No Enemy But Time

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Hazy in the harsh light of dawn, emptiness. Once, long ago, this part of Zarakal had been fertile grasslands; today it looked like a petrified sea, broken here and there with combers of thorn scrub, grit kicking up in spray at the unpredictable bidding of the wind. A lone hyena stood on the salt flat watching a caravan of three vehicles moving northwestward along the highway connecting Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in the country’s heartland with the Lake Kiboko Protectorate in the Great Rift Valley. The highway had been built over the past two years with American money, machinery, and supervision, although the Zarakali Minister of Interior, Alistair Patrick Blair, had insisted on a large management role for himself and a coolie work force of indigenes. One part of the highway linked Marakoi, the capital, with the air base thirty miles northeast, but the remaining three hundred miles of macadam struck many observers, both native and American, as Blair’s private expressway to nowhere. The Great Man had grown weary of replenishing the supplies of his field workers at the Lake Kiboko digs by helicopter or light aircraft. Hence this ribbon of asphalt through the awesome emptiness of the Zarakali desert.

Joshua murmured, “Not a used-car dealership in sight.”

“Our military still hasn’t been here all that long,” replied Woody Kaprow, who was driving the second vehicle in the caravan. “Give it time, Joshua. Give it time.”

“God forbid there should ever be that much time.”

Alistair Patrick Blair, riding between Kaprow and Joshua in the cab of the big vehicle, laughed. “God and Woody Kaprow, physicist supreme. They jointly hold the patent on all temporal properties.”

“Not so,” Kaprow replied. “Not so.”

Ahead of them, the lead vehicle in their caravan, cruised a Land Rover that had been modified to accommodate not only a swivel-mounted machine gun but also a hundred-gallon drum of drinking water.

An American air policeman was driving this escort, a uniformed Zarakali security agent riding shotgun.

Behind Joshua, Blair, and Kaprow, the caravan’s caboose was a huge truck with a covered flatbed pulling a generator more suggestive of a collapsible camper than a caisson. Both the Land Rover and the truck were a dusty olive-drab, chevroned with the doubtful camouflage of zebra striping.

Of the three vehicles in the caravan, the one in which Joshua and his companions rode had the strangest design and the most mysterious purpose. Half again as long as the truck, it resembled an Airstream trailer coated with a layer of protective plastic; its most aerodynamic-looking hull was as sleek as the skin of a porpoise, while its cab protruded like the nose of an immense electric iron with a wraparound windshield set into it. Six monstrous tires bore the weight of this vehicle, which Kaprow had recently taken to calling, with subtle bravado, The Machine. Only a month before this expedition to Lake Kiboko, it had arrived in Bravanumbi, Zarakal’s principal port city, aboard an American aircraft carrier; and Kaprow, who had accompanied it on that voyage, would let no one else drive it. Blair had offered to spell him at the wheel during their night-long trip from the air base, but Kaprow had firmly declined the offer. Although its development had been funded with U.S. tax monies, he regarded The Machine—if not Time itself—as his personal property.

“But I’m an excellent driver,” Blair had sweet-talked the physicist, “and you’ve done yeoman duty these last two hours.”

“It would be immoral for me to let anyone else sit here.”

“Immoral?”

“Absolutely. If you wrecked The Machine, Dr. Blair, I’d despise you forever. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”

“But if you wreck it…?”

“Well, if I wreck it, I’ll be damned pissed off, of course, but eventually I’ll forgive myself. To err is human, especially if it’s you who’s done the erring. Otherwise it’s intolerable.”

“Dr. Blair’s transcended the merely human,” Joshua had put in. “Everyone in Zarakal knows that. Maybe you could trust him for thirty minutes or so.”

“Demigods are always chauffeured. You can look it up. Try The Iliad, for instance.”

