No Enemy But Time

Coda

With my mother’s blessing I entitled my book about my adventures in prehistoric East Africa Eden in My Dreams. It was not published in the United States until 1994, seven years after my return from the distant past, when the American government grudgingly lifted the lid on the White Sphinx Project and acknowledged officially that my cockamamie stories about visiting the Pleistocene as an Air Force chrononaut were not cockamamie after all. In the interval, however, I had become a Zarakali citizen and cabinet minister. Indeed Eden in My Dreams had first been published in 1993 in English and Swahili editions by Gatheru & Sons Publishing Company of Marakoi. The American press had been quick to report the appearance of my book and to accuse both the administration and the Pentagon of sullying my name and appropriating millions upon millions of tax dollars without Congressional approval, an eerie recapitulation of the flap that had attended my departure from the States in 1990. By this time, though, I was too busy taking care of my daughter and serving as Zarakal’s Minister of Tourism and Intercultural Affairs to worry about the fuss and flutter in Washington, D.C.

Time, as it always does, passed.

On the fifteenth anniversary of my return from my stay among the habilines (the very date in August that Monicah, a.k.a. the Grub, had at the ripe old age of six chosen as her “official birthday”), I took my daughter to the spanking-new Sambusai Sands Convention and Recreational Centre on the shores of scenic Lake Kiboko. This was my birthday gift to her. She would soon be off to the States to resume her education at a private school in Kent, Connecticut, and I was hoping that a few days of paddleboating, Ping-Pong, shuffleboard, swimming, crocodile watching, and casino games would erase her melancholy mood.

Although White Sphinx had long ago purged me of my spirit-traveling episodes, I knew what Monicah was suffering. She dreamed as I had once dreamed. Not of her mother’s cat-eat-chalicothere grasslands, however, but of a vivid utopian tomorrow whose inaccessibility sometimes frustrated her beyond bearing.

I, the past; she, the future. By nature Monicah was a cheerful child, whom both Jeannette and Anna had come to know and like, but in the wake of recent sociopolitical catastrophes (from which Zarakal, by means of a friendship treaty with the Pan-Arabian League and a strong leadership role in the East African Confederation Movement, had partly insulated itself) her dreams had increased in number, duration, and intensity. She was a tormented young woman, my Monicah. If this holiday did not rub the rust from the rose, I could not in good conscience send her off to school in Connecticut.

I had then served in Zarakal’s cabinet for nearly a decade. At thirty-nine I was still the youngest member of the National Assembly with an appointment to the President’s cabinet, and it was one of my duties to be on hand for the gala Grand Opening of the Sambusai Sands Hotel and Cabaret. Not merely by chance, this event coincided with the anniversary of my deliverance from the Pleistocene and with Monicah’s birthday.

My position had its perks. When Monicah and I arrived at the newly completed Alistair Patrick Blair Airport, a group of Sambusai ilmoran, or warriors, met our private jet and escorted us into the terminal—where two of their number, apparently the winners of a lot drawing, attached themselves to us as additional bodyguards. Imposing in their ceremonial cloaks and ornate beaded headbands, they were soft-spoken fellows who had attended a Catholic mission school at a nearby frontier outpost. They towered over my daughter and me.

Monicah, despite my protests in Marakoi, had shaved her head and donned elegant African garb as (her own words, I swear) “prophylactics against the corrupting influence of the resort.” Now she would have to wear a wig to her classes at Kent School. Our Sambusai bodyguards did not mind. They turned their deep brown eyes on Monicah with respectful admiration. Good. I had begun to fear that all my plans on her behalf were going to be thwarted by her own intransigent attitude. Maybe the casual closeness of a pair of innocently virile males would improve her disposition. I sent her down to the paddleboat marina with the Sambusai warriors and one well-armed security agent while my aide and I checked in at the hotel’s main desk and rode upstairs to scrutinize our V.I.P. suite.

“Very WaBenzi.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed Timothy Njeri, a fiftyish Kikembu assigned to me not long after I had won my seat in the National Assembly. Timothy’s briefcase contained sophisticated electronic gear, which he immediately deployed to scan the room for listening devices. “It seems to be quite clean,” he said at last, carefully packing his equipment away.

I told Tim to fix himself a drink from the suite’s well-stocked bar. Then I eased myself into an Agosto Caizzi fishnet pullover and a pair of designer bush shorts and descended to the Sands lobby to fulfill another of my obligations on this multipurpose mission.

One-armed bandits whirred and rang in the gaming room to my right, while in the left-hand casino a dozen roulette wheels ratcheted through their fateful orbits. There were more Americans than ever in Zarakal, and the Air Force, in response to our treaty-extension stipulations, had just inaugurated free shuttles from Russell-Tharaka and the naval facility at Bravanumbi for all eligible military personnel.

Further, an American coffee concern had built a company town in the central highlands, and there was a Ford suncar plant on the outskirts of the capital, where Zarakali laborers pocketed four times the average hourly wage of other native workers but only a third of what their American counterparts in Dearborn and Detroit were making. In spite of the continuing drought in the Northwest Frontier District, our economy was booming. Marakoi’s East African Ledger made occasional mention of my contribution to the boom.

A black man in Western clothes wearing a distinctive scarab tie pin caught my eye and pushed through the smoky revolving doors to the terrace overlooking the lake. The tie pin identified the man as my contact, a liaison between the custodians of the moribund White Sphinx Project and the Zarakali government. For obvious reasons Matthew Gicoru, our Vice President, had selected me to represent our interests in this meeting, but I still did not understand either the need for such a get-together or the liaison’s insistence on these embarrassing James Bond tactics. After ten minutes in the arid lacustrine heat his enameled scarab would melt right down the front of his tie.

