The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Usually I dreamed of Kirinyaga, but this night the image of Ahmed haunted my dreams. Ahmed, eternally confined by a force field; Ahmed, trying to imagine what lay beyond his tiny enclosure; Ahmed, who would live and die without ever seeing another of his own kind.

  And gradually, my dream shifted to myself: to Koriba, attached by invisible chains to a Nairobi he could no longer recognize; Koriba, trying futilely to mold Kirinyaga into what it might have been; Koriba, who once led a brave exodus of the Kikuyu until one day he looked around and found that he was the only Kikuyu remaining.

  * * *

  In the morning I went to visit my daughter on Kirinyaga—not the terraformed world, but the real Kirinyaga, which is now called Mount Kenya. It was here that Ngai gave the digging-stick to Gikuyu, the first man, and told him to work the earth. It was here that Gikuyu’s nine daughters became the mothers of the nine tribes of the Kikuyu, here that the sacred fig tree blossomed. It was here, millennia later, that Jomo Kenyatta, the great Burning Spear of the Kikuyu, would invoke Ngai’s power and send the Mau Mau out to drive the white man back to Europe.

  And it was here that a steel-and-glass city of five million inhabitants sprawled up the side of the holy mountain. Nairobi’s overstrained water and sewer system simply could not accommodate any more people, so the government offered enormous tax incentives to any business that would move to Kirinyaga, in the hope that the people would follow—and the people accommodated them.

  Vehicles spewed pollution into the atmosphere, and the noise of the city at work was deafening. I walked to the spot where the fig tree had once stood; it was now covered by a lead foundry. The slopes where the bongo and the rhinoceros once lived were hidden beneath the housing projects. The winding mountain streams had all been diverted and redirected. The tree beneath which Deedan Kimathi had been killed by the British was only a memory, its place taken by a fast-food restaurant. The summit had been turned into a park, with tram service leading to a score of souvenir shops.

  And now I realized why Kenya had become intolerable. Ngai no longer ruled the world from His throne atop the mountain, for there was no longer any room for Him there. Like the leopard and the golden sunbird, like I myself many years ago, He too had fled before this onslaught of black Europeans.

  Possibly my discovery influenced my mood, for the visit with my daughter did not go well. But then, they never did: She was too much like her mother.

  * * *

  I entered my son’s study late that same afternoon.

  “One of the servants said you wished to see me,” I said.

  “Yes, I do,” said my son as he looked up from his computer. Behind him were paintings of two great leaders, Martin Luther King and Julius Nyerere, black men both, but neither one a Kikuyu. “Please sit down.”

  I did as he asked.

  “On a chair, my father,” he said.

  “The floor is satisfactory.”

  He sighed heavily. “I am too tired to argue with you. I have been brushing up on my French.” He grimaced. “It is a difficult language.”

  “Why are you studying French?” I asked.

  “As you know, the ambassador from Cameroon has bought a house in the enclave. I thought it would be advantageous to be able to speak to him in his own tongue.”

  “That would be Bamileke or Ewondo, not French,” I noted.

  “He does not speak either of those,” answered Edward. “His family is ruling class. They only spoke French in his family compound, and he was educated in Paris.”

  “Since he is the ambassador to our country, why are you learning his language?” I asked. “Why does he not learn Swahili?”

  “Swahili is a street language,” said my son. “English and French are the languages of diplomacy and business. His English is poor, so I will speak to him in French instead.” He smiled smugly. “That ought to impress him!”

  “I see,” I said.

  “You look disapproving,” he observed.

  “I am not ashamed of being a Kikuyu,” I said. “Why are you ashamed of being a Kenyan?”

  “I am not ashamed of anything!” he snapped. “I am proud of being able to speak to him in his own tongue.”

  “More proud than he, a visitor to Kenya, is to speak to you in your tongue,” I noted.

  “You do not understand!” he said.

  “Evidently,” I agreed.

  He stared at me silently for a moment, then sighed deeply. “You drive me crazy,” he said. “I don’t even know how we came to be discussing this. I wanted to see you for a different reason.” He lit a smokeless cigarette, took one puff, and threw it into the atomizer. “I had a visit from Father Ngoma this morning.”

  “I do not know him.”

  “You know his parishioners, though,” said my son. “A number of them have come to you for advice.”

  “That is possible,” I admitted.

  “Damn it!” said Edward. “I have to live in this neighborhood, and he is the parish priest. He resents you telling his flock how to live, especially since what you tell them is in contradiction to Catholic dogma.”

  “Am I to lie to them, then?” I asked.

  “Can’t you just refer them to Father Ngoma?”

  “I am a mundumugu,” I said. “It is my duty to advise those who come to me for guidance.”

  “You have not been a mundumugu since they made you leave Kirinyaga!” he said irritably.

  “I left of my own volition,” I replied calmly.

  “We are getting off the subject again,” said Edward. “Look—if you want to stay in the mundumugu business, I’ll rent you an office, or”—he added contemptuously—“buy you a patch of dirt on which to squat and make pronouncements. But you cannot practice in my house.”

