by Mike Resnick
I looked toward the village one last time, the village that had once feared and worshipped Ngai, and which had sold itself, like some prostitute, to the god of the Europeans.
“No,” I said firmly.
“Are you speaking to me?” asked the pilot, and I realized that the hatch was open and waiting for me.
“No,” I replied.
He looked around. “I don’t see anyone else.”
“He is very old and very tired,” I said. “But He is here.”
I climbed into the ship and did not look back.
INTRODUCTION TO “BIBI”
Susan Shwartz
Call him “Bwana.” That was Mike Resnick’s net-name on GEnie, the writer-friendly bulletin board that, before GE turned off the lights, produced numerous anthologies, collaborations, and the TV show Babylon 5.
Creation went on either in people’s personal topics or the online conference rooms attached to the Science Fiction Round Tables (SFRT).
Late at night was when the ideas got really strange, because that was when the wild things came out and prowled into the conference rooms, looking for company.
I was there because I’d just learned that a dear friend of mine had died of AIDS. The topic drifted to Africa’s AIDS epidemics and the “die-off” that might occur. The ominous word glittered on the dark MS-DOS background we called “the phosphors.” Myths had evolved about them. If “the phosphors” moved fast, you could log in efficiently. If they were slow, the system would hang. Some people believed “the phosphors” reflected the Internet’s moods.
That night, they hurt.
<
A specimen of Australopithecus afarensis found in Ethiopia in 1974, Lucy dated back 3.2 million years. Bwana was finishing up Kirinyaga. Of course, he remembered Lucy.
<<“You’d think she’d come back and help her children.”>>
A pause in “the phosphors.” Mike typed back:
<
<>
<>
Another pause. “The phosphors” awaited developments.
<
Deal.
“Bibi” means female elder, grandmother, mother of us all. Carol Resnick informed us our story was a novella. Then, she told me I couldn’t dodge the confrontation between the hero, an HIV-positive financial analyst turned relief worker, and his ex.
I stayed up till weird o’clock to write it because that’s when I take risks. I tore through one draft, read it, then cried myself to sleep. I sent it off to Bwana, asking, “Do we have the letter or just a crying jag?”
Things moved fast after that. I still think “Bibi” is one of the best things I’ve ever worked on.
Jambo, Bwana. And thanks.
One night I met my friend, fellow science fiction writer Susan Shwartz, in one of the conference rooms of the late lamented GEnie computer network. She had an idea for a powerful story, but it had to be set in East Africa, and since I’d been there so often, knew something about the different tribes, and could speak some Swahili, would I be interested in collaborating?
She described her characters to me, and some of the background, and I was sold. Basically, the African details and descriptions, and the scenes with Bibi, are mine, and almost all of the rest is hers. It turned out pretty well. “Bibi” was nominated for the 1996 Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella.
BIBI
(with Susan Shwartz)
HER CHILDREN’S CRIES WOKE HER from her safe nest. She stretched, easing the aches in her bones. In the quiet dawn, she ventured to the lake for water. She saw less of her enemies’ spoor than ever before. Almost nothing was freshly dead, though a few circling birds warned her: soon. Not my children! she wailed silently. They were fevered and ill and even dying. But where were they? No one crouched beside the lake. No one edged through the bush, seeking her. She had to find them soon, before she was a mother without children.
The land was dry and brown, as it had always been, but there were differences. The footpaths were missing, the birds no longer fled in fear of her, the few antelope she saw were smaller and quicker than any she could remember. She felt uneasy, walking in the open, with no trees to climb should she come across those fearsome doglike creatures that could swallow her in three bites. She gripped her club, which was really nothing more than an old femur bone. She had watched a great cat bring down an antelope and waited patiently for it to fill its belly, then fought the birds for the spoils and came away with a weapon as well as a meal.
She looked up again. The birds seemed smaller, and they were the wrong colors. They were still ominous and foreboding as they rode the thermals high above the savannah and sought the flesh of the newly dead.
