No Enemy but Time (49 page)
All my love,
Mom
Joshua reread the letter twice, slid it back into its envelope, and put the envelope in an inside jacket pocket. He was wearing civilian clothes because off-duty American personnel, by treaty stipulation, were not permitted to wear their uniforms in either Marakoi or Bravanumbi. No one on either side wished to foster the impression that the Americans comprised an occupation force. Joshua therefore resembled an ambitious young native politician, a newcomer to the WaBenzi tribe. Although his nervousness distinguished him from most of the other smart go-getters drinking their lunches at Karsanji's, he had not yet drawn undue attention to himself.
His mind turning like a merry-go-round past all the items in his mother's letter, he drank, ordered more wine, and drank again. The last shuttle back to base left the embassy grounds at midnight; he could spend the next ten hours right here. For dinner, a kidney pie and a mug of thick Irish stout; then back to wine again. If he could not decide which long-range goal to pursue now that White Sphinx had ended and a thousand conflicting options vied for his approval, at least he could kill the remainder of the day.
Effortlessly. Painlessly.
“May I join you?”
Joshua looked up to see Alistair Patrick Blair standing beside the chair his mother had deserted.
Unenthusiastically he nodded the Great Man into the empty place.
“Where is Mrs. Monegal?”
“Leaving the country.”
“So soon?”
“She's supposed to begin a promotional tour for her new book. Her visit here required her to drop four stops from her schedule, and her publisher did not exactly smile on the deletion.”
“She should tell her publisher to go to blazes,” Blair said amiably. “I never tour for my books.”
“Only to raise money for your digs.”
“That's true enough.”
“My mother makes her living from her writing. My father made no arrangements to provide his family with survivors’ benefits, and he died before he got his Air Force pension.”
“I'm sorry to hear that, Joshua.”
The two men stared at each other. Yesterday Joshua had unburdened himself of two years of his subjective experience in the distant past. Alternating questions about paleoanthropological and temporal matters, Blair and Kaprow had grilled him for ten solid hours—for the benefit of their own insatiable curiosity and two silently grinding tape machines. Joshua had told all, not omitting the details of his long
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and intimate relationship with the habiline woman he had named Helen.
That relationship explained the Grub, and Joshua did not intend to yield his daughter to anyone for the purpose of illegal, unethical, and immoral biological experiments. She was, as Kaprow had already conceded, a human being. Any viable offspring of a human parent was by definition—yes, by definition:
his
—a human being, and by denying him custody of the child, the United States Air Force and the Zarakali government were in violation of one of his most basic human rights. At the end of the ten-hour session Joshua had broken down and cursed both men, surrendering wholeheartedly to rage if not to tears.
“You've been drinking quite a lot, I think. Do you mind if I try to overtake you?”
“What for?”
“Well, Joshua, a celebration.”
“Of the fact that I've blown your
Homo zarakalensis
theory right out of the water?”
“If you like. However, I'm not convinced that you have, you know.”
“Or of your scuzzy treatment of my daughter and me?”
“Joshua, the child is a native Zarakali, with all the rights and privileges accruing to citizens of our republic. It's possible that we could find excuses to limit
your
freedom, but never hers.”
“What, then, are we celebrating?”
“I thought Americans passed out cigars. I've not yet got mine. I suppose this excellent vintage must suffice.”
Joshua stared at the Great Man.
“Your first embarkation on the ocean of fatherhood.” Blair lifted the glass that one of Karasanji's wine stewards had just provided him. “To Joshua Kampa, the New Adam, Futurity's Sire.”
“Bullshit.”
“Very pretty, very aromatic bullshit.”
“But bullshit nonetheless.”
“Mzee Tharaka told me this morning that no matter what either I or the American authorities wish, your daughter must be remanded to your custody immediately. Should we balk on this point, he will expel me from my cabinet position and the Americans from their expensive new military facilities.”
“You told him about the Grub?”
“He already knew, Joshua.”
“How?”
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“It seems that two of our nation's would-be astronauts are also intelligence agents. They ran a fishing launch up and down Lake Kiboko during the White Sphinx Project and recorded your return to us through the telephoto lens of a hand-held movie camera. It was impossible to get you and the child from the omnibus to the medical station without bringing you briefly into the open.”
Joshua dimly remembered having seen a boat on the lake—a small boat, always at a distance.
“There's more. Some of those bothersome Sambusai who occasionally come foraging over the protectorate—well, it appears that one or two of those fellows are also in Mzee Tharaka's employ, for our President-for-Life has many eyes and ears. He was quite impressed with you the day you visited the Weightlessness Simulation Incline. He considers you a brave man. Before you return to the United States, you will be made an honorary citizen of Zarakal in a private ceremony at the President's Mansion.
Do you begin to understand what you have to celebrate, Joshua?”
“The Grub is mine!”
“I would think you might wish to give her a more dignified name. Mzee Tharaka is sure to demand that much.”
“How do you think President Tharaka would like Monicah?”
“Monicah?”
“It's a nice monicker, don't you think? It's the name I've had in mind, a decent English/Zarakali name.”
When Blair did not reply, Joshua added, “What else does the President intend to demand?”
Nonchalantly sipping, Blair beaded his mustachios with tiny rubies of Chablis. He patted his mouth with a napkin and eyed the passing traffic. “I fear that I've misspoken, Joshua. The President
hopes
you will always consider this country a second homeland; that once you have left the American military you will agree to reside in Zarakal with your daughter for at least a portion of each year. To this end, he has determined that you should receive a small annual stipend for your part in solidifying relations between our two countries. Also, a high-rise apartment here in Marakoi. It would be a shame, he believes, for, ah, Monicah to grow up solely as an American, nourished on hamburgers and banana splits, educated by television programs and cassette recorders, uprooted from the soil, the people, and the culture of her homeland. The idea of such total deracination appalls the President, and he is sure that you, as an intelligent black man, will see the matter pretty much as he does.”
