“Not ‘we,’ sir. ‘You.’ All I’ve ever needed is my dreams, and that’s why I’m here.”
“He’s right,” Kaprow said.
“Of course,” Blair responded. “Of course.”
Surprised by his own bitter querulousness, Joshua watched a jumbled ridge fall away to the left and the lake appear before their caravan like a huge spill of mercury. The western wall of the Great Rift Valley seemed far, far away, an arid lunar battlement.
Lunar battlement…
This image reminded Joshua of the day, nearly eighteen months ago, when Blair had first escorted him to a meeting with President Tharaka. The morning had begun with the paleoanthropologist and his baffled American protégé blinking in the ferocious sunlight parching the parade ground outside the cinderblock building in which Joshua had been living since his arrival, five weeks before, in Zarakal. The heat was unlike the heat of the Gulf Coast, and he did not know if he would ever get used to it. Although he was pigmented like a native, that accident of birth did not seem to help very much. Maybe later, when he was acclimated.
“Ah. Here come the WaBenzi,” Blair had said.
“The WaBenzi? What are the WaBenzi?”
“My colleagues in the ministries, Joshua. Minor local officials. Jackals highly enough placed to demand a little dash.”
“Dash, sir? What’s that?”
Sliding his thumb and forefinger together silkily, Alistair Patrick Blair nodded at the motorcade of sleek black vehicles coming through the main gate of Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base. Beyond the gate, the bare candelabra of sisal plants lined one side of the melting asphalt strip to Marakoi, while on the other side the salt flat stretched away toward an unconfirmed rumor of the Indian Ocean. Joshua noted that the automobiles in the motorcade were all Mercedes-Benzes.
“Dash is bribery?”
Blair affirmed this deduction with a grunt.
“President Tharaka is susceptible to bribery?”
“Only on a large scale. How else do you suppose the United States managed to place its bases here?”
“You’re not immune to a little dash dealing either, are you?”
The Great Man bridled, slipped voodoo needles into Joshua’s body with his eyes. “I was referring to the bounders in the motorcade, Kampa. The provincial commissioner, the district officer, the minister of science, and the other pettifogging mucky-mucks who’ve come up here from Marakoi for the day.”
“You sound like a closet Klansman.”
“Rubbish, Joshua! The WaBenzi are a persistent scourge on the backs of our citizenry. I’d despise their venality even if it came cloaked in Anglo-Saxon pinkness. You can stop that adolescent smirking. It’s a measure of your ignorance.”
“My ignorance? About what?”
“Africa. I’m a white man, granted, but this is my bloody country, and these are my people. You’re a black man, but you’re still a cultural dilettante and an outsider when it comes to comprehending what you see here.”
Joshua said, “That’ll put me in my place.”
Blair expressed his contempt for this comeback by snorting like a bush pig. Meanwhile, the President’s cavalcade—eight automobiles and a pair of khaki-clad outriders on motorcycles—passed behind a row of whitewashed administration buildings and turned onto an access road leading to the testing ranges in the salt flats. Two American air policemen on motorcycles and a navy-blue staff car belonging to the base commander had joined the procession at the main gate, and they were dutifully bringing up the rear, maintaining a discreet distance between themselves and the WaBenzi. This was a low-key reception for the leader of the air base’s host country, but Mzee Tharaka, the fabled Zarakali freedom fighter, vacillated between pomp and austerity in matters of governance, and you could never be sure what occasions would provoke which response. Today, apparently, it was a little of both, a motorcade but no fanfare.
“Let’s go,” Blair said. “The President wants to meet you.”
“Yes, sir. I know.”
Joshua followed the Great Man to a Land Rover parked on the edge of the parade ground and abashedly climbed in on the passenger’s side. Blair was put out with him. He had offended his mentor with that Klansman slur, then compounded the insult by smarting off. What a clumsy comedy. This was Africa, all right, but he was a long way from home. The Land Rover accelerated to overtake Mzee Tharaka and his obsequious WaBenzi retinue. The Great Man played the gear-shift knob as if it were the handle on an unforthcoming slot machine.
“At least there’s youth to excuse my petulant behavior.”
Blair glanced sidelong at Joshua. “Ha,” he said, grudgingly amused. “He got here earlier than I expected.
We should have been out there waiting for him. Delays annoy him.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Do you know why Mzee Tharaka values your presence here?”
“No, sir. Not really.”
“You’re part of his modernization program. You’ll be visiting the realm of yesterday for the greater glory of Zarakal’s tomorrow. Integrating the technological with the spiritual is a passion of his, even if he is sometimes unsure how to accomplish that goal.”
The Land Rover sprinted up the access road until it was cruising three or four car lengths behind the base commander’s vehicle. One of the American air policemen dropped back on his motorcycle to see who they were, then saluted and waved them on.
Ten minutes later the procession slowed. Ahead of them Joshua saw a barricade of chain-link fence and another boxlike sentry post. On duty here was a young African soldier wearing pinks, rose-colored khakis, and a helmet like a deep-dish silver hubcap. He held his awkward, palm-outward salute until even the Land Rover had passed through the gate, upon which hung a large sign stenciled in Day-Glo red letters:
“ZAPPA?” Joshua said.
“It’s an acronym for Zarakali Administration for Peace and Prosperity through Astronautics.”
“Astronautics?”
“Surely that doesn’t boggle your bourgeois brain, Joshua. After all, you’re a Zarakali chrononaut.”
“Yes, but—”
“Astro-, chrono-, what matters the prefix? President Tharaka is visiting all his nauts today. That’s why you’ve been summoned.”
“Yes, sir. But I’m a special case, aren’t I? It’s a little hard to believe that Zarakal has a space program, too.”
“What Mzee Tharaka wants, Mzee Tharaka gets.”
A wooden reviewing stand with a high oblong hutch resembling a press box appeared in the hazy middle distance, bleacher-green against the dirty beige of the desert. A pair of revolving sprinklers watered the narrow travesty of lawn in front of these bleachers, and six spiky palm trees in tubs lined the walkway that bisected the reviewing stand. Not an especially auspicious site for a football or soccer stadium. As it turned out, however, the reviewing stand overlooked not a well-kept playing field but a barren depression, or cut, in the landscape.
The enameled WaBenzi limousines slotted by ministerial rank into crudely marked spaces on the lip of the gorge, but an armed African soldier in pinks deflected the Land Rover into an unpaved parking area and told Blair that he and Joshua would not be able to dismount until the President had climbed to his place in the hutch at the top of the bleachers. The battered Land Rover did not qualify as an official vehicle, nor Blair himself as a bona fide WaBenzi.
“Suits me,” the Great Man said. “I’m delighted he doesn’t know we’re late.”
“Very good, sir.”
Finally, clicking his heels and opening Blair’s door, the soldier announced that the President would receive them, and Blair and Joshua marched across the parking area to the bleachers. All you could see between the two halves of the reviewing stand was a vast, pitted plain. And in front of the plain a huge, alkaline crater. There was a terrible charnel beauty to this landscape.