by Anthology
"It is a European game."
"In point of fact, it is an American game."
I shrugged. "They are the same."
"And now it is an African game as well. I played on the only Kenyan team ever to defeat the Americans. I had hoped that would make you proud of me, but you never even mentioned it."
"I heard many stories of an Edward Kimante who played basketball against the Europeans and the Americans," I said. "But I knew that this could not be my son, for I gave my son the name Koriba."
"And my mother gave me the middle name of Edward," he said. "And since she spoke to me and shared my burdens, and you did not, I took the name she gave me."
"That is your right."
"I don't give a damn about my rights!" He paused. "It didn't have to be this way."
"I remained true to my convictions," I said. "It is you who tried to become a Kenyan rather than a Kikuyu."
"I am a Kenyan," he said. "I live here, I work here, I love my country. All of it, not just one tiny segment."
I sighed deeply. "You are truly your mother's son."
"You have not asked about her," he noted.
"If she were not well, you would have told me."
"And that's all you have to say about the woman you lived with for seventeen years?" he demanded.
"It was she who left to live in the city of the Europeans, not I," I replied.
He laughed humorlessly. "Nakuru is not a European city. It has two million Kenyans and less than twenty thousand whites."
"Any city is, by definition, European. The Kikuyu do not live in cities."
"Look around you," he said in exasperation. "More than ninety-five percent of them do live in cities."
"Then they are no longer Kikuyu," I said placidly.
He squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles turned ash-gray.
"I do not wish to argue with you," he said, struggling to control his emotions. "It seems that is all we ever do anymore. You are my father, and despite all that has come between us, I love you—and I had hoped to make my peace with you today, since we shall never see each other again."
"I have no objection to that," I said. "I do not enjoy arguing."
"For a man who doesn't enjoy it, you managed to argue for twelve long years to get the government to sponsor this new world of yours."
"I did not enjoy the arguments, only the results," I replied.
"Have they decided what to name it yet?"
"Kirinyaga."
"Kirinyaga?" he repeated, surprised.
I nodded. "Does not Ngai sit upon His golden throne atop Kirinyaga?"
"Nothing sits atop Mount Kenya except a city."
"You see?" I said with a smile. "Even the name of the holy mountain has been corrupted by Europeans. It is time that we give Ngai a new Kirinyaga from which to rule the universe."
"Perhaps it is fitting, at that," he said. "There has been precious little room for Ngai in today's Kenya."
Suddenly he began slowing down, and a moment later we turned off the road and across a recently harvested field, driving very carefully so as not to damage his new car.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"I told you: I have a surprise for you."
"What kind of surprise can there be in the middle of an empty field?" I asked.
"You will see."
Suddenly he came to a stop about twenty yards from a clump of thorn bushes, and turned off the ignition.
"Look carefully," he whispered.
I stared at the bushes for a moment without seeing anything. Then there was a brief movement, and suddenly the whole picture came into view, and I could see two jackals standing behind the foliage, staring timidly at us.
"There have been no animals here in more than two decades," I whispered.
"They seem to have wandered in after the last rains," he replied softly. "I suppose they must be living off the rodents and birds."
"How did you find them?"
"I didn't," he answered. "A friend of mine in the Game Department told me they were here." He paused. "They'll be captured and relocated to a game park sometime next week, before they can do any lasting damage."
They seemed totally misplaced, hunting in tracks made by huge threshing and harvesting machines, searching for the safety of a savannah that had not existed for more than a century, hiding from cars rather than other predators. I felt a certain kinship to them.
We watched them in total silence for perhaps five minutes. Then Edward checked his timepiece and decided that we had to continue to the spaceport.
"Did you enjoy it?" he asked as we drove back onto the road.
"Very much," I said.
"I had hoped you would."
"They are being moved to a game park, you said?"
He nodded his head. "A few hundred miles to the north, I believe."
"The jackal walked this land long before the farmers arrived," I noted.
"But they are an anachronism," he replied. "They don't belong here anymore."
I nodded my head. "It is fitting."
"That the jackals go to a game park?" he asked.
"That the Kikuyu, who were here before the Kenyans, leave for a new world," I answered. "For we, too, are an anachronism that no longer belongs here."
He increased his speed, and soon we had passed through the farming area and entered the outskirts of Nairobi.
"What will you do on Kirinyaga?" he asked, breaking a long silence.
"We shall live as the Kikuyu were meant to live."
"I mean you, personally."
I smiled, anticipating his reaction. "I am to be the mundumugu."
"The witch doctor?" he repeated incredulously.
"That is correct."
"I can't believe it!" he continued. "You are an educated man. How can you sit cross-legged in the dirt and roll bones and read omens?"
"The mundumugu is also a teacher, and the custodian of the tribal customs," I said. "It is an honorable profession."
He shook his head in disbelief. "So I am to explain to people that my father has become a witch doctor."
"You need fear no embarrassment," I said. "You need only tell them that Kirinyaga's mundumugu is named Koriba."
