The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  It was then that Mtepwa decided that he could not die, that somehow the act of dismembering the poor Zaneke girl had made him immortal. Since both incidents had occurred within sight of his superstitious followers, they fervently believed him.

  Now that he was immortal, he decided that it was time to stop trying to accommodate the Europeans who had invaded his land and kept issuing warrants for his arrest. He sent a runner to the Kenya border and invited the British to meet him in battle. When the appointed day came, and the British did not show up to fight him, he confidently told his warriors that word of his immortality had reached the Europeans and that from that day forth no white men would ever be willing to oppose him. The fact that he was still in German territory, and the British had no legal right to go there, somehow managed to elude him.

  He began marching his warriors inland, openly in search of slaves, and he found his share of them in the Congo. He looted villages of their men, their women, and their ivory, and finally, with almost 600 captives and half that many tusks, he turned east and began the months-long trek to the coast.

  This time the British were waiting for him at the Uganda border, and they had so many armed men there that Mtepwa turned south, not for fear for his own life, but because he could not afford to lose his slaves and his ivory, and he knew that his warriors lacked his invulnerability.

  He marched his army down to Lake Tanganyika, then headed east. It took him two weeks to reach the western corridor of the Serengeti, and another ten days to cross it.

  One night he made camp at the lip of the Olduvai Gorge, the very place where he had gained his freedom. The fires were lit, a wildebeest was slaughtered and cooked, and as he relaxed after the meal he became aware of a buzzing among his men. Then, from out of the shadows, stepped a strangely familiar figure. It was Haradi, now fifteen years old, and as tall as Mtepwa himself.

  Mtepwa stared at him for a long moment, and suddenly all the anger seemed to drain from his face.

  “I am very glad to see you again, Haradi,” he said.

  “I have heard that you cannot be killed,” answered the boy, brandishing a spear. “I have come to see if that is true.”

  “We have no need to fight, you and I,” said Mtepwa. “Join me in my tent, and all will be as it was.”

  “Once I tear your limbs from your body, then we will have no reason to fight,” responded Haradi. “And even then, you will seem no less repulsive to me than you do now, or than you did all those many years ago.”

  Mtepwa jumped up, his face a mask of fury. “Do your worst, then!” he cried. “And when you realize that I cannot be harmed, I will do to you as I did to the Zaneke girl!”

  Haradi made no reply, but hurled his spear at Mtepwa. It went into the slaver’s body, and was thrown with such force that the point emerged a good six inches on the other side. Mtepwa stared at Haradi with disbelief, moaned once, and tumbled down the rocky slopes of the gorge.

  Haradi looked around at the warriors. “Is there any among you who dispute my right to take Mtepwa’s place?” he asked confidently.

  A burly Makonde stood up to challenge him, and within thirty seconds Haradi, too, was dead.

  * * *

  The British were waiting for them when they reached Zanzibar. The slaves were freed, the ivory confiscated, the warriors arrested and forced to serve as laborers on the Mombasa/Uganda Railway. Two of them were later killed and eaten by lions in the Tsavo District.

  By the time Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Patterson shot the notorious Man-Eaters of Tsavo, the railway had almost reached the shanty town of Nairobi, and Mtepwa’s name was so thoroughly forgotten that it was misspelled in the only history book in which it appeared.

  * * *

  “Amazing!” said the Appraiser. “I knew they enslaved many races throughout the galaxy—but to enslave themselves! It is almost beyond belief!”

  I had rested from my efforts, and then related the story of Mtepwa.

  “All ideas must begin somewhere,” said Bellidore placidly. “This one obviously began on Earth.”

  “It is barbaric!” muttered the Appraiser.

  Bellidore turned to me. “Man never attempted to subjugate your race, He Who Views. Why was that?”

  “We had nothing that he wanted.”

  “Can you remember the galaxy when Man dominated it?” asked the Appraiser.

