He increased his speed, and soon we had passed through the farming area and entered the outskirts of Nairobi.
“What will you do on Kirinyaga?” he asked, breaking a long silence.
“We shall live as the Kikuyu were meant to live.”
“I mean you, personally.”
I smiled, anticipating his reaction. “I am to be the mundumugu.”
“The witch doctor?” he repeated incredulously.
“That is correct.”
“I can’t believe it!” he continued. “You are an educated man. How can you sit cross-legged in the dirt and roll bones and read omens?”
“The mundumugu is also a teacher, and the custodian of the tribal customs,” I said. “It is an honorable profession.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “So I am to explain to people that my father has become a witch doctor.”
“You need fear no embarrassment,” I said. “You need only tell them that Kirinyaga’s mundumugu is named Koriba.”
“That is my name!”
“A new world requires a new name,” I said. “You cast it aside to take a European name. Now I will take it back and put it to good use.”
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” he said as we pulled into the spaceport.
“From this day forward, my name is Koriba.”
The car came to a stop.
“I hope you will bring more honor to it than I did, my father,” he said as a final gesture of conciliation.
“You have brought honor to the name you chose,” I said. “That is quite enough for one lifetime.”
“Do you really mean that?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Then why have you never said so before now?”
“Haven’t I?” I asked, surprised.
We got out of the car and he accompanied me to the departure area. Finally he came to a stop.
“This is as far as I am permitted to go.”
“I thank you for the ride,” I said.
He nodded.
“And for the jackals,” I added. “It was truly a perfect morning.”
“I will miss you, my father,” he said.
“I know.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I could think of nothing further to say.
For a moment I thought he was going to place his arms around me and hug me, but instead he reached out, shook my hand, muttered another farewell, and turned on his heel and left.
I thought he would go directly to his car, but when I looked through a porthole of the ship that would take us to Kirinyaga, I saw him standing at a huge, plate-glass window, waving his hand, while his other hand held a handkerchief.
That was the last sight I saw before the ship took off. But the image I held in my mind was of the two jackals, watching alien sights in a land that had itself become foreign to them. I hoped that they would adjust to their new life in the game park that had been artificially created for them.
Something told me that I soon would know.
DESERT RAIN
Mark L. Van Name & Pat Murphy
Mark L. Van Name is a new writer who has already sold stories to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Full Spectrum, When the Music’s Over, Tomorrow’s Voices, and other markets. He works as a free-lance computer writer and consultant, was the editor of the influential critical magazine Short Form, and lives near Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, Rana.
Pat Murphy lives in San Francisco, where she works for a science museum, the Exploratorium, and edits the Exploratorium Quarterly. Her literate and inventive stories appeared throughout the decade of the 1980s in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Elsewhere, Amazing, Universe, Shadows, Chrysalis, and other places. One of them, the classic “Rachel in Love,” won a Nebula Award in 1988. Murphy’s first novel, The Shadow Hunter, appeared in 1982, to no particular notice, but her second novel, The Falling Woman, won her a second Nebula Award in 1988, and was one of the most highly acclaimed novels of the late eighties. Her third novel, The City, Not Long After, appeared in 1990, as did a collection of her short fiction, Points of Departure, and she is at work on another novel, a “historical, feminist werewolf novel.” Her story “In the Islands” was in our First Annual Collection; “Rachel in Love” was in our Fifth Annual Collection; and her “Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates” was in our Eighth Annual Collection.
Here they tell the poignant and fascinating story of a very unusual sort of Love Triangle.…
Teresa looked up at the framework of welded steel tubing. It stood nine feet tall and just over six feet on a side. Within the framework, steel tracks snaked above and below one another in seemingly random patterns, forming a gleaming tangle. At regular intervals along the tracks, lines of one-inch ball bearings waited to be released. Teresa pulled the string that dangled from the chute at the top of the sculpture, and closed her eyes to listen.
With the faint whisper of metal scraping against metal, a gate opened and freed the first ball, which rattled along the grooved surface of the track. As the ball rounded the first curve, it struck a trip wire and released two more balls. Each of these in turn freed more balls, until dozens were rolling down the tracks with a sound like faraway thunder.
The music started slowly, building as the balls rumbled down the tracks. The first ball struck a series of tuning forks, and three high notes rang out. Another ball rattled across a section of metal reeds, then clattered through a maze of gates. Every ball followed a different path: ringing bells, striking chimes, and bouncing off tuning forks.
When the first ball reached the gathering basket, the sound began to lessen. As the others followed the first, the sound faded entirely.
With her eyes still shut, Teresa shook her head. The music was not right; it was not even close. She wasn’t sure anymore exactly how the composition should sound, but she knew this was not it. The piece sounded too mechanical, too predictable. In her proposal, she had promised the Santa Fe Arts Commission a sculpture that conveyed the essence of water, the rush and flow of it—a waterless fountain for a desert town. She wanted music that would remind people of rain drumming on a tin roof or the roar of a breaking wave. Instead, she had the hum of trucks on the freeway.