"That is my name!"
"A new world requires a new name," I said. "You cast it aside to take a European name. Now I will take it back and put it to good use."
"You're serious about this, aren't you?" he said as we pulled into the spaceport.
"From this day forward, my name is Koriba."
The car came to a stop.
"I hope you will bring more honor to it than I did, my father," he said as a final gesture of conciliation.
"You have brought honor to the name you chose," I said. "That is quite enough for one lifetime."
"Do you really mean that?" he asked.
"Of course."
"Then why did you never say so before now?"
"Haven't I?" I asked, surprised.
We got out of the car and he accompanied me to the departure area. Finally he came to a stop.
"This is as far as I am permitted to go."
"I thank you for the ride," I said.
He nodded.
"And for the jackals," I added. "It was truly a perfect morning."
"I will miss you, my father," he said.
"I know."
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I could think of nothing further to say.
For a moment I thought he was going to place his arms around me and hug me, but instead he reached out, shook my hand, muttered another farewell, and turned on his heel and left.
I thought he would go directly to his car, but when I looked through a porthole of the ship that would take us to Kirinyaga, I saw him standing at a huge, plate-glass window, waving his hand, while his other hand held a handkerchief.
That was the last sight I saw before the ship took off. But the image I held in my mind was of the two jackals, watching alien sights in a l
and that had itself become foreign to them. I hoped that they would adjust to their new life in the game park that had been artificially created for them.
Something told me that I soon would know.
WINTER SOLTSTICE
Mike Resnick
IT IS NOT easy to live backwards in time, even when you are Merlin the Magnificent. You would think it would be otherwise, that you would remember all the wonders of the future, but those memories grow dim and fade more quickly than you might suppose. I know that Gallahad will win his duel tomorrow, but already the name of his son has left me. In fact, does he even have a son? Will he live long enough to pass on his noble blood? I think perhaps he may, I think that I have held his grandchild upon my knee, but I am not sure. It is all slipping away from me.
Once I knew all the secrets of the universe. With no more than a thought I could bring Time to a stop, reverse it in its course, twist it around my finger like a piece of string. By force of will alone I could pass among the stars and the galaxies. I could create life out of nothingness, and turn living, breathing worlds into dust.
Time passed -- though not the way it passes for you -- and I could no longer do these things. But I could isolate a DNA molecule and perform microsurgery on it, and I could produce the equations that allowed us to traverse the wormholes in space, and I could plot the orbit of an electron.
Still more time slipped away, and although these gifts deserted me, I could create penicillin out of bread mold, and comprehend both the General and Special Theories of Relativity, and I could fly between the continents.
But all that has gone, and I remember it as one remembers a dream, on those occasions I can remember it at all. There was -- there someday will be, there may come to you -- a disease of the aged, in which you lose portions of your mind, pieces of your past, thoughts you've thought and feelings you've felt, until all that's left is the primal id, screaming silently for warmth and nourishment. You see parts of yourself vanishing, you try to pull them back from oblivion, you fail, and all the while you realize what is happening to you until even that perception, that realization, is lost. I will weep for you in another millennia, but now your lost faces fade from my memory, your desperation recedes from the stage of my mind, and soon I will remember nothing of you. Everything is drifting away on the wind, eluding my frantic efforts to clutch it and bring it back to me.
I am writing this down so that someday someone -- possibly even you -- will read it and will know that I was a good and moral man, that I did my best under circumstances that a more compassionate God might not have forced upon me, that even as events and places slipped away from me, I did not shirk my duties, I served my people as best I could.
They come to me, my people, and they say, It hurts, Merlin. They say, Cast a spell and make the pain go away. They say, My baby burns with fever, and my milk has dried up. Do something, Merlin, they say; you are the greatest wizard in the kingdom, the greatest wizard who has ever lived. Surely you can do something.
Even Arthur seeks me out. The war goes badly, he confides to me; the heathen fight against baptism, the knights have fallen to battling amongst themselves, he distrusts his queen. He reminds me that I am his personal wizard, that I am his most trusted friend, that it was I who taught him the secret of Excalibur (but that was many years ago, and of course I know nothing of it yet). I look at him thoughtfully, and though I know an Arthur who is bent with age and beaten down by the caprices of Fate, an Arthur who has lost his Guinevere and his Round Table and all his dreams of Camelot, I can summon no compassion, no sympathy for this young man who is speaking to me. He is a stranger, as he will be yesterday, as he will be last week.
An old woman comes to see me in the early afternoon. Her arm is torn and miscolored, the stench of it makes my eyes water, the flies are thick around her.
I cannot stand the pain any longer, Merlin, she weeps. It is like childbirth, but it does not go away. You are my only hope, Merlin. Cast your mystic spell, charge me what you will, but make the pain cease.
I look at her arm, where the badger has ripped it with his claws, and I want to turn my head away and retch. I finally force myself to examine it. I have a sense that I need something, I am not sure what, something to attach to the front of my face, or if not my whole face then at least across my nose and mouth, but I cannot recall what it is.
