wild, farther from the supply drop and the assembly ground. Two hours. Three. At last, panting with my pursuit’s momentum, I broke into a clearing. The noises drawing me on had ceased. I was alone, and lost.
Filling the clearing, rising like a wide pagoda, loomed the impervious mass of something built. The resonances of Time dwarfed me. Panic climbed hand over hand up the slick ladder in my throat. Oliver Oliphant Frasier had studied the ruins of one of these structures, learning only that the Asadi may once have had a true civilization.
I was staring at an enormous relic of that civilization. Amethyst windows. Stone carvings above the entablature. A dome. Tiers of successively tinier roofs as my gaze shinned up the face of the structure.
I plunged back into the Wild and hurtled away, backpack thumping.
Where to? Back to the assembly ground! Which way to run? I didn’t know, but had no need to answer that question. Blindly, I ran toward the leaf and twig tickings that had resumed shortly after I fled the pagoda. The Bachelor? I don’t know. I saw nothing. But in three hours’ time, I reached the safety of my lean-to. . . . Now I await the dawn, the tidal influx of Asadi. I’m high, even without a dose of my refilled P-nol.
Day 57 (Evening): They’re gone again. But I’ve witnessed something unsettling. The Bachelor did not arrive this morning with the others. Has he injured himself in our midnight chase through the Wild? By noon I was exhausted and puzzled—exhausted by my search for him and my lack of sleep, puzzled by his defection. I sheltered in my lean-to and lay down. In a little while, I was sleeping, but not soundly. Tickings of twig and leaf made my eyelids flicker. I dreamed that a grey shape came and sat in the lotus position on the edge of the clearing about five meters from where I lay. Like a wordless familiar, that shape watched over me. . . .
Kyur-AAACCCCK!
Groans and thrashings. Thrashings and hackings. The brush near my lean-to crackled beneath the tread of many heavy feet. Bludgeoned out of my dream by these sounds, I sat up and attempted to reorient myself. I saw The Bachelor and three of the larger, more athletic males bearing him down and pinioning him. They appeared to be cooperating in subduing him!
Ignoring me, these males picked up The Bachelor and carried him to the center of the clearing. I followed them out onto it. As they had during the old chieftain’s two odd visits, the Asadi crowded to the sidelines—but without stepping into the jungle. They remained on the field, buffeting one another like spectators at a World Cup event. I was the only creature other than the four struggling males in the center of the clearing, however, and when I looked down at The Bachelor, his eyes seemed almost to change colors, from their usual clayey-white to a thin, dispirited yellow. But I could not help him and so declined to interfere.
They shaved his mane. A female holding two flat, beveled stones emerged from the crowd on the field’s eastern perimeter. She gave the stones to the males. With them the males scraped away the last mangy tufts of The Bachelor’s silver-blue collar. Just as they were about to finish, he gave a wild kick that briefly dislodged one tormentor, then acquiesced in his shame and lay back staring at the sky. The shaving took only about ten minutes. The three males sauntered off, and the satisfied spectators, now that the barbering had ended, filtered nonchalantly back into the clearing, ignoring The Bachelor with a frigidity they’d once reserved for me. I stood in the center waiting for him to get to his feet, but he lay unmoving. His narrow shorn head, scarred by their barbering stones, looked pathetically fragile. I offered him my hand. An Asadi jostled me. Accidentally, I think. The Bachelor rolled to his stomach, curled into the fetal position—then sprang up from the dust and dodged through startled clusters of his kin.
Intervening bodies blocked my view, but I suppose that The Bachelor disappeared into the trees and kept on running. What does all this signify? My hypothesis is that the Asadi have punished The Bachelor for leading me, whether purposely or inadvertently, to the ancient pagoda in the Synesthesia Wild. His late arrival in the clearing may have been an ingenuous attempt to forestall this punishment. Why else would the Asadi have tried to make The Bachelor even more of an outcast than he already was?
Patience is nine-tenths of cultural xenology. Mystified, I pray for patience.
Day 61: The Bachelor has not returned. Knowing that he’s now officially a pariah, he chooses to be one on his own terms.
