A typed note on the supply bundle: ‘Look, Dr Chaney, you don’t have to insist on 100% nonassociation with us base campers. You’ve been gone almost two months. Let us drop you a radio. A little conversation with genuine human beings won’t destroy your precious ethnography, sir. You can use it in the evenings. If you want it, send up a flare tomorrow night before Balthazar has risen and I’ll copter it out the next day.’
The note was signed by Benedict. But of course I don’t want a radio. Part of this business is the suffering. I knew that before I came out here. I won’t quit until things have begun to make a little sense.
Day 57 (Predawn): I haven’t been asleep all night. Yesterday, just six or seven hours ago, I went into the jungle to retrieve Benedict’s eighth supply drop. Another typed note on the bundle: ‘Dr Chaney, Eisen says you’re a pigheaded ninny. That you don’t even know how to conjugate your own first name. It should have been Ego, he says, and not Egan. Have you started preaching neo-Pentecostal sermons to the trees? What a picture. Send up a flare if you want anything. Ben.’
On the way back to the clearing I heard noises again. The Synesthesia Wild echoed with the plunging greyness of an indistinct form – The Bachelor, spying on me, retreating clumsily before my pursuit. Even with a backpack of new supplies weighing me down, I determined to follow these suspicious tickings of leaf and twig. Although I never overtook my prey, I was able to keep up! It had to be The Bachelor. None of his fellows would have given me so much as a glimpse of the disturbed foliage in the wake of their disappearance. I went deeper and deeper into the Wild, farther away from the supply drop and the assembly ground. Two hours. Three.
At last, panting with the sheer momentum of my pursuit, I broke into an opening among the trees. All at once I realized that the noises drawing me on had ceased. I was alone, and lost, and confused.
Filling the clearing, rising against the sky like an Oriental pagoda, there loomed over me the broad and impervious mass of something built. The resonances of Time dwarfed me. Thunderstruck, I felt panic climbing hand over hand up the membranous ladder in my throat. Oliver Oliphant Frasier had studied the ruins of one of these structures, learning only that the Asadi may once have had a civilization of some consequence. I was staring at a huge, intact relic of that civilization. Amethyst windows. Stone carvings above the entablature. A dome. A series of successively smaller roofs as the eye went up the face of the structure. At last I turned, plunged back into the jungle, and raced wildly away, my backpack thumping.
Where was I going? Back to the assembly ground, I hoped. Which way to run? I didn’t know, but I didn’t have to answer this question. Blindly, I moved in the direction of the suspicious tickings of leaf and twig that had resumed shortly after I fled the pagoda. The Bachelor again? I don’t know. I saw nothing. But in three hours’ time I had regained the safety of my lean-to . . . Now I’m waiting for the dawn, for the tidal influx of Asadi. I’m exhilarated, and I haven’t even touched my new supply of P-nol.
Day 57 (Evening): They’re gone again. But I’ve witnessed something important and unsettling. The Bachelor didn’t arrive this morning with the others. Could he have injured himself in our midnight chase through the Wild? By noon I was both exhausted and puzzled – exhausted by my search for him and my lack of sleep, puzzled by his apparent defection. I came to my lean-to and lay down. In a little while I was sleeping, though not soundly. Tickings of twig and leaf made my eyelids flicker. I dreamed that a grey shape came and squatted on the edge of the clearing about five meters from where I lay. Like a mute familiar, the shape watched over me . . .
Kyur-AAACCCCK!
Groans and thrashings about. Thrashings and hackings. The underbrush beside my lean-to crackled beneath the invasion of several heavy feet. Bludgeoned out of my dream by these sounds, I sat up and attempted to reorient myself to the world. I saw The Bachelor. I saw three of the larger and more agile males bearing him to the ground and pinioning him there. They appeared to be cooperating in the task of subduing him!
Ignoring me with all the contemptuous élan of aristocrats, the three males picked up The Bachelor and bore him to the center of the clearing. I followed this party onto the assembly ground. As they had during the old chieftain’s two unexpected visits, the Asadi crowded to the sidelines – but without disappearing into the jungle. They remained on the field, buffeting one another like rabid spectators at a World Cup event. I was the only individual other than the four struggling males in the center of the assembly floor, however, and I looked down at The Bachelor. His eyes came very close to changing colors, from their usual clay-white to a thin, thin yellow. But I couldn’t help him, couldn’t interfere.
They shaved his mane. A female carrying two flat, beveled stones came out of the crowd on the eastern perimeter of the field. She gave these to the males. With these stones the males scraped away the last sad mangy tufts of The Bachelor’s silver-blue collar. Just as
