Futures Near and Far (7 page)

There were occasional times, as menopause approached and I wondered what would have happened
if I had married my college
sweetheart and stayed in the United States, that I wasn’t totally
content with the alternative I’d chosen. But I was able to answer KoCherop
honestly, “I do what I do because I want to. My work fulfills me.”

She shook her head, mystified. “I could never be like that. Take me from my clan and this dirt and I
would die.”

We stopped in the shade of the escarpment, where we were
relatively inconspicuous but nevertheless had an unobstructed view of the road. Greg got out quickly, looked
toward the rear of the truck, and groaned.

“I thought that last mile was a mite rough,” he said. I walked around to his side, and saw that we had a
flat tire.

“A gift from the Samburu?” I suggested.

“Could be. Most likely the frigging road.” He opened up the rear of the Land Rover. “Last spare,” he
said, which we both knew already. I checked the map to measure the
distance to Lake Victoria, and gnawed at my inner lip.

I began to help him, but he convinced me to relax, and in exchange I would drive the remaining short
leg until sundown. KoCherop and I found a relatively comfortable spot in
the talus a few yards away, where I spread out the last of our fresh fruit, as
well as bread and, most important of all, a jug of water. The flies were
overjoyed at the repast.

KoCherop ate a piece of fruit, a treat even in good seasons and a part of her diet of which she had
surely been totally deprived lately, drank her fill, and turned to look
at the plain.

“Have more,” I said.

She didn’t answer. Occasionally her glance would dart toward
the north, where we had now left the last of the Pokot lands behind. She began
taking apart her head-band, running the beads off the ends of their threads one
by one and flicking them away.

I am ashamed to confess that my own appetite was ravenous,
and when I was certain my friend was not going to touch another bite, I saw to
it that the ants had nothing more than stems and gleaned rinds to attack. The
sand at the edge of the talus was now vivid with specks of color, an
inadvertent piece of artwork created by KoCherop’s cast-off beads, each one a
particle of the life she knew, gone. I made sure not to disturb it as I walked
back to check on Greg.

He was cinching the last nut. I handed him his canteen. He
drained it. “Next time we bring a chauffeur,” he joked, slightly breathless.

“We’re losing her,” I told him. “She’s just waiting until
the wind calls her name and takes her away.”

He stowed the tire iron. “Well,” he murmured, “the choice is
hers now, isn’t it? You can’t make it for her.”

The words seemed callous, but I had no answer for them at
the time. KoCherop was waiting for the world to conform to her desires, not
unlike the scientists who had created the Termite bacteria. But the world has
ways of turning the tables back around. Now it was mankind’s, and KoCherop’s,
turn to adapt, and she was refusing.

Brooding, I assisted Greg in lifting the flat tire into the
Land Rover. The winds of upper Kenya had arrived with their usual vigor,
hurrying us toward the next leg of our journey.

We were walking along the bank of a river. The drought had
been severe for three years, and now the watercourse contained only sand,
pocked with pits where the tribespeople had dug to reach the watertable. Now
even those holes were desiccated. Thirty years before, when I had still lived
here, the river had been lined with grass and overhung by broad, leafy acacias.
Now even the stumps were gone.

Ironically, it was the industrialized nations that had benefitted from the modified
E. coli
. The sugar industry no longer had to boil away
ninety percent of the raw cane during refining. Grains no longer had to be as
thoroughly processed. But in the Third World bureaucrats became dangerously lax
in educating the people about the need for population control, and the added
demand for wood exacerbated the already severe deforestation problem. The
climate had rebelled.

Cherop, the granddaughter for whom my friend had been
renamed, skipped along ahead of us, always alert for a sunning lizard or a
pretty stone. We were solemn in spite of the child’s exuberance. KoCherop’s
husband had died two months before. This was my first visit since that event,
and our conversation had awakened some of KoCherop’s sense of loss. Now we just
walked, thinking about the changes brought by time. It was young Cherop who
broke the silence.

“Look!” she cried, pointing. Not far off the path, partially
hidden in a thorn bramble, stood a termite mound.

