by Chad Oliver
The land was reborn in a miraculous and astonishing burst of life. Green was everywhere: a crisp new green that soothed the eye and refreshed the mind. The bush, once a barren world of dry gray-brown branches and dead grass and blowing red dust, was a riot of living things. It was a new earth, a different earth. Rain in an arid land had done its age-old work, touching seeds long dormant, patiently waiting grass, questing roots, budding leaves …
The vegetation was taller than a man and so thick that Royce could not see through it. Even the baobabs were lush and green. The cactus-like euphorbia seemed to grow before his eyes. The convolvulus had sprouted into clumps that were eight and nine feet high, and the plants were covered with white blossoms that looked like morning glories. Bees droned in the warm, still air.
The toy whistles of the busy trains were heard again and the rust stains were ground from the gleaming tracks by heavy wheels of steel. Crews of sweating men worked on the roads. Bridges were rebuilt across deceptively gentle streams. In time, even the red dust came back again to settle on wax-green leaves and the tough pitted hides of rhino and elephant.
The main road was open, to Nairobi and beyond.
It was all as it had once been, and yet for Royce it could never be the same.
The generator was repaired with monumental labor and minimal cost and the Baboonery lights came on again in the black velvet of the African night. The staccato sounds of drumming came once more from dances near the station. Piles of supplies were unloaded from the Nairobi train. Matt Donaldson came back to supervise the repairs to his battered safari camp.
Royce tried to pick up the threads of his life. It was a curious life certainly—he saw it now as though through alien eyes—but nonetheless he had a job to do. He was not a man to quit without warning; he would do what he had to do until he could be replaced. He owed that, at least, to the Africans who worked for him; if the Baboonery operation collapsed, they might all be fired. He did not regard his decision as being in any way heroic. The threat was over, after all. There was no point in scurrying for safety on a retroactive basis.
He set his traps, caged his animals. He resumed the shipments of baboons to the United States. He told himself that what he was doing was good and valuable. He tried to remember the benefits that would come from medical research. It was not easy.
Royce was not fond of baboons. Certainly, he did not idealize them. But the parallels were too close; they made him feel guilty and uncomfortable. They, too, had taken baboons, experimented with them, used them for purposes that had seemed worthwhile to them. They had done it for the same reason that Royce was doing it: the baboons were a lot like human beings. There was a kinship there. Perhaps there was also a responsibility …
And he looked closely at every baboon he trapped. He looked for signs of weakness, of sickness, of an alien intelligence staring out through desperate primate eyes. Not all of the transformed baboons could have made it back to the ship. He doubted that any of them had survived, but how could he be sure? Were any of them still out there in the bush, bewildered and alone, stranded voyagers in a world not their own?
No, he could not ever again see a baboon without wondering, without remembering …
He wrote to Ben Wallace in Houston, asking that a replacement be sent. He gave reasons, but not the real ones. He told about the fire and the floods and said that his family wanted to leave, which was true enough. He detailed the fine work that had been done by the men and recommended raises for all of them. In particular, he singled out Mutisya and Wathome. He suggested that Mutisya be given enough training so that one day he could manage the Baboonery himself. He made no attempt to tell Wallace the true story of what had happened. Houston was far, far away in another world, and Ben Wallace was only a man.
Royce returned several times to the place where the great white sphere had been. It would have been fitting, he thought, if no grass had grown in that lonely clearing. It should have been marked somehow; it should have carried the imprint of the strange visitation it had known. But the grass grew there as everywhere, and the flowers nodded in the sun, and the warm wind rustled through the leaves.
They had come and they had gone, and they had left no sign upon the land.
Royce had taken no photographs. He had been fighting for survival, and picture-taking had never crossed his mind. In any case, he knew, photographs would prove nothing. Pictures could always be faked.
The bodies of the baboon-things he had stored in the freezer had decomposed in the weeks before the power from the generator had been restored; they were only stinking chunks of decaying meat. He had buried the bodies without attempting an autopsy.
Bob Russell’s corpse had been found in his house, still on the couch where Royce had placed it. Royce read the obituary in the East African Standard that came in on the train. The death was ascribed to natural causes. Russell’s death had created no special stir. He had not been the only man to perish in the isolation and confusion of the floods.
Royce had not the slightest desire to live out his life as a freak, and he was not anxious to get involved with the Kenya Police. No action of his could help Bob Russell now. He knew that Russell would not have held him responsible for his death. He would probably have agreed that there were some things better left unsaid.
Royce knew, too, what would happen if he tried to tell his story, the story of what had really happened during those strange days and nights at the Baboonery. He would be thought mad at best, and at worst dismissed as the sorriest kind of publicity-seeker. The situation was a profoundly curious one. Mankind had reached the point where people could discuss such things in the abstract and believe in the possibility—even the probability—of non-earthly life. At the same time, if you met a man or heard of a man who claimed that an alien spaceship had landed in his backyard—that was a different proposition. People were not ready for that. Royce himself would have dismissed such a story as absurd only a few months ago.
