ear, but now it must perform a more urgent task, saving Helen’s life. I gathered together all the dry grass in our hut, carried it outside, and set it afire with one of the last of my matches. Then, as Malcolm gazed down skeptically, I piled brushwood on the fire and sterilized my large pen blade in the unruly flames. Snatching the knife out again, I blistered my fingers, but the pain was of no consequence, and I ignored it to get back to Helen.
Emily, Dilsey, and Alfie had also entered Guinevere’s semicircular windbreak. Their eyes turned toward me, going almost immediately to the knife. I gestured with it, eased my way inward, and knelt by Helen with a premonition of disaster settling in my belly. My entire body seemed to be held together by gummy resins and tangled strings.
Helen cried out, an inhuman cry of warning and pain. Everyone looked at her, then at me. I raised the knife and told the habilines in clear, calm, rational tones that it might be necessary to make an incision in the outer edge of Helen’s vagina to facilitate delivery. My fear was that this cut, even if I could make it cleanly, would prove an inadequate remedy for her troubles. In fact, I had brought the knife thinking that if she died in labor, I might be able to rescue the infant with a crude Caesarean section.
The clinical clarity of this plan broke down under the weight of Helen’s suffering. The idea of even touching her with the knife sickened me, and I dropped it into the dirt. In deepening perplexity four silent habilines looked on, consoling one another with embraces and absent-minded pats. I do not think that even Dilsey had ever witnessed so taxing a labor.
As the storm drifted southwest from the Horn—sheet lightning giving way to zigzag slashes of almost unendurable brilliance, thunder whip-cracking after every bolt—Helen somehow managed to evict the tiny torturer in her womb. Guinevere, not I, received the child. In the oppressive glow of the storm its body shone neither blue-black nor gray, but a startlingly phosphorescent white.
The baby’s skin was blancmange, the color of milk pudding. How could this unappetizing little grub be the issue of my lovemaking with Helen? The mired hippopotamus that the Minids had eaten had been a lovelier hue, a more comprehensible variety of mutant. I had refused to eat of it for fear of violating the integrity of one of my dreams—but this creature, my daughter, how was I ever going to be able to love her? Her head was too large for her gaunt body; her pallor suggested not merely albinism but illness.
“Mai mwah,” said Helen feebly from where she lay.
I placed the grub at full length between my wife’s breasts. Helen enfolded the child in her hairy arms, lifting her head to peer downward at the little creature. Her lips parted. “Mai mwah,” she said again. No one moved. The grub found one of Helen’s breasts and began to suckle: a small ivory incubus drinking the heart’s blood of the woman who had borne her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Northwest Frontier District, Zarakal
July 1987
HAZY IN THE HARSH LIGHT OF DAWN, EMPTINESS. Once, long ago, this part of Zarakal had been fertile grasslands; today it looked like a petrified sea, broken here and there with combers of thorn scrub, grit kicking up in spray at the unpredictable bidding of the wind. A lone hyena stood on the salt flat watching a caravan of three vehicles moving northwestward along the highway connecting Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in the country’s heartland with the Lake Kiboko Protectorate in the Great Rift Valley. The highway had been built over the past two years with American money, machinery, and supervision, although the Zarakali Minister of Interior, Alistair Patrick Blair, had insisted on a large management role for himself and a coolie work force of indigenes. One part of the highway linked Marakoi, the capital, with the air base thirty miles northeast, but the remaining three hundred miles of macadam struck many observers, both native and American, as Blair’s private expressway to nowhere. The Great Man had grown weary of replenishing the supplies of his field workers at the Lake Kiboko digs by helicopter or light aircraft. Hence this ribbon of asphalt through the awesome emptiness of the Zarakali desert.
Joshua murmured, “Not a used-car dealership in sight.”
“Our military still hasn’t been here all that long,” replied Woody Kaprow, who was driving the second vehicle in the caravan.