"No, Koriba, it would not."
"Have you in fact answered questions put to you by Kamari?"
"Yes, Koriba, I have," replied the computer.
"I see," I said. "Stand by for a new directive."
"Waiting . . ."
I lowered my head in thought, contemplating the problem. That Kamari was brilliant and gifted was obvious: she had not only taught herself to read and write, but had actually created a coherent and logical language that the computer could understand and in which it could respond. I had given orders, and without directly disobeying them she had managed to circumvent them. She had no malice within her, and wanted only to learn, which in itself was an admirable goal. All that was on the one hand.
On the other hand was the threat to the social order we had labored so diligently to establish on Kirinyaga. Men and women knew their responsibilities and accepted them happily. Ngai had given the Maasai the spear, and He had given the Wakamba the arrow, and He had given the Europeans the machine and the printing press, but to the Kikuyu He had given the digging-stick and the fertile land surrounding the sacred fig tree on the slopes of Kirinyaga.
Once before we had lived in harmony with the land, many long years ago. Then had come the printed word. It turned us first into slaves, and then into Christians, and then into soldiers and factory workers and mechanics and politicians, into everything that the Kikuyu were never meant to be. It had happened before; it could happen again.
We had come to the world of Kirinyaga to create a perfect Kikuyu society, a Kikuyu Utopia: could one gifted little girl carry within her the seeds of our destruction? I could not be sure, but it was a fact that gifted children grew up. They became Jesus, and Mohammed, and Jomo Kenyata—but they also became Tippoo Tib, the greatest slaver of all, and Idi Amin, butcher of his own people. Or, more often, they became Frederich Neitzsche and Karl Marx, brilliant men in their own right, but who influenced less brilliant, less capable men. Did I have the right to stand aside and hope that her influence upon our society would be benign when all history suggested that the opposite was more likely to be true?
My decision was painful, but it was not a difficult one.
"Computer," I said at last, "I have a new Priority Order that supercedes my previous directive. You are no longer allowed to communicate with Kamari under any circumstances whatsoever. Should she activate you, you are to tell her that Koriba has forbidden you to have any contact with her, and you are then to deactivate immediately. Do you understand?"
"Understood and logged."
"Good," I said. "Now deactivate."
* * *
When I returned from the village the next morning, I found my water gourds empty, my blanket unfolded, my boma filled with the dung of my goats.
The mundumugu is all-powerful among the Kikuyu, but he is not without compassion. I decided to forgive this childish display of temper, and so I did not visit Kamari's father, nor did I tell the other children to avoid her.
She did not come again in the afternoon. I know, because I waited beside my hut to explain my decision to her. Finally, when twilight came, I sent for the boy, Ndemi, to fill my gourds and clean my boma, and although such chores are woman's work, he did not dare disobey his mundumugu, although his every gesture displayed contempt for the tasks I had set for him.
When two more days had passed with no sign of Kamari, I summoned Njoro, her father.
"Kamari has broken her word to me," I said when he arrived. "If she does not come to clean my boma this afternoon, I will be forced to place a thahu upon her."
He looked puzzled. "She says that you have already placed a curse on her, Koriba. I was going to ask you if we should turn her out of our boma."
I shook my head. "No," I said. "Do not turn her out of your boma. I have placed no thahu on her yet—but she must come to work this afternoon."
"I do not know if she is strong enough," said Njoro. "She has had neither food nor water for three days, and she sits motionless in my wife's hut." He paused. "Someone has placed a thahu on her. If it was not you, perhaps you can cast a spell to remove it."
"She has gone three days without eating or drinking?" I repeated.
He nodded.
"I will see her," I said, getting to my feet and following him down the winding path to the village. When we reached Njoro's boma he led me to his wife's hut, then called Kamari's worried mother out and stood aside as I entered. Kamari sat at the farthest point from the door, her back propped against a wall, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms encircling her thin legs.
"Jambo, Kamari," I said.
