Win Some, Lose Some

by Mike Resnick

  “If you want to become black Europeans, go back to Kenya!” I snapped in disgust. “It is filled with them!”

  “We are not black Europeans,” said Karenja, refusing to let the matter drop. “We are Kikuyu who think it is possible that not all European ideas are harmful.”

  “Any idea that changes us is harmful,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Koinnage, his courage to oppose me growing as he realized that many of the Elders supported him. “Where is it written that a Utopia cannot grow and change? If that were the case, we would have ceased to be a Utopia the day the first baby was born on Kirinyaga.”

  “There are as many Utopias as there are races,” I said. “None among you would argue that a Kikuyu Utopia is the same as a Maasai Utopia or a Samburu Utopia. By the same token, a Kikuyu Utopia cannot be a European Utopia. The closer you come to the one, the farther you move from the other.”

  They had no answer to that, and I got to my feet.

  “I am your mundumugu,” I said. “I have never misled you. You have always trusted my judgment in the past. You must trust in it in this instance.”

  As I began walking out of the boma, I heard Karenja’s voice behind me.

  “If you were to die tomorrow, Ndemi would become our mundumugu. Are you saying we should trust his judgment as we trust yours?”

  I turned to face him. “Ndemi is very young and inexperienced. You, as the elders of the village, would have to use your wisdom to decide whether or not what he says is correct.”

  “A bird that has been caged all its life cannot fly,” said Karenja, “just as a flower that has been kept from the sun will not blossom.”

  “What is your point?” I asked.

  “Shouldn’t we begin using our wisdom now, lest we forget how when Ndemi has become the mundumugu?”

  This time it was I who had no answer, so I turned on my heel and began the long walk back to my hill.

  * * *

  For five days I fetched my own water and made my own fires, and then Ndemi returned, as I had known he would.

  I was sitting in my boma, idly watching a herd of gazelles grazing across the river, when he trudged up the path to my hill, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Jambo, Ndemi,” I said. “It is good to see you again.”

  “Jambo, Koriba,” he replied.

  “And how was your vacation?” I asked, but there is no Swahili word for vacation so I used the English term and the humor and sarcasm were lost on him.

  “My father urged me to come back,” he said, bending over to pet one of my goats, and I saw the welts on his back that constituted his “urging.”

  “I am glad to have you back, Ndemi,” I said. “We have become like father and son, and it pains me when we argue, as I am sure it pains you.”

  “It does pain me,” he admitted. “I do not like to disagree with you, Koriba.”

  “We have both made mistakes,” I continued. “You argued with your mundumugu, and I allowed you access to all that information before you were mature enough to know what to do with it. We are both intelligent enough to learn from our mistakes. You are still my chosen successor. It shall be as if it never happened.”

  “But it did happen, Koriba,” he said.

  “We shall pretend it did not.”

  “I do not think I can do that,” said Ndemi unhappily, protecting his eyes as a sudden wind blew dust across the boma. “I learned many things when I spoke to the computer. How can I unlearn them?”

  “If you cannot unlearn them, then you will have to ignore them until you are older,” I said. “I am your teacher. The computer is just a tool. You will use it to bring the rains, and to send an occasional message to Maintenance, and that is all.”

  A black kite swooped down and made off with a scrap of my morning meal that had fallen beside the embers of my fire. I watched it while I waited for Ndemi to speak.

  “You appear troubled,” I said, when it became apparent that he would not speak first. “Tell me what bothers you.”

  “It was you who taught me to think, Koriba,” he said as various emotions played across his handsome young face. “Would you have me stop thinking now, just because I think differently than you do?”

  “Of course I do not want you to stop thinking, Ndemi,” I said, not without sympathy, for I understood the forces at war within him. “What good would a mundumugu be if he could not think? But just as there are right and wrong ways to throw a spear, there are right and wrong ways to think. I wish only to see you take the path of true wisdom.”

  “It will be greater wisdom if I come upon it myself,” he said. “I must learn as many facts as I can, so that I can properly decide which are helpful and which are harmful.”

  “You are still too young,” I said. “You must trust me until you are older, and better able to make those decisions.”

  “The facts will not change.”

  “No, but you will.”

  “But how can I know that change is for the good?” he asked. “What if you are wrong, and by listening to you until I become like you, I will be wrong too?”

  “If you think I am wrong, why have you come back?”

  “To listen, and decide,” he said. “And to speak to the computer again.”

  “I cannot permit that,” I said. “You have already caused great mischief among the tribe. Because of you, they are questioning everything I say.”

  “There is a reason for that.”

  “Perhaps you will tell me what it is?” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm from my voice, for I truly loved this boy and wished to win him back to my side.

  “I have listened to your stories for many years now, Koriba,” he said, “and I believe that I can use your method to show you the reason.”

  I nodded my head and waited for him to continue.

  “This should be called the story of Ndemi,” he said, “but because I am pretending to be Koriba, I shall call it the story of the Unborn Lion.”

  I plucked an insect from my cheek and rolled it between my fingers until the carapace cracked. “I am listening.”