  “I can remember the galaxy when Man’s progenitors killed Bokatu and Enkatai,” I replied truthfully.

  “Did you ever have any dealings with Man?”

  “None. Man had no use for us.”

  “But did he not destroy profligately things for which he had no use?”

  “No,” I said. “He took what he wanted, and he destroyed that which threatened him. The rest he ignored.”

  “Such arrogance!”

  “Such practicality,” said Bellidore.

  “You call genocide on a galactic scale practical?” demanded the Appraiser.

  “From Man’s point of view, it was,” answered Bellidore. “It got him what he wanted with a minimum of risk and effort. Consider that one single race, born not five hundred yards from us, at one time ruled an empire of more than a million worlds. Almost every civilized race in the galaxy spoke Terran.”

  “Upon pain of death.”

  “That is true,” agreed Bellidore. “I did not say Man was an angel. Only that, if he was indeed a devil, he was an efficient one.”

  It was time for me to assimilate the third artifact, which the Historian and the Appraiser seemed to think was the handle of a knife, but even as I moved off to perform my function, I could not help but listen to the speculation that was taking place.

  “Given his bloodlust and his efficiency,” said the Appraiser, “I’m surprised that he lived long enough to reach the stars.”

  “It is surprising in a way,” agreed Bellidore. “The Historian tells me that Man was not always homogeneous, that early in his history there were several variations of the species. He was divided by color, by belief, by territory.” He sighed. “Still, he must have learned to live in peace with his fellow man. That much, at least, accrues to his credit.”

  I reached the artifact with Bellidore’s words still in my ears, and began to engulf it …

  * * *

  Mary Leakey pressed against the horn of the Landrover. Inside the museum, her husband turned to the young uniformed officer.

  “I can’t think of any instructions to give you,” he said. “The museum’s not open to the public yet, and we’re a good 300 kilometers from Kikuyu-land.”

  “I’m just following my orders, Dr. Leakey,” replied the officer.

  “Well, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to be safe,” acknowledged Leakey. “There are a lot of Kikuyu who want me dead even though I spoke up for Kenyatta at his trial.” He walked to the door. “If the discoveries at Lake Turkana prove interesting, we could be gone as long as a month. Otherwise, we should be back within ten to twelve days.”

  “No problem, sir. The museum will still be here when you get back.”

  “I never doubted it,” said Leakey, walking out and joining his wife in the vehicle.

  Lieutenant Ian Chelmswood stood in the doorway and watched the Leakeys, accompanied by two military vehicles, start down the red dirt road. Within seconds the car was obscured by dust, and he stepped back into the building and closed the door to avoid being covered by it. The heat was oppressive, and he removed his jacket and holster and laid them neatly across one of the small display cases.

  It was strange. All the images he had seen of African wildlife, from the German Schillings’ old still photographs to the American Johnson’s motion pictures, had led him to believe that East Africa was a wonderland of green grass and clear water. No one had ever mentioned the dust, but that was the one memory of it that he would take home with him.

  Well, not quite the only one. He would never forget the morning the alarm had sounded back when he was stationed in Nanyuki. He arrived at the settlers’
farm and found the entire family cut to ribbons and all their cattle mutilated, most with their genitals cut off, many missing ears and eyes. But as horrible as that was, the picture he would carry to his grave was the kitten impaled on a dagger and pinned to the mailbox. It was the Mau Mau’s signature, just in case anyone thought some madman had run berserk among the cattle and the humans.

  Chelmswood didn’t understand the politics of it. He didn’t know who had started it, who had precipitated the war. It made no difference to him. He was just a soldier, following orders, and if those orders would take him back to Nanyuki so that he could kill the men who had committed those atrocities, so much the better.

