The other two creatures halted. In the triangular lanterns of their skulls their eyes shone eerily. The smaller of these two hyenas suddenly turned tail and loped back through the corridor of flames toward the lake.
Undeterred by these defections, the third animal vented a hysterical laugh and resumed its swaying trot. I shook my outstretched brand at it to no avail.
Even though the burning bush had begun to broil my fingers, I did not let go. I was immune to both pain and fear. After all, I had once survived the onslaught of an entire pack of these animals. On another occasion I had helped the Minids outlast a siege of giant hyenas by reciting a story and obediently shooting one of the besiegers with my besottedness to wholesale ingestion by a leopard. Why, then, should I fear this frenzied, stinking hulk of a hyena?
Running past me—away from the brand that I tried to plunge into its face—the hyena twisted its body about and took my leg into its jaws. By bracing its feet and forcibly tugging, it upended me. This, I remembered, was virtually the same tactic the hyenas at the water hole had used to drag down the rhino calf. As I fell, I tossed aside my torch and tried to shift my weight so that the Grub would receive none of the inevitable impact.
My butt struck the ground, then my head. Despite my preparations, these sudden jolts sent the Grub tumbling through a powdery coverlet of ash. Stunned, I lay where I had fallen, unable to go after my daughter or to resist the hateful savagery of the hyena.
What then occurred will strike many as an improbable
deus ex machina
solution to our dilemma. I cannot effectively counter this complaint. To argue that I dreamed this solution is to cast into doubt everything else that happened during my sojourn in Pleistocene East Africa. (However, it is entirely possible that I foresaw this solution in a childhood spirit-traveling episode, one that, at the time, I had believed a tainted or impure dream.) On the other hand, to insist on the absolute reality of this occurrence is to violate the self-consistent world to which the director of the White Sphinx Project posted me. Let me, therefore, justify the following strange events in the only way possible, by declaring that they conform to the reality of my subjective experience immediately after falling to the hyena's attack. If they have any other justification, I do not intend to record it here.
After the thunder, an explosion. I believe that Mount Tharaka was erupting again. Doomed in any case, we were too far away to fear destruction from the volcano. The hyena pricked its ears and scanned the southeastern horizon.
Then, out of a matte-black sky, there fell toward the Grub, the hyena, and me a small constellation of flaring stars. A shadow appeared among these flames, and this shadow was the spidery frame on which the vehicle's vernier jets were mounted.
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At which point I realized that this was no constellation, but a wingless space module dropping out of the heavens to our rescue. With a whoosh it swept by overhead and touched down about fifty yards away, right in the middle of the fire-flanked corridor through which the hyena had attacked us. A flurry of volcanic dust eddied like snow about the module's legs, and firelight reflected from the angular surfaces of the craft, which bore upon one high plane a vivid decal of the Zarakali flag: a hominid skull on a golden ground.
Jolly Roger, I thought, trying to rise. I could not get up.
After the hyena had fled, I crawled to my daughter, rolled to a sitting position, and lifted her out of the ashes. Her limbs were flailing, and her features were screwed up into a moue of utter outrage. She was not pretty. I had to dig a paste of dust from her nostrils with the nail of my little finger. Her phosphorescent whiteness made me fear that she was either radioactive or afflicted with the high luminosity of an unknown prehistoric illness. I rocked her, wiped her face with my saliva, and sang her a soothing song:
"
I remember the time
/
That the goose she drank wine,
/
And the monkey spit tobacco
/
On the
streetcar line.
/
Well, the streetcar it broke,
/
And the monkey got choke
', /
And they all went to
heaven
/
In a little red boat.
”
A hatch on the Zarakali space module opened, and two tall, gaunt astronauts in tight-fitting suits with oxygen packs and helmets clambered down. Behind them they unreeled thick lengths of hose. These hoses the men turned on the grass fires raging to the right and left of their craft. They also directed streams of water toward the Grub and me, extinguishing flames, settling the ash cover, and filling the night with the distinctive stench of wet char.
When they had finished, and the only fires still visible were several bright fuses running eastward against the wind, they stashed their hoses in the module and came bounding over the landscape to see what they could do for us. Two or three bounds were all they required to close fifty yards, so proficient were they at maneuvering in the giddy weightlessness of their country's distant past.
Inside those streamlined helmets, black faces.
The astronauts bent solicitously over the Grub and me, murmured inaudible words of consolation, and scrutinized my writhing daughter from head to toe. One of the men tapped her chest with a gloved finger, tested her reflexes, gently pinched her naked limbs. To my questioning look he returned a broad, unequivocal smile. Undoubtedly the medical expert in the crew, this same man heightened my gratitude by examining my leg and flashing another reassuring grin. We were going to be okay.
A moment later the medical officer was supporting me as we limped through the dark to the brightly illuminated module. The captain of the mission was carrying the Grub, who had stopped squirming.
Once inside the cramped vehicle, I glanced about at the ranks of switches and dials, immensely relieved that I did not have to try to make sense of them. I could shunt to these brave astronauts all the responsibility for our deliverance.
We lifted and flew. The flight was smooth, exhilarating, and brief. When we landed again, the module balanced astride a peculiar flat outcropping of tuff on the southeastern shore of Lake Kiboko. In the dark the lake looked like a vast oil slick, but I could smell the fertile fishiness of the shallows and knew that I was almost home.
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One of the astronauts helped me down the ladder to the ground. The other, waiting below, put the Grub into my arms as if presenting me a trophy for surviving my ordeal. Then they returned to their vehicle, closed the hatch, and ascended again into the sky on delicate streamers of fire. Two gods in a machine.
After their departure, the Grub and I were on our own again. I scrambled over the outcropping of tuff, searching for the spot where Kaprow had parked the omnibus.
There. There it was.
