No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  Fred made a cooing sound and pointed into the underbrush. Rousing myself, I saw nothing, only thorn trees and desolation under a falling moon. Fred continued to coo, and a moment later a shadow emerged from a thicket to the northeast. At the sight of this figure my heart began ker-chunking like an engine block whose bolts have shaken loose.

  It was Helen.

  I repressed the urge to halloo, to scramble down to meet her. The Minids deserved to sleep, and my rushing to Helen would inevitably rouse and perplex more than a few of them. My heart laboring noisily, I waited for her to pick her way across the intervening territory to our water hole. Fred, having alerted her to our position, stopped cooing, but Helen did not seem to make good progress toward us. Ordinarily she was light-footed and quick. What was taking her so long? Had she sustained some terrible injury?

  No, she had not. Helen was carrying something, clutching it in front of her like an idol. It was a baby. I remembered the baboon infant that, some time ago, she had brought back from a foraging expedition. That infant had not long survived its abduction, and if this was another stolen child, as it certainly appeared to be, the inarguable result of Helen’s frustrated maternal longings would be the poor creature’s death. Sweet Jesus, I thought, not again.

  As quietly as I could, I went down to Helen and met her at the far side of the water hole. She handed me her darling, which was not a baboon but an australopithecine baby—from the africanus troop that had shadowed us all the way from New Helensburgh. The baby came willingly into my arms, and my first thought was that she resembled a human child in furry long johns. Her feet were more or less bare, and her knees—as if she had worn holes in her pajamas—were naked, calloused knots very like my own. She refused to look at me, glancing instead at Helen before staring wistfully out into the darkness of the bush. She was slightly larger and slightly hairier than Fred and Nicole’s A.P.B., probably more than a year old.

  “At least you had the sense to steal one that’s old enough to eat solid foods,” I told Helen.

  Helen took the australopithecine child out of my arms and set her on the ground between us. Then, embracing me, she patted my back with both hands, all the while gibbering a series of syllables that had little relation to any I had taught her. Their unintelligibility did not obscure their binding import. As surely as if we had conceived this child ourselves, Helen and I were the australopithecine’s mother and father. It was our responsibility to see that she grew into a healthy adult.

  “This is crazy,” I protested. “Helen, she’s not a habiline. She’s a kidnapped southern ape. Even if we manage to shepherd her past adolescence, what kind of life do you suppose she’ll have?”

  Still patting my back, Helen mumbled a string of incoherent sweet nothings. With foolish-fond eyes she looked down at our daughter, who appeared to be lapsing into an autistic trance.

  “Who’s going to mate with her?” I continued. “She’ll be lucky if the Minids tolerate her presence, much less accept her as one of their own. Nor are her own folks going to want to take her back. She’ll be despised by habilis and africanus alike, Helen, just as if she were a half-breed. Can’t you see what folly this is, what potential disaster?”

  Helen was having no part of my faintheartedness. She hunkered beside the tiny girl-child and tenderly groomed her head. Now I saw that on her raid against the australopithecines Helen had not totally escaped injury. Blood from a series of claw marks striated her inner arm. And yet she had stolen this child with no worse hurt than that, a feat of such competent derring-do that I could only shake my head. The look on Helen’s face said that I should tend to the child while she took a few moments to see to her wounds. Awkwardly I knelt beside the little hominid and went nit-picking through her scalp, a courtesy that her trance did not permit her to acknowledge.

  On the other side of the water hole Emily awoke, sat up, and looked at us. After yawning sleepily, she rose and ambled around the pond to satisfy her curiosity. Were we real or only a midnight apparition? Squatting as Helen had, she touched the kidnap victim on the chin. Then, fascinated by the australopithecine’s passivity, she pulled her finger back and stared. Helen and I scarcely dared to breathe—as if Emily’s next decision would spell either life or death for the abducted child.

  At last I said, “Her name is Mary.” I looked at Helen. “Is that all right with you? Mary?”

  “Mai mwah,” Helen said. “My mirror,” I thought, was a reasonable approximation of “Mary.” Let it stand. Let it stand.

  “Good. That’s settled.”