They had laughed at that, but Kaprow had not relinquished the wheel, and they had been traveling since midnight, a departure time settled upon to protect the caravan from midday temperatures and the possibility of aerial surveillance—although everyone understood that a sophisticated spy satellite would find mere darkness no impediment at all. On the other hand, a paleoanthropological expedition was hardly a prime target for the espionage operations of Zarakal’s Marxist enemies.

The sun had just risen. Joshua watched the hyena ahead of them on the salt flat turn sideways and break into a frightened lope. Hunting had apparently been none too good of late; the ugly creature was all bones and mangy to boot. Joshua leaned his head against the side window and closed his eyes.

Blair said, “You’re not having second thoughts, are you, Joshua?”

“Lately all my thoughts are second thoughts.”

“There’s still time to go back, of course.”

Joshua opened his eyes. “All right. Let’s go back.”

Blair shifted his pipe in his teeth, a meerschaum like the one Hugo had lost to the rhesus monkey at Ritki’s Animal Ranch. Kaprow shot him a swift sidelong glance. Both scientists, their pet projects in the balance, were visibly alarmed.

“Joke,” Joshua comforted them, patting Blair on the knee. “Didn’t mean to scare you shitless. I’m as obsessed as you two are. It’s just that I didn’t ask for my obsession.”

“Neither did I,” Kaprow countered.

“My saying we could take you back wasn’t an insincere formality, Joshua. If you want us to, we can.”

“It’s okay. Really. I’ve got a bad case of preflight jitters, that’s all.” A model of innocence, he lifted his eyebrows. “Only human, you know.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to—”

“Renege, Dr. Blair?”

“Pull out, I was going to say.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.” Joshua closed his eyes again, in spite of which he was hungry rather than sleepy. Mentally he superimposed a segment of Florida’s Miracle Strip on the desolate African landscape sliding past him outside. “What Zarakal needs out here, I think, is a good International House of Pancakes.”

“Come now, Joshua. A moment ago you were applauding the absence of used-car lots.”

“Or a Burger King.”

Blair chuckled appreciatively. “In a place where many of the people, not omitting the local police, poach elephants for a living?”

“Burger King would fry ’em, Dr. Blair.”

“Jesus,” said Kaprow. “At a time like this.”

The Great Man mumbled something about the delicious banality of Joshua’s wit, and their conversation concluded. The Machine hummed along the highway until the highway itself ran out, and the Land Rover ahead of them eased down into the thornveldt, its wheels negotiating the bumpy track to Lake Kiboko like four pallbearers on uneven ground. Then Kaprow committed The Machine to this same formidable course, and the truck with the generator came rattling and clanging after. The caravan was now deep within the two hundred square miles of eastern lakeshore territory that Blair had persuaded President Tharaka to designate a “paleontological protectorate.”

During his training at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, Joshua had heard conflicting stories about the prevailing Zarakali attitude toward the Lake Kiboko Protectorate. People in Marakoi and Bravanumbi regarded the area as a national treasure, the site of the discovery of Homo zarakalensis, and they supported Blair’s work there as a means of thrusting their country into the world spotlight. These folks never set foot within the protectorate, however, and probably had no wish to. Let the interior minister dig to his heart’s content, until the camels came home from Ethiopia and the sand flea went extinct.

The pastoralists and seminomadic tribespeople who had once driven their camels and cattle through the area had another view, but it did not appear to count for much because their lifestyles disfranchised them from the politics of a nation struggling desperately to modernize. Industrialization and agricultural recovery were far more pressing concerns than the doubtful proprietary rights of either the Moslem nomads or the Sambusai pastoralists who often used this land. Only those whose trespass Blair specifically approved were supposed to set foot within the protectorate, and the Great Man seldom made concessions to either group.

After all, fossils lay exposed on the arid surface here, and the danger was that the Sambusai warriors, or their stupid cattle, would kick the skullcap of one of Adam’s ancestors to uninformative smithereens. The importance of paleoanthropological research was beyond their understanding. Because they wanted to use the land, rather than simply stalk and sift it, they actively resented the government’s decision to set aside two hundred square miles for Blair’s researches. That this decision was unenforceable did not appease the Great Man, however, when he saw several Sambusai herding their livestock through the protectorate in haughty disdain for the legislation prohibiting their access.

