No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  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 bac
k, 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 M
zee 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: