No Enemy But Time

Chapter Twenty-Four

Soon after Mary’s murder we separated from the Huns and made an encampment for ourselves on the northeastern flank of Mount Tharaka, eight or nine miles from our former hosts and at a considerably lower elevation. The mountain appeared to approve of our arrangements, for it refrained from bellyaching about them, and we could lie down at night without fearing that an outbreak of burps and belches would jolt us all awake. I may have been the only Minid who worried at all about the stability of Mount Tharaka’s gastrointestinal tract. These worries I suppressed by a very simple expedient: I shut down most conscious mental activity and drifted from one day to the next as if dreaming the successive episodes of my outward life.

I became, as in my spirit-traveling episodes before White Sphinx, a disembodied observer, a camera on a mobile boom—with the telling exception that among the Minids I retained my body as a camera housing. For the next several weeks, then, my life was a picaresque narrative without a protagonist, a runaway Ferrari from which the driver has leapt, not out of panic but from a ripening indifference to its destination. The wind still scoured my flesh, and the night might kindle my vision with the fagot tips of stars—but now I drank in these phenomena without consciously remarking them.

Helen eventually recovered from the bouts of nausea that had plagued her in the highland kingdom of the Huns. She continued to mourn our loss of Mary, however. Picking a fruit from a galol tree or digging a tuber out of the ground, she would suddenly pause and cast a pitiable glance on Zippy or A.P.B. To distract her I would usually put one of my own grimy discoveries into her hand and gesture her on to the next likely foraging site. When we separated from the others, such descents into funk were rare, for we were away from the stimulus to melancholy that the children represented.

Our new camp—twig and brush hovels through which the wind played sonatinas—lay in a bamboo thicket near a spring not far from the savannah. Temperatures here sometimes dropped alarmingly, and Helen and I would lie entwined in each other’s arms against the cold. My teeth made typewriter racket, and my body often quivered like a clapper-struck bell, but I did not suffer unduly. The running sore at the corner of my mouth, the insect bites damasking my flesh, the bruises and abrasions incising their steel-blue intaglios on my shins… none of these annoyances truly annoyed me. Helen and I held each other, and the nights ricocheted away around us like the fragments of primeval chaos. I had become a habiline. So far as I could tell this transformation did not mark a devolution, but a detour. I was dreaming myself into being out of the forgotten materials of preconsciousness, and Helen was my guide through the dark.

I dreamed that my chukkas were wearing out, and they were. I had already broken and replaced several shoelaces, but now the rubber soles were fissuring, the scuffed Maple Cuddy leather cracking open to reveal the aromatic little piggies penned up inside. Babington would have been ashamed of me for not discarding my boots and going barefoot, but I patched them with bark, bound them with moistened strips of bamboo, and pretended that my repairs were successful. They were not. One day I tripped on a binding, tore out the side of my right chukka, and, in disgust, hurled both my beloved boots into the canebrake below me. Thenceforward, until my feet had developed a new set of calluses, I lurched about like a gimpy middle guard. Surprisingly, maybe because I was dreaming, the calluses were quick to form.

My shorts also went. First the crotch seam split. Although I mended it with a fishhook needle and a remnant of fishing line (which, for want of an opportunity, I had never used in Lake Kiboko or anywhere else), the resewn seam promptly ripped out too. In any event, thorn bushes, briars, and hard wear had opened numerous tiny windows in the fabric. My flanks were exposed, and I was fighting a doomed rear-guard action against nakedness. Because a couple of my pockets had long since worn through, I had already transferred their contents to my knapsack. It was no hardship to displace my remaining belongings to it as well, and to surrender my shorts to Helen for a kaross.

More and more frequently I left my.45 in its holster in our hut. I covered the weapon, my bandolier, and my backpack with dried grass and walked upon Africa’s good earth as naked as any Minid. The minor surgery Babington had performed on my masculine member in Lolitabu distinguished me from the other males in our band, but it was hardly a conspicuous addition to my several points of departure from the anatomical standard. In fact, naked, I was finally in uniform. Giving up the security of the.45 and the bullet-laden bandolier was easier than giving up the security of my bush shorts. Dreaming, still dreaming, I had almost totally divested myself of my twentieth-century identity.

For the first time in my life (I can see, in retrospect) I fit. My dreaming consciousness did not invalidate my desire to belong to both the Minid community and the larger Pleistocene community encompassing it.

None of Helen’s people made any attempt to tell the dreamer from the dream….

One day, parched by my dream of interminable drought, I dreamed that it rained. And it did.

The following morning the valley below our camp and a significant sward of savannah looked as if they had been decorated for the senior-class prom. Flowers boogalooed in the breeze, flipping scarlet petticoats and saffron capes. To walk through those dancing flowers would have been akin to shuffling through a post-party spill of perfumed crepe paper. I drank the scene in. It intoxicated me, but not in the way that puckerplums could do. I still had my basic motor skills, and with these intact I led Helen down the ridge from our camp into the holiday ground cover—into, it seemed, a garden.

We were not alone in this celebration, for the other Minids also came cavorting down the slope.

Experimentally uprooting handfuls of scarlet or lavender, the children went sniffing from blossom to blossom, much in the way that kids in Florida frolic in the virgin white graupel of a rare February sleetfall.

Groucho, Bonzo, Jocelyn, and Pebbles stayed the longest of all the habiline youngsters, but Helen and I outlasted even them, and when they had finally departed, we collapsed panting amid the luxuriant vegetable filigree of our narrow mountain valley.

