“You all right?”
“Think so.”
“Don't talk. Don't try to get up. You're going to have a raft of visitors once they know you're conscious and able to talk.”
He lay back in the stiff sheets and found that he was clad in a hospital gown, a gray sheath like a wraparound bib. His leg ached dully, and the antiseptic tang of the room offended his nostrils, worked its way into his throat like a hook. When he was very small, Jeannette had once let him take a whiff from an ammonia bottle and he had screamed as if she had gassed him. The smell in this room, he realized, was equally offensive. Water came to his eyes, flushed from his tear ducts by the stinging smell of disinfectants, rubbing alcohol, arcane medicines.
“Helen,” he said. “Helen.”
The woman beside his bed looked at him peculiarly but did not question him. He felt a tremendous surge of affection for her simply because she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.
“I can't wear this. It hurts.”
Before she could summon help, he swung his feet to the opposite side of the bed, tore the hospital gown off his back, and tottered a few steps toward the corridor. The linoleum under his feet was exactly the color of bleu cheese dressing, with chives. This comparison came to his mind unbidden as he struggled toward the door, outside which stood a sentinel with a weapon. Rick, looked like. The air policeman who had been assigned to White Sphinx not long after his own arrival in Zarakal. The kid should have rotated home by now. Why was he still playing soldier for Kaprow? He had always pooh-poohed the idea of reenlisting.
“Johnny!” his mother called.
The bleu-cheese floor was treacherous. His legs were not going to negotiate the crossing.
“Where's my daughter?” he cried. “Where's the Grub?”
When he fell, his mother and the air policeman helped him from the floor. He was scarcely conscious of being assisted. The sting in his nostrils, the weakness of his legs, the salty film in his eyes—these things bespoke a deeper discomfort, a more compelling hurt.
“What the hell have you people done with my baby?”
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displaced by sunset, a conflagration of interthreading pastels. Stars were also visible, high and sparse.
Although he was shivering in the chilly room, he liked the starched hospital gown no more than he would have a straitjacket.
As his mother had done earlier, Kaprow engaged in a lengthy monologue. He stared across the bed at the door, scrupulously avoiding Joshua's eyes. Even though he never moved his head, his pale eyes flickered excitedly as he explained that they had almost given Joshua up for dead; that the entire White Sphinx Project was under a cloud because of their inability to monitor his activities in the past; that Blair expected and ought to receive a series of extensive reports on the mission as soon as Joshua felt well enough to face the Great Man; and that he, Kaprow, had approved Jeannette Monegal's visit to help Joshua ease himself back into the turbid waters of the late twentieth century.
“In a sense, Joshua, you've been reborn. You're going to have to take a little time to grow back into your old world. I'll do whatever I can to help you.”
“I want to see my daughter.”
“Joshua, that isn't your daughter.”
“I want to see the child I brought back with me.” Joshua pulled himself to a sitting position and looked piercingly at the physicist, who shifted his gaze to a photograph of President Tharaka that some wag had hung on the door to the water closet. The old man was wearing his hominid skull and a plush leopard-skin cloak. “Just tell me if I brought a child back with me, Dr. Kaprow. Was that a dream or did it really happen?”
“There's an infant in the maternity ward downstairs, Joshua, an infant you were clutching in your arms when we retrieved you from the Backstep Scaffold. She's a strange little creature but perfectly healthy.
They treated her for jaundice right after we brought the two of you in. Put her under sun lamps with cotton batting over her eyes. She's well now, though.”
“I
fathered
her, Dr. Kaprow.”
“Joshua, you were away from us only a little over a month. It's natural you should be disoriented, though.
There's no need to worry. Things'll straighten out for you soon enough.”
“A little over a month?”
“Thirty-three days. I insisted that we drop the scaffold at least four times a day, for two hours each go—but our transcordions were apparently out of synch, and if you hadn't returned when you did, well, pretty soon I would've had to buckle under to an order to depressurize The Machine and cut our losses.”
“Namely, me.”
“You and a sizable amount of time and money.”
“I was gone at least two years. I fell in love with a habiline, I fathered a child, I watched my wife die in childbirth. What you're telling me doesn't correspond to what
I
know about what happened, and I was the one who was there.
I know what happened to me, Dr. Kaprow!
”
“Look, here's a calendar on your bedside table—”
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“I don't give a damn about any goddamn calendars,” Joshua said levelly. “I brought a child back with me, and I'm her father.”
Kaprow finally looked directly at Joshua. As colorless as glass, his irises danced in their whites. “All right. Maybe because of the
distance
you went into the past you experienced a kind of time dilation—the opposite of what a passenger aboard a faster-than-light vessel would experience subjectively, when those remaining at home age dozens of years to the spacefarer's one or two. A time dilation would—”
“I want to see the Grub!”
“The Grub?”
“My baby.”
Kaprow's eyes cut away to the door again. “Okay, Joshua. I'll go with you. Maybe you'd appreciate a pair of pajama bottoms.”
“Suit yourself.”
The physicist smiled. “I'm suited. You're not.” But he sent an orderly after both the pajama pants and a pair of slippers, with which the man quickly returned. Although Joshua had to turn up six or seven inches of the pajama legs into lumpy cuffs, the slippers fit almost perfectly.
Not speaking, he and the physicist rode an elevator to the carpeted maternity ward on the first floor, where they paused outside the bright little aquarium given over to the showcasing of newborns. A nurse was pushing one of the movable bassinets into a farther room, but the bassinet contained no baby. Joshua searched for the Grub.
There she was. Her head was the same—disproportionately large, a kaleidoscope of grimaces—but the color of her skin had deepened from blancmange to beige, probably as a result of the sun-lamp treatments that Kaprow had mentioned.