I followed the man outside. My contact, after checking to see that I was not being tailed, led me along a palm-lined parapet away from the hotel. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and much too hot for such foolishness. Book-ended between her Sambusai galley slaves beneath a big polka-dot parasol, my Monicah was a passenger in the only paddleboat plying the turquoise waters of the lake. A small rescue vessel stood offshore to rescue any boater who fell victim to the heat.

To the north of the hotel we were building a nine-hole golf course, with Astro-turf fairways and greens, but it was difficult to imagine anyone but a rich Bedouin ever using it. In addition to dehydration and sunstroke, there were other hazards. My contact, jumping down from the retaining-wall promenade, ignored a tall stone obelisk warning of these:

This message, repeated in Swahili, French, and Arabic, bore a replica of my own signature: Minister of Tourism and Intercultural Affairs. It was countersigned by the Interior Minister.

Several dozen yards beyond the obelisk my contact halted on a ridge overlooking the fossil beds where Alistair Patrick Blair had made his reputation as a paleoanthropologist. The heydays of the seventies and eighties were no more. A chain-link fence enclosed the area where the Great Man’s successors labored to keep his work alive in the mocking shadow of the Sambusai Sands Hotel.

I did not like to come out this far, because memories nagged at me here. One of them was commemorated by a bronze sculpture of a hominid skull that turned on a stainless-steel pivot above a cairn of mortared stones. This monument stood in front of the wattle shack that had been Blair’s headquarters at Lake Kiboko. Tourists could enter the protectorate, shrunk from two hundred square miles to a few hundred square yards since the Great Man’s death, only on Sundays, and they were always accompanied by armed guards who did not permit them to wander from a preordained route.

The guards’ pistols were to intimidate the tourists as well as to defend against lions. The plaque on the cairn read:

Blair’s ashes were buried under the pedestal.

“Dirk Akuj,” the man on the ridge greeted me as I drew near. He was thin, coal-black in color, and ascetic-looking. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kampa.”

“It would have been more pleasant in the air-conditioned hotel.”

“But less private. And from here, sir, we can monitor your daughter’s leisurely progress across the lake.”

“What does my daughter have to do with this?” I demanded, angry.

“A lovely young woman. It surprises me, sir, that a famous person like you allows a famous person like her such free rein. The world is full of unscrupulous people.”

“Am I talking to one of them?”

“Don’t think ill of me, sir. There is no other like Monicah. Her safety should be a matter of great concern to all of us.”

“The year she was born, President Tharaka declared her a national resource, a national treasure. Those Sambusai warriors know that, and so does my man at the marina. Should anything happen to her on this outing, they will suffer the consequences.”

“Yes, sir—but would their punishments, including even their death, repay you for your daughter’s loss?”

“Nothing repays a parent the death of a child.” I took a freshly laundered, pale-pink kerchief from my pocket and wiped my brow. “What’s all this to you, Mr. Akuj? I don’t much like your questions.”

“I’m from White Sphinx.”

“I know that, Mr. Akuj. But you’re Zarakali, I think, and White Sphinx died fifteen years ago today.”

“Actually, Mr. Kampa, I’m a Karamojong from Uganda. That’s not terribly far from here, though, and I look upon this as my country too.” His eyes swept the lake, the desert, the eastern horizon. Then he nodded at another barren ridge inside the chain-link fence. “The Great Man died there, didn’t he?”

“Yes. A horrified American Geographic Foundation cameraman got it all on film. Blair stumbled while prospecting that embankment, toppled down and broke his neck.”

“Striving for the impossible.”

I shot Dirk Akuj an annoyed glance.

“He was striving for the impossible, don’t you think? He died on his very own Weightlessness Simulation Incline.”

“Who’s to say what’s impossible?” I asked testily.

“Who indeed? Not I, Mr. Kampa. White Sphinx, you should know, has been born again from Woody Kaprow’s ashes.”

This news stunned me because I had not known that Kaprow was dead. I had not heard from the physicist in eight or nine years, and had last seen him at Blair’s funeral in Marakoi, but I had always supposed he was incommunicado for security reasons. The U.S. government had shifted him into other lines of temporal research, and, happy as a ram in rut, he was rigorously pursuing these. So I had supposed.

“His ashes? He’s dead?”

“I was speaking metaphorically, Mr. Kampa, but we do feel certain Dr. Kaprow is dead. Eight years ago he failed to return from a mission undertaken at Dachau in West Germany. The mission was supposedly a test for certain improvements to the temporal-transfer machinery, but it now seems that Dr.

Kaprow insisted upon this dropback out of… call it ‘racial guilt.’ He went to join the martyrs.”

“And never came back?”

“No, sir. We think he purposely rejected that option.”

I scrutinized the young man’s face. “‘We’?”

“Like you, Mr. Kampa, I have dual citizenship. I am the assistant project director for the new incarnation of White Sphinx. My association with Dr. Kaprow began three years after yours ended.”

“You dream,” I said under my breath. “You spirit-travel.”

“I hallucinate, sir. It began when I was a seven-year-old child in a relief center in Karamoja, slowly starving to death.” He paused. “Does my story interest you? I would be happy to tell it.”

“Let’s get out of the sun.”

