by Mike Resnick
“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 the 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. “Uncircum-cised 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.
I spent the rest of the morning shopping at vehicle rental agencies, until I found exactly what I wanted. I had the saleswoman show me how to manipulate it, practiced until nightfall, hovered opposite the laboratory until I saw Kamau enter the grounds, and then maneuvered up to the side gate.
“fambo, mundumugu!” whispered Kamau as he deactivated enough of the electronic barrier to accommodate the vehicle, which he scrutinized carefully. I backed up to Ahmed's enclosure, then opened the back and ordered the ramp to descend. The elephant watched with an uneasy curiosity as Kamau deactivated a ten-foot section of the force field and allowed the bottom of the ramp through.
“Njoo, Tembo” I said. Come, elephant.
He took a tentative step toward me, then another and another. When he reached the edge of his enclosure he stopped, for always he had received an electrical “correction” when he tried to move beyond this point. It took almost twenty minutes of tempting him with peanuts before he finally crossed the barrier and then clambered awkwardly up the ramp, which slid in after him. I sealed him into the hovering vehicle, and he instantly trumpeted in panic.
“Keep him quiet until we get out of here,” said a nervous Kamau as I joined him at the controls, “or he'll wake up the whole city.”
I opened a panel to the back of the vehicle and spoke soothingly, and strangely enough the trumpeting ceased and the scuffling did stop. As I continued to calm the frightened beast, Kamau piloted the vehicle out of the laboratory complex. We passed through the Ngong Hills twenty minutes later, and circled around Thika in another hour. When we passed Kirinyaga—the true, snowcapped Kirinyaga, from which Ngai once ruled the world—ninety minutes after that, I did not give it so much as a glance.
We must have been quite a sight to anyone we passed: two seemingly crazy old men, racing through the night in an unmarked cargo vehicle carrying a six-ton monster that had been extinct for more than two centuries.
“Have you considered what effect the radiation will have on him?” asked Kamau as we passed through Isiolo and continued north.
“I questioned my son about it,” I answered. “He is aware of the incident, and says that the contamination is confined to the lower levels of the mountain.” I paused. “He also tells me it will soon be cleaned up, but I do not think I believe him.”
“But Ahmed must pass through the radiation zone to ascend the mountain,” said Kamau.
I shrugged. “Then he will pass through it. Every day he lives is a day more than he would have lived in Nairobi. For as much time as Ngai sees fit to give him, he will be free to graze on the mountain's greenery and drink deep of its cool waters.”
“I hope he lives many years,” he said. “If I am to be jailed for breaking the law, I would at least like to know that some lasting good came of it.”
“No one is going to jail you,” I assured him. “All that will happen is that you will be fired from a job that no longer exists.”
“That job supported me,” he said unhappily The Burning Spear would have no use for you, I decided. You bring no honor to his name. It is as I have always known: I am the last true Kikuyu.
I pulled my remaining money out of my pouch and held it out to him. “Here,” I said.
“But what about yourself, mzee?” he said, forcing himself not to grab for it.
“Take it,” I said. “I have no use for it.”
“Asantesana, mzee,” he said, taking it from my hand and stuffing it into a pocket. Thank you, mzee.
We fell silent then, each occupied with his own thoughts. As Nairobi receded farther and farther behind us, I compared my feelings with those I had experienced when I had left Kenya behind for Kirinyaga. I had been filled with optimism then, certain that we would create the Utopia I could envision so clearly in my mind.
The thing I had not realized is that a society can be a Utopia for only an instant—once it reaches a state of perfection it cannot change and still be a Utopia, and it is the nature of societies to grow and evolve. I do not know when Kirinyaga became a Utopia; the instant came and went without my noticing it.
Now I was seeking Utopia again, but this time of a more limited, more realizable nature: a Utopia for one man, a man who knew his own mind and would die before compromising. I had been misled in the past, so I was not as elated as the day we had left for Kirinyaga; being older and wiser, I felt a calm, quiet certitude rather than more vivid emotions.<
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An hour after sunrise, we came to a huge, green, fog-enshrouded mountain set in the middle of a bleached desert. A single swirling dust devil was visible against the horizon.
