Read Transfigurations for Free Online Page B

ownership of that sacred piece of stained ground. The moons of Bosk Veld throw his shadow in three different directions, and the huri on his shoulder has begun to move a little. This is the first night since I came out here that I haven't been alone, base-camp buggers, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all. ...
    Personal Involvement: The Bachelor
    From the private journals of Egan Chaney: My meeting of the The Bachelor, as I called him almost from the beginning, represented an unprecedented breakthrough. It came on my 29th day in the field—although, actually, I had noticed him for the first time three days prior to his resolute approach and shy touching of my face. As far removed from a threat as a woman's kiss, that touch frightened me more than the first appearance of the old chieftain, more than the nightmare shape of the huri, more even than the chaos of rending and eating that followed the old man's gift of the flame-bright carcass. I'd been alone for weeks. Now, without much preamble, one of the Asadi had chosen to acknowledge my presence by ... by touching me!
    I must back up a bit—to the night the Asadi chieftain, against all custom, stayed in the clearing. My first realization that he intended to stay was a moment of minor terror, I'll confess, but the implications of his remaining overrode my fear. Wakeful and

    attentive, I sat up to study his every movement and to record whatever seemed significant.
    The old man didn't move. The huri grew restive as the night progressed, but it didn't leave the old man's shoulder. To be painfully brief, they stayed in the clearing all that night and all the following day, sitting on the stained ground, guarding the spot. Then, when twilight fell on that second day, they departed with all the rest.
    I despaired. How many days would I have to suffer through before something else unusual occurred?
    Not long, apparently. On my 26th day on the clearing's edge I saw The Bachelor. If I'd ever seen him before, I'd certainly never paid him any real attention, for The Bachelor was a completely unprepossessing specimen whom I judged to be three or four years beyond Asadi adolescence.
    Grey-fleshed and gaunt, he had a patchy silver-blue mane of so little length the others must surely consider him a virtual outcast. In fact, in all the time I knew him he never once took part in either coitus or the ritualized staring matches of the full-maned Asadi. When I first felt his eyes upon me. The Bachelor was on my imaginary twenty-yard line looking toward my lean-to from a pocket of his ceaselessly moving brethren. He had chosen me to stare at. That he didn't receive a cuffing for violating the one heretofore inviolable Asadi taboo confirmed for me the negligibility of his tribal status. It was he and I who were brethren, not he and the other Asadi.
    In one extremely salient particular The Bachelor didn't resemble the vast majority of Asadi at all: his eyes. These were exactly like the old man's—translucent but empty, enameled but colorless, fired in the oven of his mother's womb but as brittle-seeming as sun-baked clay. Never did The Bachelor's eyes flash through the rainbow spectrum as did the prismatic eyes of his conspecifics. They were always clayey and cold, a shade or two lighter than his flesh.
    And it was with these eyes, on my 26th day in the field, that The

    Bachelor took my measure. The noonday heat held us in a shimmering mirage, our gazes enigmatically locked.
    "Don't just stand there making google faces," I shouted, beckoning at him. "Come over here where we can talk."
    My voice had little effect on either The Bachelor or the teeming Asadi. Although a movement of the head indicated that he had heard my invitation. The Bachelor regarded me with no more, and no less, interest than before. Of course, he couldn't "talk" with me. My eyes don't have even the limited virtuosity of traffic lights, and since The Bachelor's never changed colors, he couldn't even "talk" with his own