At the beginning of the decade several million people—refugees from the civil conflicts in Ethiopia, nomadic pastoralists fleeing drought and tribal warfare—had straggled into this region to die of starvation and disease. A portion of what was now Russell-Tharaka AFB had once been a receiving area for the refugees, the focus of an international relief effort run jointly by the Zarakali government and the United Nations Development Program. Skirmishes with Somali irregulars along a disputed border and battles with Ethiopian Army units in the Djilbabo Plain had eventually cut off the southward flow of the dispossessed, a rather mixed blessing, if a blessing at all. Meantime, graft in Marakoi had undone the relief effort by diverting food and medical supplies to Zarakali soldiers in the frontier regions. The WaBenzi had played a telling role in this fiasco, but, magnificently irate, Mutesa David Christian Ghazali Tharaka had purged the most blatant offenders. Now he had a new batch of WaBenzi, and the dead… well, the dead were dead. The vultures and hyenas had obliterated nearly every trace of them. For having briefly suffered the dazed tread and shuffle of a hapless multitude, the land looked little if any different.
A sign on the metal rail designed to prevent a visitor from slipping and falling into the depression below the bleachers caught Joshua’s attention:
“Up,” Blair said. “The sign’s meaning will become clear only when you witness the use to which we put the incline.”
They climbed a set of switchbacking metal stairs to the hutch nearly sixty feet above the ground. The climb seemed altogether familiar to Joshua, a dream numbly repeating itself. Blair wheezed in the heat, wiped his sweaty brow, and nodded curtly at three black officials—WaBenzi all—seated under an immense vinyl umbrella in the center of the reviewing stand. Plainly the President had not granted them permission to sit with him above.
In the carpeted, air-conditioned hutch, Mzee Tharaka received Blair and Joshua as if he had planned this entire outing around their presence and participation. Standing before a rectangle of delicately tinted plate glass, Joshua found his right hand imprisoned between the strong, plump hands of the President, like a mug from which the old man was about to quaff a potent and exotic brew.
“Welcome, Mr. Kampa. Welcome.”
The voice was hoarse, the English impeccable, but what disconcerted Joshua about the old freedom fighter was his attire. A man of medium height, with no single compelling feature other than his eyes, which were penetrating and mournfully red-rimmed, Mzee Tharaka today shunned the Western-style business suits of his retainers in favor of a Sambusai toga, a gorget of monkey’s teeth, a red silk cloak featuring a pattern of alternating fleur-de-lis and (of all things) golden appliqué pineapples, and a set of silver anklets, from which depended tiny effigies of the country’s vanishing wildlife, an ornamental touch that reminded Joshua of the grade-school name bracelet to which his sister, Anna Monegal, had once added charms depicting a puppy, a broken heart, a pair of saddle oxfords, a football, and so on.
The President’s feet were bare. His head was not. Atop his grizzled sponge of hair he wore a felt crown to which had been affixed an enameled hominid skull discovered by Blair at Lake Kiboko in the early 1970s. Joshua was able to get a good look at the skull, which usually gawped upward at sky or ceiling, only when the President bowed ritually to the paleontologist and warmly clasped his hands. This skull, Joshua knew, was genuine, not a plaster cast or a clever facsimile. Blair had yielded it to the President, under stern and probably injudicious protest, only after his staff at the National Museum had obtained a plaster duplicate from an American physical anthropologist and had catalogued for posterity every known fact about the valuable fossil.
This episode in recent Zarakali history had provoked worldwide interest and comment. The Times of London had run an article predicting Blair’s expulsion from the native government and his possible arraignment for criticism detrimental to the country’s best interests, but the affair had blown over in a fortnight, the President privately placating Blair by promising to restore the hominid crown to the National Museum at his death, and Blair appeasing Mzee Tharaka by agreeing to refuse public comment on the issue and to reaffirm his loyalty pledge to the old man at an open session of the National Assembly. The paleontologist had kept his promises. What Mzee Tharaka would do no one could say. He might choose to be buried wearing the crown. In the meantime, however, he was by universal acknowledgment the only head of state who periodically proclaimed his sovereignty by donning the skull of a human ancestor nearly three million years old.
“Sit,” said the President, indicating the padded swivel chairs in front of the window. “Sit, sit. Mr. Kampa is our guest. He must see that Zarakal is pursuing its future as actively as any other great nation.”
“His especial interest is the past,” Blair said.
“But not for its own sake, surely. Very few people are interested in the past for its own sake. Where we have been, gentlemen, shapes what we are. Further, it implies where we may be going.” The President patted Joshua on the hand. “Zarakal is humanity’s birthplace, young man, and it will not be a negligible factor in determining our species’ ultimate destiny.” He gestured at the merciless blue sky, at the rugged yawn of the gorge. “Here you behold the primitive but fateful beginnings of Project Umuntu, the diaspora of our evolving intelligence to the stars.”
Joshua looked out the window at the Weightlessness Simulation Incline. Three of Zarakal’s astronauts-in-training stood on the opposite ridge, paying homage to their Commander in Chief with the stiff, palm-outward salute that was a relic of the days of British colonialism. They were dwindled by distance, these trainees, but their white uniforms and tight-fitting headgear reminded Joshua of hospital workers in rubber bathing caps. Each man was standing by a large, upright barrel, and each barrel was balanced on the edge of the incline by wires connected to cables strung across the gorge like an unfinished suspension bridge. Red, yellow, and blue, the barrels appeared to be made of a hard, dent-resistant plastic. They were perforated with air holes, and at the moment their hatch covers were up, quite like toilet seats.
Looking down the counter to an official hunched over a microphone, Mzee Tharaka said, “It’s time to begin.”
“Prepare for drop-off,” said the man at the microphone. “One minute and counting.”
The official’s amplified voice echoed over the bleak desert landscape like the voice of God. The astronauts climbed into their capsules and closed the hatch covers.
Mzee Tharaka said, “It’s ridiculous that of all the nations of the earth only the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and perhaps the People’s Republic of China, should be trying to conquer the frontiers of space.”
“Isn’t it equally ridiculous for a nation with insufficient resources and personnel to be making the attempt?” Joshua asked. “Zarakal has more pressing business to attend to, hasn’t it?”
The President’s flinty eyes flashed, but with delight rather than disapproval. “One need not be a giant to have great dreams, Mr. Kampa. As you well know.”
“Yes, Mzee.” The shrewd old bastard.
“For just that reason, and for the reason that although Zarakal may be no giant, Africa is a colossus stirring with a newfound sense of its strength, I am the champion of African astronautics, Mr. Kampa. It was I, incidentally, who initially convinced President Kaunda of Zambia that we must put an African on the moon without the assistance of the so-called superpowers. Zambia’s fledgling space program collapsed under the weight of a staggering economy, but our program is taking wing.”