were rose-pink against the lightening sky, gangly and graceful at the same time.
Returning my attention to the waterbucks, I was stunned by the quickness with which death struck a calf that had ventured too far out. A crocodile—maybe even the one I had just seen slither off the beach—lunged from submarine concealment and seized the hapless calf by the throat. As the surviving waterbucks bolted in terror for open country, the croc’s viselike jaws dragged the calf into deeper water. Crimson began to marble the turquoise surface of the lake, and although the family of hippos bathing just west of me remained blithely indifferent to the slaughter, I had to turn aside. My survival training with Babington should have inured me to such sights, but until now I had not really believed that the matter-of-fact savagery of African bionomics would prevail in my objectified dream world. I had been wrong, of course, and the rapacity of the crocodile was not only the young waterbuck’s comeuppance but mine as well.
Fear had survival value. It could prevent me from falling victim to complacency my first day on the job.
And what, exactly, was my job? In truth, it was twofold. First, to justify further military funding of the White Sphinx Project, I had to satisfy Woody Kaprow’s curiosity about the range and effectiveness of his Time Displacement Apparatus. Second, I had to provide the Zarakali government, in the person of its opinionated Minister of Interior, proof that our species’ earliest recognizably “human” forebears had lived within yodeling distance of Lake Kiboko, Mount Tharaka, and environs. Alistair Patrick Blair wanted hard evidence supporting his highly controversial theories about human evolution, and he had persuaded his country’s Western-educated President that White Sphinx would deliver on this point, with benefits eventually redounding to both the nation’s scientific establishment (i.e., by vindicating Blair himself) and its economy (i.e., by encouraging tourism, grants, and additional American aid). As a noncommissioned officer in the United States Air Force, I was the pawn of two governments. My “job” was to make both governments happy.
Specifically, I had to search for protohuman hominids, observe their lifestyles, and report my findings to my superiors. The transcordion was supposed to bear the brunt of this last obligation, but because it was not working, I would have to commit my observations to memory until I could discharge that duty in person. Blair had suggested that the dropback take place next to Lake Kiboko. His hope had been that I could find a Homo zarakalensis welcoming committee gathered about the Backstep Scaffold, but that hope had already gone glimmering. The only two-legged creatures in the vicinity were birds, and they had not yet made a friendly overture.
I strode down from the tuff bordering the lake and hiked eastward into open savannah. The differences between this landscape and its twentieth-century version began to astonish me. Where Zarakal had salt flats and thornveldt, this terrain boasted a well-trodden grass cover, small patches of forest, and a network of half-hidden arroyos feeding into Lake Kiboko from the hills to the west. To the southeast, much taller and mightier than it appears today, Mount Tharaka rose up into the sky like the hunched shoulder of a Titan. Evidence of volcanic activity—calderas, compacted ash, glintings of obsidian—marked the landscape if you looked closely, but on the whole the scene was pastoral, even idyllic. This was the way I remembered it from my previous spirit-traveling, but the surprise of finding my dreams corroborated made me lightheaded, giddy with the deliciousness of déjà vu.
Halting, I surveyed the plain. Everywhere my eyes went, life. As earlier at the lake, I felt that I had called this procession of creatures out of temporal limbo by stepping into their element. The richness of racial memory, and my tapping of that richness, had bidden them into being. An egocentric view of the matter but one I could not quite shake. In addition to the waterbucks that had fled Lake Kiboko, I saw gazelles, wildebeest, zebras, and ungainly giraffids with antlers like massive human pelvises. The landscape rippled with spots and stripes, all seemingly suspended in an ecology of mirage.
Only, I had to keep reminding myself, apparently this mirage was real. Although none of Kaprow’s dreamfarers had died on their dropbacks, he and his assistants agreed that a dreamfarer could easily perish in the territory of an objectified dream.
Babington, the Wanderobo, had told me that I need not fear lions overmuch—but lions, leopards, and the relict population of