“This was foolish, Thomas!” she snapped. “They will force us to leave, and because we made no preparations, we will have to leave all our possessions behind.”
“Nobody is leaving,” said Naikosiai.
He stood up and walked to the closet. “You stay here,” he said, donning his long coat and his mask. “I will meet them outside.”
“That is both rude and cruel, to make them stand out there when they have come all this way.”
“They were not invited,” said Naikosiai. He reached deep into the closet and grabbed the rifle that leaned up against the back wall, then closed the closet, walked through the airlock and emerged on the front porch.
Six men, all wearing protective clothing and masks to filter the air, confronted him.
“It is time, Thomas,” said the tallest of them.
“Time for you, perhaps,” said Naikosiai, holding the rifle casually across his chest.
“Time for all of us,” answered the tall man.
“I am not going anywhere. This is my home. I will not leave it.”
“It is a pustule of decay and contamination, as is this whole country,” came the answer. “We are all leaving.”
Naikosiai shook his head. “My father was born on this land, and his father, and his father’s father. You may run from danger, if you wish; I will stay and fight it.”
“How can you make a stand against radiation?” demanded the tall man. “Can you put a bullet through it? How can you fight air that is no longer safe to breathe?”
“Go away,” said Naikosiai, who had no answer to that, other than the conviction that he would never leave his home. “I do not demand that you stay. Do not demand that I leave.”
“It is for your own good, Naikosiai,” urged another. “If you care nothing for your own life, think of your wife’s. How much longer can she breathe the air?”
“Long enough.”
“Why not let her decide?”
“I speak for our family.”
An older man stepped forward. “She is my daughter, Thomas,” he said severely. “I will not allow you to condemn her to the life you have chosen for yourself. Nor will I let my grandchildren remain here.”
The old man took another step toward the porch, and suddenly the rifle was pointing at him.
“That’s far enough,” said Naikosiai.
“They are Maasai,” said the old man stubbornly. “They must come with the other Maasai to our new world.”
“You are not Maasai,” said Naikosiai contemptuously. “Maasai did not leave their ancestral lands when the rinderpest destroyed their herds, or when the white man came, or when the governments sold off their lands. Maasai never surrender. I am the last Maasai.”
“Be reasonable, Thomas. How can you not surrender to a world that is no longer safe for people to live on? Come with us to New Kilimanjaro.”
“The Maasai do not run from danger,” said Naikosiai.
“I tell you, Thomas Naikosiai,” said the old man, “that I cannot allow you to condemn my daughter and my grandchildren to live in this hellhole. The last ship leaves tomorrow morning. They will be on it.”
“They will stay with me, to build a new Maasai nation.”
The six men whispered among themselves, and then their leader looked up at Naikosiai.
“You are making a terrible mistake, Thomas,” he said. “If you change your mind, there is room for you on the ship.”
They all turned to go, but the old man stopped and turned to Naikosiai.
“I will be back for my daughter,” he said.
Naikosiai gestured with his rifle. “I will be waiting for you.”
The old man turned and walked off with the others, and Naikosiai went back into his house through the airlock. The tile floor smelled of disinfectant, and the sight of the television set offended his eyes, as always. His wife was waiting for him in the kitchen, amid the dozens of gadgets she had purchased over the years.
“How can you speak with such disrespect to the Elders!” she demanded. “You have disgraced us.”
“No!” he snapped. “They have disgraced us, by leaving!”
“Thomas, you cannot grow anything in the fields. The animals have all died. You cannot even breathe the air without a filtering mask. Why do you insist on staying?”
“This is our ancestral land. We will not leave it.”
“But all the others—”
“They can do as they please,” he interrupted. “En-kai will judge them, as He judges us all. I am not afraid to meet my creator.”
“But why must you meet him so soon?” she persisted. “You have seen the tapes and disks of New Kilimanjaro. It is a beautiful world, green and gold and filled with rivers and lakes.”
“Once Earth was green and gold and filled with rivers and lakes,” said Naikosiai. “They ruined this world. They will ruin the next one.”
“Even if they do, we will be long dead,” she said. “I want to go.”
“We’ve been through all this before.”
“And it always ends with an order rather than an agreement,” she said. Her expression softened. “Thomas, just once before I die, I want to see water that you can drink without adding chemicals to it. I want to see antelope grazing on long green grasses. I want to walk outside without having to protect myself from the very air I breathe.”
“It’s settled.”
She shook her head. “I love you, Thomas, but I cannot stay here, and I cannot let our children stay here.”
“No one is taking my children from me!” he yelled.
“Just because you care nothing for your future, I cannot permit you to deny our sons their future.”
“Their future is here, where the Maasai have always lived.”
“Please come with us, Papa,” said a small voice behind him, and Naikosiai turned to see his two sons, eight and five, standing in the doorway to their bedroom, staring at him.
“What have you been saying to them?” demanded Naikosiai suspiciously.
“The truth,” said his wife.
He turned to the two boys. “Come here,” he said, and they trudged across the room to him.
“What are you?” he asked.
“Boys,” said the younger child.
“What else?”
“Maasai,” said the older.
