CHAPTER 2
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 Zarakal taking part in an experiment a mission if you will that wouldn’t work sans my talent as a dreamer. The American physicist Woodrow Kaprow has strapped me into an apparatus suspended inside a closed vehicle much like a windowless omnibus.
This large vehicle rests on the outer edge of an ancient stretch of beach some four hundred feet from the southeastern shore of Lake Kiboko, one of several lakes in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley. We’ve positioned the omnibus according to Alistair Patrick Blair’s calculations. He has told Kaprow that Lake Kiboko in Early Pleistocene times had a much larger surface area than it does today and that if the omnibus sits too close to its twentieth-century shore I may 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 so my life would end even if I didn’t drown. We have therefore left ourselves a margin for error.
Outside the sun rises. July swelters about us. Inside though a pair of interlocking rotary blades have begun to spin over my supine body. The breeze they make evaporates the sweat from my forehead. Kaprow hunches inside a bell-shaped glass booth punching buttons and flipping switches. If I turn my head I can see him but he has asked me to lie totally still, close my eyes, and concentrate on the recorded human heartbeat drumming in my earphones. Its hypnagogic rhythms 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 lie at the compact hurricane’s eye, the toroidal field generated by the rotors. Waking and dreaming soon interthread. Although I slumber my inward vision brings me images alternating between a primeval landscape of gazelles and the twentieth-century interior of the omnibus. Soon these images are coterminous and I exist in two places at once. In the throes of dream I drift for two thousand millennia.
The rhythm of the heartbeat ceases and my eyes open to find that the rotors above my scaffold have almost stopped turning. The booth in which Kaprow has monitored my dropback appears empty. Its transparent hood has a smoky cast. The trouble is that Kaprow has remained in humanity’s consensus present whereas I’ve retreated to Ngai knows what exact year. Ngai presides over the Kikembu spirit world. The inside of the vehicle exists at a set of temporal coordinates different from those of the rest of the machine and my dreaming has been instrumental in affecting this dislocation. Glancing about bewildered I apply a faint forward pressure to the control nearest my hand.
It maneuvers my scaffold up and down on the pneumatic struts attaching it to the ceiling and now that scaffold drops through a bay in the floor of the vehicle. The rotors half-encircling me remain in place but like a birdcage someone has cracked open on the edge of my platform and I hatch out into a simulacrum Kaprow’s word of our planet’s hazy prehistory.
Blair and Kaprow planned my exit wisely for when I emerge from the omnibus’ belly I won’t arrive inside a solid mass of rock or find myself forty feet above the surface with no safe or easy way down. No, the ground is a body length below me but for now I gaze upward into a column of space furnished with the arcane equipment that has helped me make this transfer. The remainder of the omnibus tires, chassis, body has vanished and exists materially in the final fifth of the twentieth century. Briefings and simulations haven’t prepared me for the weirdness of this effect and I peer into this hovering hole in the Pleistocene sky much like Alice rueing her advent in Wonderland.
Although I missed the lake what splash did I make in that ancient timescape? Not much. Had there been a fashion-conscious creature there to note my arrival though it would have adjudged me the Beau Brummell of hominids. Although still in harness on the apparatus’ backstep scaffold I’d brought with me not only the clothes on my back but several changes and a portable cornucopia of survival items to last for my mission’s duration: anywhere from two weeks to a month.
Beyond the bush jacket, bush shorts, and chukkas in which I arrived here is what I had: three pairs of cotton jockey shorts Fruit of the Loom, three white V-necked cotton undershirts Hanes, three pairs of white calf-length tube socks Gold Cup, and a scarlet bandanna that my sister Anna had given me as a talisman on my eighth birthday. My bush jacket and shorts came from a safari outfitter in Marakoi but my chukkas hailed from the Eddie Bauer firm of Seattle Washington USA. They had rubber soles and heels, cushioned scree-guards at the ankles, and uppers of rugged Maple Cuddy leather. Even if not designed for East African landscapes and hot weather they felt great.