No good could come from blurting out such a yarn. Royce felt that he owed his family something better than that. And he did not try to kid himself. He was what he was; a man can be marked by a strong experience and even changed somewhat, but he does not suddenly become a totally different human being. Royce had his own values, whether they were right or wrong, and they did not include a desire to be a celebrity, a martyr, or a nut to be paraded on television. He wanted a chance to live his own life as best he could, a life that was satisfying and meaningful to him. It was not an outrageous ambition, despite being somewhat unfashionable. Royce believed that perhaps he had earned the right to be himself.
It might be that one day they would come again in another place and under other circumstances. If that happened, he was prepared to tell what he knew. It might serve a useful purpose then. It might possibly help to know that they were not totally alien, however inexplicable their actions seemed to be. It might help to know that there was a gulf that could be bridged …
Royce did not know and could not guess where the great white sphere had come from, or where it had gone. He did not pretend to understand why the ship had come or what its inhabitants had sought. This small corner of the African earth had been a port of call, a mysterious island touched in the course of an alien Odyssey. Somewhere, perhaps, on a world lost in the deeps of space, there was a Homer who would sing of that voyage, sing of Earth and the beings who lived there.
Royce dared to hope that they had learned something good about man. He dared to hope that the songs—if songs there were—might say that men were something more than savages, that they had a capacity for understanding, that there was something in them that could be respected. Yes, and that there was a toughness in man, that they were not to be despised as potential friends in the maelstrom of the universe.
It was only a hope, but it was something.
It could have been worse, for both of them.
Meanwhile, Royce had his own life before him.
It wasn’t much, one man’s life.
But it always came down to that in the end.
One man. One life.
15
A day came when work was done, a time when Royce could take off on his own without guilt and without worry. It was not his last day at the Baboonery but the end was in sight. It was a time of hiatus, a time of waiting, a time for winding up one phase of his life. The new man had not yet arrived but Kathy had started her packing. The kids were playing with furious energy, excited at the prospect of flying away to a distant land called home.
It was a day that had to be.
Royce knew that he would see Buck again this day. He knew that he would have his chance. Call it the sure instinct of the hunter or give it a fancier name, it did not matter. Buck would be waiting.
He took the .375 and the cameras and the glasses. He took one man with him—Mutisya.
They set out together in the battered Land Rover, an unspoken bond between them
It was a perfect afternoon for hunting: a time of golden sunlight and soft shadows and cool green leaves. Royce. drove slowly, savoring it all, wanting to remember. The Land Rover whined and growled along the weed-grown trail. Through the thick bush where the tsetse flies waited, past the clearing where Matt Donaldson’s camp was neat and clean again in anticipation of a fresh covey of hunters from Nairobi. Across the sparkling silver of the Kikumbuliu, once more a gentle stream, and finally out into that great green plain that swept away to the Tsavo. Under that immense African sky, a sky empty now of menace but still a vast sky that went on forever …
Royce saw game that quickened the heart, game that was plentiful with the new grass and water, game that lived as it had lived for uncounted thousands of years. Gray-brown kudu, long-horned oryx, striped zebras that ran in a field of yellow flowers, ungainly ostriches trotting along with the single-minded determination of long-distance runners, dignified old elephants secure in their conviction of immortality. It required a conscious effort of the imagination to realize that the United States, too, had once presented such a picture. The animals had been different, of course, but the scene had been much the same: buffalo and antelope, bears and bobcats, deer and coyotes in an unspoiled land. It took even more of an effort to realize that the days of the old Africa were numbered, that this Pleistocene panorama before his eyes would be gone within fifty years or so.
Royce knew that he was seeing something that would never come again. It was a terrible loss, no matter how inevitable it might be. It left a hole in the world. He wanted to fight it but he recognized that the odds were hopeless. He, too, was an anachronism. He was out of step—or other people were.
He took some pictures. They were not for himself; the only pictures he wanted he carried in his head. The photographs were for the magazine articles he would be writing. A man had to eat.
He did not use his rifle. There was only one animal he wanted now.
He could smell the big river, a cool fresh wetness carried on the rising wind.
He stopped the Land Rover on the rim of the Tsavo valley. He climbed outside, the breeze from the river stirring against his skin. The Tsavo seemed still and quiet in the distance, a river of glass winding across the earth. The flood scars were still plainly visible but there was no fury now. The green meadow sloped peacefully away to the river, alive with new grass and flowers and the rustlings of the wind.
He lifted his binoculars, but it was Mutisya who spotted them first.
“Kuro,” he said, pointing to his left. “Waterbuck.” Royce nodded. Buck would be there, waiting.
He took the .375 from the cab of the Land Rover. The rifle was cold and heavy in his hands.