“That is right,” said Naikosiai. “You come from a race of giants. There was a time when, if you climbed to the very top of Kilimanjaro, all the land you could see in every direction belonged to us.”
“But that was long ago,” said the older boy.
“Someday it will be ours again,” said Naikosiai. “You must remember who you are, my son. You are the descendant of Leeyo, who killed one hundred lions with just his spear; of Nelion, who waged war against the whites and drove them from the Rift; of Sendayo, the greatest of all the laibons. Once the Kikuyu and the Wakamba and the Lumbwa trembled in fear at the very mention of the word Maasai. This is your heritage; do not turn your back on it.”
“But the Kikuyu and the other tribes have all left.”
“What difference does that make to the Maasai? We did not make a stand only against the Kikuyu and the Wakamba, but against all men who would have us change our ways. Even after the Europeans conquered Kenya and Tanganyika, they never conquered the Maasai. When Independence came, and all the other tribes moved to cities and wore suits and aped the Europeans, we remained as we had always been. We wore what we chose and we lived where we chose, for we were proud to be Maasai. Does that not mean something to you?”
“Will we not still be Maasai if we go to the new world?” asked the older boy.
“No,” said Naikosiai firmly. “There is a bond between the Maasai and the land. We define it, and it defines us. It is what we have always fought for and always defended.”
“But it is diseased now,” said the boy.
“If I were sick, would you leave me?” asked Naikosiai.
“No, Papa.”
“And
just as you would not leave me in my illness, so we will not leave the land in its illness. When you love something, when it is a part of what you are, you do not leave it simply because it becomes sick. You stay, and you fight even harder to cure it than you fought to win it.”
“But—”
“Trust me,” said Naikosiai. “Have I ever misled you?”
“No, Papa.”
“I am not misleading you now. We are En-kai’s chosen people. We live on the ground He has given us. Don’t you see that we must remain here, that we must keep our covenant with En-kai?”
“But I will never see my friends again!” wailed his younger son.
“You will make new friends.”
“Where?” cried the boy. “Everyone is gone!”
“Stop that at once!” said Naikosiai harshly. “Maasai do not cry.”
The boy continued sobbing, and Naikosiai looked up at his wife.
“This is your doing,” he said. “You have spoiled him.”
She stared unblinking into his eyes. “Five-year-old boys are allowed to cry.”
“Not Maasai boys,” he answered.
“Then he is no longer Maasai, and you can have no objection to his coming with me.”
“I want to go too!” said the eight-year-old, and suddenly he, too, forced some tears down his face.
Thomas Naikosiai looked at his wife and his children—really looked at them—and realized that he did not know them at all. This was not the quiet maiden, raised in the traditions of his people, that he had married nine years ago. These soft sobbing boys were not the successors of Leeyo and Nelion.
He walked to the door and opened it.
“Go to the new world with the rest of the black Europeans,” he growled.
“Will you come with us?” asked his oldest son.
Naikosiai turned to his wife. “I divorce you,” he said coldly. “All that was between us is no more.”
He walked over to his two sons. “I disown you. I am no longer your father, you are no longer my sons. Now go!”
His wife put coats and masks on both of the boys, then donned her own.
“I will send some men for my things before morning,” she said.
“If any man comes onto my property, I will kill him,” said Naikosiai.
She stared at him, a look of pure hatred. Then she took the children by the hands and led them out of the house and down the long road to where the ship awaited them.
Naikosiai paced the house for a few minutes, filled with nervous rage. Finally he went to the closet, donned his coat and mask, pulled out his rifle, and walked through the airlock to the front of his house. Visibility was poor, as always, and he went out to the road to see if anyone was coming.
There was no sign of any movement. He was almost disappointed. He planned to show them how a Maasai protected what was his.
And suddenly he realized that this was not how a Maasai protected his own. He walked to the edge of the gorge, opened the bolt, and threw his cartridges into the void one by one. Then he held the rifle over his head and hurled it after them. The coat came next, then the mask, and finally his clothes and shoes.
He went back into the house and pulled out that special trunk that held the memorabilia of a lifetime. In it he found what he was looking for: a simple piece of red cloth. He attached it at his shoulder.
Then he went into the bathroom, looking among his wife’s cosmetics. It took almost half an hour to hit upon the right combinations, but when he emerged his hair was red, as if smeared with clay.
He stopped by the fireplace and pulled down the spear that hung there. Family tradition had it that the spear had once been used by Nelion himself; he wasn’t sure he believed it, but it was definitely a Maasai spear, blooded many times in battle and hunts during centuries past.
Naikosiai walked out the door and positioned himself in front of his house—his manyatta. He planted his bare feet on the diseased ground, placed the butt of his spear next to his right foot, and stood at attention. Whatever came down the road next—a band of black Europeans hoping to rob him of his possessions, a lion out of history, a band of Nandi or Lumbwa come to slay the enemy of their blood, they would find him ready.
* * *
They returned just after sunrise the next morning, hoping to convince him to emigrate to New Kilimanjaro. What they found was the last Maasai, his lungs burst from the pollution, his dead eyes staring proudly out across the vanished savannah at some enemy only he could see.