In the way of in-the-field gear I had these items: a canteen Army surplus, government issue; a Swiss Army pocketknife with a lanyard chain L.L. Bean, Inc., Freeport Maine; an Eddie Bauer combination stove and survival kit; a shaving bag with a Gillette Track-II razor; a small can of Colgate shaving cream lime scented and a collapsible mirror; a first-aid kit with bandages, malaria pills, water-purification tablets, and a small supply of latex condoms for purposes other than the customary; a penlight with several extra batteries Duracell; a .45-caliber automatic pistol Colt, government issue; a canvas bandolier with 200 rounds of ammunition Army surplus, government issue; a leather holster and belt Cheyenne Leatherworx; Manitou Springs Colorado; a reduced-print Bible cum Guide to Pleistocene Ecology the Gideons in tandem with the American Geographic Foundation; a magnifying glass; thirty feet of nylon rope; and an expensive intertemporal communicator KaprowKorn Instruments Ltd that immediately failed me. Much of this equipment I wore, stowed in my pockets, or carried in a nylon pack strapped to my chest. Once down from the backstep scaffold I planned to shift the pack to my shoulders.
In addition I had three other things going for me before I leapt to the ground. First, Air Force doctors had immunized me against every known East African disease and several unknown ones. Second, I’d spent eight months in the Lolitabu National Park with Thomas Babington Mubia undergoing wilderness training. And third, I had visited this untamed epoch hundreds if not thousands of times in my dreams. How could I die in this prehistoric realm of ngoma or spirits?
I shed my harness and earphones and pulled the electrodes taped to my temples and brow. Then I eased to a sitting position, surveyed the landscape, and jumped. A Beau Brummell hominid debuting in an era of sartorial barbarism with my red bandanna about my neck for a sign of piratical dash. As if anyone here I saw no one cared. Despite my sidearm or because of it I felt like a paratrooper dropped miles and miles behind enemy lines.
Beside me dazzling turquoise in the early sun: the lake, much larger than its modern self. A short jog would take me into its shallows. The lake’s oddest feature now was that Joshua Kampo aside it had no constituency: Lake Hippopotamus entertained no cavorting or sunbathing riverhorses. No skittish herds of gazelles or wildebeest braved its shoreline to slake their thirsts and not one crocodile knifed through its languid waters in search of breakfast. An eerie emptiness reigned.
To the east a mixed habitat of savanna, bush, thornveldt, and gallery forest gave me a similar glimpse of the native wildlife. No birds in the sky, no animals among the trees and grasses. The wide rolling plain lay vacant and the range of gentle faraway hills over which the sun now rose appeared as uninhabited as the highlands of the moon. Had the project code-named White Sphinx translated me to primogenial Pangea rather than to preadamite Africa? I stood alone and for once in my life didn’t know if I was awake or dreaming.
From my bush jacket I took the handheld communicator that would establish contact with my twentieth-century colleagues: a transcordion as Woody Kaprow termed it. Its modus operandi involved a piezoelectric correspondence among the crystals in the microcircuitry of each matched set. Kaprow had the mate to mine and so all I had to do to message him was type on mine’s keyboard. Previous tests with chrononauts who’d dropped back just a century or two showed the transcordions performing well even under adverse weather conditions and Kaprow thought the size of the temporal gap between a transcordion pair had no bearing on their effectiveness. But the energy cost of sending me to the Pleistocene hadn’t allowed us to test this hypothesis in my case and I realized that Kaprow genius extraordinaire had figured wrong. Marconi, Bell, and Edison had no doubt also had their off days.
But for those who collect first words, last words, and/or pithy epigrams here’s my first transcordion bon mot: That’s one small leap for a man, one big backward step for humanity. It pleased me to text rather than speak this message for I had no fear that radio static would garble my words and obscure or delete the crucial article in my first clause. Kaprow didn’t reply. Maybe he hadn’t found my opening gambit amusing. I bore down: The lake appears dead, the landscape barren of all life but vegetation, though Dr. Blair was right to assure us that I’d be visiting a wetter more hospitable period. The desert of Zarakal’s Northwest Frontier District is no desert this morning. It’s a big gone-to-seed golf course with woods, sand traps, water hazards, and overgrown fairways. The absence of wildlife scares me. It’s going to be impossible to shoot a hyrax here much less a birdie or an eagle.
