Because our monograph has since appeared in nearly a hundred additional printings in sixteen languages, few people on Earth and the Glaktik Komm colony worlds have not heard of BoskVeld and the Asadi. Moreover, although the monograph deals exclusively with Chaney’s field work in the rain forests, it has given the entire planet – officially, GK-World Leo/Denebola IV – an aura of romance.
Colonists arrived on BoskVeld with the name of the Asadi on their lips, even though their first priority after planetfall was to homestead the veldts. They came into Frasierville from the Egan Chaney Shuttle Field (for so we had eventually named it), spent a week or so listening to orientation lectures and outfitting themselves for the hard times ahead, and then departed in helicraft or veldt-rover caravans for the territories preassigned them by Colonial Administration. Only a few of these venturesome people took time out from their indoctrination for a look-see into the rain forests, and those who did stuck close to beaten paths, tempting the sirens of romance no further than seemed politic. They knew that the real business of their lives lay elsewhere, even if the legend of Egan Chaney and the mystery of the Asadi had played no small part in enticing them to BoskVeld.
The trouble, of course, was that people didn’t regard Death and Designation Among the Asadi as anything but a clever and compelling fiction.
Stay-at-home experts continued to dismiss the monograph as my own exploitative work of the imagination, meanwhile self-righteously damning me for plundering the private and professional scholarship of a dead colleague for my own wealth and fame. The two accusations seemed to me mutually exclusive: Either I had composed a fiction to which I had put Chaney’s name, or else I had unconscionably appropriated Chaney’s legitimate field work for my own, but surely not both together. No matter. Most of the academic reviewers of Death and Designation Among the Asadi made both charges at once.
In fact, the furor created by Chaney’s and my collaborative monograph seemed to substantiate his belief that unswayable Pygmies of the intellect abound and prosper. They had been using the ineffectual blowguns of their wits against me for more than five years. Because I didn’t return from BoskVeld to face them, many surmised that they had stung me to the heart. What use to Thomas Benedict on the fourth planet of the Denebolan system, they wondered, are the wealth and fame he’s filched from Egan Chaney’s suffering? And not realizing that I didn’t give a damn about either riches or celebrity, they concluded I was afraid to come home and face them.
The truth?
The only thing I was really afraid of was something I also anticipated with high hopefulness: the arrival of Chaney’s daughter, a twenty-two-year-old woman who signed her light-probe communications Elegy Cather. My apprehension derived from the fact that young Cather put implicit faith in even the most credulity-straining portions of her father’s in-the-field tapes and journals.
Even I didn’t go that far. I knew that Chaney had subjectively experienced everything that appears in our monograph – but having spent so much time in the Wild searching for demonstrable proof, I found it difficult to credit the objective reality of the ornate pagoda at which the Asadi had supposedly concluded their ritual of death and designation. The hard plastic eyebooks, or spectrum-displaying cassettes, that Chaney had brought out of the Wild with him were indeed tangible evidence that he had found something indicative of advanced technology in there, but not necessarily a towering building that cunningly eluded our discovery. I had to believe that Chaney had erected his imaginary pagoda on the ruins of a genuine structure about which he had read in an early monograph of Oliver Oliphant Frasier’s.
Elegy Cather believed otherwise. Nearly eight months before this little history of mine opens, I had checked my box in Frasierville’s radio room and found this unexpected communication:
Dear Dr Benedict,
The residuals from the American edition of my father’s book on the Asadi have put me through the Goodall-Fossey College of Primate Ethology here in East Africa. I have done field work with both chimps and baboons in the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania. You must know that I am grateful to you for making this possible. By editing and seeing to the publication of my father’s work, you have given me both the financial support and the incentive to obtain my degree as a primate ethologist.
But for my initial fear that I might not succeed here, I would have written to thank you long ago.
Maybe I am over that hurdle now. The Nyerere Foundation of Dar es Salaam has just provided me with a grant to study the Asadi on BoskVeld. In addition, the colonial authority of Glaktik Komm and Kommthor itself have approved my application for an interstellar visa. I will arrive aboard the probeship Wasserläufer IX before the end of the year.
You should know, Dr Benedict, that it is my intention not only to study the Asadi but to determine without doubt the fate of my father. I also wish to vindicate the reliability of his final in-the-field reports, even those that seem most suspect. In fact, as soon as I had learned of the failure of the Sankosh expedition to find either my father or his notorious pagoda, I put in for my grant.
Although skeptics describe the pagoda as an architectural Yeti