“Damn! Look there! Those beggars’ve blocked us!”

Three Sambusai drovers had prodded their herd across the unpaved track approaching the lake. The air policeman in the Land Rover got out and began waving his pistol around. Neither the cattle nor their masters found this performance a compelling reason to move.

“Let me out, Joshua. Your compatriot needs my help.”

Joshua unlatched his door and climbed down into the withering morning heat; Blair followed. Outside The Machine, Joshua felt as vulnerable as a turtle that has ill-advisedly wriggled out of its shell. Blair marched toward the confrontation.

One of the Sambusai warriors, contemptuous of the angry air policeman, suddenly leapt high into the air.

He did not move his iron spear from its steady vertical, and at the summit of his leap he trembled his shoulders rakishly and smiled a faraway smile. As soon as he had touched down, a second Sambusai performed the same sort of leap. The red ocher on his plaited hair dusted up visibly when he landed, a halo of crimson grit.

Seeing Blair and Joshua approach, the air policeman holstered his pistol and returned sheepishly to the Land Rover.

His withdrawal seemed to trigger the leap of the last Sambusai warrior on the path. Because this herdsman was naked under his scanty, ill-secured toga, his penis performed a tardy recapitulation of his leap. Joshua, intimidated by these prepossessing men, hung back several feet. In comparison to them, he was a pygmy or a child. He could see the first two warriors nodding at him, appraising him, consigning him to some unflattering category reserved for runts, outsiders, cowards, or crazy persons.

Blair barked a greeting at the Sambusai. Having ceased their gymnastics, they inclined their heads just perceptibly in response. They seemed surprised to hear their own language coming out of the mouth of a paunchy white man with drooping mustachios and a bald brown pate. Nevertheless, they palavered amiably with Blair, nodded more than once at Joshua and The Machine, and stalwartly held their ground.

Wiping his brow with a handkerchief and humorously pursing his lips, the Great Man returned to Joshua.

“They’re a decent enough crew, I think. Ignorant about human prehistory, of course. We’d probably do well to indulge them in a couple of their whims.”

“What were they saying about me?”

“Why, nothing. Nothing more than what they were saying about the lot of us, that is.”

“And what was that?”

“Referred to us, jocularly, as iloridaa enjekat, I’m afraid. Sounds lovely if you don’t know what it means.”

“Iloridaa what?”

“Enjekat, Joshua. Means ‘those who confine their farts.’ Has to do with the kinds of breeches we wear.”

“Jocularly?”

“Well, I would say so. On the whole, they were quite pleasant.”

“What do they want? Did you tell them to move?”

“I asked them to move, Joshua. However, they’re not going to pack off without a concession or two from the man who had this traditional grazing area proclaimed a state protectorate.”

“They’ve got your number, then.”

“Well, they know who I am, of course. Figured that out readily enough. It tickles them to have run up against the High Mucky-Muck of the interior ministry, so to speak. I’m the chap who displaces living people to dig up the bones of dead ones.”

“They look tickled.”

Kaprow stepped down from The Machine. He stood with one hand on the door, waiting for Blair and Joshua to come abreast. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “If Joshua’s going to get off by tomorrow morning, we need to get set up.”

Blair said, “Dr. Kaprow, a great many things in Africa are on permanent hold. I’m afraid you’re going to have to—”

“We have a schedule. If we don’t—”

“We will, Dr. Kaprow, we will. I should have had a police unit from one of the frontier outposts sweep the area. Unfortunately, the protectorate’s a little too big to fence.”

“Unfortunately,” Joshua echoed the Great Man. He pulled the moist material of his shirt away from his rib cage and wiped his forehead with his wrist. Out here, stickiness was a chronic affliction.