We stopped, then unsealed the elephant's compartment. We stood back as Ahmed stepped cautiously down the ramp, his every movement tense with apprehension. He took a few steps, as if to convince himself that he was truly on solid ground again, then raised his trunk to examine the scents of his new—and ancient—home.
Slowly the great beast turned toward Marsabit, and suddenly his whole demeanor changed. No longer cautious, no longer fearful, he spent almost a full minute eagerly examining the smells that wafted down to him. Then, without a backward glance, he strode confidently to the foothills and vanished into the foliage. A moment later we heard him trumpet, and then he was climbing the mountain to claim his kingdom.
I turned to Kamau. “You had better take the vehicle back before they come looking for it.”
“Are you not coming with me?” he asked, surprised.
“No,” I replied. “Like Ahmed, I will live out my days on Marsa-bit.”
“But that means you, too, must pass through the radiation.”
“What of it?” I said with an unconcerned shrug. “I am an old man. How much time can I have left—weeks? Months? Surely not a year. Probably the burden of my years will kill me long before the radiation does.”
“I hope you are right,” said Kamau. “I should hate to think of you spending your final days in agony”
“I have seen men who live in agony,” I told him. “They are the old mzees who gather in the park each morning, leading lives devoid of purpose, waiting only for death to claim another of their number. I will not share their fate.”
A frown crossed his face like an early-morning shadow, and I could see what he was thinking: he would have to take the vehicle back and face the consequences alone.
“I will remain here with you,” he said suddenly. “I cannot turn my back on Eden a second time.”
“It is not Eden,” I said. “It is only a mountain in the middle of a desert.”
“Nonetheless, I am staying. We will start a new Utopia. It will be Kirinyaga again, only done right this time.”
I have work to do, I thought. Important work. And you would desert me in the end, as they have all deserted me. Better that you leave now.
“You must not worry about the authorities,” I said in the same reassuring tones with which I spoke to the elephant. “Return the vehicle to my son and he will take care of everything.”
“Why should he?” asked Kamau suspiciously.
“Because I have always been an embarrassment to him, and if it were known that I stole Ahmed from a government laboratory, I would graduate from an embarrassment to a humiliation. Trust me: he will not allow this to happen.”
“If your son asks about you, what shall I tell him?”
“The truth,” I answered. “He will not come looking for me.”
“What will stop him?”
“The fear that he might rind me and have to bring me back with him,” I said.
Kamau's face reflected the battle that was going on inside him, his terror of returning alone pitted against his fear of the hardships of life on the mountain.
“It is true that my son would worry about me,” he said hesitantly, as if expecting me to contradict him, perhaps even hoping that I would. “And I would never see my grandchildren again.”
You are the last Kikuyu, indeed the last human being, that I shall ever see, I thought. I will utter one last lie, disguised as a question, and if you do not see through it, then you will leave with a clear conscience and I will have performed a final act of compassion.
“Go home, my friend,” I said. “For what is more important than a grandchild?”
“Come with me, Koriba,” he urged. “They will not punish you if you explain why you kidnapped him.”
“I am not going back,” I said firmly. “Not now, not ever. Ahmed and I are both anachronisms. It is best that we live out our lives here, away from a world we no longer recognize, a world that has no place for us.”
Kamau looked at the mountain. “You and he are joined at the soul,” he concluded.
“Perhaps,” I agreed. I laid my hand on his shoulder. Kwaheri, Kamau.”
“Kwaheri, mzee,” he replied unhappily. “Please ask Ngai to forgive me for my weakness.”
It seemed to take him forever to activate the vehicle and turn it toward Nairobi, but finally he was out of sight, and I turned and began ascending the foothills.
I has wasted many years seeking Ngai on the wrong mountain. Men of lesser faith might believe Him dead or disinterested, but I knew that if Ahmed could be reborn after all others of his kind were long dead, then Ngai must surely be nearby, overseeing the miracle. I would spend the rest of the day regaining my strength, and then, in the morning, I would begin searching for Him again on Marsabit.
And this time, I knew I would find Him.
Author's Afterword
How does one go about writing the most honored science-fiction book in history?
Well, not on purpose, believe me.