Meanwhile, I have contemplated two things: 1) If the Asadi did in fact punish him for the crime of leading me to the pagoda, they must realize that I am not simply a maneless outcast. I am genetically different, a creature from elsewhere, and they consciously wish me to remain ignorant of their past. 2) I would like to make an expedition to the pagoda. It should not be very hard to find, given that I plan to go during the day. Unusual things happen so rarely in the Asadi clearing that I can afford to absent myself for a time. One day of playing hooky should not leave any irreparable gaps in my ethnography. If all goes well, I could develop some heady insights into the ritual of Asadi life.
If only, however, The Bachelor would return.
Day 63: Since today was the day of Benedict’s ninth scheduled drop, I chose to make my trip into the Wild early this morning. Two birds with one stone, as Ben might put it. First, I would search for the lost pagoda. Second, even failing to find it, I would make use of the day by picking up my new supplies. I left before dawn. But the directional instincts of human beings must have died millennia ago: I got lost. The Wild stirred with an inhuman calm that tore the thin fabric of my resourcefulness into rags.
Late in the afternoon, Ben’s Dragonfly saved me. It made a series of stuttering circles over the jungle. Once, I saw its undercarriage hanging so close to the treetops that a sprightly monkey might have essayed to leap aboard. I dogged the noise of the helicraft to our drop point. From there, I had no trouble getting back to the clearing. Today, then, marks the first day since I’ve been in the Wild that I haven’t seen a single member of the Asadi, and so I continue to miss The Bachelor. . . .
Day 68: Foolishly, I went looking for the pagoda again. But the last four days have given me zero information or insight: I had to take some kind of positive action. I got lost again, scarily lost. Green creepers coiled about me. The sky vanished. How, then, did I get home, especially since Benedict’s helicraft won’t return for two more days? Again, the suspicious tickings of leaf and twig: I followed them, confident again that The Bachelor is out there still and steadfast in my decision to embark on no more expeditions until I have help.
Day 71: The Bachelor has returned!
Day 72: The Bachelor still has little mane to boast of, and the Asadi treat him as a total outcast. Also, these last two days, The Bachelor has demonstrated a healthy degree of independence in his relations with me. He follows me less often. He no longer hunkers beside my lean-to. Does a made structure evoke for him the pagoda to which he led me and for whose revelation to me he was publicly humiliated? I find this new arrangement a felicitous one, however. A little privacy can heal the battered soul.
Day 85: The note on yesterday’s supply bundle: “Send up a flare tomorrow night if you wish to stay in the Wild. Eisen is thinking of hauling you out. Only a flare will save you. My personal suggestion, sir, is that you sit tight and wait for us. Your good friend and servant, Ben.” Me, I’ve just sent up two damn flares. Day 85 will stand in cultural-xenological history as Egan Chaney’s personal Fourth of July.
Day 98: I again hold my own. I’ve survived a month without abandoning the assembly ground. Most of my time I’ve devoted to noting important differences among the Asadi. Because their behavior manifests, for the most part, a bewildering uniformity, I now observe their physical characteristics. Even in this area, though, most differences are more apparent than real; beyond the principles of sex and the quality of the mane (length, color, thickness, etc.), I’ve found few useful discriminators. Size has importance, certainly—but no matter how tall the Asadi, his or her body usually conforms to an ectomorphic configuration. Their eyes’ ability to flash through the spectrum is another discriminator. Of sorts. The only Asadi who don’t possess this ability in a complete degree are the old chieftain and The Bachelor.
Still, I recognize on sight several Asadi other than these prominent two. I’ve tried to give easy descriptors to these recognizable individuals. The smallest adult male here I call Turnbull because his stature reminds me Colin Turnbull’s account of the Ituri pygmies and my own work among that same admirable people, gone now and unrecoverable. A nervous fellow with active hands I call Benjy, after Benedict . . . The old chieftain continues to exert a forceful influence on my thinking. His name I derived by simple analogy: I call him Eisen Zwei.
