No Enemy but Time (8 page)
She watched me. How, two million and six years after our first meeting, to describe her? Well, even as my forefinger fumbled for my automatic's trigger, I noticed that she had uncanny self-reliance and poise.
The fact that she was carrying a hefty club in one fist underscored this observation, but did not occasion it. She appeared to be about four inches shy of five feet tall and too lithe of build to throw her weight around effectively—a diminutive, sinewy Black Beauty. Her beauty was to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore
/
That gently, o
'
er a perfumed sea,
/
The weary, way-worn
wanderer bore
/
To his own native shore
...
This poem crossed my mind, I think, because Babington had recited it repeatedly during our last two or three weeks together in the Lolitabu National Park. From the first, then, I called the creature who had awakened me in the prehistoric woods Helen—not so much after the Helen of Homeric legend as after the enduring passion of an old Wanderobo warrior who had once been married to a woman by that name. This distinction is important, for although I recognized the individuality of Helen Habiline's beauty almost from the outset, I saw it in an African rather than a Western European context.
She appeared to be clad in the creation of a horny furrier. A girdle of fur covered her lower abdomen and loins, but her breasts and upper thighs were so lightly haired that the ebony smoothness of her flesh shone through. The hair on her head was hyacinth, wiry, and flyaway, almost as if she had grabbed an uncombed fright wig from a department store mannequin—but her eyes sparkled like ripe black olives and her nose was fierce and generous. Her everted upper lip curled backward over a set of prodigious uppers, teeth like unpainted casino dice. In brief, her face and figure commanded my attention, focused my admiration and awe.
The heat of the day and the suety animal smell of Helen told me that I was not dreaming. There was precedent for what was happening to us, too, for I recalled that on the only occasion that Lemuel Gulliver permits himself to go skinny-dipping in the land of the Houyhnhnms, a female Yahoo throws herself lustfully into the water after him. Although Helen was less brash than that libidinous Yahoo and I more modestly attired than the startled Gulliver, our meeting otherwise seemed to parallel that of our fictional counterparts.
Helen scrutinized my clothes with intent interest—from the red bandanna about my neck to the rubber-soled chukkas encasing my feet. When she cocked her head to one side, I had the unnerving impression that, with an effort of superhabiline concentration, she was mentally disrobing me. What kind of body did I have under the strategically arrayed skins cloaking my back and loins? Although she had never met a fop before, Helen clearly understood that my togs were accessories rather than outlandish extensions of my person. She tried to see through them to me.
I took off my bandanna and held it out to her. “Here. If you want it, it's yours.”
Her eyes widened at the sound of my voice, but she did not accept the bandanna, merely studied the way it dangled between my fingers. Then she retreated another step or two.
“Joshua Kampa at your service. I've come in peace for all mankind. Womankind, too, as far as that goes.”
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At this point Helen raised her club, showed me her enviably powerful teeth, and erected the short hairs on her shoulders and upper arms. This response nonplused and frightened me. I gestured placatingly with the bandanna, but she pivoted, glanced at me over one muscular shoulder, and, imparting a pretty swivel to her steatopygic fanny, stalked eastward through the undergrowth. A ridge of dark fur ran down her spine to the small of her back, but there was only enough hair about her anus to defend her when she sat upon the ground.
* * * *
Australopithecus habilis
or
Homo habilis
. Alistair Patrick Blair preferred the former term because he had pinned his hopes of winning the earliest-near-human-ever-discovered sweepstakes to the coccyx of a dubious creature called
Homo
zarakalensis
. To my mind, though, Helen had to be considered human, and the term I preferred then—and still prefer today—is
Homo habilis
.
The specimens of
A. robustus
who had fled from me earlier
were
mere apes by comparison to Helen.
The fact that she had come out exploring on her own also told me something about her character: i.e., that she possessed a degree of independence typical of many well-adjusted, adult human beings. She did not mind taking acceptable risks; she did not mind acting, upon occasion, entirely on her own. A baboon, an australopithecine, or even a chimp would never have ventured so far afield without at least one confederate nearby for moral support.
Looked at in another light, however, Helen's independence argued
against
her categorization as an advanced hominid. Our immediate ancestors, Blair had taught me, were gregarious creatures, craving companionship and the approval of their peers. A loner among such buddy-buddy primates would have been an aberration, for her people would have lived in a social unit where the ethos of a loner could contribute only uncertainty and disruption. This chain of reasoning led me to conclude that Helen was indeed an aberration among her kind, but probably in a positive rather than a pejorative way. Judged against the standard of her fellow habilines, she was more, rather than less, human. She had her eye on the angels.
Why was she out alone? Two possible reasons presented themselves. First, maybe she had got fed up with the demands of habiline togetherness and retreated to the woods to commune with her—dare I propose it?—soul. Second, maybe she had struck off by herself on a mission meant to benefit her entire group, in which case she would have been a patriot rather than a misanthrope, and hence an aberration with a certain grimy social cachet. If this second hypothesis proved out, why, Helen and I had something significant in common.
I struck off in the direction she had gone.
* * * *
Three crude dwellings—with stone bases, curved sapling supports, and haphazard thatchings of brush—occupied this little nook, and I gaped at them like a man who has stumbled upon a McDonald's at the summit of a remote Himalayan mountain. None of these structures would keep out a heavy rain or deflect a howling wind, but they were clearly capable of providing shade during the day and a sense of womblike security at night.
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Damn my broken transcordion. Here was confirmation that the habilines had built shelters similar to those of contemporary hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari and elsewhere, but I could not report the finding.
