No Enemy But Time Read online

  No Enemy But Time

  by Michael Bishop

  ElectricStory.com, Inc.®

  NO ENEMY BUT TIME

  Copyright © 1982 by Michael Bishop. All rights reserved.

  Original publication: Timescape/Simon and Schuster, 1982.

  Ebook edition of No Enemy But Time copyright © 2000 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-59729-090-6

  Quotation from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien copyright © 1965 by J.R.R. Tolkien.

  Lines from William Butler Yeats’s “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” from Collected Poems, copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

  ElectricStory.com and the ES design are trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

  Cover art by and copyright © 2000 Jamie Bishop.

  Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  For the full ElectricStory catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.

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  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

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  To Floyd J. Lasley, Jr.,

  Our mild Irish Godfather

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: “Next Slide, Please”

  Chapter One: Lolitabu National Park, Zarakal

  Chapter Two: Into the Dream

  Chapter Three: Seville, Spain

  Chapter Four: An Ecology of Mirage

  Chapter Five: Seville, Spain

  Chapter Six: Helen

  Chapter Seven: Morón de la Frontera

  Chapter Eight: Aubade

  Chapter Nine: Van Luna, Kansas

  Chapter Ten: Fruit of the Looms

  Chapter Eleven: Cheyenne, Wyoming

  Chapter Twelve: Among the Minids

  Chapter Thirteen: Van Luna, Kansas

  Chapter Fourteen: A Death

  Chapter Fifteen: Elgin Air Force Base, Florida

  Chapter Sixteen: Habiline Reflections

  Chapter Seventeen: Pensacola, Florida

  Chapter Eighteen: In a Season of Drought

  Chapter Nineteen: New York City, The Bronx

  Chapter Twenty: A Disappearance

  Chapter Twenty-One: Blackwater Springs, Florida

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Mary

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Panama City, Florida

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Dream Seed

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Fort Walton Beach, Florida

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Life in Shangri-la

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Northwest Frontier District, Zarakal

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: A Gift from the Ashes

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, Zarakal

  Chapter Thirty: Marakoi, Zarakal

  Coda: Daughter of Time

  Also by Michael Bishop

  Other Ebooks from ElectricStory

  Author’s Note

  AS HE 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 Time is a work of fiction. The country Zarakal does not exist on any map, but I imagine its geographic dimensions roughly 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 as Homo 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 designating Homo habilis and Australopithecus 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

  Prologue

  “Next Slide, Please”

  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 re-experiencing 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 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 from me.”

  “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.”

  “You can’t enjoy 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 . . . of one 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’m not going to put them back the way they belong.”

  “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 story was 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.

  Chapter One

  Lolitabu National Park, Zarakal

  July 1986 to February 1987

  FOR NEARLY 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 to rika 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.

  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 withi
n the old man’s sight. He was half afraid that to be looked upon naked by Babington would be to acquire Ngwati 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 from sight,

  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.”