  But in the meantime, he had pulled what he considered Idiot Duty. There had been a very mild outburst of violence in Arusha, not really Mau Mau but rather a show of support for Kenya’s Kikuyu, and his unit had been transferred there. Then the government found out that Professor Leakey, whose scientific finds had made Olduvai Gorge almost a household word among East Africans, had been getting death threats. Over his objections, they had insisted on providing him with bodyguards. Most of the men from Chelmswood’s unit would accompany Leakey on his trip to Lake Turkana, but someone had to stay behind to guard the museum, and it was just his bad luck that his name had been atop the duty roster.

  It wasn’t even a museum, really, not the kind of museum his parents had taken him to see in London. Those were museums; this was just a two-room mud-walled structure with perhaps a hundred of Leakey’s finds. Ancient arrowheads, some oddly-shaped stones that had functioned as prehistoric tools, a couple of bones that obviously weren’t from monkeys but that Chelmswood was certain were not from any creature he was related to.

  Leakey had hung some crudely drawn charts on the wall, charts that showed what he believed to be the evolution of some small, grotesque, apelike beasts into Homo sapiens. There were photographs, too, showing some of the finds that had been sent on to Nairobi. It seemed that even if this gorge was the birthplace of the race, nobody really wanted to visit it. All the best finds were shipped back to Nairobi and then to the British Museum. In fact, this wasn’t a museum at all, decided Chelmswood, but rather a holding area for the better specimens until they could be sent elsewhere.

  It was strange to think of life starting here in this gorge. If there was an uglier spot in Africa, he had yet to come across it. And while he didn’t accept Genesis or any of that religious nonsense, it bothered him to think that the first human beings to walk the Earth might have been black. He’d hardly had any exposure to blacks when he was growing up in the Cotswolds, but he’d seen enough of what they could do since coming to British East, and he was appalled by their savagery and barbarism.

  And what about those crazy Americans, wringing their hands and saying that colonialism had to end? If they had seen what he’d seen on that farm in Nanyuki, they’d know that the only thing that was keeping all of East Africa from exploding into an unholy conflagration of blood and butchery was the British presence. Certainly, there were parallels between the Mau Mau and America: both had been colonized by the British and both wanted their independence … but there all similarity ended. The Americans wrote a Declaration outlining their grievances, and then they fielded an army and fought the British soldiers. What did chopping up innocent children and pinning cats to mailboxes have in common with that? If he had his way, he’d march in half a million British troops, wipe out every last Kikuyu—except for the good ones, the loyal ones—and solve the problem once and for all.

  He wandered over to the cabinet where Leakey kept his beer and pulled out a warm bottle. Safari brand. He opened it and took a long swallow, then made a face. If that’s what people drank on safari, he’d have to remember never to go on one.

  And yet he knew that someday he would go on safari, hopefully before he was mustered out and sent home. Parts of the country were so damned beautiful, dust or no dust, and he liked the thought of sitting beneath a shade tree, cold drink in hand, while his body servant cooled him with a fan made of ostrich feathers and he and his white hunter discussed the day’s kills and what they would go out after tomorrow. It wasn’t the shooting that was important, they’d both reassure themselves, but rather the thrill of the hunt. Then he’d have a couple of his black boys draw his bath, and he’d bathe and prepare for dinner. Funny how he had fallen into the habit of calling them boys; most of them were far older than he.

  But while they weren’t boys, they were children in need of guidance and civilizing. Take those Maasai, for example; proud, arrogant bastards. They looked great on postcards, but try dealing with them. They acted as if they had a direct line to God, that He had told them they were His chosen people. The more Chelmswood thought about it, the more surprised he was that it was the Kikuyu that had begun Mau Mau rather than the Maasai. And come to think of it, he’d noticed four or five Maasai elmorani hanging around the museum. He’d have to keep an eye on them …

  “Excuse, please?” said a high-pitched voice, and Chelmswood turned to see a small skinny black boy, no more than ten years old, standing in the doorway.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Doctor Mister Leakey, he promise me candy,” said the boy, stepping inside the building.

  “Go away,” said Chelmswood irritably. “We don’t have any candy here.”

