Killing Time (31 page)

All was instantly, appallingly
clear. I groaned once as the realization sank in and then tightened my grip on
Mutesa's arm. "You must not do this," I said, quietly but with real
passion. "Mutesa, I beg you—"

"And
I
beg
you,"
he answered, his voice softening. "Gideon, Dugumbe has decreed it. To
resist means the girl's death, and if you involve yourself, it will mean yours,
too."

He pried himself from my grip, no
longer looking angry but instead deeply saddened; and as he followed his wife
into the next tent to comfort his daughter I stood there agape, trying to determine
what in the world I could do to stop the sickening rite of passage that was
about to take place. My mind, however, had been dulled by shock; and when I
heard a gaggle of old maids start to collect outside the tent, chanting a lot
of idiotic nonsense about a girl's entry into womanhood, I began to panic
stupidly, rushing outside and screaming at them to keep quiet and go away. But
they completely ignored me, making it plain that my status as an outsider made
me invisible at such a ritualistic moment. All the same I kept hollering until
the shaman arrived, accompanied by several armed guards who looked quite
menacing. In the shaman's hand was a vicious-looking knife, and the sight of
it, along with a very no-nonsense glare from the shaman, was enough to send me
back into the tent, where I now found Mutesa with his arm around the shaking,
sobbing Ama.

"Mutesa," I said,
realizing with deep dread that there was in fact no way to stop the nightmare,
"at least tell the shaman to let me prepare her. I have drugs that can
dull the pain, and we must keep the knife and the wound clean."

"Gideon, you
must not
interfere"
Mutesa once again declared. "This is not a subject for
argument. It will be done as it is always done." I thought he might even
weep himself when he said, "She is a female child, Gideon. The pain does
not matter, only the ceremony." At his words Ama began to shriek
fearsomely, and Mutesa tightened his grip on her. Ordering her to be silent, he
proceeded to drag her out to the crowd that had gathered.

Ama's cries were horrible to hear
even before the cutting began; but when the knife went in they became quite
simply the most horrifying and unbearable sound I've ever heard. I clutched my
head, thinking that I might go mad—and then a thought occurred to me. I ran to where
I'd stowed my bag and withdrew the stun gun. If I could not stop the
unspeakable act, I could at least ease the child's torment.

I dashed outside to a scene so
revolting that it stopped me dead in my tracks. There was no special area set
aside for the procedure, not even a blanket thrown on the earth—the regard in
which the "female child" was held was amply displayed by the way her
genitalia were being cut up in the dirt, much as one would have gelded an animal.
With a sudden roar, I brought the ceremony to a halt; and when I raised my
weapon the shaman, bloody knife in hand, took a step away from the girl, giving
me a line of fire. Instantly I pulled the trigger, and Ama's body jerked a few
inches into the air as she painlessly and mercifully lost consciousness.

"She is only asleep!" I
shouted, using much of what little I knew of their language and breathing hard;
then I quickly directed the weapon at the shaman's guards. "Tell the
shaman that he can go on now, Mutesa," I said in English, opening the tent
flap and backing inside. "And I hope that your gods will forgive you
all."

Needless to say, things were
never quite the same for me in Dugumbe's camp after that evening. Oh, I argued
the subject with the chief, to be sure, argued it many times on many nights.
But for the most part he thought my declarations nothing more than amusing,
although on a few occasions they seemed to make him quite irritated. A woman
who took physical pleasure from sex, he said, was a woman who could never be controlled,
who would roam from tent to tent like a whore—and he would have no whores in
his camp. Furthermore, he told me that though he had enjoyed my company and
appreciated my efforts on behalf of his people, I would do well to pick my
battles more carefully: he could brook only so much impertinence from any man,
particularly any white man, and he had no desire to make an example of me.
Knowing that his veiled threat was sincere, I finally let the subject drop and
elected to surreptitiously do what I could by teaching the mothers in camp how
to administer analgesics and, when we could make them, opiates to their
daughters before the terrible ceremony. But in truth many of those women,
having endured the same torture, seemed to have no inclination to ease the
suffering of even their own flesh and blood; and so the mutilations went on as
before.

Little came of my use of the stun
gun. I knew that the soldiers who had been at the ceremony would report to
Dugumbe about it (though the shaman, not wanting to admit that anyone's powers
were greater than his, would likely not follow suit); so that very night I went
outside camp and drained the weapon's energy cells. When Dugumbe demanded to
see the thing, I offered it to him as a gift; and when it failed to produce any
effect he tossed it back, declaring that the soldiers were fools and that Ama
had simply fainted from the pain. This left me with the dilemma of possessing
only a weapon that would kill; and so it became necessary to watch myself
carefully, to avoid arguments (which meant avoiding the shaman), and to try to
concentrate on my medical duties.

But disillusionment made such a
life increasingly difficult, and it wasn't very long before I found myself
wondering if by coming to Africa I had really escaped the evils of the
"information age" at all. What was the collected wisdom of Dugumbe's
people if not "information"? Unrecorded, true, but nonetheless
powerful—and manipulable. What had Mutesa done in his tent that night but
convince himself of something that he knew in his heart to be utterly false but
to which it was necessary to adhere if he were to preserve his place and his
faith in the tribe? Could he not have accurately had
"Mundus vult
decipi"
painted above the entrance to his tent? Were the evils that
I'd sought to escape when I'd boarded the Frenchmen's plane outside Naples not
in fact human evils, defiant of time and technology and passed on wherever the
human species elected to establish its dominance?

And wasn't Malcolm right in
saying that we would never change any of this until we could reengineer the
past?