I led Dirk Akuj down from the ridge and along the lakeshore to the fence surrounding the protectorate.

Here I fumbled with my keys, unlocked the gate, and found a second key to admit us to Blair’s mud-and-wattle shack, now a sort of makeshift museum. Inside, we sat down at a rickety wooden table before a large cabinet containing mastodon tusks, suid teeth, and the skull and horn cores of a medium-sized buffalo, Homioceras nilssoni. Each item was tagged, but a visitor would search in vain for any hominid fossil other than a few jigsaw-puzzle skull fragments. At the cash register postcards featuring the bottomless grin of “Homo zarakalensis” were on sale. I moved to turn on the air-conditioning, for the hut was oppressive with heat and dust motes, but the Ugandan held up his hand.

“I will make my story brief, Mr. Kampa.”

Dirk Akuj explained that in the crowded relief center, after better than a month of watching skeletal children die of malnutrition, disease, and, sometimes, lovelessness, the night turned to plastic for him—here, illustratively, he tapped his scarab tie pin—and out of the melting indigo of his vision a delicate, almond-eyed savior took shape. This unlikely being swallowed Dirk Akuj with a laugh. The boy’s essence flowed into the blue tubing of the stranger’s esophagus, belly, and intestines. Then these organs turned themselves inside-out and unraveled a vast membrane of sky above the desert. Like a cloud, the boy was pulsed across this luminous membrane to a place where he dissolved into rain.

“Endless torrents of nonexistence,” to use my contact’s own words. He did not extract himself from this state—nor did he want to, ever again—until a merciless dawn in Karamoja awakened him to the clamor, dirt, and pathos of the relief center.

Three days later a slender Oriental male closely resembling the “savior” in Dirk Akuj’s dream, or hallucination, arrived in camp. This unusual-looking man, an anomaly among the bearded European photographers, whey-faced nuns, and unsympathetic black soldiers from Kampala, selected five children, seemingly at random, and spirited them out of the camp, out of Uganda, out of Africa.

“To the United States,” the man concluded.

“How?”

“It’s difficult to recall. With many official-looking papers and a persuasive manner. He was soft-spoken but very insistent and direct. He did not permit himself to be hassled, you see.”

“But what was his motive?”

Despite a Do Not Touch placard, Dirk Akuj lifted the tooth of an ancient warthog from the display cabinet and turned it between his fingers like a jewel. His only response to my question was a half-mocking, half-saintly smile.

“Only five?” I asked the Ugandan.

“He did what he could. I was raised in the family of a wealthy real-estate broker in Southern California. I continued to hallucinate my future. One such hallucination prophesied my meeting with Dr. Kaprow on a high school R.O.T.C. trip from San Bernadino, where we lived, to Edwards Air Force Base. And…” He let his voice trail off.

“And what?”

“And it came to pass.” He returned the suid tooth to the cabinet. “It is hot in here, isn’t it?”

“Why did you want to talk to me, Mr. Akuj?”

“Why don’t we resume our discussion in a more comfortable setting? This, sir, was just a get-acquainted session. I am also Uganda’s representative to the official opening of the Sambusai Sands. We’ll see each other this evening in the cabaret.” Before I could raise a protest, he glided to the door and out into the glare of late afternoon. “Wait a few minutes before following me back to the hotel, Mr. Kampa. I can let myself out.”

Annoyed, suspicious, perplexed, I stood on the porch watching my pantherine visitor retrace his path to the metal gate. Here he pivoted and waved, his plastic scarab glowing almost incandescently.

“I can scarcely wait to meet your daughter,” he called. He pushed through the gate and strode nimbly toward the butt end of the retaining-wall walkway back to the hotel. I wished that a lion would fall upon him, a crocodile leap from the water to seize him.

Monicah and her regal galley slaves were no longer on the lake. Why had Dirk Akuj brought her into our little talk so frequently? This question frightened me because I thought I knew the answer.

In the cabaret—more accurately, the grand entertainment hall of the Sambusai Sands, a multitiered dining floor with an orchestra pit and an immense stage hung with zebra-striped foil curtains—a thousand or more people had gathered for the official grand opening of our billion-dollar Convention and Recreational Centre. Portions of the complex had been operating for nearly three months, but tonight marked the culmination of our labors, a new beginning on the road to economic independence. At tables scattered like islands in the electric dark sat many African dignitaries, residually wealthy Arabs, American service personnel, and casino-hopping European playpeople. On each side of the hall, at balcony level, leopards stalked back and forth in lifelike dioramas of the Pleistocene.

Nearest the orchestra pit (from which the strains of “Born Free” had been emanating for twenty minutes) were the tables reserved for Zarakali cabinet ministers, the commanding officers of the bases at Bravanumbi and Russell-Tharaka, and the representatives of every country in the East African Confederation. Monicah and I shared our table with Vice Admiral Cuomo and the Tanzanian representative, a handsome Arusha woman who clearly disapproved of the festivities.

A table away sat Dirk Akuj, vaguely sinister in a phosphorescent lime-green tuxedo jacket. His name, I had discovered after returning to my suite, did indeed appear on the official guest list, but I had never supposed that any African invited to our grand opening would also be a shill for White Sphinx. I tried to avoid the man’s glance, but he kept ogling Monicah and giving me enigmatic smiles, and I was hard pressed to ignore him.

