by John Farris
And sometimes there are watchers of a different kind.
They keep their distance, but I see a flash of sun off a lens, I hear helicopters in the night. They find ways to get into my office when I'm not there. If there truly are Malterrans—but I know this makes you cringe. I'll get off the subject.
Meg Pardo is still hurt because I won't give her your E-mail address, but I told her it's best under the circumstances if I pass on any messages. Meg has been as good a friend to me as she is to you. Helped me get through some difficult nights. Sorry sorry sorry. Don't want to burden you. Let me remind you again, none of it was ever your fault.
Better go now. Ten days before I board that plane at SFO, and lots to do. Can't wait, truly. I'll be a gibbering mess soon as I lay eyes on you, but I promise to shape up fast.
Cheerio, dear one.
"What are you bawling about?" Eden's doppelganger asked. She was sitting on a railing of the veranda letting Eden's pet monkey nibble a piece of fruit from her fingers.
"I'm not bawling. I just got a little homesick for a while. I don't need you right now."
"Sure, that's why I'm here, in the flesh. Can I borrow some clothes?"
"I can see you, and nobody else around here needs to."
"Old monkeyface sees me too." She chucked the black-and-white colobus under the chin, and he stood up, chittering, long tail forming a question mark. "So Betts is coming for a visit. Are you going to introduce me?"
"And scare her into a coronary?"
"She's read your dreambooks. She knows I exist. Betts would like me. How's this for an idea? I could spend some of my lonely downtime in California keeping Betts company while you're busy organizing the Psi Resistance. You'll have Tom and Bertie looking out for you."
Eden flicked a crawling insect like an emaciated beetle off her wrist, careful not to damage it, which would raise a caustic blister on her skin. Africa, or that part of Kenya she'd become familiar with, was close to heaven. Except for the dudu. A bull giraffe went striding by, ten yards from the veranda. They were seeing more giraffes lately in the game preserve; she needed to make a note of it for Tom.
"By the way—do you know who he is? The one who keeps showing up in your dreams these days?" The dpg dropped her a significant look.
Eden glanced at her own face. Better than having a mirror, sometimes. She could see that she needed to trim her hair, which had grown out in its natural color.
"No. I don't know who he is. What are you doing poking around in my dreams?"
"He's on your mind when you're awake too. Good-looking guy. Know what I think? He could be your Robin Sandza. I mean, Robin before they destroyed his sanity at Psi Faculty."
Eden got up from her cane rocking chair, shouldered the AK-47 she carried everywhere because of the Shifta, Somalian gangs of poachers who sometimes infiltrated the Naivasha Preserve. The Kenyan Wildlife Service rangers lately had been doing a good job of patroling their area, and Tom Sherard had his own security force utilizing two fast helicopters, but disturbing incidents of violence throughout the country were reported every day. Eden could shoot very well and wouldn't hesitate. That was something new in her heart, and in her face.
"Where're you going?" the dpg asked as Eden strolled away.
"I want to retrieve some film, find out if the leopard that's been leaving pug marks in the lugga showed up again last night. Also I need to get away from the hammering. It's giving me a headache."
"Us a headache. Want some company?"
Eden hesitated on the steps. "Sure. Glad to have you. If you don't mind the dogs."
She put two fingers in the corners of her mouth and whistled shrilly.
"Dogs?!"
Two of Tom Sherard's mixed-breed watchdogs appeared on the run, then took off ahead of Eden. She turned and grinned at her doppelganger on the porch.
"Nothing to worry about. We both have the same, uh, body odor, so they probably won't even notice you."
The dpg fidgeted, then lifted her chin and said with a touch of defiance, "Name's Guinevere. I've decided. Or Gwen for short."
"Not yet it isn't. I still need you. Just the way you are."
"A bitter disappointment." Nonetheless her doppelganger joined Eden in the yard. They were followed by the colobus monkey, begging for the security of a shoulder to ride on. Eden paused and scooped him up. "I'm sorry to bring this to your attention," the dpg continued, "But your life expectancy—I get chills thinking about it. Here you are, walking around in shorts and sandals with wild beasts everywhere. Jeez, what are those over there with the tusks going every which way?"
"Some kind of warthog. They leave potholes all over the place but otherwise they're no bother."
"Three weeks ago you ran a temperature of a hundred and four from a little tick bite. High enough to boil both our brains."
Eden shrugged, with an expression of contentment.
"Tom says I should have seen Shungwaya thirty years ago," she mused as they crossed a nearly dried-up creek. "But it's plenty good enough for paradise now. What's a bite, a fever, a rash now and then? I want to stay forever. Bertie's father Joseph told me—"
"'The best part of having lived in a beautiful but hard land is knowing that you never gave in.'"
"How do you know that?"
"I know what you know, of course. So—are we staying?"
Eden drew a pensive breath, didn't reply. She watched an African hoopoe, magnificent in orange with an orange and black crest, drift down as if leaving the orbit of the sun to light up the shady side of a baobab tree. She raised the binoculars that she wore around her neck and focused on a small herd of kudu moving single file through a donga a quarter of a mile away. The lead bull was huge, probably more than six hundred pounds, with a gray coat smooth as flannel, thin vertical white stripes on his body behind the shoulder and a long tuft of white on his spine. His horns were long and spiraling, two and a half twists.to rapier points.
Tom had told her of the time he had come across two such bulls near a grove of acacia albida, one of kudus' prime feeding grounds. They were both kneeling on the red earth facing each other, bodies torn and black with flies at the bloody places, eyes growing dim in death, their twisted horns locked fatally together after a rutting bout. Bateleur vultures had begun their wheeling stalk in the sky. Each bull had fought as he was born to fight, and neither had given in. The heat of their struggle was still vivid in the air. It was a lonely, bleak, but untellably beautiful scene: the essence of life, the pride in death.
Eden lowered the binoculars.
"We're going back," she said. "I don't know about this new guy. If there's goodness in him, or pure evil. All I know is, the vultures had better keep their distance."
Eden Waring, Tom Sherard, and Bertie Nkambe will return in
THE FURY AND THE POWER.