Killing Time

by Caleb Carr

  In fact my leg was throbbing with every step he took, but I only said, “How did you know—?”

  “We saw you jump from the plane. And land. And shoot our enemies! We thought the jungle would claim you. But then you began your womanish wailing. It might have attracted our enemies. So we decided it was better to rescue a fool than become greater fools by letting him be the cause of our deaths.”

  “Sound thinking,” I said. “You speak English very well.”

  “There was still a school that taught it, when I was a boy,” he answered. “Below the mountains.”

  “Ah.” Wondering how long I was to hang there, I asked, “Where are we going, by the way?”

  “We will take you to our chief—Dugumbe. He will decide what to do with you.”

  I eyed the rather ferocious-looking soldiers again. “Is he a compassionate man, by any chance?”

  “Compassionate?” The man laughed again. “I would not know. But he is fair, even with fools.” Shifting me onto his other shoulder without breaking stride, he added, “It must have been something very terrible.”

  “What must?” I said, wincing with the shift.

  “Whatever drove you here,” the man answered simply. “You must have been driven. I know this. Because not even a fool would choose this place.”

  C H A P T E R 4 5

  The man’s name, I soon learned, was Mutesa; and during the months to come he and his family would prove my saviors, taking me in as something of a cross between ward and pet after their chief, the aforementioned Dugumbe, announced that I could not stay in his tribe’s mobile armed camp without a sponsor. Dugumbe fancied himself an enlightened despot: he dressed in an elaborate combination of traditional garb and several modern military uniforms and liked to pepper his conversation with concise denunciations of Western society. His personal code of conduct was based, or so he claimed, on the principal dictate of one of his nineteenth-century ancestors: “Only the weak are good—and they are good only because they are not strong enough to be bad.” Yet beneath all this bluster Dugumbe possessed surprising intellectual rigor, even erudition, and in time his attitude toward me would soften. Indeed, because of our shared resentment of the technologically advanced world beyond the shores of Africa, Dugumbe and I would eventually become friends of sorts; but my primary gratitude to and affection for Mutesa, his wife, and their seven children was by then already solidly and irrevocably in place.

  Dugumbe made it clear from the beginning that in addition to requiring a family to shelter and feed me while I was among his tribe, I would also need to fill some sort of role in his impressive force of five hundred disciplined, battle-hardened—and, it must be said, ruthless—men. I had no intention, of course, of sharing the remarkable technology that was hidden in my shoulder bag; I had already been fortunate that Mutesa and his detachment had been far enough from the action during my encounter with their enemies that they’d simply thought that I’d killed the men with a conventional weapon. Nor did I much relish the idea of going into tribal battle with an American or European assault weapon in one hand and a crude machete in the other. I asked Dugumbe whether he had any sort of medical officer, to which he said that while of course he had his tribal shaman, he was aware that when it came to the wounds of battle Western doctors could often be more effective. And so I became a field surgeon, calling on my medical school knowledge and even more on the basic tenets of hygiene and sterilization.

  We campaigned all that winter and spring in the mountains, where I spent much of my time learning what plants were known to Dugumbe’s people to have medicinal properties. Eventually we assembled quite a rudimentary pharmacy, which was fortunate, as there were no longer any “medicines” in the Western sense available to such people: during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Western pharmaceutical companies—after making donations of meaningless amounts of anti-HIV drugs for publicity purposes—had stopped shipping to poverty-stricken Africa not only those expensive products but also drugs that treated the host of other diseases that were decimating the continent: sleeping sickness, malaria, and dysentery, to name but a few. Necessity had, in the years that followed, forced the women in tribes like Dugumbe’s to seek new cures in the jungle forest (his shaman continued to rely on spells and absurd potions made primarily from desiccated animal and human flesh), and they had discovered several plants with quite powerful antibiotic and analgesic powers. Some of these, such as the root I had experimented with during my first days in the mountains, had extreme side effects ranging from hallucination to death; but in controlled doses they were quite useful, and it struck me as deeply ironic that the same drug companies that had written Africa off so cold-bloodedly could have made enormous profits had they only shown a bit more foresight.