Admiral Cuomo was something of a help because he had engaged the Arusha woman and me in animated small talk about his favorite subject, ice hockey, about which he supposed us intensely curious because of our lack of exposure to the sport. Monicah sat silent, encouraged in her moroseness by the chilly attitude of Rochelle Mutasingwa, the Tanzanian. She was unaware of Dirk Akuj’s interest in her, and I was grateful for her failure to notice the man. As Admiral Cuomo faithfully recounted the high points of last year’s Stanley Cup finals, the evening seemed to stretch out before us like a deathwatch.

The dying strains of “Born Free” at last fell captive to silence, and the Marakoi Pops struck up a fanfare.

The expectant nattering of the crowd faded away, the stage was brilliantly spotlighted, and the American singer-composer Manny Barrelo emerged from the wings beside the self-propelled wheelchair of President Mutesa Tharaka.

As one person, everyone in the hall rose to accord our aged President a standing ovation. Without whistling, foot stamping, or unseemly cries of praise or thanksgiving, it was nevertheless thunderous. Even Monicah was moved, for this was the first time in nearly three years that Mzee Tharaka had made a public appearance. On most state and ceremonial occasions Vice President Gicoru acted in his stead, and no one had anticipated a change of these arrangements even for the long-awaited grand opening of the Sands. Our applause lasted nearly five full minutes.

Nodding and smiling, Barrelo quieted us by raising his hands and addressing us to the effect that we were all “eyewitnesses to history.” The President, meanwhile, sat slumped in his chair like a well-heeled scarecrow, the gilded skull on his crown staring out into the dark with a threat that everyone implicitly understood but nervously disregarded. The roar of the leopard stalking the left-hand balcony was audible even through the bullet-proof plastic of its diorama, and Barrelo saluted the creature without interrupting his remarks.

“…lots of fine live entertainment for you this evening, folks, and continuous gaming in the casinos just off the lobby.” Whereupon he squinted down into the footlights at the tables just beyond the orchestra. “Is Joshua Kampa here this evening? Of course he is, what a ridiculous question. Josh, c’mon, Josh, stand up, please. President Tharaka wants you to take a bow for making Zarakal’s beautiful Lake Kiboko resort genuinely competitive with Vegas and Monte Carlo. Stand up, stand up. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man whose mind conceived the Sambusai Sands Convention and Recreational Centre!”

Numbly I got to my feet, stood blinking in a white-hot spot, and sat back down to the dovetailing applause of hundreds of fellow Homo sapiens. The Centre, I wanted to tell them, was not entirely my fault.

“President Tharaka wants everyone here tonight to know that the revenues generated by this complex will fund schools, agricultural programs, cultural exchanges, and technological progress for everyone in East Africa. Already ZAPPA—the Zarakali Administration for Peace and Prosperity through Astronautics—has been revived, and you can bet your ostrich feathers that an African will walk on the moon before this decade is out. That’s what President Tharaka and Minister Kampa had in mind when they made construction of this complex a top national priority only six or seven years ago. Why, Mr. Kampa gave up a place on the lucrative American lecture circuit just to return to Zarakal and run for a seat in the National Assembly. He’s a credit to his country—both his countries—and I think he deserves another round of applause.”

We got it, Manny Barrelo and I, a bigger round than we had received before (even though Barrelo had grossly muddled the facts about my desertion of the “lucrative American lecture circuit”), and Admiral Cuomo patted me on the back. At the adjacent table Dirk Akuj smiled at me cryptically.

“But enough talk. It’s time for these festivities to begin, and our opening act, our overture, is a tribute to Mr. Kampa, his beautiful daughter Monicah, and the emergence of Zarakal as a potential space-age power…. Ladies and gentlemen, for your pleasure, Lisa Chagula and the Gombe Stream Chimps!”

Manny Barrelo gestured toward the right-hand wing, then spun the President’s chair around so that they could exit stage left. The Marakoi Pops broke into an up-tempo version of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and applause again filled the hall.

The zebra-striped curtains parted to reveal a back-lighted scrim upon which a convincing, two-dimensional replica of a volcano was erupting over a muted pastel landscape. A many-pronged bolt of lightning flashed against this scrim, and about the trunk of a papier-mâché baobab, streamers of red and orange crepe paper danced like flames. Wearing African garb from the Lake Tanganyika region, Lisa Chagula entered and positioned herself on the outer apron of the stage. Then she whistled.

Five chimpanzees swaggered in from stage right, one of them having been shaved to simulate a quasi-human nakedness. I saw through the chimp’s imposture immediately, and so did everyone else who knew the details of my legendary trip into the distant past, i.e., everyone in attendance. The ape was supposed to be me. A further clue to its assumed identity was the pink plastic doll cradled in its arms, a surrogate for Monicah in her original incarnation as the Grub. The chimps quailed from the “flames” surrounding them.

“Oh, God,” murmured Monicah, and my heart misgave me.

For two years after the trauma of my involvement with White Sphinx, I had made a good living in the States recounting my adventures for college students, television talk-show hosts, and the readers of Sunday magazine supplements. Because the Air Force and the U.S. government routinely ridiculed my claims, and because I would allow no one with a degree in physical anthropology to examine Monicah, I had been widely regarded as an amusing crackpot. For a time my notoriety grew, bringing me more money, an unwanted retinue of hangers-on, and the curse of instant recognition on any street or side road in my readopted homeland. Then the bottom had fallen out, and I had gone the way of yesterday’s superstar, straight down the lonely cul-de-sac of media neglect to the crumbling brick wall of oblivion.

