No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

Encarnación hesitated. Her child, his every didy in need of laundering, was wearing only a stained cotton jersey; and this old woman—hardly a friend, since no one in the building was—hurried forward to examine the boy. After easing her tin can onto the lid of the water drum beside the stairwell entrance, she poked the child with gnarly fingers, all the while gabbling furiously. Although he recoiled from these attentions, the pokes seemed to trouble him less than the spent air spiraling noisily from the vieja’s mouth. He had heard Encarnación give vent to many strange sounds, including, most often, tongue clicks meant to warn him away from mischief—but the crone’s performance was of a different order, vigorous and patterned. It hypnotized as well as cowed him.

  “Qué alerto,” declared the old woman, addressing the mother while studying the child. “Is it true that he has never heard the talk of other people? Is it true you have not taken him to the priests for christening? Por Dios, Señorita Ocampo, if these accusations are true, you arm those misguided gossips who call you bruja. You give them cause to dishonor your name.”

  Spoken to her face, the word bruja—witch—made Encarnación cringe. This calumny, she well knew, derived from her singular appearance and her neighbors’ astute surmise that her ancestors were Moriscos—that is, Christianized Moors—of uncertain steadfastness in their new faith. Disciples of Mahomet, the Moors had come to Iberia from northern Africa. Yes, but what spiritual allegiance had bound them before their conversion to Islam? Black magic, Encarnación’s neighbors would say. Mumbo jumbo. Voodooism. Imbued with misinformation and prejudice, they believed her a stalking horse for Satan. Indeed, the old woman haranguing her on the rooftop now ascribed to her, heartlessly point-blank, an odious personal quality known among Spaniards as mal ángel, or negative charm.

  “A proper christening would remove this child from the realm of devils. Why do you deny him? To increase your stores of mal ángel? Do you wish him to converse only with your titties and the evil spirits of your sins? Por Dios, Señorita, it hurts me to ask such things.”

  Ignoring these impertinences, Encarnación set her child down and brushed past the old woman toward the stone basin in the laundry shed. The vieja followed her.

  The toddler, meanwhile, hunkered in a wet spot under the flapping clothes, fascinated by the graceful schooling of Seville’s pigeons. They careened overhead like scraps of half-charred paper buoyed on erratic updrafts. While Encarnación, heedless of the birds, flooded the basin with cold water and unwrapped her clothes, her son reached heavenward. All his yearning was for the wheeling pigeons.

  “How extraordinary, Señorita. Your baby is walking at—what?—seven months? He looks much younger, even though his head is very big. It’s the blackness in him, I imagine, this power to walk at so young an age. Do you fear he’ll lose this power if you have him christened? Do you believe you must raise him as a brujito, a warlock, to insure his survival? Is that your thinking?”

  For a brief moment, in the black mirror of the water, the child’s mother saw her own unsmiling face. She resembled, even to herself, the bewildered representative of some lost tribe of humanity: sloe-black eyes, a sensuous mouth, and eyebrows growing together above her broad pug nose. In the shadowy water under her hands her swarthiness was emphasized by an even deeper shadow. Many Spaniards considered her a Negro. She shattered her image with a handful of cheap detergent and the limp bludgeon of a diaper.

  “Instead, Señorita Ocampo, you are fattening this baby for someone else’s feast. You have deprived him of both baptism and the comfort of human speech, and, should you die, no one will stoop to help him. Never mind that he scrambles about your apartment like a Barbary ape. Outside, he will not be able to fend for himself—for at present he is only his selfish mother’s juguete, a plaything. If you were to suffer a fatal accident or sicken unto death, he too would be doomed. It is wicked of you not to have thought of this.”

  At the conclusion of this part of the old woman’s argument, the child hooted spontaneously and ambled to the railing overlooking the inner courtyard. Encarnación, not seeing him behind her, interrupted her washing to fetch the boy back. To reach him she had to bump the old woman aside, but the contact was less peremptory than she would have liked it to be. This persistent meddling in her affairs was insupportable. It sapped her of energy and self-esteem.

