No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  I sat apart and watched the habilines carve the hippo into strips with craftily ad-libbed flake tools. Alfie and Malcolm worked over the carcass in the water, while Ham and Jomo passed chunks of flesh to the women and children on the bank. Fred and Roosevelt cooperated in gutting the beast and washing its luminous internal organs in the muddy water. I had dreamed a very substantial, very meaty behemoth; its flensing required concentration and time. I concealed my distaste and tried hard to recall what Babington had taught me about hippos.

  “It might interest you to know,” I informed the Minids, “that you’re butchering a first-rate source of protein. As much as four ounces out of every pound of hippo flesh is solid protein, about twice what you’d get in a comparable amount of mutton, beef, or pork.”

  Irritated, Alfie gestured for me to join him and the others in the water.

  “Forgot my pocketknife,” I begged off. “Stay at it, though. Nearly three quarters of a hippo carcass may be usable, whereas even with a blue-ribbon Four-H steer you’re sometimes lucky if half the carcass will render. You know, if only President Tharaka had had the foresight to encourage hippo ranching, Zarakal might have been able to avert famine in its frontier districts.”

  Alfie, shaking his head, grumbled over the curl of his bottom lip, and I relapsed into silence. When I looked up again, I saw that Helen had taken notice of my change of mood. She waded through the ankle-deep water to join me beneath the trees on the sandy bank. Her manner was quietly reassuring.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Go ahead—eat with the others. It’s not every day we run into something like this.”

  Helen would not budge from my side. She sat with one arm draped over my shoulder. Upon occasion she would wave off an encroaching vulture or fling a handful of sand, but otherwise she was motionless. She seemed to be willing to share my lack of appetite. I looked down at the swollen ball of her abdomen. Its surface bulged once, then surrendered to a run of elastic waves. The fetus—our child—was fisting out feisty rhythms in the bistro of Helen’s womb.

  “You’re eating for two, Helen. Go on now, get down there, take your share.”

  She would not budge. She was adamant. If I would not eat, neither would she. I wanted to make a sacrifice for her, to give her an excuse to eat—but I could not face the prospect of forcing down a single bite of blancmange, not even one, and so kept Helen from feeding with the others. I was ashamed of myself and half in awe of Helen. She was a saint, a genuine habiline saint.

  * * *

  Jomo fell ill. Unable to eat, hunt, or tolerate the japeries of the children, he tried to remove himself as a burden to the Minids by wandering off alone into a distant thicket on the plain. That same afternoon, missing him, Guinevere conferred anxiously with Helen. Tottering wide-eyed about Shangri-la, singing her distress in eerie bass notes, the old woman raised a small expedition to search for her husband.

  Ham and Roosevelt accompanied Guinevere, Helen, and me down the mountain, tracking Jomo by scent and virtually imperceptible trail signs. Within an hour we had found the old man. He was sitting in a beautiful Kaffir boom tree, staring out over the savannah with glassy eyes. He would not come down. His languid intractability on this point so discouraged Roosevelt and Ham that they began foraging their way back across the grasslands. If a crazy old habiline wanted to sit by himself in a tree, who were they to interfere?

  Guinevere, Helen, and I waited out the long starry night in the clearing beneath the Kaffir boom. In the absence of any leaves, the tree’s coral-colored flowers waved petals like tiny tentacles. The trunk of the tree bristled with blunt spikes, but Jomo had climbed to his perch without any regard for the hurt they were inflicting upon him.

  Once, foolhardily braving these spikes, I tried to climb up to Jomo, but he placed the sole of his foot on my head and levered me to earth with a single forceful thrust. That dampened my enthusiasm for trying to rescue him. Scratches tattooed my belly and thighs, and all that night my right buttock throbbed incessantly. If a crazy old habiline wanted to sit by himself in a tree, who was I to interfere?

  Then I remembered Genly’s death and its ritual aftermath, events that seemed as long ago and far away as my childhood in Van Luna, Kansas. Jomo, I realized, had taken his own funeral arrangements in hand. If the penultimate resting place of a Minid was the fork of a tree (the ultimate, of course, being a leopard’s maw or the gullets of a gang of carrion birds), why, then, he would install himself in the tree of his choice. He had picked a beauty, too. His vertical coffin was a truly awesome coral tree, with wood of resilient softness and durability.

