by Mike Resnick
You must assert yourself and put it in order, I say, wondering what he is talking about.
It’s not that easy, he says.
It never is, I say.
I need Lancelot, says Arthur. He is the best of them, and after you he is my closest friend and advisor. He thinks I don’t know what he is doing, but I know, though I pretend not to.
What do you propose to do about it, I ask.
He turns to me, his eyes tortured. I don’t know, he says. I love them both, I don’t want to bring harm to them, but the important thing is not me or Lancelot or the queen, but the Round Table. I built it to last for all eternity, and it must survive.
Nothing lasts for eternity, I say.
Ideals do, he replies with conviction. There is Good and there is Evil, and those who believe in the Good must stand up and be counted.
Isn’t that what you have done, I ask.
Yes, says Arthur, but until now the choice was an easy one. Now I do not know which road to take. If I stop feigning ignorance, then I must kill Lancelot and burn the queen at the stake, and this will surely destroy the Round Table. He pauses and looks at me. Tell me the truth, Merlin, he says, would Lancelot be a better king than I? I must know, for if it will save the Round Table, I will step aside and he can have it all—the throne, the queen, Camelot. But I must be sure.
Who can say what the future holds, I reply.
You can, he says. At least, when I was a young man, you told me that you could.
Did I, I ask curiously. I must have been mistaken. The future is as unknowable as the past.
But everyone knows the past, he says. It is the future that men fear.
Men fear the unknown, wherever it may lie, I say.
I think that only cowards fear the unknown, says Arthur. When I was a young man and I was building the Table, I could not wait for the future to arrive. I used to awaken an hour before sunrise and lay there in my bed, trembling with excitement, eager to see what new triumphs each day would bring me. Suddenly he sighs and seems to age before my eyes. But I am not that man anymore, he continues after a thoughtful silence, and now I fear the future. I fear for Guinevere, and for Lancelot, and for the Round Table.
That is not what you fear, I say.
What do you mean, he asks.
You fear what all men fear, I say.
I do not understand you, says Arthur.
Yes, you do, I reply. And now you fear even to admit to your fears.
He takes a deep breath and stares unblinking into my eyes, for he is truly a brave and honorable man. All right, he says at last. I fear for me.
That is only natural, I say.
He shakes his head. It does not feel natural, Merlin, he says.
Oh, I say.
I have failed, Merlin, he continues. Everything is dissolving around me—the Round Table and the reasons for it. I have lived the best life I could, but evidently I did not live it well enough. Now all that is left to me is my death—he pauses uncomfortably—and I fear that I will die no better than I have lived.
My heart goes out to him, this young man that I do not know but will know someday, and I lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
I am a king, he continues, and if a king does nothing else, he must die well and nobly.
You will die well, my lord, I say.
Will I, he asks uncertainly. Will I die in battle, fighting for what I believe when all others have left my side—or will I die a feeble old man, drooling, incontinent, no longer even aware of my surroundings?
I decide to try once more to look into the future, to put his mind at ease. I close my eyes and I peer ahead, and I see not a mindless babbling old man, but a mindless mewling baby, and that baby is myself.
Arthur tries to look ahead to the future he fears, and I, traveling in the opposite direction, look ahead to the future I fear, and I realize that there is no difference, that this is the humiliating state in which man both enters and leaves the world, and that he had better learn to cherish the time in between, for it is all that he has.
I tell Arthur again that he shall die the death he wants, and finally he leaves, and I am alone with my thoughts. I hope I can face my fate with the same courage that Arthur will face his, but I doubt that I can, for Arthur can only guess at his while I can see mine with frightening clarity. I try to remember how Arthur’s life actually does end, but it is gone, dissipated in the mists of Time, and I realize that there are very few pieces of myself left to lose before I become that crying, mindless baby, a creature of nothing but appetites and fears. It is not the end that disturbs me, but the knowledge of the end, the terrible awareness of it happening to me while I watch helpless, almost an observer at the disintegration of whatever it is that has made me Merlin.
A young man walks by my door and waves to me. I cannot recall ever seeing him before.
Sir Pellinore stops to thank me. For what? I don’t remember.
It is almost dark. I am expecting someone, I think it is a woman, I can almost picture her face. I think I should tidy up the bedroom before she arrives, and I suddenly realize that I don’t remember where the bedroom is. I must write this down while I still possess the gift of literacy.
Everything is slipping away, drifting on the wind.
Please, somebody, help me.
I’m frightened.
INTRODUCTION TO “ONE PERFECT MORNING, WITH JACKALS”
Janis Ian
Mike Resnick is a master of many things—a brilliant editor, teacher, mentor, unfailingly generous with his knowledge and expertise—but it’s as a writer that I first discovered him. And it’s as a writer that he will be remembered.
Mike writes from a fullness of spirit. His characters are imbued with real-life complexity and strength; in this story, the sturdy, steady patience of a father toward his un-hearing son is an emotional aside a lesser writer would have missed.
