Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

His stomach dropped, but he did not cry out. Instead, his hand crept through the darkness to turn on the floor lamp next to the sagging bed.

Click!

In the electric light’s yellow glare John-John saw a mirror in which his own dark face was reflected. The expression on the face betrayed his fear.

Hugo was gone. Further, the Dodge Dart was not in the parking lot outside the cabin. Benumbed by this inexplicable desertion, John-John stood in the open doorway staring at the small, swordfish-shaped neon sign burning red and violet above the motel’s office building. He stood there for a long time, watching automobiles go by on the highway and waiting for one that looked like the Dart. He felt no panic, for he believed implicitly that Hugo would return for him.

Eventually a Florida state trooper arrived at the motel. He came to John-John with Hugo’s room key and the news that his father had just had a serious automobile accident several miles to the west.

Later, after Hugo had died without recovering consciousness, the Monegals were able to reconstruct the sequence of events culminating in the accident. John-John and the state police were instrumental in providing the details that made this story cohere.

Possessed by a desire for vengeance, Hugo had waited for John-John to fall asleep. At last convinced that the boy was dozing, or perhaps even spirit-traveling, he had left the motel and driven back along the highway toward Ritki’s Gift & Souvenir Emporium. Before reaching the compound, however, he turned onto a side road, a mere red-clay gash in the pine forest, and parked. Darkness and clustering foliage concealed the car.

Carrying the Remington 30.06 he had bought in Wyoming for his hunting trips and poaching expeditions with Pete Grier, Hugo climbed the little hill behind the animal ranch. At the top of the hill, crouching beneath the fanlike branches of the trees, he had a clear moonlit view of the cage containing the rhesus monkeys. He took a sighting and fired. One of the monkeys—ironically, the female—slammed into the back of the cage, almost as if it had been thrown against a wall, and the entire compound erupted in a hysterical chirping, howling, and braying.

As Hugo stumbled back down the hill, a battery of klieg lights flashed on, illuminating the entire complex and a formidable swatch of highway.

John-John’s father fled the scene, obviously intending to return to the motel, but driving recklessly fast.

Three or four miles from Ritki’s he was intercepted by a trooper going in the opposite direction. The trooper braked, wrestled his car about, and set off after the Dart at high speed, siren and tires screaming.

The night came alive with the spooky, peacocklike cries and the revolving blue strobes of one willful machine prodding another to the brink of self-annihilation. Even when the superior horsepower of the state vehicle had plainly decided the outcome of their contest, Hugo kept gunning the accelerator. The result was that the Dart capsized, fired one rear tire off its rim into the woods, and pinned Hugo beneath the steering column and the spectacularly dimpled roof.

Back from her sabbatical in New York, Jeannette was waiting for John-John when he finally got home.

Anna was there, too, as distraught as he had ever seen her. By this time Hugo was slowly, painstakingly dying, and no one knew what to say to anybody else to alter, disguise, or soften this fact. It was not Jeannette’s fault, John-John knew. No, of course not; it was definitely not his mother’s fault. But from that moment he began withdrawing from Jeannette; and later, when it seemed to him that she had taken steps to sacrifice him to her ambition, he did not find it difficult to close the door on his life with the Monegals and to run away from home.

Theevening that Helen returned my pistol I was as nervous as a seventeen-year-old virgin. My confusion had a simple source: I did not know what mode of approach and receptivity must prevail between us.

This confusion, baldly stated, has certain humorous overtones that I did not fully appreciate at the time.

Pair bonding, as I believe I have shown, was a common feature of the habiline lifestyle. Although the resident cock of the wadi, or alpha male, might with impunity coerce somebody else’s cutie into his clutches, he usually had a favorite among these rotating concubines. In Alfie’s case, of course, this was Emily, and after Genly’s death she became his permanent live-in.

Observing this, I decided that Alfie had had designs upon Emily from the beginning, but that his status among the Minids and his uneasy relationship with Genly had not permitted him to surrender to out-and-out monogamy. To have done so would have been to risk another serious run-in with his only real rival among the men, for Genly was not so cowed as he sometimes contrived to appear. Therefore, not only to reaffirm his preeminence in the band but also to minimize the chances of a savage knock-down-drag-out with Genly, Alfie had had to bestow his affections upon Guinevere and Nicole as well as Emily.

Inadvertently, then, I had helped provide Alfie with an escape from the prison of his own power. He no longer had to lord it over the wives of Jomo and Fred in order to underscore his chieftancy, for Jomo was too old and Fred too young to represent genuine threats to his leadership. Variety being a much-sought-after spice, Alfie did not completely forgo the company of other ladies while establishing a household with Emily, but his philandering took on a decidedly illicit cast, occurring out of doors and catch-as-catch-can rather than by invitation in the sacrosanct confines of his hut. He was a changed and seemingly happier man.

So was I, albeit a confused one, too. Wherefore my confusion?

First, without deliberately engaging in voyeurism, I had seen plenty. The habilines were an uninhibited people. Their natural rhythms, if you will pardon a phrase with an unhappy history, had an immediate outlet in their personal relationships. Couples coupled when coupling called. Ordinarily they sought privacy in which to answer this summons, but not always. Anyone with eyes would eventually learn that Minid males pressed their suits from behind and that, in order to facilitate disengagement should a dinothere come dithering along or a porcupine prickling past, partners often remained upright. Although I, too, placed a premium on survival, these approaches were not my style.

Second, they were not invariably the Minids’ style, either. Sometimes a couple disappeared into a strip of forest, where in a half-hidden bower they lay side by side on plaitings of savannah grass and rocked in each other’s arms like children afraid of the dark. (I had once stepped on Malcolm and Miss Jane so disposed.) Was this a nocturne of love or merely a melody of mutual consolation? I did not know, but I had a hunch that among the Minids now, eyes had more to say to them than rump or pubic promontories.

Granted, they could still find pleasure in the backward amorousness favored even today by Kalahari Bushmen, but their options seemed to be increasing, their tastes growing more catholic. Slowly, however; very slowly.

Third, despite all I had witnessed and surmised, I did not yet know if habiline women enjoyed a state of constant sexual receptivity or if they were the love slaves of an estrous cycle. Had Alfie invited Emily, Guinevere, and Nicole in and out of his hut in solitary heats because no other arrangement afforded him the unadulterated pleasure of their company? Or did he, requiring a brief recuperative respite as surely as the next man, order these entries and withdrawals in accordance with a tyrannical cycle of his own?