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    Two moons are up, burnt-gold and unreal. I'm netted in by shadows and my growing loneliness. Field conditions, to be frank, have seldom been so austere for me, and I've begun to wonder if the Asadi were ever intelligent creatures. Maybe I'm studying a variety of Denebolan baboon. Ole Oliver Oliphant Frasier, though, reported that the Asadi once had both a written language and a distinctive system of architecture. He wasn't very forthcoming about how he reached these conclusions—but the Synesthesia Wild, I'm certain, contains many secrets. Later I'll be more venturesome. But for the present I've got to try to understand those Asadi who are alive today. They're the key to their own and the distant Ur'sadi past.
    One or two final things before I attempt to sleep.
    First, the eyes of the Asadi: These are somewhat as Benedict described them in the imaginary dialogue I composed two weeks ago. That is, like the bottoms of thick-glassed bottles. Except that I've noticed the eye really consists of two parts: a thin transparent covering, which is apparently hard, like plastic, and the complex, membranous organ of sight that this covering protects. It's as if

    each Asadi is bom wearing a built-in pair of safety glasses.
    Frasier's impression of their eyes as "murky" is one not wholly supported by continued observation. What he saw as murkiness probably resulted from the fact that the eyes of the Asadi—behind the outer lens or cap—are almost constantly changing colors. Sometimes the speed with which a yellow replaces an indigo, and then a green the yellow, and so on, makes it difficult for a mere human being to see any particular color at all. Maybe this is the explanation for Frasier's perception of their eyes as "murky." I don't know. I'm certain, though, that this chameleonic quality of the Asadi's eyes has social significance.
    A second thing: Despite the complete absence of a discernible social order among the Asadi, today I may have witnessed an event of the first importance to my unsuccessful, so far, efforts to chart their group relationships. Maybe. Maybe not. Previously, no real order at all existed. Dispersal at night, congregation in the morning—if you choose to call that order. But nothing else. Random milling about during the day, with no set times for eating, sex, or their habitual bloodless feuds. Random plunges into the jungle at night. What's a humble Earthling to make of all this? A society held together by institutionalized antisocialness? What happened today leads me irrevocably away from that conclusion.
    Maybe.
    This afternoon an aged Asadi whom I'd never seen before stumbled into the clearing. His mane was grizzled, his face wizened, his hands shriveled, his grey body bleached to a filthy cream. But so agile was he in the Wild that no one detected his presence until his strangely clumsy entry into the clearing. Then, everyone fled from him. Unconcerned, he sat down in the center of the Asadi gathering place and folded his long, sparsely haired legs. By this time, all his conspecifics were in the jungle staring back at him from the edge of the clearing. Only at sunset had I ever before seen the Asadi desert the clearing en masse.
    But I haven't yet exhausted the strangeness of this old man's visit. You see, he came accompanied.

    He came with a small, puq^lish-black creature perched on his shoulder. It resembled a winged lizard, a bat, and a deformed homunculus all at once. But whereas the old man had great round eyes that changed color extremely slowly, if at all, the creature on his shoulder had not even a pair of empty sockets. It was blind, blind by virtue of its lack of qny organs of sight. It sat on the aged Asadi's shoulder and manipulated its tiny hands compulsively, tugging at the old man's mane, then opening and closing them on empty air, then tugging once again at its protector's grizzled collar.
    Both the old man and his beastlike/manlike familiar had a furious unreality. They existed at a