“What do they want?”

“They each want an item in trade, Dr. Kaprow. In addition, two of them would like a special favor.”

“Trade? What do we get?”

“Their cattle out of the road, I would imagine.”

“And the special favor?”

“Let’s meet their specific demands first, shall we? The special favor is going to require a little of our time.”

“That’s exactly what I had hoped to save, sir.”

“Nevertheless,” said Alistair Patrick Blair.

The warriors’ specific requests were simple, either poignant or grasping depending on your relationship to the item forfeited. Joshua yielded a leather belt with a brass buckle on which the jaunty figure of Mickey Mouse had been embossed. Kaprow, bewildered, forked over several American coins, while Blair made a lavishly eloquent presentation of his meerschaum pipe. The air policeman in the Land Rover, despite protesting that its sacrifice would put him in violation of the Air Force dress code, gave up his silver helmet, along with its camouflage net.

Finding that the helmet fit perfectly, the Sambusai warrior who had acquired it began chanting softly and doing gentle leaps, a Mona Lisa beatitude veiling his features. His tribesmen staggered about laughing, unable to puncture his composure with their jibes and catcalls. Then, controlling their mirth, they approached Blair with another request.

“What now?” Kaprow asked warily.

“They’re envious of the helmet, but don’t see any others to choose from. They’ll settle for cardboard sun visors.”

“Oh, good.”

Joshua saw that a group of technicians (Americans) and field workers (Zarakalis) had climbed out of the covered flatbed of the truck behind them. Several were wearing sun visors, which they readily doffed and handed over to Blair to give to the importunate herders. As soon as the Sambusai had put these on, they began leaping with their helmeted comrade. The support personnel from the truck came forward to watch. One or two of them joined the dance, pogo-sticking with good-natured incompetence. The activity reminded Joshua of fuzzy kinescopes of American Bandstand segments on which Philadelphia teenagers had surrendered to a form of rhythmic seizure called the Watusi. It had not looked exactly like this, but then the Sambusai were not the Watusi.

Kaprow said, “All we need now is a punch bowl and some helium balloons.”

The sun visors, Joshua noted, were red and white. They were emblazoned with the trademark of an American soft drink.

“My goodness, Dr. Kaprow,” said Blair. “You’re awfully young for a curmudgeon.”

“What’s the special favor they want? We need to grant it, if possible, and get on into camp.”

“They want to look inside The Machine.”

“Look inside The Machine!”

“They’ve never seen so fat a motorcar before, and it arouses their curiosity.”

Kaprow turned the angry russet of a baked apple. “They can’t. It’s impossible. You know it’s impossible.”

“How badly do you want their cattle out of the road?” Blair put his hand on the physicist’s shoulder.

“You don’t think they’re going to steal your Nobel Prize poking around in there, do you? I’ve never been able to make brain or bunion of the whole untidy scramble.”

“It’s not your specialty, Dr. Blair.”

“Oh, I see. You believe these Sambusai herders are secret graduates of MIT, magna cum laude?”

“No, of course I don’t. It’s just that White Sphinx—”

“I’ll show them around inside,” Joshua interrupted. “A tour guide who doesn’t speak their lingo isn’t going to spill much, is he?”

Because he had to, Kaprow acquiesced. Blair politely intervened in the Sambusai’s dancing, and a moment later Joshua was leading two of the warriors to The Machine, where he pulled himself into a control space behind the cab. In this cramped chamber the Sambusai towered over him like professional basketball players. Their bodies gave off a unique commingling of scents: dung and cowhide, ocher and tallow, dust and sweat. To Joshua’s surprise they seemed even more nervous than he.

“This way, gentlemen.”

Joshua turned a key and a door panel slid back into the insulated six inches of interior bulkhead. The Sambusai were delighted. They grinned, exchanged unintelligible commentary, and sauntered into the bizarre cargo section of The Machine. A metal rail outlined a rectangular catwalk around the inside of the vehicle. Opposite the three men was a small bell-shaped booth of smoky glass, and beside the booth stood an air policeman with a submachine gun.