The Bachelor now seems to wish to retain his anonymity. His mane has grown very little since the shaving. Perhaps, he plucks it at night, keeping it short on purpose. These last few days, after ascertaining my whereabouts in the morning and then again before sunset, he’s avoided me. Good. We’re both more comfortable.
Today was another drop day. I didn’t go out to retrieve parcels—too weary. But I’ve sworn off Placenol, and the psychological lift attendant on this minor victory has made my physical weakness bearable. As I’ve tapered off this “nonaddictive” drug, the amount of P-nol in each drop has correspondingly decreased. To hell with the base-camp computer. I refuse to let the predictability of my victory detract from its mental-health benefits.
Tonight I plan to read Odegaard’s official report on the Shamblers of Misery. And then I plan to sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep.
Day 106: Eisen Zwei, the old chieftain, came back today! He first entered this clearing ninety days ago. Has a pattern begun to emerge? I can’t interpret its periodicity. I don’t even know what sort of life span the Asadi have. . . . But to come back to the issue at hand, Eisen Zwei entered with the huri on his shoulder, sat down, remained perhaps an hour, and stalked back into the Wild. The Asadi, of course, fled from him—driven, it seemed, more by loathing than fear. How long must I wait until old E. Z. returns?
Day 110: The behavior of the Asadi has undergone a subtle change, one I cannot fathom. For the last two days, every member of this mad species has taken great pains to avoid stepping into a large invisible rectangle in the center of the clearing. Thus, they have crowded into two separate groups at opposite ends of the field. These “teams”—as I only half facetiously call them—do not behave exactly as they did as one continuous group. Animals on both sides of the agreed-upon no-man’s land betray a heightened nervousness. They clutch their arms across their chests. They sway, undergoing odd paroxysms while weaving in and out among their fellows. They seem to writhe to eerie flute music played deep in the surrounding green recesses. Sometimes staring matches occur between two creatures on opposite sides of the unmarked rectangle. But neither participant puts a foot inside the crucial area of separation, an area about thirty meters wide and almost the entire length of the clearing. Not quite, mind you—because there exists a narrow strip of ground on each sideline through which these two teams may exchange members, one animal at a time. These exchanges occur infrequently, with a lone Asadi darting nervously out of its group, down an unmarked causeway, and into the ranks of the “enemy.” Do they avoid the clearing’s center because Eisen Zwei once made his bloody offering of flesh there? I have no idea.
The Bachelor has reacted to all this by climbing into a fat-boled tree ten meters from my lean-to. From dawn to sunset he sits high above his inscrutable clan, watching, sleeping, trying, possibly, to assess the general mood. Occasionally he looks my way to see what I make of these developments. To date, I haven’t made much of them.
Day 112: This strange bipartite waltz continues. The dancers have grown more frantic. Anxiety throbs in the air like electricity. The Bachelor climbs higher, wedging himself into his tree’s curtained limbs. The nonexistent flute music in my head has grown stingingly shrill. What will the end of this madness bring?
Day 114: Events culminated today in a series of bizarre developments that pose a conundrum of the first order. It began early. Eisen Zwei entered the clearing an hour after the arrival of the Asadi. He bore on his back the carcass of a dressed-out animal. His huri, though upright on his shoulder, looked like the work of an inept taxidermist, awkwardly posed and inanimate. The Asadi deserted their distinct but identically restive groups by fleeing into the jungle.
Half-hidden by great lacquered leaves, The Bachelor leaned out over the clearing’s edge and gazed down with clayey-white eyes. Surrounded now by the curious, loathing-filled beasts that had crowded into the jungle, I clutched the bole of the tree in which The Bachelor resided, and all of us watched.
Eisen Zwei lowered his burden. But now, instead of stepping aside and letting a few of the braver males advance, he took the huri from his shoulder and set it on the bleeding lump of meat. The huri’s blind head did not move, but its tiny fingers rippled with a visibly dexterous malice. Then this hypnotic rippling ceased, and the huri sat there looking bloated and dead, a scabrous plaything. Without any farewell, Eisen Zwei strolled back into the Synesthesia Wild. Foliage clattered as several Asadi parted to let him pass.