She stared at me but said nothing.
"Your mother worries for you, and your father tells me that you no longer eat or drink."
She made no answer.
"You also have not kept your promise to tend my boma."
Silence.
"Have you forgotten how to speak?" I said.
"Kikuyu women do not speak," she said bitterly. "They do not think. All they do is bear babies and cook food and gather firewood and till the fields. They do not have to speak or think to do that."
"Are you that unhappy?"
She did not answer.
"Listen to my words, Kamari," I said slowly. "I made my decision for the good of Kirinyaga, and I will not recant it. As a Kikuyu woman, you must live the life that has been ordained for you." I paused. "However, neither the Kikuyu nor the Eutopian Council are without compassion for the individual. Any member of our society may leave if he wishes. According to the charter we signed when we claimed this world, you need only walk to that area known as Haven, and a Maintenance ship will pick you up and transport you to the location of your choice."
"All I know is Kirinyaga," she said. "How am I to chose a new home if I am forbidden to learn about other places?"
"I do not know," I admitted.
"I don't want to leave Kirinyaga!" she continued. "This is my home. These are my people. I am a Kikuyu girl, not a Maasai girl or a European girl. I will bear my husband's children and till his shamba, I will gather his wood and cook his meals and weave his garments, I will leave my parents' shamba and live with my husband's family. I will do all this without complaint, Koriba, if you will just let me learn to read and write!"
"I cannot," I said sadly.
"Buy why?"
"Who is the wisest man you know, Kamari?" I asked.
"The mundumugu is always the wisest man in the village."
"Then you must trust to my wisdom."
"But I feel like the pygmy falcon," she said, her misery reflected in her voice. "He spent his life dreaming of soaring high upon the winds. I dream of seeing words upon the computer screen."
"You are not like the falcon at all," I said. "He was prevented from being what he was meant to be. You are prevented from being what you are not meant to be."
"You are not an evil man, Koriba," she said solemnly. "But you are wrong."
"If that is so, then I shall have to live with it," I said.
"But you are asking me to live with it," she said, "and that is your crime."
"If you call me a criminal again," I said sternly, for no one may speak thus to the mundumugu, "I shall surely place a thahu on you."
"What more can you do?" she said bitterly.
"I can turn you into a hyena, an unclean eater of human flesh who prowls only in the darkness. I can fill your belly with thorns, so that your every movement will be agony. I can—"
"You are just a man," she said wearily, "and you have already done your worst."
"I will hear no more of this," I said. "I order you to eat and drink what your mother brings to you, and I expect to see you at my boma this afternoon."
I walked out of the hut and told Kamari's mother to bring her banana mash and water, then stopped by old Benima's shamba. Buffalo had stampeded through his fields, destroying his crops, and I sacrificed a goat to remove the thahu that had fallen upon his land.
When I was finished I stopped at Koin
nage's boma, where he offered me some freshly-brewed pombe and began complaining about Kibo, his newest wife, who kept taking sides with Shumi, his second wife, against Wambu, his senior wife.
"You can always divorce her and return her to her family's shamba," I suggested.
"She cost twenty cows and five goats!" he complained. "Will her family return them?"
"No, they will not."
"Then I will not send her back."
"As you wish," I said with a shrug.
"Besides, she is very strong and very lovely," he continued. "I just wish she would stop fighting with Wambu."
"What do they fight about?" I asked.
"They fight about who will fetch the water, and who will mend my garments, and who will repair the thatch on my hut." He paused. "They even argue about whose hut I should visit at night, as if I had no choice in the matter."
"Do they ever fight about ideas?" I asked.
"Ideas?" he repeated blankly.
"Such as you might find in books."
He laughed. "They are women, Koriba. What need have they for ideas?" He paused. "In fact, what need have any of us for them?"
"I do not know," I said. "I was merely curious."
"You look disturbed," he noted.
"It must be the pombe," I said. "I am an old man, and perhaps it is too strong."