Resnick is prescient; in 1991, when “Jackals” was first published, the dangers of growing imported corn and wheat in a country better served by its own drought-resistant crops were rarely mentioned by scientists, let alone science fiction writers.
Resnick never leaves you hanging; his stories have real beginnings, and real endings, something sadly lacking in the field of late. The reconciliation between father and son, at once complete and yet unfinished, leaves layers of veiled subtext aspiring writers like myself would have over-written and ruined.
In my personal favorite Resnick series, the Kirinyaga stories, he not only steps into another culture’s shoes—he discards footwear entirely, in favor of a reality that makes transporting an African tribe to a terraformed planet not just plausible, but logical. A white, Jewish male from Cincinnati writing in the voice of a black Kikuyu mundumugu would beggar belief in the hands of a lesser writer. Under Mike’s capable fingers, that also becomes not just plausible, but logical.
In a world where political correctness is often mistaken for tolerance, and naïvetè for innocence, Resnick brings us back to the essential nature of Art—its unique ability to educate, inform, and ennoble us about other cultures, other lives, and other hearts.
This is not the first Kirinyaga story written, but it is chronologically the first. After the story of Koriba’s attempts to create a Kikuyu Utopia on the terraformed world of Kirinyaga had won a couple of Hugos, my editor, Gardner Dozois, asked me to give him the story of Koriba’s last day on Earth. I did, and it was a 1992 Hugo nominee for Best Short Story.
ONE PERFECT MORNING, WITH JACKALS
NGAI IS THE CREATOR OF all things. He made the lion and the elephant, the vast savannah and the towering mountains, the Kikuyu and the Maasai and the Wakamba.
Thus, it was only reasonable for my father’s father and his father’s father to believe that Ngai was all-powerful. Then the Europeans came, and they killed all the animals, and they covered the savannahs with their factories and the mountains with their cities, and they assimilated the Maasai and the Wakamba, and one day all that was left of what Nga
i had created was the Kikuyu.
And it was among the Kikuyu that Ngai waged His final battle against the god of the Europeans.
* * *
My former son lowered his head as he stepped into my hut.
“Jambo, my father,” he said, looking somewhat uncomfortable, as usual, in the close confines of the rounded walls.
“Jambo, Edward,” I replied.
He stood before me, not quite knowing what to do with his hands. Finally he placed them in the pockets of his elegantly-tailored silk suit.
“I have come to drive you to the spaceport,” he said at last.
I nodded, and slowly got to my feet. “It is time.”
“Where is your luggage?” he asked.
“I am wearing it,” I said, indicating my dull red kikoi.
“You’re not taking anything else?” he said, surprised.
“There is nothing else I care to take,” I replied.
He paused and shifted his weight uncomfortably, as he always seemed to do in my presence. “Shall we go outside?” he suggested at last, walking to the door of my hut. “It’s very hot in here, and the flies are murderous.”
“You must learn to ignore them.”
“I do not have to ignore them,” he replied, almost defensively. “There are no flies where I live.”
“I know. They have all been killed.”
“You say that as if it were a sin rather than a blessing.”
I shrugged and followed him outside, where two of my chickens were pecking diligently at the dry red earth.
“It’s a beautiful morning, is it not?” he said. “I was afraid it might be as warm as yesterday.”
I looked out across the vast savannah, which had been turned into farmland. Wheat and corn seemed to sparkle in the morning sun.
“A perfect morning,” I agreed. Then I turned and saw a splendid vehicle parked about thirty yards away, white and sleek and shining with chrome.
“Is it new?” I asked, indicating the car.
He nodded proudly. “I bought it last week.”
“German?”
“British.”
“Of course,” I said.
The glow of pride vanished, and he shifted his weight again. “Are you ready?”
“I have been ready for a long time,” I answered, opening the door and easing myself into the passenger’s seat.
“I never saw you do that before,” he remarked, entering the car and starting the ignition.
“Do what?”
“Use your safety harness.”
“I have never had so many reasons not to die in a car crash,” I replied.
He forced a smile to his lips and began again. “I have a surprise for you,” he said as the car pulled away and I looked back at my boma for the very last time.
“Oh?”
He nodded. “We will see it on the way to the spaceport.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
I shrugged and remained silent.
“We’ll have to take some of the back roads to reach what I want to show you,” he continued. “You’ll be able to take a last look at your country along the way.”
“This is not my country.”
“You’re not going to start that again, are you?”
“My country teems with life,” I said adamantly. “This country has been smothered by concrete and steel, or covered by row upon row of European crops.”
“My father,” he said wearily as we spend past a huge wheat field, “the last elephant and lion were killed before you were born. You have never seen Kenya teeming with wildlife.”
“Yes I have,” I answered him.
“When?”
I pointed to my head. “In here.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said, and I could tell that he was trying to control his temper.
“What doesn’t?”
“That you can turn your back on Kenya and go live on some terraformed planetoid, just because you want to wake up to the sight of a handful of animals grazing.”