  With the three of us alternating watches beneath the old man, he lasted two days in the tree. Vultures began circling overhead on the second day, however, for the odor of Jomo’s mortality hung heavier in the air than did the fragrance of the tree’s scarlet flowers. Finally, his spirit—his soul, if the species known as Homo habilis possessed that intangible commodity—left him, and he toppled out of the Kaffir boom in a heap.

  You could not leave a patriarch like Jomo—who had perhaps once occupied the Minids’ chieftaincy—lying crumpled on the ground. We must get him back up his prickly tree. Helen, after indicating by mumbles and signs her intentions, set off to Shangri-la to retrieve another prospective corpse-booster or two. During her absence I used a lava cobble to grind off as many of the Kaffir boom’s spines as I could reach. Guinevere, meanwhile, lay across Jomo’s body, daintily picking vermin from his grizzled beard and mane.

  The vultures kept circling.

  Ham and Alfie came back with Helen. They touched their dead comrade with the tips of their clubs, wiped the death smell into the dirt, and made threatening noises at the birds. Back and forth beneath the coral tree they strode, as if Jomo’s death were a great personal affront to every Minid, an ill-advised practical joke by a Landlord who did not deserve such forbearing tenants.

  Helen was exhausted. I had no idea what due date an Air Force physician would have assigned her, but her time could not be too far off. She did not join Ham and Alfie in their protest, but crouched stiffly beside Guinevere and beckoned me forward to assist her. I saw then that she had brought my Swiss Army knife from our hut. She passed the knife to me, and Guinevere sat up to see what was happening.

  Doubtful about the wisdom of humoring Helen, I pulled the knife’s large pen blade free and stropped it several times on my lava cobble. Helen retrieved the knife from me and put its point to Jomo’s right temple.

  “Whoa,” I said, thinking of the Homo erectus skulls found once upon a time in a limestone cave at Choukoutien, China. The spinal cords of several of the skulls had been painstakingly enlarged, presumably to permit the removal of the brains. Did Helen wish to dine on Jomo’s gray matter? Did she think such a meal would impart to the old man’s unborn grandchild some of his knowledge, cunning, or wisdom?

  My speculations were misplaced. Helen wanted to cut off the old man’s right ear. Hindered by her belly, she leaned over the mop of his hair and tentatively set to work. She was no more adept at this task than she had been at pulling the blade from the handle. Frustrated, she returned the knife to me and held the rubbery brown cauliflower of Jomo’s ear away from his head so that I could slice it off.

  Swallowing my objections, I quickly did her bidding. Helen packed a bit of dried grass on the old man’s head to absorb the oozing blood and took possession of the ear. She then extended it on her palm to Guinevere, who looked back and forth between this offering and her daughter’s solemn face.

  “It’s a keepsake,” I whispered. “Something to cherish.”

  Guinevere finally accepted the melancholy gift.

  A moment later Alfie, Ham, Helen, and I were boosting Jomo’s corpse back into the Kaffir boom. That accomplished, we consigned the old boy to the immemorial obsequies of the vultures.

  In its own way, it was a lovely funeral.

  * * *

  Several days later Helen awakened me early, if only in my dream. Stick-pin stars held th
e darkness in place, and Mister Pibb was still on sentry duty in the flame tree beneath whose crepe-hung branches we slept. In an uneasy trance, for I was dreaming, I followed Helen down the mountainside to the moonlit chessboard of the savannah.

  Friendly beyond all expectation, a pair of chalicotheres approached. Like camels, they knelt on their forelimbs and lowered their sloping hindquarters to the ground. Helen mounted the female, gripping its silken mane for purchase. With a curt nod she indicated that I should mount the other chalicothere, the male. Although I feared they would not be easy creatures to ride, I obeyed. A moment later both animals were back on their feet, and, swaying from side to side, our fossil steeds trotted out into the grasslands on their enormous talons.

