No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

Blair’s ashes were buried under the pedestal.

  “Dirk Akuj,” the man on the ridge greeted me as I drew near. He was thin, coal-black in color, and ascetic-looking. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kampa.”

  “It would have been more pleasant in the air-conditioned hotel.”

  “But less private. And from here, sir, we can monitor your daughter’s leisurely progress across the lake.”

  “What does my daughter have to do with this?” I demanded, angry.

  “A lovely young woman. It surprises me, sir, that a famous person like you allows a famous person like her such free rein. The world is full of unscrupulous people.”

  “Am I talking to one of them?”

  “Don’t think ill of me, sir. There is no other like Monicah. Her safety should be a matter of great concern to all of us.”

  “The year she was born, President Tharaka declared her a national resource, a national treasure. Those Sambusai warriors know that, and so does my man at the marina. Should anything happen to her on this outing, they will suffer the consequences.”

  “Yes, sir—but would their punishments, including even their death, repay you for your daughter’s loss?”

  “Nothing repays a parent the death of a child.” I took a freshly laundered, pale-pink kerchief from my pocket and wiped my brow. “What’s all this to you, Mr. Akuj? I don’t much like your questions.”

  “I’m from White Sphinx.”

  “I know that, Mr. Akuj. But you’re Zarakali, I think, and White Sphinx died fifteen years ago today.”

  “Actually, Mr. Kampa, I’m a Karamojong from Uganda. That’s not terribly far from here, though, and I look upon this as my country too.” His eyes swept the lake, the desert, the eastern horizon. Then he nodded at another barren ridge inside the chain-link fence. “The Great Man died there, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. A horrified American Geographic Foundation cameraman got it all on film. Blair stumbled while prospecting that embankment, toppled down and broke his neck.”

  “Striving for the impossible.”

  I shot Dirk Akuj an annoyed glance.

  “He was striving for the impossible, don’t you think? He died on his very own Weightlessness Simulation Incline.”

  “Who’s to say what’s impossible?” I asked testily.

  “Who indeed? Not I, Mr. Kampa. White Sphinx, you should know, has been born again from Woody Kaprow’s ashes.”

  This news stunned me because I had not known that Kaprow was dead. I had not heard from the physicist in eight or nine years, and had last seen him at Blair’s funeral in Marakoi, but I had always supposed he was incommunicado for security reasons. The U.S. government had shifted him into other lines of temporal research, and, happy as a ram in rut, he was rigorously pursuing these. So I had supposed.

  “His ashes? He’s dead?”

  “I was speaking metaphorically, Mr. Kampa, but we do feel certain Dr. Kaprow is dead. Eight years ago he failed to return from a mission undertaken at Dachau in West Germany. The mission was supposedly a test for certain improvements to the temporal-transfer machinery, but it now seems that Dr. Kaprow insisted upon this dropback out of . . . call it ‘racial guilt.’ He went to join the martyrs.”

  “And never came back?”

  “No, sir. We think he purposely rejected that option.”

  I scrutinized the young man’s face. “ ‘We’?”

  “Like you, Mr. Kampa, I have dual citizenship. I am the assistant project director for the new incarnation of White Sphinx. My association with Dr. Kaprow began three years after yours ended.”

  “You dream,” I said under my breath. “You spirit-travel.”

  “I hallucinate, sir. It began when I was a seven-year-old child in a relief center in Karamoja, slowly starving to death.” He paused. “Does my story interest you? I would be happy to tell it.”

  “Let’s get out of the sun.”

  I led Dirk Akuj down from the ridge and along the lakeshore to the fence surrounding the protectorate. Here I fumbled with my keys, unlocked the gate, and found a second key to admit us to Blair’s mud-and-wattle shack, now a sort of makeshift museum. Inside, we sat down at a rickety wooden table before a large cabinet containing mastodon tusks, suid teeth, and the skull and horn cores of a medium-sized buffalo, Homioceras nilssoni. Each item was tagged, but a visitor would search in vain for any hominid fossil other than a few jigsaw-puzzle skull fragments. At the cash register postcards featuring the bottomless grin of “Homo zarakalensis” were on sale. I moved to turn on the air-conditioning, for the hut was oppressive with heat and dust motes, but the Ugandan held up his hand.

