Sometimes, though, he wondered. Several months back, in the barracks at Russell-Tharaka, Rick had told Joshua that he could not imagine why anyone would go to war over such godforsaken territory. Step outside Marakoi and the ritzier sections of Bravanumbi (Rick had found two ritzy sections there), and Zarakal was your typical desert hell hole. Its world-famous big-game animals were being hunted to extinction or dying off naturally, and in another hundred years the Sahara would have crept so far south that half of Africa would consist of nothing but sand dunes. By then, according to Rick, Zarakal would be a sort of subsilicate Atlantis, submerged if not forgotten, and Uncle Sam's initial investment would be utterly lost.
Joshua gestured the Sambusai herdsmen to the left. He tried to see the apparatus hanging at the heart of The Machine through their eyes. This was not impossible because he himself did not fully understand either the placement of the various parts or the rationale behind their design. The Sambusai could scarcely be more baffled than he. Nor had the act of plugging himself into the components of this equipment—as the only living element in the assembly—revealed to him the mystery powering its weird gestalt. His dreams may have led him to this place—to this jumped-up dynamo of Woody Kaprow's fevered invention—but his dreams had not yet enabled him to fathom the technology. He, Joshua Kampa, was not only a part of that technology but also its essential payload.
How did you explain these notions to a pair of spear-carrying herdsmen who had astutely pointed out that Western-style clothes were fart-confining? Yes, how?
“H. G. Wells revisited,” Joshua said. “It's a time machine. Only trouble is, you have to be me to use it.”
At present most of the machinery arranged in the vehicle's cargo section was deployed at eye level or higher. A pair of heavy metal rotors mounted in movable boxes on opposite walls met in the middle of the van; their interlocking blades half enclosed a platform suspended from the ceiling by a pair of extensible aluminum tubes. In operation the platform rose and fell inside the toroidal fields of the rotors, which themselves moved in synchrony with the platform.
“Kaprow calls those rotors Egg Beaters, at least when he's talking to me. The platform he calls The Swing, even though it doesn't. It just goes up and down. He also calls it the Backstep Scaffold, though, and that pretty accurately describes its function.”
One of the Sambusai put a hand on Joshua's shoulder, whether to silence him or to offer comradely reassurance he could not tell. Then the warrior dropped his hand and muttered at his companion. They were bored with the tour. The Egg Beaters, the Backstep Scaffold, and all the attendant paraphernalia—coils, tubing, insulation, motors, and whatnot—were complex all right, but you could take them in visually with a couple of sweeps of the eyes. In the absence of comprehensible explanations, the machinery had no magic for the Sambusai tourists.
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But what had they expected? A wet bar with Coca-Cola, 7-Up, and seltzer water? A picture gallery of Walt Disney characters? A display of modern weapons?
Who could possibly guess?
“I'm afraid that's all there is to it,” Joshua said. “Sorry we can't give you a demonstration.”
Nodding farewell to Rick, he pointed the herders to the exit. They emerged smiling, pleased with themselves for having explored The Machine, even if it had not altogether thrilled them. Joshua noticed that before returning to their comrade in the silver helmet they conferred briefly with Blair, who was sitting on the running board in the shade of Kaprow's open door. Soon all three warriors, reunited, were shooing their cattle out of the roadway, herding the animals out of the Lake Kiboko Protectorate toward the southwest.
“At last,” said Kaprow, starting the omnibus.
* * * *
“They wanted to know the purpose of the machinery.”
“What did you tell them?” Kaprow asked.
“That it's a very expensive means of making contact with our ancestors.”
“And?” Joshua wondered aloud.
“I'm afraid they laughed. You heard them, didn't you? The entire idea is ridiculous to them because they get in touch with their ancestors through ritual incantations and dreams. To require the assistance of so much metal and glass and plastic, well, that indicates to them that we must be painfully backward.”
“Not ‘we,’ sir. ‘You.’ All I've ever needed is my dreams, and that's why I'm here.”
“He's right,” Kaprow said.
“Of course,” Blair responded. “Of course.”