  This was the grand tour. We passed herds of dozing zebras, fitfully dreaming dinotheres, asleep-on-their-feet gazelles. Giraffids teetered through the distant thornveldt like antlered sea serpents; and, strangest of all, an albino hippopotamus ran across our path in painful slow motion, its thick neck extended and its legs languidly treading air. It was the color of blancmange, this hippo, with boiled-looking freckles on its broad back, and I remembered that I had seen one like it not very long ago, perhaps in a waking dream.

  When it disappeared into the rivercourse toward which it had been loping, our chalicotheres turned aside, carried us past a gang of thuggish hyenas, and stampeded through the low grass toward a destination unknown to Helen and me. Desperately we clutched their manes and dug our knees into their shedding flanks.

  A leopard appeared ahead of us. It had flattened its body against the ground, but not quickly enough to go unremarked.

  Helen’s mount leapt like an impala, tossing her to the ground. I too was thrown, and as we struggled to our feet, rubbing our bruised buttocks and exchanging glances of wounded commiseration, the chalicotheres fled. I was so afraid that Helen’s heavy fall might result in the miscarriage of our child that the nearness of the crouching leopard did not greatly trouble me. I began running toward Helen, intent on embracing and comforting her.

  The leopard sprang from nowhere, swatted me across the chest, and immobilized me by sinking its canines into my skull. Helen screeched and scrambled away. I was glad to see her saving herself. She could hardly hope to rescue me, and, Ngai be praised, my own discomfort was minimal. A helpful mechanism of my preconsciousness had switched on, shunting both hurt and fear into a sensory limbo beneath my dreams. My neck snapped, but I had already relaxed so completely that the noise seemed like a burst of light rather than a crack of pain.

  Dragging me between its legs, the leopard struggled across the savannah to a tree.

  The landscape turned upside down. The leopard, setting and resetting its claws in the tree trunk, hoisted me to a convenient fork about nine feet from the ground. Here it wedged me into place and, holding one rough paw on my lower spine, began to feed. Its teeth tore inward through my kidneys, pancreas, bowels; and its tongue lapped speculatively at my warm, rich blood.

  Neither terrified nor pain-racked, I died into the night.

  Hunger awakened me. It was still too early for the habilines’ aubades, and the two-legged corpse under my paws was good for another meal only if I ate daintily and paced myself. This was not my style. I shifted the body and devoured as much of the stringy, acrid flesh as I could stomach. As I was eating, an upright figure appeared on the plain about forty feet away. This was the female companion of the nearly hairless biped I had stunned and dragged aloft. Except for the low-slung tumor of her pregnancy, her profile had a graceful slenderness. I lifted my head from the ravaged carcass to see what the female intended to do. She came stalking on a leisurely diagonal. Her progress toward me was hypnotic. I considered the desirability of making another kill and found the notion attractive. The fetal sweetmeat in the woman’s womb would make a fine dessert.

  Suddenly she made a sweeping motion with her arm.

  A rock or a hard-shelled nut ricocheted off the tree trunk past my head. I flattened my ears and roared, but the roaring did not daunt her. In fact, it may have provoked her, for she let loose a barrage of invisible missiles. I could not see them, but I could feel them. One struck me in the upper lip, cracking a tooth.

  I sprang headlong to the carpet of grass and furiously rushed my tormentor.

  She did not quail away, but passed her club from one hand to the other and braced her feet to accept my charge.

  I hesitated. The carcass on which I had been feeding slithered from my tree, a pudding of torn flesh and splintered bones. This female habiline, I realized, was avenging a loss, not merely ordering up dessert, and her steadfastness arose from the urgency of her purpose. I had to be equally firm to triumph over her. Ignoring her mate’s fallen body, I resumed my charge. At the last instant, however, she danced aside and thwacked me on the hindquarters with her club, shattering a vertebra and so pitching me sidelong to the ground.

  Although I bucked over to my belly, the woman was astride me before I could regain my feet. Her gnarled legs clutched my flanks like calipers, and her fingernails raked through the astonished vermin in the matted fur behind my head. I howled, but my dinner had settled in me heavily and I could not get off the grass. What ignominy. I had never suffered such humiliation before. I was terrified that she would kill me where I lay. The pain from my shattered vertebra was almost unbearable.