As the sun rose higher, she withdrew into the comforting shadows of the trees. Her stomach cried out, and she turned over a dry log, looking for termites. But the log crumbled into dust and she realized, even as she sifted through its remains, finding a few laggard insects, that the main army had moved on to choicer morsels.
How easy it used to be to find food. In the kinder days of her youth, she could have traveled fast, grubbing food from the earth or from hanging branches. Now, it took her hours to fill her belly so it did not cry like a baby, and she barely heard the cries or coughs of beasts. Her feet bled, tender after her long rest, but she trudged on. She had slept too long.
* * *
The camp lay 40 kilometers due west of Moroto, in the blistering heat of the Karamojo country. Even the flies had become lethargic. Dust devils swirled across the empty landscape, red and angry, reaching hundreds of feet into the startling blue sky.
Two boreholes supplied water for all the tents. One teased them with cool, clear water for two or three minutes at a time, then went dead for half an hour or more, while the other offered a slow, sluggish trickle of warm brown liquid.
“Wake up, wake up!”
A weight landed on Jeremy Harris’s cot, and a child shrilled in his ears. Translating the child’s excited Swahili automatically, Jeremy fixed his tormentor, not four feet high, with a bleary eye, then glanced outside. What the hell was the kid doing waking him up in practically the middle of the night?
“Dr. Umurungi told me to fetch you. You remember old Kabute? He died around midnight.”
Jeremy remembered the man: not forty yet impossibly aged, almost mummified, in the final emaciation of the AIDS that threatened to finish the job in Uganda that Idi Amin began and Milton Obote had carried forward. They died. Sooner or later, everyone died.
The child’s eyes reflected awareness and resignation: he’d already lost both parents to the disease and was HIV-positive himself. It would be a miracle if he reached puberty. Forget AZT: the relief workers were happy if they could provide three meals a day.
“I’m sorry,” said Jeremy. “Do they want me to talk to the family?”
He could think of several people better qualified by language or race to talk to the man’s family—an elderly mother, two withered wives. One bore the marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma, purple against black, and coughed almost constantly. There were several children; Jeremy would have bet good money that all of them were HIV-positive.
Jeremy was a volunteer, not a physician: if they needed him to drive, he drove. If they wanted him to perform medical tests, they taught him and looked the other way. If they wanted an English class, he taught it. When it came to bribing officials, he was without peer. Best of all, when (never if) they needed emergency funding, his old Wall Street training could usually wring it from some unsuspecting philanthropical prey—or allow the prey to donate it anonymously and still keep his tax break.
What they mostly needed these days, however, was a gravedigger. In New York, Jeremy had worked out with a trainer who came to his private gym when he didn’t go to his university club, his company’s fitness center, or any of the places that took up a large part of his very private life. But di
gging graves out here in the bush put more muscle on him than his trainer would have dreamed possible.
“Dr. Umurungi said they left the compound, taking Kabute’s body with them.”
The boy opened the tent flap wider. Jeremy winced at the sunrise and swore with the inventive profanity of the equity traders he used to match drink for drink at Harry’s. Not only would the women and children not get proper care—so what if they die a month before their time, the darkness in him muttered, we’re all on Death Row here—but carrying a corpse, they’d be lucky if they didn’t run afoul of hyenas on the plain or crocs crossing the rivers on their way back to their village—and that was on the unlikely assumption that it hadn’t been looted by Somali or Sudanese bandits.
He lowered his feet decisively, and the child practically hugged himself with relief. Reaching for his boots and trousers, Jeremy shook them before he put them on. He folded his bedding, just so. A place for everything or you’d go crazy, living in a cluttered tent in an AIDS relief camp. Everything in its place.
He unlocked the box where he kept his megavitamins and the other drugs, downing a handful of pills without water, before replacing the phials next to his portfolio statements, medical records, and a few letters. The most recent was from his parents in Vermont. He knew it by heart.
