‘You think I’ll fare better than you have?’
‘Try, Ben. You were his only friend in Frasierville – in the Third Expedition’s base camp, I mean. His last memories of human contact have to include you prominently. So, yes, you’ve got to give it a try.’
Elegy and I exchanged places. As she had done before me, I extended a hand and touched Egan Chaney’s shoulder. Then, not believing in my power to resurrect Chaney where Elegy had already failed, I said, ‘Egan, this is Thomas Benedict. I’m here with you beneath the Asadi temple.’
Again, the telltale hitch in the transfigured man’s breathing, a movement of the mouth. But no other response.
I repeated my name. I told Chaney what had happened to him in the Wild six years ago. I rehearsed for him the story of his disappearance from base camp. I narrated a little of Frasierville’s recent history. I informed him that his daughter had indeed come all the way to BoskVeld from Dar es Salaam just to find him. I said that she was beside me at this moment. Then I repeated my stupid self-introduction and began the history lesson all over again—
Whereupon the man in the silken chrysalis murmured, ‘Ben.’ One word. Like his own body, it had an alien husk on it, this word, and it trembled in the air.
I leaned toward him. ‘Yes, it’s Ben. You’ve been gone from us a long time. Do you remember where you are?’
Elegy’s hands gripped my shoulders from behind, and I glanced up to see her scrutinizing the chrysalis’s inhuman head for some evidence of the beloved face she recalled from her girlhood. But time, distance, and a terrible metamorphosis had interposed many veils between that face and the face before her now, and she seemed to be having trouble making the connection.
‘Do you remember where you are?’ I repeated.
We waited. Finally, the thing that had been Egan Chaney murmured another word, one cryptic word: ‘Halfway.’
‘Halfway?’ I echoed him inanely. ‘Tell us what you mean, Egan.’
‘And I’ll never,’ he confessed, almost before I had finished speaking. ‘Get. The remainder. Of the way.’
At my ear Elegy whispered, ‘He’s talking about his physiological condition. He’s trying to say that his alien metamorphosis hasn’t taken. He’s halfway between his humanity and some other state.’
I took Elegy’s cue: ‘Egan, who did this to you? What were they trying to do? What went wrong?’
‘You’re going too fast,’ Elegy admonished me.
But Chaney’s mind processed the questions in order, and his lips shaped the answers: ‘The huri did this. Through The Bachelor. They wanted to make’ – Chaney’s tongue, black in his mouth, licked at the tatters of caul surrounding it – ‘an Ur’sadi. Of me,’ he finally managed. ‘They wanted. To redeem the Asadi. Through a return to their past.’ Another long pause. ‘My metamorphosis. Into one of their ancestors. Was supposed. To do the trick. Everything. Went wrong.’
‘It was The Bachelor who strung you up like this?’
The black tip of Chaney’s tongue protruded briefly, like a lizard’s head emerging from a hole. ‘Paralysis. Came first. The huri did that. They—’
‘They did something to the psychomotor areas of your brain,’ I said, attempting to aid him. ‘They jammed those areas with ultrasonic pulses.’
‘But they didn’t. Steal my consciousness.’ His tongue made a leisurely circuit around his mouth, then disappeared again. ‘How long. Has it been.’ There was no note of interrogation in the words.
‘Six years,’ I told him again.
‘Forever,’ his voice corrected me. ‘Gestating forever. They won’t. Let me abort.’
Suddenly I was crying. The tears flowed copiously, and I let them come. ‘After the paralysis,’ I said, ‘you were bound and strung up?’
‘It took. Forever. I was done. In stages. My face. Went last. But always.’ The inevitable pause, lengthening painfully until he managed in one burst: ‘But always I knew.’
This final word was Chaney’s first to convey the weight of any real inflection or emphasis, and its effect on Elegy was immediate. ‘We’ve got to get him out of this shithole!’ she exclaimed, digging her fingers into my collar bones. ‘We’ve got to cut him down and carry him out!’
The man in the chrysalis murmured, ‘Who.’
‘Your daughter, Egan. I’ve told you about her already. She came all this way to find you.’
‘Here.’
I wiped my eyes, then tilted my head back to look at Elegy. It took us both a moment to realize that that single word was a question.
‘Yes, I’m here,’ Elegy said quietly.
‘Wrong sound,’ the voice from Chaney’s mouth contradicted her. ‘It’s a fever. That gives you. The lie.’ And, a moment later: ‘My body’s. Burning. From inside out.’
‘You’re not delirious,’ Elegy insisted, close to either anger or a crippling pathos. ‘I’m a grown woman. I’ve come a long, long road, and I’m standing here beside you, Father.’
The black tongue tip made its customary journey around Chaney’s mouth. ‘I’m stranded. Halfway. They detected in me. Intelligence. Like that of their Ur’sadi symbionts. Who brought them here.’ The man seemed to be warming up, gaining fluency. ‘They also liked my blood. Found it compatible to their needs. But later it was somehow. Wrong. I’m not sure how. Too much like that of the protohominids. From whom we evolved.’
Elegy seemed to be waiting for him to return to the subject of her presence, but Chaney had either forgotten the matter or else deliberately set it aside.
‘Who told you these things?’ I asked. ‘How do you know them?’
‘The
