Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

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CONTENTS

Author's Note

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

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Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Lines from William Butler Yeats's “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” from

Georgie Yeats.

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[Back to Table of Contents]

To Floyd J. Lasley, Jr., Our mild Irish Godfather

[Back to Table of Contents]

Author's Note

Ashe has on other book-length projects, my editor, David Hartwell, worked very closely with me on the

final version of this manuscript. I wish to thank both him and his family for boarding me over the

three-day period that he and I devoted to an especially intense scrutiny of my work.

I also owe a great deal to my wife, Jeri Bishop, for her support, encouragement, and

suggestions—during both the protracted research that this novel entailed and the many months of actual

writing.

No Enemy But Timeis a work of fiction. The country Zarakal does not exist on any map, but I imagine

its geographic dimensionsroughly coextensive with those of Kenya. However, the reader may not

automatically suppose that Zarakal and Kenya are historically, sociologically, and politically identical.

They are not, nor were they intended to be.

Likewise, the protohuman hominid that my characters refer to asHomo zarakalensis is a fictional

construct. I have created this spurious ancestral human as a means to a particular dramatic and narrative

end.

For the most part, however, my paleoanthropological nomenclature conforms to the usage of those

scientists currently struggling to solve the riddle of human origins. Although I urge readers not to regard

this work as a textbook on hominid evolution, I have not deliberately misconstrued the enormous

amounts of data available to those fascinated by the topic.

Debates about classifications and interpretations will undoubtedly continue to rage. A decade from now,

possibly even less, the terms designatingHomo habilis andAustralopithecus afarensis may be

taxonomic fossils—just as the bones they are intended to identify are virtually all that remain of the small,

bipedal creatures who pioneered the frontiers of our humanity so many million years ago.

—Michael Bishop

Pine Mountain, Georgia

June 23, 1981

[Back to Table of Contents]

Prologue

"Next Slide, Please"

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I time-traveled in spirit long before I did so in bodily fact. Until the moment of my departure, you see,

my life had been a slide show of dreams divided one from another by many small darknesses of wakeful

dread and anticipation. Sometimes the dreams and the darknesses alternated so rapidly that I was unable

to tell them apart. An inability to distinguish between waking and dreaming may be an index of madness,

or it may be a gift. After more than thirty years of trying to integrate the two into a coherent pattern, I

understand that it is, or was, my gift.

When I was four, my father Hugo brought home a slide projector from the BX at McConnell Air Force

Base in Wichita, Kansas. This was a machine with a circular tray for the slides, and if you kept clicking

the changer, eventually the same scenes—the same past moments—would flash into fleeting prominence

over and over again. In a way, then, each slide wheel was a time machine; and the procession of images

on either the wall or the hanging linen sheet was a cyclical tour of bygone days.

To me, though, it was often more fun to have gaps in the tour, empty tray slots that translated into

windows of blinding white illumination—for my father, who spoke English with a noticeable Spanish

accent, liked to make up silly captions for those vacant squares:

“Moby Deek's backside!”

“Frosty the Snowman at a Koo Kloox Klan rally!”

“A polar bear swimmin’ in a vat of vanilla ice cream!”

My sister Anna and I would shout out captions of our own, most of them even more juvenile than

Hugo's, and our mother Jeannette, who appreciated continuity, would urge him to get on with the show.

She tried to keep the circular trays filled with slides—each one held a hundred—so that there would be

relatively few occasions for nonsense. It was not that she lacked a sense of humor, but that for her the

wheel of slides represented a living world, a mandala of bright, recapturable experience. Her fun lay in

reexperiencing each brilliant epiphany in the show.

After Hugo was transferred from McConnell to Francis E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and

after Jeannette went to work for one of Cheyenne's daily newspapers as a book columnist and feature

writer, our family took fewer photographs. The slide trays still came out on birthdays, holidays, and

Jeannette's occasional moments of nostalgia—but once you had endured the programs four or five times,

they were as predictable as television situation comedies. “John-John Pointing at Cows” always

preceded “Jeannette Hauling John-John Out of Pasture” and always followed “John-John Bundled for

October Walk.” You could count on this sequence.

From the fleeting darknesses between changer clicks, I began to create my own private “slides.” In fact,

after my eighth birthday, I usually fell into a light trance whenever the projection equipment was

operating; I dropped out of the here-and-now into a past even older than the one flashing by on the wall.