  “What of the little one’s father? If he knew you had borne him a child, he would surely wish to rescue it from the folly of such an upbringing. A black man sired this one on you—anyone can see that—but even black men have tongues with which to speak their preferences. You should tell him he has a son.”

  Encarnación returned to the wash house. The child, emboldened by his most recent adventure, approached the old woman and gripped her stiff skirts. She, in turn, put the tip of one finger in the center of his woolly head and rubbed it around on that spot as if to ward off any evil implicit in his nearness.

  “Cruelty and arrogance,” the crone continued, still rubbing the boy’s head. “It’s pride that makes you take on a responsibility of which you are unworthy. Otherwise you would understand that what you do guarantees the ruin—yes, the damnation—of your brujaco. Time will undo both your pride and your son. And the shameful occupations you pursue—listen, Señorita, they will kill you before you think.”

  Her hands and arms dripping, Encarnación whirled about and broke her child’s grip on the old woman’s skirts. The vieja blinked but did not draw back. Although cadaverously skinny, she towered over the young woman, and her height advantage perhaps made her foolhardy. In a moment her mouth was working again, spilling out recriminations, advice, and ominous prophecies.

  Encarnación, casting about for an ally, spotted the tin can into which her tormentor had recently emptied her bladder. This she snatched up. Then, shaking the can from side to side before the old woman’s astonished face, she circled her prey to cut off her escape down the interior stairs. The crone gasped, covered her eyes with her forearm, and darted beneath a wire supporting the threadbare burden of her family’s wash.

  “Tenga merced,” she cried, ducking beneath a pair of trousers. “Have mercy, Señorita.”

  The child, hooting, pivoted to keep the action in view. He had forgotten the pigeons, if only for this moment.

  The chase continued, and Encarnación permitted the old woman to sweep back beneath the clotheslines and to reach the stairwell. The crone was turning the corner on the first lower landing when Encarnación, upending the can, scored a warm, liquid bull’s-eye on the retreating figure’s head and shoulders. Screaming and gibbering, her piety altogether flushed from her system, the vieja disappeared into the bowels of the building. Her cries echoed clamorously in the tiled enclosure.

  Chapter Four

  An Ecology of Mirage

  BIRDS, WHEELING BIRDS.

  From the western edge of Lake Kiboko, in the lee of the ramparts on that side of the Rift, there lifted a glittering cloud of birds. Cormorants maybe, or kingfishers. They were too far away to identify easily (even with my combination reduced-print Bible and field guide), but in spite of the distance I believed that they were reacting to my presence in their world. Their appearance above the lake legitimized my arrival. In fact, it seemed to me that I had somehow summoned these birds into existence.

  The past was awakening.

  Once, long ago, in another past, my first awakening to my “talent” as a spirit-traveler sprang from a vision of pigeons flying above the rooftops of an ancient city. Birds on the wing invariably provoke this early memory in me, as a taste of madeleine soaked in a decoction of lime flowers always brought to Proust a vivid recollection of his childhood village. A paradox. Nearly two million years before my birth I had been recalling my infancy. . . .

  * * *

  Suddenly the lakescape was alive.

  Not forty feet away, a crocodile—a moment ago merely a ridge of pebbly earth beside the lake—slithered into the water. Beyond the crocodile, a family of hippopotami, submerged almost to their
nostrils, were taking their ease in the weed-grown shallows. These animals were members of the extinct species H. gorgops, immediately recognizable by their periscopic eyes. . . . Ah, but language plays tricks on me. How could they be extinct when I saw them snorting and yawning like living engines? I, not this family of riverhorses, was the anachronism here.

  Never one to surrender without a fight to the fallibility of tomorrow’s technology, I took out my transcordion and keyed in this message: “I’m home, Dr. Kaprow. This is the destination foretold for me in thousands upon thousands of spirit-traveling episodes. It’s inhabited, this place, and I’m one of the inhabitants.”

  Then I typed, “Wow.” And waited for a response that never came. And put the transcordion back in my pocket.

