Elegy, laying out one of the beef haunches and trimming away a long snake of fat with a pair of soundless butcher’s shears, compared the early Asadi to victims of prolonged sensory deprivation.
‘They were the only animal species on the planet,’ she said, ‘of any intellectual development – even if they’d perverted it by isolating themselves from one another and then killing off those who conspicuously differed from them in behavior or appearance. In their original clearing the Asadi were like a man in a small black box or tiger cage underground. Their every physical response to the world was a reenactment of old and time-worn behaviors. They were at a remove from reality, just like the prisoner who can certify his existence only by biting his lip or clawing the inside of his thigh. That prisoner, you leave him alone long enough, finally goes insane. Well, that’s what happened to the ecologically isolated Asadi – they grew into an overwhelming and seemingly irreversible community insanity. By default, Ben, their species was the measure of all things.’
And when Asadi numbers again began to climb, the clearing teemed anew with impatient and angry animals.
‘At which time,’ said Elegy, ‘the females began to select their more robust infants as objects of family cannibalism, and for the first time since the departure of their ancient Ur’sadi forebears, the possibility of love reentered the complex of Asadi emotions.’
‘Love,’ Jaafar scoffed, the old prejudice resurfacing. ‘They love what they eat, is that it? Just as I “love” honey, and hot fresh bread, and fried cephalopod tentacles. Spare me such love from a mother, though. Much better she should hate me inordinately but keep her teeth out of my liver and lights.’
‘I don’t say the practice arose from an impulse of love,’ responded Elegy, putting down the butcher’s shears and using the bone saw I handed her to cut a blood-red hunk of meat. ‘It probably arose as means of easing population pressures in the clearing. It also gave the Asadi the promise of protein in a familiar and appetizing guise. The nutritional value of the sacrificial child wasn’t really important. What was important was that the female subtracted one twin from each double birth by giving herself and the weaker child the psychological blessing of meat ready to hand. The cannibalism really didn’t significantly improve the protein and fat content in the Asadi diet – it still doesn’t – but it created an effective stabilizing factor in their population growth. It also reinforced the pattern of Twilight Dispersal by giving each adult Asadi a gruesome incentive to return at sunset to the Wild.’
Her hands slick with grease, Elegy gave me a long strip of fat and a section of bone with meat still clinging to it. ‘Take these to Kretzoi, Ben.’
I carried the offerings to the helicraft’s door, spotted Kretzoi grooming himself beneath the tent awning, and tossed him both the ragged bone and the snaky, glistening rind. Kretzoi looked at me indifferently, then picked up the strip of fat as if it were a lei to be worn about his neck. I returned to the helicraft without waiting to see how he disposed of his meal.
Elegy was still working, still talking to Jaafar.
‘. . . mothers learned it was more rewarding – both psychologically and nutritionally – to keep the sacrificial child alive as long as possible. To do this they had to expend energy and care; they had to search out, usually in full darkness, herbs and plants with which to heal and anesthetize the meat-sibling. The return in protein and fat wasn’t large enough to justify so much labor . . . Not unless you suppose, as I do, that Asadi mothers derive great satisfaction from caring for the Eaten One. For that matter, Asadi children, male as well as female, do, too. Those who are permitted to live are raised to cherish the meat-sibling, to eat of it only in the dark – and temperately, even then – and to nurture it at all other times. In four or five years, in fact, the meat-sibling becomes the possession and love object solely of the designated survivor – for the mother, by this time, passes out of her infertile lactation interval and becomes pregnant again. When this happens, she builds a new nest quite distant from the old one and begins a new family.
‘The designated survivor carries on as it has been taught. Until its mane is full, it remains both day and night with the Eaten One. Then it ventures by itself into the Asadi clearing and undergoes its initiation into the social life of its conspecifics. Indifferent Togetherness. And Indifferent Togetherness strengthens the new arrival’s desire to flee back to its meat-sibling at sunset. In just this way, then, it surrenders its identity to a well-established pattern and becomes another lost marcher in the Procession of the Asadi Damned.’
With a long-handled, thick-bladed knife Elegy perforated one of the beef haunches and worked diligently to make the slits go all the way through the meat.
‘But the seeds of affection, of tenderness, of love,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘have been sown among the Asadi, Jaafar, and if they can break out of their rut and survive another hundred thousand years or so – maybe much, much less – they may be able to redeem themselves from the fatiguing hell into which they’ve fallen.
‘Bojangles is evidence that – were we given the go-ahead to intervene – a delicate programming operation might be all that’s necessary to put them right again. We could do