“It’s all right, Rick. We’ve got Dr. Kaprow’s permission.”

“They don’t plan to use those spears, do they?”

“Not that I know of. We’ll take a quick look around and get out of your hair.”

“What’s going on?”

“Intercultural collision. Fill you in later.”

The air policeman—Rick, a blond Iowa farm kid—lowered his weapon but maintained the alert feet-apart posture of a sentinel. He had, Joshua knew, only a distorted inkling of the purpose of the arcane machinery inside Dr. Kaprow’s vehicle, believing it a variety of mobile intelligence-gathering equipment meant to bolster Zarakal’s military position in the Horn. Why Dr. Kaprow had driven The Machine inland to Lake Kiboko he had no clear idea, however. He was a GI who kept his nose clean by obeying orders.

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.

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.

Later, in the cab, Joshua asked Blair what the drivers had said to him before allowing their caravans to proceed.

“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.

“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, 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:

“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.”

“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:

“Up,” Blair said. “The sign’s meaning will become clear only when you witness the use to which we put the incline.”

They climbed a set of switchbacking metal stairs to the hutch nearly sixty feet above the ground. The climb seemed altogether familiar to Joshua, a dream numbly repeating itself. Blair wheezed in the heat, wiped his sweaty brow, and nodded curtly at three black officials—WaBenzi all—seated under an immense vinyl umbrella in the center of the reviewing stand. Plainly the President had not granted them permission to sit with him above.

In the carpeted, air-conditioned hutch, Mzee Tharaka received Blair and Joshua as if he had planned this entire outing around their presence and participation. Standing before a rectangle of delicately tinted plate glass, Joshua found his right hand imprisoned between the strong, plump hands of the President, like a mug from which the old man was about to quaff a potent and exotic brew.

“Welcome, Mr. Kampa. Welcome.”

The voice was hoarse, the English impeccable, but what disconcerted Joshua about the old freedom fighter was his attire. A man of medium height, with no single compelling feature other than his eyes, which were penetrating and mournfully red-rimmed, Mzee Tharaka today shunned the Western-style business suits of his retainers in favor of a Sambusai toga, a gorget of monkey’s teeth, a red silk cloak featuring a pattern of alternating fleur-de-lis and (of all things) golden appliqué pineapples, and a set of silver anklets, from which depended tiny effigies of the country’s vanishing wildlife, an ornamental touch that reminded Joshua of the grade-school name bracelet to which his sister, Anna Monegal, had once added charms depicting a puppy, a broken heart, a pair of saddle oxfords, a football, and so on.

The President’s feet were bare. His head was not. Atop his grizzled sponge of hair he wore a felt crown to which had been affixed an enameled hominid skull discovered by Blair at Lake Kiboko in the early 1970s. Joshua was able to get a good look at the skull, which usually gawped upward at sky or ceiling, only when the President bowed ritually to the paleontologist and warmly clasped his hands. This skull, Joshua knew, was genuine, not a plaster cast or a clever facsimile. Blair had yielded it to the President, under stern and probably injudicious protest, only after his staff at the National Museum had obtained a plaster duplicate from an American physical anthropologist and had catalogued for posterity every known fact about the valuable fossil.

This episode in recent Zarakali history had provoked worldwide interest and comment. The Times of London had run an article predicting Blair’s expulsion from the native government and his possible arraignment for criticism detrimental to the country’s best interests, but the affair had blown over in a fortnight, the President privately placating Blair by promising to restore the hominid crown to the National Museum at his death, and Blair appeasing Mzee Tharaka by agreeing to refuse public comment on the issue and to reaffirm his loyalty pledge to the old man at an open session of the National Assembly. The paleontologist had kept his promises. What Mzee Tharaka would do no one could say. He might choose to be buried wearing the crown. In the meantime, however, he was by universal acknowledgment the only head of state who periodically proclaimed his sovereignty by donning the skull of a human ancestor nearly three million years old.