  “I will make my story brief, Mr. Kampa.”

  Dirk Akuj explained that in the crowded relief center, after better than a month of watching skeletal children die of malnutrition, disease, and, sometimes, lovelessness, the night turned to plastic for him—here, illustratively, he tapped his scarab tie pin—and out of the melting indigo of his vision a delicate, almond-eyed savior took shape. This unlikely being swallowed Dirk Akuj with a laugh. The boy’s essence flowed into the blue tubing of the stranger’s esophagus, belly, and intestines. Then these organs turned themselves inside-out and unraveled a vast membrane of sky above the desert. Like a cloud, the boy was pulsed across this luminous membrane to a place where he dissolved into rain. “Endless torrents of nonexistence,” to use my contact’s own words. He did not extract himself from this state—nor did he want to, ever again—until a merciless dawn in Karamoja awakened him to the clamor, dirt, and pathos of the relief center.

  Three days later a slender Oriental male closely resembling the “savior” in Dirk Akuj’s dream, or hallucination, arrived in camp. This unusual-looking man, an anomaly among the bearded European photographers, whey-faced nuns, and unsympathetic black soldiers from Kampala, selected five children, seemingly at random, and spirited them out of the camp, out of Uganda, out of Africa.

  “To the United States,” the man concluded.

  “How?”

  “It’s difficult to recall. With many official-looking papers and a persuasive manner. He was soft-spoken but very insistent and direct. He did not permit himself to be hassled, you see.”

  “But what was his motive?”

  Despite a Do Not Touch placard, Dirk Akuj lifted the tooth of an ancient warthog from the display cabinet and turned it between his fingers like a jewel. His only response to my question was a half-mocking, half-saintly smile.

  “Only five?” I asked the Ugandan.

  “He did what he could. I was raised in the family of a wealthy real-estate broker in Southern California. I continued to hallucinate my future. One such hallucination prophesied my meeting with Dr. Kaprow on a high school R.O.T.C. trip from San Bernadino, where we lived, to Edwards Air Force Base. And . . .” He let his voice trail off.

  “And what?”

  “And it came to pass.” He returned the suid tooth to the cabinet. “It is hot in here, isn’t it?”

  “Why did you want to talk to me, Mr. Akuj?”

  “Why don’t we resume our discussion in a more comfortable setting? This, sir, was just a get-acquainted session. I am also Uganda’s representative to the official opening of the Sambusai Sands. We’ll see each other this evening in the cabaret.” Before I could raise a protest, he glided to the door and out into the glare of late afternoon. “Wait a few minutes before following me back to the hotel, Mr. Kampa. I can let myself out.”

  Annoyed, suspicious, perplexed, I stood on the porch watching my pantherine visitor retrace his path to the metal gate. Here he pivoted and waved, his plastic scarab glowing almost incandescently.

  “I can scarcely wait to meet your daughter,” he called. He pushed through the gate and strode nimbly toward the butt end of the retaining-wall walkway back to the hotel. I wished that a lion would fall upon him, a crocodile leap from the water to seize him.

  Monicah and her regal galley slaves were no longer on the lake. Why had Dirk Akuj brought her into our little
talk so frequently? This question frightened me because I thought I knew the answer.

  * * *

  In the cabaret—more accurately, the grand entertainment hall of the Sambusai Sands, a multitiered dining floor with an orchestra pit and an immense stage hung with zebra-striped foil curtains—a thousand or more people had gathered for the official grand opening of our billion-dollar Convention and Recreational Centre. Portions of the complex had been operating for nearly three months, but tonight marked the culmination of our labors, a new beginning on the road to economic independence. At tables scattered like islands in the electric dark sat many African dignitaries, residually wealthy Arabs, American service personnel, and casino-hopping European playpeople. On each side of the hall, at balcony level, leopards stalked back and forth in lifelike dioramas of the Pleistocene.

  Nearest the orchestra pit (from which the strains of “Born Free” had been emanating for twenty minutes) were the tables reserved for Zarakali cabinet ministers, the commanding officers of the bases at Bravanumbi and Russell-Tharaka, and the representatives of every country in the East African Confederation. Monicah and I shared our table with Vice Admiral Cuomo and the Tanzanian representative, a handsome Arusha woman who clearly disapproved of the festivities.