My mother and my sister’s testimony dismissed as worthless, my amusement value squandered, my livelihood compromised, I had dropped from the semireputable status of a psychic or a newspaper astrologer to the pathetic one of a palmist or a flying-saucer nut. Too proud to accept my mother’s charity, I had briefly, and altogether seriously, considered going back to work for Gulf Coast Coating in the Florida panhandle—whereupon, through a consular official in Washington, D.C., President Tharaka had publicly confirmed my story, chastised the United States Air Force for making me out a liar, and invited me to return to Zarakal. “I have important work for you to do,” read the portion of the communiqué addressed directly to me; “please come home.” Grateful for aid from this unexpected quarter (President Tharaka and Alistair Patrick Blair had maintained an impregnable silence for two years), I made haste to emigrate, leaving behind a thoroughly bewildered American public and a rancorous congressional debate about abuses of power in the Pentagon and the executive branch.

In Marakoi I was served with a subpoena hailing me before a Senate investigative committee, but with Mutesa Tharaka’s blessing I ignored it and began laying the groundwork for my campaign for a seat in Zarakal’s National Assembly. After a parade through the capital and a hero’s build-up in the East African press, I ran unopposed. Only two weeks after my election I received an appointment to the cabinet.

Since that time, by hard work and a scrupulous avoidance of the WaBenzi image, I had won the complete respect of my constituents and had reestablished my credibility with American officials in Zarakal.

Although I had long since concluded that President Tharaka had played his Kampa card to win American concessions of which I was still unaware, this suspicion did not compromise my gratitude to him. Monicah and I had finally found our place in the sun. I was the man who had traveled in time, she was a diminutive African Eve, and, as Dirk Akuj had noted that afternoon, we were celebrities whose story had inspired international controversy. Indeed, upon his death, the flamboyant mantle of Alistair Patrick Blair had passed to my daughter and me.

Now, in the dinner theater of the Sambusai Sands, the Gombe Stream Chimps were reenacting one of the final episodes of the Joshua Kampa legend. This “tribute” having been kept a secret from Monicah and me, I had had no chance to approve it beforehand. That was bad. The champagne we had been drinking, along with my own embarrassment, made the mimicry of Lisa Chagula’s chimpanzees seem especially intrusive, a violation of something sacred. I gripped the edge of the table and said nothing. The reenactment would be over soon, and quickly forgotten as other performers and divertissements succeeded it. No point in disrupting the evening with an indignant outburst.

Only the ape impersonating me remained in view, sheltering its baby doll from the myriad swirling tatters of crepe paper. The other chimps had hurried off stage-left when projectors mounted all about the hall threw holographic images of several spotted hyenas into their midst. To the oohing and ahing of the audience these hallucinatory creatures advanced on my pongid counterpart, their eyes scintillating like topazes. Lisa Chagula, on the apron of the stage, pantomimed her sympathetic horror, covering her eyes with her forearm and crouching away to one side. At which point a gaudy mock-up of a lunar module descended from on high—on wires—to rescue Monicah and me. This contraption contained a pair of chimpanzees in show-business spacesuits, who jumped from their craft and began pulling bright yellow fire hoses out its hatch.

“I can’t stand this!” Monicah exclaimed, loud enough to be heard over the clamorous music.

“Do you feel your dignity is being assailed?” asked Rochelle Mutasingwa, as if it were rather late to worry about the matter.

“Not mine, the chimpanzees’.”

“Lisa Chagula and the Gombe Stream Chimps have been Tanzania’s good-will ambassadors for years.

Their dignity has never been questioned.”

“Maybe not,” Monicah replied. “But this is a vulgar exploitation of the little chaps.”

“Exploitation!”

“You heard me. Those chimps are your niggers, Miss Mutasingwa, and the late President Nyerere would never have approved anything so mean and disgusting.”

“Ladies,” said Admiral Cuomo. “Ladies.”

“Your daughter’s remarks go beyond the bounds of adolescent irresponsibility,” Rochelle Mutasingwa told me angrily. “I wonder if they have your approval.”

“No, of course not. Monicah hasn’t been—”

“For God’s sake, Daddy!”

On stage, the Grub and I were climbing into the lunar module with the chimps in the sequin-covered pressure suits. Doused, the crepe-paper streamers lay flat on the floor, while ancient Mount Tharaka, delicately backlit, continued to mutter and spew. Monicah did likewise, using vivid American expressions that I would have thought alien to the vocabularies of her affluent classmates. The lunar module, meantime, ascended on paper flames—and wires—into a canvas empyrean.

When Lisa Chagula and all seven chimps returned from the wings to exult in their triumph, Monicah abruptly stood up and swept her champagne glass to the floor. More monkey business appeared to be in the works, and she was going to have none of it. Fortunately, the darkness cloaking the hall concealed her distress from everyone but those in our immediate vicinity.

“Daddy, I don’t feel well. I’ve got to get out of here.”

I was torn. To desert my guests would be inhospitable, almost a breach of diplomatic etiquette.

However, if Monicah were genuinely ill, I owed it to her to escort her back to our suite. During the entertainment to follow, my absence would be of small consequence to these people.

As the Gombe Stream Chimps initiated a tumbling exhibition, Dirk Akuj pushed back his chair and made a tactful half bow. “At your service, Mr. Kampa. Allow me the honor.”

Alarmed, I tried to protest.

“He’ll do fine, Daddy. Spiffy jacket, polished shoes, a credit to his tribe, whatever it may be.”

