‘Do the huri communicate ultrasonically with the Asadi?’
Chaney’s voice was definitely shedding its huskiness, as if the activity of speaking aloud were loosening his vocal cords. ‘Not so well as they used to. With their Ur’sadi ancestors. Each of the ultrasonic pulses. Corresponds to a color. If you can interpret huri. You can also interpret. The Ur’sadi spectral language.’
Vaguely chagrined that I kept grilling him even as the horror of his transfiguration drew my stinging tears, I asked, ‘The eyebooks, Egan? What about them?’
‘Eyebooks,’ Chaney acknowledged. ‘If I could see one. I could read it. The colors are all. In my head. The huri put them there. But I’m halfway, Ben, and I’m stranded.’
‘What went wrong?’ Elegy suddenly asked. ‘What exactly?’
‘It’s the fever giving you the lie,’ her father responded enigmatically. ‘I’m neither fish nor fowl. No huri savior. The huri have intelligence. Only in the aggregate. It’s taken them forever. To understand I’m not their savior. Nor are any of us.’ Chaney licked his lips. ‘Being what we are.’ Then, with a moan, he fell back into himself.
‘Father!’ Elegy cried, not in desperation but in an attempt to recall him to the present.
I spoke Chaney’s Christian name a couple of times, but finally decided he was recycling emotionally and physically. In much the way that I had let the huri’s viscous, metabolic antifreeze spill from his mouth, our brief colloquy with Chaney had also drained him. And so, for the moment, we let Elegy’s father go . . .
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Parturition
That was not a time of clear thinking for me. We had found Egan Chaney alive, but changed and apparently unrecoverable. The huri had attempted to transform him in the vain, perhaps even idiot, hope of recreating a specimen of the Asadi’s ancient forebears, with whom, eons in the past, they had come to BoskVeld as symbiotic fellow travelers. In fact, the superorganism that the huri comprised may have been the motivating force behind that interstellar migration. They were manipulators and parasites, tiny slavemasters who fed on their chattels’ bodies and minds. The Ur’sadi had been exemplars of intelligence, but the huri superorganism had used the individuals of that departed hominoid race as a Komm-galen uses the instruments of his surgery – as physical extensions of the will. Just such extensions of an external will had been the Ur’sadi in the motivational grip of the huri – except that the Ur’sadi were living creatures with living, if ultrasonically subverted, wills of their own.
Having small bodies and only rudimentary hands, the huri had evolved a joint consciousness dependent not on any sort of inexplicable psychic or telepathic communion, but on a ‘language’ of high-frequency pulses precisely attuned to the thermal variations arising from the Ur’sadi’s private spectral displays. Perhaps the huri had once been the pets, or the blind gyrfalcons, or the totemic court animals of Ur’sadi masters. If they had, the huri had gradually appropriated the language of their masters – albeit in the medium of sound rather than light – so that ultimately they were able to unite as a single consciousness and enslave the very species that had first either enslaved or domesticated them. A turnabout of no mean proportions, but one that seemed to be indicated by everything Elegy and I had experienced over the last several hours.
The breakdown in the ascendancy of the huri had come long after the migration to BoskVeld from a home world still unknown to us. Their power was first crippled when they permitted the Ur’sadi to engineer genetic changes in their eyes and bloodstreams to combat the quirkish solar activity of Denebola. The huri permitted these changes in order to insure the survival of their hosts, their instruments – but once the Ur’sadi had altered their blood, ostensibly to regulate the production of lymph cells as a defense against radiation-induced diseases, the huri found themselves sickening and occasionally even dying. They fed not only on the thallophytes imported from their home world (a planet long since engulfed by a solar catastrophe of its own), but also – periodically – on Ur’sadi blood; the change in its composition, although not technically of a basic chemically nature, was enough to incapacitate large numbers of the huri who fed upon it.
When the Ur’sadi whose eyes were newly capable of photosynthesis began fleeing into BoskVeld’s jungles, as much to escape the bemused and wounded huri as to separate themselves from their progenitors, the breakdown in huri control reached a critical point of no return: The enslaver/enslaved relationship that had existed for ages between the two species finally began to move toward total collapse.
The huri depended a great deal on the centralization of the host population to maintain their control; and the Ur’sadi dispersal, which in their weakness the huri were unable to prevent, threatened to sabotage the principal unifying element of their transcendent consciousness. The huri themselves had to disperse. Most of them went after the fleeing renegades, into the jungles, where they were eventually able to regain a measure of control and so influence the construction of huge temple-memorials. These they had built against the day when the Ur’sadi inevitably found the means to abandon them. They foresaw their abandonment even as they struggled to prevent it. The grandeur of the wilderness pagodas, in fact, was a concession to the Ur’sadi spirit they had bridled for so long with ultrasonic reins. The huri kept control just long enough to get three or four of these structures built, whereupon the photosynthesizing Ur’sadi, rekindling the fires of their own extinguished wills, broke free and set themselves on a devolutionary course none of them could have predicted.
Meanwhile, the Ur’sadi in their original veldt settlement prepared to pull up stakes and leave. They had cast off
