‘But why did they do that?’ Elegy wanted to know. ‘What possible purpose could a statue like that serve?’
‘Maybe the huri are all sculptors manqué. – Hell, I don’t know, Elegy. It’s possible they were identifying me spatially and temporally for the benefit of their sleeping relatives. Only a few stay awake at a time, it seems, and when they’re not functioning together as a single mind, individual “brain cells” – individual huri, that is – may have to record intrusions for those who’ll awake later.’
‘How does one of their statues identify an intruder temporally?’
‘By its position in one of the guano gardens, I guess. Haven’t you ever heard of achaeological strata? The deeper you go, the further back in time are the antiquities you unearth. A statue that’s completely exposed is a recent statue.’
‘They didn’t make a statue of me, Ben.’
‘You stayed with The Bachelor. You didn’t give ’em a chance to triangulate on you. What else can I say? I can’t even pretend to understand everything we’ve encountered down here.’
We walked in silence beside the coruscating waters until, narrowing, they extended a snaky arm into a corridor bounded by neither a grid of dovecotes nor a wall of amethyst. The partitions here were ramparts of natural limestone, grey-green and wet-looking in the reflected sheen of the water. The Bachelor hugged the right-hand wall, and Elegy preceded me along this slender pathway.
After a time, the lagoon – or, better, its armlike tributary – died in a tiny delta where so many diatoms and their snowflake skeletons had washed up that the glow was stark and uncanny. Beyond this delta, straight ahead of us, was what appeared to be another guano compound. But immediately before it, partially blocking the opening, stood a biosonically engineered sculpture that grabbed our attention by stilling our hearts. The statue’s subject was a human being.
‘That’s my father,’ Elegy whispered.
I recognized it as Egan Chaney, too, although in retrospect I’m not sure how. Like the huri’s recent sculpture of me, this one lacked individualizing detail. The body appeared clothed, but the drape of the clothing was merely suggested. The face had features, but the bioluminescence of the waste matter comprising the statue blurred and obscured them.
Maybe it was the set of the bearded jaw or the martial rigidity of the posture that identified the statue for us. Or maybe it was our knowledge that it couldn’t be anyone but Egan Chaney.
A trail of diatoms and murky algal weeds to the base of the statue told us that lunar tides regularly moved the lagoon waters down here – without ever pulling them close enough to erode the statue itself.
Elegy ran to the thing and shoved it in the chest. As if it had been made at least partially of carbonized sugar, it crumbled and broke apart, its torso and arms cascading down in a cinder storm. This dismemberment accomplished, Elegy kicked at the upright stumps of the statue’s legs. They, too, shattered and went whirling across the floor.
Unmoved by Elegy’s violent display, The Bachelor stood to one side, his back still against the right-hand rampart of limestone. The huri, too, appeared indifferent, almost comatose atop The Bachelor’s head.
Elegy threw back her head and breathed an audible sigh of relief. ‘I was afraid,’ she began, ‘that it might literally be my father – his corpse, you know, plastered over with huri crap.’ She raised her head and swung a foot across the debris. ‘It wasn’t, though. You can see it wasn’t. Not unless they crystallized his remains.’
‘He’s in there, Elegy.’ I nodded toward the compound. ‘That’s why they brought us this far – not to show us another biosonic sculpture.’
Queasy and frightened, I entered the little compound ahead of Elegy and found that it was not another guano dump at all. Instead, it was both a crypt and an incubator. In its center . . . well, my first impression was of a mummy canted from the floor at a forty-five-degree angle in a macramé hammock of glistening silk.
I stared at the thing. ‘Your father, Elegy – not that other, but this.’ She was at my shoulder. We both stared.
A great fan of milky silk filled the chamber, gently cradling Egan Chaney’s chrysalis. The threads at the top of the fan disappeared into, or fused molecularly with, the amethyst wall at the rear of the chamber; the threads converging below the chrysalis’s feet ran tautly into a pit of dark but glittering water that may well have fed the lagoon behind us. Water or some more syrupy fluid oozed down the wall behind the chrysalis, disappearing noiselessly into the gravelike pit above which the hammock was suspended. Guy lines of silk – they resembled wings – supported the body on either side, running to left and right of the hammock and seeming almost to pass directly through the natural limestone of the compound. Meanwhile, beads of viscous water trembled in procession down the lines to the chrysalis’s head and body.
‘We’ve got to get him down, Ben!’ Elegy broke free of me and ducked beneath the webbing to the left of the pit. She looked like a shuttle weaving among a fan of milky threads. When she had finally reached her father’s head, she took a knife from her belt and leaned purposefully out over the hammock.
‘You’re liable to kill him!’ I cried. ‘That’s been his life-support system for God knows how long!’
Elegy’s face was acrawl with reflections from the water. ‘He’s as good as dead now, Ben. For whom or what is he living?’ She began cutting at one of the support lines raying upward to the chamber’s rear wall.
She wasn’t thinking straight. If she did manage to cut her father loose, his chrysalis would plunge into the pit beneath him.
At this point The Bachelor’s huri arrowed past me into the chamber and alighted on Elegy’s father without, stirring a single thread. Then