“Karamojong, Miss Kampa.”

“Right. A survivor. He’s got to be okay, Daddy. Ta ta. We’ll see you whenever you can tear yourself away.”

Arm in arm, they disappeared together into the multitiered dark. Tim Njeri and another security man would intercept them at the door and accompany them upstairs, but I still did not appreciate the turn that events had taken. Dirk Akuj was a stranger with admitted ulterior motives, and his interest in my daughter, just fifteen today, struck me as ominous, something other than the tardy fibrillations of a young man’s fancy. After all, the Ugandan was not that much younger than I.

Carrying congratulatory birthday telegrams from Jeannette Monegal and the Whitcombs, I stumbled off the elevator onto the fourteenth floor. It was two-thirty in the morning, and Tim Njeri and Daniel Eunoto were standing sentinel at the door to my suite. Actually, Daniel was in a kind of upright trance while Timothy crouched doggo behind a potted eucalyptus. They might have been ilmoran in the bushveldt rather than security agents in the corridor of a resort hotel.

“She’s feeling better, I think,” Timothy told me.

“What about Mr. Akuj from Uganda?”

Tim nodded at the door.

“He’s still with her?” I was incredulous.

“Unless he jumped from the balcony, sir. There’s no place else for him to go.” Tim correctly read my disapproving look. “Miss Monicah insisted, Mr. Kampa, and today is certainly her birthday.”

“Yesterday was certainly her birthday.”

I went inside and found to my relief that Dirk Akuj was boiling water in a small ceramic kettle on my hotplate, a pair of piddling WaBenzi luxuries about which I never suffered any guilt pangs, not even in establishments prohibiting their use. He had shed his phosphorescent tuxedo jacket but was otherwise fully attired. Although that meant nothing five hours after my last sight of him, I pretended that it did.

Lying on the colorful cloak she had worn around her shoulders that evening, Monicah was snoozing in her Sambusai maiden’s outfit. Her tiny breasts were exposed, and her shaven skull gleamed like an obsidian egg. A twenty-year-old photograph of President Tharaka kept watch over her from the wall above the bedstead. I put my daughter’s telegrams down next to her outstretched hand and turned to face the intruder.

Dirk Akuj toasted me with a demitasse cup of tea and asked me if I would care to join him. I declined.

“Why are you still here?” An astringent medicinal scent pervaded the room, probably from his tea.

“I wanted to talk to you in a more hospitable setting than the protectorate, sir.”

I took off my coat and shoes and slumped into the chair. I hoped that my posture would convey my weariness.

Dirk Akuj said, “You never spirit-travel anymore, do you?”

“The flesh is willing, but the spirit’s weak.”

“Have you ever wondered why, sir?”

“Why the spirit’s weak?”

“Why you’ve been ‘cured’ of the dreams that set you apart from your fellows as a child.”

“Because Woody Kaprow and White Sphinx used my attunement to make me live those dreams, that’s why. I got them out of my system, and for the past fourteen years I’ve been an ordinary person.”

“Ordinary celebrity, sir.”

I conceded this stickling emendation with a grimace.

“Have you ever considered that your spirit-traveling, your dreamfaring, was predictive?”

“Of what?”

“Of what happened to you during one long month in the late summer of 1987. Your dreams were premonitions of the time-travel experience that finally took place through the agency of White Sphinx. You had been seeing the future as well as the past. Do you understand?”

“It’s too late for this, Mr. Akuj.”

“Has none of this ever occurred to you, sir?”

“No, none of it ever has. My spirit-traveling episodes didn’t correspond to what happened to me once I’d been physically displaced into the past. So they weren’t predictive, you see.”

Dirk Akuj sipped whatever was in his cup and strolled past the wall-sized window overlooking the lake.

My annoyance did not discomfit him. His manner suggested that the satisfaction of his curiosity was more important than the satisfaction of mine. What did he want? What was he driving at? I wanted to shout these questions at him but did not like to disclose so nakedly my eagerness for answers. Monicah stirred in her sleep.

“How do you feel about what happened to you back there?” he asked, gesturing at the window with his cup. “I mean, how do you feel today about the strange interruption of your life?”

“I try not to think about it, Mr. Akuj.”

“Why, sir?”

“Because it’s grown more and more remote with each passing year, and I’m half afraid none of it ever really happened.”

“Paradise Lost?”

I raised my eyebrows. What was that supposed to mean?

“But there’s your daughter, Mr. Kampa.” Dirk Akuj nodded at the bed. “To doubt her reality would be akin to doubting the world’s.”

“I’d doubt the world’s first, let me assure you.”

“It’s interesting you should feel so. Dr. Kaprow often used to displace himself into the past for brief stays. He kept them brief to prevent using up his ability to make the transition. But upon coming back, Mr. Kampa, he would sometimes say that he had returned to a ‘simulacrum’ of the present. His very word, simulacrum.”

Pensive, Dirk Akuj touched his lips to the rim of his cup, then drew them back.

“Even continuous transcordion contact did not reassure Dr. Kaprow. When he reemerged from our displacement vehicle, he feared that he had given himself into the society of ghosts and Doppelgängers.

Each trip, he once informed me, put him at a further remove from the real. Eventually the horrifying past of the martyrs became his prime reality, and he chose to stay there.”

This little narrative frightened me. If I lay down to sleep beside Monicah, might I awaken to find that the Sambusai Sands had disappeared into mist, that the world itself had evaporated? Where would I be then? A limbo in which the terms of my ghostliness prohibited any further contact with the people who had played a part in my life? The lateness of the hour, the champagne I had drunk, and the disorienting presence of Dirk Akuj set me trembling.