  “Father Ngoma’s parishioners must not like what he has to say,” I observed, “or they would not seek advice elsewhere.”

  “I do not want you speaking to them again. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is clear that you do not want me to speak to them again.”

  “You know exactly what I mean!” he exploded. “No more verbal games! Maybe they worked on Kirinyaga, but they won’t work here! I know you too well!”

  He went back to staring at his computer.

  “It is most interesting,” I said.

  “What is?” he asked suspiciously, glaring at me.

  “Here you are, surrounded by English books, studying French, and arguing on behalf of the priest of an Italian religion. Not only are you not Kikuyu, I think perhaps you are no longer even Kenyan.”

  He glared at me across his desk. “You drive me crazy,” he repeated.

  * * *

  After I left my son’s study I left the house and took an airbus to the park in Muthaiga, miles from my son and the neighbors who were interchangeable with him. Once lions had stalked this terrain. Leopards had clung to overhanging limbs, waiting for the opportunity to pounce upon their prey. Wildebeest and zebra and gazelles had rubbed shoulders, grazing on the tall grasses. Giraffes had nibbled the tops of acacia trees, while wartbogs rooted in the earth for tubers. Rhinos had nibbled on thornbushes, and charged furiously at any sound or sight they could not immediately identify.

  Then the Kikuyu had come and cleared the land, bringing with them their cattle and their oxen and their goats. They had dwelt in huts of mud and grass, and lived the life that we aspired to on Krinyaga.

  But all that was in the past. Today the park contained nothing but a few squirrels racing across the imported Kentucky blue grass and a pair of hornbills that had nested in one of the transplanted European trees. Old Kikuyu men, dressed in shoes and pants and jackets, sat on the benches that ran along the perimeter. One man was tossing crumbs to an exceptionally bold starling, but most of them simply sat and stared aimlessly.

  I found an empty bench, but decided not to sit on it. I didn’t want to be like these men, who saw nothing but the squirrels and the birds, when I could see the lions and the impala, the war-painte
d Kikuyu and the redclad Maasai, who had once stalked across this same land.

  I continued walking, suddenly restless, and despite the heat of the day and the frailty of my ancient body, I walked until twilight. I decided I could not endure dinner with my son and his wife, their talk of their boring jobs, their continual veiled suggestions about the retirement home, their inability to comprehend either why I went to Kirinyaga or why I returned—so instead of going home I began walking aimlessly through the crowded city.

  Finally I looked up at the sky. Ngai, I said silently, I still do not understand. I was a good mundumugu. I obeyed Your law. I honored Your rituals. There must have come a day, a moment, a second, when together we could have saved Kirinyaga if You had just manifested Yourself. Why did You abandon it when it needed You so desperately?

  I spoke to Ngai for minutes that turned into hours, but He did not answer.

  * * *

  When it was ten o’clock at night, I decided it was time to start making my way to the laboratory complex, for it would take me more than an hour to get there, and Kamau began working at eleven.

  As before, he deactivated the electronic barrier to let me in, then escorted me to the small grassy area where Ahmed was kept.

  “I did not expect to see you back so soon, mzee,” he said.

  “I have no place else to go,” I answered, and he nodded, as if this made perfect sense to him.

  Ahmed seemed nervous until the breeze brought my scent to him. Then he turned to face the north, extending his trunk every few moments.

  “It is as if he seeks some sign from Mount Marsabit,” I remarked, for the great creature’s former home was hundreds of miles north of Nairobi, a solitary green mountain rising out of the blazing desert.

  “He would not be pleased with what he found,” said Kamau.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, for no animal in our history was ever more identified with a location than the mighty Ahmed with Marsabit.

  “Do you not read the papers, or watch the news on the holo?”

  I shook my head. “What happens to black Europeans is of no concern to me.”

  “The government has evacuated the town of Marsabit, which sits next to the mountain. They have closed the Singing Wells, and have ordered everyone to leave the area.”

  “Leave Marsabit? Why?”

  “They have been burying nuclear waste at the base of the mountain for many years,” he said. “It was just revealed that some of the containers broke open almost six years ago. The government hid the fact from the people, and then failed to properly clean up the leak.”

  “How could such a thing happen?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer. After all, how does anything happen in Kenya?

  “Politics. Payoffs. Corruption.”

  “A third of Kenya is desert,” I said. “Why did they not bury it there, where no one lives or even thinks to travel, so when this kind of disaster occurs, as it always does, no one is harmed?”

  He shrugged. “Politics. Payoffs. Corruption,” he repeated. “It is our way of life.”

  “Ah, well, it is nothing to me anyway,” I said. “What happens to a mountain five hundred kilometers away does not interest me, any more than I am interested in what happens to a world named after a different mountain.”

  “It interests me,” said Kamau. “Innocent people have been exposed to radiation.”

  “If they live near Marsabit, they are Pokot and Rendille,” I pointed out. “What does that matter to the Kikuyu?”

  “They are people, and my heart goes out to them,” said Kamau.

