Meanwhile, the late-comers comported themselves admirably; they touched the moist place in the dust, then touched their fingers to their lips. Even though Kretzoi’s huri could not fly, even though Kretzoi was different from them in subtle ways beyond the evident inability of his eyes to pinwheel polychromatically, the Asadi treated him with deference, even honor. Throughout the entire ceremony, in fact, he was continuously visible – no Asadi trespassed upon the little circle of ground he had staked out for himself, and none entreated him to contribute something more to the solemn festival of their homage.
‘Now,’ Elegy whispered, ‘Kretzoi must die.’
I ceased filming, glanced at her in surprise.
‘Figuratively,’ she emended. ‘Theatrically, if you like.’
Whereupon Kretzoi, savagely abridging the Ritual of Death and Designation, began wrestling with BoskVeld’s sun. He rose out of his crouch to do battle with Denebola, and as his hands tore at the flaring corona of the sun, as if trying to pull the alien star into ragged filaments of taffy, the Asadi took note and retreated again to opposite ends of the field. From these vantages they watched the hand-to-hand combat between the sun that fed them and the chieftain who fed them, and I realized, for the first time, that the significance of the combat lay in the Asadi chieftain’s presumptuous challenge to Denebola as his people’s most important, most generous provider.
It was a combat no mortal Asadi could ever hope to win, of course, and any chieftain who entered upon it was in fact surrendering his eyesight and his life to the greater power of the sun. First, blindness; then, death – the first a metaphor for the second, and the second an inevitable consequence of the former. Meat was a mere mortal’s gift, whereas the gift of Denebola to the photosynthesizing Asadi was the energy innate in sunlight: the virtually immortal fuel of solar systems, of galaxies, of the living, binding plasma of the cosmos itself.
This speculation by no means explained the Asadi to me, but it suffused their lives and their behavioral patterns with a towering significance I had never before recognized. I was suddenly elated. The contrast between the grubby physical spectacle below us and the redeeming philosophical import of that spectacle roared through me in combers of insight and perception. Had something similar happened to Egan Chaney before his ultimate return to the Wild? Maybe. ‘I belong among the Asadi,’ he had written, ‘not as an outcast and not as a chieftain – but as one of the milling throng.’
Filming Kretzoi’s reenactment of old E.Z.’s challenge to Denebola, I experienced the bewildering conviction that I, too, was a brother to the Asadi. Our fraternity was written not merely in the identical amino-acid sequence of our hemoglobin, but in the even more compelling miracle by which the cosmos had given us life and self-awareness. Chaney had defected to the Wild, I finally understood, for reasons essentially ontological and hence religious. Did Elegy understand that? Did she know that in seeking out her father we were knocking at a door that opened into other dimensions, other continua, other modes of knowledge?
‘Let’s hope he’s keeping his eyes closed,’ she whispered.
‘He’s got ’em shut,’ I responded. ‘Kretzoi’s not crazy.’
At last, his act almost concluded, Kretzoi covered his head with his arms and slumped to the ground. He rolled so that his eyes stared sightlessly into the eastern portion of the Wild, his limbs tucked inside the rigid curve of his body. The mock-huri was thrown to the ground by his fall. It looked dead. Old E.Z.’s huri had flown, and I think both Elegy and I feared the remainder of the Ritual would fail to unravel as it ought because ours couldn’t fly.
But the Asadi, bless ’em, gave the make-believe huri a wide berth; made no move either to examine it or to grab it up and hurl it into the forest. Instead, they suddenly began acting in concert to bring about a desired end.
A pair of aliens from each group came to the center of the field and lifted Kretzoi like pallbearers hoisting a casket. In the meantime, other Asadi gathered foliage from the Wild with which to make a pallet. Soon, so rapidly had the Asadi worked, Kretzoi was lying on a pile of rubber-tree fronds, his arms folded on his breast and his head tilted back as if to receive a final ambiguous blessing from the sun.
After a while, swinging my camera’s barrel back and forth between the two opposing groups of aliens, I saw that the eyes of every single specimen were radiating a mournful deep-blue color. Indigo, Chaney had called the color. It made the carapaces protecting the Asadi’s eyes even murkier-seeming than usual. Moreover, the afternoon light sifting through the mosses and bearded lianas of the Wild daguerreotyped everything beneath us in subtle mercury vapors. Strange, passing strange, and lovely.
Heads began moving from side to side, snouts inscribing figure eights in the air. This went on – hypnotically, obsessively – for better than an hour. Denebola was sinking into the Calyptran baths beyond the western foilage of the Wild.
Indigo eyes. Everywhere, indigo eyes.
And then, so secretly that I scarcely had any consciousness of its arrival, twilight gathered in the rain forest and seeped out into the clearing like a flow of cyanide. Sunset. Evening star. And the inaudible bugle notes of twilight’s poignant taps. A call to retire.
But no one retired.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Thus We Vindicate Schliemann
‘Dr Benedict,’ a voice sounded in my ear. ‘Dr Benedict, are you there? You, too, Civ Cather – are you there?’
It was Jaafar, speaking to us from the BenDragon Prime. He had held his peace all afternoon, but now that Denebola had set he wanted
