Killing Time

for argument. It will be done as it is always done.' I thought he might even weep himself when he said, 'She is a female child, Gideon. The pain does not matter, only the ceremony.' At his words Ama began to shriek fearsomely, and Mutesa tightened his grip on her. Ordering her to be silent, he proceeded to drag her out to the crowd that had gathered.

Ama's cries were horrible to hear even before the cutting began; but when the knife went in they became quite simply the most horrifying and unbearable sound I've ever heard. I clutched my head, thinking that I might go mad — and then a thought occurred to me. I ran to where I'd stowed my bag and withdrew the stun gun. If I could not stop the unspeakable act, I could at least ease the child's torment.

I dashed outside to a scene so revolting that it stopped me dead in my tracks. There was no special area set aside for the procedure, not even a blanket thrown on the earth — the regard in which the 'female child' was held was amply displayed by the way her genitalia were being cut up in the dirt, much as one would have gelded an animal. With a sudden roar, I brought the ceremony to a halt; and when I raised my weapon the shaman, bloody knife in hand, took a step away from the girl, giving me a line of fire. Instantly I pulled the trigger, and Ama's body jerked a few inches into the air as she painlessly and mercifully lost consciousness.

'She is only asleep!' I shouted, using much of what little I knew of their language and breathing hard; then I quickly directed the weapon at the shaman's guards. 'Tell the shaman that he can go on now, Mutesa,' I said in English, opening the tent flap and backing inside. 'And I hope that your gods will forgive you all.'

CHAPTER 46

Needless to say, things were never quite the same for me in Dugumbe's camp after that evening. Oh, I argued the subject with the chief, to be sure, argued it many times on many nights. But for the most part he thought my declarations nothing more than amusing, although on a few occasions they seemed to make him quite irritated. A woman who took physical pleasure from sex, he said, was a woman who could never be controlled, who would roam from tent to tent like a whore — and he would have no whores in his camp. Furthermore, he told me that though he had enjoyed my company and appreciated my efforts on behalf of his people, I would do well to pick my battles more carefully: he could brook only so much impertinence from any man, particularly any white man, and he had no desire to make an example of me. Knowing that his veiled threat was sincere, I finally let the subject drop and elected to surreptitiously do what I could by teaching the mothers in camp how to administer analgesics and, when we could make them, opiates to their daughters before the terrible ceremony. But in truth many of those women, having endured the same torture, seemed to have no inclination to ease the suffering of even their own flesh and blood; and so the mutilations went on as before.

Little came of my use of the stun gun. I knew that the soldiers who had been at the ceremony would report to Dugumbe about it (though the shaman, not wanting to admit that anyone's powers were greater than his, would likely not follow suit); so that very night I went outside camp and drained the weapon's energy cells. When Dugumbe demanded to see the thing, I offered it to him as a gift; and when it failed to produce any effect he tossed it back, declaring that the soldiers were fools and that Ama had simply fainted from the pain. This left me with the dilemma of possessing only a weapon that would kill; and so it became necessary to watch myself carefully, to avoid arguments (which meant avoiding the shaman), and to try to concentrate on my medical duties.

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.