Surprised by his own bitter querulousness, Joshua watched a jumbled ridge fall away to the left and the lake appear before their caravan like a huge spill of mercury. The western wall of the Great Rift Valley seemed far, far away, an arid lunar battlement.
Lunar battlement...
This image reminded Joshua of the day, nearly eighteen months ago, when Blair had first escorted him to a meeting with President Tharaka. The morning had begun with the paleoanthropologist and his baffled American protégé blinking in the ferocious sunlight parching the parade ground outside the cinderblock building in which Joshua had been living since his arrival, five weeks before, in Zarakal. The heat was unlike the heat of the Gulf Coast, and he did not know if he would ever get used to it. Although he was pigmented like a native, that accident of birth did not seem to help very much. Maybe later, when he was acclimated.
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“Ah. Here come the WaBenzi,” Blair had said.
“The WaBenzi? What are the WaBenzi?”
“My colleagues in the ministries, Joshua. Minor local officials. Jackals highly enough placed to demand a little dash.”
“Dash, sir? What's that?”
Sliding his thumb and forefinger together silkily, Alistair Patrick Blair nodded at the motorcade of sleek black vehicles coming through the main gate of Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base. Beyond the gate, the bare candelabra of sisal plants lined one side of the melting asphalt strip to Marakoi, while on the other side the salt flat stretched away toward an unconfirmed rumor of the Indian Ocean. Joshua noted that the automobiles in the motorcade were all Mercedes-Benzes.
“Dash is bribery?”
Blair affirmed this deduction with a grunt.
“President Tharaka is susceptible to bribery?”
“Only on a large scale. How else do you suppose the United States managed to place its bases here?”
“You're not immune to a little dash dealing either, are you?”
The Great Man bridled, slipped voodoo needles into Joshua's body with his eyes. “I was referring to the bounders in the motorcade, Kampa. The provincial commissioner, the district officer, the minister of science, and the other pettifogging mucky-mucks who've come up here from Marakoi for the day.”
“You sound like a closet Klansman.”
“Rubbish, Joshua! The WaBenzi are a persistent scourge on the backs of our citizenry. I'd despise their venality even if it came cloaked in Anglo-Saxon pinkness. You can stop that adolescent smirking. It's a measure of your ignorance.”
“My ignorance? About what?”
“Africa. I'm a white man, granted, but this is my bloody country, and these are my people. You're a black man, but you're still a cultural dilettante and an outsider when it comes to comprehending what you see here.”
Joshua said, “That'll put me in my place.”
Blair expressed his contempt for this comeback by snorting like a bush pig. Meanwhile, the President's cavalcade—eight automobiles and a pair of khaki-clad outriders on motorcycles—passed behind a row of whitewashed administration buildings and turned onto an access road leading to the testing ranges in the salt flats. Two American air policemen on motorcycles and a navy-blue staff car belonging to the base commander had joined the procession at the main gate, and they were dutifully bringing up the rear, maintaining a discreet distance between themselves and the WaBenzi. This was a low-key reception for the leader of the air base's host country, but Mzee Tharaka, the fabled Zarakali freedom fighter,
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vacillated between pomp and austerity in matters of governance, and you could never be sure what occasions would provoke which response. Today, apparently, it was a little of both, a motorcade but no fanfare.
“Let's go,” Blair said. “The President wants to meet you.”
“Yes, sir. I know.”
Joshua followed the Great Man to a Land Rover parked on the edge of the parade ground and abashedly climbed in on the passenger's side. Blair was put out with him. He had offended his mentor with that Klansman slur, then compounded the insult by smarting off. What a clumsy comedy. This was Africa, all right, but he was a long way from home. The Land Rover accelerated to overtake Mzee Tharaka and his obsequious WaBenzi retinue. The Great Man played the gear-shift knob as if it were the handle on an unforthcoming slot machine.
“At least there's youth to excuse
my
petulant behavior.”
Blair glanced sidelong at Joshua. “Ha,” he said, grudgingly amused. “He got here earlier than I expected.
