Transfigurations deals with all of these things and more, it is wonderfully intelligent and has a great deal to tell us about who and what people are. But like all the best stories, there is a compelling mystery at its very complex, highly human heart. The desire to solve this mystery will keep you reading, and what you find out along the way will not only keep you thinking for a long time afterwards, it might also change the way you think about the nature of humanity . . . or even just nature.
You are going on a long journey. And by the time you turn the last page, you’ll really feel like you did.
Pat Cadigan
PROLOGUE
Well over six years ago Egan Chaney disappeared into the mute and steamy depths of the Calyptran Wilderness on the planet BoskVeld. ‘Don’t come after me,’ he wrote before leaving us, ‘I won’t let you bring me back.’ Nevertheless, despite what many people persisted in believing in the interval between his disappearance and my recent return to Earth, we made repeated attempts to rescue Chaney from the Wild and to discover what had happened to him.
None of those attempts was successful, and the last such endeavor before Elegy Cather’s arrival took place only about a year ago: a privately financed expedition led by the Bhutanese explorer Geoffrey Sankosh, who once made a solitary descent into the major caldera of Nix Olympica on Mars. Sankosh managed to shoot a stunning holographic film of an Asadi female giving birth to twin infants in her arboreal nest, but he found no trace of either Chaney or the huge winged pagoda that Chaney had described so meticulously in his journals and in-the-field tapes.
On the night before young Cather was due to take the shuttle bringing her out of probeship orbit to the surface of BoskVeld, I took a long walk around the perimeters of Frasierville. As I walked, I carried on a one-sided conversation with Chaney’s ghost.
Egan, I thought, you must be dead.
I had supposed as much six years ago – only weeks after he had left us – but I had always believed that one day we would stumble upon his glowing bones and so establish my supposition as fact. No such luck. Chaney continued to elude us, and there were nights when nearly inaudible trillings from the jungle reminded me of his rueful and laconic laughter.
Are you still out there? I asked his ghost.
The base camp from which Chaney and the rest of us had worked we now called Frasierville, and plasma lamps on tall vanadium-steel poles made an eerie presidio of what had once been a jumble of quonset huts and storage sheds on the boundary between the rain forest and the twilight desolation of the veldts. The infirmary in which Chaney recuperated after Eisen and I answered the summons of his flares had become a hospital, albeit a rather small one. Wood-frame dwellings had taken the place of our prefabricated dormitories, and a dozen of our most senior scientific personnel had imported their families to share with them the back-breaking joys and the poignant midnight nostalgias of the pioneer. I was an exception because I had had no family to import, and I lived alone in one of the dilapidated quonsets from base-camp days.
As I was walking that evening, I heard a baby cry.
Think of that, Egan, I addressed my old friend’s ghost: BoskVeld remains a mystery to us, but we are actually bringing children here. An overeager colonial authority has approved the immigration of five thousand families during the coming fiscal year, and a policy of computer-directed homesteading will soon determine the fate of the grasslands, steppes, and savannahs that give this planet half its name. Such changes in only six years! A baby!
Are you happy you’re safely dead, Egan?
Chaney would never know the ambivalent pleasure of tasting a breakfast cereal made from a grain hybridized for BoskVeld’s soil and climate. The human palate might suffer, but our human pride told us that the accomplishment was sweet. Whilais. That’s what our agrogeneticists called that grain, and already I could envision children running through fields of its delicate reedlike stalks and devouring breadsticks baked from its coarse pinkish meal.
I couldn’t escape the topic of children. This was probably because the following morning Egan Chaney’s daughter would set foot on BoskVeld for the first time in her life and it seemed imperative to me that I anticipate and prepare for her arrival. Seven years ago I had had no idea that Chaney had once had a family, had presumed him a bachelor like myself. Tomorrow morning, though, I would come face to face with a young woman whose existence shamed his failure to acknowledge her and whose purpose was to succeed where Chaney’s most stalwart colleagues, not to mention the famous Geoffrey Sankosh, had met only frustration and defeat.
That night, then, I sought amid the lacework of stars that so reminded Chaney of ‘flaming cobwebs’ the orbiting star of his daughter’s probeship. I think I saw it. It was hard to be certain.
In any case, there came together briefly in a glittering arc of sky Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior, the trio of moons whose wine-like bouquets of light had intoxicated him so cruelly during his field work among the Asadi. In memory of Chaney I tried to feel drunk with homesickness for Earth. But all I managed to feel was a nagging anticipation of the dawn.
Six years ago I compiled from Egan Chaney’s notes, letters, and random recordings an unorthodox monograph about the hominoid Asadi.
Over a period of weeks, as the priority scheduling of light-probe transmissions from our base-camp radio room allowed, I sent the manuscript home piecemeal. Eventually the fragments were gathered, proofread, and published by The Press of the National University of Kenya in Nairobi, the same
