The Uprights were laughing together. Malenfant could hear their voices, oddly monotonous, their jabbered speech.
‘Their talk is simple,’ Malenfant said.
‘Yes. Direct and non-abstract. Sweet, isn’t it? About the level of a six-year-old human child.’
‘What are they, de Bonneville?’
‘Can’t you tell? They make me shudder. They are physically beautiful, of course. The women are sometimes compliant … Here. More pombe.’
‘No.’
They sat in the cooling night, an old man and an invalid, stranded out of time, as in the distance the Uprights clustered around their fire, tall and elegant.
Malenfant agreed to travel with Pierre de Bonneville to Usavara, the hunting village of the Kabaka, and from there to the capital, Rubaga. Rubaga was the source of those radiation anomalies Malenfant had observed from orbit.
The next day they rowed out of the bay. De Bonneville’s canoe was superb, and Magassa, the Upright, drummed an accompaniment to the droning chant of the oarsmen.
Malenfant, sitting astern, felt as if he had wandered into a theme park.
About two kilometres along the shore from Usavara, the hunting village, Malenfant saw what had to be thousands of Waganda – which was, de Bonneville said, this new race’s name for themselves. They were standing to order on the shore in two dense lines, at the ends of which stood several finely-dressed men in crimson and black and snowy white. As the canoes neared the beach, arrows flew in the air. Kettle and bass drums sounded a noisy welcome, and flags and banners waved.
When they landed, de Bonneville led Malenfant up the beach. They were met by an old woman, short and bent. She was dressed in a crimson robe which covered a white dress of bleached cotton. De Bonneville kneeled before this figure, and told Malenfant she was the Katekiro: a kind of Prime Minister to the Kabaka.
The Katekiro’s face was a wizened mask.
‘Holy shit. Nemoto.’ It was her; Malenfant had no doubt about it.
When she looked closely at Malenfant, her eyes widened, and she turned away. She would not meet his eyes again.
De Bonneville watched them curiously.
The Katekiro motioned with her head and, amid a clamour of beaten drums, Malenfant and de Bonneville walked into the village.
They reached a circle of grass-thatched huts surrounding a large house, which Malenfant was told would be his quarters. They were going to stay here a night, before moving inland. Nemoto left as soon as she could, and Malenfant didn’t get to speak to her.
When Malenfant emerged from his hut he found gifts from the Kabaka: bunches of bananas, milk, sweet potatoes, green Indian corn, rice, fresh eggs, and ten pots of maramba wine.
Reid Malenfant, cradling his NASA pressure suit under his arm, felt utterly disoriented. And the presence of Nemoto, a human being he’d known a thousand years before, somehow only enhanced his sense of the bizarre.
He laughed, picked up a pot of wine, and went to bed.
The next day they walked inland, towards the capital.
Malenfant found himself trekking across a vast bowl of grass. The road was a level strip two metres wide, cutting through jungle and savannah. It had, it seemed, been built for the Kabaka’s hunting excursions. Some distance away there was a lake, small and brackish, and beyond that a range of hills, climbing into mountains. The lower flanks of the mountains were cloaked in forest, their summits were wreathed in clouds. The dome-like huts of the Waganda were buried deep in dense bowers of plantains – flat leaves and green flowers – which filled the air with the cloying stink of over-ripe fruit.
Malenfant heard a remote bellowing.
He saw animals stalking across the plain, two or three kilometres away. They might have been elephants; they were huge and grey, and tusks gleamed white in the grey light of the pre-dawn sky. The tusks turned downwards, unlike the zoo animals Malenfant remembered.
He asked de Bonneville about the animals.
De Bonneville grunted. ‘Those are deinotherium. The elephant things. Genetic archaeology.’
Malenfant tried to observe all this, to memorize the way back to the coast. But he found it hard to concentrate on what he was seeing.
Nemoto: God damn. She’d surely recognized him. But she’d barely acknowledged his existence, and during this long walk across Africa, he couldn’t find a way to get close to her.