Suspended in the air as if by Hindu legerdemain, the Backstep Scaffold. I knelt beneath it and stared up into the interior of the bus, an equipment-crowded chapel of stinging white light. There were Kaprow's Egg Beaters, huge coppery rotors, and enclosing them were the padded interior walls and ceiling of the omnibus. Deliverance.
“We're going home, baby. Going home.”
I pushed the Grub up and over the edge of the Backstep Scaffold, which was about a foot above eye level, then chinned my way onto the platform and settled into its contours with my daughter in my left arm. It took me a moment to locate the toggle for retracting the platform, but when I found and activated it, the rotors inside the omnibus began to spin and the past to drop away beneath us like an ill-remembered dream. My baby and I were going home. Home.
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Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, Zarakal
September 1987
“
Welcome
back, Johnny. I was beginning to think you were going to sleep the rest of your life away.”
At first he did not recognize the face outlined above him against a window of robin's-egg blue. The face was a gentle caricature of one he remembered from another time. Most disconcerting, its skin was pale, with hints of applied color in the cheeks and lavender crescents on the eyelids. His tongue would not move.
“Don't try to talk yet, Johnny. You've been sedated for several days. I've ... well, I've watched you sleep for the last three. Off and on, that is. They've given me a room in the Visiting Officers’ Quarters. First time I've ever had officers’ quarters in my life. Hugo would have scoffed at me for even accepting them—but noncoms’ widows don't rate an on-base hostelry all their own and it's better than trying to commute out here every morning from Marakoi.
“God, Johnny, they did everything they could to keep me out of this country, everything but charge me with a federal crime and lock me up in Leavenworth. Suddenly, though, just a few days ago, their resistance collapsed, and here I am.... I don't think I've ever watched you sleep so many straight hours without your eyeballs disappearing up into your forehead. Maybe you're over that now. Maybe that justifies what they've done to you. Maybe that absolves them of using you for a guinea pig in some sort of temporal I-don't-know-what.... Woody Kaprow tried to explain it. He was the one who insisted on their
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letting me into the country once you got back from wherever the hell you supposedly were. I owe him for that, I know I do, but the rest of it—the secrecy, the deceptions, the bullyings, the run-arounds—God knows when I'll be able to forgive them for
that
. God knows.”
The face was coming into focus, taking on a recognizable human aspect. It was an older face than he remembered, but he had not seen it for—well, for what?—eight years? ten years? more than two million?
It belonged to the woman who had raised him, an aging woman against whom he had perpetrated a terrible wrong, believing himself, at her hands, the victim of an unforgivable treachery. He had forestalled any future treachery by cutting all ties with her.
Now—whenever Now was—here she was again. He did not resent this torrent of words from her or even the implicit assumption underlying them, that they could resume their lives without agonizing over or even referring to the cause of their break. That was a false assumption, however. He had a good deal to answer for. He knew it, and he tried unsuccessfully to make his tongue work.
“No, really. You don't have to say anything, Johnny. They said you might have trouble. Apparently you've awakened briefly twice before. Kaprow and a couple of Air Force doctors were with you, but you couldn't talk. Not a word. They wanted a kind of deposition from you, I think. A debriefing document. You weren't ready to give it. Flustered Kaprow lots, I'm afraid, even if at bottom he's a reasonably decent fellow, one of the few people I've met who won't duck the implications of his own responsibility for a fiasco like this one. He acknowledges his part in involving you, for instance. Blames himself for losing contact with you while you were gone, for the injuries you've sustained. Everyone else—Air Force brass, the local interior ministry, Defense Department officials back home—everyone else seems to be working on a C.Y.A. basis. They wanted a deposition attesting to the complete success and worthiness of this project.... You don't even remember Kaprow and the others coming in here, do you? You ought to see your face—it's an acting-class paradigm of Total Bewilderment.”
His mother gave a nervous laugh, wiped his forehead with a wet cloth, and leaned aside so that the African sky in the window overwhelmed him with its raw immensity. A jet fighter flashed by from left to right, as if it had just taken off from a nearby runway, but the sound of its engines was muted by the hum of the air-conditioning and the thickness of the walls in the cavelike hospital room.
C.Y.A. meant “cover your ass,” an old and deservedly hallowed Air Force abbreviation. He had not smiled at his mother's use of the term because what she was telling him was vaguely troubling. The last image in his mind, prior to the appearance of her face, was of the coppery blur of the rotors in the omnibus. That blur had seemed to enfold and annihilate him. When could Kaprow, or anyone else, have tried to talk to him since the dream of his deliverance?
“Lie back, Johnny, just lie back. They lost you for a month, were afraid they wouldn't be able to retrieve you at all. I think Kaprow finally brought pressure to bear on the authorities to let me come see you when you failed to respond to either the doctors or him. You were like a zombie, he said. Thought the sight of a familiar face might jolt you back to reality. Here I am, then. A shot of Old Jolt, Johnny. Am I working?
I think I am, I can tell by your eyes.... This reminds me of when you were little. Didn't speak a word until you were almost two. Said ‘cao’ in Richardson's pasture on the outskirts of that new housing area in Van Luna. You had the most expressive eyes, though. You could talk with them as well as some people can with words. You haven't lost any of that ability, either. I can see by your eyes that this shot of Old Jolt has gone right to your head.”
“Right,” he echoed her, smiling.
“And that's the prettiest word I've heard you say since your first really emphatic ‘
cao
,’ I swear to God
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it is, John-John.” She turned her head away, refused to look at him. “Yesterday was my birthday. I told them you'd wake up for my birthday. You're only a day late, and it's a fine, fine present.” She looked at him again. “I'm fifty, can you believe that? Half a goddamn century. I feel like Methuselah's mother.”
He worked to get the words out: “I'm Methuselah, then.”