  “Once there was an unborn lion who was very anxious to see the world,” began Ndemi. “He spent much time talking about it to his unborn brothers. ‘The world will be a wonderful place,’ he assured them. ‘The sun will always be shining, and the plains will be filled with fat, lazy impala, and all other animals will bow before us, for there shall be no animal mightier than us.’

  “His brothers urged him to stay where he was. ‘Why are you so anxious to be born?’ they asked him. ‘Here it is warm and safe, and we never hunger. Who knows what awaits us in the world?’

  “But the unborn lion would hear none of it, and one night, while his mother and brethren slept, he stole out into the world. He could not see, so he nudged his mother and said, ‘Where is the sun?’ and she told him that the sun vanishes every evening, leaving the world cold and dark. ‘At least when it comes back tomorrow, it will shine on fat lazy impala that we will catch and eat,’ he said, trying to console himself.

  “But his mother said, ‘There are no impala here, for they have migrated with the rains to the far side of the world. All that is left for us to eat is the buffalo. Their flesh is tough and tasteless, and they kill as many of us as we kill of them.’

  “‘If my stomach is empty, at least my spirit will be full,’ said the newly-born lion, ‘for all other animals will look upon us with fear and envy.’

  “‘You are very foolish, even for a newly-born cub,’ said his mother. “‘The leopard and the hyena and the eagle look upon you not as an object of envy, but rather as a tasty meal.’

  “‘At least all of them will fear me when I am fully-grown,’ said the newly-born lion.

  “‘The rhinoceros will gore you with his horn,’ said his mother, ‘and the elephant will toss you high into the trees with his trunk. Even the black mamba will not step aside for you, and will kill you if you try to approach it.’

  “The mother continued
her list of all the animals that would neither fear nor envy the lion when he grew up, and finally he told her to speak no more.

  “‘I have made a terrible mistake by being born,’ he said. ‘The world is not as I pictured it, and I will rejoin my brothers where they are warm and safe and comfortable.’

  “But his mother merely smiled at him. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, not without compassion. ‘Once you are born, whether it is of your own choosing or mine, you cannot ever go back to being an unborn lion. Here you are, and here you shall stay.’”

  Ndemi looked at me, his story finished.

  “It is a very wise story,” I said. “I could not have done better myself. I knew the day I first made you my pupil that you would make a fine mundumugu.”

  “You still do not understand,” he said unhappily.

  “I understand the story perfectly,” I replied.

  “But it is a lie,” said Ndemi. “I told it only to show you how easy it is to make up such lies.”

  “It is not easy at all,” I corrected him. “It is an art, mastered only by a few—and now that I see that you have mastered it, it would be doubly hurtful to lose you.”

  “Art or not, it is a lie,” he repeated. “If a child heard and believed it, he would be sure that lions could speak, and that babies can be born whenever they chose to be.” He paused. “It would have been much simpler to tell you that once I have obtained knowledge, whether is was freely given or not, I cannot empty my mind and give it back. Lions have nothing to do with that.” He paused for a long moment. “Furthermore, I do not want to give my knowledge back. I want to learn more things, not forget those that I already know.”

  “You must not say that, Ndemi,” I urged him. “Especially now that I see that my teachings have taken root, and that your abilities as a creator of fables will someday surpass my own. You can be a great mundumugu if you will just allow me to guide you.”

  “I love and respect you as I do my own father, Koriba,” he replied. “I have always listened and tried to learn from you, and I will continue to do so for as long as you will permit me. But you are not the only source of knowledge. I also wish to learn what your computer can teach me.”

  “When I decide you are ready.”

  “I am ready now.”

  “You are not.”

  His face reflected an enormous inner battle, and I could only watch until it was resolved. Finally he took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “I am sorry, Koriba, but I cannot continue to tell lies when there are truths to be learned.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Kwaheri, mwalimu.” Good-bye, my teacher.

  “What will you do?”

  “I cannot work on my father’s shamba,” he said, “not after all that I have learned. Nor do I wish to live in isolation with the bachelors at the edge of the forest.”

  “What is left for you?” I asked.

  “I shall walk to that area of Kirinyaga called Haven, and await the next Maintenance ship. I will go to Kenya and learn to read and write, and when I am ready, I will study to become an historian. And when I am a good enough historian, I will return to Kirinyaga and teach what I have learned.”

  “I am powerless to stop you from leaving,” I said, “for the right to emigrate is guaranteed to all our citizens by our charter. But if you return, know that despite what we have been to one another, I will oppose you.”

  “I do not wish to be your enemy, Koriba,” he said.

  “I do not wish to have you as an enemy,” I replied. “The bond between us has been a strong one.”

  “But the things I have learned are too important to my people.”

  “They are my people too,” I pointed out, “and I have led them to this point by always doing what I think is best for them.”

  “Perhaps it is time for them to choose what is best.”

  “They are incapable of making that choice,” I said.

  “If they are incapable of making that choice, it is only because you have hoarded knowledge to which they have as much right as you do.”

