Michael Bishop: No Enemy But Time

Blair’s ashes were buried under the pedestal.

“Dirk Akuj,” the man on the ridge greeted me as I drew near. He was thin, coal-black in color, and ascetic-looking. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kampa.”

“It would have been more pleasant in the air-conditioned hotel.”

“But less private. And from here, sir, we can monitor your daughter’s leisurely progress across the lake.”

“What does my daughter have to do with this?” I demanded, angry.

“A lovely young woman. It surprises me, sir, that a famous person like you allows a famous person like her such free rein. The world is full of unscrupulous people.”

“Am I talking to one of them?”

“Don’t think ill of me, sir. There is no other like Monicah. Her safety should be a matter of great concern to all of us.”

“The year she was born, President Tharaka declared her a national resource, a national treasure. Those Sambusai warriors know that, and so does my man at the marina. Should anything happen to her on this outing, they will suffer the consequences.”

“Yes, sir—but would their punishments, including even their death, repay you for your daughter’s loss?”

“Nothing repays a parent the death of a child.” I took a freshly laundered, pale-pink kerchief from my pocket and wiped my brow. “What’s all this to you, Mr. Akuj? I don’t much like your questions.”

“I’m from White Sphinx.”

“I know that , Mr. Akuj. But you’re Zarakali, I think, and White Sphinx died fifteen years ago today.”

“Actually, Mr. Kampa, I’m a Karamojong from Uganda. That’s not terribly far from here, though, and I look upon this as my country too.” His eyes swept the lake, the desert, the eastern horizon. Then he nodded at another barren ridge inside the chain-link fence. “The Great Man died there, didn’t he?”

“Yes. A horrified American Geographic Foundation cameraman got it all on film. Blair stumbled while prospecting that embankment, toppled down and broke his neck.”

“Striving for the impossible.”

I shot Dirk Akuj an annoyed glance.

“He was striving for the impossible, don’t you think? He died on his very own Weightlessness Simulation Incline.”

“Who’s to say what’s impossible?” I asked testily.

“Who indeed? Not I, Mr. Kampa. White Sphinx, you should know, has been born again from Woody Kaprow’s ashes.”

This news stunned me because I had not known that Kaprow was dead. I had not heard from the physicist in eight or nine years, and had last seen him at Blair’s funeral in Marakoi, but I had always supposed he was incommunicado for security reasons. The U.S. government had shifted him into other lines of temporal research, and, happy as a ram in rut, he was rigorously pursuing these. So I had supposed.

“His ashes? He’s dead?”

“I was speaking metaphorically, Mr. Kampa, but we do feel certain Dr. Kaprow is dead. Eight years ago he failed to return from a mission undertaken at Dachau in West Germany. The mission was supposedly a test for certain improvements to the temporal-transfer machinery, but it now seems that Dr.

Kaprow insisted upon this dropback out of… call it ‘racial guilt.’ He went to join the martyrs.”

“And never came back?”

“No, sir. We think he purposely rejected that option.”

I scrutinized the young man’s face. “‘We’?”

“Like you, Mr. Kampa, I have dual citizenship. I am the assistant project director for the new incarnation of White Sphinx. My association with Dr. Kaprow began three years after yours ended.”

“You dream,” I said under my breath. “You spirit-travel.”

“I hallucinate, sir. It began when I was a seven-year-old child in a relief center in Karamoja, slowly starving to death.” He paused. “Does my story interest you? I would be happy to tell it.”

“Let’s get out of the sun.”

I led Dirk Akuj down from the ridge and along the lakeshore to the fence surrounding the protectorate.

Here I fumbled with my keys, unlocked the gate, and found a second key to admit us to Blair’s mud-and-wattle shack, now a sort of makeshift museum. Inside, we sat down at a rickety wooden table before a large cabinet containing mastodon tusks, suid teeth, and the skull and horn cores of a medium-sized buffalo, Homioceras nilssoni . Each item was tagged, but a visitor would search in vain for any hominid fossil other than a few jigsaw-puzzle skull fragments. At the cash register postcards featuring the bottomless grin of “ Homo zarakalensis ” were on sale. I moved to turn on the air-conditioning, for the hut was oppressive with heat and dust motes, but the Ugandan held up his hand.

“I will make my story brief, Mr. Kampa.”

Dirk Akuj explained that in the crowded relief center, after better than a month of watching skeletal children die of malnutrition, disease, and, sometimes, lovelessness, the night turned to plastic for him—here, illustratively, he tapped his scarab tie pin—and out of the melting indigo of his vision a delicate, almond-eyed savior took shape. This unlikely being swallowed Dirk Akuj with a laugh. The boy’s essence flowed into the blue tubing of the stranger’s esophagus, belly, and intestines. Then these organs turned themselves inside-out and unraveled a vast membrane of sky above the desert. Like a cloud, the boy was pulsed across this luminous membrane to a place where he dissolved into rain.

“Endless torrents of nonexistence,” to use my contact’s own words. He did not extract himself from this state—nor did he want to, ever again—until a merciless dawn in Karamoja awakened him to the clamor, dirt, and pathos of the relief center.

Three days later a slender Oriental male closely resembling the “savior” in Dirk Akuj’s dream, or hallucination, arrived in camp. This unusual-looking man, an anomaly among the bearded European photographers, whey-faced nuns, and unsympathetic black soldiers from Kampala, selected five children, seemingly at random, and spirited them out of the camp, out of Uganda, out of Africa.

“To the United States,” the man concluded.

“How?”

“It’s difficult to recall. With many official-looking papers and a persuasive manner. He was soft-spoken but very insistent and direct. He did not permit himself to be hassled, you see.”

“But what was his motive?”

Despite a Do Not Touch placard, Dirk Akuj lifted the tooth of an ancient warthog from the display cabinet and turned it between his fingers like a jewel. His only response to my question was a half-mocking, half-saintly smile.

“Only five?” I asked the Ugandan.

“He did what he could. I was raised in the family of a wealthy real-estate broker in Southern California. I continued to hallucinate my future. One such hallucination prophesied my meeting with Dr. Kaprow on a high school R.O.T.C. trip from San Bernadino, where we lived, to Edwards Air Force Base. And…” He let his voice trail off.

“And what?”

“And it came to pass.” He returned the suid tooth to the cabinet. “It is hot in here, isn’t it?”

“Why did you want to talk to me, Mr. Akuj?”

“Why don’t we resume our discussion in a more comfortable setting? This, sir, was just a get-acquainted session. I am also Uganda’s representative to the official opening of the Sambusai Sands. We’ll see each other this evening in the cabaret.” Before I could raise a protest, he glided to the door and out into the glare of late afternoon. “Wait a few minutes before following me back to the hotel, Mr. Kampa. I can let myself out.”