In conclusion, beautiful as the place looked, it was a failure. It might make a good resort planet, possibly a hospital or asylum recuperation spot. But the Company already owned dozens of those, most with far more spectacular settings than this bland little world. The final designation turned out to be Class R: Cost-inefficient to Exploit.
Even if he now wanted to, Andy felt he could not now return to the Dallas. Not after that vote. Only Willow had cared enough to vote in his favor. She had good qualities, Andy admitted. Among them, loyalty—up to a point. But in the end, the essential superficiality and simple vanity of Willow’s mind, which made her a perfect Playby partner and genial travel companion, had—at least for a T-p—resolved itself. He was sure that she too would get over him in no time.
After one more general communication and requests for six hours for Andy to return on board went unanswered, the Dallas lifted out of orbit. Its golden glint in the cerulean sky lasted but an instant.
*
His own supplies had run out, and although Andy had eaten his fill of the fruits and vegetables around him, he felt weaker and more tired every day. He found himself skimming less, exploring far less, sitting more, falling asleep more, feeling a nearly transcendental peace amid the T-p silence, in the cool nights, the warm days. With this new peace, he hardly ever needed to call on the voice anymore for assurances, for company, although occasionally, as he was awakening from his sixth nap of the day, he would T-p the giggles distantly.
One late afternoon, he awakened with the redSun past zenith, the white-blueSun approaching meridian. He’d been sleeping since the redSundown of the previous day. By his timepiece, that had been a sleep of almost twenty-two regular hours. Even so, he had a difficult time clearing his mind and he could barely lift his head. His vision was spotty, his hearing undermined by a series of constant hollow tones thrumming. His stomach felt cavernously empty.
He suddenly realized that he was starving and was going to die. With what little strength still remained in him, Andy began to cry, sobbing convulsively. He knew that he was being foolish—it would exhaust the last bit of energy left in him. But he was unable to stop himself. His thoughts ran back to his infancy, to the difficulties of being a T-p and the thousands of slights, offenses, insults, and humiliations he’d received over the years in Education and Development, and even later working for the Company. He couldn’t forget the pain of being different. No matter how close he came to anyone during Playby, the truth was he’d always been alone. Truly alone.
Giggle, giggle.
At least he’d heard that sound clearly.
—Go away!—he T-ped.
—Away?—
—Go away! You know. Go away from me.—
—Everywhere—it came back to Andy.—No distinction—
—Can’t you see I’m starving to death!—
Silence. Then,—You not are?—
—No, I still am. But by tomorrow I’ll be not are—
—What’s tomorrow?—the voice asked.
Andy began to explain about time, then he remembered that the voice didn’t know time. Not days, not months, not years.
—Always are—the voice said.—No distinction—it giggled.
—I’m hurt!—Andy tried.—I’ll be not are without—much care—
Another set of misunderstanding T-p exchanges ensued until Andy was completely frustrated, exasperated, and finally before the voice appeared to comprehend him, totally exhausted. Or did it comprehend? He wasn’t sure. He was no longer sure he cared what happened to him anymore. He was so tired. He wanted nothing but to fall asleep, but he fought the feeling, believing that once he did sleep, he’d never wake up.
The last thing Andy remembered clearly was what looked like a twig with sharp thorns blown hard against his legs, puncturing his left ankle. He recalled watching his by now much-thinned blood seeping out through the gash and into the surrounding grass and earth. He looked at it objectively, uncaring, really. It didn’t hurt. Then Andy went under.
*
His recovery was slow: it took weeks. When he was finally able to stay awake long enough to see, hear, and think clearly, he realized that he was immobilized. The fingers of both hands and toes of both feet through his thorn-ripped shoes had been transformed somehow into roots that were deeply, safely, comfortingly anchored into the ground, roots through which he now understood he would be fed, clothed, warmed, cared for.
—Who are you?—he T-p’ed a question.
—No distinction—the voice replied.
—Then…then…Who am I?—he asked. And even as he formulated the thought, the question seemed utterly academic.
—No distinction—the voice replied.
As he knew it would answer. Then, as he knew it would, it giggled.
—No distinction—Andy repeated.
Andy giggled and giggled and giggled.
Love and the She-Lion
I was told this story at the Windhoek Airport in Namibia several years ago while awaiting a very late connection from Salisbury back to the States. I’d been in Zimbabwe trying to track down some facts on the middle, “lost” African years of a British author whose biography I was planning to write.
The narrator of the tale was a cinematographer named Dale from the Tampa Bay area who’d worked in Namibia as part of a National Geographic Society film team shooting a TV documentary on the Etosha Pan wildlife preserve. Dale was one of those wiry, tense, perpetually tanned women you can spot all over African and South American airport and hotel lobbies, former Vassar and Smith valedictorians who’d discovered that life in the States was too small for their wide aspirations. Despite their formidable appearance, these women are usually great talkers, smart, funny, and confident enough to be able to make instant if temporary friendships with single men traveling alone who make little attempt to hit on them.