After three hours’ march, they came into view of a flat-topped hill, which cast a long shadow across the countryside. The hill was crowned by a cluster of tall, conical grass huts, walled by a cane fence. This hill-top village, said de Bonneville, was the capital, Rubaga; the hill itself was known as Wanpamba’s Tomb. Rubaga struck Malenfant as a sinister, brooding place, out of sympathy with the lush green countryside it ruled.
In the centre of the hill-top cluster of huts stood a bigger building. Evidently this was the Imperial Palace. To Malenfant it looked like a Kansas barn. Fountains thrust up into the air around the central building, like handfuls of diamonds catching the light. That struck Malenfant as odd. Fountains? Where did the power for fountains come from?
Broad avenues radiated down the hill’s flanks. The big avenues blended into lower grade roads, which cut across the countryside. Along these radiating roads, Malenfant saw, much of the traffic – pedestrians and ox-carts – was directed, towards and away from the capital.
Two of the bigger roads, to east and west, seemed more rutted and damaged than the rest, as if they bore heavy traffic. The eastern road didn’t ascend the hill itself but rather entered a tunnel cut into the hill-side. It looked like it was designed for delivering supplies of some sort to a mine or quarry inside the bulk of the hill, or maybe for hauling ore out of there. In fact he saw a caravan of several heavy, covered carts, drawn by labouring bullocks, dragging its way along the eastern road. It reminded Malenfant of a twenty-mule team hauling bauxite out of Death Valley.
They proceeded up the hill, along one of the big avenues. The ground was a reddish clay. The avenue was fenced with tall water-cane set together in uniform rows.
People crowded the avenues. The Waganda wore brown robes or white dresses, some with white goatskins over their brown robes, and others with cords folded like a turban around their heads. They didn’t show much curiosity about de Bonneville’s party. Evidently a traveller was a big deal out in Usavara, out in the sticks, but here in the capital everyone was much too cool to pay attention.
There wasn’t so much as a TV aerial or a Coke machine in sight. But de Bonneville surprised Malenfant by telling him that people here could live as old as 150 years.
‘We have been to the stars, and have returned. Rubaga might look primitive, but it is deceptive. We are living on the back of a thousand years’ progress in science and technology. Plus what we bought from the Gaijin, and others. It is invisible – embedded in the fabric of the world – but it’s here. For instance, many diseases have been eradicated. And, thanks to genetic engineering, ageing has been slowed down greatly.’
‘What about the Uprights?’
‘What?’
‘What lifespan can they expect?’
De Bonneville looked irritated. ‘Thirty or forty years, I suppose. What does it matter? I’m talking about Homo Sapiens, Malenfant.’
Despite de Bonneville’s claims about progress, Malenfant soon noticed that mixed in with the clean and healthy and long-lived citizens there were a handful who looked a lot worse off. These unclean were dressed reasonably well. But each of them, man, woman or child, was afflicted by diseases and deformities. Malenfant counted symptoms: swollen lips, open sores, heads of men and women like billiard balls to which mere clumps of hair still clung. Many were mottled with blackness about the face and hands. Some of them had skin which appeared to be flaking away in handfuls, and there were others with swollen arms, legs and necks, so that their skin was stretched to a smooth glassiness.
All in all, the same symptoms as Pierre de Bonneville.
De Bonneville gr
imaced at his fellow sufferers. ‘The Breath of Kimera,’ he hissed. ‘A terrible thing, Malenfant.’ But he would say no more than that.
When these unfortunates moved through the crowds the other Waganda melted away from them, as if determined not even to glance at the unclean ones.
They reached the cane fence which surrounded the village at the top of the hill. They passed through a gate and into the central compound.
Malenfant was led to the house which had been allotted to him. It stood in the centre of a plantain garden and was shaped like a marquee, with a portico projecting over the doorway. It had two apartments. Close by there were three dome-like huts for servants, and railed spaces for – he was told – his bullocks and goats.
Useful, he thought.
The prospect from up here was imperial. A landscape of early summer green, drenched in sunshine, fell away in waves. There was a fresh breeze coming off the huge inland sea. Here and there isolated cone-shaped hills thrust up from the flat landscape, like giant tables above a green carpet. Dark sinuous lines traced the winding courses of deep tree-filled ravines, separated by undulating pastures. In broader depressions Malenfant could see cultivated gardens and grain fields. Up towards the horizon all these details melted into the blues of the distance.