Such thoughts burned in my head
not only during my waking hours but when I was asleep, as well; and when those
dreams were one night accompanied by a sound I knew to be the deep rumble that
Malcolm's ship produced when he wished to either terrify his enemies or
destabilize their structures, I thought as I began to awaken that it was only
my subconscious making an appropriate association. It wasn't until Mutesa
shook me to full consciousness and told me the rumors about a strange aircraft
that was making its way toward the general area of our camp from the northeast
that I realized the sound had been real.

"It is said that they look
for you, Gideon," he told me urgently, "and that if they are attacked
they destroy entire fields, whole parts of the forest, even villages, by
increasing the power of the sun."

I sat up on my cot, trying to
grasp it. Clearly the ship was coming, and clearly it was coming for me: the
line of approach indicated that it was following the same route I had used to
get to this place. My movements through Europe and then into Africa could not,
of course, have been difficult for my friends aboard the vessel to track; and
at first the fact that they had, given my recent feelings about life in
Dugumbe's camp in particular and the analog archipelago in general, seemed a
good and welcome thing. But as my mind cleared, other thoughts brought a pang
of deep dread:

Why
were they coming? My
falling-out with Malcolm had been virtually complete, and I knew him too well
to think that he'd ever accept someone who had expressed such severe doubts
about his work back into the fold. Nor, for that matter, would the others, whatever
our mutual affection; even Larissa had expressed no desire to have me stay if I
couldn't believe in what they were doing. Why, then? I had no special technical
knowledge that they needed—their successful deployment of the Washington
materials had proved that. What did they want?

All possible avenues of
explanation led to only one conclusion: Malcolm had told me sincerely that he
wasn't at all certain he wanted me "roaming loose" if I knew his
secrets; and that vulnerability must have begun to gnaw at his unstable mind so
much that he was now coming to put an end to at least one of his worries—
permanently.

During the following the two
days—which is also to say the
last
two days—as the thunderous rumbling
has continued to reverberate through the mountains and the reports from
villages on the lower slopes have become more numerous, I have tried but failed
to come up with another,
any
other, interpretation of the situation. I
don't know why Larissa or the others would participate in my death unless
Malcolm—persuasive as he can be—has managed to talk them into it. Perhaps he's
even fabricated evidence to prove that I've betrayed them. Whatever the answer
actually is, I will likely never learn it; all I know for certain is that I
can't risk seeing these people who have sheltered me become collateral victims
of this continued madness. I must move on.

Dawn is just breaking, and I can
hear Mutesa assembling his kit outside my tent. His insistence on escorting me
to the coast is, I think, partly the result of our friendship and partly due to
the gratitude that he has always shown in his eyes, but never acknowledged in
words, for my having eased the suffering of the unfortunate Ama. It will be
hard to say good-bye to him and his family, but I shall miss little else about
this place. Dugumbe's occasional pearls of wisdom— especially his admonition
that information is not knowledge— cannot, I must regretfully record,
rationalize his actions; and though, as I say, I'm grateful that he is
concerned for my safety, I can declare in the privacy of these pages that on
balance his own definition of knowledge is no boon to his tribe or to the
world. I've told him that when the ship comes he must neither engage it in
battle nor hesitate to tell those who fly it where I have gone, and I hope that
he will heed the advice; but his belligerent pride may make him incapable of
doing so.

Mutesa is whispering my name
through the canvas; I must go. If we make the coast, I have decided, I will
post this document somewhere on the Internet, for the little good it will do.
After that, I have no illusions: I can and will try to run, but if Malcolm and
the others truly want me dead, chances are I already am.

OFF THE COAST OF ZANZIBAR, 3
A.M., TWO DAYS LATER

Quick as I have tried to be about
telling this tale, I can be quicker still in bringing it to a close—for events
during the last twelve hours have suddenly made it certain that no one will
believe what I have written. All of us live in a different world from the one
that existed just fifty-odd hours ago: the one that I inhabited when I first
sat down to record my account. Just
how
different this world is I do not
yet know; I have seen only a small piece. But if that piece is any measure,
those of us aboard this ship may well be the only humans on earth who are aware
of the startling transformation that has taken place. Everyone else cannot help
but accept this new reality as the way things have always been, and therefore
the record I have written will seem not only implausible but insane.

I say "aboard this
ship" because that is, somewhat surprisingly, where I am: aboard the great
electromagnetic vessel that until yesterday morning I considered Malcolm
Tressalian's most remarkable invention. Larissa sleeps next to me on the bed
in my quarters as I write, exhausted, as are we all, by the task of trying to
comprehend what has happened. That task has not diminished the joy of being
with her again, of course, nor of discovering that in fact my friends were not
out for my blood. But it is consuming enough to have made this happy time take
on the trappings of unreality, and I expect at every moment to wake up back in
Chief Dugumbe's camp, to the sounds of food being prepared and weapons being
readied. Perhaps that is why I cannot sleep—why I
will
not sleep—until I
have made a record of this last episode: for if indeed this new world still
exists when next I wake, I may need to refer to these pages to remind myself
of how it came to be.

Mutesa and I lost the few men who
were in our party not twelve hours after leaving camp. The sight of Malcolm's
ship, when it finally did appear on the horizon behind us, was simply too much
for them to bear, as it nearly was for me; but Mutesa was as stalwart as ever
and, finding us shelter in the hollow of a giant baobab tree, prepared to help
me make what was presumably going to be my last stand. At his insistence that I
arm myself I reluctantly took out the rail pistol, incapable of fully
comprehending that I might have to turn it against Larissa and the others and
wondering if it might not be better all the way around to simply surrender
myself.

This I decided to do, much to
Mutesa's dismay. As the ship approached the tree in which we were hiding, he
insisted that he escort me out onto the grassy patch of flatland that
surrounded it, to make certain that I was not simply shot down like a dog. How
exactly he intended to prevent this was unclear, but I welcomed his company on
what I genuinely thought might be my final walk across any part of this Earth.