“A high-rise apartment in Marakoi takes care of the problem?”
“Not entirely, no. Mzee Tharaka wishes you to regard yourself as a bridge between two worlds.
Marakoi is merely one of the anchors for the span. The other anchor could be Pensacola, Florida, or Cheyenne, Wyoming, or Wichita, Kansas. Wherever you like. But if you reject the high-rise apartment here in Marakoi, the bridge collapses for want of support, and commerce between your daughter's native land and her adoptive one must necessarily cease, at least for you and your daughter. President Tharaka's watchword has always been
Let there be commerce.
”
The wine he had drunk in the heat of the day had not made Joshua receptive to syllogistic argument. He felt that he had fallen into an intricate web. Now he was creeping along a filament leading deeper inward rather than out. What multi-eyed predator awaited him at the heart of this pattern?
Distracted, he muttered, “Persephone.”
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“I beg your pardon.”
“He wants Monicah to spend a portion of each year in the underworld and a portion on earth with the living—like Persephone.”
Blair laughed. “Ah, yes. But which is which?”
“I've brought her out of the land of the dead, Dr. Blair.” He gestured at the crowd in the restaurant, at a strip of sky visible through a gap in the awning. “Everything up here is both. Not just in Marakoi. All over. Everywhere. There, too; even in the underworld.”
“You're a trifle tipsy, aren't you?”
“You've influenced President Tharaka in this. You want Monicah in Zarakal a part of each year so that you can prod and poke and measure and compare. Am I right?”
“That would be helpful. And no more harmful to the Grub, I would think, than a yearly physical examination.”
“She's not one of your goddamn fossils!” Joshua was conscious of heads turning to track this outburst.
He lowered his voice: “Not one of your goddamn fossils. A human being. Helen's daughter.”
Blair put his glass aside, scraped his chair back, and stood. “Of course. And
your
daughter, too. The medical people at the base have confirmed as much. So she's yours, and Mzee Tharaka has interceded to insure that no one disputes your claim to her. His intercession warrants a little gratitude, don't you think? Please consider this, Joshua, when the time comes to make a real decision.” After paying for his share of the wine with several notes engraved with portraits of the President in his hominid-skull crown and leopard-skin cloak, the Great Man gave Joshua an affectionate pat on the shoulder and headed off down Tharaka Boulevard toward the National Museum, from which he had apparently come for his midday break.
Joshua gave the African wine steward and the Indian waiter extravagant tips. Then he toddled uncertainly into the sunlight. The brightness of the buildings and the paving squares stunned him.
Peacocks strutted in a small emerald plaza beyond the nearest intersection. He walked about aimlessly for nearly an hour. Engine noise made him look up. Over the city a jet arrowed north-northwest into a wilderness of achingly empty sky. It was his mother's flight to Rome, the first stop on her journey back to the States.
“
Ciao
,” he told the aircraft, saluting. “
Ciao.
” The other word he left unspoken, reverberating in his memory.
A chapter in his life—an era, rather—had come to a close. The slide show had finally ended. The early Pleistocene was no longer accessible to him in dreams, and the White Sphinx program was over, probably for good. Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.
“
Ciao
,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.
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[Back to Table of Contents]
Coda
Daughter of Time
August 2002
With
my mother's blessing I entitled my book about my adventures in prehistoric East Africa
Eden in
My Dreams
. It was not published in the United States until 1994, seven years after my return from the distant past, when the American government grudgingly lifted the lid on the White Sphinx Project and acknowledged officially that my cockamamie stories about visiting the Pleistocene as an Air Force chrononaut were not cockamamie after all. In the interval, however, I had become a Zarakali citizen and cabinet minister. Indeed
Eden in My Dreams
had first been published in 1993 in English and Swahili editions by Gatheru & Sons Publishing Company of Marakoi. The American press had been quick to report the appearance of my book and to accuse both the administration and the Pentagon of sullying my name and appropriating millions upon millions of tax dollars without Congressional approval, an eerie recapitulation of the flap that had attended my departure from the States in 1990. By this time, though, I was too busy taking care of my daughter and serving as Zarakal's Minister of Tourism and Intercultural Affairs to worry about the fuss and flutter in Washington, D.C.
Time, as it always does, passed.
On the fifteenth anniversary of my return from my stay among the habilines (the very date in August that Monicah, a.k.a. the Grub, had at the ripe old age of six chosen as her “official birthday"), I took my daughter to the spanking-new Sambusai Sands Convention and Recreational Centre on the shores of scenic Lake Kiboko. This was my birthday gift to her. She would soon be off to the States to resume her education at a private school in Kent, Connecticut, and I was hoping that a few days of paddleboating, Ping-Pong, shuffleboard, swimming, crocodile watching, and casino games would erase her melancholy mood.
Although White Sphinx had long ago purged me of my spirit-traveling episodes, I knew what Monicah was suffering. She dreamed as I had once dreamed. Not of her mother's cat-eat-chalicothere grasslands, however, but of a vivid utopian tomorrow whose inaccessibility sometimes frustrated her beyond bearing.
I, the past; she, the future. By nature Monicah was a cheerful child, whom both Jeannette and Anna had come to know and like, but in the wake of recent sociopolitical catastrophes (from which Zarakal, by means of a friendship treaty with the Pan-Arabian League and a strong leadership role in the East African Confederation Movement, had partly insulated itself) her dreams had increased in number, duration, and intensity. She was a tormented young woman, my Monicah. If this holiday did not rub the rust from the rose, I could not in good conscience send her off to school in Connecticut.