Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

The Bledsoes live in Little Rock, Arkansas. You would probably be a welcome visitor to their home, should you decide to approach them. Photographs of their son in his Seville Dependent High School Basketball uniform, his letter jacket, and his senior cap and gown—from a segregated civilian school in Montgomery, Alabama—decorate the walls of the Bledsoes’ paneled living room. I visited them five years ago, when I still had no inkling where you were, on the chance that you had somehow contrived to find them before I did.

Because LaVoy, Lucky James’s father, remembered Hugo from the days of their professional relationship on the flight line at Morón, the Bledsoes accepted me into their home. Neither LaVoy nor his wife Pauline believed that I had sought them out solely to renew an acquaintance that had never been very close to begin with. When I told them of Hugo’s death, they commiserated in a touchingly heartfelt way—but, while Pauline plied me with whiskey-and-7-Up cocktails, LaVoy asked harder and harder questions about the trouble I had gone to to find them, and I finally confessed that their dead son had a living heir.

This news did not shock or upset them. I think they were almost grateful for it. Which is why I believe you could step into their lives without wounding or discomfiting the Bledsoes. They are your grandparents, Johnny, and that night, when they asked me where you were, I had to confess my ignorance, my guilt, my sorrow. I wept unabashedly for ten to fifteen minutes, and Pauline—bless her—wept with me. We have written each other or exchanged telephone calls at least once a month ever since my visit, but I have not yet told them you are alive and presumably safe in another country. (Anna, after all, was not supposed to tell me.) That remains for you to do, if you believe they deserve this small consideration. To my mind, they do.

Lord, look how long this letter has grown. I’ve been working on it for three straight hours—while the streets of Madrid seem to be washing away under a heavy April rain. Después de Juan Carlos, el diluvio. The reign in Spain, I fain would claim, is not mainly on the wane. Nor the rain, either. But I am growing giddily weary of writing, as my prose shows, and I had better close. Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny.

— Eden in His Dreams.

See how stubbornly I resisted writing those words, how tenaciously I delayed the inevitable. Between writing “Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny” and the next four words, nearly an hour passed. The sky is perceptibly lightening, the rain slackening. And I have finally written the phrase upon which this entire epistle teeters, even if that four-word fulcrum seems more than a tad off-center.

Johnny, forgive me. You will never fully understand how much I regret what I did, nor how dearly you have made me pay for that error. I am sorry for the pain I caused you, sorry for the pain I have reaped myself. If we should ever see each other again, I will probably not be able to speak of some of these things. This is why I have written about them at such stupid, even stupefying, length. You have an immense extended family, but though I have hurt you with one ill-considered act, and bewildered you by evolving from one sort of person into another (as I had to do), I hope that you will not exclude me forever from a place in this family. I belong there, too. In spite of everything, Johnny, I belong there, too.

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 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.”