Dale and I shared close to two hours of drinks, jokes about the airline’s efficiency, and conversation at Windhoek Airport while our plane was being checked out and refueled. She was the very last of her team to be kicked out of Namibia by its then newly installed, comic book Marxist government, a honor she admitted was due entirely to her wiliness, her perseverance, and her desperate desire to get a bit of extra film shot long after the rest of the crew had packed up and shipped out.
This is what Dale told me:
I suppose you’ve heard a lot of stories about Africa while you were here. Africa is full of weird, awful stories. One especially strange incident happened up around Tsumeb a couple of months ago concerning a woman and a lioness. We were shooting around there and it was one of those stories that makes you stop and think about what it means to yourself, to your life. Especially if you’re a woman, and particularly if you’re a woman on your own, and by your own choice. There were three women on our shooting crew and we discussed it endlessly, trying to find in it some sign, some significance. Whether the men on the crew talked about it among themselves as much, I don’t know, and at the time I didn’t think to ask. All of a sudden I feel I have to share it with a man. Not with a man I know well, but with someone who’ll be objective about it—if that’s at all possible. I’m not sure if I’m completely clear about this, but here goes. I’d met the woman involved only once, on her wedding day. And I just found out a week ago the circumstances that led up to the wedding and to the incident. Partly from her husband, and partly from the local witch doctor. He’d been helpful to the crew while we were scouting around for locations and shooting and it seems that he was in on the story almost from the beginning.
The land around the village of Ohopoho is ancient savanna. Or rather new savanna replacing an ancient one. The farmers still practice slash-and-burn agriculture for the most part, and because of the mild prevailing southerlies, over the centuries, the people there have learned how and when to ring their fires so that land isn’t overburned or the soil leached. The local crops are sugar beet, barley, a rough sort of milo wheat, tubers that easily resist the prevalent droughts, tr
ee nuts, and ground nuts. The people also herd cattle, goats, and pigs.
The tribal people aren’t rich really, but compared to most of Africa, they’re well off, possibly because the Koaoka Veldt is underpopulated. White men have been on that coast since the Portuguese landed there in the fifteenth century. Portuguese, English, German, and Boers have held large tracts of coastland for years. Their coffee and cocoa plantations are extensive and productive and many villagers have enough leisure to sometimes work the plantations for extra pay. As a result, a few towns there—Otavi, Tsumeb, Ohopoho—have large, well-stocked weekly markets.
Even so, the people remain almost untouched by modern conveniences. Few telephones or electricity. Old Land Rovers are the most commonly seen motor vehicle and roads are few, meandering, and often washed away by sudden storms.
The people are healthy and well-fed, and because they’ve never been conquered by whites, they’re rather proud and tenacious of their traditions. A century ago Arab merchants established several trading posts, but while the locals adopted some of their customs and clothing and cooking methods, Islam never took there as it did in other parts of the continent. Neither missionaries nor politicians much affect these people’s lives.
The men of the Etosha Pan consider themselves warriors and hunters, although they hunt little and usually only as part of specific initiations and rituals. The bulk of their meat is from livestock.
The women of the area are somewhat more independent than one usually finds in Africa. They inherit matrilineally and even hold minor ceremonial offices. But while they can own property and smaller animals, the women aren’t supposed to own cattle. Most marriages, therefore, are important financial mergers, where a female’s inherited cattle dowry is mixed into her husband’s often far smaller herd, making him a richer man.
This particular woman I want to speak of was the fifth daughter of a prosperous native farmer and herder, and upon his death she received no animals. But at her mother’s remarriage to another tribesman soon after, the young woman inherited a second piece of farmland and enough movable property to hire help to farm it. Although she’d been asked to move in with several of her older sisters as co-wife to their husbands, even as a young teenager, she had refused.
She was a beautiful girl and people said that she’d been spoiled from an early age by her aging, near-doddering father—which is rare anywhere in Africa. As a result, her marriage age had come and gone three times. More than a dozen suitors had camped on the edges of her property. None of these marriage offers had been acceptable to her. A clever woman, she’d managed to break down each negotiation at some crucial point—the potential husband had two other wives, he drank too much, he’d never sired a child—leaving each suitor to think that he still might have a chance of winning her. In hopes that the woman would continue to think favorably of his offer, each warrior had returned to his own farm or village, leaving behind a gift of a kid, a calf, a piglet, for her father. Since her father was dead and her mother remarried, in this way the woman managed to collect a small wealth of livestock, and these proved sufficiently fertile that she was soon owner of a small flock of mixed animals. In fact, by these stratagems, at the time she was fifteen, she was the wealthiest single woman in the Etosha.
On market days, she would arrive in Ohopoho with her several boy employees, each laden with produce to sell. Because she was younger and single, her assigned market stall was on the undesirable northernmost end of the women’s mart, close to the men’s larger stalls. Despite the second-class nature of the location, the woman had taken this particular stall by force the very first time she arrived to sell at the market. It was a spot mostly kept empty to demarcate the men’s and women’s markets and so her brazen seizure had scandalized her sisters, aunts, and female cousins, who were even more annoyed by the excellent business she did at this key locale from her very first market day.