  Satisfied that Emily intended Mary no harm, Helen left me in charge of the child and disappeared into the night again. When, ten or fifteen minutes later, she returned, she was carrying a good supply of ol duvai, wild sisal, with whose sticky balm she treated the claw marks on her arm. Emily helped her, smoothing Helen’s sparse forearm hairs aside and squeezing the natural anodyne of the wild sisal into her cuts. Why such solicitude? I wondered. Maybe it was the late hour, the presence of the child whose head I was still desultorily searching for lice, or the all-pervasive quiet. Whatever the reason, I too was at peace, my misgivings about adopting the australopithecine routed by an army of fatuous hopes.

  * * *

  Alfie roused us from sleep by banging his stave repeatedly against the bole of a tree. It was almost dawn. In clusters on the plain, like cowlless monks at matins, sat the vultures that had settled on the corpse of the hyena impaled by the female rhino and gutted by its own fellows. The other hyena—the one I had shot—had been dragged down to the water’s edge, out of the birds’ reach. Even so, the vultures kept their eyes peeled for an opportunity to move in.

  Any troop of self-respecting baboons would have breakfasted before departing, but Alfie, along with Ham and Jomo, moved us out into the veldt with nothing in our stomachs but muddy water and the fluttery sensation that accompanies either doubt or encroaching illness. The idea was to get us going before the arrival of a lion or the return of the hyenas pinned us up for the better part of the morning.

  Today Helen marched at the center of our procession, taking Mary with her. Now that she had a child she was indisputably entitled to give up her roles as outrider, sentry, and bodyguard in favor of those as veldtwife, mother, and ward. Dragging her acacia stave behind her like a broken rudder, she carried little Mary on her hip. A weapon in one hand, a baby in the other. If she was confused by the disparate allegiances embodied by these symbols, her heart—at least for now—was with the women. Nor did the women harass or cold-shoulder her for joining them.

  Once the Minids had all become aware of her, Mary focused their occasional attention without provoking their hostility. I had expected angry faces, angry gestures, maybe even an assault. Instead, the habilines took turns examining the child, whom they seemed to delight in sniffing and gently poking. Helen allowed the Minids their inspections. If Mary were to survive, they must satisfy their curiosity about the kidnapped child and accept her as one of their own. Without once whimpering or struggling to get away, Mary clung to Helen with wide, terrified eyes, fatalistically enduring her ordeal.

  During our march the child overcame some of her fear of the Minids, and on one occasion, when we stopped to rest, she toddled away to join Bonzo, Duchess, and Pebbles, who appeared to be experimentally tormenting a pair of coprid beetles left over from yesterday’s encounter with the chalicotheres. The children did not prevent Mary from taking up with them. In fact, they allowed her to participate in the dismemberment of one of the insects, and both Helen and I looked on dotingly. After that, Mary, for all intents and purposes, was a habiline.

  By noon we were in more or less open country, full-fledged savannah, but the mountain—still, I decided, about fifteen miles away—sometimes appeared to retreat from our approach.

  A brake on our progress, the children continued to tumble about like puppies and to lolligag over any bit of desiccated matter in the grass. Mary was one of them now, and Helen sometimes edged out of the center of our co
lumn as if to renounce motherhood for sentry duty. She hurried back to Mary, though, each time the child showed signs of fatigue or crankiness. Her dedication to our daughter made me pensive and a little resentful. I had liked Helen as a comrade as well as a lover.

  Late that afternoon Ham separated from the group and ran gimpily ahead of us to a depression in the grass. He circled this small concavity (which, but for Ham’s strange behavior, I would not have looked at twice), then halted and cautiously circled it in the other direction. He hooted for reinforcements. When the other habiline men arrived, me among them, he lurched forward and yanked a large wedge of sod from the hollowed-out place in the savannah.

  A high, perilous hissing sound ensued. I supposed that Ham had uncovered a snake, maybe one of those egg snakes whose ceaselessly coiling bodies and cobralike hoods make your blood turn to ice. But their behavior is all empty bluff, and Babington had taught me not to fear them.

