No Enemy But Time

Chapter Fourteen

The night exploded. I ascended from my dream to find Genly stretched out on the hilltop not more than five or six feet away. My pistol was not in my holster but wrapped about two of the unfortunate habiline’s fingers. I crawled to him in the dark—the moon had long since gone down—and discovered that although he had shot himself through the lungs, he was still conscious, still painfully breathing. His black eyes, tiny pools of ink in a cadaverous face, stared up at me with neither recrimination nor recognition.

As I eased the.45 out of his limp hand, I made a clumsy attempt to read his pulse.

Curiosity killed this cat, I thought.

Another portion of me replied, Curiosity and your own goddamn stupidity, Kampa.

I could have cried. What restrained me was my terror of the Minids, who scrambled from their hovels or crept cautiously toward me from their resting places on the cold hillside. They encircled me and their dying comrade, but did not venture beyond an imaginary barrier about ten feet away. Helen and Emily were the only exceptions to this superstitious timidity. Without waiting to assess the others’ reactions they glided like wraiths to my side and knelt with me over Genly’s prostrate form. Although I expected moans and teeth-gnashing from them, their behavior, despite their bewilderment, was exemplary, low-keyed and seemly—as if they understood that an unrestrained outpouring of grief or rage would further traumatize the dying male.

At last, when Emily put her lips to her husband’s furrowed forehead, I did cry. The habilines apparently had no tears—not for emotions, anyway—and their dry-eyed faces ringing us about seemed a shadow-gallery of gargoyles and carven masks. I was a stranger here. Then the faithless lady lifted Genly’s hand and with a kind of reminiscent tenderness held it between her thighs. Genly shifted his gaze, and a froth of blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth.

“Genly, Genly, I’m sorry—”

I do not remember all that went through my mind then or shortly afterwards, but my foremost thought was that Genly was suffering. I ought to put the.45 to his temple and pull the trigger.

Technologically disadvantaged, the Minids did not understand the mechanical operation of firearms. Few of them, however, doubted that my automatic was a potent death-dealer. Even Genly in his curiosity and presumption had understood that much; he had simply not counted on dealing that fatal card to himself.

So when I raised the Colt to his head, the Minids grunted their disapproval even as they cowered away into the darkness.

Beside me, Emily put one lank, hairy arm around her husband’s head, while Helen, angry, made insistent chattering noises and jostled my gun hand. I engaged the pistol’s safety and backed away.

“He can’t recover, Helen. There’s no way Genly’s ever going to be well again. You’ve got to let me ease him along, ladies. All I want to do is ease him along.”

Helen ceased chattering and stared at me. Under the implications of that stare, I withered. Shot down by an Eolithic princess who popped the heads of tree mice between her fingers and performed most of her excretory functions in public. Even though I believed then, and still believe today, that Genly deserved the merciful blitz of a bullet to the brain, I withered. Emily and Helen were holding out for life when the choice was not between life and death, but between a quick death and a needlessly protracted one.

Because they would not let me shoot Genly, he would have to modulate by painful degrees toward his inevitable dying. That process was not one I was going to be able to watch.

“Listen, Helen—”

When she jostled my hand again, I stood up, removed the clip from my pistol, scattered cartridges right and left, and held the weapon before me like a defanged cobra, a creature no less hateful for having been rendered harmless. The night was chilly, probably no more than fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit; and, half-naked to the stars, I was a candidate for either pneumonia or hypothermia. I wanted a good warm, woolen blanket and a bottle of whiskey or ouzo. My tears were streaming, and I tried to staunch them with my forearms and the back of my wrist.

Goddamn rod, I thought. You’ve turned poor Genly into his own assassin. You’ve made me an accomplice….

I stumbled away from the dying habiline and the two Minid women. The other members of the band, wearing expressions of imbecilic incomprehension, reeled back to let me by, and I began circling a small section of the hilltop, winding my body about itself the way a discus thrower does. At last I caught myself up and hurled my pistol out over the savannah toward Mount Tharaka. It spun away into the night like a stone from a catapult. I was rid of it. This knowledge frightened as well as relieved me. For the sake of a quixotic scruple I had set my entire life at risk. Did Genly, or anyone else, give a damn…?

Genly was a hardy soul. Although he finally fell unconscious, he took all night to die. Considering the nature of his wound, my first-aid kit (a grab bag of bandages, painkillers, and placebos) was powerless to aid or ease him, and I made no second attempt to intervene. Afraid to go too far afield as well as to remain too close at hand, I spent that night hiking up and down the hillside and along its serpentine parapets of stone. At dawn I returned and found only Emily still keeping vigil.