I named this village Helensburgh.
Having arrived just ahead of me, Helen hooted to announce her return, and through the holes in the haystack huts I saw dark bodies responding to her oddly musical call. Several females and children spilled out into the V-shaped clearing from the huts, while others appeared from the edges of the woods.
Because of my impeded view at the edge of the gallery forest and the habilines’ incessant movement, I could only estimate the number of creatures that turned out to welcome, or waylay, their prodigal Amazon. Fourteen or fifteen, it seemed to me. Helen had status among these people. What kind of status, however, I could not yet say.
My next surprise was that she towered over the adults in the village by as many inches as I towered over her. Standing among them, she might have been the queen of a race of delicate pygmies. All her subjects, though, were matrons, ingénues, or children, some of these last so small and downy that they resembled teddy bears or upright vervet monkeys. A couple of the younger women clutched infants in their arms.
This was civilization of a kind, a civilization in miniature, and I hung back to keep from disrupting its workings. Having just named the village Helensburgh, I decided that Helen's people needed a name, too, something descriptive but far less formal than
Homo habilis
. As members of the family Hominidae (of which all-conquering
Homo sapiens
is today the only surviving species), they led me willy-nilly to the nickname Minids.
During my childhood in Kansas and Wyoming, people speaking to my mother about me would often say, “Why, Jeannette, he's no bigger than a minute.” I was still small, but Helen's diminutive people were even smaller, and I relished the idea of confronting all my mother's old friends with the news that, yes, I was finally bigger than a Minid. For the first time in my life, in fact, I was
tall
.
The Minids quickly disabused me of the notion that Helen was their queen. After ascertaining her identity, one grizzled matron waved an arm at Helen (revealing a ridge of hair from her armpit to the underside of her wrist), chattered high-pitched imprecations, and furiously shook her head and mouth.
Bored, the children eventually wandered away, while the two mothers with infants sat down on the grass to poke and dandle them. Helen endured this scolding for two or three minutes, occasionally glancing at the gallery forest with a vacant expression, but finally tired of the game and lifted her club over the old woman's shoulder to signal her weariness. Even though this gesture looked as much like a salute as a threat, the harridan ducked her head, turned sideways, and, bending deeply, exposed the enlarged
labia
minora
of her genital region, a pink satin slipper.
Rather indifferently, Helen touched her club to the old woman's tailbone, forgiving and dismissing her with the same gesture. Then she ambled off to another section of the clearing. Here she squatted and relieved herself. No one paid her any further mind, and the object of her parodic knighting went chattering back into her hut as if nothing had happened. By briefly assuming what primate ethnologists call the presentation posture, the harridan had both truckled to and appeased Helen. She had also underscored the ambiguity of Helen's status among the Minids, for Helen was a female whom the other adult females treated both as a wayward sister (the scolding) and as an unattached adolescent male with formidable physical strength but no real community standing (the presentation posture). It was entirely possible that Helen had forgotten me the moment her back was turned, and that her disregard of my presence had enabled me to follow her back to Helensburgh. I did not like to think that her endocranial volume was so slight that it denied even a few out-of-the-way brain cells to a memory of me, but I could not ignore this possibility. Maybe I was nothing to her because I had literally made no impression on her understanding. A painful hypothesis.
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Inwardly denying it, I watched her and the other habiline villagers go lackadaisically about their business—which seemed to consist primarily of half-hearted foraging and vigorous loafing.
The Minids—a band of approximately twenty-five, if I counted in the adult males who were probably out scavenging or hunting—had their capital at the overlap of two of the habitats of the East African mosaic: savannah and gallery forest. Because bush country, hills, and lakeshore territories also lay close by, the Minids were well situated to exploit a number of different food sources and survival modes. Still, I had not expected to find half of such a band taking its ease at midday without a single sentry.
Eventually I decided to withdraw from the encampment. If the males came back and found me ogling their women and children, I might find my visit to the Pleistocene cut short by their intolerance and outrage. At this early stage in my explorations, it was best to avoid arousing either suspicions or tempers.
Moving from tree to tree, then, I renegotiated the path that I had followed to Helensburgh—but I had gone no more than thirty or forty yards when I spotted a small, hairy figure approaching the village from farther down the path.
My counterpart halted and glowered at me like an offended policeman or teacher. It—he—was a Minid, with beady eyes, protruding lips, and a receding chin from which waggled a sparse, reddish-black goatee. Although he was several inches shy of five feet, he was clearly an adult, and a lankily muscular one whose small size did little to calm my fears of him. At length I took a cautious step forward and nodded apologetically at the habiline, who, keeping me in his sights, began to creep around me in a cunning arc. My principal concern was that he might be leading the other males home.
“Listen,” I began, “I'm sorry. It's just that—”
From several feet away he lofted a globule of saliva and hit me squarely on the chin. Then, while I was wiping my face with the back of my hand, he scampered into the village screeching and chattering and calling down the wrath of Ngai. A terrible hubbub broke out among the encampment's denizens, and I fled, my legs churning and my fancy indelicately conjuring up a dozen different ways to die at the hands of these protohuman creatures. Soon enough, however, I realized that they were not following me and that the Minid I had just encountered was probably their appointed sentry. I had caught him taking an unauthorized and ill-advised break, and each of us had scared the gibbering bejesus out of the other.
For a long time, then, I stood on the edge of the vast savannah trying to recover my wind and quiet the thunderous pounding of my heart. These things done, I began to laugh, and my laughter doubled me over into a self-protective crouch, and in this crouch, still laughing, I made myself consider what I must do next.