"That is because Kibo will not listen when Wambu tells her how to brew it. I really should send her away"—he looked at Kibo as she carried a load of wood on her strong, young back—"but she is so young and so lovely." Suddenly his gaze went beyond his newest wife to the village. "Ah!" he said. "I see that old Siboki has finally died."
"How do you know?" I asked.
He pointed to a thin column of smoke. "They are burning his hut."
I stared off in the direction he indicated. "That is not Siboki's hut," I said. "His boma is more to the west."
"Who else is old and infirm and due to die?" asked Koinnage.
And suddenly I knew, as surely as I knew that Ngai sits on His throne atop the holy mountain, that Kamari was dead.
I walked to Njoro's shamba as quickly as I could. When I arrived, Kamari's mother and sister and grandmother were already wailing the death chant, tears streaming down their faces.
"What happened?" I demanded, walking up to Njoro.
"Why do you ask, when it is you who destroyed her?" he replied bitterly.
"I did not destroy her," I said.
"Did you not threaten to place a thahu on her just this morning?" he persisted. "You did so, and now she is dead, and I have but one daughter to bring the bride price, and I have had to burn Kamari's hut."
"Stop worrying about bride prices and huts and tell me what happened, or you shall learn what it means to be cursed by a mundumugu!" I snapped.
"She hung herself in her hut with a length of buffalo hide."
Five women from the neighboring shamba arrived and took up the death chant.
"She hung herself in her hut?" I repeated.
He nodded. "She could at least have hung herself from a tree, so that her hut would not be unclean and I would not have to burn it."
"Be quiet!" I said, trying to collect my thoughts.
"She was not a bad daughter," he continued. "Why did you curse her, Koriba?"
"I did not place a thahu upon her," I said, wondering if I spoke the truth. "I wished only to save her."
"Who has stronger medicine than you?" he asked fearfully.
"She broke the law of Ngai," I answered.
"And now Ngai has taken His vengeance!" moaned Njoro fearfully. "Which member of my family will He strike down next?"
"None of you," I said. "Only Kamari broke the law."
"I am a poor man," said Njoro cautiously, "even poorer now than before. How much must I pay you to ask Ngai to receive Kamari's spirit with compassion and forgiveness?"
"I will do that whether you pay me or not," I answered.
"You will not charge me?" he asked.
"I will not charge you."
"Thank you, Koriba!" he said fervently.
I stood and stared at the blazing hut, trying not to think of the smoldering body of the little girl inside it.
"Koriba?" said Njoro after a lengthy silence.
"What now?" I asked irritably.
"We did not know what to do with the buffalo hide, for it bore the mark of your thahu, and we were afraid to burn it. Now I know that the marks were made by Ngai and not you, and I am afraid even to touch it. Will you take it away?"
"What marks?" I said. "What are you talking about?"
He took me by the arm and led me around to the front of the burning hut. There, on the ground, some ten paces from the entrance, lay the strip of tanned hide with which Kamari had hanged herself, and scrawled upon it were more of the strange symbols I had seen on my computer screen three days earlier.
I reached down and picked up the hide, then turned to Njoro. "If indeed there is a curse on your shamba," I said, "I will remove it and take it upon myself, by taking Ngai's marks with me."
"Thank you, Koriba!" he said, obviously much relieved.
"I must leave to prepare my magic," I said abruptly, and began the long walk back to my boma. When I arrived I took the strip of buffalo hide into my hut.
"Computer," I said. "Activate."
"Activated."
I held the strip up to its scanning lens.
"Do you recognize this language?" I asked.
The lens glowed briefly.
"Yes, Koriba. It is the Language of Kamari."
"What does it say?"
"It is a couplet:
I know why the caged birds die —
For, like them, I have touched the sky."
* * *
The entire village came to Njoro's shamba in the afternoon, and the women wailed the death chant all night and all of the next day, but before long Kamari was forgotten, for life goes on and she was just a little Kikuyu girl.