She turned away and looked through the sliding glass doors at the desert. The late June sun was setting, and clumps of gray-green rabbit brush cast long shadows. The landscape shimmered a little, distorted by heat rising from the flagstone patio just outside the door. She was alone, surrounded by heat and silence.
She closed her eyes and remembered the view from her old studio, a big, drafty room in the Marin Headlands Art Center. She had always been cold there: from early fall to late spring, she had worn wool socks and a down vest. Every winter, she had nursed a head cold that never quite went away. Still, the drafts that had crept in through cracks in the window frames had smelled of salt air. From the window, she could see the ocean, a slash of blue water alive with restless waves. The wind tousled the grass and shook the branches of the cypress trees. She could see tiny figures on the beach: a dancer from the Art Center practicing leaps in the sand, a man sitting and staring at the water, two women walking hand in hand.
She took a deep breath of the air-conditioned air and opened her eyes. The desert was still there.
She heard a knock on the door that led from the studio to the rest of the house. “Come on in!” she said, momentarily glad of the interruption. When Jeff opened the door, she said, “You’re home early. It’s nice to see you.”
Jeff was thirty-seven, five years older than Teresa. But when he was excited, as he clearly was now, he looked like a kid. A shock of brown hair had fallen into his eyes; he pushed it back impatiently. Teresa had suggested last week that he needed a haircut, but he had just nodded, his thoughts elsewhere. He was too busy to make an appointment, he had said, too busy for almost anything.
He grinned at her now. “I’ve been here for a while, but I didn’t want to disturb yo
u when you were working. I came home early to finish installing the system in the rest of the house. It’s just about ready to go.”
For as long as Teresa had known Jeff, he had been working on the development of what he called “the system,” some kind of computer program that could run a household. For the past four months, ever since they had returned from their honeymoon, he had been completely immersed in the project. When he wasn’t at work, he was preparing their house for the first working prototype, installing cameras, microphones, and monitors in most of the rooms. The whole time, he had been trying to convince Teresa that the system would make her life much easier: it would answer the phone, put on music, adjust the air conditioner, look up information in its library. He was downright evangelical about it. Teresa had accepted his attempts to persuade her with amused skepticism, accepting this as another of Jeffs incomprehensible but lucrative computer projects.
“All I have to do now is define the personality,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d want to help. You could design the face, choose the voice, stuff like that.”
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans, feeling uncomfortable. “You know I don’t know anything about computers.”
“You don’t need to know anything. It’ll be fun. Besides, I figured that if you created the personality, you’d have a better feel for it. You’ll see it’s completely in your control.”
She glanced back at the sculpture. “I probably should keep on working. This really isn’t going well.”
He reached out and took her hand. “Oh, come on. You sound like you could use a break.”
Reluctantly, she let him lead her into the living room. One wall of the room was dominated by a large monitor; the shelves of the surrounding wall unit were crowded with electronics gear, gadgets and gizmos that Teresa regarded as Jeffs toys. She knew how to turn on the stereo, the television, and the controller for the satellite dish, but she ignored the rest of it. She didn’t like admitting it, but she found the collection of electronic devices a little intimidating.
Jeff gestured to the swivel chair in front of the monitor. “Why don’t you sit here?”
“That’s okay; you do it. I’ll just watch.”
“Please, Teresa? You’d be helping me out. I might get some ideas watching you work. We’re just starting to test this on people outside the lab.”
“I’m a rotten guinea pig—I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“No, that makes you a perfect guinea pig. This is for regular people, not just computer nerds.”
She studied his face and relented. “All right.” She sat in the chair. “What do I do?”
“Here—I’ll get you started.” Jeff leaned over her and tapped on the keyboard. He straightened up as his company’s logo appeared on the screen, then faded. “Now the set-up software will walk you through the process. Just type in an answer when it asks you a question, or use the mouse to point to your choice when it gives you a list. Once the full system is running, we’ll switch to voice input.”
Teresa read the words on the screen. “Do you want to create a companion?”
“Why not?” she said, pretending a nonchalance she didn’t feel. She clicked the pointer on “Yes.”
“Man or woman?” the screen asked.
She glanced at Jeff. “Your choice,” he said. “I want you to be comfortable with this.”
“Well,” she said, “you know I’m partial to boys. And I don’t think you could handle having two women around.” She clicked the pointer on “Man.”
“Name?”
She frowned at the screen. “I’ve got to name it? Don’t you already have a name for it?” She glanced at Jeff.
He shrugged. “Some of the guys on the team call it HIAN, short for Home Information and Appliance Network.”
“HIAN?” Teresa shook her head. “No sense of poetry, those computer boys.” She thought for a moment and then said, “How about Ian? That has a nice sound.” She typed it in.
“Would you like to choose a face or customize a face?” Below the question the screen displayed sample faces of many races, including Caucasian, black, Indian, Amerindian, Chinese, and Japanese.