The two men moved down into the valley on foot, quartering across the gentle slope. There wasn’t much cover-the tall, swaying grass, a few clumps of commiphora—but the wind was right. If they were careful, they should be able to get very close.
Royce was certain that he had him. He had been on too many hunts not to know.
They worked their way down until they were within two hundred yards of the unsuspecting animals. Royce stopped, half hidden in the grass. He stood very still, watching.
There were four of them, all males, standing quietly in the grass near the river. Royce caught their scent clearly—a strong smell, rather like turpentine, but with a heavy animal muskiness. There were four of them, but he saw only one.
Old Buck stood a little apart from the others. He was not a herd animal.
He was a stately creature; he carried himself with aloof dignity, his head up, his splendid horns like a lyre above his alert, rounded ears. He was a majestic animal, a great stag of legend come to claim his world. His sleek coat glowed redly in the westering sun. The white lines that striped his eyes gave him a painted, ceremonial look. The deep curve of his chest told of power that had never known defeat, while the white on his rump hinted at an odd and unexpected playfulness.
Buck must have weighed a quarter of a ton but he stood as delicately balanced as a gazelle.
Royce knelt down and raised his rifle. He got Buck’s big chest in the cross hairs of his scope. It was easy, very easy.
He felt nothing, nothing at all.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
Royce made no decision with his conscious mind. The choice came from deep within him. His rifle moved. Not much, just a little. But enough. There was only a small brown rock in his scope.
He fired.
The flat sound of the shot cracked and echoed in the valley of the Tsavo. A puff of dust and splinters exploded from the rock. The four waterbuck were catapulted into sudden motion. They bolted for the river, Buck in the lead.
They ran without hesitation into the water. The animals were strong, graceful swimmers. They made it across with effortless ease. Royce watched them climb out, dripping, on the far bank.
It was still an easy shot. He held his fire.
The last sight he had of Buck was his white rump—a neat circle like a painted target—vanishing into the high grass.
Mutisya was utterly disgusted.
“Missed him,” Royce said, grinning broadly.
Mutisya was not fooled. He felt cheated. “Someone else will kill him, Mr. Royce.”
“Not today, anyhow. Maybe he’s got a few years left.”
Mutisya shook his head. He had no sentimentality about animals. Meat was meat.
Royce felt good about what he had done. There were times when a man had a choice. He had no compulsion to explain his actions even if he could find the words. He thought that he understood a little about himself now; perhaps in time he would understand more. It was not a new thing with him but it was a conviction that had been strengthened by what had happened to him-and by what had not happened. Surely, if man could find a point of contact and identity with beings from another world then there must be a kind of continuity between the creatures that shared the earth. There would be other days when choices could be made. His gesture had been a small one; he was only one imperfect human being. Still, there were articles he could write, pictures he could take, actions that were within his grasp. Perhaps there was a place on this earth where something could be saved …
The two men walked slowly back up the slope to the Land Rover. Mutisya said nothing more, but the burden of his disapproval was heavy. Royce did not doubt that Mutisya would be leading the new man down to the Tsavo for a crack at Buck before long.
Well, maybe the new man would be a lousy shot.
Maybe not.
They climbed into the Land Rover and started back toward the Baboonery. Long before they reached the Kikumbuliu Mutisya spotted some kudu on the grassy plain. He looked a question at Royce.
Royce stopped the Land Rover. He handed the rifle to Mutisya. Mutisya’s seamed face creased in an eager smile. He was out of the vehicle in an instant, maneuvering for a clear shot.
Royce watched him and responded to the ancient thrill of the hunt. There was a streak of common clay in him; he could not think of himself as a vegetarian. Ma
n had been a hunter for hundreds of thousands of years before he had sown his first crop. The plants of the field have shallow roots; there are other roots that go deeper.
It was an old drama that was set in its ways and it was soon over: the stalk, the crisp shot, the fall, and death where there had been life.
He helped Mutisya drag the heavy warm body to the road and heave it into the back of the Land Rover. The two men climbed back into the cab and started off again. Mutisya was pleased and happy.
The dead kudu flopped and rolled bonelessly in the back of the vehicle. The soft liquid eyes were dull and glazed, like blobs of old jelly. The dry horns scraped and clicked against metal. There was a lot of thick blood. The big flies covered the animal, feasting.
The great dark shadows were gathering again in the bush. The wind stirred across the lonely land with the first chill of the approaching night.
The dead kudu was very close behind him but Royce tried to force it from his mind. This had been one of the good days. There were other things to remember.
He looked up when he could, out through the dirty windshield, up at that tremendous arch of blue African sky. It was a more mysterious sky to him now, a sky filled with danger and promise, but still a sky that touched the world of man. It was a sky as boundless as it had been when the earth was born.
Life was just beginning, even now.
If he could have a little luck—if he could remember well enough and long enough—he could carry the memory of that free African sky with him wherever he had to go.
It was a long way home.
Royce hoped that he would not lose it, somewhere along the way.
If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you’ll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.