We should have been out there waiting for him. Delays annoy him.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Do you know why Mzee Tharaka values your presence here?”
“No, sir. Not really.”
“You're part of his modernization program. You'll be visiting the realm of yesterday for the greater glory of Zarakal's tomorrow. Integrating the technological with the spiritual is a passion of his, even if he is sometimes unsure how to accomplish that goal.”
The Land Rover sprinted up the access road until it was cruising three or four car lengths behind the base commander's vehicle. One of the American air policemen dropped back on his motorcycle to see who they were, then saluted and waved them on.
Ten minutes later the procession slowed. Ahead of them Joshua saw a barricade of chain-link fence and another boxlike sentry post. On duty here was a young African soldier wearing pinks, rose-colored khakis, and a helmet like a deep-dish silver hubcap. He held his awkward, palm-outward salute until even the Land Rover had passed through the gate, upon which hung a large sign stenciled in Day-Glo red letters:
Authorized Personnel Only—
By Order of ZAPPA
“ZAPPA?” Joshua said.
“It's an acronym for Zarakali Administration for Peace and Prosperity through Astronautics.”
“Astronautics?”
“Surely that doesn't boggle your bourgeois brain, Joshua. After all, you're a Zarakali chrononaut.”
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“Yes, but—”
“Astro-, chrono-, what matters the prefix? President Tharaka is visiting all his nauts today. That's why you've been summoned.”
“Yes, sir. But I'm a special case, aren't I? It's a little hard to believe that Zarakal has a
space
program, too.”
“What Mzee Tharaka wants, Mzee Tharaka gets.”
A wooden reviewing stand with a high oblong hutch resembling a press box appeared in the hazy middle distance, bleacher-green against the dirty beige of the desert. A pair of revolving sprinklers watered the narrow travesty of lawn in front of these bleachers, and six spiky palm trees in tubs lined the walkway that bisected the reviewing stand. Not an especially auspicious site for a football or soccer stadium. As it turned out, however, the reviewing stand overlooked not a well-kept playing field but a barren depression, or cut, in the landscape.
The enameled WaBenzi limousines slotted by ministerial rank into crudely marked spaces on the lip of the gorge, but an armed African soldier in pinks deflected the Land Rover into an unpaved parking area and told Blair that he and Joshua would not be able to dismount until the President had climbed to his place in the hutch at the top of the bleachers. The battered Land Rover did not qualify as an official vehicle, nor Blair himself as a bona fide WaBenzi.
“Suits me,” the Great Man said. “I'm delighted he doesn't know we're late.”
“Very good, sir.”
Finally, clicking his heels and opening Blair's door, the soldier announced that the President would receive them, and Blair and Joshua marched across the parking area to the bleachers. All you could see between the two halves of the reviewing stand was a vast, pitted plain. And in front of the plain a huge, alkaline crater. There was a terrible charnel beauty to this landscape.
At the beginning of the decade several million people—refugees from the civil conflicts in Ethiopia, nomadic pastoralists fleeing drought and tribal warfare—had straggled into this region to die of starvation and disease. A portion of what was now Russell-Tharaka AFB had once been a receiving area for the refugees, the focus of an international relief effort run jointly by the Zarakali government and the United Nations Development Program. Skirmishes with Somali irregulars along a disputed border and battles with Ethiopian Army units in the Djilbabo Plain had eventually cut off the southward flow of the dispossessed, a rather mixed blessing, if a blessing at all. Meantime, graft in Marakoi had undone the relief effort by diverting food and medical supplies to Zarakali soldiers in the frontier regions. The WaBenzi had played a telling role in this fiasco, but, magnificently irate, Mutesa David Christian Ghazali Tharaka had purged the most blatant offenders. Now he had a new batch of WaBenzi, and the dead ...
well, the dead were dead. The vultures and hyenas had obliterated nearly every trace of them. For having briefly suffered the dazed tread and shuffle of a hapless multitude, the land looked little if any different.
A sign on the metal rail designed to prevent a visitor from slipping and falling into the depression below the bleachers caught Joshua's attention: