Now the Ritual of Death and Designation was nearly over. Two of the six corpsebearers on the temple’s highest tier moved to complete that ritual. They touched the head and feet of Eisen Zwei with the tips of the two great flambeaux, and instantly the old man’s body raged with green fire and the raging flame leaped up the face of the temple as if to abet the verdigris in its more patient efforts to eat the building away.
The Bachelor stood almost in the very blast of this configuration. I feared that he, too, would be consumed. But he was not. Nor was the huri. The fire died, Eisen Zwei had utterly disappeared, and the corpsebearers came back down the steps and joined the shaggy anonymity of their revitalized people.
The Ritual of Death and Designation had ended.
For the purposes of this ethnography I will minimize the significance of what then occurred and report it as briefly as I am able.
Several of the Asadi turned and saw me in the pagoda’s clearing. They actually looked at me. After having been ignored for over four months, I didn’t know how to react to the signal honor of abrupt visibleness. Out of monumental surprise, I returned their stares. They began advancing upon me, hostility evident in the rapid blurring of colors that took place in their eyes. Behind me, the Synesthesia Wild. I turned to escape into it. Another small group of Asadi had insinuated themselves into the path of my intended escape, blocking my way.
Among this group I recognized the individual whom I had given the name Benjy. Cognizant of nothing but a vague paternal feeling toward him, I sought to offer him my hand. His own nervous hand shot out and cuffed me on the ear. I fell. Dirt in my mouth, grey faces descending toward me, I understood that I ought to be terrified. But I spat out the dirt, the manes and faces retreated as quickly as they had come, and my incipient terror evaporated like alcohol in a shallow dish.
Overhead, a familiar flapping.
I looked up and saw the huri returning to The Bachelor’s outstretched arm. He had released the creature upon his fellows in order to save me. An action illustrating the mind-boggling complexity of the relationship between the Asadi chieftain and the huri. Which of them rules? Which submits to command?
At that moment I didn’t very much care. Denebola had risen, and the Asadi had dispersed into the Wild, leaving me dwarfed and humbled in the presence of their self-sustaining pagoda and the reluctant chieftain who stared down from its uppermost tier. Although he remained aloof, before the day was out The Bachelor had led me back to the original assembly ground. Without his help, I ought to add, I never would have found it. I would be out there still today . . .
PART FOUR
An Introduction to ‘Chaney’s Monologue’
Thomas Benedict speaking: I have put this paper together out of a complicated sense of duty. As one of the few people who had any substantial contact with Egan Chaney before his defection, I am perhaps also the only man who could have undertaken this task – despite my limited qualifications in the area of cultural xenology. But this is not really the place to discuss the strange fait accompli of our collaborative monograph. Suffice it to say that I owed Chaney my dedication to this project.
The section you have just read – ‘The Ritual of Death and Designation’ – Chaney wrote in our base-camp infirmary while recuperating from exposure and a general inability to reorient himself to the society of human beings. In one of our conversations, as well as here in the monograph itself, he compared himself to Gulliver after his return from the land of the Houyhnhnms. At any rate, beyond Part Three of this monograph Chaney never wrote anything about the Asadi for publication, although immediately after his release from the infirmary I believe he intended to write a book about them. This monograph is the ghost of that unwritten book.
After returning to the original assembly ground of the Asadi, Chaney stayed two more weeks in the Calyptran Wild. On Days 126 and 133 I made supply drops, but, just as Chaney had requested, I did not fly over the clearing in the vain hope of spotting him and thereby determining the state of his health. It was enough to verify his robustness, he told me, from the fact that each week when I coptered in his supplies I could note that he had dutifully picked them up and carried them off. The argument that he was not the only creature in the Wild capable of hauling away the goods intended for him impressed Chaney not at all.
‘I might as well be,’ he wrote on one of his infrequent notes left in a canister at the drop point. ‘The Asadi have all the initiative of malaria victims. More horrible than this, friend Ben, is the face-slapping truth that there is no one else out here. No one else at all.’
I am now the sole owner of the personal effects of Egan Chaney. These include his private journals and professional notebooks, a number of unfiled ‘official’ reports, a series of in-the-field tapes, and a small bit of correspondence. Those records concerning the Asadi that I don’t own myself I have access to as a result of my affiliation with the Third Denebolan Expedition as Chaney’s pilot and aide. I tell you this only because I know for an incontrovertible fact that during his last fourteen days in the Wild, either Chaney did not make a single entry in any of his journals or notebooks, or he so completely effaced these dubious entries that they may as well never have existed.
We have only one complete report of any kind dealing with
