The nest contained something with eyes.
They coruscated in the moonlight, and they scared the residual bejesus out of me. They seemed disembodied, and vaguely saurian, and chillingly close to death. Closing my own eyes, I told Kretzoi in a whisper that I was ready to go down.
‘You already knew what we’d find?’
‘I had an idea,’ Elegy responded when Kretzoi and I again sat with her in the twisted root arches under the mangrove. ‘Bojangles told Kretzoi, and Kretzoi told me. But I wanted it confirmed.’
‘That’s an Asadi up there,’ I said. ‘It’s still alive, but it’s been reduced to little more than a head and a truncated torso.’
‘That’s Bojangles’s twin, his sibling, his “meat-brother.”’
‘Whom Bojangles has cannibalized to this horrifying stage of dismemberment and incipient rot?’ I looked with unseeing eyes back up into the mangrove. ‘Sibling rivalry’s played for keeps among the Asadi, isn’t it?’
‘The meat-sibling is simply a twin until the two juvenile Asadi are old enough to warrant their mother’s making a determination about which is the more robust, which has better sustained itself through optical photosynthesis. Mother’s milk and photosynthetic nutrients are all the infants feed on for the first two or three years of their lives, you see.’
‘And the more robust animal is automatically designated the cannibal, the weaker its perpetual victim?’
Elegy and Kretzoi exchanged a brief flurry of hand signs. ‘It may be the other way around,’ she said, looking back at me. ‘Kretzoi isn’t sure. Bojangles gave some indication that the stronger becomes the meat-sibling – because it’s better able to sustain the continuous depredations of the next several years.’
‘How can it survive them a week, much less a number of years?’ I asked aloud, my voice rising out of a whisper into almost Chaneyesque indignation at the infuriating alienness of the Asadi.
‘The Asadi mother uses ready-to-hand herbal coagulants to stanch the bleeding of the meat-sibling and other herbal drugs to anesthetize her sacrificial child to the day-by-day feasting of its weaker sibling and herself. In fact, long periods go by when the sacrificial child is permitted to recuperate, even given a chance to regenerate limbs and organs already partially consumed. This is a reptilian characteristic that the Asadi have apparently retained . . . Then the love feast begins again, quite tenderly and touchingly, an act of reverence and solicitude you’ll never see enacted in the Asadi clearing – because, on the assembly ground, tribal allegiance takes precedence over private family ties and Indifferent Togetherness is the order of the day.’
‘You’re saying the ritual cannibalism of the meat-sibling by its twin and its mother derives from a love impulse?’
‘Why not?’ Elegy shifted positions, supporting herself on one outstretched arm and gesturing modestly with her free hand. ‘For the most part, cannibalism among the Asadi takes place at night, when they can’t photosynthesize. The dispersal that occurs every sunset, then, frees a few individual Asadi to rendezvous with other creatures with whom they share family ties. In some cases, at least.
‘The old and the prematurely bereaved, I’d imagine, simply retire into the woods to sleep or to look for dying or dead tribesmen. These last, once discovered, are probably greedily cannibalized. Then their bones are buried. They aren’t given the care the Asadi female and her cannibal offspring lavish on the sacrificial child because, ordinarily, an immediate family tie doesn’t exist between the eater and the eaten. And because, even when drugged, the old and sick can’t withstand a nightly cannibalism over a protracted period.
‘But the Asadi child who is being eaten and sustained, in order to be eaten and sustained again, engenders nothing but devotion in its mother and its cannibal sibling; they prize and cherish it, they rush to it at sunset – not only to feed from its body but to tend its wounds and raise its threshold of apprehensible pain by giving it herbal anodynes. They also feed it nuts and other protein-rich sources of plant matter – but in paste form, pre-chewed so that it will be easily ingestible by the semiconscious victim of their love.
‘Look, Ben, what you saw up there frightened and revolted you. It would have me, too, if I’d gone up there. At first, in fact, I’m probably not going to be of much use when we take it out of the tree in order to carry it back to the Dragonfly. But—’
‘Back to the Dragonfly!’ I exclaimed.
Startled by my voice, Kretzoi moved away and took up lodging in an adjacent root-arch chapel partially concealed from our view. Elegy watched him go with a finger laid across her lips, to shush and calm me.
‘Ben, you’re reacting to this out of its proper context; you’re passing ethnocentric judgments. If you’d—’
‘I want to know what you mean by saying we’re going to carry that thing up there back to the BenDragon Prime.’
‘Do you remember my father’s fondness for the twentieth-century anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the author of The Forest People? In that book Turnbull rejoiced in the lives of the Ituri pygmies, who at the time he went among them were still a viable but pristine society.’
‘What’s this got to do with the Asadi and their nocturnal cannibalism?’
‘Turnbull in later years went among an East African people called the Ik,’ Elegy said, ignoring my question. ‘He wrote a scathing book about them called The Mountain People. The state regime of that period had forbidden the Ik to hunt, even though they’d never before been agriculturists and lived in an arid and infertile region of the country. The result was that in their individual struggles to stave off hunger and survive, the Ik came to treat one another with cruelty and derision. All fellow feeling was lost; they behaved toward their compatriots only as a private
