Win Some, Lose Some

by Mike Resnick

  “I know,” said Kamau. “But then, neither do you, mzee. You should be back on Kirinyaga, living as the Kikuyu were meant to live.”

  I frowned. “No one on Kirinyaga is living as the Kikuyu were meant to live.” I sighed deeply. “I think perhaps the time for mundumugus is past.”

  “This cannot be true,” he protested. “Who else can be the repository of our traditions, the interpreter of our laws?”

  “Our traditions are as dead as his,” I said, gesturing toward Ahmed. Then I turned back to Kamau. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Certainly not, mundumugu.”

  “I am glad you sought me out, and I have enjoyed our conversations since I returned to Kenya,” I told him. “But something puzzles me: since you feel so strongly about the Kikuyu, why did I not know you during our struggle to find a homeland? Why did you remain behind when we emigrated to Kirinyaga?”

  I could see him wrestling with himself to produce an answer. Finally the battle was over, and the old man seemed to shrink an inch or two.

  “I was terrified,” he admitted.

  “Of the spaceship?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then what frightened you?”

  Another internal struggle, and then an answer: “You did, mzee.”

  “Me?” I repeated, surprised.

  “You were always so sure of yourself,” he said. “Always such a perfect Kikuyu. You made me afraid that I wasn’t good enough.”

  “That was ridiculous,” I said firmly.

  “Was it?” he countered. “My wife was a Catholic. My son and daughter bore Christian names. And I myself had grown used to European clothes and European conveniences.” He paused. “I was afraid if I went with you—and I wanted to; I have been cursing myself for my cowardice ever since—that soon I would complain about missing the technology and comfort I had left behind, and that you would banish me.” He would not meet my gaze, but stared at the ground. “I did not wish to become an outcast on the world that was the last hope of my people.”

  You are wiser than I suspected, I thought. Aloud I uttered a compassionate lie: “You would not have been an outcast.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I am sure,” I said, laying a comforting hand on his bony shoulder. “In fact, I wish you had been there to support me when the end came.”

  “What good would the support of an old man have been?”

  “You are not just any old man,” I answered. “The word of a descendant of Johnstone Kamau would have carried much weight among the Council of Elders.”

  “That was another reason I was afraid to come,” he replied, the words flowing a little more easily this time. “How could I live up to my name—for everyone knows that Johnstone Kamau became Jomo Kenyatta, the great Burning Spear of the Kikuyu. How could I possibly compare to such a man as that?”

  “You compare more favorably than you think,” I said reassuringly. “I could have used the passion of your belief.”

  “Surely you had support from the people,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Even my own apprentice, who I was preparing to succeed me, abandoned me; in fact, I believe he is at the university just down the road even as we speak. In the end, the people rejected the discipline of our traditions and the teachings of Ngai for the miracles and comforts of the Europeans. I suppose I should not be surprised, considering how many times it has happened here in Africa.” I looked thoughtfully at the elephant. “I am as much an anachronism as Ahmed. Time has forgotten us both.”

  “But Ngai has not.”

  “Ngai, too, my friend,” I said. “Our day has passed. There is no place left for us, not in Kenya, not on Kirinyaga, not anywhere.”

  Perhaps it was something in the tone of my voice, or perhaps in some mystic way Ahmed understood what I was saying. Whatever the reason, the elephant stepped forward to the edge of the force field and stared directly at me.

  “It is lucky we have the field for protection,” remarked Kamau.

  “He would not hurt me,” I said confidently.

  “He has hurt men whom he had less reason to attack.”

  “But not me,” I said. “Lower the field to a height of five feet.”

  “But…”

  “Do as I say,” I ordered him.

  “Yes, mundumugu,” he replied unhappily, going to a small control box and punching in a code.

  Suddenly the mild visual distortion vanished at eye level. I reached out a reassuring hand, and a moment later Ahmed ran the tip of his trunk across my face and body, then sighed deeply and stood there, swaying gently as he transferred his weight from one foot to the other.

  “I would not have believed it if I had not seen it!” said Kamau almost reverently.

  “Are we not all Ngai’s creations?” I said.

  “Even Ahmed?” asked Kamau.

  “Who do you think created him?”

  He shrugged again, and did not answer.

  I remained for a few more minutes, watching the magnificent creature, while Kamau returned the force field to its former position. Then the night air became uncomfortably cold, as so often happened at this altitude, and I turned to Kamau.

  “I must leave now,” I said. “I thank you for inviting me here. I would not have believed this miracle had I not seen it with my own eyes.”

  “The scientists think it is their miracle,” he said.

  “You and I know better,” I replied.

