by Chad Oliver
He did not know how long he had been sitting there. He didn’t care. The stars had moved. The camp was silent.
Jerry waited.
It happened.
A shadowy form materialized out of the night. A familiar voice spoke.
“Doctor Jerry?”
It was Kwi. The question was a formality. Kwi knew perfectly well who he was; the hunter had eyes like a cat. But a man did not approach another person at night without an invitation.
“Old friend,” Jerry replied in Kwaruma. Kwi had just used up most of his English. “I am glad that you have come. Please join me.”
Jerry shifted his position on the stump to make room. He should have known better. Kwi dropped down into a squatting position, his heels beneath his body and his elbows on his upper legs. He could sit like that for hours. He had something in his right hand. He did not put it on the ground.
Jerry smiled. He was glad that Kwi had come, and that had nothing whatever to do with his work. He enjoyed his company. He could barely see the safety pin in Kwi’s ear glinting in the starlight.
Jerry extended the tin cup. “Drink?”
Kwi laughed softly. He liked to show his missing tooth. He took the cup in his left hand, sipped politely and without comment, and returned the cup to Jerry. Kwi did not care for Scotch. They had found that out long ago.
The ensuing silence was long but not uncomfortable. Jerry did not push at it. Kwi would say what he had to say when he was ready.
Jerry studied the man without seeming to look directly at him. He did not need more light than there was. He knew every wrinkle in that prematurely lined face. He knew every scar on that leather-skinned body. He had photographed his friend hundreds of times; Kwi would be famous one day. He had interviewed him, hunted with him, joked with him.
Oh, he knew all about Kwi. He could tell the story of his life. He knew how Kwi had become the headman of the Kwaruma. (The Kwaruma had no chiefs. Nobody had selected Kwi as headman; “he just got to be that way.”) He knew how Kwi had lost the incisor tooth. (Let Kwi tell that story.) He knew how Kwi could double as a shaman. (“I can leave my body, Dr. Jerry. It is a gift. When the Others tell me what to do—when the power is right—I can heal.”)
And he knew nothing about Kwi. They shared the bond of a common humanity and something in their personalities meshed. But Kwi had lived a life that Jerry could not share. Kwi knew much—and felt much—that he could not communicate to a well-intentioned alien. It worked both ways. Jerry had been unable to explain what a Department of Anthropology was. Somehow, that did not seem very important.
Jerry poured himself a bit more Scotch. He waited. He was very good at that.
Finally, Kwi broke the silence.
“You say that we are the last,” he said.
“Yes. It is true.”
“That is a hard thing to believe.”
“You do not lie to me. I do not lie to you.”
Kwi sighed. It was as close as he had come to expressing regret over what was passing. He was not a man given to self-pity. “No,” he said. “You do not lie.”
The silence came again. Jerry said nothing, prepared to wait it out.
This time, the silence was short.
“There is something I want you to have, “Kwi said. “My People have always had it. It will be lost where we are going.”
“I will protect it. You honor me with your gift.” The words were Kwaruma. They sounded inadequate. The thoughts that churned in Jerry’s head were not Kwaruma. They didn’t fit the occasion either.
Kwi rocked forward slightly on his toes. He was more serious than Jerry had ever seen him. “I have listened to the stories you have told me,” Kwi said. “I have heard other stories. Understand me. My people have always had it. I do not mean just the Kwaruma. All my people.”
Very slowly, Jerry put the tin cup down. His hand was shaking. He thought he understood what Kwi was saying. That was the problem.
He picked his words with care. “All of your people? Do you mean all of the hunters and gatherers? Everywhere?”
Kwi smiled his gap-toothed smile and relaxed. Communication had been easier than he had figured. “You have it right. That is what I was told. I have not seen it with my own eyes. Only for some.”
Jerry stared at the object in Kwi’s right hand. It appeared to be a hide wrapping of some kind. “What is it?” he asked inanely.
“It is yours now,” Kwi said. He gave it to Jerry as though ridding himself of a burden.
Jerry took the thing and held it gingerly. It was a skin container; he could tell by the texture. It was small, only a little larger than his hand. There was something hard inside it.
Jerry went into his tent and got a flashlight. He came back and placed the object on the stump.
He unfolded the creased hide and there it was.
He didn’t know what he had expected, if anything. But not this.
It was old, chalk-white, and ridged. It had been much used; it had finger smudges on it.
It was the shell of a turtle.
Well, what do you do? Laugh? Cry? Tell shaggy dog stories?
Jerry felt drained. A pragmatic man, he had somehow believed that he was on the edge of revelation. He should have known better. This was the real world.
A turtle!
The damned thing was not even ancient—certainly not an object handed down from the beginnings of mankind. The shell was dry and brittle, not fossilized. It was at most a century or two old.
Was Kwi joking?
Perhaps sensing his disappointment, Kwi said: “It was given to me by my father. He received it from his father.”
No, he was not joking.
Jerry studied the shell. He knew next to nothing about turtles. Testudo something. What was the difference between a turtle and a tortoise? Let’s see, the upper plates formed the carapace, and the bottom plates were the plastron….
