PROLOGUE
Well over six years ago Egan Chaney vanished into the mute and steamy depths of the Calyptran Wilderness on the planet BoskVeld. “Don’t come after me,” he wrote before leaving us. “I won’t let you bring me back.” Even so, despite what many people persisted in believing in the interval between his disappearance and my recent return to Earth, we made repeated attempts to rescue Chaney from the Wild to learn what had happened to him.
None of those attempts was successful, and the last such endeavor before Elegy Cather’s arrival took place only about a year ago: a privately financed expedition led by the Bhutanese explorer Geoffrey Sankosh, who once made a solitary descent into the major caldera of Nix Olympica on Mars. Sankosh managed to shoot a stunning holographic film of an Asadi female giving birth to twin infants in her arboreal nest, but he found no trace of either Chaney or the huge winged pagoda that Chaney had described so meticulously in his journals and in-the-field files.
On the night before Elegy Cather would ride a shuttle out of probeship orbit to the surface of BoskVeld, I took a long walk around the perimeters of Frasierville. As I walked, I talked, one-sidedly, with Chaney’s ghost.
Egan, I thought, you must be dead.
I had supposed that at least six years ago—only weeks after he’d left us—but had always believed that one day we would stumble upon his glowing bones and so establish my supposition as fact. No such luck. Chaney continued to elude us. Many nights, nearly inaudible trillings from the jungle reminded me of his high-pitched rueful laughter.
Are you still out there? I asked his ghost.
The base camp from which we had all worked was now called Frasierville. Plasma lamps on tall vanadium-steel poles made an eerie presidio of what had once been a jumble of quonset huts and storage sheds between the rainforest and the twilight desolation of the veldts. The infirmary in which Chaney recuperated after Eisen and I answered the summons of his flares had become a respectable hospital. Wood-frame dwellings had replaced our prefab dormitories, and many of our senior scientists had summoned their families to share the back-breaking joys and poignant midnight nostalgias of the pioneer. I was an exception, for I had no family and lived alone in a small remodeled quonset from base-camp days.
As I was walking that evening, a baby’s frail cry assailed me.
Think of that, Egan, I told my old friend’s ghost: BoskVeld remains a mystery, but now we actually bring children here. An overeager colonial authority has approved the immigration of five thousand families during the next fiscal year, and our computer-directed homesteading will soon determine the fate of the grasslands, steppes, and savannahs that give this planet half its name. Such changes in only six years! A baby!
Are you glad you’re safely dead, Egan?
Chaney would never know the ambivalent pleasure of tasting a cereal made from a grain hybridized for BoskVeld’s soil and climate. The human palate might suffer, but our pride told us that our achievement was sweet. Whilais: the name our agrogeneticists gave that grain. Already I envisioned children running through fields of its reedlike stalks and biting into bread baked from its pinkish meal.
Children! The following morning, Egan Chaney’s daughter would arrive on BoskVeld, and I must prepare for her advent. Seven years ago, I had presumed that Chaney was a bachelor like me. Tomorrow, though, I would meet a young woman whose existence shamed his failure to acknowledge her and whose purpose was to succeed where Chaney’s stalwart colleagues, not to mention the famed Geoffrey Sankosh, had met only defeat. Thus, amid the starry lacework that Chaney had called “flaming cobwebs,” I sought the star of his daughter’s probeship. Maybe I even saw it. In any case, in one glittering arc of sky, Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior converged: the trio of moons whose wine-like light had intoxicated Chaney during his field work among the Asadi. In his memory, I tried to feel drunk with homesickness for Earth, but all I could manage was a sour foretaste of dawn.
*
Six years earlier I had compiled from Egan Chaney’s notes and random recordings a unique series of observations about the hominoid Asadi.
Over several weeks, as the scheduling of light-probe transmissions from our base-camp allowed, I sent these items home. Eventually the fragments were gathered, edited, and published by The Press of the University of Kenya in Nairobi, the same institution from which I had taken degrees in paleoanthropology and extraterrestrial ecological theory. This single document was released as Death and Designation among the Asadi. It went through three editions in one year, focusing a lot of attention on the work of the Third Denebolan Expedition on BoskVeld and alerting me to the fact that Chaney had had a child with a woman still alive. From that point on, royalties from the document were divided between the University’s research foundation and my late friend’s lawful living heirs. That arrangement persists.
Because the ethnography has since appeared in nearly a hundred additional editions (in sixteen languages), few people on Earth and the Glaktik Komm colony worlds are ignorant of BoskVeld and the Asadi. Moreover, although the ethnography deals solely with Chaney’s field work in the rainforests, it has given the entire planet—officially, GK-World Leo/Denebola IV—an aura of romance.