It wasn’t very long. Surprisingly, it wasn’t his mother who had written it, but his father, who had always been better with tools than words. The fact that Jeremy could continually force unnatural life into the camp’s ancient truck was a gift from his father that he’d only now come to value. As a boy, he had lived in terror that those skills would chain him to grimy hands and grease-stained clothes, to life in a gas station, a town, a way of life he had fought to escape.
“Son,
“You didn’t want your mother and me to come to the airport and see you off, so I didn’t get a chance to see you. I don’t suppose I’d have been able to say what I’ve been thinking about there anyhow. Things move too fast for me in New York, and you probably were all taken up with getting things arranged and saying good-bye to your friends.” (What friends? Jeremy thought to himself. The one person—the one other person he might have wanted to see would never be there again.)
“And with your mother there trying not to cry, I couldn’t have said what I wanted to say. We’ve never had all that much to say to each other that wasn’t cars, or ‘How’s your schoolwork going?’ or ‘That’s really interesting,’ and now I’m sorry. I always though maybe I was the wrong father for you…but that’s water under the bridge. I want you to know that you don’t have to do this. You’re my son, and I’m proud of you. If you’re sick, come home and your mother and I will take care of you. You always have a place here.
“Love, (his father had scratched it out, then written the word again. Probably he feared that if he had to recopy the letter, he’d never send it.)
“Your Dad”
Very gently Jeremy replaced the letter in its sheltering plastic bag. Then he pulled out the small, tattered box with the monogrammed cufflinks and the unopened letter. Jeremy remembered the man to whom he’d given the cufflinks. As always, he was surprised that the box had reached him with the letter and the rejected gift inside.
It would have been a mercy if some official had heard the cufflinks rattling around and stolen the box before it reached him. It was a mercy that Raymond hadn’t thrown the cufflinks at him along with his anger when he learned just how disastrously careless Jeremy had been. “Gifts, always giving me things like I didn’t know how to choose for myself. Well, this last gift you gave me was really a killer, wasn’t it?” Ray had walked out, slamming the door on Jeremy and any chance they’d had for a life together, and all those gifts—except for the deadly one he carried inside him.
Jeremy left the box under the pillow on his cot and stuck the letter into his pocket. Maybe today he’d find the time—or the guts—to open it. Or throw it away.
Or maybe he’d lose it.
He turned back to face the little boy. I do have to be here, he told the ghost of his father. Everything in its proper place. Just as he was.
Automatically, he scanned himself. No lesions. No fever. No faint weariness, no cough, no trace of night sweats. Nothing to worry about.
Yet.
Like so many of the people in his world, Jeremy Harris was HIV-positive. The verdict had surprised the hell out of him, though he supposed it shouldn’t have. His life had been so precisely arranged: the 80-hour weeks where weekends blended into weekdays and when he sometimes lived on the phone so he could make his pile and pay for the place on Fire Island; the weeks and weekends down in the Keys, where the beer was cold, the seafood spicy, and the company—he’d better not think of that…or of how many of his old friends were still alive. You had to walk a very fine line between indifference, which could kill you, and caring too much, which would tear you apart.
The last time he’d visited his old haunts, the Keys had been like a ghost town. No one knew where Raymond was (or maybe he’d told them to keep their mouths shut.) That whole group of writers and artists and smart guys with money had turned into people like his father, no good at words about the real things. The survivors were either drinking themselves into oblivion or, like Jeremy, working to the point of exhaustion while becoming health and diet fanatics.
And for what? To watch their other friends die while waiting for a cure that 98% of them could never afford even if it was discovered? He subscribed to medical journals and followed the latest research on S.I.V.—simian immunodeficiency virus—and the vaccine Harvard Med School had developed, one that protected monkeys for three years. He’d even allowed himself to hope when Johns Hopkins turned up a 43-year-old woman who’d had three healthy children after being diagnosed HIV-positive—and when, try as they might, they couldn’t get infectious HIV from her blood.