By this time Genly had begun to resemble the mummy that death would make of him. His skin was taut on his bones, his hair brittle and lackluster. When he died, Emily, who knew, made a blood-clabbering keening sound, her head thrown back and her cry half the howl of a canid and half the desperate threnody of a human being. All the Minids came out to listen, and to watch, and to feel the fingers of mutability grapple at the mortal handles of their hearts. One of their own was dead.

Ceremony?

Yes, there was ceremony. To have witnessed it, Alistair Patrick Blair would have given up his post in President Tharaka’s cabinet. To have prevented its cause, I would have foregone the chance to give flesh to my dreams. These were sacrifices that neither Blair nor I had the option of making, however, and the ceremony commemorating Genly’s passage from death to some uncertain transcorporal realm took place in my presence rather than the paleontologist’s.

First, the Minids knew that they must remove the corpse from their city. If they did not, the smell of decomposition would summon vultures, hyenas, and other carrion eaters. Second, the habilines remembered Genly as he had once been. In mourning the rigid, unblinking state into which he had lapsed they also mourned their own mortality. Conscious, or preconscious, our protohuman ancestors suffered an acute tristesse that could only have derived from an intuition of the inevitability of death: “One day Genly’s fate will be mine. What does this mean?”

Not long after sunrise, the women spread out across the steppe and gathered the wild sisal called ol duvai by the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania as well as by their Sambusai cousins in Zarakal. Later the women anointed Genly’s body with the juices of this plant, a natural antiseptic and painkiller. They covered him from head to foot and canted his corpse onto its side in order to reach every part of him.

Wherefore medicine for a dead man? Did they wish to spare him the unknown agonies awaiting the newly dead deeper in the domain of nonexistence?

But the females had played out their role. Genly’s body hair was gummy with sisal juice, his brow a piece of parchment spread with mucilage. Now the males moved in, and I with them. Fortunately no one sought to prohibit or discourage my involvement. As the youngest hunters, Roosevelt and Fred bore the brunt of transporting Genly’s corpse down the hillside to the savannah, but the rest of us helped when the going got particularly treacherous. Beneath New Helensburgh the Minids rested briefly, girding themselves for a trek to the southeast—in the direction of Mount Tharaka, the throne of their world.

The travois on which we had brought the warthog back to our citadel lay at the base of the hill. I signaled to the habilines that, if we still had a good distance to go, Genly should be laid upon the travois.

After debating this matter with glances and subtle eye narrowings, the Minids agreed to my suggestion. I insisted on gripping the forward poles of the sledge and dragging my dead friend’s body to wherever his compatriots wished it to go. Again no one gainsaid me. The other Minids, carrying staves or clubs, acted as outriders, and for approximately three miles we trudged in disorderly procession across the grasslands to a solitary baobab.

Here, to my surprise, Alfie, Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Fred struggled to install the corpse in the tree, as high among the great rootlike branches as they could lodge it without risking their own lives. Exempt from this labor by virtue of age, past service, or (in my case) fatigue, Jomo, Ham, and I looked on. We made ourselves useful by surveying the surrounding countryside for enemies, predatory gatecrashers. At last poor Genly sat slumped in a niche of baobab boughs, and the other Minids, sticky with sisal balm, cascaded to the ground one after another to offer their heartfelt obeisance to the corpse. I expected singing, but there was none until all the Minids except Ham had retreated to a patch of bush nearly a hundred yards from the tree. I withdrew with the majority, but I kept thinking that if a lion or a sabertooth or even a pack of wild dogs caught Ham out there alone, he would soon join Genly in the problematical Never-Never Land of Habiline Heaven.

Then Ham began to sing. His tired old throat gave out a rasping keen that went on and on, focusing the implicit meaning of the entire veldt on the baobab beneath which he stood. I shuddered to hear his song, shuddered to think that I might actually understand the immemorial impulse giving rise to such homage.

Then Ham stopped singing and came sauntering toward us on his bandy legs, a naked, defenseless gnome paradoxically dwindling in stature the farther behind him he left the baobab—as if the reality of his person paled before the ideal embodied in his lofty, sour song.

I then expected the Minids to set out for New Helensburgh, to take back to their women confirmation of Genly’s tree burial. From dust to dust, from treetop to treetop. But even as the day drew on past noon, we remained in our blind of scrub plants and gall acacias. To stop the throbbing in my temples, I sat down and hung my head between my knees. Roosevelt and Fred paced back and forth in the undergrowth, heedless of the heat, impatient for a break in our vigil. Excitedly they signaled this break themselves by hooting softly and crowding forward to the edge of the thicket.

