Michael Bishop: No Enemy But Time

“You told him about the Grub?”

“He already knew, Joshua.”

“How?”

“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.”

“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.

Withmy 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.