Far From This Earth

by Chad Oliver

  There were no Masai visible now, although some would be on duty later, in costume, at Safariland. He could see some animals, even from the main road. (Stephen could remember when there had not been a single paved road of any consequence in all of Kenya outside the cities.) There were five giraffes in the bush to his left, their stalklike heads poked up above the screening acacias and watching him with typical giraffe curiosity. If he stopped the car and waited, they would walk right up and try to stick their heads in through the windows, their great long tongues uncoiling like snakes. There was an ostrich trotting with imperturbable dignity along the side of the road, looking for all the world like a long-distance runner in training for the Olympics. There were Tommys—Thomson’s gazelles—everywhere, some of them stotting in their characteristic stiff-legged gait. It was odd, Stephen thought. As a boy, he had shared the attitudes of most Africans about wild animals. They were meat, pure and simple. He had saved his affection for his cows. Now, he had learned to admire them, even to envy them at times. He was not sentimental about them, like some of the British he had known, but he welcomed their presence on the land. His people needed them, yes; they brought in the tourist money. But it was more than that. They were not cows, but they were something. Of all the changes he had known in his life, this was one of the greatest. It was one of the few gifts of the white man that did not corrupt.

  It took him nearly an hour to reach the field station. The sun was higher in the great sky, flooding the plains with golden light and welcome warmth. It was not hot and would not get hot even in the afternoon. Kenya was on the equator, but most of it was high plateau country and the air was cool and dry. For real heat you had to go to the coastal lowlands, to Mombasa on the shores of the Indian Ocean. But Stephen had no desire to go to that tourist trap with its swarming beaches. They called it the New Riviera, but to Stephen Mombasa would always be tainted. Mombasa had been the mainland starting point for the slavers from Zanzibar, and some of those Arab slave caravans had reached hungrily into Ukambani….

  Ah no, he did not deceive himself. The good old days had been no Eden. He had lost three sisters and a brother, all dead before they reached their fifth year. He remembered his father, so drunk on sugar-cane beer in the afternoons that he could not speak. He remembered his mother, toiling endlessly in the fields, so bent over at the waist that she could hardly stand erect. He remembered the killing oaths, and the witches. He would not go back if he could. That dream was for the foolish young, who had never been there and so could not remember. And for the very old, perhaps, the elders lost in a new world and groping for the only alternative they knew.

  He tried not to think about it as he checked the reports. He knew what he would find, out there on the sunlit savannah. He knew that they could not escape him.

  His heart was heavy when he went out to the waiting copter. He did not relish this part of his job. It had to be done, yes, but it could not be done with joy. The past had been murdered enough.

  The chopper climbed into the vault of the sky and swung toward the southwest. There was no Safariland here and only dirt trails cut through the thorny bush. Elephants, not gray as they were in zoos but rust-colored from the dust. Fatbellied zebras, breaking into an oddly clumsy gallop as the shadow of the copter passed over them. Kongoni, those most ungainly of antelopes, unconcerned as always. One lazy lion, a male, flopped down asleep in the tall grass. Stephen knew him. They called him Lord Lugard, and Stephen was worried about his teeth.

  “The damn fools,” the pilot said. “Won’t they ever learn?” He spoke in English. It still surprised the tourists, but English had been the major language in Kenya for years. The tribal languages were fading out, and Swahili was not what the doctor ordered for a nation trying hard to be modern.

  “Wait a bit,” Stephen said. “You’ll get older and disappoint the old lady some night. Then you’ll be out hunting rhino horn with the rest of them.”

  The pilot looked at him blankly. “I meant the cowboys.”

  Stephen did not reply. Cassius, the pilot, was a Luo and too clever by half. Stephen found him pretty hard to take. He was deliberately obtuse with Cassius, mostly to shut him up. It seldom worked.

  “I mean, they haven’t a chance when we can spot them from the air,” Cassius said. “If they had half a brain between them they could figure that out.”

  “Africans ain’t got no brains, don’t you know that? We are like children.”

  Cassius lapsed into silence. He wasn’t angry, just puzzled. Stephen was aware that he was something of an enigma to his colleagues, and he rather fancied the role.

  The copter droned on, flying a search pattern. Stephen didn’t bother to use his glasses. He could see well enough. He wouldn’t miss a herd of cattle, not from the air or from the ground. He knew about where they had to be. Close enough to the fence to get them out at night, using a portable wooden walkway to get the animals over the electric fence. Close to the Tanzania border, away from the tourists and the game patrols.

  Cassius was right. They were fools. But they were other things as well. He thought of his father, and of his grandfather. He thought of all the men of his clan, stretching backward into the mists of time, the men and their cattle, always the cattle….

  He saw the two peaks of Kilimanjaro thrusting up through the clouds, sharing the sky to his left. The snow and ice gleamed on the summits. According to legend, the Kamba had once lived on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. And now he was coming back—

  “In a great silver bird,” he muttered in self-mockery.

  “How’s that?”

  “Nothing, man. An old joke.”

  The copter flew on. The sun climbed high in a sky that was a brilliant blue.