Already I was notorious within my family as a dreamer—not the spaced-out, chin-on-fist variety

common to most classrooms, but a rare, visionary kind of dreamer—and I am now convinced that

Jeannette's apparent fondness for our slide programs was in part a function of her well-meaning desire to

tie me to reality. She wanted to reinforce my allegiance to the Monegal family by impressing upon me the

indelibility, the vividness, of my tenure among the three of them.

Each slide wheel, as I have said, was a time machine (a time machine with a comfortably circumscribed

range), but it was also a yoke to the status quo. By ignoring the Monegal Family Past and investing each

moment of darkness between the slides with a freight of private meaning, I was subverting my mother's

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intentions. I was distancing myself emotionally as well as temporally.

When I was ten, I played a joke that in some ways foreshadowed the principal rebellion of my

adolescence.

Hugo, a noncommissioned minion of the Strategic Air Command, had just been sent from Cheyenne to

Guam. Even though there were facilities for dependents on the island, he had gone unaccompanied—not

only to decrease the length of his tour, but to honor the demands of Anna (who was happy at her current

school) and Jeannette (who had begun to earn a respectable paycheck from her reviewing and feature

writing). That no one had consulted me about my stake in the matter was no big deal because my dreams

were the same wherever I happened to be. I was trying to learn more about them, though, primarily by

going to the library and poring over magazines devoted to either travel or natural history. With Hugo

absent, in fact, the three of us still in Cheyenne seemed to be riding a dozen centrifugal interests outward

from the nuclear heart of the family.

My joke? Well, right before Christmas that year I went to the closet where we kept our slide equipment

and removed the boxes containing the trays. Back in my room I spent a good thirty minutes randomly

rearranging slides, leaving gaps in the sequence and slotting several transparencies sideways or

upside-down. “John-John Bundled for October Walk” ended up following a topsy-turvy “Jeannette

Enjoying Beach at Cádiz,” while “Anna Watching Semana Santa Procession in Seville” gave way to a

sideways-slotted “Grandfather Rivenbark Checking Out Customers at Old Van Luna Grocery.” Then I

returned the trays to their boxes and the boxes to their closet shelves.

On Christmas Eve Jeannette told Anna to fetch the slides and set up for another trip into the Monegal

Family Past. Anna, now fourteen, obeyed, and we gathered in the dining room. I turned off the lights,

Anna clicked her magic changer, and a kind of wacky chaos ensued.

Jeannette's reaction to my vandalism was not what I had expected. After muttering “What the hell” into

her cupped hand, she gave me an appraising look, put her fingers into my wiry hair, and pulled my head

into the pit of her arm. Although she would not let go, I could tell she was not angry, merely amused by

the form my defiance had taken. Anna was the one who got angry. She railed about the time it would

take to restore the slides to their sacrosanct order, and she refused to continue the show.

“Damn you, Johnny-boy!” she exclaimed. “You're going to straighten this out yourself. Don't expect any

help fromme .”

“Oh, Anna, it's all right,” our mother replied. “Go on to the next one.”

“But, Mamma, he's mixed them all up.”

Jeannette laughed. “But we know what's what, don't we? Let's just run through the lot and enjoy them as

they come up.”

“Youcan 'tenjoy them. Somebody who'd never seen them before wouldn't know what was going on.

They don't tell a story anymore, they're just bits and pieces of ... ofone big mess .”

“But, Anna, the story's in our heads. It won't hurt to show them out of sequence. Let's not worry about

some hypothetical somebody who doesn't even know who we are.”

“Mamma,I 'mnot going to put them back the way they belong.”

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“I don't want you to. I'll do it. It won't be hard. They're all numbered, anyway. So let's just go ahead, all

right?”

Sullenly, then, Anna showed the slides in all their helter-skelter, heels-over-head, gap-ridden glory, and I

was not scolded. And Jeannette had spoken truthfully: The storywas in our heads. Each slide evoked its

own context. I paid attention to the program—the immutable program implicit even in this crazy

shuffling—as I had not paid attention to any of our slides in a very long time. The Monegal Family

Experience had taken on new life. My shuffling of images managed to convey nuances that linear

sequence could not really communicate. Each click of the changer was a revision and a gloss.

I put my head on my mother's breast believing that she had finally given in to the randomness of “reality.”

