No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  The foremost indignity of Genly’s life sprang from the control that Alfie exerted over his relationship with Emily, his bond partner. Wolves and whippoorwills establish essentially steadfast pair bonds; so did the majority of habilines, but Alfie, unlike all the other Minid males, rotated among a series of pallet partners. His favorite, as I have mentioned, was Emily, Genly’s “wife.”

  Emily was a lanky lady with atavistically prehensile toes and skin the deep blue color of ripe plums. Frequently she would forsake the bosom of her family to live in Alfie’s windbreak mansion. She did this so often that her allegiance to Genly began to seem a function of Alfie’s whim rather than of her own free will and devotion. She came each time Alfie summoned her and departed each time he dismissed her—so that I could hardly blame her if she no longer knew her own mind.

  Not long after my arrival among the Minids, Genly turned to me for solace, the innocent solace arising naturally between people who must make do in the emotional hinterlands of pariah-hood. Almost, he was a male Helen. Not quite, though, because when Emily returned to him, he melted back into the habiline status quo and became just another adult hunter—whereas Helen and I were never that smoothly folded into the aspic of Minid society. Often, then, Genly came to me seeking either comfort or diversion, and I tried to oblige him.

  He wanted little enough, really. A chance to fondle or heft certain of my twentieth-century artifacts was enough to transport him from his problems. I gave him, for instance, the penlight. He shone it into his eyes and ears, played its beam across the faces of the children as he had seen me do, poked it into snake holes and warthog burrows, and exhausted its batteries within a mere three days. I took the penlight back and gave him my magnifying glass. He accepted this new plaything, lifted it to his eye, and, after “reading” a few pages of the tiny book I had also handed him, returned both items and stared meaningfully at my pistol.

  Startled, I shook my head. “Cain and Abel are still a few centuries up the line, Genly. Murdering Alfie isn’t going to solve your personal problems.” (In retrospect, however, I wonder. . . .)

  Genly put his hand on the butt of the automatic, forcing me to twist aside from him and spread my fingers across his chest as a friendly caution. Disturbingly, he did not take his eyes from the weapon.

  “Veddy dangerous,” I told him. “Pull trigger. Go boom. You recall this effect, no?”

  My pre-Phrygian patois did not impress Genly. He raised his eyes and leveled at me a long, disarming stare.

  Well, not quite disarming, for I refused to yield the Colt and finally distracted him by jockeying a new set of batteries into the penlight and directing its beam through the thatching of one of the nearby huts.

  Alone among the habilines, however, Genly displayed no fear of the pistol. Even though I tried to keep it holstered and had not used it since shooting the copper-colored antelope at the lake, even Helen eyed it warily. Alfie, too, remembered what my .45 had done. I felt sure that his present laissez-faire attitude toward me owed a great deal to enlightened self-interest. He was far from stupid (even if he did not yet understand the benefits of occasionally washing the briefs he had taken from Roosevelt), and insofar as my weapon went, at least, the other Minids had adopted his policy of Leave Well Enough Alone. All, that is, but Genly.

  I began to believe—naïvely, as it happened—that a new demonstration of the Colt’s power would deepen the other habilines’ awe of my weapon and convert even the persistent Genly to this respectful attitude. I decided to use the pistol the next time we went stalking on the plains. The fact that the males’ last several hunts had been only middling successes, and that scavenging during this period had not been very profitable, either, gave me an additional excuse for unholstering the .45 again. Genly must learn to respect the Colt, and the Minids, me included, deserved the psychological boost of a kill larger than hyrax, hare, or guinea hen. We had gone a long time without.

  The day after my little talk with Genly (while Emily was still shacking up with Alfie), I shot a giant suid—a devastatingly ugly warthog—at almost the full extent of my pistol’s effective range.

  During the stalk the habilines closed in on this bygone beast by looking one another to the places where each hunter ought to be. Depending on eye contact and discreet head bobs, they made very little use of hand signals. Eventually, without its ever having seen them, they half encircled the animal in a copse of whistling thorns, convincing me that it would be unnecessary and maybe even counterproductive to break out my .45. Then, however, Fred and Roosevelt, who had been engaged since dawn in a kind of frisky one-upmanship, destroyed the element of surprise by bursting into the copse from the north and flushing the warthog into the open before their fellow hunters had completely closed their dragnet.

