Transfigurations by Michael Bishop Read Free Book Online Page A

excited about my work again. Tomorrow seems a hundred years off. . . .
    Day 35: Nothing. The Bachelor continues to follow me around, never any more than eight or nine paces away. His devotion is such that I can't take a pee without his standing guard at my back. He must think he's found an ally against the indifference of the others, who blithely ignore us. I've begun to weary of his attentions.
    Day 40: I'm ill again. The medicine Benedict dropped during an earlier bout of diarrhea is almost gone. It's raining. As.I write this, lying on my pallet in my lean-to, the odor of the Asadi's morose, grey dampness assaults me like a poison, intensifying my nausea. In and out they go, back and forth. . . .
    I have formulated the interesting notion that their entire way of life, in which I've had to struggle to see even one or two significant patterns, is itself the one significant and ongoing ritual of their

    species. Formerly, I had been looking for several minor rituals to help me explain this people. It may be that they are the ritual. As the poet said, "How tell the dancer from the dance?" But having formulated this new and brilliant hypothesis about the Asadi, I'm still left with the question. What is the significance of the ritual the Asadi themselves are? An existential query, of course.
    The Bachelor sits cross-legged in the dripping, steam-silvered foliage about five meters from my lean-to. His mane clings to his skull and shoulders like so many tufts of matted, cottony mold. Even though he's been dogging my footsteps for eleven days now, I can't get him to enter my shelter. He always sits outside and stares at me from beneath an umbrella of leaves. Even when it's raining. His reluctance to come under a manufactured roof may be significant. If only I could make the same sort of breakthrough with two or three others I've made with The Bachelor.
    Day 50: After the Asadi fled into the jungle last night, I trudged toward the supply pickup point where Benedict leaves my rations and medicine each week. The doses of Placenol I've been giving myself lately, shooting up the stuff like a junkie, have gotten bigger and bigger—but Eisen, at the outset of this farcical expedition, assured me that P-nol, in any quantity, is absolutely nonaddictive. What amazes me beyond this sufficiently amazing attribute of the drug, though, is the fact that Benedict's been dropping more and more of it each week, providing me with a supply almost exactly in tune with my increasing consumption.
    Or do I use more because he drops more?
    No, of course not. Everything goes into a computer at base camp. A program they ran weeks ago probably predicted this completely predictable upsurge in my "emotional" dependency on P-nol. At any rate, I'm feeling better; I've begun to function again.
    Trudging toward the pickup point, I felt a haunting uneasiness seeping into me from the fluid shadows of the rainthom trees. I heard noises. The noises persisted all the way to the drop point: faint, unidentifiable, and frightening. I believe, however, that The

    Bachelor lurked somewhere beyond the wide leaves and trailing vines where those noises originated. Once, in fact, I think I saw his dull eyes reflect a little of the sheen of the evening's first moon. I don't know.
    A typed note on the supply bundle: "Look, Dr. Chaney, you don't have to insist on 100% nonassociation with us base campers. You've been gone almost two months. Let us drop you a radio. A little conversation with genuine human beings won't destroy your precious ethnography, sir. You can use it in the evenings. If you want it, send up a flare tomorrow night before Balthazar has risen and I'll copter it out the next day."
    The note was signed by Benedict. But of course I don't want a radio. Part of this business is the suffering. I knew that before I came out here. I won't quit until things have begun to make a litde sense.
    Day 57 (Predawn): I haven't been asleep all night. Yesterday, just six or seven