As Denebola, fat and mocking, crossed a small arc of sky, sundogs danced in a host of inaccessible jungle grottos. An hour passed, and Eisen Zwei returned. He had simply left the huri to guard his first offering. Now, the old chieftain came back with a second carcass slung across his bony shoulders. He set it down near the first. His huri animated itself, shifted, and straddled the contiguous pieces of meat. Then the old Asadi departed again.
An hour later he returned with a third lump of meat—but this time he entered the clearing from the west, not far from my lean-to. I realized that he had first entered from the east, then from the south. A pattern’s developing, I thought. Now he’ll leave again and reenter from the north. Many peoples on Earth ascribe mystical characteristics to the four points of the compass, and the possibility of drawing a meaningful analogy excited me.
But Eisen Zwei did not withdraw, shattering my hopes. (In fact, as on my twenty-second night in the Wild, he still hasn’t left. Under the copper-green glow of Melchior, the old chieftain and his huri squat on the blood-clumped dirt waiting for the first pink spiderwebbings of dawn.) Instead, he made one complete circuit of the clearing, walking counterclockwise from his point of entrance.
This done, Eisen Zwei rejoined his motionless familiar at midfield.
Here, the second stage of this new ceremony commenced. Without unloosening the third carcass from his back, E. Z. picked up the huri and put it on his shoulder. Kneeling, he tied straps through the two slabs of meat over which the huri had kept watch. Next, he pulled these marbled brown and red slabs through the dirt. He dragged the first into the southern half of the clearing, unslipped its strap, and set the huri on it again as its guardian. This procedure he duplicated in the clearing’s northern half, except that here he necessarily stood guard over the second offering himself. The final carcass still freighted his scrawny back.
Eisen Zwei stepped away from the second slab. In his throat he made a noise like that of a human being fighting back a sob. This noise, I must add, is the first and so far the only example of voiced communication, discounting growls and moans, I’ve heard among the Asadi. The huri reacted to Eisen Zwei’s “sobs”—clearly a signal—by hopping off the object of its guardianship and scrabbling wretchedly through the dust toward the old man, its rubbery wings dipping and twisting. (Surely, the huri is incapable of flight. Do its wings represent an anatomical holdover from an earlier stage of its evolution?) When both E. Z. and his 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 he extended his arms, tilted his head back, and, staring at the sun, made a shuddering inhalation of such piteous depth it seemed that his lungs would burst or his heart break. His sob echoed through the clearing and into the Wild.
At once, the Asadi poured out of their hiding places back onto the assembly ground—not only the adult males, but animals of every sex and age. Again, in the midst of this lunging riot, the population before me divided into two groups, each one scrimmaging furiously, intramurally, in its own cramped plot of dust. Manes tossed. Eyes pinwheeled with mute color. The hunger of the Asadi made low sad music over the Wild, like summer thunder.
Slashing at one another, the Asadi quickly devoured the two carcasses. Like piranhas, I thought. Then E.Z. moaned mightily again, and the riot halted. Every lean grey snout turned toward him. The dying went off to die alone, if any were mortally wounded. I saw none leave, but neither did I see anyone lying helplessly injured. 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 view of his bemused conspecifics, ate the monstrous slab piece by piece. Although he gave the huri nothing, the huri, inert but clinging, did not protest this oversight. Meanwhile, maddeningly slowly, Eisen Zwei ate.
Eventually I retired to my lean-to. I often emerged to check the goings-on in the clearing. By the second hour, the Asadi had begun to stir within their separate plots. By the third hour, these plots had merged, making it impossible to distinguish the two “teams” of previous days. The old pattern of Indifferent Togetherness had reasserted itself, except that now the Asadi moved sluggishly, suspiciously eyeing their chieftain and refusing to encroach on the unmarked rectangle containing him.
The Bachelor no longer sat aloft, but I could not find him in the clearing. All I saw was E.Z., isolated by revolving barricades of legs, peeling away the last oily strips of meat from his dinner and chewing them with a look of stupid pensiveness. The huri flapped once or twice, but the old man still did not feed it.