But then I recalled her saying, “They're all numbered, anyway,” and I saw in the corner of each

cardboard mounting the numerals she had scrupulously, minutely, inked there. These were a hedge

against forgetfulness, entropy, chaos—but they seriously undercut my appreciation of my mother's

surprising tolerance of my prank. It was easy to be generous of spirit when you could instantly (or at least

quickly) reorder the world to your liking. An uncharitable insight on a chilly Christmas Eve in Wyoming.

Later, when I was a teenager, I rebelled in a more vehement way against another of Jeannette's

ill-advised attempts to impose order on my random experience. And both of us suffered.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter One

Lolitabu National Park, Zarakal

July 1986 to February 1987

Fornearly eight months Joshua lived in a remote portion of Zarakal's Lolitabu National Park, where an

old man of the Wanderobo tribe taught him how to survive without tap water, telephones, or cans of

imported tuna. Although hunting was illegal in the country's national parks, President Tharaka granted a

special dispensation, for the success of the White Sphinx Project would depend to an alarming extent on

Joshua's ability to take care of himself in the Early Pleistocene.

Despite having lived his entire life among the agricultural Kikembu people (Zarakal's largest single ethnic

group), Thomas Babington Mubia had never given up the hunting arts of the Wanderobo. In 1934 he had

taught a callow Alistair Patrick Blair (today a world-renowned paleoanthropologist) how to catch a

duiker barehanded and to dress out its carcass with stone tools chipped into existence on the spot. Now,

over half a century later, Blair wanted his old teacher to communicate these same skills to Joshua—for,

although considerably slower and not quite so sharp-eyed, Babington had lost none of his basic skills as

stalker, slayer, and flint-knapper.

Babington—as everyone who knew him well called him—was tall, sinewy, and grizzled. In polite

company he wore khaki shorts, sandals, and any one of a number of different loud sports shirts that Blair

had given him, but in the bush he frequently opted for near or total nudity. Welts, scars, wheals, and

tubercules pebbled his flesh, in spite of which he appeared in excellent health for a man belonging torika

ria Ramsay , an age-grade group that had undergone circumcision during the ascension of Ramsay

MacDonald's coalition cabinet in England. For Joshua, the old man's incidental bumps and cuts were less

troubling than a deliberate vestige of that long-ago circumcision rite.

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Ngwati, the Kikembu called it. This was a piece of frayed-looking skin that hung beneath Babington's

penis like the pull tab on a Band-Aid wrapper. It hurt Joshua to look at this “small skin.” He tried not to

let his eyes shift to Babington's crotch, and, for reasons other than Western modesty, he did his

darnedest not to shed his shorts or make water within the old man's sight. He was half afraid that to be

looked upon naked by Babington would be to acquireNgwati himself.

Until his circumcision Joshua's mentor had attended a mission school run by Blair's Protestant Episcopal

parents, and he knew by heart a score of psalms, several of Shakespeare's soliloquies, and most of the

poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a great favorite of the old Wanderobo's. Sometimes, in fact, he disconcerted

Joshua by standing naked in the night and booming out in a refined British accent whichever of these

memory-fixed passages most suited his mood. In July, their first month in the bush, Babington most

frequently declaimed the lesser known of two pieces by Poe entitled “To Helen":

"But now, at length, dear Dian sank / Into a western couch / of thunder-cloud; / And thou, a

ghost, amid the / entombing trees / Didst glide away. Only thine eyes / remained. / They would not

go—they never yet / have gone. / Lighting my lonely pathway home / that night, / They have not

left me (as my hopes / have) since.”

Sitting in the tall acacia in which he and Babington had built a tree house with a stout door, Joshua looked

down and asked his mentor if he had ever been married.

“Oh, yes. Four times all at once, but the loveliest and best was Helen Mithaga.”

“What happened?”

“During the war, the second one, I walked to Bravanumbi from Makoleni, my home village, and enlisted

for service against the evil minions of Hitler in North Africa. I was accepted into a special unit and fought

with it for two years. When I returned to Makoleni, three of my wives had divorced me by returning to

their families. I was Wanderobo; they were Kikembu. Although Helen was also Kikembu, she had

waited.

“We loved each other very much. Later, a year after the war, she was poisoned by a sorcerer who

envied me the medals I had won and also my Helen's Elysian beauty. I lost her to the world of spirits,

which we callngoma . On nights like this one, dry and clear, I know that she has fixed the eyes of her

soul upon me. Therefore, I speak to her everlasting world with another man's poignant words.”