  A table away sat Dirk Akuj, vaguely sinister in a phosphorescent lime-green tuxedo jacket. His name, I had discovered after returning to my suite, did indeed appear on the official guest list, but I had never supposed that any African invited to our grand opening would also be a shill for White Sphinx. I tried to avoid the man’s glance, but he kept ogling Monicah and giving me enigmatic smiles, and I was hard pressed to ignore him.

  Admiral Cuomo was something of a help because he had engaged the Arusha woman and me in animated small talk about his favorite subject, ice hockey, about which he supposed us intensely curious because of our lack of exposure to the sport. Monicah sat silent, encouraged in her moroseness by the chilly attitude of Rochelle Mutasingwa, the Tanzanian. She was unaware of Dirk Akuj’s interest in her, and I was grateful for her failure to notice the man. As Admiral Cuomo faithfully recounted the high points of last year’s Stanley Cup finals, the evening seemed to stretch out before us like a deathwatch.

  The dying strains of “Born Free” at last fell captive to silence, and the Marakoi Pops struck up a fanfare. The expectant nattering of the crowd faded away, the stage was brilliantly spotlighted, and the American singer-composer Manny Barrelo emerged from the wings beside the self-propelled wheelchair of President Mutesa Tharaka.

  As one person, everyone in the hall rose to accord our aged President a standing ovation. Without whistling, foot stamping, or unseemly cries of praise or thanksgiving, it was nevertheless thunderous. Even Monicah was moved, for this was the first time in nearly three years that Mzee Tharaka had made a public appearance. On most state and ceremonial occasions Vice President Gicoru acted in his stead, and no one had anticipated a change of these arrangements even for the long-awaited grand opening of the Sands. Our applause lasted nearly five full minutes.

  Nodding and smiling, Barrelo quieted us by raising his hands and addressing us to the effect that we were all “eyewitnesses to history.” The President, meanwhile, sat slumped in his chair like a well-heeled scarecrow, the gilded skull on his crown staring out into the dark with a threat that everyone implicitly understood but nervously disregarded. The roar of the leopard stalking the left-hand balcony was audible even through the bullet-proof plastic of its diorama, and Barrelo saluted the creature without interrupting his remarks.

  “ . . . lots of fine live entertainment for you this evening, folks, and continuous gaming in the casinos just off the lobby.” Whereupon he squinted down into the footlights at the tables just beyond the orchestra. “Is Joshua Kampa here this evening? Of course he is, what a ridiculous question. Josh, c’mon, Josh, stand up, please. President Tharaka wants you to take a bow for making Zarakal’s beautiful Lake Kiboko resort genuinely competitive with Vegas and Monte Carlo. Stand up, stand up. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man whose mind conceived the Sambusai Sands Convention and Recreational Centre!”

  Numbly I got to my feet, stood blinking in a white-hot spot, and sat back down to the dovetailing applause of hundreds of fellow Homo sapiens. The Centre, I wanted to tell them, was not entirely my fault.

  “President Tharaka wants everyone here tonight to know that the revenues generated by this complex will fund schools, agricultural programs, cultural exchanges, and technological progress for everyone in East Africa. Already ZAPPA—the Zarakali Administration for Peace and Prosperity through Astronautics—has been revived, and you can bet your ostrich feathers that an African will walk on the moon before this decade is out. That’s what President Tharaka and Minister Kampa had in mind when they made construction of this complex a top national priority only six or seven years ago. Why, Mr. Kampa gave up a place on the lucrative American lecture circuit just to return to Zarakal and run for a seat in the National Assembly. He’s a credit to his country—both his countries—and I think he deserves another round of applause.”

  We got it, Manny Barrelo and I, a bigger round than we had received before (even though Barrelo had grossly muddled the facts about my desertion of the “lucrative American lecture circuit”), and Admiral Cuomo patted me on the back. At the adjacent table Dirk Akuj smiled at me cryptically.

  “But enough talk. It’s time for these festivities to begin, and our opening act, our overture, is a tribute to Mr. Kampa, his beautiful daughter Monicah, and the emergence of Zarakal as a potential space-age power. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, for your pleasure, Lisa Chagula and the Gombe Stream Chimps!”

