‘“You’ll have your father in person,” my mother told me. “Why do you think you’ll still require the holotapes?”
‘I didn’t know – but when we got to the camp, via a final sweltering trip along the Japurá in a ramshackle motor launch, I discovered that I really didn’t have my father in person at all. He was too preoccupied with saving the last BaMbuti to favor me with anything more intimate than an occasional weary smile, altogether in passing, and my mother was finding her time similarly monopolized.
‘I dug in the mud, shot feather darts endlessly out of a blowgun into improvised targets, or tagged along after the mestizos from Lago Paricá who kept our camp going. The pygmies I saw only rarely, and I knew they were dying – dying in spite of everything Egan Chaney and Celestine Cather could do . . . It’s a measure of my mood, Ben, that I’d begun to think it served the sad, poisoned buggers right.’
Just then an inquiry from SteppeChilde – a veldt colony to the far northeast – was patched through my computer from the relay at Chaney Field. I tapped out the communication code indicating preemptive priority business. There was nothing I could tell BoskVeld’s impatient SteppeChildren that demanded an immediate response, and Elegy seemed, at the moment, more perilously in need of my ear and my unspoken sympathy.
‘When we’d been in the jungle nearly half a year and it was clear the BaMbuti were bound for extinction, Egan Chaney proposed that my mother preserve tissue samples from the last three shell-shocked pygmies. He thought it might be possible to clone replacements for them when we could get back to facilities permitting that exacting procedure.
‘The other nine or ten diminutive Africans had been given Viking funerals on the Japurá, cast adrift at night in oil-soaked canoes and cremated in cindery bonfires above the river. I remember those funerals very well, Ben – I can still see the reflections of the flames in the dark water and hear the provocative crackling of their bones. There was some fear, you see, that the pygmies had been contaminated by unknown biological agents during the African Armageddon. Even burial seemed an insufficient precaution against the spread of their undiagnosable and wholly conjectural disease. Hence, Viking funerals. I can remember that I enjoyed these festive boat burnings immensely. They were events, every one of them.
‘Anyway, my mother – even though she had both the equipment and the know-how to take the tissue samples my father wanted – felt ethically compelled to refuse. There was a quarrel, one that I overheard because I happened to be in my mother’s tent in a cot draped with mosquito netting. They woke me up quarreling. My father kept repeating the phrase “the death of diversity,” muttering it over and over like an incantation, while my mother framed arguments that seemed to me, groggy as I was, young as I was, rational and humane.
‘First, my mother told Chaney, it might be that the cloned pygmies would carry in their genes the inheritable malignancy to which their parental donors had fallen prey. Who knew what kinds of insidious microscopic warfare the kols and autoks were waging in Central Africa? Second, she said, supposing the clones grew to healthy adulthood, what kind of life would they have? The Ituri was a radioactive swamp, and the pygmies’ entire cultural milieu had been obliterated irretrievably – as irretrievably as some crippled whore’s dreams of paradise. And third, the BaMbuti deserved to die out with as much dignity as they had lived. Japurá Camp, my mother finally declared, had been from first to last a praiseworthy but foredoomed exercise in altruism. Why the hell couldn’t Egan Chaney throw in the towel without first waving it over his head like a battle flag?’
‘And this argument eventually led Chaney to sever all contacts with your mother and you?’ I asked.
‘In part,’ Elegy replied, staring sightlessly at the open monograph in her hands. ‘During the following week, the last three pygmies died, one at a time. My mother was in attendance on all but the very last, a grizzled old woman with dugs like goatskin wine sacks. She wasn’t with this last one because I had taken sick the day before and she refused to leave my cotside to watch the old woman’s inevitable demise. Instead, Chaney and a mestizo named Estanislau sat by the BaMbuti woman, and the next day, when I was suddenly quite well again, Estanislau reported that Chaney had wept all night, even biting a hunk of flesh from his forearm when it dawned on him they were keeping vigil over a corpse. Indeed, in the preparations for the old woman’s funeral on the river Chaney showed up with a bright gauze bandage above his right wrist. My mother hadn’t applied it, either, and he answered no one’s questions about the wound it concealed.’
‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What had been wrong with you?’
‘Nothing, Ben. Nothing at all.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Well, something, I guess. I had feigned being ill to keep my mother beside me on the final night, dimly aware that Chaney would suffer more than anyone because of