  What Ham had found, though, was not an egg snake or a bona fide cobra. Not at all. He had uncovered a litter of cheetah kittens. I counted four of them, elegant little felines with masks for faces and jewels for eyes. In their immature, silver-blue coats, they pressed against one another spitting out their fear and indignation. Their outrage was humorous. Mother was off hunting somewhere, but she would be back soon and we had better scram before she caught us poking around in their crib. Who did we think we were, anyway?

  Even after several months in the Pleistocene I was surprised when I found out.

  Roosevelt and Fred clubbed three of the kittens to death, showering blood and gray matter all over the grass. The fourth kitten tried to run, but Alfie booted it in the butt and fell upon it with his knee, cracking its ribs and pinning it to the ground. He killed it by biting through its neck. When he next looked up at me, blood was running from his mouth and there was a tuft of beautiful, wintry fur caught in his beard.

  * * *

  I retreated with Mary to the edge of the Minid gathering. As if the child were a magic shield or an inflatable life jacket, I clutched her to me for the comfort she afforded. Together, neither of us quite comprehending the other’s dismay, we watched the eaters eat.

  As soon as every gut had taken on a load of kitten loin, torpor descended. No one wanted to leave. Although we could have traveled several more miles that afternoon, the satiated habilines had decided to make camp where we were.

  A more vulnerable spot it would have been hard to find. There was not a tree or kopje within two or three hundred yards. Setting up housekeeping in that open place was a little like pitching a tent on an interstate highway. You were asking to be run over. But, gorged and insouciant, the Minids either did not recognize or blithely dismissed the possibility of peril. Fortunately, we were able to while away the late afternoon without having to defend ourselves against roving predators.

  The sun went down like a Day-Glo bob in the mouth of the Primal Perch. There, then gone.

  * * *

  A logy habiline is a bad insurance risk. Because I did not trust any of the men to keep their eyeballs peeled past moonrise, I decided to build a fire. Helen kept Mary beside her while I roamed the plain gathering the brittle, prickly limbs of gall acacias and the whorly, friable Frisbees of dried elephant dung. I soon had a homey blaze crackling in our midst.

  My spirits began to improve. Maybe I had been suffering from hesperian depression or evening melancholy. Watching the ants on the thorn branches curl up into weightless clinkers revived my sense of camaraderie with the habilines. Insects, unlike cheetah kittens, were not mammals. You could consign them to perdition with lighthearted hallelujahs, then stand back from the roaring hellfires and gleefully watch them burn.

  Fred—feckless, reckless Fred—returned, not with kindling, but with a weaverbird basket full of fuzzy little fruits. Where he had found them I had no idea. They were lavender-yellow ellipsoids with a sour-sweet musk. I did not eat one until Dilsey, who had taken charge of Fred’s basket, consumed six or seven with steadily increasing gusto and no conspicuous ill effects—when, by rights, she should have been stuffed to the jowls with cheetah flesh. Fruits, I told myself, watching Dilsey, were even farther down the evolutionary ladder of sentience than ants, and by now I was hungry enough to demand my share. Helen brought me a handful.

  My first taste of one of these fuzzy ellipsoids inspired me to name them. I called them puckerplums.

  Puckerplums inebriate.

  Indeed, I got drunk on puckerplums. I was not the only one, but I was by far the most maudlin of all the maudlin Minids reeling about our fire in ambulatory contemplation of the nastiness, brutality, and brevity of life. Why, in only umpteen hundred thousand years, I reflected aloud, all my habiline acquaintances—never, oh never purged from mind!—would be as Phoenician sea wrack on the condominium sands of Miami Beach. No one would ever know—really know—the living details of how they had steered their course toward the serendipitous disaster of our survival. How much we owed them, I thought, and how little most folks cared about what they had suffered for us. It was a goddamn shame, I told the Minids, that latter-day ignorance of their courage and sacrifice had pretty much denied them a place in the Annals of Great Human Heroes. They deserved better, much better, and maybe, when White Sphinx retrieved me, I would rectify this ignoble oversight.

  And then, striking one of my waterproof matches and lifting its impudent head against the travertine streaks of the horizon, I searched my memory for a haunting snippet from Yeats:

  “Dear shadows, now you know it all,

  All the folly of a fight

  With a common wrong or right.