Finally, sunset. The Asadi fled, but E. Z.—surely as stuffed as a python that has unhinged its lower jaw to admit a fawn—slumped sideways and, still half erect, did not move.
Now a single alien moon dances in the sky, and I am left with a question whose answer is so stark and self-evident I am almost afraid to ask it: From what sort of creature did the old man obtain and dress out his ritual offerings? Huddled beneath a truly insubstantial roof, I am unable to escape the frightening ramifications of the Asadi way of death. . . .
*
Speculations on Cannibalism:
An Extemporaneous Essay
From Egan Chaney’s unedited digital files: A beautiful day. If I hold my microphone out—I’m holding it out now, 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 it? Maybe you don’t. But even so, Eisen, it’s a beautiful day, four days since your counterpart, Eisen Zwei, stirred things up with his bloody three-course banquet. Since then, nothing.
I’m walking, out 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 named—Campy, Werner, Gus, Oliver, and the others—refuse to grant me my existence. This is hard, Ben. This is hard to accept. Still, I continue to feel a paternal tenderness toward these few Asadi—Jane, Thelma, Dianne, Celestine, and so on—I’ve been able to recognize and christen.
I’ve just walked by Celestine. The configuration of her features gives her a gentle look, like a Quaker woman in a tattered parka. Her seeming gentleness leads me to the topic of this commentary: How could a creature of Celestine’s mien and disposition eat the flesh of one of her own kind? God help me if her kind are intelligent and self-aware, base-camp huggers, because if they are, I walk among cannibals! They encircle me. They ensorcel me. They fill me with awe, an awe such as that which 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 called him Turnbull 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, exists nowhere among these crass, uncouth people. I’d have found him by now: he was 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 ceaseless as the diameter of time! May God damn them for their obscene rapacity!
[A lengthy pause during which only the shuffling of the Asadi can be heard.]
I think my shout unsettled them. A few of them cringed! But they don’t look at me, these cannibals. Should I be outraged or gratified? A cannibal can’t 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 coming from, and so he’s 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 species to eat him. On the other, this 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? Each attempt to achieve union with others of his kind results in a heightened alienation from himself.
[Chaney’s microphone picks up the incessant shuffling of Asadi feet and the low sighing of a breeze in the rainforest.]
Yes, I know. This is bad anthropology. But I’m not really speaking anthropologically. I’m speaking metaphorically, and maybe I’m not talking about the Asadi at all. I realize full well, base-camp huggers, that among human beings 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 to protect their sedentary way of life or to expand their holdings into areas where overuse hasn’t depleted the soil. Enemies eat one another to steal their adversaries’ strength and to gain power over them. In that context, cannibalism is patriotic, and human flesh is always kosher.
The Asadi, not being agriculturists, and having no natural enemies in the Synesthesia Wild, are not adherents of exocannibalism. Instead, Ben, they practice endocannibalism. Is that clear? In short, the Asadi regularly eat members of their own tribal unit, the only tribal unit on BoskVeld. 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 conditions, then, is an act of homage and a visible expression of a community’s wish to insure the continuity of its lifestyle 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 endocannibalism of the Asadi so offend and demoralize me? Because, God help me, I now see them as alien projections of my own consciousness, and, expecting better of myself, I expected better of them. Does that make sense? I fear you’ll think it doesn’t. But just when I’d begun to catch glimmerings of something lofty in their makeups, old E. Z.—like a nineteenth-century Indian headman putting on a potlatch—comes dragging three carcasses into the clearing and unleashes the ravenous animal in all his goggle-eyed subjects! It’s more than I can stand. Remember that old anthropological chestnut: “An exocannibal eats only enemies. An endocannibal eats only friends”? I once wrote a pair of heroic couplets that you may appreciate. Here, I’ll recite them: “An exocannibal eats only foes. / It makes him feel safer, eating those.” And, of course, the second one: “An endocannibal eats only friends. / Whereupon, I’ll bet, their friendship ends.”
The Asadi ignore me. It’s hot in this clearing, 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 turn out the people who lived there. Turnbull’s dead, O base-camp huggers, and There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no