It was picture-postcard pretty, as if Europeans had never come here. But he wondered what this countryside had seen, how much blood and tears had had to soak into the earth, before the scars of colonialism had been healed.
Not that the land wasn’t developed, pretty intensely: notably, with a network of irrigation channels and canals, clearly visible from up here. The engineering was impressive, in its way. Malenfant wondered how the Kabaka and his predecessors had managed it. The population wasn’t so great, it seemed to him, that it could spare huge numbers of labourers from the fields for all these earthworks.
Maybe they used Uprights, whatever they were.
Anyhow, he thought sourly, so much for the pastoral idyll. It looked as if Homo Sap was on the move again, building, breeding, lording it over his fellows and the creatures around him, just like always.
In this unmanaged biosphere, immersed in air that was too dense and too hot and too humid, Malenfant had trouble sleeping; and when he did sleep, he woke to fuzzy senses and a sore head.
There was no way to get coffee, decaffeinated or otherwise.
The next afternoon Malenfant was invited to the Palace.
The Katekiro – Nemoto – came to escort him, evidently under orders. ‘Come with me,’ she said bluntly. It was the first time she’d spoken directly to Malenfant.
‘Nemoto, I know it’s you. And you know me, don’t you?’
‘The Kabaka is waiting.’
‘How did you get here? How long have you been here? Are there any other travellers here?’
Nemoto wouldn’t reply.
They approached the tall inner fence around the Palace itself. He wasn’t the only visitor today, and a procession drew up. The ordinary Waganda weren’t permitted beyond this point, but they crowded around the gates anyhow, gossiping and preening.
There was a rumbling roll of a kettle-drum, and the gate was drawn aside; and they proceeded, chiefs, soldiers, peasants, and three interstellar travellers, on into a complex of courtyards.
There was a wide avenue inside the fence, and at the fence’s four corners those spectacular fountains thrust up into the air, rising fifteen metres or more. The water emerged from crude clay piping which snaked into the ground beneath the Palace. Maybe there were pumps buried in the hill-side.
Malenfant approached the nearest fountain. He reached out to touch the water – Christ, it was hot, so hot it almost scalded his fingers – and Nemoto pulled his arm back. Her hand on his was leathery and warm.
The drums sounded again. They passed through courtyard after courtyard, until finally they stood in front of the Palace itself.
It was only a grass hut. But it was tall and spacious, full of light and air. Malenfant, who had once visited the White House, had been in worse government buildings.
The heart of the Palace was a reception room. This was a narrow hall some twenty metres long, the ceiling of which was supported by two rows of pillars. The aisles were filled with dignitaries and officers. At each pillar stood one of the king’s guards, wearing a long red mantle, a white turban ornamented with monkey skin, white trousers and black blouse. All were armed with spears. But there was no throne there, nor Mtesa himself. Instead there was only what Malenfant took to be a well, a rectangular pit in the floor.
Malenfant, Nemoto and the rest had to sit in rows before the open pit.
Drums clattered, and puffs of steam came venting up from the well-mouth, followed by a grinding, mechanical noise. A platform rose up out of the well, smoothly enough. Once again, Malenfant wondered where the energy for these stunts came from. The platform carried a throne – a seat like an office chair – on which sat the lean figure of Mtesa himself. Mtesa’s head was clean-shaven and covered with a fez; his features were smooth, polished and without a wrinkle, and he might have been any age between twenty-five and thirty-five. His big, lustrous eyes gave him a strange beauty, and Malenfant wondered if there was Upright blood in there. Mtesa was sweating, his robes a little rumpled, but grinning hugely.
Nemoto, as Katekiro, and Mtesa’s vizier and scribes all came forward to kneel at his feet. Some kissed the palms and backs of his hands; others prostrated themselves on the ground. Malenfant found it very strange to watch Nemoto do this.
Through all this, a girl stood at Mtesa’s elbow. She was tall, dressed in white, her hair dark, but she had the broad neck and downy golden fur of an Upright. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She moved like a cat, and – thought Reid Malenfant, dried-up hundred-year-old star voyager – she was sexy as all hell. But she looked troubled, like a child with a guilty conscience.