This story touched Joshua. He could not regard Babington as a ridiculous figure even when, during the

arid month of August, he stood one-footed in the dark and recited,

"Hear the sledges with the bells—/Silver bells! /What a world of merriment their melody foretells! /

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, /In the icy air of night! ... ”

Nights were never icy in Lolitabu, which was tucked away in Zarakal's southwestern corner. Instead of

bells-on-bobtails you heard elephants trumpeting, hyenas laughing, and maybe even poachers whispering

to one another. Babington took pains to insure that Joshua and he never ran afoul of these men, for

although some were woebegone amateurs, trying to earn enough money to eat, others were ruthless

predators who would kill to avoid detection.

The big cats in the park worried Joshua far more than the poachers did. They did not worry Babington.

He would walk the savannah as nonchalantly as a man crossing an empty parking lot. His goal was not to

discomfit Joshua, but to school him in the differences among several species of gazelle and antelope,

some of which had probably not even evolved by Early Pleistocene times. Joshua tried to listen, but

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found himself warily eying the lions sprawled under trees on the veldt.

“We do not have an appetizing smell in their nostrils,” Babington told Joshua. “The fetor of human beings

is repugnant to lions.”

“So they will not attack us unless we provoke them?”

Babington pushed a partial plate out of his mouth with his tongue, then drew it back in. “A toothless lion

or one gradually losing its sense of smell might be tempted to attack. Who knows?”

“Then why do we come out here without weapons and walk the grasslands like two-legged gods?”

Said Babington pointedly, “That is not how I am walking.”

* * * *

During this extended period in the Zarakali wilderness Joshua dreamed about the distant past no more

than once or twice a month, and these dreams were similar in a hazy way to his daily tutorials with

Babington. Why had his spirit-traveling episodes given way to more conventional dreaming? Well, in a

sense, his survival training with Babington was a waking version of the dreamfaring he had done by

himself his entire life. With his eyes wide open, he was isolated between the long-ago landscape of his

dreams and the dreams themselves. He stood in the darkness separating the two realities.

* * * *

One day Babington came upon Joshua urinating into a clump of grass not far from their tree house.

Joshua was powerless to halt the process and too nonplused to direct it away from his mentor's gaze. At

last, the pressure fully discharged, he shook his cock dry, eased it back into his jockey shorts, buttoned

up, and turned to go back to the tree house.

“You are not yet a man,” the Wanderobo informed him.

Joshua's embarrassment mutated into anger. “It's not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but it gets me

by!”

“You have not been bitten by the knife.”

It struck Joshua that Babington was talking about circumcision. A young African man who had not

undergone this rite was officially still a boy, whatever his age might be.

“But I'm an American, Babington.”

“In this enterprise you are an honorary Zarakali, and you are too old to live any longer in thenyuba .”

Thenyuba , Joshua knew, was the circular Kikembu house in which women and young children lived.

“Babington!”

But Babington was adamant. It was unthinkable that any adult male representing all the peoples of

Zarakal should proceed with a mission of this consequence—the visiting of thengoma of the spirit

world—without first experiencingirua , the traditional rite of passage consecrating his arrival at manhood.

If Joshua chose not to submit to the knife (which Babington himself would be happy to wield), then

Babington would go home to Makoleni and White Sphinx would have to carry on without his blessing.

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On a visit to the park in early September, Blair learned of this ultimatum and of Joshua's decision to

accede to it—so long as Joshua could impose a condition of his own.

“I don't want a Band-Aid string like Babington's,” he told the Great Man. “I think I can put up with the

pain and the embarrassment, but you've got to spare me that goddamn little casing pull.”

Although less than six feet tall and possessed of a pair of watery blue eyes whose vision had recently

begun to deteriorate (a circumstance insufficient to make him wear glasses), Blair was still an imposing

figure. His white mustachios and the sun-baked dome of his forehead and pate gave him the appearance

of a walrus that had somehow blustered into the tropics and then peremptorily decided to make the

region its home. He seemed to be swaggering even when sitting on the sticky upholstery of a Land

Rover's front seat, and his voice had the mellow resonance of a bassoon. In the past ten years his

appealing ugly-uncle mug had graced the covers of a dozen news magazines and popular scientific

journals, and for a thirteen-week period three years ago he had been the host of a PBS program about

human evolution entitledBeginnings , an effort that had rekindled the old controversy between

paleoanthropologists and the so-called scientific creationists and that had incidentally served to make

Blair's name a household word in even the smallest hamlets in the United States. By now, though, Joshua

was used to dealing with the Great Man, and he had no qualms about voicing his complaints about

Babington's plans for the circumcision rite.

