Since it was impossible to send me home, Eisen transferred me to the personal bailiwick of Egan Chaney, the cultural-xenology unit. Chaney, interestingly, was the cultural-xenology unit. Eisen made me his pilot. I could not have been happier with the transfer.
Chaney was a cultural xenologist trained in Africa before the hostilities there disrupted most scientific endeavors on the continent for better than a decade. Even better, to my parochial way of thinking, he was a man with few friends on BoskVeld and no apparent ties to the home world. We were brethren, I felt. This was a delusion I didn’t see through until several months after his disappearance – when I was compiling and annotating the monograph that made Chaney, me, and BoskVeld famous.
Although he kept copious written records and often used a tape recorder to supplement the materials in his journals, Chaney seldom talked just to be talking. I did. Once we began sharing a dormitory section in the Third Expedition’s base camp, I spent a lot of time detailing my personal history for him. I told him about growing up during the sixties and early seventies in the Dakota Territories of the Rural American Union. Chaney listened. I told him about the women who had loved or pretended to love me, and whom I had invariably found cause to bid farewell. Chaney listened. I talked about my desire to write a popular account of all three expeditions to BoskVeld, the successes and failures, the hopes and the heartbreaks, the trials and the tribulations, and so on ad nauseam, and Chaney merely listened. He listened with such intentness that it was not until he had disappeared that I realized I knew absolutely nothing about him.
The only thing I ever understood in those days was that both of us, Egan Chaney and Thomas Benedict alike, were lost and at sea. That made us brothers, and so what if he held his tongue while I talked?
After my walk around Frasierville on the night before Elegy Cather’s arrival, I returned to my quarters and took a small book off my shelf . . .
Death and Designation Among the Asadi
Sundry Notes for an Abortive Ethnography
of the Asadi of BoskVeld,
Fourth Planet of the Denebolan System,
as Compiled from the Journals
(Both Private and Professional),
Official Reports, Private Correspondence, and Tapes of
Egan Chaney, Cultural Xenologist,
by his Friend and Associate, Thomas Benedict
The Press of the National University of Kenya, Nairobi
PART ONE
Preliminaries: Reverie and Departure
From the private journals of Egan Chaney: There are no more pygmies. Intellectual pygmies perhaps, but no more of those small, alert, swaybacked black people, of necessarily amenable disposition, who lived in the dead-and-gone Ituri rain forests; a people, by the way, whom I do not wish to sentimentalize (though perhaps I may). Pygmies no longer exist; they have been dead or dying for decades.
But on the evening before the evening when Benedict dropped me into the singing fronds of the Synesthesia Wild* under three bitter moons, they lived again for me. I spent that last evening in base camp rereading Turnbull’s The Forest People. Dreaming, I lived again with the people of the Ituri. I underwent nkumbi, the ordeal of circumcision. I dashed beneath the belly of an elephant and jabbed that monstrous creature’s flesh with my spear. Finally, I took part in the festival of the molimo with the ancient and clever BaMbuti.
All in all, I suppose, my reading was a sentimental exercise. Turnbull’s book had been the first and most vivid ethnography I had encountered in my undergraduate career; and even on that last night in base camp, on the hostile world of BoskVeld, a planet circling the star Denebola, his book sang in my head like the forbidden lyrics of the pygmies’ molimo, like the poignant melodies of BoskVeld’s moons.
A sentimental exercise.
What good my reading would do me among the inhabitants of the Synesthesia Wild I had no idea. Probably none. But I was going out there; and on the evening before my departure, the day before my submersion, I lost myself in the forests of another time, knowing that for the next several months I would be the waking and wakeful prisoner of the hominoids who were my subjects. We have killed off most of the ‘primitive’ peoples of Earth, but on paradoxical BoskVeld I still had a job.
And when Benedict turned the copter under those three antique-gold moons and flew it back to base camp like a crepitating dragonfly, I knew I had to pursue that job. But the jungle was bleak, and strange, and nightmarishly real; and all I could think was There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no
Methods: A Dialogue
From the professional notebooks of Egan Chaney: I was not the first Earthling to go among the Asadi, but I was the first to live with them for an extended period. The first of us to encounter the Asadi was Oliver Oliphant Frasier, the man who gave these hominoids their name – perhaps on analogy with the word Ashanti, the name of an African people who still exist, but more likely from the old Arabic word meaning lion, asad.
Oliver Oliphant Frasier had reported that the Asadi of BoskVeld had no speech as we understood this concept, but that at one time they had possessed a ‘written language.’ He
