[Shouting]: Where the hell do you creatures get off neglecting the accumulated knowledge of millennia? You’re animals! ANIMALS!
[A cacophony of echoes. A prolonged, painful ringing.]
Forgive me, Eisen, Benedict, all of you. Forgive me. [Chaney’s voice drops to a whisper, scarcely audible.] And you, you Asadi aerialists, that’s right, pretend I don’t exist, pretend you can’t hear me, ignore the voices of your ancestors whispering to you from their deaths. [Venomously]: And may God damn you both to hell!
III. CHANEY [in a lifeless monotone]: I think I slept for a while. Under the rows upon rows of eyebooks. Maybe an hour. Then a noise woke me, a ringing of iron.
Now I’m on the helical stairway high above the museum floor. I’m in a curve of the stairway a little below and opposite the glass platform where The Bachelor was standing. He’s no longer there. A moment ago he chinned himself up to the cold ring of the chandelier, gained his feet, and balanced on the ring, quite precariously. Then he reached out and grabbed the plumb line that drops down from the dome.
The huri, meanwhile, squats on the foremost globe in the triangle of globes set in the great iron ring. He’s been there awhile.
The Bachelor, after grabbing the gold braid, fashioned a noose and slipped his neck into it. Then he swung himself out over the floor so that his feet are hanging a little below the ring of the chandelier. I’m watching him hang there, his feet inscribing an invisible circle inside the larger circle of the globe-set energy fixture.
But he isn’t dead, not a bit dead. The noose is canted so that it catches him under the throat in the plush of his mane. In the two weeks since his designation his mane has thickened considerably, especially along his jaw and under his throat, and the new fur cushions the steadily constricting braid. So now he’s just hanging there. The dangling man.
[Listlessly]: A pretty damn interesting development, I suppose. At least the huri acts as if it’s interesting. The huri’s watching all this – should I say watching, considering its eyelessness? – with either excitement or agitation, beating its wings sporadically and skittering to stay atop the globe it’s perched on. See if you can hear it. I’ll hold the microphone out for you. [A vaguely static-filled silence, followed by a distant scratching sound.] That’s it, the huri’s claws scrabbling on the globe. And the sound of The Bachelor’s feet turning north, northeast, east, southeast, south, south-southwest . . .
[After almost ten minutes of static-filled silence]: The huri’s been joined by two of its fellows. They flew up silently out of the lower darkness of the pagoda, I don’t know precisely from where, and settled like miniature brood hens on the other two energy globes. As soon as they had arrived, the original huri – The Bachelor’s huri – fluttered to the Asadi’s head, grabbed his mane with its claws, and began crabwalking around his shoulders and upper body like a steeplejack. After a couple of minutes had passed, I noticed that a kind of milky cobwebbing had begun to net in The Bachelor’s head and that the huri was paying out this glistening fiber from a pair of axillary spinnerets beneath its half-open wings. The huri’s tiny hands pulled out the thread, stretched it around the dangling Asadi’s shoulders, and looped the stuff so expertly and with such gentle speed that the beastie appeared to be spinning cotton candy out of its armpits. Wingpits, make that. In any case, this is still going on, base-camp huggers, although the other two huri have spelled The Bachelor’s huri a couple of times apiece already and The Bachelor has begun to resemble a huge, nylon-pile-lined sleeping bag turned inside out and made strangely translucent. I no longer know which huri is which, they’ve alternated their spinning chores so many times . . .
[Unawed]: Beautiful. Beautiful and grotesque at once. I’ll bet you think I’m drunk or drugged. Making silk out of a souse’s fears, so to speak. Not so. I’ve imbibed no bourbon, played with no Placenol, and I wish it was you, Eisen, or you, Morrell, who was sitting up here on this cramped stairway watching this ritual unraveling of three huri’s innards. Is it silk cable or a kind of solid, filamentous milk payed out through these creatures’ axillary mammaries? Who knows? The show is beautiful and grotesque, grotesque and beautiful, but at this stage my principal reaction seems to be one of . . . well, of disgust. [Unemotionally]: God, but my patience has been tried . . .
[Several more minutes pass. A faint flapping commences, continues for a time, ceases, and commences again.]
One of the three huri – don’t ask me which – let a strand of silk drop down The Bachelor’s body and through the axis of the dome until it damn near reached the floor. Another of the huri flew off its globe and caught up a section of the strand in its claws. Then, with both its claws and hands, flapping in higgledy-ziggledly circles, it covered The Bachelor’s feet, his ankles, and his shins. After that, it settled on the old boy’s wrapped feet. Now, its wings outspread and its spinnerets, I’d imagine, virtually exhausted, the huri’s hanging up there like a bat and still bravely mummy-wrapping its master. It’s got help, though. The other two huri are also single-mindedly crawling his body, getting The Bachelor ready for Christmas. And all three of them, mind you, are blind, as blind as . . . as a besotted cultural xenologist. Good boy, Chaney, no more clichés than the experience itself calls for.
I don’t know how long it’ll take – not much longer, apparently – but in a while The Bachelor will be completely encased in a murky chrysalis, a sheath which the huri look as if they would like to finish and tie off as soon as they can. Already