  Dugumbe had decided that the need to stay on the move precluded his participation in the regional slave trade, thus saving me from an inconvenient crisis of conscience. Though never really dead in Africa, trafficking in human beings had in recent years proliferated to an extent that rivaled its ancient heights; and although I often heard Dugumbe describe it as an honored tradition, I chose to ignore such statements, just as I ignored all potentially disturbing aspects of the tribe’s folklore, including and especially the ridiculous edicts of Dugumbe’s shaman. My satisfaction with the way in which I’d removed myself from the information society that dominated the rest of the world, along with my nightly conversations with Dugumbe about the evils of said society, allowed me to turn a blind eye toward not only the petty squabbling that underlay most of the area’s conflicts but also the smaller ways in which purely traditional wisdom hurt these people of whom I was daily growing fonder. It was not until the following summer that their customs and rituals would present me with any serious problem; when it finally came, however, the problem was so serious that I almost lost my life over it.

  One evening, I arrived at the series of linked canvas tents that was home to Mutesa’s family to find the mood uncharacteristically solemn. Mutesa was striding about with the air of a truly authoritarian patriarch, which stood in stark contrast to the usual way in which he joked and played with both his children and his wife. That good woman, Nzinga, was utterly silent—again very unusual—and while Mutesa’s four sons were going through their usual evening ritual of cleaning both his and their rifles, the three girls were huddled in one of the tents. All of them were crying; the loudest was Mutesa’s eldest daughter, Ama, who was just thirteen.

  I asked Mutesa what evil had come into his house. “No evil, Gideon,” he answered. “My daughters weep foolishly.”

  “And me?” Nzinga called out as she prepared the evening meal. “Do I weep because I am a fool?”

  “You speak because you are disobedient!” Mutesa shouted back. “Finish making my food, woman, and then prepare your daughter! The shaman comes soon.”

  “The butcher comes soon,” Nzinga said as she passed us on her way into the tent where her daughters were hiding. Mutesa made a move to strike her, but I grabbed his upheld arm, although I don’t think that he would have followed through with the blow. Nonetheless, he was clearly a tormented man just then—and his discomfort was becoming infectious.

  “Why is the shaman coming?” I asked. “Is there illness in your house? If so, I can—”

  “You must not interfere, Gideon,” Mutesa said firmly. “I know that you of the West do not approve—but it is Ama’s time.”

  All was instantly, appallingly clear. I groaned once as the realization sank in and then tightened my grip on Mutesa’s arm. “You must not do this,” I said, quietly but with real passion. “Mutesa, I beg you—”

  “And I beg you,” he answered, his voice softening. “Gideon, Dugumbe has decreed it. To resist means the girl’s death, and if you involve yourself, it will mean yours, too.”

  He pried himself from my grip, no longer looking angry but instead deeply saddened; and as he followed his wife into the next tent to comfort his daughter I stood there agape, trying to determine what in
the world I could do to stop the sickening rite of passage that was about to take place. My mind, however, had been dulled by shock; and when I heard a gaggle of old maids start to collect outside the tent, chanting a lot of idiotic nonsense about a girl’s entry into womanhood, I began to panic stupidly, rushing outside and screaming at them to keep quiet and go away. But they completely ignored me, making it plain that my status as an outsider made me invisible at such a ritualistic moment. All the same I kept hollering until the shaman arrived, accompanied by several armed guards who looked quite menacing. In the shaman’s hand was a vicious-looking knife, and the sight of it, along with a very nononsense glare from the shaman, was enough to send me back into the tent, where I now found Mutesa with his arm around the shaking, sobbing Ama.

  “Mutesa,” I said, realizing with deep dread that there was in fact no way to stop the nightmare, “at least tell the shaman to let me prepare her. I have drugs that can dull the pain, and we must keep the knife and the wound clean.”

