Stephen Baxter - Space

“But you see the irony, Malenfant. We travelers return from the stars to this dismal posttechnological future — a world of illiterates — and yet I find myself a prisoner of an empire that lists the acts of every citizen as pure unadorned numbers. This may look like Eden to you; in fact it is a dread, soulless metropolis!”

The Uprights were laughing together. Malenfant could hear their voices, oddly monotonous, their jabbered speech.

“Their talk is simple,” Malenfant said.

“Yes. Direct and nonabstract. Sweet, isn’t it? About the level of a six-year-old human child.”

“What are they, de Bonneville?”

“Can’t you tell? They make me shudder. They are physically beautiful, of course. The women are sometimes compliant… Here. More pombe.”

“No.”

They sat in the cooling night, an old man and an invalid, stranded out of time, as in the distance the Uprights clustered around their fire, tall and elegant.

Malenfant agreed to travel with Pierre de Bonneville to Usavara, the hunting village of the Kabaka, and from there to the capital, Rubaga. Rubaga was the source of those radiation anomalies Malenfant had observed from orbit.

The next day they rowed out of the bay. De Bonneville’s canoe was superb, and Magassa, the Upright, drummed an accompaniment to the droning chant of the oarsmen.

Malenfant, sitting astern, felt as if he had wandered into a theme park.

About two kilometers along the shore from Usavara, the hunting village, Malenfant saw what had to be thousands of Waganda — which was, de Bonneville said, this new race’s name for members of their tribe. They were standing to order on the shore in two dense lines, at the ends of which stood several finely dressed men in crimson and black and snowy white. As the canoes neared the beach, arrows flew in the air. Kettle and bass drums sounded a noisy welcome, and flags and banners waved.

When they landed, de Bonneville led Malenfant up the beach. They were met by an old woman, short and bent. She was dressed in a crimson robe that covered a white dress of bleached cotton. De Bonneville kneeled before this figure and told Malenfant she was the katekiro: a kind of prime minister to the Kabaka.

The katekiro’s face was a wizened mask.

“Holy shit. Nemoto. ” It was her; Malenfant had no doubt about it.

When she looked closely at Malenfant, her eyes widened, and she turned away. She would not meet his eyes again.

De Bonneville watched them curiously.

The katekiro motioned with her head and, amid a clamor of beaten drums, Malenfant and de Bonneville walked into the village.

They reached a circle of grass-thatched huts surrounding a large house, which Malenfant was told would be his quarters. They were going to stay here a night, before moving inland. Nemoto left as soon as she could, and Malenfant didn’t get to speak to her.

When Malenfant emerged from his hut he found gifts from the Kabaka: bunches of bananas, milk, sweet potatoes, green Indian corn, rice, fresh eggs, and ten pots of maramba wine.

Reid Malenfant, cradling his NASA pressure suit under his arm, felt utterly disoriented. And the presence of Nemoto, a human being he’d known a thousand years before, somehow only enhanced his sense of the bizarre.

He laughed, picked up a pot of wine, and went to bed.

The next day they walked inland, toward the capital.

Malenfant found himself trekking across a vast bowl of grass. The road was a level strip two meters wide, cutting through jungle and savannah. It had, it seemed, been built for the Kabaka’s hunting excursions. Some distance away there was a lake, small and brackish, and beyond that a range of hills, climbing into mountains. The lower flanks of the mountains were cloaked in forest; their summits were wreathed in clouds. The domelike huts of the Waganda were buried deep in dense bowers of plantains — flat leaves and green flowers — that filled the air with the cloying stink of overripe fruit.

Malenfant heard a remote bellowing.

He saw animals stalking across the plain, two or three kilometers away. They might have been elephants; they were huge and gray, and tusks gleamed white in the gray light of the predawn sky. The tusks turned downward, unlike the zoo animals Malenfant remembered.

He asked de Bonneville about the animals.

De Bonneville grunted. “Those are deinotherium. The elephant things. Genetic archaeology.”

Malenfant tried to observe all this, to memorize the way back to the coast. But he found it hard to concentrate on what he was seeing.

Nemoto: God damn. She’d surely recognized him. But she’d barely acknowledged his existence, and during this long walk across Africa, he couldn’t find a way to get close to her.

After three hours’ march, they came into view of a flat-topped hill that cast a long shadow across the countryside. The hill was crowned by a cluster of tall, conical grass huts, walled by a cane fence. This hilltop village, de Bonneville said, was the capital, Rubaga; the hill itself was known as Wanpamba’s Tomb. Rubaga struck Malenfant as a sinister, brooding place, out of sympathy with the lush green countryside it ruled.

In the center of the hilltop cluster of huts stood a bigger building. Evidently this was the imperial palace. To Malenfant it looked like a Kansas barn. Fountains thrust up into the air around the central building, like handfuls of diamonds catching the light. That struck Malenfant as odd. Fountains? Where did the power for fountains come from?

Broad avenues radiated down the hill’s flanks. The big avenues blended into lower-grade roads, which cut across the countryside. Malenfant saw that much of the traffic — pedestrians and ox carts — was directed along these radiating roads, toward and away from the capital.

Two of the bigger roads, to east and west, seemed more rutted and damaged than the rest, as if they bore heavy traffic. The eastern road didn’t ascend the hill itself but rather entered a tunnel cut into the hillside. It looked like it was designed for delivering supplies of some sort to a mine or quarry inside the bulk of the hill, or maybe for hauling ore out of there. In fact he saw a caravan of several heavy covered carts, drawn by laboring bullocks, dragging its way along the eastern road. It reminded Malenfant of a twenty-mule team hauling bauxite out of Death Valley.

They proceeded up the hill, along one of the big avenues. The ground was a reddish clay. The avenue was fenced with tall water-cane set together in uniform rows.

People crowded the avenues. The Waganda wore brown robes or white dresses, some with white goatskins over their brown robes, and others with cords folded like a turban around their heads. They didn’t show much curiosity about de Bonneville’s party. Evidently a traveler was a big deal out in Usavara, out in the sticks, but here in the capital everyone was much too cool to pay attention.

There wasn’t so much as a TV aerial or a Coke machine in sight. But de Bonneville surprised Malenfant by telling him that people here could live to be as old as 150 years.

“We have been to the stars, and have returned. Rubaga might look primitive, but it is deceptive. We are living on the back of a thousand years’ progress in science and technology. Plus what we bought from the Gaijin, and others. It is invisible — embedded in the fabric of the world — but it’s here. For instance, many diseases have been eradicated. And, thanks to genetic engineering, aging has been slowed down greatly.”

“What about the Uprights?”

“What?”

“What life span can they expect?”

De Bonneville looked irritated. “Thirty or forty years, I suppose. What does it matter? I’m talking about Homo Sapiens, Malenfant.”