Constructed in approved Ur’sadi ways to withstand the erosive capacities of time and weather, these pagodas proved short-lived rallying points for the neo-Ur’sadi. They forsook not only the temples but the small forest communities around them in order to pursue a thousand separate individual quests for meaning. Their umbilical to the land severed by their new power to photosynthesize, their ties to one another frayed and weakened by this same miraculous force, they scattered, willfully distancing themselves from kith and kind. In this way the seeds of speciation were sown among the Ur’sadi for the first time in millions of years: The selective pressures of environment came to bear once more on their evolution. By coming back into harmony with nature through their creators’ desperate manipulation of their genes, these neo-Ur’sadi had irrevocably surrendered their destinies to nature. Ahead of them, unknown to them, lay approximately three million years of painful retreat from civilization.
‘Meanwhile,’ Elegy said, once we’d moved beneath the orange-and-white awning in front of the BenDragon Prune, ‘Denebola’s disruptive solar activity continued, and the original Ur’sadi, seeing what was happening to their unmannerly offspring, decided to leave. They razed their settlements and cleared away the debris. Then they doctored the surrounding landscape so that no one could find a scrap of evidence they’d ever even visited BoskVeld.’
‘Why did they do that?’ Jaafar asked. Sorting the various drugs in our medical kit, he held up vial after cut-glass vial for inspection.
‘Because that’s the only possible explanation for our not having found a trace of their existence on the veldts,’ I told Jaafar. ‘Unless you’re silly enough to suppose they were never here at all.’
Elegy laughed. ‘Because they wanted to disguise the fact they’d been here,’ she corrected me. ‘They wanted no part of their mutinous offspring. At the same time, though, they wanted to give them a chance to evolve as nature directed. They were bequeathing the planet to their ungrateful children, handing it over without strings or hindrance . . . There’s some evidence – in the partial ruins of the pagoda Frasier investigated, for example – they may have tried to carry off every last clue to their presence here by destroying the jungle temples of the neo-Ur’sadi. Something prevented them, though, and they, had to leave BoskVeld without making the break as cleanly as they would have liked. Today’s Asadi betray their ancestors’ presence here, and so do the eyebooks my father brought out of the Wild six years ago.’
Under Elegy’s guidance Jaafar prepared an anesthetic milder than the one she had earlier given Cy. We held this in reserve against the time the creature revived and again needed a painkiller. Periodically we traipsed to the edge of the clearing to check him. Each time we peered into his nest, his raw and mutilated appearance startled me anew.
Cy was a lesson in Asadi anatomy. His muscles gleamed in fiery knots, organs protruded lopsidedly, and scar tissue crazed his purplish-grey lower intestines like a network of varicose cabling. Because she feared the sedative she had given him was repressing his ability to photosynthesize, Elegy was anxious for him to come to.
Back in the Dragonfly, the three of us unfolded a metal table with a thick sealed-cork surface to use as a butcher’s block. In the outdraft of the refrigeration locker we struggled to remove the beef haunches Moses had given us. Then, as we played at butcher, Elegy told us what she believed had happened to the Ur’sadi who scattered through the Wild after building temples to their past.
‘First, they discovered they still had strong appetites for solid food and occasional socialization. Their bodies, after all, were made to assimilate protein in the form of animal flesh as well as in nuts and other exotic forest products; and, photosynthesis or no photosynthesis, they still had to rendezvous occasionally to mate. So seldom did these sexual encounters occur at first, however, that twin births proved an especially adaptive feature of their reproductive strategy. More and more of the solitary proto-Asadi creatures were born, and they slaked their meat hunger by preying upon the old, the sick, the feeble. The proto-Asadi became their own scavengers. Because of steadily mounting population pressures, bands coalesced in the Wild, and these bands, in turn, took to warring with one another in order to establish territorial elbow-room. They also took prisoners, whom they ultimately sacrificed not to any cruel omnipotent god but to the less-than-godly yearning in their bellies. Moreover, to satisfy their reborn cravings for fat and animal protein, they embarked upon periodic bulges of infanticide. These practices combined to reduce population levels again – until, finally, a proto-Asadi contingent with enough dim intelligence to perceive what was happening to it stepped in to mark off an area of jungle in which cannibalism was taboo during the hours of their highest photosynthetic efficiency. This clearing was the forerunner of the Asadi assembly ground. By outright designation it gave the Asadi a center for their absurd communal activities and a refuge from their tendency to feast on one another.
Collateral species of Ur’sadi – bands that failed to submit to the hallowedness of this primeval