  “Gideon, you must not interfere,” Mutesa once again declared. “This is not a subject for argument. It will be done as it is always done.” I thought he might even weep himself when he said, “She is a female child, Gideon. The pain does not matter, only the ceremony.” At his words Ama began to shriek fearsomely, and Mutesa tightened his grip on her. Ordering her to be silent, he proceeded to drag her out to the crowd that had gathered.

  Ama’s cries were horrible to hear even before the cutting began; but when the knife went in they became quite simply the most horrifying and unbearable sound I’ve ever heard. I clutched my head, thinking that I might go mad—and then a thought occurred to me. I ran to where I’d stowed my bag and withdrew the stun gun. If I could not stop the unspeakable act, I could at least ease the child’s torment.

  I dashed outside to a scene so revolting that it stopped me dead in my tracks. There was no special area set aside for the procedure, not even a blanket thrown on the earth—the regard in which the “female child” was held was amply displayed by the way her genitalia were being cut up in the dirt, much as one would have gelded an animal. With a sudden roar, I brought the ceremony to a halt; and when I raised my weapon the shaman, bloody knife in hand, took a step away from the girl, giving me a line of fire. Instantly I pulled the trigger, and Ama’s body jerked a few inches into the air as she painlessly and mercifully lost consciousness.

  “She is only asleep!” I shouted, using much of what little I knew of their language and breathing hard; then I quickly directed the weapon at the shaman’s guards. “Tell the shaman that he can go on now, Mutesa,” I said in English, opening the tent flap and backing inside. “And I hope that your gods will forgive you all.”

  C H A P T E R 4 6

  Needless to say, things were never quite the same for me in Dugumbe’s camp after that evening. Oh, I argued the subject with the chief, to be sure, argued it many times on many nights. But for the most part he thought my declarations nothing more than amusing, although on a few occasions they seemed to make him quite irritated. A woman who took physical pleasure from sex, he said, was a woman who could never be controlled, who would roam from tent to tent like a whore—and he would have no whores in his camp. Furthermore, he told me that though he had enjoyed my company and appreciated my efforts on behalf of his people, I would do well to pick my battles more carefully: he could brook only so much impertinence from any man, particularly any white man, and he had no desire to make an example of me. Knowing that his veiled threat was sincere, I finally let the subject drop and elected to surreptitiously do what I could by teaching the mothers in camp how to administer analgesics and, when we could make them, opiates to their daughters before the terrible ceremony. But in truth many of those women, having endured the same torture, seemed to have no inclination to ease the suffering of even their own flesh and blood; and so the mutilations went on as before.

  Little came of my use of the stun gun. I knew that the soldiers who had been at the ceremony would report to Dugumbe about it (though the shaman, not wanting to admit that anyone’s powers were greater than his, would likely not follow suit); so that very night I went outside camp and drained the weapon’s energy cells. When Dugumbe demanded to see the thing, I offered it to him as a gift; and when it failed to produce any effect he tossed it back, declaring that the soldiers were fools and that Ama had simply fainted from the pain. This left me with the dilemma of possessing only a weapon that would kill; and so it became necessary to watch myself carefully, to avoid arguments (which meant avoiding the shaman), and to try to concentrate on my medical duties.

  But disillusionment made such a life increasingly difficult, and it wasn’t very long before I found myself wondering if by coming to Africa I had really escaped the evils of the “information age” at all. What was the collected wisdom of Dugumbe’s people if not “information”? Unrecorded, true, but nonetheless powerful—and manipulable. What had Mutesa done in his tent that night but convince himself of something that he knew in his heart to be utterly false but to which it was necessary to adhere if he were to preserve his place and his faith in the tribe? Could he not have accurately had “Mundus vult decipi” painted above the entrance to his tent? Were the evils that I’d sought to escape when I’d boarded the Frenchmen’s plane outside Naples not in fact human evils, defiant of time and technology and passed on wherever the human species elected to establish its dominance?

  And wasn’t Malcolm right in saying that we would never change any of this until we could reengineer the past?