  Well to the south, a small herd of rather shaggy antelopes—they looked overdressed for this latitude—was tentatively approaching the lake. I thumbed past Revelation all the way to Ungulates and confirmed that they were either waterbucks (Kobus ellipsiprymnus) or their Early Pleistocene equivalents. A solitary bull with a pair of impressive ringed horns led his harem down to the beach, and even though I had assumed the water to be too brackish for drinking, the cows and several yearlings spread out along the shore and nervously lowered their muzzles.

  Overhead, a flight of flamingoes on their way to another Rift Valley lake or maybe another part of this one. They were rose-pink against the lightening sky, gangly and graceful at the same time.

  Returning my attention to the waterbucks, I was stunned by the quickness with which death struck a calf that had ventured too far out. A crocodile—maybe even the one I had just seen slither off the beach—lunged from submarine concealment and seized the hapless calf by the throat. As the surviving waterbucks bolted in terror for open country, the croc’s viselike jaws dragged the calf into deeper water. Crimson began to marble the turquoise surface of the lake, and although the family of hippos bathing just west of me remained blithely indifferent to the slaughter, I had to turn aside. My survival training with Babington should have inured me to such sights, but until now I had not really believed that the matter-of-fact savagery of African bionomics would prevail in my objectified dream world. I had been wrong, of course, and the rapacity of the crocodile was not only the young waterbuck’s comeuppance but mine as well.

  Fear had survival value. It could prevent me from falling victim to complacency my first day on the job.

  And what, exactly, was my job? In truth, it was twofold. First, to justify further military funding of the White Sphinx Project, I had to satisfy Woody Kaprow’s curiosity about the range and effectiveness of his Time Displacement Apparatus. Second, I had to provide the Zarakali government, in the person of its opinionated Minister of Interior, proof that our species’ earliest recognizably “human” forebears had lived within yodeling distance of Lake Kiboko, Mount Tharaka, and environs. Alistair Patrick Blair wanted hard evidence supporting his highly controversial theories about human evolution, and he had persuaded his country’s Western-educated President that White Sphinx would deliver on this point, with benefits eventually redounding to both the nation’s scientific establishment (i.e., by vindicating Blair himself) and its economy (i.e., by encouraging tourism, grants, and additional American aid). As a noncommissioned officer in the United States Air Force, I was the pawn of two governments. My “job” was to make both governments happy.

  Specifically, I had to search for protohuman hominids, observe their lifestyles, and report my findings to my superiors. The transcordion was supposed to bear the brunt of this last obligation, but because it was not working, I would have to commit my observations to memory until I could discharge that duty in person. Blair had suggested that the dropback take place next to Lake Kiboko. His hope had been that I could find a Homo zarakalensis welcoming committee gathered about the Backstep Scaffold, but that hope had already gone glimmering. The only two-legged creatures in the vicinity were birds, and they had not yet made a friendly overture.

  I strode down from the tuff bordering the lake and hiked eastward into open savannah. The differences between this landscape and its twentieth-century version began to astonish me. Where Zarakal had salt flats and thornveldt, this terrain boasted a well-trodden grass cover, small patches of forest, and a network of half-hidden arroyos feeding into Lake Kiboko from the hills to the west. To the southeast, much taller and mightier than it appears today, Mount Tharaka rose up into the sky like the hunched shoulder of a Titan. Evidence of volcanic activity—calderas, compacted ash, glintings of obsidian—marked the landscape if you looked closely, but on the whole the scene was pastoral, even idyllic. This was the way I remembered it from my previous spirit-traveling, but the surprise of finding my dreams corroborated made me lightheaded, giddy with the deliciousness of déjà vu.

  Halting, I surveyed the plain. Everywhere my eyes went, life. As earlier at the lake, I felt that I had called this procession of creatures out of temporal limbo by stepping into their element. The richness of racial memory, and my tapping of that richness, had bidden them into being. An egocentric view of the matter but one I could not quite shake. In addition to the waterbucks that had fled Lake Kiboko, I saw gazelles, wildebeest, zebras, and ungainly giraffids with antlers like massive human pelvises. The landscape rippled with spots and stripes, all seemingly suspended in an ecology of mirage.