Jeff leaned over her shoulder. “When it’s up and running, you’ll see the face on the monitor. It’ll talk to you through the monitor’s speakers, and see and hear you through the Minicams. We’ve got a whole rack of processors dedicated to animation: the face can smile, shrug, wink, frown—pretty much anything you or I can do. The display changes in real time.” She glanced up at him; all his attention was on the screen. “My assumption has always been that it has to be friendly to succeed. Our human-interface people created the standard faces with that in mind, designing faces that most people would trust. Of course, you could also go with a celebrity—we’ve got a few that we’re experimenting with: Katharine Hepburn, Robert Redford, Alec Guinness, Ronald Reagan—”
Teresa waved a hand, interrupting the monologue. “I don’t want some prepackaged face that a marketing expert says I’ll trust. I’ll make my own, thanks.” She clicked on the customize option.
“See, it’s not as bad as you thought.” Jeff rested one hand on her shoulder, absentmindedly massaging the tight muscles of her neck. “You’ll be an expert in no time.”
She leaned back into his hands, relaxing a little. “Ah,” she said softly. “I remember those hands. It’s been a while.”
Oblivious, Jeff stopped rubbing to gesture toward the screen. It had changed to display small pictures of blank faces, hair, eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. “You see, now you can assemble a face that you like from a variety of parts. Even people without your drawing ability can create a companion. Go ahead and make one you like.”
“Okay, okay.” She leaned forward again and clicked on the first face. Most of the dull gray of the screen winked out and in its place was a fat man’s face, round cheeked and small chinned, empty of eyes and other features. She could see only the figure’s blank face, neck, and shoulders. A black T-shirt covered the shoulders. She moved on to the next face, which was thin and aristocratic, with a delicate chin. She flipped through the choices, about twenty in all, and finally settled on one that was broad but a bit craggy. She liked the face and the burly shoulders that went with it.
At first, she chose a pair of bright blue eyes that reminded her of her father’s eyes—intense and excitable, ready to challenge and confront. Then she reconsidered and selected a more muted shade of blue, closer to blue-gray. Intense, but with a touch of compassion.
Working methodically, she assembled a face. The screen responded to her changes instantly. As she worked, she forgot that Jeff was standing just behind her and concentrated on creating a picture of an attractive stranger. He wasn’t a classically handsome man, but he was good-looking in a rough-edged sort of way. She gave him a beard and a mustache and a diamond stud earring in his left ear. He looked like a guy who worked with his hands, she figured. He could have been a bouncer in a bar or a mechanic or a fisherman. Good-natured, she thought, but maybe a little dangerous. A motorcycle rider. A drifter. A sidewalk philosopher. The kind of guy she had always been involved with before she met Jeff.
“You’re doing great,” Jeff murmured.
She glanced up, feeling guilty that she had forgotten him, however briefly. She stopped working. “I guess that’s it,” she said. “That’s good enough.”
“You can change the clothes, if you like,” Jeff said. “A business suit, maybe.”
“I like the black T-shirt,” she said. “Ian’s a casual kind of guy.”
“You can choose a different background, too,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be gray.” He leaned over and clicked the mouse on a small icon in the lower left of the screen. The gray background became a white wall; Teresa could see framed certificates behind Ian. “Doctor’s office,” Jeff said. “Or here—how about this?” He clicked again. The wood paneling that replaced the white wall looked familiar, as did the easy chair where Ian sat.
Te
resa glanced behind her, half expecting to see Ian sitting on the chair. “You used our living room?”
“Why not?”
Teresa studied the screen, momentarily disoriented. It felt odd to see this imaginary person sitting on a chair that she knew was very real. It was as if she were watching a stranger answer her living-room phone.
“I kind of like that background,” Jeff said.
“I guess so,” she agreed slowly.
Jeff studied the face. “This one has a lot more character than any of our canned faces, that’s for sure.”
She studied the screen and the face she had created. “Yeah, Ian’s no white-bread movie star. What now?”
Jeff leaned over and pulled a black box from the shelf beside the screen. A cable trailed from the back of the box to the computer. He clicked the mouse pointer on an icon labeled “Voice Definition,” and the face on the screen came alive. Staring straight ahead, the face began to speak in a tinny voice. As the voice rose and fell, graphs jumped up and down in boxes below the “Voice Definition” heading.
“Four score and seven years ago…” it said.
“Jeff! The Gettysburg Address?” Teresa laughed.
“Why not? It’s in the system. You wouldn’t believe the library the system can access. We’ve got several multi-terrabyte optical stores, and—”
The tinny voice kept talking, restarting the address. “Do I turn this knob?” she asked. She twisted the knob on the box and jumped as the voice climbed to a screech. She turned the knob slowly to the left until the voice was pleasantly deep. After a little fiddling, she had a level that sounded almost perfect. Almost. “That’s real close, but he still sounds too all-American. Too mom and apple pie. I’d like a sort of Tom Waits growl. Not too much, but a little.”
Jeff clicked the pointer in a box and typed a few words. The voice roughened as it hit “of the people.” Ian’s voice sounded like one of her lovers in college, a chain-smoking sculptor who had seduced her with love sonnets and then left her for a dance student with the world’s thinnest thighs. Even though he’d been a jerk, she remembered the love poetry fondly. “That’s perfect,” she said. She leaned back in her chair, cushioning her head on Jeff’s arm. “Now what?”
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 83