  He frowned. “But why do you think Ngai has allowed Ahmed to live again, at this time and in this place?”

  I paused for a long moment, trying to formulate an answer, and found that I couldn’t.

  “There was a time when I knew with absolute certainty why Ngai did what He did,” I said at last. “Now I am not so sure.”

  “What kind of talk is that from a mundumugu?” demanded Kamau.

  “It was not long ago that I would wake up to the song of birds,” I said as we left Ahmed’s enclosure and walked to the side gate through which I had entered. “And I would look across the river that wound by my village on Kirinyaga and see impala and zebra grazing on the savannah. Now I wake up to the sound and smell of modern Nairobi and then I look out and see a featureless grey wall that separates my son’s house from that of his neighbor.” I paused. “I think this must be my punishment for failing to bring Ngai’s word to my people.”

  “Will I see you again?” he asked as we reached the gate and he deactivated a small section long enough for me to pass through.

  “If it will not be an imposition,” I said.

  “The great Koriba an imposition?” he said with a smile.

  “My son finds me so,” I replied. “He gives me a room in his house, but he would prefer that I lived elsewhere. And his wife is ashamed of my bare feet and my kikoi; she is constantly buying European shoes and clothing for me to wear.”

  “My son works inside the laboratory,” said Kamau, pointing to his son’s third-floor office with some pride. “He has seventeen men working for him. Seventeen!”

  I must not have looked impressed, for he continued, less enthusiastically, “It is he who got me this job, so that I wouldn’t have to live with him.”

  “The job of paid companion,” I said.

  A bittersweet expression crossed his face. “I love my son, Koriba, and I know that he loves me—but I think that he is also a little bit ashamed of me.”

  “There is a thin line between shame and embarrassment,” I said. “My son glides between one and the other like the pendulum of a clock.”

  Kamau seemed grateful to hear that his situation was not unique. “You are welcome to live with me, mundumugu,” he said, and I could tell that it was an earnest offer, not just a polite lie that he hoped I would reject. “We would have much to talk about.”

  “That is very considerate of you,” I said. “But it will be enough if I may visit you from time to time, on those days when I find Kenyans unbearable and must speak to another Kikuyu.”


  “As often as you wish,” he said. “Kwaheri, mzee.”

  “Kwaheri,” I responded. Farewell.

  I took the slidewalk down the noisy, crowded streets and boulevards that had once been the sprawling Athi Plains, an area that had swarmed with a different kind of life, and got off when I came to the airbus platform. An airbus glided up a few minutes later, almost empty at this late hour, and began going north, floating perhaps ten inches above the ground.

  The trees that lined the migration route had been replaced by a dense angular forest of steel and glass and tightly-bonded alloys. As I peered through a window into the night, it seemed for a few moments that I was also peering into the past. Here, where the titanium-and-glass courthouse stood, was the very spot where the Burning Spear had first been arrested for having the temerity to suggest that his country did not belong to the British. Over there, by the new eight-story post office building, was where the last lion had died. And there, by the water recycling plant, my people had vanquished the Wakamba in glorious and bloody battle some 300 years ago.

  “We have arrived, mzee,” said the driver, and the bus hovered a few inches above the ground while I made my way to the door. “Aren’t you chilly, dressed in just a blanket like that?”

  I did not deign to answer him, but stepped out to the sidewalk, which did not move here in the suburbs as did the slidewalks of the city. I preferred it, for man was meant to walk, not be transported effortlessly by miles-long beltways.

  I approached my son’s enclave and greeted the guards, who all knew me, for I often wandered through the area at night. They passed me through with no difficulty, and as I walked I tried to look across the centuries once more, to see the mud-and-grass huts, the bomas and shambas of my people, but the vision was blotted out by enormous mock-Tudor and mock-Victorian and mock-Colonial and mock-contemporary houses, interspersed with needlelike apartment buildings that reached up to stab the clouds.

  I had no desire to speak to Edward or Susan, for they would question me endlessly about where I had been. My son would once again warn me about the thieves and muggers who prey on old men after dark in Nairobi, and my daughter-in-law would try to subtly suggest that I would be warmer in a coat and pants. So I went past their house and walked aimlessly through the enclave until all the lights in the house had gone out. When I was sure they were asleep, I went to a side door and waited for the security system to identify my retina and skeletal structure, as it had on so many similar nights. Then I quietly made my way to my room.

  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 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 forth 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 Ngona?”

  “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 sit and make pronouncements. But you cannot practice in my house.”

  “Father Ngoma’s parishoners 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 warthogs 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 Kirinyaga.

  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.