and Intercultural Affairs.
It was countersigned by the Interior Minister.
Several dozen yards beyond the obelisk my contact halted on a ridge overlooking the fossil beds where Alistair Patrick Blair had made his reputation as a paleoanthropologist. The heydays of the seventies and eighties were no more. A chain-link fence enclosed the area where the Great Man’s successors labored to keep his work alive in the mocking shadow of the Sambusai Sands Hotel.
I did not like to come out this far, because memories nagged at me here. One of them was commemorated by a bronze sculpture of a hominid skull that turned on a stainless-steel pivot above a cairn of mortared stones. This monument stood in front of the wattle shack that had been Blair’s headquarters at Lake Kiboko. Tourists could enter the protectorate, shrunk from two hundred square miles to a few hundred square yards since the Great Man’s death, only on Sundays, and they were always accompanied by armed guards who did not permit them to wander from a preordained route. The guards’ pistols were to intimidate the tourists as well as to defend against lions. The plaque on the cairn read:
ALISTAIR PATRICK BLAIR
STATESMAN AND SCIENTIST
1914–1991
Blair’s ashes were buried under the pedestal.
“Dirk Akuj,” the man on the ridge greeted me as I drew near. He was thin, coal-black in color, and ascetic-looking. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kampa.”
“It would have been more pleasant in the air-conditioned hotel.”
“But less private. And from here, sir, we can monitor your daughter’s leisurely progress across the lake.”
“What does my daughter have to do with this?” I demanded, angry.
“A lovely young woman. It surprises me, sir, that a famous person like you allows a famous person like her such free rein. The world is full of unscrupulous people.”
“Am I talking to one of them?”
“Don’t think ill of me, sir. There is no other like Monicah. Her safety should be a matter of great concern to all of us.”
“The year she was born, President Tharaka declared her a national resource, a national treasure. Those Sambusai warriors know that, and so does my man at the marina. Should anything happen to her on this outing, they will suffer the consequences.”
“Yes, sir—but would their punishments, including even their death, repay you for your daughter’s loss?”
“Nothing repays a parent the death of a child.” I took a freshly laundered, pale-pink kerchief from my pocket and wiped my brow. “What’s all this to you, Mr. Akuj? I don’t much like your questions.”
“I’m from White Sphinx.”
“I know that, Mr. Akuj. But you’re Zarakali, I think, and White Sphinx died fifteen years ago today.”
“Actually, Mr. Kampa, I’m a Karamojong from Uganda. That’s not terribly far from here, though, and I look upon this as my country too.” His eyes swept the lake, the desert, the eastern horizon. Then he nodded at another barren ridge inside the chain-link fence. “The Great Man died there, didn’t he?”
“Yes. A horrified American Geographic Foundation cameraman got it all on film. Blair stumbled while prospecting that embankment, toppled down and broke his neck.”
“Striving for the impossible.”
I shot Dirk Akuj an annoyed glance.
“He was striving for the impossible, don’t you think? He died on his very own Weightlessness Simulation Incline.”
“Who’s to say what’s impossible?” I asked testily.
“Who indeed? Not I, Mr. Kampa. White Sphinx, you should know, has been born again from Woody Kaprow’s ashes.”
This news stunned me because I had not known that Kaprow was dead. I had not heard from the physicist in eight or nine years, and had last seen him at Blair’s funeral in Marakoi, but I had always supposed he was incommunicado for security reasons. The U.S. government had shifted him into other lines of temporal research, and, happy as a ram in rut, he was rigorously pursuing these. So I had supposed.
“His ashes? He’s dead?”
“I was speaking metaphorically, Mr. Kampa, but we do feel certain Dr. Kaprow is dead. Eight years ago he failed to return from a mission undertaken at Dachau in West Germany. The mission was supposedly a test for certain improvements to the temporal-transfer machinery, but it now seems that Dr. Kaprow insisted upon this dropback out of . . . call it ‘racial guilt.’ He went to join the martyrs.”
“And never came back?”
“No, sir. We think he purposely rejected that option.”
I scrutinized the young man’s face. “ ‘We’?”
“Like you, Mr. Kampa, I have dual citizenship. I am the assistant project director for the new incarnation of White Sphinx. My association with Dr. Kaprow began three years after