* * *
I released the cartridge, my strength nearly gone, my emotions drained.
So that was how it had ended for Man on earth, probably less than a mile from where it had begun. So bold and so foolish, so moral and so savage. I had hoped the last artifact would prove to be the final piece of the puzzle, but instead it merely added to the mystery of this most contentious and fascinating race.
Nothing was beyond their ability to achieve. One got the feeling that the day the first primitive man looked up and saw the stars, the galaxy’s days as a haven of peace and freedom were numbered. And yet they came out to the stars not just with their lusts and their hatred and their fears, but with their technology and their medicine, their heroes as well as their villains. Most of the races of the galaxy had been painted by the Creator in pastels; Men were primaries.
I had much to think about as I went off to my quarters to renew my strength. I do not know how long I lay, somnolent and unmoving, recovering my energy, but it must have been a long time, for night had come and gone before I felt prepared to rejoin the party.
As I emerged from my quarters and walked to the center of camp, I heard a yell from the direction of the gorge, and a moment later the Appraiser appeared, a large sterile bag balanced atop an air trolly.
“What have you found?” asked Bellidore, and suddenly I remembered that the Exobiologist was missing.
“I am almost afraid to guess,” replied the Appraiser, laying the bag on the table.
All the members of the party gathered around as he began withdrawing items: a blood-stained communicator, bent out of shape; the floating shade, now broken, that the Exobiologist used to protect her head from the rays of the sun; a torn piece of clothing; and finally, a single gleaming white bone.
The instant the bone was placed on the table, the Mystic began screaming. We were all shocked into momentary immobility, not only because of the suddenness of her reaction, but because it was the first sign of life she had shown since joining our party. She continued to stare at the bone and scream, and finally, before we could question her or remove the bone from her sight, she collapsed.
“I don’t suppose there can be much doubt about what happened,” said Bellidore. “The creatures caught up with the Exobiologist somewhere on her way down the gorge and killed her.”
“Probably ate…”
“… her too,” said the Stardust Twins.
“I am glad we are leaving today,” continued Bellidore. “Even after all these millennia, the spirit of Man continues to corrupt and degrade this world. Those lumbering creatures can’t possibly be predators: there are no meat animals left on Earth. But given the opportunity, they fell upon the Exobiologist and consumed her flesh. I have this uneasy feeling that if we stayed much longer, we, too, would become corrupted by this world’s barbaric heritage.”
The Mystic regained consciousness and began screaming again, and the Stardust Twins gently escorted her back to her quarters, where she was given a sedative.
“I suppose we might as well make it official,” said Bellidore. He turned to the Historian. “Would you please check the bone with your instruments and make sure that this is the remains of the Exobiologist?”
The Historian stared at the bone, horror-stricken. “She was my friend!” it said at last. “I cannot touch it as if it were just another artifact.”
“We must know for sure,” said Bellidore. “If it is not part of the Exobiologist, then there is a chance, however slim, that your frie
nd might still be alive.”
The Historian reached out tentatively for the bone, then jerked its hand away. “I can’t!”
Finally Bellidore turned to me. “He Who Views,” he said. “Have you the strength to examine it?”
“Yes,” I answered.
They all moved back to give me room, and I allowed my mass to slowly spread over the bone and engulf it. I assimilated its history and ingested its emotional residue, and finally I withdrew from it.
“It is the Exobiologist,” I said.
“What are the funeral customs of her race?” asked Bellidore.
“Cremation,” said the Appraiser.
“Then we shall build a fire and incinerate what remains of our friend, and we will each offer a prayer to send her soul along the Eternal Path.”
And that is what we did.
* * *
The ship came later that day, and took us off the planet, and it is only now, safely removed from its influence, that I can reconstruct what I learned on that last morning.
I lied to Bellidore—to the entire party—for once I made my discovery I knew that my primary duty was to get them away from Earth as quickly as possible. Had I told them the truth, one or more of them would have wanted to remain behind, for they are scientists with curious, probing minds, and I would never be able to convince them that a curious, probing mind is no match for what I found in my seventh and final view of Olduvai Gorge.
The bone was not a part of the Exobiologist. The Historian, or even the Moriteu, would have known that had they not been too horrified to examine it. It was the tibia of a Man.
Man has been extinct for five thousand years, at least as we citizens of the galaxy have come to understand him. But those lumbering, ungainly creatures of the night, who seemed so attracted to our campfires, are what Man has become. Even the pollution and radiation he spread across his own planet could not kill him off. It merely changed him to the extent that we were no longer able to recognize him.
I could have told them the simple facts, I suppose: that a tribe of these pseudo-Men stalked the Exobiologist down the gorge, then attacked and killed and, yes, ate her. Predators are not unknown throughout the worlds of the galaxy.
But as I became one with the tibia, as I felt it crashing down again and again upon our companion’s head and shoulders, I felt a sense of power, of exultation I had never experienced before. I suddenly seemed to see the world through the eyes of the bone’s possessor. I saw how he had killed his own companion to create the weapon, I saw how he planned to plunder the bodies of the old and the infirm for more weapons, I saw visions of conquest against other tribes living near the gorge.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 61