So what?
“It is not clear in my mind,” he said. That was putting it mildly. “Your people have always had this turtle shell?”
Kwi grunted. He gave Jerry a look reserved for backward children and dim-witted anthropologists. “The shell of the churi is not strong when it dries. There is nothing inside. It will break if you drop it. If you put something on top of it, the shell will shatter. This one has lasted a long time. It is lucky. There were many others before this one. That is what I was told.”
“So it has been replaced? Many times?”
Kwi did not bother to answer.
“And it is not this turtle shell that all of your people—all of the hunters and gatherers—had?”
Kwi stood up. He was getting tired. It may have been that he too was disappointed. Doctor Jerry could be a little slow in the head.
“My meaning was that they all had a churi. That is what I was told. I have seen some, long ago. Not this same shell. But like it. They all work the same.”
Jerry took a deep breath. They were back in the real world. It was just barely possible—
“Work the same?”
“The churi is medicine,” Kwi said slowly. “It is power. It connects things.”
Jerry did not know how to respond to that. The real world was getting fuzzy again.
“Protect it,” Kwi said. “You will see.”
The last of the Kwaruma headmen had said all that he cared to say. He had done what he had to do. That was the story of his life.
He turned and vanished into the night.
A great weariness descended over Jerry Hartshorn. The stars seemed heavy. He stumbled into his tent, taking his gear with him.
A half-empty bottle, a tin cup, a flashlight.
And an old turtle shell wrapped in hide.
Sleep would not come.
Tired as he was, Jerry’s mind was racing.
It may have been the extraordinary day he had been through. It could have been the illness. It might have been the Scotch.
Who knew? Maybe it was the turtle shell.
&nbs
p; He felt it there, right under his cot.
He had made a classic mistake, and he knew it.
He had trapped himself in the real world without asking the key question. Whose real world?
His? A world choking with billions of people, a world beset with problems that had no solutions, a world of science that had no room left for miracles?
The world that Kwi had known? Hunters and gatherers had populated the earth, but not harshly. There had been no population explosion. There had been no wars. There had been no destruction of the land. There had been no alienation from other living things. They had killed, yes, but they had not exterminated. They had endured for millions of years. For all Jerry knew, that was a record that had no counterpart in the entire universe. Certainly, as far as mankind was concerned, it had no equal on the planet earth. It was a world that had its own rules: sharing, accommodation, fulfillment. It was a world in which miracles could happen.
The world of the turtles? Well, why not? The turtles were older than humanity, older even than the primates. They were as old as the earliest dinosaurs. Frozen in their shells, they had waddled and paddled down through the eons. They had changed very little; they had developed a mechanism for retracting their heads instead of tucking their necks along the sides of the shells. That was about all. They knew something about endurance. Indeed, they were close to immortality….
Oh yes, the real world.
Did Jerry Hartshorn have a part to play in it?
(Hartshorn. Even his name was a link with the past. Was that an accident?)
He could sense the turtle shell under him. Churi. What had Kwi said? “It is power. It connects things.”
Question: Could they have missed something like this? Something crucial? All the anthropologists who had worked with hunting and gathering peoples for more than a century?
Answer: Absolutely. It was precisely the kind of thing that would have been overlooked. Something seemingly without significance. Something that their training never mentioned.
Who asked questions about turtles?
Who listened if the subject came up?
Jerry twisted in his sleeping bag. The cot was singularly uncomfortable.
“Friend,” he said aloud, “you’ve been out here too long. You’re headed for the old laughing academy.”
The words hung there in the cold night air. They were alien.
He had the sensation that something was trying to get through to him. Something pecking away at the traditional barriers of his mind….
“You’re sick, old buddy,” he said.
Maybe.
Get out of the way. Let it happen.
He tried. Feeling almost guilty, he even put his hand down and touched the hide container beneath his cot.
Nothing happened. Or had it already happened? Or—
“The hell with it,” Jerry said.
He closed his eyes and attempted to sleep.
Dawn was streaking the African sky with color. Inside the little tent, Jerry Hartshorn was neither asleep nor awake. His hand still rested on the skin-wrapped turtle shell.
He had not prayed since he was a child. He was not sure that he was praying now.
His mind seemed clear—unnaturally so—but he had trouble with the proper form of address.
God? No: too culture-bound.
Great Spirit? Never: too corny
To Whom It May Concern? Not bad. It covered a lot of territory, supernatural and otherwise.
He sent his message, silently. He did not want to be overheard babbling in his tent. Tenure and all that.
I don’t know who you are or if you are. I’m new at this game. I have this damned turtle shell and I don’t know what it means. If you understand it, if it can help you or it can help us, please find me. The turtle shell and I will be together. We’ll be waiting.
There was no answering message. He hadn’t expected one.
Just the same, he felt better.
He opened his eyes and examined the pale light.
“Might as well get up,” he muttered.
He had a lot to do today.
