But Chaney didn’t do his book. Three months he stayed with us, copying his notes, working in the base-camp library, joining us only every sixth or seventh meal in the general mess. He kept to himself, as isolated among us as he had been in the Asadi clearing. And, I suppose, he must have done a lot of thinking, a lot of somber, melancholy, fatalistic thinking.
He did something else that few of us paid much attention to. He grew a beard and refused to have his hair cut.
Later we understood why.
One morning we couldn’t find Egan Chaney anywhere in base camp. By evening he still had not returned. Eisen sent me to the dormitory quarters we shared and told me to go through Chaney’s belongings to see if I could determine his whereabouts from an explicit note or a random scrawl – anything he might have left behind in farewell. Already, you see, we were beginning to believe Chaney had defected to the Wild.
‘I really don’t think he’ll be back,’ Eisen told me. He was right about that, but he was wrong in supposing that Chaney would have left his farewell amid the clutter of our dormitory room.
It wasn’t until the next day, when I checked my mailbox in the radio room, that I found what Eisen had told me to look for. Knowing that there had been no probeship deliveries or private light-probe transmissions, I checked my box merely out of habit. And I found the note from Chaney. The only comfort it gave me was the comfort of knowing my friend had not decided to commit suicide – that he had successfully fought off a subtle but steadily encroaching madness.
Eisen disagreed with me in this assessment, believing that Chaney had committed suicide as surely as if he had taken poison or put a bullet through his brain.
Read the note he left behind, however. It expresses a peculiar sort of optimism, I think, and if you don’t see the slender affirmative thread running through it, well, I would suggest that you go back and read the damn thing again. Because even if Chaney has committed suicide, he has died for something he believed in.
CHANEY’S FAREWELL
I’m going back to the Asadi clearing, Ben. But don’t come after me, I won’t let you bring me back. I’ve reached a perfect accommodation with myself. Probably I’ll die. Without your supply drops, that seems certain, doesn’t it?
But I belong among the Asadi, not as an outcast and not as a chieftain – but as one of the milling throng. I belong there even though that throng is stupid, even though it persists in its self-developed immunity to instruction. I’m one of them. I feel for them.
Like The Bachelor, Ben, I’m a great slow moth. A tiger moth. And the flame I choose to pursue and die in is the same flame that slowly consumes every one of the Asadi. Don’t forget me, Ben, but don’t come after me, either.
Good health to you,
Egan
* There follows a totally irrelevant analysis of the ways in which The Bachelor resembles the character of Smerdyakov in Dostoevski’s novel. This remarkable analysis, delivered extemporaneously while Chaney follows the Asadi chieftain through the Wild, lasts better than an hour. To spare the reader, I’ve deleted it. I believe that the passage which follows was recorded almost six hours later. T.B.
* From the end of the previous section to the beginning of this one Chaney engaged in a great deal of irrelevant ‘blathering.’ I have deleted it. Altogether, about twelve or fourteen hours of real time passed, time during which Chaney also slept and ate. In this ‘Interlude’ I have taken the liberty of borrowing small sections from the deleted passages in order to provide a continuity which would not otherwise exist. T.B.
* Just one of the many apparently unsimulatable sound effects that convince me of the authenticity of the tapes. How much of what Chaney reports is hallucination rather than reality, however, I’m not prepared to conjecture. T.B.
CHAPTER ONE
Moses Eisen
After rereading Death and Designation Among the Asadi for the umpteenth time, I slept only a little. Denebola’s rising spread a radiance through Frasierville that automatically dimmed the streetlamps and set their vanadium-steel poles glinting like silverware in the hands of hungry pioneers. Maybe it was the noise of their flashing that sliced through my dreams and woke me up.
In my austere little debussy I relieved myself and drew enough water through the vacuum tap to slap away the numbness in my cheeks and crow’s-feet. The mirror showed me a man whose every encounter with his mattress leaves him imprinted as if by a waffle iron. I dressed hurriedly and banged down the steps to hunt up Moses Eisen.
Eisen now lives with his wife and two children, both BoskVeld-born, in a house whose grounds jut into the Calyptran Wild like a barren peninsula. Three-quarters of the house lie below the surface. An unpainted wood verandah fronts the ground-level roof, and a ventilation tower rises above the jungle canopy behind the verandah. By default, this residence constitutes our planet’s ‘Governor’s Mansion’ – for three years ago Kommthor elevated Eisen from the captaincy of the Third Denebolan Expedition to the post of interim administrative head of the BoskVeld Colony. When we were engaged in matters of official import, then, I was supposed to call him Governor Eisen and refrain from indecorous displays of intimacy.
That had never been hard. Eisen had no aptitude for either small talk or jokes, and although old hands were able to barge in upon him without risking a stiff rebuke or an imperious stare, they could never accuse Eisen of trying to make them feel themselves a part of the family. Usually, weather permitting, he came outside to receive callers; and in the four and a half years