  Only, I had to keep reminding myself, apparently this mirage was real. Although none of Kaprow’s dreamfarers had died on their dropbacks, he and his assistants agreed that a dreamfarer could easily perish in the territory of an objectified dream.

  Babington, the Wanderobo, had told me that I need not fear lions overmuch—but lions, leopards, and the relict population of saber-toothed cats that might inhabit this terrain stayed on my mind, and I was glad for my .45, even if a larger-caliber weapon would have offered more real protection. You make do with what you have, and the logistics of my dropback had dictated our choice of the faithful and familiar Colt. It would easily kill a hyena or a baboon, and if I braced my legs and fired successive shots into the forehead of a charging lion, well, it would probably serve in that situation, too.

  “Just don’t go walking in a forest of elephant legs,” Blair had cautioned me, “and you’ll probably be all right.”

  To make myself less conspicuous, I thought of following Babington’s advice and strapping a bit of foliage about my middle, but dismissed the idea because none of the wildlife grazing or browsing within a hundred yards of me seemed especially agitated by my passage. For a moment or two I thought I might be invisible to the animals here, but a small herd of zebras (Equus grevyi, today a relatively rare species) blocking my way into a thicket of fig trees dispelled this idiot notion by pricking up their ears, flicking their tails, and stampeding away to the south. Because I was walking into the sun, they had seen me before I saw them, and my presence on the plain had moved them to exercise that immemorial escape clause, flight.

  Cautiously I entered the fig-tree glade. No lions or cobras lay in wait, but I did find evidence that it had not always been uninhabited. A small midden of bones and lava-cobble flakes suggested that under one tree a group of tool-using hominids had butchered a small antelope of some kind and feasted on its carcass. Bits of fur snagged on the underbrush or ground into the sandy floor of the stream dissecting the thicket told me that the kill had taken place within the past year or so. I examined the stones scattered about. Obviously imported from elsewhere, they included lumpish core tools and the splinters fractured from them by the industrious bipeds. Hunger had prodded the creatures to this cunning labor, but so cheap and easily duplicable were its products that they had abandoned the implements upon abandoning the glade. I knelt beside the broken rib cage of the antelope and practiced knapping flakes from a polyhedral core tool.

  This was something that Blair and Babington had taught me during my eight months in the Lolitabu National Park. The resulting tools—call them awls, or scrapers, or burins—were not so serviceable as th
e various scissors, toothpicks, tweezers, and corkscrews concealed in the bright red handle of my Swiss Army knife; however, they did not cost me thirty-five bucks, either. One of these tools was sufficiently acute to make an incision (accidental) across the toe of my left chukka boot.

  Dutifully, I took out my transcordion: “Firm evidence of hominids only a half hour’s walk from the lake, Dr. Blair. Small midden with tool remnants and animal remains. Wish you were here.” And, this time, I put the instrument away without waiting for a reply.

  Although not yet noon, it was very hot, and I was sweating feverishly from my work with the lava cobbles. At the eastern edge of the fig-tree thicket I looked across the grasslands at the hills I had seen from the lake. From these hills wooded corridors stretched out into the savannah like the spokes of an enormous shell. Although Blair, the expert, had made many of his hominid-related discoveries in the fossil beds near the lake, I decided that this modest upland region was as likely a habitat for protohumans as any other. I based my decision on my past spirit-traveling and on years of intensive reading to explicate my dreams. If Mary Leakey, Alistair Patrick Blair, and Don Johanson had made no important finds in the uplands, the reason was not that hominids had never lived in them, but that erosion, predators, and volcanism had more successfully obliterated the signs of habitation there. It would take a couple of hours of walking to reach the hills, but I intended to go there. If I wanted to explore the haunts of habilines—that is, representatives of the near-human hominid family known as Homo habilis, a species first named and championed by Louis S. B. Leakey—I would have to seek them out and demonstrate for them the full range of my charms and accomplishments.

  Ladies and gentlemen, Beau Brummell is on his way.

  How would I be received into that unlikely Eden? With open arms or bared bicuspids?