  Therefore, when the suid, lifting its tail, attempted to vamoose, I planted my feet, took aim, and fired. The noise scattered a flock of migrating swallows from the whistling thorns and momentarily confounded the Minids, who dropped to the ground or darted to the cover of the shrubbery. Although the fear of loud noises is supposedly innate, a carryover from the automatic fears of our reptilian forebears, Genly merely winced and crouched. A moment later he was at my side, his jittery attention focused not on the dead warthog across the savannah but on the smoking barrel of my gun.

  “You’re hopeless,” I told him.

  Was it possible that Genly had a hearing impairment? Other than his immunity to noise-induced panic, I had no real evidence for this theory, but life among the habilines would not have been impossible for a deaf person, merely exceedingly difficult. Sight, smell, and the more subtle tactile senses might have compensated for an auditory deficiency. In any case, Genly was not wholly deaf.

  “Boom,” I said, holstering the pistol and fastening the snap.

  We got the pig home by means of a crude travois that I improvised from branches, my open bush jacket, and a couple of pieces of nylon rope. My marksmanship with the .45 and my ingenuity in assembling the travois—a feat of on-the-spot engineering that I had craftily premeditated—gave the Minids a great deal to think about. You could see their thinkers thinking, whirring toward better mousetraps and self-propelled family vehicles and maybe even unspoken unified field theories. As Genly and I dragged my makeshift sledge and its savory burden back toward New Helensburgh, I felt that Alfie and the others had finally concluded that I, Joshua Kampa, was . . . a Credit to All Hominidae. I basked in their (probably illusory) esteem and wished that Helen were there to witness my moment of self-justifying triumph. Helen, however, had remained with the womenfolk that morning, probably with the intention of going off later and plundering our populous paradise of tree mice.

  Her absence did not badly cramp my enjoyment of the moment. Little aware of what was to come, I strutted and strained in harness.

  * * *

  That evening we partied. The warthog was dragged, shoved, boosted, and kneed up the slope of the hill to the flat, grassy summit above New Helensburgh. In that spot all the Minids gathered to partake of the dead animal’s flesh. Excitement ran through these creatures—indeed, through me too—like surgings of electricity, the elemental élan vital. Our gamboling on that gentle rampart was spontaneous and joyful. The hunters made an initial show of nonchalance, but this gave way to undignified chases and hide-and-go-seek games with Mister Pibb, Jocelyn, Groucho, Bonzo, et al., and only Helen seemed to be having any success resisting the general frolic.

  Alfie had bequeathed to me the honor of butchering the suid for dinner; I did so with never an appeal to habiline flake tools, relying instead on my Swiss Army knife to slit, slice, and dismember. This hard work kept my inward ebullience on an outward simmer. Once I had finished cutting, Alfie indicated that I was to have the first substantial bite and the opportunity to parcel out allotments as I saw fit. At social gatherings like this one, habiline etiquette demanded that whoever had made the kill receive the proper due, even if the successful hunter were a youth, a female, an outlander, or, like
me, an exotic freak of nature. Alfie was abiding by this tradition, this natural morality, and I played my part by distributing meat to all those brave enough to come and get some.

  At first even Ham and Jomo hung back, afraid to approach me. After they had come forward to take generous servings from my hands, however, the children and some of the women clustered near, too. No one disputed my right to serve, or squabbled with me or any other partygoer about the size of our portions, or sought to secure seconds before everyone else had taken firsts. I nibbled as I worked, twilight giving the veldt beneath us the beautiful antique dinge of an old painting.

  By this time, though, flies—miniature fighter aircraft with hairy landing struts and faceted double cockpits for eyes—were buzzing about with annoying persistence, and the redness of the warthog’s flesh had begun to alarm me. Against the entire thrust of my survival training with Babington, I suddenly feared contracting either a pest-borne viral disease or the worm-communicated agonies of trichinosis. Dizziness descending, I stopped nibbling, stopped dispensing cold cuts.