  “Yes yes,” said the boy, stepping forward. “Every day.”

  “He gives you candy every day?”

  The boy nodded his head and smiled.

  “Where does he keep it?”

  The boy shrugged. “Maybe in there?” he said, pointing to a cabinet.

  Chelmswood walked to the cabinet and opened it. There was nothing in it but four jars containing primitive teeth.

  “I don’t see any,” he said. “You’ll have to wait until Dr. Leakey comes back.”

  Two tears trickled down the boy’s cheek. “But Doctor Mister Leakey, he promise!”

  Chelmswood looked around. “I don’t know where it is.”

  The boy began crying in earnest.

  “Be quiet!” snapped Chelmswood. “I’ll look for it.”

  “Maybe next room,” suggested the boy.

  “Come along,” said Chelmswood, walking through the doorway to the adjoining room. He looked around, hands on hips, trying to imagine where Leakey had hidden the candy.

  “This place maybe,” said the boy, pointing to a closet.

  Chelmswood opened the closet. It contained two spades, three picks, and an assortment of small brushes, all of which he assumed were used by the Leakeys for their work.

  “Nothing here,” he said, closing the door.

  He turned to face the boy, but found the room empty.

  “Little bugger was lying all along,” he muttered. “Probably ran away to save himself a beating.”

  He walked back into the main room—and found himself facing a well-built black man holding a machete-like panga in his right hand.

  “What’s going on here?” snapped Chelmswood.

  “Freedom is going on here, Lieutenant,” said the black man in near-perfect English. “I was sent to kill Dr. Leakey, but you will have to do.”

  “Why are you killing anyone?” demanded Chelmswood. “What did we ever do to the Maasai?”

  “I will let the Maasai answer that. Any one of them could take one look at me and tell you that I am Kikuyu—but we are all the same to you British, aren’t we?”

  Chelmswood reached for his gun and suddenly realized he had left it on a display case.

  “You all look like cowardly savages to me!”

  “Why? Because we do not meet you in battle?” The black man’s face filled with fury. “You take our land away, you forbid us to own weapons, you even make it a crime for us to carry spears—and then you call us savages when we don’t march in formation against your guns!” He spat contemptuously on the floor. “We fight you in the only way that is left to us.”

  “It’s a big country, big enough for both races
,” said Chelmswood.

  “If we came to England and took away your best farmland and forced you to work for us, would you think England was big enough for both races?”

  “I’m not political,” said Chelmswood, edging another step closer to his weapon. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “And your job is to keep two hundred whites on land that once held a million Kikuyu,” said the black man, his face reflecting his hatred.

  “There’ll be a lot less than a million when we get through with you!” hissed Chelmswood, diving for his gun.

  Quick as he was, the black man was faster, and with a single swipe of his panga he almost severed the Englishman’s right hand from his wrist. Chelmswood bellowed in pain, and spun around, presenting his back to the Kikuyu as he reached for the pistol with his other hand.

  The panga came down again, practically splitting him open, but as he fell he managed to get his fingers around the handle of his pistol and pull the trigger. The bullet struck the black man in the chest, and he, too, collapsed to the floor.

  “You’ve killed me!” moaned Chelmswood. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

  “You have so much and we have so little,” whispered the black man. “Why must you have what is ours, too?”

  “What did I ever do to you?” asked Chelmswood.

  “You came here. That was enough,” said the black man. “Filthy English!” He closed his eyes and lay still.

  “Bloody nigger!” slurred Chelmswood, and died.

  Outside, the four Maasai paid no attention to the tumult within. They let the small Kikuyu boy leave without giving him so much as a glance. The business of inferior races was none of their concern.

  * * *

  “These notions of superiority among members of the same race are very difficult to comprehend,” said Bellidore. “Are you sure you read the artifact properly, He Who Views?”

  “I do not read artifacts,” I replied. “I assimilate them. I become one with them. Everything they have experienced, experience.” I paused. “There can be no mistake.”