  Such thoughts burned in my head not only during my waking hours but when I was asleep, as well; and when those dreams were one night accompanied by a sound I knew to be the deep rumble that Malcolm’s ship produced when he wished to either terrify his enemies or destabilize their structures, I thought as I began to awaken that it was only my subconscious making an appropriate association. It wasn’t until Mutesa shook me to full consciousness and told me the rumors about a strange aircraft that was making its way toward the general area of our camp from the northeast that I realized the sound had been real.

  “It is said that they look for you, Gideon,” he told me urgently, “and that if they are attacked they destroy entire fields, whole parts of the forest, even villages, by increasing the power of the sun.”

  I sat up on my cot, trying to grasp it. Clearly the ship was coming, and clearly it was coming for me: the line of approach indicated that it was following the same route I had used to get to this place. My movements through Europe and then into Africa could not, of course, have been difficult for my friends aboard the vessel to track; and at first the fact that they had, given my recent feelings about life in Dugumbe’s camp in particular and the analog archipelago in general, seemed a good and welcome thing. But as my mind cleared, other thoughts brought a pang of deep dread:

  Why were they coming? My falling-out with Malcolm had been virtually complete, and I knew him too well to think that he’d ever accept someone who had expressed such severe doubts about his work back into the fold. Nor, for that matter, would the others, whatever our mutual affection; even Larissa had expressed no desire to have me stay if I couldn’t believe in what they were doing. Why, then? I had no special technical knowledge that they needed—their successful deployment of the Washington materials had proved that. What did they want?

  All possible avenues of explanation led to only one conclusion: Malcolm had told me sincerely that he wasn’t at all certain he wanted me “roaming loose” if I knew his secrets; and that vulnerability must have begun to gnaw at his unstable mind so much that he was now coming to put an end to at least one of his worries—permanently.

  During the following the two days—which is also to say the last two days—as the thunderous rumbling has continued to reverberate through the mountains and the reports from villages on the lower slopes have become more numerous, I have tried but failed to come up with another, any other, interpretation of the situation. I don’t know why Larissa o
r the others would participate in my death unless Malcolm—persuasive as he can be—has managed to talk them into it. Perhaps he’s even fabricated evidence to prove that I’ve betrayed them. Whatever the answer actually is, I will likely never learn it; all I know for certain is that I can’t risk seeing these people who have sheltered me become collateral victims of this continued madness. I must move on.

  Dawn is just breaking, and I can hear Mutesa assembling his kit outside my tent. His insistence on escorting me to the coast is, I think, partly the result of our friendship and partly due to the gratitude that he has always shown in his eyes, but never acknowledged in words, for my having eased the suffering of the unfortunate Ama. It will be hard to say good-bye to him and his family, but I shall miss little else about this place. Dugumbe’s occasional pearls of wisdom—especially his admonition that information is not knowledge—cannot, I must regretfully record, rationalize his actions; and though, as I say, I’m grateful that he is concerned for my safety, I can declare in the privacy of these pages that on balance his own definition of knowledge is no boon to his tribe or to the world. I’ve told him that when the ship comes he must neither engage it in battle nor hesitate to tell those who fly it where I have gone, and I hope that he will heed the advice; but his belligerent pride may make him incapable of doing so.

  Mutesa is whispering my name through the canvas; I must go. If we make the coast, I have decided, I will post this document somewhere on the Internet, for the little good it will do. After that, I have no illusions: I can and will try to run, but if Malcolm and the others truly want me dead, chances are I already am.

  C H A P T E R 4 7

  OFF THE COAST OF ZANZIBAR, 3 A.M., TWO DAYS LATER

  Quick as I have tried to be about telling this tale, I can be quicker still in bringing it to a close—for events during the last twelve hours have suddenly made it certain that no one will believe what I have written. All of us live in a different world from the one that existed just fifty-odd hours ago: the one that I inhabited when I first sat down to record my account. Just how different this world is I do not yet know; I have seen only a small piece. But if that piece is any measure, those of us aboard this ship may well be the only humans on earth who are aware of the startling transformation that has taken place. Everyone else cannot help but accept this new reality as the way things have always been, and therefore the record I have written will seem not only implausible but insane.