No Enemy but Time (35 page)
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....
* * * *
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!”
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“
Mai mwah,
” she replied, plucking a violet blossom between forefinger and crippled-looking thumb.
* * * *
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
.)
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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.
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Fort Walton Beach, Florida, to Van Luna, Kansas
September to December 1985
Woody
Kaprow was an enigma. He did not consider Florida home, but he paid so little heed to his
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physical surroundings that no other place in the world (with the possible exception of a marshy area in Poland from which his family hailed but upon which he had never laid eyes) could claim that distinction, either. He was truly at home only in his own mind. A civilian, he let his mind to the Air Force under the terms of a complicated military research-and-development contract. A bachelor, he was married to this work. A loner, he was surrounded by assistants. A genius (if you could trust the judgment of these often fuddled minions), when it came to literature, music, art, or the likely contenders in this year's Super Bowl game, he had the attention span of a third-grader. Time—its properties, paradoxes, metaphysics, measurement, and maddening theoretical possibilities—was Woody Kaprow's passion. It was his career.
A vocation that did not prevent him from misgauging the number of minutes it required to heat a frozen TV dinner. A passion that he could indulge while rinsing out a pair of socks, picking his nose, or attending committee meetings.
Kaprow, in person, was unprepossessing. A slender, middle-aged man with dark hair and eyes like bloated cocktail onions, he seemed younger than his years. (Joshua felt that this was because his ruling passion gave him a distracted, adolescent air, like a teenager in love with opera or astrology.) His clothes were always minimum-maintenance: dungarees, drip-dry shirts, chinos, turtleneck pullovers, jean jackets, sweatshirts, deck pants, and, occasionally, an orange, multizippered flight suit that he had purchased from a retiring fighter pilot. Even in the flight suit, however, he looked less like a military man than like one of the surviving members of the Flying Wallendas. Indeed, with his head cocked just so, his eyes afloat in the martini-bright waters of Abstract Speculation, he sometimes seemed to be walking a high wire invisible to mortal ken. At such times the jaunty, orange flight suit merely accentuated the incongruity of his metaphysical derring-do. A cough, a word, the slamming of a door would only infrequently shatter his concentration, but when they did, you could see him slipping from the wire and plummeting earthward like any other workaday Joe of average ambition, intelligence, and inspiration. Unprepossessing. Off the wire, almost—but not quite—a dullard.
Joshua had first met Kaprow in the mammoth Quonset hut given over to his workshop and laboratory.
The physicist had been lying flat on his back on a grease-monkey's sled, apparently examining the chassis of an ugly, buslike vehicle that took up most of the floor space at the north end of the Quonset. Only Kaprow's Converse tennis shoes were visible, their scuffed rubber toes pointing toward the skylight. Not the most awe-inspiring of the man's attributes, these sneaker-clad feet, but Colonel Crawford knelt beside the bus and announced in a clear voice that White Sphinx's newest recruit was awaiting Kaprow's pleasure. Whereupon the physicist scooted out from under the bus, jumped up like a calisthenics instructor, and warmly, albeit distractedly, took Joshua's hand. He looked back and forth between the colonel and Joshua as if trying to connect them to the work he had just been doing. Satisfied that neither visitor was a ghost or an importer, he smiled and slapped Joshua on the shoulder.
“Here you are,” he said. “My dreamfarer.”
“Alistair Patrick Blair thinks I'm his.”
“Actually,” Colonel Crawford put in, “you belong brain, belly, and balls to the U.S. Air Force.”
“Yes, massa.”
Kaprow slapped him on the shoulder again and smiled a sweet, lopsided smile. “A dreamfarer's principal bondage is to his dreamfaring. All the others are secondary. Isn't that so, Mr. Kampa?”
“Anything you say, sir.”
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In September Blair was concluding his American Geographic Foundation lectures, which he had interrupted for two weeks in August to hold a series of meetings with officials of the departments of Defense and State in Washington, D.C. These meetings had produced—very quickly—an important agreement between the governments of Zarakal and the United States, a codicil to the recent treaties establishing American military bases in Blair's homeland. Now, having fulfilled both his diplomatic and his paleontological obligations in the United States, he was returning to Marakoi. He stopped at Eglin to confer with Woody Kaprow and Joshua Kampa.
Hands thrust deep in the pockets of his boiler suit, the Great Man stood as if hypnotized before the cut-away body of the vehicle that would eventually translate Joshua to an earlier geologic epoch. Physics and engineering, not being his specialties, intimidated him in the same way they intimidated Joshua. But Blair did not enjoy being intimidated, and he was out of sorts. Kaprow interrupted the paleoanthropologist's sullen reverie to thrust a small, flat instrument rather like a pocket computer into his hands, then crossed the workshop and bestowed the instrument's mate on Joshua, who had spent most of the morning session sitting at the physicist's metal desk feeling like a tiny third wheel on a high-rolling bicycle that never let him touch ground. Blair and Kaprow had scarcely spoken to him. He might as well have spent the day on the beach.
“What's this?” Blair asked, looking across the workshop at Kaprow.