  Quite suddenly, Stephen spotted them. They were nakedly exposed on the plains below. They could not hide any more than ants could hide on a greasy white plate.

  “Take her down, Cassius.”

  Cassius stared at him. “We going in alone? Don’t you think—”

  “Take her down, Cassius.”

  The copter started down.

  Stephen climbed out of the copter, his boots crushing the soft, fragrant grass. He carried no weapon. Cassius stayed behind, shouting into the radio. Stephen walked forward, hating what he had to do.

  Almost, he thought, it was a timeless scene, a frieze from a ruined temple. There were the hump-backed cattle, beyond any man-made law, munching on the grass. And there were the herdsmen with their staffs, frozen like statues, only the eyes alive. Hostile eyes, fearful eyes, resigned eyes. Eyes that looked again on the destroyers of herds …

  But it was like all scenes now. There were distortions, bits and chunks of wrongness. A man had to edit to see what he wanted to see—or look beyond. There was the copter, for one thing, and that in a way was the least of it. The herdsmen—there were three of them—were very old, too old to be taking cattle to grass. That had been a job for boys, back when boys still did such things. The men were dressed in ragged, baggy suits—ripped by the thorns, stained by years of filth. One man even wore a tie although he had no shirt. And there were only sixteen cows in the herd. Three men for sixteen cows!

  Stephen recognized one of the men as a Kamba. He could tell by the way his teeth had been filed, a custom that hadn’t been practiced in fifty years.

  Stephen spoke to him gently, the old language strange in his mouth. “Nouvoo, mutumia?” Is it peace, elder? A standard Kamba greeting once, but it had a literal meaning now.

  The old man looked surprised, subtly pleased by the use of his language and his title. Hope flickered briefly in the cloudy eyes. He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Ii nesa.” The ancient response. Yes, it is well, it is peace.

  Stephen knew his job. Elders did not fight. “Old man,” he said softly, “you cannot herd your cows here.”

  “Where can I herd them?” The elder’s hands were trembling, more with age than fear.

  “You cannot herd them anywhere. There is no land for cattle.”
/>   “There is land here. Much land.”

  “Not for cows. For wild animals.”

  The elder shook his head. This was madness. Stephen knew the memories in the old man’s mind. When the British had come, it had been the same. The people had been moved to protect the animals. Then the white men had come to shoot the animals. It made no sense. “I must have cows,” the old man said simply. “I have always had cows.”

  “That is all over. I am sorry.” Stephen did not try to explain. There were no words to reach this man. Population growth rates, land shortages, the necessity to increase agricultural yields—these things had no meaning for him. Irrigated farmland could support twenty times as many people as the same land spent on herding. Kenya could not support the luxury of cows.

  The elder was beyond tears. He did not attempt to argue. He had suffered many blows in his long lifetime. He stood there, leaning on his staff, waiting for the next blow to fall.

  Stephen waited with him, in silence. It took several hours; the sun started down the arc to the western horizon and the air was still. The flies were very bad. In time, the police trucks rolled up in showers of dust. The cattle were loaded. The three old men were arrested and put in with the cows. The trucks drove off.

  That was that. Stephen looked for a moment at the distant Kilimanjaro. He could see only its dark base, rising so improbably out of the level plain. The peaks were hidden by clouds. He walked back to the copter and climbed in.

  “Okay, Cassius. Another heroic mission accomplished. Chins up and all that.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get an arrow through you.”

  “You just don’t understand savages, old boy. Just have to look them right in the eye and speak in a loud, clear voice.”

  “Ah, go to hell.”

  “Filthy superstition. I’m disappointed in you. Shall we have a go at the bloody rhino poachers?”

  “What’s with this crazy colonial talk? You could find yourself in a mess of trouble, Steve.”

  Stephen thought: We took their houses, their cars, their clothes, their schools, their courts, their money, their cities, their clubs, their guns, their books, and their whisky. Why not their patterns of speech? He said, “Some of my best friends are natives. I used to be one myself.”

  Cassius clamped his teeth together and turned to the controls. The chopper lifted with a great clatter into the blue sky. Down below, the good grass undulated in the wind from the whirling blades. Then all motion stopped and there was nothing.

  They wasted a couple of long afternoon hours searching for signs of the rhino hunters. They found one dead rhino, its grotesque carcass bloating in the sun. The animal had been dead for days. The horns, both front and rear, had been neatly detached from the skull. The horns were missing, of course.

  Stephen felt an anger that he had never been able to feel against the old men with their cattle. This rhino horn business had been going on for centuries. The passage of time does not necessarily make people less gullible. There were still millions of persons—in the Arab countries, in China—who believed that rhino horn was a cure for impotence. The horn, which was not a true horn at all, was ground up and served in a potion. It was incredible, but perhaps no more incredible than—say—astrology or statistics. Stephen didn’t know how it worked out in the bedroom, but he did know the result in Africa. The rhino was virtually extinct.

