Only then did the Ur’sadi act. They razed their own settlement on the veldt – a single settlement, not many as Elegy had once conjectured – and mounted separate attacks on the wilderness pagodas. These forays were swift, comprehensive, and pretty much effective. Their purpose was to destroy the huri for all time, eradicate any vestige of their memory, and bequeath the planet in perpetuity to the neo-Ur’sadi tribes that had diffused through the Wild in quest of solitary fulfillments of their own.
But the huri had had their neo-Ur’sadi slaves equip the largest of these temples with light- and perception-polarizing minerals quarried from areas near the shores of Calyptra and then toted inland by small groups of porters ultrasonically programmed to resist detection. These materials came to only one site in the Wild (the one beneath which Elegy and I were huddled beside the transfigured form of her father), but they accumulated so slowly that several decades passed before the great amethystlike windows were precision ground, hoisted into their moorings, and activated so that the excavation and furnishing of the catacombs beneath the pagoda could proceed undetected, too. Thus, the largest of the wilderness temples disappeared one twilight midway through the huri’s century-long building program. Although the temple was then conspicuous by its absence – once the Ur’sadi had perceived its absence – they eventually came to believe the huri had dismantled it for purposes of their own, perhaps because it was too damn big to be realized according to plan. In reality, then, the Ur’sadi attacks on the other huri pagodas in the Wild were little more than the demolition of enormous architectural decoys erected, adorned, and furnished for the sole purpose of focusing and thereby diffusing the Ur’sadi wrath.
After which, reasonably well pleased with themselves, the Ur’sadi fled to the stars. The huri remained underground, and the neo-Ur’sadi, at last almost completely free of their host role, began their melancholy decline toward the ritualized cannibalism and photoperiodically dictated life-style of the maned Asadi beasts they were to become . . .
Waiting for Chaney to come around again, crouched beside Elegy in the dark, I recited for her the complex chain of reasoning and deductive historiography you have just read. My purpose was at least as much to keep Elegy’s mind off her father’s unknowable agony as to sort out and illuminate the mysteries of an unknowable past.
‘It makes a good story,’ Elegy said when I was finished. In the prison of iridescent cables raying out from Chaney’s cocoon, she smiled at me. ‘Do you believe it, Ben?’
Telling it, I had almost come to. ‘The facts—’
‘The facts are diverse and open to multiple interpretations,’ Elegy broke in. ‘Not only that, Ben, in many instances they’re not facts at all, but suppositions arising from our bewilderment. They’re seductive because we’d rather concoct an explanation than admit or live with our ignorance.’
‘Goddamn it, Elegy, who’s getting analytical and superrational now? All I really wanted to do was—’
‘It’s enough for me that I’ve found my father.’
Understanding that, I shut down the nagging little homunculus within me who wanted Elegy’s gratitude. Nevertheless, I began to wonder what – exactly – we had found. Had Chaney really spoken to us already? Would he speak to us again? I was ready to leave.
Then, as if from the cavernous basement of his soul, Chaney repeated, ‘Nor are any of us. Being what we are.’ He was surfacing at the place in his free-associational monologue where earlier he had chosen to go under.
Elegy and I stood up, silk cables taut across our arms and torsos where we leaned into them. The caul covering Chaney’s head shimmered wetly, a thing both fascinating and painful to see.
A strange sound escaped Chaney. Then it came again, confounding us. We exchanged glances.
‘He’s laughing,’ I said.
‘Laughing,’ Chaney acknowledged. ‘I’m laughing.’ His laughter was a metallic-sounding ratcheting that reminded me of a chain being dragged across a surface of tin or aluminum.
‘Why are you laughing?’ Elegy asked him.
‘Eyebooks,’ Chaney said.
‘The eyebooks,’ Elegy prompted. ‘I’ve got several with me. We took them from the great wall in the pagoda.’
The torn membrane at Chaney’s mouth fluttered. ‘The huri have told me. That most of them are garbage. The Ur’sadi programmed them. With epithets and fear. They knew for what. Those eyebooks were intended. And they released. To huri posterity. Only the hatred they felt. For their—’ the final word was awhile in coming – ‘enslavers.’
‘If the Ur’sadi deprived their enslavers of knowledge,’ I reminded Chaney, ‘they also deprived their Asadi children of knowledge they might have recovered one day.’
‘Not so long as the huri themselves exist,’ Chaney responded with some fluency. ‘And they still exist. Don’t they, Ben.’
I looked to the top of the amethyst wall and saw The Bachelor’s huri roosting there. It attended our colloquy without appearing to take any genuine interest in what we did or said.
‘They continue to exert,’ Chaney was saying, ‘a kind of vampiric power. Over mute and feeble Asadi. Like The Bachelor. Like Eisen Zwei. Like how many previous chieftains. Since the Asadi began.’
Chaney stopped, almost breathless, and his pause lengthened until it seemed I would again have a