Maybe I’m a mutant just like her! he thought desperately. Which, of course, made him feel even more like an outcast from the human race.
He went to Montreal to visit Biochem Pharma, where a new drug, 3TC, in combination with ATZ, showed promising results. He monitored the Glaxo-Wellcome PLC merger with the attention the dying gave to the Last Rites because that had to affect the supply of the AZT he expected to need one day. What good did it do him? All the biotechs had tanked. AZT was more a poison than a cure, and with healthcare costs the way they were…
Of course, as long as he raked in the commissions, he had key man insurance from his company. He hardly thought they’d keep it up (ha! Now there was a good pun!) when he got really sick. And if he changed companies and came down with ARC or full-blown AIDS, there he was with a preexisting condition. When his money finally ran out—his portfolio was only solid, not huge—he’d be out on the street, and that wasn’t Wall Street—and on whatever might be left of Medicaid by that time.
So Jeremy kept fit. Every day he scanned himself for deterioration. As his friends and lovers sickened and died around him, Jeremy realized that he was what researchers called a non-progressor; he might have 10, 15, 20 years yet. One man, infected 17 years ago, still had a normal CD-4 white blood cell count. Maybe Jeremy would get lucky too.
Day after day, he worked, and worked out, and waited either for the disease or a cure. You can’t call that living at all, his psychiatrist said.
At an Audrey Hepburn revival at the Thalia, for God’s sake, a handout told him how she’d starved as a child, working for the Resistance. Until cancer left her too weak to continue, she’d tried to feed kids in Ethiopia.
The very next day, The Wall Street Journal had carried a story on the AIDS epidemic in Zambia and Uganda. If that wasn’t some sort of omen, he didn’t know a thing about market timing. So he’d liquidated his stock positions and parked the money in secure Triple-A bond funds, said good-bye to his trainer, sold his co-op for a good price despite rotten interest rates, and unloaded his beach house. His friends thought he’d gone crazy, his psychiatrist thought he’d gone sane and helped him
negotiate the wilderness of regulations, and his family simply cried and wanted him to come back home where everyone would whisper about “Jeff Harris’s boy, what a shame, so young to go.” Money and some damn good networking had enabled him to hook up with a small relief organization; and so here he was.
He finished his daily checklist. Nothing left out for kids or monkeys to steal. Everything in its proper place, except for the finishing touch. He’d given up the Hermès ties, the custom-tailored suits, the meticulous Manhattan grooming for the cheapest, toughest, coolest clothes he could find, but one grace note remained. From his footlocker, he pulled out a spool of red ribbon, cut off a couple inches, and pinned it to his shirt. The boy’s eyes widened and he held out an eager hand. So Jeremy grinned and cut him an AIDS ribbon too, and out they went.
He began walking through the camp, which seemed like two separate worlds to him—or, actually, three. There was the world inhabited by the camp’s employees: immaculate tents in a cluster, a spotless mess area, the infirmary—it was too small and too easily victimized by the elements to call it a hospital; even infirmary seemed to give it an unearned dignity.
Then there was the world of the Africans: they had come by the dozens, and finally the hundreds, once word got out that another crazy European was passing out free food and medicine, and a small city of mud and thatched huts now completely encircled the world of the camp attendants.
Finally there was that tiny world inhabited only by himself and Elizabeth, a pair of people who didn’t fit in either of the other worlds. Jeremy, whose medical training was limited to a lifesaving badge he earned in swimming class when he was twelve, and Elizabeth, who had been born in Uganda and raised in Europe and didn’t quite belong to either society.
As he passed a huge pile of folded, unused tents, he saw a troop of vervet monkeys edging closer to an extended family of Africans that were warming their banana mash breakfasts over a fire. Hunger had made the monkeys brave, bravery had made them foolish, and Jeremy knew that at least one family was going to be having meat for lunch.