  “Brothers,” I cried. “Sisters,” I added. “How would you like to top off this party with a taste sensation nonpareil?”

  The Minids gaped at me. They seemed to regard my rare verbal outbursts as staunch Anglicans might view the babblings of a Pentecostal ecstatic. That is, as unseemly lapses. Ironically, their own bursts of amelodic song at sunrise or other unpredictable moments of emotional overload were inarticulate analogues of my recourse to speech. The Minids did not recognize this similarity, of course; and, at the time, neither did I.

  “Brothers, sisters, gather round. For the first time in the history of the prehuman race, I offer you the chance of a lifetime. You ain’t seen nothing like what I’m about to lay on you this evenin’. . . .”

  And so on.

  Unraveling this tawdry spiel, I got my nausea under control, waved merrily at the circling flies, and spitted the remainder of our warthog on a stick. There was not a lot of fuel lying about the hillside, but I gathered what I could find—dry grass, twigs, some underbrush—and flicked a match into the pile. The flare-up so astonished the Minids that they gasped and fell back. The sinuous flicker of the fire imparted an iridescent oiliness to the dark eyes and skins of the habilines, who, recovering, crept forward again. Still talking, still spouting poppycock, I thrust the haunch of the suid into the flames and held it there until the popping of its skin and the outrush of a delectable fragrance had overwhelmed our entire company.

  “There,” I said. “There’s the first-time-ever smell of roast pig. Ain’t it sweet, though? Ain’t it sweet?”

  The fire drove the Minids back, but the aroma enticed them closer; not one of them seemed to have a good idea which impulse to obey. For want of fuel, unfortunately, my fire was going out, and the sparks drifting up into the African twilight were like evanescent stars, forming and dying at the same time. I had driven off the pesky flies, but the meat was still red, empurpled by thickening blood and the advent of early-evening darkness. I had to keep the fire going if I wanted this pig to cook, and the only way to keep the fire going was to add more fuel to the tiny conflagration at my feet.

  “Here we go,” I crooned. “Here we go now. Gonna barbecue up some ribs for every little Minid.”

  I began nudging the heart of my fire across the hilltop to the ledge of eroded boulders overlooking New Helensburgh. I charred the toe of one of my chukkas doing this, but the habilines, fuddled, parted to give me passage, then closed again and followed me to the lip of the granite wall. Directly below me was one of the four habiline huts. Crying “Banzai!” I kicked the pitiful remains of my fire over the ledge and onto the topknot of dry grass roofing that shelter. The hut ignited almost at once, sending a shower of sparks back up the hillside and illuminating our citadel, no doubt, for miles across the outlying steppe.

  Several of the Minids began singing, pouring out arias of praise or lamentation to the youthful night. Your heart would have leapt or broken to hear them, and mine, I think, did both. In my hands, though, was the stick on which I had spitted the remaining meat, and I lifted this load into the air with both hands, presenting it to Ngai, Who dwells on Mount Tharaka. The fitful singing of the habilines faded in my ears.

  “Preheat to four hundred fifty degrees!” I shouted. “Then roast until a tender cinnamon-brown throughout and bubbling with natural juices! Serve with pineapple slices, parsley sprigs, and side dishes of fresh spinach salad!”

  I hurled the warthog haunch into the burning hut, where it collapsed a section of thatching and disappeared into an angry roar of flames. The smell of the roasting meat was heavenly. The habilines left off lamenting the ruin of the hut to peer down into the conflagration. I half expected to see the soul of that poor suid ascending to the realm of spirits on blistered pig’s feet. Helen, who had crowded forward, was suddenly at my elbow.

  “You don’t have to roast the rafters with the repast,” I announced to all and sundry. “But it’s a time-honored technique. Invented by a Chinese nitwit descended, I assume, from Peking man. Read all about it. Read all about it in . . . in ‘A Dissertation on Roast Lamb’ by one Charles Pigg—for of all the delicacies in the entire mundus edibilis, my friends, this one is the princeps. Hallelujah. Step right up, brothers, sisters; step right up for a succulent taste of heaven.”