“Sit,” said the President, indicating the padded swivel chairs in front of the window. “Sit, sit. Mr. Kampa is our guest. He must see that Zarakal is pursuing its future as actively as any other great nation.”

“His especial interest is the past,” Blair said.

“But not for its own sake, surely. Very few people are interested in the past for its own sake. Where we have been, gentlemen, shapes what we are. Further, it implies where we may be going.” The President patted Joshua on the hand. “Zarakal is humanity’s birthplace, young man, and it will not be a negligible factor in determining our species’ ultimate destiny.” He gestured at the merciless blue sky, at the rugged yawn of the gorge. “Here you behold the primitive but fateful beginnings of Project Umuntu, the diaspora of our evolving intelligence to the stars.”

Joshua looked out the window at the Weightlessness Simulation Incline. Three of Zarakal’s astronauts-in-training stood on the opposite ridge, paying homage to their Commander in Chief with the stiff, palm-outward salute that was a relic of the days of British colonialism. They were dwindled by distance, these trainees, but their white uniforms and tight-fitting headgear reminded Joshua of hospital workers in rubber bathing caps. Each man was standing by a large, upright barrel, and each barrel was balanced on the edge of the incline by wires connected to cables strung across the gorge like an unfinished suspension bridge. Red, yellow, and blue, the barrels appeared to be made of a hard, dent-resistant plastic. They were perforated with air holes, and at the moment their hatch covers were up, quite like toilet seats.

Looking down the counter to an official hunched over a microphone, Mzee Tharaka said, “It’s time to begin.”

“Prepare for drop-off,” said the man at the microphone. “One minute and counting.”

The official’s amplified voice echoed over the bleak desert landscape like the voice of God. The astronauts climbed into their capsules and closed the hatch covers.

Mzee Tharaka said, “It’s ridiculous that of all the nations of the earth only the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and perhaps the People’s Republic of China, should be trying to conquer the frontiers of space.”

“Isn’t it equally ridiculous for a nation with insufficient resources and personnel to be making the attempt?” Joshua asked. “Zarakal has more pressing business to attend to, hasn’t it?”

The President’s flinty eyes flashed, but with delight rather than disapproval. “One need not be a giant to have great dreams, Mr. Kampa. As you well know.”

“Yes, Mzee.” The shrewd old bastard.

“For just that reason, and for the reason that although Zarakal may be no giant, Africa is a colossus stirring with a newfound sense of its strength, I am the champion of African astronautics, Mr. Kampa. It was I, incidentally, who initially convinced President Kaunda of Zambia that we must put an African on the moon without the assistance of the so-called superpowers. Zambia’s fledgling space program collapsed under the weight of a staggering economy, but our program is taking wing.”

“We’ve recently replaced our obsolescent beer kegs,” said Blair, wryly, “with expertly engineered ‘descent cylinders.’”

“True, very true.” The President laughed, not at all offended. “But now we have direct American aid—not for space technologies, mind you, but for military and economic programs that will permit us to develop such. The prospect of bartering coffee, sisal, and refined petroleum products for computer technology and educational opportunities is a major step forward.”

“Thirty seconds and counting.”

“That’s aid from a superpower, isn’t it?” Joshua remarked. “I think you’re splitting hairs on this point.”

“Well, certainly, we intend to take advantage of what others have learned through trial and error. It would be stupid to insist that we ignore existing technologies, put blinders on ourselves, and create an unadulterated Zarakali space program in the desert of our national purity. And we are not stupid, Mr. Kampa.”

To change the subject, Joshua said, “Are those barrels padded?”

“Most assuredly. Finest quality American foam rubber.”

