No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  Another explosion wracked the mountain.

  Below our encampment Alfie and Malcolm were hooting frantically. Quite clearly from where I lay, only a few feet from Helen and the Grub, I could hear other habilines calling back and forth across the ridge. I turned on my side and saw Guinevere hurrying out of her windbreak and down a worn footpath toward the men.

  Emily, Fred, and Nicole next came scurrying past me, and Nicole was carrying A.P.B., whose eyes were fixed over his mother’s shoulder on the prodigious bonnet of ash cowling Mount Tharaka’s truncated peak. The ground was tilting and heaving even as they fled, and it occurred to me that I had only two possible courses of action: I could die with Helen or I could bid her farewell and perhaps save my life. And the Grub’s.

  Kicking aside the struts of the unfinished travois, I threw myself into Guinevere’s shelter. There lay Helen. The Grub squirmed against her breasts, where I had placed the infant to free my hands for work. About her neck my dead wife still wore the red bandanna that my sister Anna had given me in Cheyenne. I unknotted it, wiped Helen’s forehead, and, after closing her lackluster eyes, tied the bandanna around my own neck. Another powerful explosion shook the mountain. Time was tightening like a noose.

  “Come here, baby. Come to Poppa.”

  I picked my daughter off Helen’s chest again and, cradling her in the crook of one arm, mouthed an incoherent goodbye to my lady. Then I darted out of the windbreak in desperate pursuit of the other Minids. The ridge sluiced with yellow mud, but I kept my balance and overtook the habilines in the very meadow where I had first learned that Helen was going to have a child.

  Hot ash was showering down. From the vantage of the meadow it was evident that Mount Tharaka had blown away a good four to five hundred feet of its summit. Most of the smoke and soot—or at least the darkest plumes—trailed off to the east, while the sky directly above the mountain had the benighted look of a mirror draped with a black mantilla. Rivers of mud—of scorched tapioca—were oozing down the northwestern flank from the fractured summit, and several of these had already breached the timberline.

  Chance and the mountain’s peculiar topography had diverted these floods away from Shangri-la, toward the citadel of Attila Gorilla and his unfortunate people. Unless they had been far more prescient than we, it was hard to imagine that they had escaped their lofty fastness.

  Numb, the Minids and I walked away from Mount Tharaka. The men had clubs of one sort or another, but otherwise we had fled the volcano without any worldly goods. The Grub and Helen’s red bandanna were all I had salvaged from the catastrophe still unfolding behind us.

  On the savannah elephants trumpeted and guinea fowl paced. The foremost concern of every creature was not to kill a fellow refugee for lunch but to put a healthy distance between itself and the angry mountain. Therefore our evacuation proceeded almost like a parade. We saw baboons abreast of us, unruffled ostriches sprinting into thorn brakes, and giraffids moseying along in self-possessed pairs. As for us, we seemed to be heading toward our old capital cities in the gentle hills east of Lake Kiboko.

  The Grub soiled me and began to cry. Her high-pitched mewling alarmed the Minids. I held my daughter at arm’s length, scrutinizing her pallid body and monkeyish features. Her head, too heavy for her scrawny neck, lolled. Her face was a jigsaw puzzle of splotches and lines. Most surprising, her eyes were not the white-rabbit pink of pure albinism but a pair of obsidian dots, hard and penetrating. These dots disappeared when she howled, as she now recommenced to do, and I brought the child back into the cradle of my embrace.

  Prolonged exposure to the sun would probably blister an infant so bereft of pigmentation. I tried to shade her with my chest, but the Grub did not stop crying. Shade was not all she wanted.

  She was hungry. I was not equipped to satisfy that need and began to fear that I had rescued her from Mount Tharaka only to condemn her to starvation on the veldt. I might just as easily have left her writhing on Helen’s corpse. Milk was what she required.

  Guinevere drew alongside me, gesturing for her granddaughter. I handed the Grub to her and watched the baby nudge the depleted reservoirs of her dugs. The futility of this struggle was dismaying—but Guinevere carried her forward to Nicole, who was striding along with A.P.B. sitting jockey-style on her upper back. The child’s dark, downy legs encircled his mother’s waist like sooty pipe cleaners; and when Guinevere tried to transfer the Grub into Nicole’s arms, A.P.B. poked at my daughter with jealous fingers. I hurried forward to deal him a hearty slap.