The arm is swollen to almost twice its normal size, and although the wound is halfway between her elbow and her shoulder, she shrieks in agony when I gently manipulate her fingers. I want to give her something for her pain. Vague visions come to mind, images of something long and slender and needlelike flash briefly before my eyes. There must be something I can do, I think, something I can give her, some miracle that I employed when I was younger and the world was older, but I can no longer remember what it is.
I must do more than mask her pain, this much I still know, for infection has set in. The smell becomes stronger as I probe and she screams. Gang, I think suddenly: the word for her condition begins with gang -- but there is another syllable and I cannot recall it, and even if I could recall it I can no longer cure it.
But she must have some surcease from her agony, she believes in my powers and she is suffering and my heart goes out to her. I mumble a chant, half-whispering and half-singing. She thinks I am calling up my ethereal servants from the Netherworld, that I am bringing my magic to bear on the problem, and because she needs to believe in something, in anything, because she is suffering such agony, I do not tell her that what I am really saying is God, just this one time, let me remember. Once, years, eons from now, I could have cured her; give me back the knowledge just for an hour, even for a minute. I did not ask to live backward in Time, but it is my curse and I have willingly borne it -- but don't let this poor old woman die because of it. Let me cure her, and then You can ransack my mind and take back my memories.
But God does not answer, and the woman keeps screaming, and finally I gently plaster mud on the wound to keep the flies away. There should be medicine too, it comes in bottles -- (bottles? Is that the right word?) -- but I don't know how to make it, I don't even remember its color or shape or texture, and I give the woman a root, and mutter a spell over it, and tell her to sleep with it between her breasts and to believe in its healing powers and soon the pain will subside.
She believes me -- there is no earthly reason why she should, but I can see in her eyes that she does -- and then she kisses my hands and presses the root to her bosom and wanders off, and somehow, for some reason, she does seem to be in less discomfort, though the stench of the wound lingers long after she has gone.
Then it is Lancelot's turn. Next week or next month he will slay the Black Knight, but first I must bless his sword. He talks of things we said to each other yesterday, things of which I have no recollection, and I think of things we will say to each other tomorrow.
I stare into his dark brown eyes, for I alone know his secret, and I wonder if I should tell Arthur. I know they will fight a war over it, but I do not remember if I am the catalyst or if Guenivere herself confesses her infidelities, and I can no longer recall the outcome. I concentrate and try to see the future, but all I see is a city of towering steel and glass structures, and I cannot see Arthur or Lancelot anywhere, and then the image vanishes, and I still do not know whether I am to go to Arthur with my secret knowledge or keep my silence.
I realize that it has all happened, that the Round Table and the knights and even Arthur will soon be dust no matter what I say or do, but they are living forward in Time and this is of momentous import to them, even though I have watched it all pass and vanish before my eyes.
Lancelot is speaking now, wondering about the strength of his faith, the purity of his virtue, filled with self-doubt. He is not afraid to die at the hands of the Black Knight, but he is afraid to face his God if the reason for his death lies within himself. I continue to stare at him, this man who daily feels the bond of our friendship growing stronger while I daily find that
I know him less and less, and finally I lay a hand on his shoulder and assure him that he will be victorious, that I have had a vision of the Black Knight lying dead upon the field of battle as Lancelot raises his bloody sword in victorious triumph.
Are you sure, Merlin, he asks doubtfully.
I tell him that I am sure. I could tell him more, tell him that I have seen the future, that I am losing it as quickly as I am learning the past, but he has problems of his own -- and so, I realize, have I, for as I know less and less I must pave the way for that youthful Merlin who will remember nothing at all. It is he that I must consider -- I speak of him in the third person, for I know nothing of him, and he can barely remember me, nor will he know Arthur or Lancelot or even the dark and twisted Modred -- for as each of my days passes and Time continues to unwind, he will be less able to cope, less able to define even the problems he will face, let alone the solutions. I must give him a weapon with which to defend himself, a weapon that he can use and manipulate no matter how little he remembers of me, and the weapon I choose is superstition. Where once I worked miracles that were codified in books and natural law, now as their secrets vanish one by one, I must replace them with miracles that bedazzle the eye and terrify the heart, for only by securing the past can I guarantee the future, and I have already lived the future. I hope I was a good man, I would like to think I was, but I do not know. I examine my mind, I try to probe for weaknesses as I probe my patients' bodies, searching for sources of infection, but I am only the sum of my experience, and my experience has vanished and I will have to settle for hoping that I disgraced neither myself nor my God.
After Lancelot leaves I get to my feet and walk around the castle, my mind filled with strange images, fleeting pictures that seem to make sense until I concentrate on them and then I find them incomprehensible. There are enormous armies clashing, armies larger than the entire populace of Arthur's kingdom, and I know that I have seen them, I have actually stood on the battlefield, perhaps I even fought for one side or the other, but I do not recognize the colors they are wearing, and they use weaponry that seems like magic, true magic, to me.