I have reached a few purely speculative conclusions about the Asadi.
With them nothing is certain. Their behavior, though it must necessarily have a deep-seated social/biological function, does not make sense to me. At this stage – I keep telling myself – that’s to be expected. But I persist. I ask myself, ‘If you can’t subsist on what BoskVeld gives you, how do the Asadi?’ My observations in this area have given me the intellectual nourishment to combat despair. Nothing else on BoskVeld has offered a morsel of consolation. In answer to the question, ‘What do the Asadi eat?’ I can respond quite truthfully, ‘Everything I do not.’
They appear to be herbivorous. In fact, they eat wood. Yes, wood. I have seen them strip bark from the rubber trees, the rainthorn, the alien mangroves, the lattice-sail trees, and ingest it without difficulty or qualm. I have watched them eat pieces of the very hearts of young saplings, wood of what we would consider prohibitive hardness even for creatures equipped to process it internally.
Three days ago I boiled down several pieces of bark, the sort I’ve seen so many of the young Asadi consume. I boiled it until the pieces were limply pliable. I managed to chew the bark for several minutes and finally to swallow it. Checking my stool nearly a day later, I found that this ‘meal’ had gone right through me. Bark consists of cellulose, after all. Indigestible cellulose. And yet the Asadi eat wood and digest it. How?
Again, I have to speculate. I believe the Asadi digest wood in the same manner as earthly termites; that is, through the aid of bacteria in their intestines, protozoa that break down the cellulose. A symbiosis, Benedict might say, being versed, as he is, in biological and ecological theory . . .
This is later. Tonight I have to talk, even if it’s only to a microphone. With the coming of darkness the Asadi have disappeared again into the jungle, and I’m alone.
For the first three nights I was here, I too returned to the Wild when Denebola set. I returned to the place where Benedict had dropped me, curled up beneath the overhanging palm and lattice-sail leaves, slept through the night, and then joined the dawn’s inevitable pilgrimage back to this clearing. Now I remain here through the night. I sleep on the clearing’s edge, just deep enough into the foliage to find shelter. I go back into the jungle only to retrieve my food drops.
Although the Asadi disapprove of my behavior, because I’m an outcast they can do nothing to discipline me without violating their own injunction against acknowledging a pariah’s existence. As they depart each evening, a few of the older Asadi – those with streaks of white in their mangy collars – halt momentarily beside me and breathe with exaggerated heaviness. They don’t look at me because that’s apparently taboo. But I don’t look at them, either. Ignoring them as if they were pariahs, I’ve been able to dispense with those senseless and wearying treks in and out of the clearing that so exhausted me in my first three days here.
To absolve myself of what may seem a lack of thoroughness, I suppose I ought to mention that on my fourth and fifth nights here I attempted to follow two different Asadi specimens into the jungle – in order to determine where they slept, how they slept, and what occupies their waking time when they are away from the clearing. I wasn’t successful, however.
When evening comes, the Asadi disperse. This dispersal is complete: No two individuals remain together, not even the young with their parents. Each Asadi – I believe – finds a place of his or her own, one completely removed from that of any other member of the species. This practice runs counter to my experience with almost every other social group I’ve ever studied – although it’s somewhat analogous to the solitary nest building of chimpanzees, as observed frequently in the Gombe Stream Reserve in East Africa. Female chimps, however, do sleep with their young. Perhaps, now that I think of it, Asadi females do, too . . . In any case, I was humiliatingly outdistanced by the objects of my pursuit. Nor can I suppose I’d have any greater success with different specimens, since I purposely chose to follow an aged and decrepit-seeming Asadi on the first evening and a small, scarcely pubescent creature on the second. Both ran with convincing strength, flashed into the trees as if still arboreal by nature, and then flickered from my vision and my grasp . . .
Two moons are up, burnt-gold and unreal. I’m netted in by shadows and my growing loneliness. Field conditions, to be frank, have seldom been so austere for me, and I’ve begun to wonder if the Asadi were ever intelligent creatures. Maybe I’m studying a variety of Denebolan baboon. Ole Oliver Oliphant Frasier, though, reported that the Asadi once had both a written language and a distinctive system of architecture. He wasn’t very forthcoming about how he reached these conclusions – but the Synesthesia Wild, I’m certain, contains many secrets. Later I’ll be more venturesome. But for the present I’ve got to try to understand those Asadi who are alive today. They’re the key to their own and the distant Ur’sadi past.
One or two final things before I attempt to sleep.
First, the eyes of the Asadi: These are somewhat as Benedict described them in the imaginary dialogue I composed two weeks ago. That is, like the bottoms of thick-glassed bottles. Except that I’ve noticed the eye really consists of two parts: a thin transparent covering, which is apparently hard, like plastic, and the complex, membranous organ of sight that this covering protects. It’s as if each Asadi is born wearing a built-in pair of safety glasses.
Frasier’s impression of their eyes as ‘murky’ is one not wholly supported by continued observation. What he saw as murkiness probably resulted from