I gave Kaprow five minutes to register and digest this info but still he failed to reply. I grew uneasy. Maybe the enormous time span separating the physicist and me had affected the transcordions. If it made for a short time lag between sending and receiving well that would entail inconvenience but not catastrophe. Astronauts have to cope with this phenomenon so why not time travelers?
Walking along the shore I texted: The past FEELS different, Dr. Kaprow. At least to me. It’s not just a matter of misaligned geographies or molecules twisted out of true. It’s even different from my perception of the Early Pleistocene in my spirit-traveling episodes. Maybe I can explain.
After clearing the transcordion’s screen I tried: When I was a child, ten or so, I was thumbing through a science book when I came across a strange photo. It showed a canary submerged on a perch in an aquarium. The bird was in the water, with guppies and goldfish swimming around it. How neat, I thought, and how weird. It reminded me of my terrible out-of-placeness in my dreams.
I cleared my text area again knowing that Kaprow’s unit was linked to a printout terminal that would preserve my messages on long sheets of computer paper. My device for portability’s sake had no such attachment so Kaprow was limited to messages of ten lines of sixty-five characters each. So far though he hadn’t said, Boo.
I typed: That canary was inside a cubic foot of water sheathed by an oxygen-permeable membrane of laminated silicon. Although immersed it could breathe. It existed in an alien physical medium, bewildered maybe but alive, and that’s more or less the way I’m experiencing the past. It feels different, but it’s not impossible to breathe and think here. Does that give you any idea what I’m experiencing now?
I waited. Surely Kaprow would have had time to receive and respond to at least my first message. I wanted his or Blair’s advice about the absence of wildlife. Or had I leapt into the wrong past and now our only viable course was to abort the mission?
FISH surrounded that canary, I continued. I, though, am totally alone. And I miss the fish. I want the whole Pleistocene, you see, the total experience of it. I’ve waited a lifetime for this, Dr. Kaprow, and I’m willing to wait much much longer to make those scary but beautiful dreams come true. SOS. Do you read?
No, I’d never abort the mission. We’d talked about the possibility of failing to establish or of losing transcordion contact but always with the tacit understanding that neither of these dreadful eventualities would befall us. The latter had occupied more of our discussion time for I could drop the transcordion on a rock or into a stream or forfeit it to an envious baboon but because the transcordion could withstand a lot of physical abuse and I fully grasped its value we had entertained the possibility of this danger just as a dutiful intellectual exercise.
DAMN IT KAPROW! ANSWER PLEASE!
Our contingency plan was simple. If the transcordions failed I must assess my situation and either abort or continue the mission according to that assessment. If I opted to continue I was to return the backstep scaffold to the omnibus’ interior so as not to leave an anomalous hole in the prehistoric atmosphere and return to this lakeshore site at least once every day. At regular intervals Kaprow or a tech would lower the scaffold so I could either reject the invitation or get aboard for a trip back to my chronological home. My set times for these rendezvous? Dawn, noon, and sunset. Kaprow didn’t want to leave the scaffold out at night for fear of retracting into the bus’ interior some rambunctious representative of a Pleistocene primate species. At all costs we must avoid monkey fur in the works. Also Kaprow had dictated that I wasn’t to remain longer than a week without direct transcordion contact.
Reaching overhead I pushed the scaffold control and watched it retreat upward through the omnibus’ bomb-bay doors. When they closed sealing the guts of the vehicle from prying Pleistocene eyes the sky grew whole again.
I stood alone on the lakeshore, electric twinkles in the air around me like a swarm of gnat-sized fireflies. This phenomenon was, then wasn’t. Staring at the place where the hole had been I reflected that if anyone in the twentieth century broke into the vehicle’s equipment hold it would either explode or lose the temporal pressure sustaining its prehistoric atmosphere. A blowout was the more likely of these two events according to Kaprow but in either case I would have to live the remainder of my life in this desolate primeval setting.
Pocketing the useless transcordion I said aloud,
I miss the fish.