The wires connecting the barrels to the suspension-bridge cables began slackening. The barrels themselves began rocking from side to side as their pilots prepared for launch. Through the larger holes in the capsules Joshua could see the men’s immaculate white uniforms, like bits of tissue paper in punctured cookie tins.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven—”

“Pay attention, Mr. Kampa. The first trial run is often the most exhilarating, for the observer as well as the trainee.”

“—three, two, one: DROP-OFF!”

The wires on the capsules yanked free, and the Zarakali astronauts came barreling down the Weightlessness Simulation Incline at a dizzying clip. The barrels bounced like balloons from some surfaces, skidded like rolling pins along others, occasionally caromed off one another like billiard balls. In a matter of seconds, it was over. The hatches on two of the barrels popped open, and their pilots wriggled out into the bottom of the gorge. The man in the remaining barrel, however, required assistance, and he was carefully extracted and led into the shade by his comrades.

“Brave men,” said Mzee Tharaka. “Very brave men.”

“Much braver than I, Mr. President.” Joshua believed it, too. All he had to do on Woody Kaprow’s Backstep Scaffold was close his eyes and dream. The time-displacement equipment and his own dreaming consciousness did the rest. It was as easy as falling downstairs.

“Not necessarily, Mr. Kampa, but perhaps you would be interested to know that many of our astronauts-in-training must overcome a powerful psychological reluctance to take part in these experiments. Tribal ways and allegiances sometimes militate against their willingness to test pilot our WSI vehicles.”

“I don’t understand.”

“These trainees are members of the Kikembu tribe. In their society, Mr. Kampa, one of the punishments reserved for sorcerers—evil persons who inflict illness or misfortune on their neighbors—quite resembles an exercise on the Weightlessness Simulation Incline.”

Joshua waited, knowing that the President intended to detail the similarity whether he replied or not.

“When the sorcerer is apprehended, you see, usually by a contingent of men who have lain in wait for him, they find an immense beehive, put the sorcerer inside it alive, seal the hive, and send it tumbling down a slope. At the bottom, Mr. Kampa, the sorcerer is invariably discovered to have given up the ghost. One of our first trainees, interestingly enough, died of fright during his maiden descent of the WSI.

He must have assumed that his selection to our program constituted a formal accusation of sorcery. On the other hand, he may actually have been guilty of poisoning someone or practicing witchcraft. As a result, his guilt combined with the trauma of weightlessness simulation to punish him for his crimes. Not only are our trainees brave, they are virtuous.”

“I reckon so,” Joshua said.

“What about you, Mr. Kampa? You modestly downplay your own bravery, which must be considerable—but are you virtuous?”

“Virtuous?”

Everyone in the hutch, including Alistair Patrick Blair, was looking at him. Was he virtuous?

“Pardon me, Mzee. I’m not sure how to answer. I voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections.”

Mutesa David Christian Ghazali Tharaka patted Joshua’s hand; whether in tribute or consolation was not clear. They watched four more barrel races before the President wearied of the show and returned with his retinue to Marakoi.

“You made a good impression,” Blair had told Joshua on the way back to his barracks.

“How?”

“Perhaps by preserving your sang-froid when you caught sight of his ceremonial attire. Besides, he’s always been partial to Americans.”

Yes, sang-froid. That was what he would require now, for Kaprow’s omnibus was prowling the lake margin (the lunar battlement of the Rift’s western wall like a mirage on their left), and tomorrow morning he would be playing chrononaut for keeps. Joshua’s stomach knotted, and the jumbled slide show of his past clicked away inside his mind with every jolt of The Machine’s balloonlike tires. This was his mission.

He had finally got it, or it had got him, and his entire life had been pointing toward this place and this time.

A time that encompassed an infinity of moments. An infinity of possibilities.

“You all right?” Kaprow asked, wrestling with the steering wheel. “You’ve been mighty quiet.”

“He’s anticipating the morrow,” Blair put in.

“More than that,” Joshua confessed. “Lots more than that.”