But disillusionment made such a life increasingly difficult, and it wasn't very long before I found myself wondering if by coming to Africa I had really escaped the evils of the "information age" at all. What was the collected wisdom of Dugumbe's people if not "information"? Unrecorded, true, but nonetheless powerful — and manipulable. What had Mutesa done in his tent that night but convince himself of something that he knew in his heart to be utterly false but to which it was necessary to adhere if he were to preserve his place and his faith in the tribe? Could he not have accurately had "Mundus vult decipi" painted above the entrance to his tent? Were the evils that I'd sought to escape when I'd boarded the Frenchmen's plane outside Naples not in fact human evils, defiant of time and technology and passed on wherever the human species elected to establish its dominance?
And wasn't Malcolm right in saying that we would never change any of this until we could reengineer the past?
Such thoughts burned in my head not only during my waking hours but when I was asleep, as well; and when those dreams were one night accompanied by a sound I knew to be the deep rumble that Malcolm's ship produced when he wished to either terrify his enemies or destabilize their structures, I thought as I began to awaken that it was only my subconscious making an appropriate association. It wasn't until Mutesa shook me to full consciousness and told me the rumors about a strange aircraft that was making its way toward the general area of our camp from the northeast that I realized the sound had been real.
"It is said that they look for you, Gideon," he told me urgently, "and that if they are attacked they destroy entire fields, whole parts of the forest, even villages, by increasing the power of the sun."
I sat up on my cot, trying to grasp it. Clearly the ship was coming, and clearly it was coming for me: the line of approach indicated that it was following the same route I had used to get to this place. My movements through Europe and then into Africa could not, of course, have been difficult for my friends aboard the vessel to track; and at first the fact that they had, given my recent feelings about life in Dugumbe's camp in particular and the analog archipelago in general, seemed a good and welcome thing. But as my mind cleared, other thoughts brought a pang of deep dread:
Why were they coming? My falling-out with Malcolm had been virtually complete, and I knew him too well to think that he'd ever accept someone who had expressed such severe doubts about his work back into the fold. Nor, for that matter, would the others, whatever our mutual affection; even Larissa had expressed no desire to have me stay if I couldn't believe in what they were doing. Why, then? I had no special technical knowledge that they needed — their successful deployment of the Washington materials had proved that. What did they want?
All possible avenues of explanation led to only one conclusion: Malcolm had told me sincerely that he wasn't at all certain he wanted me "roaming loose" if I knew his secrets; and that vulnerability must have begun to gnaw at his unstable mind so much that he was now coming to put an end to at least one of his worries— permanently.
During the following the two days — which is also to say the last two days — as the thunderous rumbling has continued to reverberate through the mountains and the reports from villages on the lower slopes have become more numerous, I have tried but failed to come up with another, any other, interpretation of the situation. I don't know why Larissa or the others would participate in my death unless Malcolm — persuasive as he can be — has managed to talk them into it. Perhaps he's even fabricated evidence to prove that I've betrayed them. Whatever the answer actually is, I will likely never learn it; all I know for certain is that I can't risk seeing these people who have sheltered me become collateral victims of this continued madness. I must move on.
Dawn is just breaking, and I can hear Mutesa assembling his kit outside my tent. His insistence on escorting me to the coast is, I think, partly the result of our friendship and partly due to the gratitude that he has always shown in his eyes, but never acknowledged in words, for my having eased the suffering of the unfortunate Ama. It will be hard to say good-bye to him and his family, but I shall miss little else about this place. Dugumbe's occasional pearls of wisdom— especially his admonition that information is not knowledge— cannot, I must regretfully record, rationalize his actions; and though, as I say, I'm grateful that he is concerned for my safety, I can declare in the privacy of these pages that on balance his own definition of knowledge is no boon to his tribe or to the world. I've told him that when the ship comes he must neither engage it in battle nor hesitate to tell those who fly it where I have gone, and I hope that he will heed the advice; but his belligerent pride may make him incapable of doing so.
Mutesa is whispering my name through the canvas; I must go. If we make the coast, I have decided, I will post this document somewhere on the Internet, for the little good it will do. After that, I have no illusions: I can and will try to run, but if Malcolm and the others truly want me dead, chances are I already am.
CHAPTER 47
Quick as I have tried to be about telling this tale, I can be quicker still in bringing it to a close — for events during the last twelve hours have suddenly made it certain that no one will believe what I have written. All of us live in a different world from the one that existed just fifty-odd hours ago: the one that I inhabited when I first sat down to record my account. Just how different this world is I do not yet know; I have seen only a small piece. But if that piece is any measure, those of us aboard this ship may well be the only humans on earth who are aware of the startling transformation that has taken place. Everyone else cannot help but accept this new reality as the way things have always been, and therefore the record I have written will seem not only implausible but insane.
I say "aboard this ship" because that is, somewhat surprisingly, where I am: aboard the great electromagnetic vessel that until yesterday morning I considered Malcolm Tressalian's most remarkable invention. Larissa sleeps next to me on the bed in my quarters as I write, exhausted, as are we all, by the task of trying to comprehend what has happened. That task has not diminished the joy of being with her again, of course, nor of discovering that in fact my friends were not out for my blood. But it is consuming enough to have made this happy time take on the trappings of unreality, and I expect at every moment to wake up back in Chief Dugumbe's camp, to the sounds of food being prepared and weapons being readied. Perhaps that is why I cannot sleep — why I will not sleep — until I have made a record of this last episode: for if indeed this new world still exists when next I wake, I may need to refer to these pages to remind myself of how it came to be.
Mutesa and I lost the few men who were in our party not twelve hours after leaving camp. The sight of Malcolm's ship, when it finally did appear on the horizon behind us, was simply too much for them to bear, as it nearly was for me; but Mutesa was as stalwart as ever and, finding us shelter in the hollow of a giant baobab tree, prepared to help me make what was presumably going to be my last stand. At his insistence that I arm myself I reluctantly took out the rail pistol, incapable of fully comprehending that I might have to turn it against Larissa and the others and wondering if it might not be better all the way around to simply surrender myself.