Below, on the revivified pasturage of the plain, elephants, zebras, gazelles, and lanky giraffids grazed, but Helen and I ignored them in beatific contemplation of each other’s navels.

Literally.

I saw that Helen’s abdomen had taken on the contour, if not the coloring, of a cantaloupe. Astonished, I touched her taut tumescent tummy and searched her eyes for some sign that she understood the significance of this alteration in her figure. In the land of the lean of loin, the pot-bellied person is… well, pregnant.

“Helen, you’re going to be a mamma. A mamma, do you understand? Hell, I don’t understand—but it’s terrific, it’s great!”

“Mai mwah,” she replied, plucking a violet blossom between forefinger and crippled-looking thumb.

Pregnant? My Helen, pregnant? Once over my initial lethargic surprise, I accepted Helen’s pregnancy as natural, foreordained, and welcome. But surely a human-habiline union could not be fruitful because of a basic chromosomal incompatibility between our two species. Even with males of her own kind Helen had heretofore been barren.

How, then, had I overcome these formidable obstacles to getting her with child?

I do not really know. Much of what occurred during this period had the lazy inevitability of events in a vision or a fugue. Today, though, I can emphasize that barren does not necessarily mean sterile ; it first implies the absence of offspring and only secondarily the inability to conceive them. Until she actually delivers a child, therefore, it is by no means incorrect to call a woman barren. Misleading, perhaps, but not incorrect.

Why did Helen not conceive a child by Alfie or one of the other male habilines, then?

Not being a gynecologist, a fertility researcher, or a certified expert in habiline insemination techniques, I must again confess ignorance. The most ingenious explanation I can hazard suggests that, genotypically, Helen was a forerunner of a hominid species closely resembling H. sapiens. Because her reproductive organs reposed farther forward than was usual among the females of her kind, she may have appeared too early to exploit this latent genetic potential—except, of course, by accident. I was Helen’s accident, an unforeseeable throwback from the future already encoded in her DNA. For which reason she conceived my child rather than Alfie’s, Malcolm’s, Roosevelt’s, or anyone else’s.

But members of distinct species—even within the same genus—are seldom interfertile.

Well, how often do they get a chance to be?

Still, it is said that apes and humans cannot profitably mate.

Profit is not always the primary motive in such encounters. Does this epigram constitute a statement of empirical fact, a pending piece of Natural Law, or an ethical imperative? None of the above, I’m afraid.

Moreover, the expression “cannot profitably mate” runs headlong into the highly suggestive fact that a siamang and a gibbon of another species confined together several years ago at Atlanta’s Yerkes Primate Center surprised their keepers with a cuddly wee one. Admittedly, neither a siamang nor its gibbony lover is a human being, but by the same token the lady I called Helen Habiline was not an ape. That simple truth bears reiteration.

Now, years later, I have the words of the following unimpeachable scientific authorities, whom I cite to intimidate the untutored:

Eugene Marais, South African naturalist and primatologist: “I am strongly inclined to believe that the offspring of no two sub-races of the same anthropoid will be found to be sterile.” (Some of the terminology may be dated, but the sentiment is unequivocal.)

Carl Sagan, American astronomer and poet laureate of scientific syncretism: “For all we know, occasional viable crosses between humans and chimpanzees are possible. The natural experiment must have been tried very infrequently, at least recently.” (One can only speculate about the biological consequences of the liaison so discreetly chronicled in John Collier’s His Monkey Wife.)

Donald Johanson, American paleoanthropologist and discoverer of the fossil remains of the Australopithecus afarensis specimen known as Lucy: “It would be interesting to know if a modern man and a million-year-old Homo erectus woman could together produce a fertile child. The strong hunch is that they could; such evolution as has taken place is probably not of the kind that would prevent a successful mating.” (However, one might reasonably suppose that a million-year-old woman had long since passed through menopause.)

Of late it has been fashionable for critics to dismiss my claim as a contemptible form of sexual braggadocio. I refute this mean-spirited charge by confessing my inadequacies as a lover.

First, a quotation from the pens of Richard Leakey (Blair’s Kenyan nemesis) and Roger Lewin (erstwhile editor of New Scientist): “As a biological response to female sexuality, human males have evolved a penis that is larger than any other primate, including the gorilla whose body bulk is almost three times that of a man’s.”

Sic, sic, sic.

(A connoisseur of others’ slip-ups and solecisms, Blair once hung a sampler bearing this remarkable assertion on the wall of his private office in the National Museum in Marakoi.) Despite an indefatigable popular belief in the sexual prowess of males of my pigmentation, my penis is not as large as a gorilla. It is not even as large as an Airedale. It may be as large as a lesser mouse lemur, but I do not propose to put this supposition to the acid test of direct comparison. And although I might pay for a quick glimpse of someone whose masculine member reminds Messrs. Leakey and Lewin of a mountain gorilla, I do not believe I would envy this person. He would probably have to purchase two fares each time he contrived to board a bus.

Second, neither do I possess exceptional staying power. Alfie was more than a match for me in this regard, as his exploits with Emily, Guinevere, and Nicole clearly demonstrated. Fortunately, even in her periods of utmost receptivity, Helen’s sexual appetite was modest, and I did not have to overextend myself to give her her fill. The fact that I remain single today may be a function of my quiescent libido.

Since Helen, I have not been drawn to any other woman, and my political obligations have exercised most of my energies.

Very well, then, setting aside chromosome counts, anatomy lessons, appeals to authority, and ritual self-abasement, how do I account for Helen’s unlikely pregnancy?

Well, it may have been a miracle.