  It was no great trick to find the rhino carcasses, but catching the killers was something else again. It was not like trying to spot some old men with a herd of cattle. The poachers were well organized, and they could work at night. A rhino horn could be carried out of the country in a briefcase.

  There was no point in aimless cruising, and the fuel was getting low. Cassius flew the copter back to the field station and landed. It was nearly five o’clock—quitting time.

  It had been a depressing day and Stephen was in no mood to hurry home. He checked out, climbed into his Chevrolet, and drove the other way, toward Safariland. The highway was crowded with cars going back to Nairobi. Stephen studied the drivers as they flashed by. Black, brown, yellow, white—they all looked the same, faces tense, films exposed, wives bedraggled, kids sullen. There were times when Stephen felt very much alone.

  Safariland was technically closed when he got there, with the maintenance crews engaged in picking up the day’s debris. Stephen had no trouble in getting in; Safariland was situated in the game park, and Stephen was a senior warden. He preferred the place without the tourists and without the gimmicks. He had eyes. He could use them.

  He ignored the buildings devoted to Africa’s past. He didn’t much care whether Stanley ever met Livingstone, and the source of the Nile was not a burning issue to him. He went straight to Spaceland and entered the great bubble of Moonbase.

  He sat down in silence and looked at another world. He was the only one there. It was a good feeling.

  The stars on the dome were very close, very bright. The animated lunar vehicles were still now with most of the power switched off for the night. The rockets were in their cradles with no fire in their tails. The helmeted human figures—so small, so lost in grandeur—did not move. The craters pocked the surface. Far away—it seemed—a lunar range thrust its ragged peaks into an unearthly sky.

  The Mountains of the Moon. Once, they had called the Ruwenzoris that, those snow-capped mountains that separated East Africa from the Congo. Once, if it came to that, they had believed that the Ruwenzoris were the source of the Nile….

  Stephen felt a kind of peace growing within him. More than that, a kind of hope. (He remembered the false hope in the old herdsman’s eyes. But a man had to have hope.) Here, of all places, there seemed to be an opportunity, a second chance—

  It wasn’t just the moon. The moon was nothing, a big hunk of barren rock. But the base on the moon stood for something, for everything. It was a sign for those who could read. It said: It can be done.

  Stephen was not, by some standards, an educated man. He had finished high school, no more. But Stephen had read books and he had a brain. It was not a combination that led to happiness, but it had its uses. Stephen had been eighteen years old when Kenya became an independent nation. He had been in the Youth Wing. He had thought himself quite enlightened; he had dispensed with the past. Everything was going to be modern, up to date. He was going to have a car, a big house, a television set, a representative in the United Nations….

  Well, he had those things. When it was too late, he discovered what he had lost. Not just the old ways, although he saw the good in them now. It was not innocence that he had lost. No, the loss had been in the power of choice. By his eagerness to be “civilized” he had thrown away all of the alternatives. His people had given up what they had. In its place they had taken a bastard culture, and they had wanted to take it. Instead of the Kamba, the Masai, the Pokot, the Taita, the Samburu, they were all the same, ants in a western anthill. Not just the Africans. The whole world was stuck with the same culture—cities, industry, money, loneliness in the manswarm.

  Stephen could not accept it. He did not believe that this was all that man could be. Other lifeways could have flowered from the old roots; even manure makes good fertilizer. There could have been warmth, kinship, purpose, fulfillment. For him, for all those on the earth today, it was too late. But clans do not die, they go on down through the generations. And one day, somewhere—

  Space was vast. There were many worlds, not all of them barren like the moon. Mars was not the end. There would be other suns, other rivers, other grasslands. Surely, on just one world, at some time unimagined, man would find a life worth living. Perhaps even with thatch-roofed houses and cows and food plants that took root in good soil—who knew?

  There was just one way to get to the stars. Stephen understood that. But then?

  He took a last look around the silent Moonbase. He felt better. A million to one shot, a billion to one shot, was better than nothing. He went back to his Chevrolet and started the long drive
home.

  The lights were on when Stephen reached his house in the hills. Stephen felt a little guilty at being late but as always after a visit to Moonbase he was filled with his vision, he wanted to talk, to communicate—

  He stepped inside. Elizabeth looked up coldly. “Where have you been?”

  Paul was stretched out on the floor, staring at a Western on television. He had his feather on. Like so many of the young people, Paul didn’t believe in anything. The Indian feather was the badge of his generation. It was worn precisely because it made no sense. Paul didn’t bother to greet his father.

  Stephen felt a hot, sudden, irrational anger. His family seemed a waste and a betrayal. They had accepted it all, wallowed in it. They were blind, just as he had once been blind.

  Stephen turned on his heel and walked back to his car. He took the wooden staff from the back seat. It was an elder’s stick with the traditional fork at the top end; he was entitled to it at his age, even though the old age-grade system no longer had much significance. He went back into his house and crossed over to the TV set. He swung the staff once. Glass tinkled, a few sparks shot out, and the TV sputtered into silence.

  Paul leaped to his feet, finally jolted into awareness. “Are you crazy? What did you do that for?”