It all began back in 1987, when Orson Scott Card asked me to contribute a story to his shared-world anthology, Eutopia, He postulated a number of artificial planetoids that were chartered by groups that wanted to create Utopian societies, and he had a pair of conditions that made it very challenging.
First, anyone who wished to leave could walk to an area called Haven and promptly be picked up by a Maintenance ship. This meant there could be no revolts against Big Brother and a Utopia gone wrong; if you didn't like your world you simply left, and no one stopped you.
Second, the story had to be told by an insider who believed in the Utopia. There could be no simplistic “wonder tour” by a visitor who codifies what he sees and then goes home.
Because of my love of Africa, and my knowledge of East Africa in particular, I chose to write about a Kikuyu Utopia. The story was “Kirinyaga,” and I handed it to Scott at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, England, where I stopped for a few days on my way down to Kenya for yet another safari.
I felt I had written a pretty good story, but writers are notoriously insecure, and I half thought Scott might reject it. He didn't, and he also gave me permission to sell it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it appeared as the November 1988 cover story, and won me my first Hugo Award the next year.
But long before that happened, even before Scott let me know he was buying it, I took my Kenya safari—and a strange thing happened. Maybe it was because I had just written “Kirinyaga” a couple of weeks earlier and it was still fresh in my mind, maybe it was because my subconscious is a lot smarter than my conscious mind, but whatever the reason, I realized that “Kirinyaga” was not a stand-alone story, but rather the first chapter in a book. Everywhere I looked I saw material for more Kirinyaga episodes, and by the time the safari was over, I had outlined the entire book that you hold in your hands. From that day to this, the only change I made was to one of the titles: “The Last Storyteller” became “A Little Knowledge.”
I decided to write the book a chapter at a time, and to sell each chapter as a short story (or novelette, or novella, depending on length), but never to lose sight of the fact that these stories were really chapters in a novel, which, when completed, would build to a climax as a novel does, and have a coda after the climax, as so many of my own novels do.
I confess that I am not the most modest, self-effacing man in the world, but even I was stunned by the reaction.
The first story chronologically (which, since it is set in Kenya rather than Kirinyaga, serves as a prologue to the novel), and the only one to be written and appear out of sequence, was “One Perfect Morning, With Jackals.” Its various nominations and awards were:
Hugo Award Nominee
Nebula Preliminary Ballot
Science Fiction Chronicle Poll Runner-
up
Alexander Award Nominee
Years Best SF—9th Annual Collection selection
The second story/chapter was “Kirinyaga,” which seems to have made my reputation (or, rather, remade it, since before its appearance I was known almost exclusively for my novels). Its various nominations and awards were:
Hugo Award Winner
Hugo Award Nominee
Nebula Award Nominee
Nebula Preliminary Ballot
Science Fiction Chronicle Poll Winner
Hayakawa SF Award Finalist
Locus Poll Runner-up
Years Best SF—6th Annual Collection selection
The third story/chapter—and my personal favorite—was “For I Have Touched the Sky,” which has actually been anthologized more often than “Kirinyaga.” Its various nominations and awards were:
Hugo Award Nominee
Nebula Award Nominee
Nebula Preliminary Ballot
Hayakawa SF Award Winner
Science Fiction Chronicle Poll Winner
Japanese Hugo (Sieun-Sho) Nominee
Years Best SF—1th Annual Collection selection
The fourth story/chapter was “Bwana.” It was not nominated for a Hugo, probably because it was in competition that year with my own Bully!, which was a stronger story. Also, I think it's the weakest of the Kirinyaga stories, primarily because there's a lack of the usual ambiguities: you know from the first line that Koriba is in the right, and you root for him to triumph. Its various nominations and awards were:
Japanese Hugo (Sieun-Sho) Nominee
HOMer Award Nominee
Nebula Preliminary Ballot
Year's Best SF—8th Annual Collection, Honorable Mention
The fifth story/chapter was “The Manamouki,” which won me my second Hugo—and by the end of it, readers could see that Ko-riba's Utopia was starting to crumble around the edges. Its various nominations and awards were:
Hugo Award Winner
Hugo Award Nominee
Nebula Award Nominee
Nebula Preliminary Ballot