  Nicole beat me to it, knocking A.P.B.’s hand aside. Then Guinevere removed the toddler from his mother’s back and put him on the ground. The Grub—as soon as she was in Nicole’s grasp—began to nurse, and this charity saved her life.

  For much of that day Nicole treated the Grub as her foster child. She even took pains to keep my daughter’s body in the shadows cast by her own.

  When the Grub was not nursing, I occasionally carried her. The men now seemed to regard me as a kind of habiline transvestite, for if you put on a child in this society, you were automatically dressed as a woman. They stayed clear of me. The Grub, meanwhile, was frustrated by the uselessness of my nipples, which she eventually learned to ignore in order to concentrate on sleeping.

  In sleep her translucent eyelids flickered. Sometimes they fell back to reveal the jaundiced whites of her eyes, and I would carefully shut them again, remembering the way Helen had stared at me in death, as if seeing into a future realm of reversed chiaroscuro. The Grub was of Helen’s flesh, but what could the Grub know of either Helen’s suffering or mine? Watching her trembling eyelids, I feared she knew too much.

  Late in the afternoon Mount Tharaka boomed so mightily that the aftershocks ran out across the savannah in waves. Debris spewed upward in billows, and several strata of ash layered the southern horizon. Dust quilted the air overhead and drifted down like snow. Our bodies collected the cindery flakes.

  Clad in lightweight surcoats of ash, looking like the Clay People in an old Flash Gordon serial I had seen on television in Van Luna, Kansas, we trudged on. The drifting ashfall, I told myself, was a natural sun shield for the Grub. I gave her back to Nicole believing that some power, maybe even my own will, was guaranteeing her survival. I would not lose her. She was Helen’s legacy to me, my wife’s final bequeathment from a past I had dreamed and dreamed again.

  Although it thundered that night, it did not rain.

  The next day found us still pushing northwestward, through thorn thickets and open grasslands. The gazelles and wildebeest seemed to be grazing on carpets of dusty gray wool, the zebras to be melting into the very air. Our entire world was a negative steeping in the chemicals of a photographer’s developing solution. Nicole fed the Grub, while the rest of us ate whatever we could find, whether ash-dusted fruits or an occasional dull-witted guinea fowl. Everything tasted gray, and the grit in our eyes made every hour the hour before dusk.

  Night brought more clouds from the northeast, immense black dreadnoughts, and the air crackled with electricity. Although we rested for a time before plunging on again, we did not pause to sleep. Everyone appeared to be fueled by adrenaline and nervous energy. Hyenas and leopards were nocturnal hunters, after all, and our knowledge that we were attempting a migration during their biological uptime kept us alert. Five male habilines with clubs might be able to hold a pack of overgrown Pleistocene hyenas at bay, but the battle would be unpleasant.

  Fortunately, cloud-spanning bolts of lightning unraveled often enough that we could monitor the transfigured landscape for predators, most of which were cowed by the incessant booming and crackling. The storm discomfited us, too, but we triumphed over our fear with the idiot, inbred bravado of our species. In fact, I put these dreadful flashes and bombinations out of my mind by thinking about Helen.

  Not too far ahead of us, maybe two hundred yards, lightning struck a solitary baobab, exploding the tree’s fibrous trunk and setting its branches ablaze like a Christmas candel
abrum. To burn so splendidly it must have been rotten to the heart. It stopped us dead. The equatorial heat had dried the ground and grasses so thoroughly after the rains that fire ran down the torch of the baobab into the savannah. The breeze fanned these fires toward us from the northeast. The lightning leaping overhead had an earthly counterpart in the crimson and amber flames dancing across our line of march.

  In spite of the wind, these fires burned wherever they wished. They consumed the shrubbery and tussocks slanting toward the lake and the patchy ground cover carpeting the steppe in front of us. Equatorial East Africa was instantly an inferno.