  “You are a good man,” I said. “I knew that from the moment we first met.” I pulled some peanuts from the pouch that hung around my neck, the same pouch in which I used to keep charms and magical tokens. “I bought these for Ahmed this afternoon,” I said. “May I…?”

  “Certainly,” answered Kamau. “He has few enough pleasures. Even a peanut will be appreciated. Just toss them at his feet.”

  “No,” I said, walking forward. “Lower the barrier.”

  He lowered the force field until Ahmed was able to reach his trunk out over the top. When I got close enough, the huge beast gently took the peanuts from my hand.

  “I am amazed!” said Kamau when I had rejoined him. “Even I cannot approach Ahmed with impunity, yet you actually fed him by hand, as if he were a family pet.”

  “We are each the last of our kind, living on borrowed time,” I said. “He senses a kinship.”

  I remained a few more minutes, then went home to another night of troubled sleep. I felt Ngai was trying to tell me something, trying to impart some message through my dreams, but though I had spent years interpreting the omens in other people’s dreams, I was ignorant of my own.

  * * *

  Edward was standing on the beautifully rolled lawn, staring at the blackened embers of my fire.

  “I have a beautiful fire pit on the terrace,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to hide his anger. “Why on earth did you build a fire in the middle of the garden?”

  “That is where a fire belongs,” I answered.

  “Not in this house, it doesn’t!”

  “I shall try to remember.”

  “Do you know what the landscaper will charge me to repair the damage you caused?” A look of concern suddenly crossed his face. “You haven’t sacrificed any animals, have you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure none of the neighbors is missing a dog or a cat?” he persisted.

  “I know the law,” I said. And indeed, Kikuyu law required the sacrifice of goats and cattle, not dogs and cats. “I am trying to obey it.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “But you are not obeying it, Edward,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  I looked at Susan, who was staring at us from a second-story window.

  “You have two wives,” I pointed out. “The younger one lives with you, but the older one lives many kilometers away, and sees you only when you take your children away from her on weekends. This is unnatural: A man’s wives should all live together with him, sharing the household duties.”

  “Linda is no longer my wife,” he said. “You know that. We were divorced many years ago.”

  “You can afford both,” I said. “You should have kept both.”

  “In this society, a man may have only one wife,” said Edward. “What kind of talk is this? You have lived in England and America. You know that.”

  “That is their law, not ours,” I said. “This is Kenya.”

  “It is the same thing.”

  “The Moslems have more than one wife,” I replied.

  “I am not a Moslem,” he said.

  “A Kikuyu man may have as many wives as he can afford,” I said. “It is obvious that you are also not a Kikuyu.”

  “I’ve had it with this smug superiority of yours!” he exploded. “You deserted my mother because she was not a true Kikuyu,” he continued bitterly. “You turned your back on my sister because she was not a true Kikuyu. Since I was a child, every time you were displeased with me you have told me that I am not a true Kikuyu. Now you have even proclaimed that none of the thousands who followed you to Kirinyaga are true Kikuyus.” He glared furiously at me. “Your standards are higher than Kirinyaga itself! Can there possibly be a true Kikuyu anywhere in the universe?”

  “Certainly,” I replied.

  “Where can such a paragon be found?” he demanded.

  “Right here,” I said, tapping myself on the chest. “You are looking at him.”

  * * *

  My days faded one into another, the dullness and drudgery of them broken only by occasional nocturnal visits to the laboratory complex. Then one night, as I met Kamau at the gate, I could see that his entire demeanor had changed.

  “Something is wrong,” I said promptly. “Are you ill?”

  “No, mzee, it is nothing like that.”

  “Then what is t
he matter?” I persisted.

  “It is Ahmed,” said Kamau, unable to stop tears from rolling down his withered cheeks. “They have decided to put him to death the day after tomorrow.”

  “Why?” I asked, surprised. “Has he attacked another keeper?”

  “No,” said Kamau bitterly. “The experiment was a success. They know they can clone an elephant, so why continue to pay for his upkeep when they can line their pockets with the remaining funds of the grant?”

  “Is there no one you can appeal to?” I demanded.

  “Look at me,” said Kamau. “I am an eighty-six-year-old man who was given his job as an act of charity. Who will listen to me?”

  “We must do something,” I said.

  He shook his head sadly. “They are kehees,” he said. “Uncircumcised boys. They do not even know what a mundumugu is. Do not humiliate yourself by pleading with them.”

  “If I did not plead with the Kikuyu on Kirinyaga,” I replied, “you may be sure I will not plead with the Kenyans in Nairobi.” I tried to ignore the ceaseless hummings of the laboratory machines as I considered my options. Finally I looked up at the night sky: The moon glowed a hazy orange through the pollution. “I will need your help,” I said at last.

  “You can depend on me.”

  “Good. I shall return tomorrow night.”

  I turned on my heel and left, without even stopping at Ahmed’s enclosure.

  All that night I thought and planned. In the morning, I waited until my son and his wife had left the house, then called Kamau on the vidphone to tell him what I intended to do and how he could help. Next, I had the computer contact the bank and withdraw my money, for though I disdained shillings and refused to cash my government checks, my son had found it easier to shower me with money than respect.