Beneath the baobab there had appeared a leopard, a long, handsome animal with caved-in flanks and sapphire-bright eyes. Although primarily a nocturnal hunter, this leopard—respectfully contemptuous of the dangers posed by the afternoon activity of its cousins, the lions—was answering Ham’s midday summons. It glanced about the landscape, gave a tentative growl, then flowed up the trunk of the baobab with the grace of a python. Here it took possession of Genly with its teeth.

Alfie, I saw, was pleased. So were the other Minids. Involuntarily, the corners of their lips had lifted into placatory smiles. Alfie was thumping the end of his stave against the ground as if applauding the leopard’s arrival. Dear Ngai, I thought, they want their comrade’s corpse to be eaten by this creature. And indeed they did. We watched the big cat tear away a portion of the dead man’s flank and bolt this down as a hungry dog gobbles down a can of Alpo. It now occurred to me that the women had anointed Genly’s body with the juice of ol duvai to inure it to the brutal depredations of the leopard. Further, by sacrificing his corpse to this handsome animal, the Minids denied it to the vultures and the hyenas. Hence the pleasure they took in what was for me a grisly interlude in the funeral ceremony.

Finally, knowing that Genly was “safe,” we returned to the Minid citadel. I dragged the travois behind me, feeling the kind of cosmic estrangement that used to succeed my childhood spirit-traveling episodes.

No one had eaten that day, and no one would eat again until the next. This fast was yet another element in the habilines’ communal reaction to death, but my discovery of these various elements—ones that many contemporary paleoanthropologists have either dismissed as nonsense or hedged about with qualifiers—gave me no sense of accomplishment, no exhilarating shot in the arm. The series of rituals that allowed the Minids to come to terms with Genly’s passing induced in me a profound shock. From the total sum of deaths suffered by human beings since the beginning of our species, I reflected, we had no right to subtract those of Homo neanderthalus, Homo erectus, or Homo habilis. How many more collateral species should we add? Was there, in fact, any legitimate cut-off point?

How strange to think that a creature dead these two million years had fears and aspirations akin to my own. Akin —a very appropriate word.

Back in New Helensburgh I set myself a task of penance and atonement. I gathered saplings, dry grass, and stones with which to build a hut to replace the one I had destroyed by fire. In fact, I accumulated and laid by enough materials to construct a second hut for myself. My preparatory labor kept me toiling up and down the slopes of the hill until evening, when I began the actual work on the huts themselves.

Quickly and surely I erected the wall and ceiling supports, then covered them with a much thicker weave of dry grasses than the Minids usually employed. This enterprise, which surprised and fascinated the habilines, kept my mind off Genly’s death—without, however, dispelling my nagging subliminal awareness of it—and I began to cherish the idea of retiring to the warm, dry interior of my hut for a long nap. I wanted privacy, but I did not want to abandon New Helensburgh to acquire it. By moonrise I had finished both structures, and I crept into mine like a creature intent on plunging itself into the oblivion of a hard, hibernal sleep.

I could not sleep. Genly had died because of my carelessness, and the anarchic gaiety of the previous evening arose in my memory to taunt me by way of contrast. From blithe giddiness to black despair in less than twenty-four hours. The Stone Age, it seemed to me, had an adamantine heart. Outside, the Minids were softly singing their loss, each dirge creating its own context of grief, eight or nine separate voices with nothing in common but an otherwise inexpressible melancholy. Like Ham’s song that afternoon, this phenomenon had no precedent in my experience among the protohumans, and I felt even more a disruptive force, an intruder.

A silhouette suddenly appeared in my low doorway. It was Helen, her flyaway hair a halo against the lingering crimson of the sunset. I had not seen her since that morning. She was no respecter of thresholds, and mine was probably too new to merit any special consideration as a threshold. What was mine was willy-nilly hers, apparently, and she seemed to have concluded that this new hut could easily accommodate both of us. She squeezed inside, walked to me on all fours, and touched my forehead like a confessor bestowing absolution on a penitent.

Something cold and hard fell against my knee. I reached down, picked it up, and realized that it was my Colt automatic. Slyly canting her head, Helen leaned back and studied my face. Her eyes were smoky marbles in a bust of discolored lapis lazuli, and I regarded her at that moment as an angel of transcendent apehood, a woman well ahead of her time.

“You’re liable to need that,” she said.

Of course she had said nothing at all, but in my despair I half believed that she had spoken, and I felt with absolute certainty that all I needed to survive this out-of-sequence period of my life was Helen herself. To that end, reading my thoughts, she had come to me of her own accord.