“Do you believe yourself to be a ghost?” I asked my nemesis.

“Certainly, most certainly, Mr. Kampa, but not perhaps in the way that Dr. Kaprow meant to imply.

Each one of us is a ghost of every other, I think. Each one of us is possessed by the spirits of our ancestors, living and dead. Otherwise, how could we dream? Not to believe ourselves ghosts in this sense would be to cut ourselves adrift from our beginnings.”

It’s too late for this, I thought, not understanding.

Aloud I said, “What do you want, Mr. Akuj? What is this all about?”

On the carven sideboard fronting the window he set his demitasse cup. A highlight twinkling on its handle mocked the glittering of the stars above the mountains on the western side of the Rift.

“White Sphinx has been revived, Mr. Kampa, but with a different emphasis. Now we choose to go forward instead of back.”

“No pursuable resonances,” I murmured.

“Despite what Dr. Kaprow may once have told you, it’s possible, sir. The chief requirement is a chrononaut whose spirit-traveling episodes propagate along advancing world lines.”

Dismayed by this intelligence, I looked at my daughter.

“I’ve discussed this matter with Monicah, Mr. Kampa. She’s eager to participate. The rewards are many.”

“WaBenzi rewards!” I exclaimed, rising and going to the bed. “I won’t let her.” I sat down beside Monicah and took her hand, which was warm and poignantly soft. How could I commend her into the custody of Dirk Akuj, whose interest in her was probably carnal as well as mentorly? Monicah’s eyes opened, and for a moment they were transparent, luminescent, bottomless, like the Grub’s before our return.

“Spiritual rewards,” countered Dirk Akuj, hoisting himself onto the sideboard and crossing his feet at the ankles. “Not only for herself, but for all those who survive to make the future their present.”

Monicah drew up her knees and scooted away from my touch. Her face wore a startling expression.

Although her appearance had always been more human than habiline, as if my blood had overwhelmed her mother’s, tonight she looked like Helen. The strange glint in her eye bewitched as well as terrified me.

“You need parental permission for this,” I told Dirk Akuj. “Monicah’s still a minor, and you need my consent for her participation.”

“You’ll give it to us, sir.”

“The hell I will.”

After a brief pause the Ugandan said, “I’ve been fasting for two weeks. A little sisal tea is the only nourishment I take during fasts, and when I fast, I hallucinate. I hallucinate the future, you understand, and earlier this evening, in Monicah’s presence, I saw you agreeing to let her participate.”

“Why would I do a crazy thing like that?” There was a quaver in my voice.

“To regain her good opinion. You’ve lost it, I think, for the same reason your mother, the writer, once lost yours. She tried to take advantage of your relationship for certain unworthy, short-term ends.”

“Monicah, is that what you think I’ve done?”

My daughter stared at me, virtually unseeing.

“She’s possessed, Mr. Kampa. You woke her before she could sleep off the effects of her trance.”

“You’ve drugged her!”

“With her full complicity, sir. In this state she communes across the years with her mother’s spirit. You never speak of her mother, Monicah says. For a while, then, I helped her become her mother.”

“Bring her back,” I commanded the Ugandan.

“Far better that we should go to her, Mr. Kampa. Surely you’ll take this opportunity to touch the spirit of your habiline wife?”

I glared at the man. The winter I had returned from the States to Zarakal, Thomas Babington Mubia had taken me to the world of ngoma by way of a Wanderobo incantation. There he had formally married my spirit to that of his dead Kikembu wife, Helen Mithaga, whom he believed a twentieth-century avatar of my Pleistocene bride. Later that winter Babington had died, but as far as I was concerned, Helen and I were linked forever, legally as well as emotionally, and my former mentor’s impromptu rite had formalized our bond even in the Here and Now.

“Did you truly love Helen, Mr. Kampa, or was your dalliance with her a matter of rut and propinquity?”

“Bring my daughter back and then get out of here!”

“Forgive me,” Dirk Akuj said. “Of course you truly loved Helen, and you would like to commune with her again.”

“Listen!” I barked. “Listen, you miserable—”

“But you do, sir. You do wish to commune with your long-dead wife, and I can help you do that.”

My resolve weakened and, intuitively recognizing that he had beaten me, he headed for the door: Dirk Akuj, a Karamojong physicist with ingrained animist sympathies. He invited Timothy Njeri and Daniel Eunoto into the suite, arguing that the participation of one of these two men would help me achieve a harmonious relationship with the ghost in Monicah’s body. The other security agent would stand aloof from the ceremony as an observer, a control. This arrangement would free us from the worry that I was utterly in Dirk Akuj’s power. However, neither Timothy nor Daniel looked eager to take part in this scheme. They awaited some word from me, but all I could do was stare bewilderedly at the girl on the bed.

Dirk Akuj crossed to his tuxedo jacket and removed from an inside pocket a pair of plastic bags containing what appeared to be leaf cuttings and roots. He opened the bags, shook their contents into the teakettle on the hotplate, replenished the water in the kettle from a bathroom faucet, turned on the hotplate, and decocted this potion for a good five minutes, all the while humming a tuneless melody. A pungent odor rose into the air with the steam from the kettle’s spout, a smell like minty ammonia.

Timothy and Daniel flipped a coin to see who would act as observer. The coin came up heads (President Tharaka’s), and Daniel retreated to the door to watch.