The main business of the afternoon was a bunch of petitioners and embassies, each of which Mtesa handled with efficiency – and, when he was displeased, brutality. In such cases the ‘Lords of the Cord’ were called forward: big beefy guards, whose job was to drag away the source of Mtesa’s anger by ropes about the neck. It was, Malenfant thought, a striking management technique.
Nemoto, as the Katekiro, was heavily involved in all this: the presentation of cases and evidence, the delivery of the verdict. And each sentencing was preceded by Nemoto placing a dry kiss on the cheek of the terrified victim – a kiss of death, Malenfant thought with a shudder, planted by a thousand-year-old woman.
At last Mtesa turned to Malenfant. Through an interpreter, a dried-up little courtier, the Kabaka asked questions. He showed a child-like curiosity about Malenfant’s story: where and when he had been born, the places he had seen in his travels.
After a while, Malenfant started to enjoy the occasion. For the first time in a thousand years, Reid Malenfant had found somebody who actually wanted to hear his anecdotes about the early days of the US space program.
Mtesa, it turned out, knew all about the Gaijin, and Saddle Point gateways, and, roughly speaking, the dispersal of humanity over the last thousand years. He wasn’t uncomfortable with the idea of Malenfant having been born a millennium ago. But these were abstractions to him, since the Gaijin didn’t intervene in affairs on Earth – not overtly anyhow – and Mtesa was more interested in what profit he could make out of this windfall.
Malenfant reminded himself that people were most preoccupied by their own slice of history; Mtesa was a man of his time, which had nothing to do with Malenfant’s. Still, Malenfant wondered how many more generations would pass before only the kings and courtiers knew the true story of mankind, while everyone else subsided to flat-Earth ignorance, and started worshipping Gaijin flower-ships as gods in the sky.
Mtesa offered Malenfant various gifts, and an invitation to stay as long as he wished, and dismissed him.
The Katekiro, Nemoto, got away from Malenfant as soon as she could.
That even
ing, alone in his villa, Malenfant started to feel ill.
He couldn’t keep down his food. He felt as if he was running up a temperature. And his hand hurt: there was a burning sensation, deep in the flesh, where the fountain water had splashed him.
In the bubble helmet of his EMU, he studied his reflection. He didn’t look so bad. A little glassy about the eyes, perhaps. Maybe it was the food.
He went to bed early, and tried to forget about it.
He pursued the Katekiro, Nemoto. He tried everything he could think of to break through to her.
Eventually, with every evidence of reluctance, Nemoto agreed to spend a little time with Malenfant. She came to his hut, and they sat on the broad, wood-floored veranda, by the light of a small oil lamp and of the blue Moon.
She brought with her a buddha, a squat, ugly carving. It was made, she said, of fused regolith from the Mare Ingenii: Moon rock, worn smooth by time. The wizened little Japanese looked up at the blue-green Moon. ‘And now the regolith is buried under metres of dirt, with fat lunar-gravity-evolved earthworms crawling through it. We have survived to see strange times, Malenfant.’
‘Yeah.’
They talked, but Nemoto was no cicerone. The only way he could get any information out of her was to let her rehearse her obsession with the Gaijin – not to mention her former employers, Nishizaki Heavy Industries, who she thought had betrayed the human species.
He was astonished to find she’d travelled here, through a thousand years of history, the long way round: not by skipping from era to era as he and the other Saddle Point travellers had done, but simply by not dying. She gave him no indication of what technology she had used to exceed so greatly the usual human lifespan.
A thousand years of consciousness: no doubt this was dwarfed by Cassiopeia and her mechanical sisters, but such a span seemed unbearable on a human scale. He wondered how well Nemoto could retrieve the memories of her own deep past, of her first meeting with him on the Moon, for instance; perhaps she had been forced to resort to technology, to reorder and optimize her immense recollections. And, listening to Nemoto, he wondered how much of her sanity, her personality, had survived this long ordeal of life. She hinted at dark periods, slumps into poverty and powerlessness, even a period – centuries long – when she had lived as a recluse on the far side of the Moon.
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