  “Think very carefully before you do this thing,” I said. “Despite my love for you, if you do anything to harm Kirinyaga, I will crush you like an insect.”

  He smiled sadly. “For six years I have asked you to teach me how to turn my enemies into insects so that I may crush them. Is this how I am finally to learn?”

  I could not help but return his smile. I had an urge to stand up and throw my arms around him and hug him, but such behavior is unacceptable in a mundumugu, so I merely looked at him for a long moment and then said, “Kwaheri, Ndemi. You were the best of them.”

  “I had the best teacher,” he replied.

  And with that, he turned and began the long walk toward Haven.

  * * *

  The problems caused by Ndemi did not end with his departure.

  Njoro dug a borehole near his hut, and when I explained that the Kikuyu did not dig boreholes but carried their water from the river, he replied that surely this borehole must be acceptable, for the idea came not from the Europeans but rather the Tswana people far to the south of Kenya.

  I ordered the boreholes to be filled in. When Koinnage argued that there were crocodiles in the river and that he would not risk the lives of our women simply to maintain what he felt was a useless tradition, I had to threaten him with a powerful thahu, or curse—that of impotency—before he agreed.

  Then there was Kidogo, who has named his firstborn Jomo, after Jomo Kenyatta, the Burning Spear. One day he announced that the boy was henceforth to be known as Johnstone, and I had to threaten him with banishment to another village before he relented. But even as he gave in, Mbura changed his own name to Johnstone and moved to a distant village even before I could order it.

  Shima continued to tell anyone who would listen that I had forced Ndemi to leave Kirinyaga because he was occasionally late for his lessons, and Koinnage kept requesting a computer that was the equal of my own.

  Finally, young Mdutu created his own version of a barbed-wire enclosure for his father’s cattle, using woven grasses and thorns, making sure he wrapped them around the fenceposts. I had it torn down, and thereafter he always walked away when the other children circled around me to hear a story.

  I began to feel like the Dutch boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale. As quickly as I put my finger in the dike to staunch the flow of European ideas, they would break through in another place.

  And then a strange thing happened. Certain ideas that were not European, that Ndemi could not possibly have transmitted to the members of the village, began cropping up on their own.

  Kibo, the youngest of Koinnage’s three wives, rendered the fat from a dead warthog and began burning it at night, creating Kirinyaga’s first lamp. Ngobe, whose arm was not strong enough to throw a spear with any accuracy, devised a very primitive bow and arrow, the first Kikuyu ever to use such a weapon. Karenja created a wooden plow, so that his ox could drag it through the fields while his wives simply guided it, and soon all the other villagers were improvising plows and strangely-shaped digging tools. Indeed, alien ideas that had been dormant since the creation of Kirinyaga were now springing forth on all fronts. Ndemi’s words had opened a Pandora’s box, and I did not know how to close it.

  I spent many long days sitting alone on my hill, staring down at the village and wondering if a Utopia can evolve and still remain a Utopia.

  And the answer was always the same: Yes, but it will not be the same Utopia, and it was my sacred duty to keep Kirinyaga a Kikuyu Utopia.

  When I was convinced that Ndemi was not going to return, I began going down to the village each day, trying to decide which of the children was the brightest and most forceful, for it would take both brilliance and force to deflect the alien ideas which were infecting our world and turning it into something it was never meant to be.

  I spoke only to the boys, for no female may be a mundumugu. Some, like Mdutu, had already been corrupted by listening to Ndemi—but t
hose who had not been corrupted by Ndemi were even more hopeless, for a mind cannot open and close at will, and those who were unmoved by what he had to say were not bright enough for the tasks a mundumugu must perform.

  I expanded my search to other villages, convinced that somewhere on Kirinyaga I would find the boy I sought, a boy who grasped the difference between facts, which merely informed, and parables, which not only informed but instructed. I needed a Homer, a Jesus, a Shakespeare, someone who could touch men’s souls and gently guide them down the path that must be taken.

  But the more I searched, the more I came to the realization that a Utopia does not lend itself to such tellers of tales. Kirinyaga seemed divided into two totally separate groups: those who were content with their lives and had no need to think, and those whose every thought led them farther and farther from the society we had labored to build. The unimaginative would never be capable of creating parables, and the imaginative would create their own parables, parables that would not reaffirm a belief in Kirinyaga and a distrust of alien ideas.

  After some months I was finally forced to concede that, for whatever reason, there were no potential mundumugus waiting to be found and groomed. I began wondering if Ndemi had been truly unique, or if he would have eventually rejected my teachings even without exposure to the European influence of the computer. Was it possible that a true Utopia could not outlast the generation that founded it, that it was the nature of man to reject the values of the society into which he is born, even when those values are sacred?

  Or was it just conceivable that Kirinyaga had never been a Utopia, that somehow we had deluded ourselves into believing that we could go back to a way of life that had forever vanished?

  I considered that possibility for a long time, but eventually I rejected it, for if it were true, then the only logical conclusion was that it had vanished because the Europeans’ values were more pleasing to Ngai than our own, and this I knew to be false.