After stripping to his T-shirt and briefs and urging Timothy and me to do likewise, Dirk Akuj showed us how we should empty our lungs and inhale deeply of the fumes from the kettle. We followed his advice.

Then the three of us sat down in a triangle in the center of the room and began drumming our knees with our knuckles. The steam in the open kettle on the floor focused our attention, and soon the hotel was blinking in and out of existence in time with our drumming. Monicah gazed down on our ceremony as if from a great height. She seemed to blink in and out of existence on the off-beats.

I closed my eyes and time ceased to have any conventional meaning. History had been repealed, the future indefinitely postponed.

Then I opened my eyes and beheld around me a grayness pulsing with the promise of light. I was alone, but in a place with neither substance nor dimension. My hands had no body, my body no hands. Then a door swung inward, and my long-lost Helen was standing in this doorway, radiant in an immaculate white dress and apron. She was even wearing shoes. Her feet looked enormous in shoes, like monument pedestals. Tears freshened my cheeks, and I hurried to draw her out of the pale rectangle of the doorway.

“You shouldn’t be wearing these,” I told Helen, kneeling in front of her. “It’s demeaning for you.”

Her shoes were cheap blue sneakers with heavy rubber soles. I began unlacing them. My tears made it difficult to see what I was doing, but I got the laces undone and slipped her feet out of the sneakers one after the other. I stood, embraced her for an infinite moment, just to feel her body against mine, and rocked her in my arms like a father holding his child. Her starched clothing began to annoy me, too, and I loosened the knot supporting her apron, expertly unbuttoned her dress, and swept these items down her flanks to the floor, there to join my V-necked T-shirt and my beautiful Fruit of the Looms. She regarded me with tender puzzlement, but did not scold me for returning us to the innocent nakedness of beasts and Minids. Instead she closed my eyelids with her fingertips and settled one gnarled fist on my heart.

I opened my eyes again. The hotel suite had rematerialized around my double bed, which I was sharing with Helen Habiline. Praise be to Ngai and the mysterious potion of Dirk Akuj!

“Mr. Kampa—Mr. Kampa, sir, may I go now, please?”

The face staring down at me was that of a matronly Sambusai woman with intensely bright eyes and a full, healthy mouth. Astonished, I slipped out from beneath her gaze and over the edge of the bed. The woman was dressed in white, the costume of a hotel maid. I tried to sort out the implications of her presence. Looking around, I saw Timothy Njeri unconscious on the floor beside my teakettle—he was still in his skivvies, while I was buck naked—and Daniel Eunoto slumped in a corner sleeping the sleep of the sledgehammered. Monicah and Dirk Akuj were nowhere in sight. The sky beyond the picture window was a chastening blue.

“What are you doing here?”

“No one answer when I knock, Mr. Kampa.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “I came in to clean.”

“Before dawn?”

“Oh, no, sir. Much after. It’s nearly noon.”

A little more questioning revealed that she had been in my suite for almost two hours and that she was disastrously behind schedule. If I did not let her go, the manager would fire her, and she would have to return to a desolate mission outpost southeast of the Recreational Centre, where life was both hard and very dull. I wrapped a sheet about myself, gave her the equivalent of nearly fifty American dollars, and told her to catch up as much of her work as she could. I would protect her from the ire of the Sands management. The woman departed, thanking me.

I dressed and stalked about the suite trying to sort out my emotions. Dirk Akuj had hoodwinked us. His ngoma ceremony had been a cunning scam. Or had it? Timothy and Daniel would come round soon enough, I could tell by their breathing, but in the meantime I wanted to collect my thoughts without their help. Was it possible that for a moment—a brief moment, at least—my Helen’s ngoma had inhabited the comfortable body of the hotel maid? In spite of everything, I felt pretty good.

Monicah had left me a note. It was written on the back of the birthday telegram from my mother:

I rode the elevator down to the lobby, then walked out to the marina in the strength-sapping heat. In spite of the heat several vacationers were out on the lake in paddleboats; a light breeze fluttered the fringes on the colorful parasols beneath which these hearty tourists labored. Despite my daughter’s note and her conviction that we could catch up with her if we tried, she and Dirk Akuj must have already reached the lake’s western shore. Although it might still be possible to overtake them in the treacherous hinterland between Zarakal and Uganda, I was not going to blow the whistle on their escape.

In spite of this decision, I returned along the pierlike arm of the marina to the walk running north and south along the lakeshore. Here I turned north and made my way to the water-purification plant servicing the entire complex. My keys admitted me to the fenced enclosure surrounding the plant, and my status in the Zarakali government short-circuited the objections of a pair of uniformed guards who clearly wondered what business I had in their little bailiwick.

I hiked through a maze of metal tubing, pressure gauges, and wheels to the clean sandy area where an immense water tower rose up into the desert sky. I climbed the narrow iron ladder on one of the tower’s colossal legs and from the catwalk looked over Lake Kiboko after my daughter. The guards and several other plant personnel watched me ascend, dumbfounded by my audacity.

Then I leaped out and caught a support rod with both hands. The plant personnel gasped. When I began a long slide inward, my feet dangling like window-sash weights, they cried, “Be careful, Mr. Kampa!

Please be careful, sir!” Their shouts were reassuring hosannas. I slid the rod to an intersection beneath the tank, then hung there in the arid breeze gazing westward after Monicah. For the duration of my stunt, at least, I was a very happy man.