  The innocent and the beautiful

  Have no enemy but time;

  Arise and bid me strike a match

  And strike another till time catch . . .”

  “In the days of the chalicothere,” I said, “there came unto you a chiromancer—that is, a diviner of palms—and I am he who will riddle the life lines in your secretive hands.”

  I went first to Dilsey, only a yard or so from the fire. Taking her scarred old hand into my own—the habiline hand with the abbreviated, crooked thumb—I tried to tell her who she was in order to predict what she would become and what would befall her.

  “Dilsey, long ago you met a small, dark man who swept you off your calloused feet and rose to a position of influence among the Minids. His name was Ham. Upon you, with your complicity, he begot the son whom we know today as Alfie. Alfie is the gemsbok melon of your eye, but your daughters Miss Jane and Odetta are also well beloved of you and your consort. In this savage place, Dilsey, you have lived a good and useful life. Though your body crawls with vermin and your mouth frequently vents the stench of rotting meat, in dignity and honor you are immaculate. Your life is as lengthy as the Nile, but you are already near the fathomless ocean into which it and all other lives inevitably pour.”

  I dropped Dilsey’s hand and stared around at the shadows staring back at me. Not quite spellbound, the old woman pushed another puckerplum into my mouth. I ate it, realizing that I had prophesied Dilsey’s death. What everyone wanted from me now was the details. Taking up her hand again, I tenderly rotated its palm into view. My saliva, I noticed, was ropy, ropy and bitter.

  “Dilsey, my dear Dilsey, you will be decapitated when the Toyota in which you are riding slips beneath the tailgate of a logging truck. Ham, your driver, will suffer the same grisly fate, but the sheriff’s report will absolve him of culpability because of local weather conditions and the failure of the logging vehicle to display a flag on the end of its projecting cargo.

  “Odetta will enter a multimillion-dollar suit against the implicated pulpwood company on your family’s behalf, but the litigation will drag on for years, in part because the coroner’s inquest has revealed an unacceptable percentage of alcohol in Ham’s bloodstream at the time of his demise. Puckerplum intoxication, apparently.

  “As for your and Ham’s funeral, Dilsey, it will be a grand event, with many hyenas and vultures in f
ormal attire gathered together at graveside. Oh, yes, a grand event. The talk of the savannah for weeks. None of this posthumous notoriety will matter to you, however, because in addition to being dead you are a deferential and unassuming lady who does not permit such silly flapdoodle to set her head spinning.”

  After kissing Dilsey on her bony brow ridge, I reeled away into the darkness beyond the fire, which the children were continuing to feed with twigs and dung pats. Jomo caught me and led me back into the semicircle of adults. Insistent, he shoved the fingers of his open palm into my chest.

  “What do you want me to tell you?” I demanded. “Dead of cancer, of gunshot wounds, of radiation poisoning? No, sir. No, ma’am. To hell with that. Gone with a bang or a whimper, I don’t want to prophesy our end, and I won’t. Tonight I’m not going to think any more about it.”

  Helen approached me out of the windy desolation of the veldt, Mary in her arms. Our fire whipped about madly, and my tattered bush shorts popped like a string of firecrackers. Helen wanted a reading. She adjusted Mary on one hip and held her palm out to me.

  “Mai mwah.”

  “This is the last one,” I told the Minids. “This is the last habiline palm I’m ever going to read. Do you understand?”

  They said nothing. Helen waited.

  Clasping her arthritic-looking hand, I declared, “Helen, you’re going to fall in love with a water-tank painter and live happily ever after. You’ll have a few so-so days, of course, blah times when you’re depressed by the international situation or the gloomy wood paneling in your mobile home. You’ll like Florida, though, and your husband’s the sort who’ll try to let you, you know, actualize your creative potential as an autonomous person. Every anniversary he’ll, uh, take you sandblasting inside some little community’s elevated water tank, where you’ll pretend you’re pioneers exploring the hollow core of another planet. This is one of the ways you’ll continually renew your romance. All things considered, it’ll be a decent, serene, unassuming life. You could do a helluva lot worse. You really could.”