  And then the female began to sing. Wrenching my ears and directing my gaze toward the moon, she divested herself of a canticle of harrowing purity. My fear evaporated, and the pain in my hindquarters surrendered to the hallucinatory loveliness of her song. Without dislodging the female habiline I got to my feet. Then, under her strong, forgiving hands, I lumbered off toward Mount Tharaka.

  The lady and the leopard.

  Entering the Minid village without alerting its sentry, we skulked through the shadows to the windbreak shelter that the woman had shared with my latest victim. Here we lay down side by side, nuzzling each other like rootling cubs. Then we fed our passions beyond the limits of her former lover’s appetite. Thus did we cuckold the dead. Afterward we curled together into a ball and jointly dreamed this dream.

  Eventually Helen awakened me. Upright among my fellow habilines, I lifted my voice in the fearsome tabernacle of the dawn.

  * * *

  Our numbers were diminishing. The deaths of Genly and Jomo had left only six adult males, myself included, among the Minids. Mister Pibb, the sole adolescent male in our band, had recently taken up with a sweet young thing of the Hunnish persuasion, and we could no longer expect to compensate for our losses from within our own ranks. Ham was visibly aging, growing increasingly more decrepit as the days passed, and I felt sure that one day soon he would emulate Jomo’s voluntary walk to oblivion.

  The Minids, of course, were in no danger of either disbanding or dying out. Our population was twenty-one, down only three since my arrival, and of the eight remaining children, three were girls, two of whom would soon be passing through the fires of adolescence. They were the salvation of the Minids, for when they began to attract suitors, our band would open its constricted throat and swallow these young males like fingerlings. The franchise would not fold. It would begin a rebuilding program with its nubile females’ first-round draft choices. Indeed, I was one of these choices.

  A brief digression:

  Never during my sojourn with the Minids, in this region a few hundred miles north of the equator, did I have a clear sense of seasonality. I had dropped into the Pleistocene during a drought-stricken July in 1987, but since my arrival I had been unable to distinguish any significant gradations between hot and not quite so hot. Often, owing to the elevation of the areas around Mount Tharaka and even Lake Kiboko, the nights were cool—but the relative coolness of the nights did not translate into any significant variation in the daytime temperatures of the savannah. I could not have said that this hot day occurred in August, this one in September, and this other in April. Months had no meaning.

  Of course, the true me
asure of seasonality in equatorial regions is not temperature but rainfall. The Somalis call the rainy period from March through May gu, and that from September to late November dayr, but if you believe that the precipitation during these periods never slackens, your brain has absorbed a crucial portion of the rainfall intended for the Somalis. Drought traditionally parches the area, even in the “rainy” seasons. Although Blair had assured me that the Lower Pleistocene was a wetter period than our own, and the vegetation accordingly more lush, I must have stepped into an unusually protracted dry spell. Lake Kiboko, just as Blair had predicted, rode higher then, but to obtain relief from the anomalous drought afflicting the grasslands, the Minids had left their traditional territory for a highland haven on the skirts of Mount Tharaka. There we had finally seen rain.

  And rain brings me back to Helen’s pregnancy.

  In the aftermath of a rainfall, I had discovered that Helen was carrying our child.

  Well, some considerable while after Jomo’s funeral, rain seemed to be in the air again. The wind blew in warm gusts from the east, screaming over the countryside from the Indian Ocean, then whispering away into muggy, nerve-racking stillnesses. At night we could hear the sepulchral grumbling of thunder, and sheet lightning lit up the horizons. Spooked by the weirdness of the sky, the herds on the grasslands ricocheted from place to place. Sometimes lions roared rebuttals at the thunder, and sometimes the gazelles and wildebeest settled down to watch the horizon-wide lightshows. Up on Mount Tharaka where the lightning flashed its bridgework, we were apprehensive, too.

  This kind of weather—maybe you could call it a season—lasted for several days. Every evening was a siege. I saw theater scrims of rain over Lake Kiboko, but in our balcony seats in Shangri-la these storms never touched us.