“I did not turn my back on Kenya, Edward,” I said patiently. “Kenya turned its back on us.”
“That simply isn’t so,” he said. “The President and most of his cabinet are Kikuyu. You know that.”
“They call themselves Kikuyu,” I said. “That does not make them Kikuyu.”
“They are Kikuyu!” he insisted.
“The Kikuyu do not live in cities that were built by Europeans,” I replied. “They do not dress as Europeans. They do not worship the Europeans’ god. And they do not drive European machines,” I added pointedly. “Your vaunted President is still a kehee—a boy who has not undergone the circumcision ritual.”
“If he is a boy, then he is a 57-year-old boy.”
“His age is unimportant.”
“But his accomplishments are. He is responsible for the Turkana Pipeline, which has brought irrigation to the entire Northern Frontier District.”
“He is a kehee who brings water to the Turkana and the Rendille and the Samburu,” I agreed. “What is that to the Kikuyu?”
“Why do you persist in speaking like an ignorant old savage?” he demanded irritably. “You were schooled in Europe and America. You know what our President has accomplished.”
“I speak the way I speak because I have been schooled in Europe and America. I have seen Nairobi grow into a second London, with all of that city’s congestion and pollution, and Mombasa into another Miami, with all of that city’s attendant dangers and diseases. I have seen our people forget what it means to be a Kikuyu, and speak proudly about being Kenyans, as if Kenya was anything more that an arbitrary set of lines drawn on a European map.”
“Those lines have been there for almost three centuries,” he pointed out.
I sighed. “As long as you have known me, you have never understood me, Edward.”
“Understanding is a two-way street,” he said with sudden bitterness. “When did you ever make an effort to understand me?”
“I raised you.”
“But to this day you don’t know me,” he said, driving dangerously fast on the bumpy road. “Did we ever talk as father and son? Did you ever discuss anything but the Kikuyu with me?” He paused. “I was the only Kikuyu to play on the national basketball team, and yet you never once came to watch me.”
“It is a European game.”
“In point of fact, it is an American game.”
I shrugged. “They are the same.”
“And now it is an African game as well. I played on the only Kenyan team ever to defeat the Americans. I had hoped that would make you proud of me, but you never even mentioned it.”
“I heard many stories of an Edward Kimante who played basketball against the Europeans and the Americans,” I said. “But I knew that this could not be my son, for I gave my son the name Koriba.”
“And my mother gave me the middle name of Edward,” he said. “And since she spoke to me and shared my burdens, and you did not, I took the name she gave me.”
“That is your right.”
“I don’t give a damn about my rights!” He paused. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
“I remained true to my convictions,” I said. “It is you who tried to become a Kenyan rather than a Kikuyu.”
“I am a Kenyan,” he said. “I live here, I work here, I love my country. All of it, not just one tiny segment.”
I sighed deeply. “You are truly your mother’s son.”
“You have not asked about her,” he noted.
“If she were not well, you would have told me.”
“And that’s all you have to say about the woman you lived with for seventeen years?” he demanded.
“It was she who left to live in the city of the Europeans, not I,” I replied.
He laughed humorlessly. “Nakuru is not a European city. It has two million Kenyans and less than twenty thousand whites.”
“Any
city is, by definition, European. The Kikuyu do not live in cities.”
“Look around you,” he said in exasperation. “More than 95% of them do live in cities.”
“Then they are no longer Kikuyu,” I said placidly.
He squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles turned ash-gray.
“I do not wish to argue with you,” he said, struggling to control his emotions. “It seems that is all we ever do any more. You are my father, and despite all that has come between us, I love you—and I had hoped to make my peace with you today, since we shall never see each other again.”
“I have no objection to that,” I said. “I do not enjoy arguing.”
“For a man who doesn’t enjoy it, you managed to argue for twelve long years to get the government to sponsor this new world of yours.”
“I did not enjoy the arguments, only the results,” I replied.
“Have they decided what to name it yet?”
“Kirinyaga.”
“Kirinyaga?” he repeated, surprised.
I nodded. “Does not Ngai sit upon His gold throne atop Kirinyaga?”
“Nothing sits atop Mount Kenya except a city.”
“You see?” I said with a smile. “Even the name of the holy mountain has been corrupted by Europeans. It is time that we give Ngai a new Kirinyaga from which to rule the universe.”
“Perhaps it is fitting, at that,” he said. “There has been precious little room for Ngai in today’s Kenya.”
Suddenly he began slowing down, and a moment later we turned off the road and across a recently-harvested field, driving very carefully so as not to damage his new car.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I told you: I have a surprise for you.”
“What kind of surprise can there be in the middle of an empty field?” I asked.
“You will see.”
Suddenly he came to a stop about twenty yards from a clump of thorn bushes, and turned off the ignition.
“Look carefully,” he whispered.
I stared at the bushes for a moment without seeing anything. Then there was a brief movement, and suddenly the whole picture came into view, and I could see two jackals standing behind the foliage, staring timidly at us.
