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
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
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.
This I decided to do, much to Mutesa's dismay. As the ship approached the tree in which we were hiding, he insisted that he escort me out onto the grassy patch of flatland that surrounded it, to make certain that I was not simply shot down like a dog. How exactly he intended to prevent this was unclear, but I welcomed his company on what I genuinely thought might be my final walk across any part of this Earth.
Mutesa's bravery took on a bewildered quality as the ship slowly descended in our direction until the bottom of the hull brushed the tips of the waving grass. Then the little green lights began to flash amidships and the hatch flew open, revealing Fouche and, behind him, Larissa. My heart leapt at the sight of her, terrified though I was: she seemed more beautiful than ever, so beautiful that I didn't at first notice that she was screaming to me over the din of the ship's engines in a voice filled with desperation. It took several more minutes to make out just what she was saying, and when at last I did my smiling face went utterly straight:
Malcolm, she was saying, had vanished.
As Larissa and Fouche continued to wave me aboard the ship, I tried to make some kind of sense out of the situation. But sense was waiting on board the vessel, not out there on that grassland. I turned to Mutesa to say good-bye and found him already smiling: I had told him about Larissa (though not about the ship), and, having now seen her, he had apparently reached the conclusion that I was going to be all right. I hugged him tightly, and he told me that I mustn't feel at all bad about returning to my world, for his really wasn't any better — a fact that he suspected I had already learned. I smiled and nodded, then ran for the ship, leaping inside and into those arms that had for so long formed the stuff of my waking and sleeping heartaches.
After getting an additional hug and nearly as many kisses from Fouche, I headed with the pair of them to the nose of the ship, where Colonel Slayton and the Kupermans were waiting. More warm greetings were exchanged, my relief that my suspicions about them had been so wrong growing by leaps and bounds. But before we could enter into any serious discussion of what had happened, we needed to hide ourselves where we would be safe from the weapons of the various tribes of whom my friends had inadvertently been making enemies in their efforts to find me. Lake Albert seemed the obvious spot for such asylum, and soon we were beneath its surface, surrounded by all the military, human, industrial, and animal wastes that had been discarded there during the long years of Africa's decline. Night soon fell, mercifully taking this dismal panorama away; and we did not turn on the ship's exterior illumination as we talked at the conference table, partly for fear of being detected and partly to avoid the ugliness around us.
With Larissa's arm tightly entwined in my own, I began to listen to the story of Malcolm's disappearance, though the telling did not take long. The success of the Washington scheme had apparently driven him into a deep depression. Convinced that the hoax would be quickly exposed and finally force widespread acknowledgment of the dangerous unreliability of modern information systems, he had been stunned to watch it become, throughout the winter and spring, just another source of media fluff and academic revisionism. During the summer he had first stopped eating regularly, then at all, and he had come out of his laboratory so rarely that the others had begun to wonder how he was surviving. Finally, after he'd been locked away for three solid days, Larissa had taken her rail pistol and shot the door down.
Inside the lab was an apparatus such as none of the rest of the team had ever seen. It was impossible to tell what the original design might have been, for it was badly mangled: the result of either a furious destructive rampage or some kind of explosive malfunction. Whatever the case, there was no sign of Malcolm, nor of his body nor indeed of any blood; and this fact brought my warning about the possibility of Malcolm's attempting suicide back into Larissa's thoughts. For the next few days she and the others used the ship and the jetcopter to search the sea for any sign of him, and for several more days they wore out their wits trying to think where else he could have gone and how. Finally accepting their inability to solve the mystery, Larissa decided it was time to find me (a task that took them all of a week) and see if I might have any ideas as to where her brother's desperate mental state could have led him.
Shocked but not entirely surprised by all this, I tried my best to come up with some alternatives to the blackest option. But the attempt was hopeless from the start, and as this became increasingly apparent the others began, one by one, to beg off and go to their quarters to absorb what seemed the only possible conclusion: that Malcolm, despondent over not only the Washington hoax but also the failure of his last technological creation, had smashed the device to pieces and then thrown himself into the sea. That no evidence of the suicide had been found was not surprising: the waters of the North Atlantic were vast, so vast that even the elaborate detection equipment on Malcolm's remarkable ship might have failed to find his body before it was torn up by predators or simply drifted down into some abyss.
Larissa, of course, had suspected that this worst possible conclusion was unavoidable; but given the unique and poignant nature of her shared background with her brother, that suspicion did little to ease the blow when it finally fell, and I was grateful that I could be there to soften it, if only a little. Such was perhaps not the romantic reunion that I had spent so many months unsuccessfully trying to keep out of my thoughts — indeed, we never left the conference table throughout the entire night — but as she drew steadily closer to me, I at least began to sense that she would survive the loss intact and that we did indeed have a future together. The approach of dawn found us both in that hazy, tearful state of exhaustion that often accompanies grief; and then, before either of us was really aware of it, something very strange began to happen:
The sun came gleaming clearly into the ship.
The waters of Lake Albert had been somehow cleansed of the filth that had been horribly evident the night before; and the sight was so miraculous that both Larissa and I could do little more than stand up, move to the transparent hull, and smile in wonder for several minutes. Then the others came barreling in, not one by one but in a noisy herd, shouting the news and asking — rather dimly, I remember taunting — if we'd seen what had happened. There was absolutely no rational explanation for the event: we had heard no sounds of machinery at work during the night, and besides, the technology to do such a thing didn't exist anywhere in Africa — quite probably in all the world. It really did seem nothing short of a miracle; but the shocks were just beginning.
After engaging the holographic projector, we rose back up above the surface to see that the western shore of the lake was utterly free of any signs of conflict. Moreover, animals were visible: the same species of wildlife that I'd read and then observed to be extinct in Africa were everywhere, making the area look much like the yellowed old
