Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

Joshua gestured the Sambusai herdsmen to the left. He tried to see the apparatus hanging at the heart of The Machine through their eyes. This was not impossible because he himself did not fully understand either the placement of the various parts or the rationale behind their design. The Sambusai could scarcely be more baffled than he. Nor had the act of plugging himself into the components of this equipment—as the only living element in the assembly—revealed to him the mystery powering its weird gestalt. His dreams may have led him to this place—to this jumped-up dynamo of Woody Kaprow’s fevered invention—but his dreams had not yet enabled him to fathom the technology. He, Joshua Kampa, was not only a part of that technology but also its essential payload.

How did you explain these notions to a pair of spear-carrying herdsmen who had astutely pointed out that Western-style clothes were fart-confining? Yes, how?

“H. G. Wells revisited,” Joshua said. “It’s a time machine. Only trouble is, you have to be me to use it.”

At present most of the machinery arranged in the vehicle’s cargo section was deployed at eye level or higher. A pair of heavy metal rotors mounted in movable boxes on opposite walls met in the middle of the van; their interlocking blades half enclosed a platform suspended from the ceiling by a pair of extensible aluminum tubes. In operation the platform rose and fell inside the toroidal fields of the rotors, which themselves moved in synchrony with the platform.

“Kaprow calls those rotors Egg Beaters, at least when he’s talking to me. The platform he calls The Swing, even though it doesn’t. It just goes up and down. He also calls it the Backstep Scaffold, though, and that pretty accurately describes its function.”

One of the Sambusai put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder, whether to silence him or to offer comradely reassurance he could not tell. Then the warrior dropped his hand and muttered at his companion. They were bored with the tour. The Egg Beaters, the Backstep Scaffold, and all the attendant paraphernalia—coils, tubing, insulation, motors, and whatnot—were complex all right, but you could take them in visually with a couple of sweeps of the eyes. In the absence of comprehensible explanations, the machinery had no magic for the Sambusai tourists.

But what had they expected? A wet bar with Coca-Cola, 7-Up, and seltzer water? A picture gallery of Walt Disney characters? A display of modern weapons?

Who could possibly guess?

“I’m afraid that’s all there is to it,” Joshua said. “Sorry we can’t give you a demonstration.”

Nodding farewell to Rick, he pointed the herders to the exit. They emerged smiling, pleased with themselves for having explored The Machine, even if it had not altogether thrilled them. Joshua noticed that before returning to their comrade in the silver helmet they conferred briefly with Blair, who was sitting on the running board in the shade of Kaprow’s open door. Soon all three warriors, reunited, were shooing their cattle out of the roadway, herding the animals out of the Lake Kiboko Protectorate toward the southwest.

“At last,” said Kaprow, starting the omnibus.

Later, in the cab, Joshua asked Blair what the drivers had said to him before allowing their caravans to proceed.

“They wanted to know the purpose of the machinery.”

“What did you tell them?” Kaprow asked.

“That it’s a very expensive means of making contact with our ancestors.”

“And?” Joshua wondered aloud.

“I’m afraid they laughed. You heard them, didn’t you? The entire idea is ridiculous to them because they get in touch with their ancestors through ritual incantations and dreams. To require the assistance of so much metal and glass and plastic, well, that indicates to them that we must be painfully backward.”

“Not ‘we,’ sir. ‘You.’ All I’ve ever needed is my dreams, and that’s why I’m here.”

“He’s right,” Kaprow said.

“Of course,” Blair responded. “Of course.”

Surprised by his own bitter querulousness, Joshua watched a jumbled ridge fall away to the left and the lake appear before their caravan like a huge spill of mercury. The western wall of the Great Rift Valley seemed far, far away, an arid lunar battlement.

Lunar battlement…

This image reminded Joshua of the day, nearly eighteen months ago, when Blair had first escorted him to a meeting with President Tharaka. The morning had begun with the paleoanthropologist and his baffled American protégé blinking in the ferocious sunlight parching the parade ground outside the cinderblock building in which Joshua had been living since his arrival, five weeks before, in Zarakal. The heat was unlike the heat of the Gulf Coast, and he did not know if he would ever get used to it. Although he was pigmented like a native, that accident of birth did not seem to help very much. Maybe later, when he was acclimated.

“Ah. Here come the WaBenzi,” Blair had said.

“The WaBenzi? What are the WaBenzi?”

“My colleagues in the ministries, Joshua. Minor local officials. Jackals highly enough placed to demand a little dash.”

“Dash, sir? What’s that?”

Sliding his thumb and forefinger together silkily, Alistair Patrick Blair nodded at the motorcade of sleek black vehicles coming through the main gate of Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base. Beyond the gate, the bare candelabra of sisal plants lined one side of the melting asphalt strip to Marakoi, while on the other side the salt flat stretched away toward an unconfirmed rumor of the Indian Ocean. Joshua noted that the automobiles in the motorcade were all Mercedes-Benzes.

“Dash is bribery?”

Blair affirmed this deduction with a grunt.

“President Tharaka is susceptible to bribery?”

“Only on a large scale. How else do you suppose the United States managed to place its bases here?”

“You’re not immune to a little dash dealing either, are you?”

The Great Man bridled, slipped voodoo needles into Joshua’s body with his eyes. “I was referring to the bounders in the motorcade, Kampa. The provincial commissioner, the district officer, the minister of science, and the other pettifogging mucky-mucks who’ve come up here from Marakoi for the day.”

“You sound like a closet Klansman.”

“Rubbish, Joshua! The WaBenzi are a persistent scourge on the backs of our citizenry. I’d despise their venality even if it came cloaked in Anglo-Saxon pinkness. You can stop that adolescent smirking. It’s a measure of your ignorance.”

“My ignorance? About what?”

“Africa. I’m a white man, granted, but this is my bloody country, and these are my people. You’re a black man, but you’re still a cultural dilettante and an outsider when it comes to comprehending what you see here.”

Joshua said, “That’ll put me in my place.”

Blair expressed his contempt for this comeback by snorting like a bush pig. Meanwhile, the President’s cavalcade—eight automobiles and a pair of khaki-clad outriders on motorcycles—passed behind a row of whitewashed administration buildings and turned onto an access road leading to the testing ranges in the salt flats. Two American air policemen on motorcycles and a navy-blue staff car belonging to the base commander had joined the procession at the main gate, and they were dutifully bringing up the rear, maintaining a discreet distance between themselves and the WaBenzi. This was a low-key reception for the leader of the air base’s host country, but Mzee Tharaka, the fabled Zarakali freedom fighter, vacillated between pomp and austerity in matters of governance, and you could never be sure what occasions would provoke which response. Today, apparently, it was a little of both, a motorcade but no fanfare.