“At least you didn't hand her over to a veterinary clinic.”
“She's human, Joshua. Nobody doubts that.”
“Then how do you explain my bringing her back from a period when human beings weren't supposed to look like she does?”
Kaprow said, “Why don't
you
explain that, Joshua?”
“I want to hold her.”
“Hold her?” The question conveyed the physicist's helpless distaste for this idea; also the hint that, even if he wanted to, he could not persuade the nurses to honor Joshua's request.
“I'm her father. I want to hold her.”
Joshua did not wait for permission. He trotted around the corner of the display room, skipped down a narrow corridor immediately behind it, and pushed his way through a swinging door into the off-limits inner sanctum. The nurse who had just removed a bassinet from the aquarium looked up from an
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instrument counter as if Joshua had surprised her filching penicillin suppositories. No words came out of her open mouth. Before she could sputter even a semi-intelligible objection, Joshua was cradling the Grub in his arms. Then Woody Kaprow burst into the display room's antechamber, and he and the nurse collided trying to get to Joshua.
“She's developing,” he said, smiling at his daughter as they confronted him amid a small fleet of bassinets.
“Of course she's developing,” the nurse angrily responded. “That's what they do at this age, and for a good many years after.” She adjusted her uniform. “What do you think you're doing in here, anyway?”
“Not
developing
, damn it!
Developing!
”
Nonplused by the small figure in rolled pajama bottoms, the nurse merely gaped. What kind of madness did the little man represent?
Kaprow said, “As in photography, I think he means.”
“Right. She's getting darker. All it took was bringing her out of the film pack and into the dark room.”
Joshua rocked the Grub. She grinned prettily at him, and he marveled at the way her skin was ripening toward a delicate duskiness. His daughter, developing...
[Back to Table of Contents]
Marakoi, Zarakal
September 1987
They
were seated beneath the fringed awning of Bahadur Karsanji's on Tharaka Boulevard in the blindingly bright heart of the capital, Marakoi. Karsanji's, a café, was one of the few businesses in the city still under Indian ownership after the wholesale “Africanization” of Asian-run establishments in 1972. It had escaped because it had a cosmopolitan clientele, a reputation for excellence antedating by three decades Zarakal's political independence, and an owner of discreet Machiavellian canniness in matters of mercantile survival.
Nearly every table under the red-and-white awning was occupied, and the crowd inside the restaurant was creating a din twice as nerve-racking as that of the traffic in the streets. Joshua and his mother, three days after his awakening in the base hospital, were eating spinach-filled crêpes (Jeannette's idea) and drinking a good California Chablis (his). At two o'clock that afternoon she would be departing the country from Marakoi International Airport, and they did not know when they would see each other again. The enlistment time remaining to Joshua complicated his situation, and so did his paternal claim on the infant in the hospital. Neither Kaprow nor Blair had welcomed this claim, for the paleoanthropologist viewed the Grub as the spoils of Joshua's mission while the physicist regarded her as a vexatious temporal anomaly. Jeannette had no idea the infant even existed, for Joshua had refrained from mentioning her after collapsing in front of his mother and Jeannette had supposed his ravings about a daughter the products of disorientation and delirium. At present the child was the ward of the United States Air Force, with a room of her own on the hospital's third floor and a round-the-clock guard.
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Though Joshua had begged and ranted, the small special staff assigned to his daughter would not permit him to feed, bathe, or hold her. In fact, he had seen her only once during the past three days. An awkward swallow of Chablis choked him, blurring his vision.
“There you go,” said Jeannette Monegal, thumping his back. “You just haven't readjusted to the pleasures of fine food and drink yet. What have they been feeding you at the hospital?”
“Rice.”
“What else?” she asked rhetorically. “I wrote you a letter, Johnny.”
“A letter? Why?”
“In case they wouldn't let me see you.”
“They did, though.”
“Amazingly. Through Dr. Kaprow's good offices. Neither the Air Force nor Alistair Blair nor the Zarakali government wanted to let me in. My book on Spain—it's just come out—has already given me a reputation as a caustic international muckraker. I had to sign a document declaring that I was coming to Zarakal solely as a tourist. Supposedly, having signed the damn thing, I can't even publish a travel article without first clearing it with the American Embassy and two or three local ministries.”
“You agreed to that?”
“To see you, yes—I certainly did.” She withdrew an envelope from her large straw purse. “Here's the letter. Please don't read it till I go. If you have any questions, you can write me in care of Anna in Newport News, Virginia. She and Dennis Junior are visiting in-laws. Here's the address. I've got your APO number. We'll stay in touch, okay? If you remove yourself from my life for another eight years, John-John, I'll be an
old
woman when next we meet. So stay in touch, okay?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
She slid a bill of large denomination across the table and stood up. He rose, too, but she would not permit him to accompany her to the airport, insisting that an airport farewell would “demolish me utterly,”
phraseology he had never before heard on her lips. They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time's river. The rattle of wine glasses and silverware, the background babble of English and Swahili—Joshua suddenly felt isolated and bereft. He wanted his mother to go quickly because he did not want her to go at all. She kissed him on the forehead, the blessing of a matriarch on one of her smallest and most beloved.
“
Ciao
, Johnny.”
“
Cao
,” he responded automatically.
Jeannette laughed. “I hope I'm not supposed to construe that as a slur. Even if I deserve it. ‘Bye, honey.
Be good.” She threw him a kiss and, carrying her own bag, stooped into the rear seat of a minicab parked about a quarter of a block from Karsanji's. When the cab came cruising past the restaurant, she gave him a faint smile before stoically averting her gaze.
He ate the remainder of his crêpe, drank the last few sips of his wine, and, buoyed by the money she
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