CHANEY: That’s Eisen’s idea, not mine. Since I told him I was going to refuse any sort of contact at all during my stay with the Asadi – any contact with you people, that is – he decided the weekly drop would be the best way to make certain, occasionally, I’m still alive.
BENEDICT: A weapon, Chaney?
CHANEY: No, no weapons. Besides food, I’ll take in nothing but my notebooks, a recorder, some reading material, a medical kit, and maybe a little something to get me over the inevitable periods of depression.
BENEDICT: A radio? In case you need immediate help?
CHANEY: No. I may get ill once or twice, but I’ll always have the flares if things get really bad. Placenol, lorqual, and bourbon, too. But I insist on complete separation from any of the affairs of base camp until my stay among the Asadi is over.
BENEDICT: Why are you doing this? I don’t mean why did Eisen decide we ought to study the Asadi so minutely. I mean, why are you, Egan Chaney, committing yourself to this ritual sojourn among an alien people? There are one or two others at base camp who might have gone if they’d had the chance.
CHANEY: Because, Ben, there are no more pygmies . . .
—End of simulated dialogue on initial methods.
I suppose that I’ve made Benedict out to be a much more inquisitive fellow than he really is. All those well-informed questions! In truth, Ben is amazingly voluble about his background and his past without being especially informative. In that, he is a great deal like me, I’m afraid . . . But when you read the notes for this ethnography, Ben, remember that I let you get in one or two unanswered hits at me. Can the mentor-pupil relationship go deeper than that? Can friendship? As a man whose life’s work involves accepting a multitude of perspectives, I believe I’ve played you fair, Ben.
Forgive me my trespass.
Contact and Assimilation
From the private journals of Egan Chaney: Thinking There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no . . . I lay down beneath a tree resembling an outsized rubber plant and I slept. I slept without dreaming, or else I had a grotesque nightmare that, upon waking, I suppressed. A wrist alarm woke me.
The light from Denebola had begun to copper-coat the edges of the leaves in the Synesthesia Wild. Still, dawn had not quite come. The world was silent. I refused to let the Wild distort my senses. I did not wish to cut myself on the crimsons, the yellows, the orchid blues. Nor did I have any desire to taste the first slight treacherous breeze, nor to hear the dawn detonate behind my retinas.
Therefore, I shook myself awake and began walking. Beyond the brutal fact of direction, I paid no attention to my surroundings. The clearing where the Asadi would soon congregate compelled me toward it. That fateful place drew me on. Everything else slipped out of my consciousness: blazing sky, moist earth, singing fronds. Would the Asadi accept me among them as they negatively accept their outcasts? Upon this hope I had founded nearly five months of future activity. Everything, I realized, floundering through the tropical undergrowth, derived from my hope in an external sign of pariahhood; not a whit of my master strategy had I based on the genuine substance of this condition.
It was too late to reverse either my aims or the direction of my footsteps. You must let the doubt die. You must pattern the sound of your footfalls after the pattern of falling feet – those falling feet converging with you upon the clearing where the foliage parts and the naked Asadi assemble together like a convention of unabashed mutes. And so I patterned the sounds of my footfalls after theirs.
Glimpsed through rents in the fretworkings of leaves, an Asadi’s flashing arm.
Seen as a shadow among other shadows on the dappled ground, the forward-moving image of an Asadi’s maned head.
The Wild trembled with morning movement. I was surrounded by unseen and half-seen communicants, all of us converging.
And then the foliage parted and we were together on the open jungle floor, the Asadi clearing, the holy ground perhaps, the unadorned territory of their gregariousness and communion, the focal point of Asadi life. The awesome odor of this life – so much milling life – assailed me.
No matter. I adjusted.
Great grey-fleshed creatures, their heads heavy with violent drapings of fur, milled about me, turned about one another, came back to me, sought some confirmation of my essential whatness. I could do nothing but wait. I waited. My temples pulsed. Denebola shot poniards of light through the trees. Hovering, then moving away, averting their murky eyes, the Asadi – individual by individual, I noticed – made their decision and that first indispensable victory was in my grasp: I was ignored!
Xenology: In-The-Field Report
From the professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: I have been here two weeks. Last night I picked up the second of Benedict’s food drops. It’s fortunate they come on time, arriving on the precise coordinates where Ben first set me down. The Asadi do not eat as we do, and the Synesthesia Wild provides me with foodstuffs neither in the way of edible vegetation nor in that of small game animals. I cannot tolerate the plants. As our biochemists in base camp predicted, most of them induce almost immediate vomiting. Or their furry bitterness dissuades me from swallowing them. A few may be edible, or a few may have juices pleasing to the palate – Frasier, after all, discovered the tree from which we have distilled the intoxicant called lorqual – but I’m no expert at plant identification. Far from it. As for animals, there simply are none. The jungle is stagnant with writhing fronds. With the heat, the steam, the infrasonic vibrancy of continual photosynthesis. Rainwater I can drink. Thank God for that, even though I boil it