It was mid-morning before the television crews arrived and Jerry did his best to ignore them. He was in no shape to give interviews. Jane made a perfunctory appearance before the cameras, but George Ndambuki was in his element. He was magnificently glib and he managed to work in all of the proper catch phrases: A Human Tragedy, The Promise of Tomorrow, The Heritage of Mankind, The New Africa, and The Responsibility of Science to Society.
Splendid.
The relocation trucks finally rolled up in the heavy heat of afternoon. Nothing ever happened on time in Kenya. As symbols of The Promise of Tomorrow the trucks did not inspire unlimited confidence. They were coated with dust and they wheezed and clanked like tanks that had been on the wrong side of a tough battle.
The television people insisted on a brief ceremony—a Farewell to Eden kind of thing—and that was the end of the Kwaruma.
The last of the hunters and gatherers were politely herded into the trucks. The adults were very subdued and old Klu was crying. The children were wide-eyed and lively. For them, this was an adventure.
Jerry had said all his farewells and he could not say them again. He walked out into the searing sunlight and stood there with his hat in his hand.
When the trucks pulled away, Jerry waved his hat.
He never saw Kwi again.
The baobab tree that had marked the last camp of the Kwaruma was far behind them now. There was tarmac under the wheels of the Land Rover. After bouncing around in rough country for so long, they seemed to be gliding.
Nairobi was one hundred miles ahead of them: a straight shot. It was still light enough to see but neither Jane nor Jerry gave the scenery so much as a glance. They knew it by heart.
George Ndambuki’s vehicle was behind them. It would turn off at Machakos.
“Are you tired?” Jerry asked. “I could drive.”
“The hell you say.” Jane gripped the wheel until her knuckles whitened. “When we get to the big city, Tarzan is going to the hospital.”
“You’ve been a mess through this whole rotten brick,” Jerry said. His voice was so weak that it frightened him a little. His moist hand reached out and touched the hide container that rested between them.
“What is that thing? Why didn’t you pack it away with the other gear?”
“It was a gift from Kwi. It’s a turtle shell.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not this time. Neither was Kwi.”
Jane Schubauer didn’t know what to say to that. Wisely, she said nothing.
“Jane?”
“I’m here.”
“In case I pass out, I have a favor to ask of you.”
She was really worried now. “You don’t have to ask, Jerry. Just tell me what you want.”
“The churi. The turtle shell. I think it’s important to us. Keep it for me, will you? It mustn’t be lost.”
“Done. Save the explanations for later. Try to get some sleep.”
It was growing dark. The first faint stars dusted the African sky. Jane switched on the headlights.
Jerry closed his eyes. He trusted Jane. He felt good about that.
When you get close to the edge, you do not worry. You just hang on.
Your mind works.
There was a kind of contact.
Jerry knew that he would not die. Not yet. They wouldn’t let him.
He was a link. (Missing? No, just a shade fragile.) There was continuity. Something flowed between him and all the countless generations of mankind, those that were gone and those that were yet to be. Something flowed out, touching, connecting….
His own kind of search was ending.
Perhaps he knew what was coming, perhaps not.
He did know that he had found something and that he too would be found.
He was certain enough to smile.
Nairobi was not the end of the trail.
They had sea
rched through an ocean of darkness, a night sea that floated worlds upon worlds, stars beyond number, universes that began and ended and flowed into yet other universes.
They were after something. Otherwise, they would not have been there.
They would know it when they found it. They would know what to do with it.
The seeking was urgent. The journey had been long.
They were ready. They would not quit. They could not afford to miss.
They were coming.
Call it a hunt.
A STICK FOR HARRY EDDINGTON
The giant photographs set into the panels of the office walls were striking anachronisms: an Eskimo crouching on blue ice, a harpoon ready in his right hand, staring intently at a bone splinter stuck into the thin partition of a seal’s breathing hole; an African man, his teeth filed down to sharp points and the lobes of his ears distended, leaning on a staff in the butter-yellow sunlight and gazing at a herd of skinny, hump-backed cattle; a Polynesian, his golden body drenched with spray, guiding an outrigger canoe through white surf that foamed like liquid cotton under a twilight sky….
Harry Eddington jerked his attention away from the pictures. “Say that again,” he demanded.
The man behind the polished desk, whose name was Richard Mavor, smiled and interlaced his well-manicured fingers. “About the financial arrangements?”
“About the price, yes,” Harry said.
“The Exchange does not dicker. Our contract is a standard one, as I told you. For clients whose net worth is over one million dollars—and we don’t accept any other kind of clients, Mr. Eddington—the client is allowed to retain one-third of his wealth. This is to enable him to provide for his wife, his children, his charities, and whatnot. The rest is signed over to the Exchange. In return, the Exchange guarantees to place the client in the form, location, and situation that has been mutually agreed upon. There can be no refunds, of course, because what we are offering you is by necessity a one-way ticket. We can put you where you wish to go, but you will then be a pauper by our standards; we can’t bring you back again at our own expense. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”
Harry Eddington ignored the advice of his doctor and lit a cigarette. “Very simple. I give you about seven million bucks. You give me a life of poverty. Is that it?”