Blair assured Joshua that educated Kikembu, especially Christians, also regardedNgwati with distaste,

and that Babington would not try to make him keep the “small skin” if Joshua were vigorously opposed

to it.

“I am,” said Joshua, but he neatly parried the Great Man's many well-meaning proposals for

sidestepping the circumcision rite altogether. He felt he owed Babington, and he wanted to earn the old

man's respect.

Apprised of Joshua's intentions, Babington declared that the ceremony would take place two days

hence, in the very grove where he and his protégé had their tree house. Blair then informed Joshua that in

order to prove himself he must not show any fear prior to the cutting or cry out in pain during it. Such

behavior would result in disgrace for himself and his sponsors. Moreover, to lend the rite legitimacy,

Babington had sent messages to several village leaders and asked Blair to invite some of the Kikembu

from the outpost village of Nyarati as onlookers. Once the knife glinted, they would applaud Joshua's

steadfastness or, if he did not bear up, ridicule his public cowardice.

“Onlookers!”

“It's traditional, I'm afraid. Of what point are the strength and beauty of a leopard if no one ever sees

them?”

“Of considerable point, if you're the leopard. Besides, we're not talking about leopards. We're talking

about my one and only reproductive organ. Onlookers be damned!”

“They're for purposes of verification, Joshua.”

“Maybe Babington ought to circumcise a leopard, Dr. Blair. I'd love to see them verifythat .”

“Now, now,” said Alistair Patrick Blair. “Tsk-tsk.”

* * * *

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Joshua spent the night before hisirua at the park's sprawling Edwardian guest lodge with Blair. At dawn

he bathed himself in a tub mounted on cast-iron lion's paws, donned a white linen robe, and, in company

with the paleoanthropologist, set off for his rendezvous with Babington aboard a Land Rover driven by a

uniformed park attendant.

They arrived in the acacia grove shortly after eight o'clock and found it teeming with young people from

Nyarati, both men and women. The women were singing spiritedly, and the boisterous gaiety of the entire

crowd seemed out of proportion to its cause, the trimming of an innocent foreskin. Blair pulled off

Joshua's robe and pointed him to the spot where the old Wanderobo would perform the surgery.

“You're not to look at Babington, Joshua. Don't try to watch the cutting, either.”

“I thought that would be part of proving my manhood.”

“No. Rather than being required, it's prohibited.”

“Thanks be to Ngai for small mercies.”

Naked and shivering, he entered the clearing beneath the tree house, sat down on the matted grass, and

averted his face from the ladder that Babington would soon be descending. Blair, his aide, could offer

him no physical assistance until the rite was concluded.

The songs of the Kikembu women, the bawdy masculine repartee at his back, and the anxious

hiccupping of his heart isolated him from the reality of what was happening. This was not happening to

him. Only, of course, it was.

Then Babington was there, kneeling before him with a knife, and Joshua put both fists to the right side of

his neck, placed his chin on one fist, and stared out into the savannah. The cutting began. Joshua

clenched his teeth and tightened his fists. Doggedly refusing to yip or whimper, he caught sight of a pair of

tourist minibuses rolling over the steppe from the vicinity of the guest lodge. That morning while boarding

the Land Rover, he recalled, he had seen them parked inside a courtyard next to the lodge. Somehow

the tour guide had learned of the approaching ceremony. When the minibuses pulled abreast of the acacia

grove, clouds of dust drifting away behind them, Joshua wanted to scream.

The faces in the windows of the two grimy vehicles belonged primarily to astonished Caucasians, many

of them elderly women in multicolored head scarves, out-of-fashion pillbox hats, or luxuriant wigs much

too youthful for their wearers. The cutting momentarily ceased. Passengers from both vans dismounted at

the outer picket of trees and filtered inward to stand behind the swaying and ululating Kikembu women.

“Jesus,” Joshua murmured.

“Hush,” cautioned Babington. “Or I will deprive you of much future pleasure and many descendants.”

A portly, middle-aged tour guide with a florid complexion used a megaphone to make himself heard

over the singing and hand-clapping Africans.

The cutting had begun again. Joshua shut out the man's spiel to concentrate on the waves of pain

radiating through him from the focus of the knife.

The eyes of the female tourist nearest the guide, Joshua noticed, had grown huge behind her thick-lensed

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Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

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