  Manny Barrelo gestured toward the right-hand wing, then spun the President’s chair around so that they could exit stage left. The Marakoi Pops broke into an up-tempo version of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and applause again filled the hall.

  The zebra-striped curtains parted to reveal a back-lighted scrim upon which a convincing, two-dimensional replica of a volcano was erupting over a muted pastel landscape. A many-pronged bolt of lightning flashed against this scrim, and about the trunk of a papier-mâché baobab, streamers of red and orange crepe paper danced like flames. Wearing African garb from the Lake Tanganyika region, Lisa Chagula entered and positioned herself on the outer apron of the stage. Then she whistled.

  Five chimpanzees swaggered in from stage right, one of them having been shaved to simulate a quasi-human nakedness. I saw through the chimp’s imposture immediately, and so did everyone else who knew the details of my legendary trip into the distant past, i.e., everyone in attendance. The ape was supposed to be me. A further clue to its assumed identity was the pink plastic doll cradled in its arms, a surrogate for Monicah in her original incarnation as the Grub. The chimps quailed from the “flames” surrounding them.

  “Oh, God,” murmured Monicah, and my heart misgave me.

  For two years after the trauma of my involvement with White Sphinx, I had made a good living in the States recounting my adventures for college students, television talk-show hosts, and the readers of Sunday magazine supplements. Because the Air Force and the U.S. government routinely ridiculed my claims, and because I would allow no one with a degree in physical anthropology to examine Monicah, I had been widely regarded as an amusing crackpot. For a time my notoriety grew, bringing me more money, an unwanted retinue of hangers-on, and the curse of instant recognition on any street or side road in my readopted homeland. Then the bottom had fallen out, and I had gone the way of yesterday’s superstar, straight down the lonely cul-de-sac of media neglect to the crumbling brick wall of oblivion.

  My mother and my sister’s testimony dismissed as worthless, my amusement value squandered, my livelihood compromised, I had dropped from the semireputable status of a psychic or a newspaper astrologer to the pathetic one of a palmist or a flying-saucer nut. Too proud to accept my mother’s charity, I had briefly, and altogether seriously, considered going back to work for Gulf Coast Coating in th
e Florida panhandle—whereupon, through a consular official in Washington, D.C., President Tharaka had publicly confirmed my story, chastised the United States Air Force for making me out a liar, and invited me to return to Zarakal. “I have important work for you to do,” read the portion of the communiqué addressed directly to me; “please come home.” Grateful for aid from this unexpected quarter (President Tharaka and Alistair Patrick Blair had maintained an impregnable silence for two years), I made haste to emigrate, leaving behind a thoroughly bewildered American public and a rancorous congressional debate about abuses of power in the Pentagon and the executive branch.

  In Marakoi I was served with a subpoena hailing me before a Senate investigative committee, but with Mutesa Tharaka’s blessing I ignored it and began laying the groundwork for my campaign for a seat in Zarakal’s National Assembly. After a parade through the capital and a hero’s build-up in the East African press, I ran unopposed. Only two weeks after my election I received an appointment to the cabinet. Since that time, by hard work and a scrupulous avoidance of the WaBenzi image, I had won the complete respect of my constituents and had reestablished my credibility with American officials in Zarakal.

  Although I had long since concluded that President Tharaka had played his Kampa card to win American concessions of which I was still unaware, this suspicion did not compromise my gratitude to him. Monicah and I had finally found our place in the sun. I was the man who had traveled in time, she was a diminutive African Eve, and, as Dirk Akuj had noted that afternoon, we were celebrities whose story had inspired international controversy. Indeed, upon his death, the flamboyant mantle of Alistair Patrick Blair had passed to my daughter and me.

  Now, in the dinner theater of the Sambusai Sands, the Gombe Stream Chimps were reenacting one of the final episodes of the Joshua Kampa legend. This “tribute” having been kept a secret from Monicah and me, I had had no chance to approve it beforehand. That was bad. The champagne we had been drinking, along with my own embarrassment, made the mimicry of Lisa Chagula’s chimpanzees seem especially intrusive, a violation of something sacred. I gripped the edge of the table and said nothing. The reenactment would be over soon, and quickly forgotten as other performers and divertissements succeeded it. No point in disrupting the evening with an indignant outburst.