  The fire did not spread to the other huts. Twenty or thirty minutes later, when the ashes were smoldering and a few acacia boughs crumbling into crimson coals, I worked my way down the hillside to New Helensburgh with Alfie, Helen, Genly, Emily, Mister Pibb, and several of the smaller children. With a stick I rolled the burnt warthog haunch out of the ashes and onto a rock to cool. Later, I gave a taste to everyone who wanted one. The habilines all appeared to enjoy what they ate, but I have since begun to doubt if their taste buds were sufficiently developed to permit fine discriminations. A pity, if true. Why were our ancestors so late to harness the random lightning to the cooking of their foods? Perhaps because they had no incentive in their mouths . . .

  Following dinner the Minids wrestled, raced, and cut capers, the curmudgeons along with the kiddies. There was not much order to these postprandial festivities, only enthusiasm and a high level of tolerance for juvenile mischief, no matter how old the perpetrators. I had recovered from both my dizziness and my irrational fears of coming down sick. And although the bloated feeling that springs from overindulgence now plagued me, I bore it stoically. I did not care if I ever returned to the present. The moon, looking little or no different from the way it looks today, spilled its ghostly lantern sheen across the vast savannah. The Minids and I were Children of Eve together, Sons and Daughters of the Dawn. With Genly and Roosevelt as sentries, we lay down like siblings on the hilltop.

  I was happy; supremely, unconditionally happy.

  But I dreamt that night, a dream of my adolescence many thousands upon thousands of years into the future of the planet. No Alka Seltzer in the Pleistocene, you see, not even in the first-aid kit of an Air Force chrononaut . . .

  Chapter Thirteen

  Van Luna, Kansas

  April 1964

  AS SOON AS WINTER HAD GIVEN WAY to the uncertain balminess of a prairie spring, Jeannette began to take Anna and John-John on walks from their house on Franklin Street to Van Luna’s old-fashioned business district: two rows of faded brick buildings facing each other across a wide, cobblestone street. Van Luna was her hometown, the community in which she had first begun to formulate a philosophy about the way the world worked, and it was good to be back. Her burly father Bill had found them a small clapboard house to rent, and, having flown home from Spain in early November, the Monegals had moved into it only a week before President Kennedy’s assassination.

  Lots of service families lived in Van Luna, in housing developments that had sprung up on the northern side of town. Air Force brats were as commonplace as roofing tar and ten-penny nails. Every morning their fathers drove the blacktop between their ticky-tacky suburban t
ract houses and McConnell Air Force Base on Wichita’s southeast side, and every evening, honorable executors of the SAC slogan “Peace Is Our Profession,” they returned via the same stretch of highway. The Monegals, however, lived in an older neighborhood, relatively near the sleepy heart of the town. Although less financially secure than the families of the officers commuting from the tract houses, they were content with their lot. Serene in its welcome predictability, no more complicated than an iron doorstop, for the most part this was a happy period in their lives.

  On their outings to the business district Anna would push her adopted brother in a squeaky stroller with a red-and-white-striped visor, while Jeannette brought up the rear pointing out flowers, meadowlarks, squirrels, even fire hydrants and lamp posts—anything at all to provide an excuse for her chatter, which she believed crucial to his development of verbal skills. (He was well past one now, and still not talking.) After descending through the park behind the Pix Theatre and the barbershop, they would cross the cobblestone street to Rivenbark’s Grocery. On an elevated concrete walk in front of the grocery, a pair of stubble-chinned retired farmers would be sitting on a railway bench swapping lies and lackadaisically ogling the street traffic. By Jeannette’s second or third such visit to her daddy’s store, they had assimilated John-John and determined that he was not a threat to civic order—not, at least, an immediate one. Jeannette, after performing the usual obligatory greeting ceremonies with these old men, would lift the boy from his stroller and shoo Anna into the store ahead of her.

  “Hey, Daddy,” Jeannette would call, going past the checkout counter, “I’ve come to get some stuff for supper.”

  “Help yourself,” Bill Rivenbark would reply, wiping his hands on an apron stained with produce spills and marking ink. “Your money’s as good as anybody’s, baby.”

  And she and the children would shop.