Assured that we were watching, she ran over to it and began
climbing. The mound was nearly three times as tall as she, rising into a dozen
eroded towers. A hyena or aardwolf had dug a burrow at its base; birds had done
the same, on a smaller scale, in its heights. The termites themselves had
abandoned the site. Cherop explored the structure as much as the thorns would
allow, no doubt hoping that one of the nests would still contain something
interesting.

I smiled. The girl gave
me a big, toothless grin, breaking off a small projection to demonstrate
her strength, offering the dust to the wind.

I turned to KoCherop, and stage by stage my smile faded. I
had never seen such a bitter look on her face.

“What’s wrong?”

“I wish that all the termites had died ten thousand years
ago. Then maybe your people would never have thought of a way to make us like
insects.”

It felt like I had been stung. The worst part of it was that
she seemed unaware that she was hurting me. I could not avoid blurting out a
response.

“Maybe if your people had stopped having so many babies, my
people wouldn’t have tried to solve your problems.”

We reached an armed checkpoint shortly before dusk. An
overweight minor officer, skin so oily it gleamed, examined our papers with a
frown, peering repeatedly at our vehicle’s
contents. He spared KoCherop a disinterested glance, mostly toward her
breasts. Greg bribed him with two packs of American cigarettes and we were on
our way. “Wish it could be that easy at the
border,” said my husband. We camped not far down the road, reasoning
that bandits might be discouraged by the proximity of the checkpoint.

It was crowded in the back of the Land Rover. I slept
between Greg and KoCherop, listening to the wind moan and the crickets trill,
unable to sleep. KoCherop’s scent evoked memories. It is strange that an entire
tribe can have an identifiable essence. When I had lived with them year round I
had become oblivious to it.

I thought about the city, trying to picture KoCherop walking
to the supermarket, wearing a cotton smock, smelling the civilized odors of
cement and auto exhaust. What kind of fool was I to think that, simply because
I loved her, I could succeed in transferring a human being from her culture
into mine?

Greg woke and crawled out
of the vehicle. Soon I heard the muffled, rain-on-the-roof sound of
urine splattering dust. I glanced at
KoCherop. Even in the dim illumination I could see the determined, stubborn
tension in her shoulders, and I became angry.

“Damn it,” I murmured. “What more do you want me to do?
It’s not my fault
.”

She didn’t stir, but something in the stillness of her
breathing hinted that she was awake. But after Greg returned and began snoring,
I convinced myself that I had imagined it.

In the distance, I was certain I heard a hyena laughing,
like a ghost of Africa of old.

The refugee camp was a sea of humanity. Our guide was a
young doctor who, judging from his haggard cheeks and the red in his eyes, had
not slept in four days. Somehow he kept his humor as we threaded through the
crowd from checkpoint to checkpoint, trying to find Lokomol and the rest of
KoCherop’s family.

A little girl, bloated with kwashiorkor, stared at me as I
passed. I turned away — from her and from all the faces, keeping my glance on
the doctor. Here and there sat a lucky family with a tent or blanket to shade
themselves; for the most part the refugees simply lay on the packed ground
beneath an open sky, waiting until the next shipment of food arrived at the
distribution point, or until the doctors received a fresh supply of basic
medicines.

Some attempt had been made to funnel members of various
tribal groups into specific areas of the camp. Otherwise we might never have
found Lokomol.

He was sitting with his youngest daughter propped in his lap. I spotted him immediately; his lean
features and long fingers closely
resembled his mother. He was, much to my relief, apparently in good
health.

“We came as soon as we got your message,” I said. “We’ve arranged for transportation to take you to
the camp near Kampala. It’s much better supplied than this one.”

“You have always been good to us, Chemachugwo,” he answered
pensively. “But it is for my mother that I sent for you.”

“Why isn’t she with you?”

He shrugged.

Knowing KoCherop, I understood completely. “You want me to
try to bring her?”

He nodded. “I am ashamed to ask this of you, but you are the
only person I have ever known who can make my mother listen.”

