‘He concluded that the Ik were a mirror of the corruption at humanity’s heart – once you had stripped away the veneers’ of “civilization.” He recoiled in disgust from the implications he drew. He forgot that to some extent the degradation of the Ik had been externally imposed. He forgot that his own cultural biases were undoubtedly shaping the philosophical thrust of the conclusions suggested by his field work. The Turnbull who laughed joyously with the Ituri pygmies was in this subsequent book a disillusioned and oddly embittered man – all because he had reached some dismaying conclusions about his entire species on the basis of his disgust with the Ik.’
‘Because that thing upstairs appalls me, I’m like this older and more cynical Turnbull? Is that what you’re suggesting, Elegy?’
‘You’re like him because you’re ignoring contexts, that’s all I’m saying. My father did the same thing, and like Turnbull he was trained in the exacting empirical methods of the cultural anthropologist. The Ik fell from grace because of changing ecological conditions and the meddlesomeness of a state trying in good faith to preserve its native wildlife. The Asadi have fallen from grace for reasons still opaque to us.
‘But their nocturnal cannibalism isn’t necessarily a sign of their present-day corruption; it could be evidence of an evolutionary recovery. The stronger is sacrificed to the weaker, out of both altruism and a grisly pragmatism. Since both infants receive the devotion and care of their mother, a bond of real affection is at work here, Ben. It’s the only one that now seems to exist among the Asadi.
‘Ritual cannibalism – probably because of population pressures and severe protein shortages at some point in their past – became the medium for this unique expression of tenderness. It undoubtedly began as a desperation measure. The intensification of production methods and subsequent increases in population led to ecological disruption, which led to food shortages and a loss of essential protein intake, and these in turn led to the adoption of infant cannibalism as a means for a select few to survive the ecological catastrophe. The old were probably always eaten, out of love as well as necessity.
‘The planet has never had any herd animals, it seems, or any other kind of land-going creatures, for that matter, except those the Ur’sadi brought to BoskVeld with them when they arrived here from another solar system. So they took their requirements of amino acids from either native plant forms or protein-rich plants whose seeds they’d carried here with them, and they intensified agricultural production to heighten yield. One result was that much of BoskVeld was deforested. Some of the planet’s veldts – today such conspicuous features of the topography – were once thick with trees. The sociological result, just as I’ve said, turned out to be the cannibalism of one or maybe even both of the infant twins born to the immigrant Ur’sadi females. Twin births were, and continue to be, the rule among the various evolutionary lines of our present-day Asadi.’
A wind scouring the Wild from the western ocean jostled the treetops, making the foliage sigh. Elegy shivered, clutched her knees self-protectingly. In a matter of mere minutes a front of towering storm clouds had blotted out the nighttime sky. The hand lamps provided our only illumination.
‘It’s going to rain,’ Elegy said. ‘We’d better get moving.’
‘Wait a minute. What’s your time scale, Elegy? How long ago are you proposing all this happened?’
‘Three to seven million years,’ she answered at once.
‘Dear God, woman, you’re certainly putting it back a ways. Why three to seven million years?’
‘Because between seven and twelve million years ago,’ she said, going off on another tack altogether, ‘the Ur’sadi may have dropped off on Earth a small contingent of colonists-explorers. They did so with the idea that their representatives would successfully cooperate or compete with a number of our presentient terrestrial primates. In fact, the Ur’sadi may have genetically and biochemically altered these pioneer specimens so that selective interbreeding could take place. Their motive was as much altruism as self-preservation; they believed they could spare their primate counterparts on Earth some of the more wasteful and tragic consequences of a purely random evolution toward intelligence.
‘But evolutionary factors and innate differences in the nature of the beasts they were dealing with did them in. There was an explosion of speciation among the terrestrial primates, followed by a number of outright extinctions of some of the “higher” forms. Whatever of themselves the Ur’sadi had hoped to preserve on Earth was submerged and lost within a period, oh, of four to five million years. One thing that remains, though, is an exact correspondence of the amino-acid sequence for hemoglobin in both their human relatives on Earth and their Asadi descendants here on BoskVeld.’ Elegy rose, wiped her hands on her thighs, and gazed up at the alarmingly booming canopy of leaves.
I stood, too. ‘Elegy, have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?’
‘You don’t have to believe me, Ben,’ she said conciliatorily, even though her eyes were fierce in their shadowy sockets. ‘You’d be crazy to believe me, in fact. How the hell do I know what happened twelve million years ago? How the hell does anybody know, for that matter?’
‘Ideally, people make intelligent suppositions on the basis of concrete evidence and proven research techniques. Sometimes a strong imagination doesn’t hurt. You just have to make sure it’s not operating independently of the facts or in a complete absence of any empirical data.’
But now Elegy was ignoring me, probably for good reason. She summoned Kretzoi back from his hiding place and put into his hands the rope she’d been carrying on her belt. With rapid hand signs she told Kretzoi she wanted him to go aloft and then lower to us the nest containing Bojangles’s semiconscious meat-sibling. Alive with wind, the alien mangrove and all its graceful kin swayed and whickered.
Jaafar’s voice sounded in my ear: ‘You’d better return to the drop