  The Minids’ bravado deserted them. Their masquerade of defiance collapsed. Alfie came pushing back through the women and children to organize a retreat. Flakes of ash clung to his beard and body hair, and his eyes coruscated like garnets. The barricades of fire radiating from the baobab had lengthened with such speed that no one resisted his command to fall back toward the danger we had escaped.

  Certainly he meant for us to fall back only until we could outflank the prairie fires and so discover another route to our destination, but his panic—and that of the other Minids—suddenly alienated me from their aims. With Helen dead, I no longer wanted to subject myself to the stark imperatives directing their lives. I did not want to go back to Shangri-la or either of the two Helensburghs. My present—even my present in this prehistoric dream territory—had antecedents outside of habiline experience, and I wanted my daughter to grow up with all the twentieth-century advantages. I had to get her out.

  Nicole had the Grub. She was fleeing with the others. I caught Nicole’s arm and took the child away. The fires partitioning the savannah continued to subdivide, extruding wall after wall of madly flailing light. I was crazy not to flee with the Minids, but a different notion had taken possession of me. Dreaming of another kind of deliverance and holding my daughter against my chest, I trotted through a flame-etched corridor of darkness toward the ancient Rift Valley lake.

  My plan was to find a safe passage through the burning grasslands to the southeastern shore of Lake Kiboko. In fact, I wanted to return to the very spot from which I had leapt into the Pleistocene.

  Was it possible that after nearly two years Kaprow’s omnibus could still be parked beside the lake, awaiting my return? Possible maybe, but not very likely. After losing transcordion contact with me, Blair and Kaprow might have reluctantly concluded that I was dead. Further, for all I knew, Somali irregulars could have overrun the lakeside protectorate or a cataclysmic world war put period to the persistent human hope for a global utopia. Either of these events, or any number of less traumatic ones, could have made White Sphinx a historical irrelevancy and me the anonymous victim of the project’s demise.

  The walls of fire crisscrossing the savannah tantalized and fretted the Grub. She arched her back, waved her tiny hands, kicked her legs. It was all I could do to keep from fumbling her to the ground like a wet football.

  Holding her, I trotted along in the imbecile conviction that my fate really did matter to my century, that my colleagues were faithfully waiting for me. They had to be. Otherwise the Grub and I would die, and the Grub, I felt confident, had not been born to waste her sweetness on the desert air. Even struggling in my arms, she did not cry.

  Ahead of us, hypnotized by the crackling barricades of fire, three giant hyenas stood in a kraal of darkness, panting like dogs. They were directly in our path. Kneeling beside a gall acacia, I exerted my strength and uprooted the bush with one hand. Then, in a blazing tussock not far from a massive bank of flames, I ignited this bush and advanced on the hyenas. For want of any alternative route away from the lake, they had begun jogging toward the Grub and me, shambling like three emaciated bears in motley. We were on a collision course.

  One of the hyenas leapt through a break in the wall of fire and disappeared into the darkness beyond. The other two creatures halted. In the triangular lanterns of their skulls their eyes shone eerily. The smaller of these two hyenas suddenly turned tail and loped back through the corridor of flames toward the lake. Undeterred by these defections, the third animal vented a hysterical laugh and resumed its swaying trot. I shook my outstretched brand at it to no avail.

  Even though the burning bush had begun to broil my fingers, I did not let go. I was immune to both pain and fear. After all, I had once survived the onslaught of an entire pack of these animals. On another occasion I had helped the Minids outlast a siege of giant hyenas by reciting a story and obediently shooting one of the besiegers with my besottedness to wholesale ingestion by a leopard. Why, then, should I fear this frenzied, stinking hulk of a hyena?

  Running past me—away from the brand that I tried to plunge into its face—the hyena twisted its body about and took my leg into its jaws. By bracing its feet and forcibly tugging, it upended me. This, I remembered, was virtually the same tactic the hyenas at the water hole had used to drag down the rhino calf. As I fell, I tossed aside my torch and tried to shift my weight so that the Grub would receive none of the inevitable impact.

  My butt struck the ground, then my head. Despite my preparations, these sudden jolts sent the Grub tumbling through a powdery coverlet of ash. Stunned, I lay where I had fallen, unable to go after my daughter or to resist the hateful savagery of the hyena.