“
Wake up,
Janet.”

It was Greg’s voice, coming from the other end of a long
tunnel. I peeled my eyes open. The morning light was unforgivably bright.

“Time for breakfast,” Greg said for the second time. “I want
to get to the border well before dusk.”

I moaned, rubbed the grit from my lashes, and went about the
meal like a zombie, hoping that my headache would soon go away. KoCherop sat
nearby. I noticed that she ate a full share this time, but otherwise I avoided
paying much attention to her. The border
crossing was enough to think about, I told myself.

“You are sad, Janet,” KoCherop said during a moment when Greg
was out of hearing range.

“That’s true,” I replied, and turned to clean my bowl.

“Janet?”

“Yes?”

“I am sorry.”

I looked at her, frowned, and climbed into the Land Rover. I
was sorry, too, but what good was that? I didn’t answer her. She had nothing to
add, and we didn’t speak for the rest of the morning.

By noon we began to see grass and brush. The air closed in,
a sign of humidity. Greg spotted a flamingo in flight. Suddenly we crested a
hill and saw Lake Victoria sprawling into the distance.

KoCherop’s eyes went
wide. It was easy to understand why.

“Where is the other side?” she whispered.

The shore to which she referred was over two hundred miles
away, lost over the horizon. The lake was so vast that it could generate its
own climate, moistening the adjacent countryside that would otherwise have been
as arid as the region from which we had emerged.

It was one more new thing to overwhelm her, I thought
bitterly.

KoCherop stared at the lake for almost an hour, while I
stayed locked in my own preoccupations. She startled me when she called for us
to stop.

“I want to look at that,” she said.

We had reached a particularly good vantage point from which
to view the lake. KoCherop got out of the vehicle and walked to the edge of the
road. Just in front of her the land dropped off abruptly. I could see jagged
rocks down below. My friend stood where one more step would send her tumbling
over the edge. Suddenly my insides clenched.

“Greg!” I cried.

“Give her a moment,” he said in a voice that struck me as
far too calm.

I held my breath,
prepared at any time to shut my eyes and cover my ears. Again Greg,
though observing carefully, seemed much too unruffled. Then, bit by bit, I
began to see it as he did.

Her posture was no longer stiff. She stared at the lake not
as if overwhelmed or contemplating suicide, but as I had the first time I had
seen this, the second largest body of fresh water in the world — with awe and
delight. I realized then that her demeanor had been different all day, but I,
in my melancholy, had failed to notice.

She turned and walked
toward me, her back straight, her eyes bright.

“Will I have my own room in Kampala?” she asked.

I felt a smile tugging at my lips. This was the KoCherop I
had once known, someone with hope for the years to come. “Yes,” I replied. “A
big one.”

“Good,” she said crisply, and climbed into the Land Rover. I
thought back to the beads she had cast away the previous day. Not particles of
life, thrown away in order to embrace Death,
but bits of the past, dropped by the wayside to make room for the
future. KoCherop was willing to adapt. The tightness in my throat melted away.

“Let’s go
home,” I told Greg.

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I am a karate
guy. Have been one now for forty years. This story was purchased for
publication by Jim Baen. At the time I sent the manuscript to him, I had no
idea he had been a karate guy as well in his younger days. Nice when things
work out that way.

He is tall and lanky, with arms like an ape, an ideal body
for null gravity karate. As soon as we hear the command to start he launches
from his side of the sphere. I see his fist heading for my face.

He is squinting, body tense, gathering all his energy into
the movement. I exhale sharply, the action moving my head backward. I don’t
block as much as push, one hand diverting his strike, the other pressing his
shoulder. The technique sends him gliding back across the combat area, and
presses me more firmly against the plexiglas under my feet. I sink into a squat
and leapfrog toward him.

We meet at the center. His arms are everywhere. In seconds
we are in a hopeless tangle. I place one good strike to the ribs, but the
judges miss it. Without fully intending it, we push away from each other once
again. I get two hands on the velcro and stop my motion.