Seldom did her boys return home with unsold produce, and more often than not, the woman left the market with new bangles she’d purchased at the men’s stalls—mostly of beaten copper and brass, but sometimes of silver and even gold. Often she earned enough money to buy another calf or kid. Her special love was for finely woven silk, and she displayed the gaudy rich cloths about her stall and on her body at every opportunity, which only furthered her general allure.
Unlike the other stall-owning women, and because she was unmarried, the woman wore no veil, not even the meaningless diaphanous ones some affected. A silk scarf embroidered with silver sometimes covered her head and shoulders, leaving her face visible to all passersby to lust after her. Equally shocking to her female relations, she offered homemade beer from a large calabash to some of her better male customers, and would herself sip demurely along with them, further inflaming their desire and their fantasies of owning such a remarkable looking and acting—and such a rich—woman.
One would suppose all this was being done to gain her a very wealthy husband, and indeed after market days, young warriors would gnash their teeth and mumble as she stalked off, her new purchases of goods and livestock in tow—back to her farm.
It wasn’t a local warrior or farmer, however, who finally captured the fancy of the woman of Ohopoho, but a stranger. His name was Veato, and he hailed from Porto de Alexandre, just across the border in Angola. Perhaps that might explain the greenish cast to his light eyes and his light pigmentation—the color, they said, of a newly whelped lion cub. So many centuries of white and black intermarried in Porto de Alexandre that no one seemed certain anymore exactly what their own ethnic background was.
Veato worked as a manager on one of the largest cocoa plantations near Tsumeb, and while many Etosha women considered him deformed because of his high color, the woman of Ohopoho was herself fair-skinned and immediately saw him as her equal, and the likely father of her children. Although Veato seldom bought anything at her stall on market days, she always called him over for a taste of beer and plied him with honeyed ground nuts. They would laugh and drink beer in full view of the marketplace.
The woman’s aunts and sisters scolded her every chance they got. Wasn’t Veato a stranger? And sickly hued? Where were his cattle? His goats? Where was his farm? His grazing land? Who were his sisters and brothers? His aunts and uncles? He was the least fitting husband for such a wealthy woman.
She laughed at their talk, telling them that Veato was better than any warrior they knew. His wealth was greater, although it lay not in cattle and land, but in bank-notes in a hut called a bank in Tsumeb. Besides which, Veato was educated—he held the esteemed magic of words. He could read and understand the signs on a book or newspaper as well as any plantation owner. Her relatives were old-fashioned: If Veato were to become her husband, she would have wealth surpassing that of the chiefs of Otavi and Ohopoho together.
Months later, when two of the boys in the woman’s employ returned to their family farms, they told how soon after she and Veato had been seen laughing and drinking beer together, the stranger began appearing at the woman’s farm. He would arrive every seven days, the young brothers said, laughing to tell it, as though he were the postman who drove into Tsumeb from Windhoek once a week. From this his detail, the brothers, their families, and soon all of the woman’s neighbors came to call Veato “the Postman.”
Word travels fast—usually in whispers on market day—and soon no young warrior arrived at the edge of the woman’s property with memorized speeches and cattle, or with elderly male relatives intent upon bargaining for her hand.
Equally soon, the fruit of the Postman’s deliveries were evident when the woman appeared in Ohopoho on market day. First one, then another boy child was born to her. As indicative of the couple’s new status was the fact that Veato seldom came to market day anymore, and when he did, he no longer spent the afternoon at the woman’s stall. After a brief greeting, he joined the men gambling in old Bl’oma’s stall or looking over cattle for sale or competing in games of sport—running with quoits, leaping, and whirling the
bull’s pizzle.
Even the woman’s relatives had come to accept the odd marriage as the true one, although no ceremony had taken place. Hadn’t the woman gone her own way even as a child? Hadn’t she as a young girl always hoed yams in her own patch before working the family plot? Hadn’t she milked cattle when she was ready, though the poor beasts might be fainting from pain? Her life belonged to her: She had no father, and no brother or uncle had ever been able to get her to obey him.
So it was with some surprise that the witch doctor watched the woman approach his enclosure one morning. Behind her was a boy leading a newly foaled calf in a halter. Doubtless the woman intended it as payment for services to be performed.
I call him a witch doctor, and you probably are imagining some wizened old creature with chunks of bone through his nostrils and ears, garbed in rotting pelts. Not so. He was a young man—the role is hereditary—and among his storehouse of herbs and other homeopathic remedies, he also kept a considerable amount of medical supplies obtained in Windhoek. Nothing too specialized or sophisticated, of course, but as much as any other country doctor might have—analgesics, antibiotics, diuretics, antifungals, and surgical instruments. This aided his medical—and most frequently called upon—practice among the Etosha. His other and more convoluted practice wasn’t so much forensic as spiritual. In that respect, he was what we would call a psychologist, except that he not only discovered the causes of depression and schizophrenia and so on, but it was also his job to name the specific spirit harassing his patient, and to somehow heal the broken or distorted link between that spirit and the patient.
Twelve O'Clock Tales Page 9