Since that day, whenever I have found a bird with a broken wing I have attempted to nurse it back to health. It always dies, and I always bury it next to the mound of earth that marks where Kamari's hut had been.
It is on those days, when I place the birds in the ground, that I find myself thinking of her again, and wishing that I was just a simple man, tending my cattle and worrying about my crops and thinking the thoughts of simple men, rather than a mundumugu who must live with the consequences of his wisdom.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
b. 1942
One of science fiction's most influential authors and critics, Samuel R. Delany was born and raised in Harlem, New York and educated at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. He became famous as a youthful prodigy when he published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), at the age of twenty. This was quickly followed by the The Fall of the Towers trilogy (1963-65), and two more novels, each published in 1966: Empire Star, and the Nebula award-winning Babel-17.
In 1967, Delany helped ring in the "New Wave of Science Fiction" with short stories emphasizing cultural speculation, the soft sciences, and mythology, as opposed to technology and the hard sciences. Written in this vein, the short story "Aye, and Gomorrah..." (1967) won a Nebula award, and the novelette "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1969) won a Hugo award and a Nebula.
In Delany's next novel, The Einstein Intersection (1967), the human race has been replaced by a race of aliens who take on human traditions in an attempt to make coherent sense of the human artifacts among which they live; Delany's own diaries provide part of the text. Nova, published in 1968, combines a Prometheus story and the Grail story into an ebulliently inventive space opera.
Still publishing an occasional work of fiction, including the best seller Dhalgren (1975) and the Neveryon series (begun in 1979), Delany increasingly returned to critical writing in subsequent years, which eventually led him into academia. In 1985, he received the Pilgrim Award for excellence in science fiction criticism, and he is p
resently a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, by Samuel R. Delany
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" is a science fiction short story by Samuel R. Delany. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story 1970, and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1969.
Relationships change and reverse as a thief and impersonator, whose aliases all have the initials "HCE", rises up through the ranks to established semi-legit crime boss. The story is told in the first person.
HCE is a professional criminal looking to improve his lot in life. He is also quite nervous and paranoid about the world around him, despite his evident successes. He is an orphan, saddled with the name Harold Clancy Everet. As a youth he was sent to work on a highly automated dairy farm in the state of Vermont, although the "cows" were basically inert masses of tissue stacked in a barn and hooked up to tubes. He stole the farmer's helicopter, got drunk, and landed on the roof of the old Pan Am building. Sent to jail, he dedicated himself to avoiding such mistakes in future, and never went by the name Harold Clancy Everet again.
He becomes a chameleon, adopting alias after alias. As the story opens, he arrives in New York City on a space flight, carrying something small but extremely valuable, which he hopes to sell. It is stolen property, although its exact nature is not revealed. Shedding his travel identity, he enters a bar to contact a man who will buy his goods, only to be accosted by a woman who draws his attention to the stone she is wearing in a bracelet. The stone is jasper. Jasper also happens to be the current Word. In the underworld the Word is a kind of global password. Used properly, two criminals who may never have met can use it to communicate many shades of meaning, from a greeting to a warning. The Word changes every thirty days, and is always the name of a semi-precious stone. HCE feigns ignorance of the stone's importance.
The woman identifies herself as Special Services Agent Maud Hinkle, from a police bureau which tracks criminals who are changing their status quickly. These are the ones who cause the most problems in society, she claims. She also claims to use "holographic information" which can interrelate all the information on a criminal, and which allowed her to predict that HCE would enter the bar so she could intercept him. She then vanishes into the crowd. As HCE pursues her a full-scale brawl breaks out and he barely escapes injury. Unfortunately the man he had hoped to sell the stolen goods to is found dead in the street outside. He is left puzzling over Maud's prediction that there are "helicopters and hawks" in his future. She also mentioned that there were "helicopters and cows" in his past, which scares HCE because he did not believe there was any evidence connecting him to the dairy farm, the helicopter having been unregistered.
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