infantryman with no head, and the robed figure of Mutesa David Christian Ghazali Tharaka, President of Zarakal. This last visitor, Joshua learned from Babington, had actually been there.
“Why was he here? What did he say?”
Babington handed Joshua an autographed picture of the President. “He said he was very proud of you. You are bridging a chasm between Zarakal’s pluralistic tribal beginnings and its modern aspirations. That you, an American black man, submitted to the knife bespeaks the fullness of your commitment to our dream.”
“What else did he say?”
“He gave me a photograph, too.” Babington pointed at the wall of the tree house, where he had hung another copy of the same photograph. This one bore an inscription to the Wanderobo. Joshua could not see it from where he lay, but he could tell that it had made Babington very happy.
At first it disturbed Joshua that he was taking so long to heal, but Babington explained that he himself had suffered intense pain and then a throbbing tenderness for well over a month after his irua. By mid-October, just as his mentor had predicted, they were stalking game again, digging tubers, picking fruit, and diving ever deeper into wilderness lore. Joshua’s glans was no longer so sensitive that simply to urinate was to conduct electricity. He was himself again.
Joshua paid attention to Babington’s lessons. He learned how to alter his upright silhouette by tying foliage about his waist, how to move on a wily diagonal while stalking game, how to club a sick or wounded animal to death without exhausting himself or making an ugly mess of his kill, and how to eat raw meat, birds’ eggs, and insects without nausea or qualm. The time in Lolitabu passed quickly.
The night before Joshua was to return to Russell-Tharaka for additional study—textbook and simulator work, with reviews of the paleontological information he had digested last spring and summer—he awoke and went to the door of the tree house. Babington, silhouetted on the edge of the grove, was reciting from Poe:
“Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
Chapter Two
Into the Dream
“AN INABILITY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN WAKING AND DREAMING may be an index of madness, or it may be a gift.”
I am in the African country of Zarakal taking part in an experiment—a mission, I ought to call it—that would not be possible without my talent as a dreamer. The American physicist Woodrow Kaprow has just strapped me into an apparatus suspended inside a closed vehicle resembling a windowless omnibus.
This large vehicle rests on the outer edge of an ancient stretch of beach about four hundred feet from the southeastern shore of Lake Kiboko, one of several large lakes in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley. We have positioned the omnibus according to Alistair Patrick Blair’s calculations. Blair has cautioned Kaprow that Lake Kiboko in Early Pleistocene times had a more extensive surface area than it does today, and that if the omnibus is parked too close to its twentieth-century shore, I am likely to emerge from my next spirit-traveling episode into several feet of tepid, brackish water. Kiboko, Blair has reminded us, means hippopotamus, but crocodiles also cotton to this great lake, and my life would probably be forfeit even if I did not drown. Therefore we have left ourselves a margin for error.
Outside the sun is rising. It is July, and very hot. Inside, however, a pair of interlocking rotary blades have begun to spin just above my outstretched body; the breeze they make evaporates the sweat from my forehead. Kaprow hunches inside a bell-shaped glass booth punching buttons and flipping switches. I can see him if I turn my head, but he has asked me to lie completely still, close my eyes, and concentrate on the recorded human heartbeat drumming in my earphones. The hypnagogic rhythms of this sound will soothe me toward slumber and induce the kind of dreaming necessary to shift my body into the Early Pleistocene.
“You’re drifting,” Kaprow intones. “You’re drifting, Joshua. Drifting . . .”
I am at the eye of a compact hurricane, the toroidal field generated by the rotors. Waking and dreaming begin to interthread. Although my eyes are closed, my inward vision brings me images that alternate between a primeval landscape of gazelles and the twentieth-century interior of the omnibus. Pretty soon these images are coterminous, and I am in two places