Colonists arrived on BoskVeld with the name of the Asadi on their lips, even if their first priority after planetfall was homesteading the veldts. They came into Frasierville from the Egan Chaney Shuttle Field (for so we’d renamed it), spent a week listening to orientation lectures and outfitting themselves for fieldwork, and then departed in helicrafts or veldt-rover caravans for the areas preassigned them by Colonial Administration. Only a few of these “pioneers” took time out from their indoctrination to visit the rainforests, and those who did stayed on beaten paths, only feebly tempting the sirens of romance. They figured the real business of their lives lay elsewhere, even if the legend of Egan Chaney and the mystery of the Asadi had seduced them to BoskVeld. This attitude stemmed from their inability to view Death and Designation among the Asadi as anything but an exciting fiction.
Many stuck-at-home specialists dismissed the ethnography as my exploitative work of the imagination. They also damned me for plundering the private and professional scholarship of a deceased colleague for wealth and fame. These accusations seemed mutually exclusive to me: either I’d written a fiction to which I’d put Chaney’s name, or else I had used his fieldwork as my own, but surely not both. Still, most reviewers of Death and Designation among the Asadi made both assumptions. In fact, the furor created by Chaney’s and my collaborative ethnography seemed to corroborate his personal dictum that unswayable pygmies of the intellect abound and prosper. These pygmies deployed the feeble blowguns of their wits against me for more than five years, and because I did not return from BoskVeld to confront them, many supposed they had stung me to the heart. What use to me, Thomas Benedict, on the fourth planet of the Denebolan system, they wondered, are the wealth and notoriety I’d filched from Chaney’s suffering? Not realizing that I loathe both riches and celebrity, they decided that I was afraid to come home and face them.
The truth?
The only thing I feared was something I also hoped for: the arrival of Egan Chaney’s daughter, a twenty-two-year-old woman who signed her light-probe messages Elegy Cather. My apprehension derived from young Cather’s implicit faith in even the most incredible portions of her father’s recordings and journals.
I could not go that far. Clearly, Chaney had subjectively experienced everything in our ethnography—but having spent so much time in the Wild searching for proof, I found it hard to credit the objective reality of the ornate pagoda at which the Asadi had concluded their ritual of death and designation. The hard plastic eyebooks, or spectrum-displaying cassettes, that Chaney had brought out of the Wild gave us tangible evidence that he had found something indicative of advanced technology, but not necessarily a towering building that deftly eluded our discovery. I believed that Chaney had built his imaginary pagoda on the ruins of a real structure about which he had read in an early monograph by Oliver Oliphant Frasier.
Elegy Cather believed otherwise. Nearly eight months before this history opens, I had found this surprising message in my box in Frasierville’s radio room:
Dear Dr. Benedict,
The residuals from the American edition of my father’s work on the Asadi have put me through the Goodall-Fossey College of Primate Ethology here in East Africa. I have done field work with both chimps and baboons in the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania. I am grateful to you for making this possible. By editing and seeing to the publication and dissemination of my father’s work, you have given me both the financial support and the incentive to obtain my degree as a primate ethologist.
But for my initial fear that I might not succeed here, I would have written to thank you long ago.
Maybe I am over that hurdle now. The Nyerere Foundation of Dar es Salaam has just provided me with a grant to study the Asadi on BoskVeld. In addition, both the colonial authority of Glaktik Komm and Kommthor itself have approved my application for an interstellar visa. I will arrive aboard the probeship Wasserläufer IX before the end of the year.
You should know, Dr. Benedict, that it is my intention not only to study the Asadi but also to determine without doubt the fate of my father. I hope to vindicate the reliability of his final in-the-field reports, even those that seem most suspect. As soon as I had learned of the failure of the Sankosh expedition to find either my father or his notorious pagoda, I put in for my grant.
Although skeptics describe the pagoda as an architectural Yeti or Loch Ness monster, I believe in its existence and think we can demonstrate its reality to our own and others’ satisfaction. (I say “we,” Dr. Benedict, because I hope to enlist you in my cause.) We need only a new approach to the problem, one that Sankosh did not know to attempt and that even your people in Frasierville have never thought to try. The time remaining to me here in the Reserve I intend to spend preparing for my arrival on BoskVeld.
Heinrich Schliemann took Homer literally and so managed to discover and excavate the ruins of Troy. The Iliad was Schliemann’s guidebook. I believe in the literal truth of my father’s final recorded words, which in his ethnography you have titled “Chaney’s Monologue.” I also proclaim the accuracy of all his previous field work and reportage.
Why shouldn’t I?
Schliemann was not related by blood to Homer, as I am to Egan, and yet his faith in the historicity of an antique poem led him to great discoveries. I would be a traitor to my heritage if I did not invest my father’s writings with at least as much authority as Schliemann found in Homer’s Iliad.
I look forward to meeting you.
Cordially,
Elegy Cather
After this first communication, Elegy Cather relayed to me via light-probe transmission four or five additional messages, none of which actually explained how she hoped to succeed where dedicated, intelligent adults had met only tangled jungle and the mockery of their own rank sweat.
That’s why I looked forward to meeting her, too, and why I was also a little frightened. How long would it take Ms. Cather to learn that she was on a fool’s errand, thereby dashing her youthful hopes along with my grey and haggard ones?