  What then occurred will strike many as an improbable deus ex machina solution to our dilemma. I cannot effectively counter this complaint. To argue that I dreamed this solution is to cast into doubt everything else that happened during my sojourn in Pleistocene East Africa. (However, it is entirely possible that I foresaw this solution in a childhood spirit-traveling episode, one that, at the time, I had believed a tainted or impure dream.) On the other hand, to insist on the absolute reality of this occurrence is to violate the self-consistent world to which the director of the White Sphinx Project posted me. Let me, therefore, justify the following strange events in the only way possible, by declaring that they conform to the reality of my subjective experience immediately after falling to the hyena’s attack. If they have any other justification, I do not intend to record it here.

  After the thunder, an explosion. I believe that Mount Tharaka was erupting again. Doomed in any case, we were too far away to fear destruction from the volcano. The hyena pricked its ears and scanned the southeastern horizon.

  Then, out of a matte-black sky, there fell toward the Grub, the hyena, and me a small constellation of flaring stars. A shadow appeared among these flames, and this shadow was the spidery frame on which the vehicle’s vernier jets were mounted.

  At which point I realized that this was no constellation, but a wingless space module dropping out of the heavens to our rescue. With a whoosh it swept by overhead and touched down about fifty yards away, right in the middle of the fire-flanked corridor through which the hyena had attacked us. A flurry of volcanic dust eddied like snow about the module’s legs, and firelight reflected from the angular surfaces of the craft, which bore upon one high plane a vivid decal of the Zarakali flag: a hominid skull on a golden ground.

  Jolly Roger, I thought, trying to rise. I could not get up.

  After the hyena had fled, I crawled to my daughter, rolled to a sitting position, and lifted her out of the ashes. Her limbs were flailing, and her features were screwed up into a moue of utter outrage. She was not pretty. I had to dig a paste of dust from her nostrils with the nail of my little finger. Her phosphorescent whiteness made me fear that she was either radioactive or afflicted with the high luminosity of an unknown prehistoric illness. I rocked her, wiped her face with my saliva, and sang her a soothing song:

  “I remember the time

  That the goose she drank wine,

  And the monkey spit tobacco

  On the streetcar line.

  Well, the streetcar it broke,

  And the monkey got choke’,

  And they all went to heaven

  In a little red boat.”

  A hatch on the Zarakali space module opened, and two ta
ll, gaunt astronauts in tight-fitting suits with oxygen packs and helmets clambered down. Behind them they unreeled thick lengths of hose. These hoses the men turned on the grass fires raging to the right and left of their craft. They also directed streams of water toward the Grub and me, extinguishing flames, settling the ash cover, and filling the night with the distinctive stench of wet char.

  When they had finished, and the only fires still visible were several bright fuses running eastward against the wind, they stashed their hoses in the module and came bounding over the landscape to see what they could do for us. Two or three bounds were all they required to close fifty yards, so proficient were they at maneuvering in the giddy weightlessness of their country’s distant past.

  Inside those streamlined helmets, black faces.

  The astronauts bent solicitously over the Grub and me, murmured inaudible words of consolation, and scrutinized my writhing daughter from head to toe. One of the men tapped her chest with a gloved finger, tested her reflexes, gently pinched her naked limbs. To my questioning look he returned a broad, unequivocal smile. Undoubtedly the medical expert in the crew, this same man heightened my gratitude by examining my leg and flashing another reassuring grin. We were going to be okay.

  A moment later the medical officer was supporting me as we limped through the dark to the brightly illuminated module. The captain of the mission was carrying the Grub, who had stopped squirming.

  Once inside the cramped vehicle, I glanced about at the ranks of switches and dials, immensely relieved that I did not have to try to make sense of them. I could shunt to these brave astronauts all the responsibility for our deliverance.

  We lifted and flew. The flight was smooth, exhilarating, and brief. When we landed again, the module balanced astride a peculiar flat outcropping of tuff on the southeastern shore of Lake Kiboko. In the dark the lake looked like a vast oil slick, but I could smell the fertile fishiness of the shallows and knew that I was almost home.