*
My full name, by the way, is Thomas Douglas Benedict. Call me Ben. I originally went to BoskVeld as the Third Denebolan Expedition’s junior paleoxenologist, in the wake of Oliver Oliphant Frasier’s discoveries near the Great Calyptran Sea and the high calamity of the Second Expedition. For a long time, though, I was merely a flunky to specialists with more formidable scientific credentials.
I was in my late thirties. My university training did not recommend me as much as did my ability to pilot an all-purpose Komm-service helicraft known as the Dragonfly. I’d learned to fly them during the final years of the African Armageddon, which threatened to end humanity’s tenure on Earth in the same general area where it probably began.
At an age when most literate adults have jobs, I was languidly finishing up my graduate work in Nairobi. I ought to have been further along. I can’t really cite the hostilities in Africa as an excuse, because I’d frittered away a decade of my life before landing in Luanda with a group of foreign mercenaries, and, after the war, I took my sweet time “recuperating.” When I finally reached Nairobi and used my status as a Pan-African veteran to enroll in school there, I caroused as often as I studied, and only my late acquaintance with an older woman who had found several promising protohominid fossil sites in Ethiopia near Lake Shamo returned my total attention to paleoanthropology.
Then I did well in school, but just well enough not to be ashamed when, my new degrees in hand, I worked up the gall to apply for a place aboard the Third Denebolan Expedition making ready at Kommthor Headquarters in Dar es Salaam.
I was chosen, but owed my selection to my presence on the continent, a generous letter of recommendation from a professor at the University of Kenya who had once met Moses Eisen in London, and the intervention of the woman who had turned me around in my studies. She visited Kommthor HQ to plead my case with a personnel officer of Captain Eisen’s. She did so, I knew, because she loved me and my devil-may-care indifference to her devotion warranted not only an admonitory generosity on her part but also a real effort to remove me from her life. And because she achieved both her goals, off I flew to BoskVeld.
Once we had established our base camp, I hoped for a chance to examine and date several specimens of pre-Asadi statuary discovered by Oliver Oliphant Frasier in some temple ruins near the Calyptran Sea. But my immediate boss, Chiyoko Yoshiba, took this duty out of my hands by virtue of her greater experience. I might have helped her appraise these artifacts, but my attitude at thirty-nine was still that of a green know-it-all, and I alienated Yoshiba with my unearned self-confidence, my anthropological jokes, and my unauthorized flights from camp in the Dragonfly belonging to her paleoxenological cadre. Often, I flew over the veldt or the jungle to get away from people more in control of their lives than I was of mine, always in the hope of purging my loneliness by “getting closer to myself.” I do not blame Yoshiba for disliking me. After Chaney’s disappearance, I resolved to grow into my chronological age, and she developed some respect for me. Eventually.
Anyway, Yoshiba found that every specimen of Asadi artwork or technology dug up from Frasier’s ruins defied clear dating. Such techniques as the carbon-14 method, potassium-argon comparisons, geomagnetic determinations, fission-track readings, and measurements of thermoluminescence all proved equally useless because they gave contradictory results. It was impossible to find out how long ago the old Asadi—we called them the Ur’sadi to distinguish them from their living but uncommunicative spawn—had built their temples or what had caused their mysterious demise. I was of no help to Yoshiba because my theories about Asadi prehistory were so obviously facetious constructs meant to provoke laughter rather than to cast light. Also, I was often away when others had need of me. Finally, in disgust, Yoshiba asked Moses Eisen to reassign me to get me out of her and her exasperated colleagues’ hair.
Since he could not send me home, Eisen transferred me to Egan Chaney’s bailiwick, the cultural-xenology unit. Chaney, interestingly, was the cultural-xenology unit. Eisen made me his pilot, and I greeted my transfer to him with unmitigated relish.
Chaney was a cultural xenologist trained before the war in Africa halted most scientific work there for more than a decade. Even better, to my parochial way of thinking, he had few friends on BoskVeld and no apparent ties to the home world. We were brethren, I felt. This was a delusion I did not exorcise until months after he vanished—while compiling and annotating the ethnography that made Chaney, me, and BoskVeld famous.
Although he kept copious written records and often used recorders to supplement the materials in his e-journals, Chaney seldom talked just to talk. I did. When we began sharing a messy dorm suite, I spent a lot of time detailing my personal history for him. I told him about growing up in the Dakota Territories of the Rural American Union. Chaney listened. I told him about the women who had professed to love me, and whom I had always found cause to bid goodbye. Chaney listened. I talked of my desire to write an account of all three BoskVeld expeditions, my hopes and heartbreaks, my successes and failures, and so on ad nauseam, and Chaney listened. He listened so intently that it was not until he’d disappeared that I realized I knew almost nothing about him.
All I ever understood in those days was that both Egan Chaney and Thomas Douglas Benedict were lost and at sea. That made us brothers. Therefore, so what if he held his tongue while I babbled on and on?
*
After my walk around Frasierville on the night before Elegy Cather’s arrival, I returned to my quarters and took a paperbound ethnography off my shelf . . .