and decide that I can’t live without an Egyptian pyramid in my back yard, then these poor bastards will spend the rest of their lives mining stone—”
“Until they starve to death, and you with them. That’s all very capricious, but without a few Egyptians growing bananas along the Nile, those pharaohs would never have gotten past the first story. Alot-too-toni,” she said imperiously to the men, and looking confusedly from Gray to Corgie and back again, they followed Gray down the path to her fields, leaving Corgie by his half-built Babel furiously without lumber for the rest of the day.
Grudgingly, Charles walled off a portion of his one-room Olympus for Gray. It was thanks to this arrangement that she discovered the advantages of being a god extended well beyond architecture.
Lying in bed one night, Gray heard the ladder outside clatter and a woman’s shy, nervous laughter. The ladder was withdrawn again, and set with a clack on the other side of Gray’s bedroom wall. Fully awake now, Gray listened stiffly to the noises from Corgie’s bed. She was used to his gruff, angry orders in the night; Corgie didn’t sleep easily, as, she thought, he had no right to. She was used to the occasional clatter of his rifle when it fell from his arms; though it was terrifying to wake this way, she actually preferred those times the rifle fell and even went off to what she was hearing now: the rustling, a chuckle, a light feminine squeal. A growl and snuffling as if an animal were rummaging through his things. Then, worst of all, the sound of Charles Corgie peacefully, silently asleep for the first time Gray had ever heard.
Gray’s toe cramped. She found she had a headache. Her eyes narrowed in the darkness. She rearranged herself loudly, sighed, and drummed the bedside with her fingertips. She was still awake when early that morning she heard the pad of small feet, a brusque grunt from Charles, and the ladder again, down and up. A great male sigh. Only then did Gray turn limply on her side and doze for a couple of hours.
“You slept soundly last night,” said Gray as they peeled mangoes at breakfast.
“Yes,” said Charles. “I feel refreshed.” He was imbedded in his mango up to the second knuckle.
Gray only toyed with hers, listlessly pulling the gooey orange strings apart and then leaving them in a pulpy pile. “I think you and I need to have a religious conference.”
“Convened,” said Charles. “Shoot.”
“Do you have to be so jaunty?”
“You’re always badgering me for being surly at breakfast. For once I wake up in a good mood and you run me down for that, too. I can’t win, Kaiser.”
Gray squashed a piece of fruit between her fingers. “I want to discuss a point of catechism.”
“Philosophy! So early, too. That brain of yours must start ticking away as soon as your feet hit the floor.”
“Some mornings,” said Gray. “But I don’t want to talk theory. I want to talk practice.”
“Which makes perfect, as I remember.”
“That depends on what you’re practicing.”
Having finished off his mango, Charles started in on a banana with large, lunging mouthfuls. “Want one?”
Gray shook her head. “You’ve got quite an appetite today.”
“I have quite an appetite, period,” said Charles. “So what’s our Sunday-school lesson for today?”
Gray crossed her arms. “Listen, I think we should discuss this, but not because I’m prim. We take so many precautions to avoid the appearance of mortality. But your adventure last night seemed perilously biological.”
Charles put his feet up on the table. “Kaiser, sweetheart, it’s great to hear you worry about keeping the old religion afloat. But believe me, when it comes to keeping an eye on my ass I am an expert—”
“Seems to me you had your eye on someone else’s last night.”
Corgie grinned. “They like it.”
Gray stood up. “Well, I don’t.” She walked out the door, Charles laughing after her.
“They think it makes them powerful,” said Charles, leaning over the ladder as Gray clipped rapidly down.
“That’s precisely my point,” said Gray. “I think it does.”
Charles must have watched her brisk and unusually rigid stride to her precious furrows with a smile on his face and a satisfied gleam in his eye.
In the process of overseeing the planting, Gray also conducted informal interviews. Especially after she’d applied first aid to several farming injuries, Il-Ororen confided in her completely. At the end of the day Gray would go back to Corgie’s cabin and take furious notes.
What fascinated Gray as she studied this tribe was that, on a scale of generations, they hadn’t been separated from the Masai very long. It seems they’d deliberately purged themselves of their own history. Maliciously they insisted on having no ancestors but those they could remember, no larger culture to which they owed their ability to throw pots, to mine and forge metal tools. Their creation myths and cautionary tales were no longer traditional Masai ones. While they still built kraals, they gladly constructed new blond structures. Nor had they gradually distorted Masai music, ceremonies, and dances; they had dumped them. Il-Ororen had invented themselves.
Most surprising of all, Gray now had no doubt that, while they resented particular tyrannies and didn’t understand the gymnasium, they cooperated willingly with Charles Corgie. She’d anticipated a gentle native population abused and manipulated by a cruel Western intruder. Instead, she found a ruthless people that had eagerly latched on to an appropriate sovereign. They liked Corgie’s projects. They enjoyed his anger as long as it wasn’t directed against them personally. They identified with his arrogance. They’d rooted Corgie deeply in their mythology, and told stories as if his arrival had been predicted for generations, like a messiah. Il-Ororen were the only people in the world, and they’d gotten themselves their own private god.
Gray’s concern, however, was with the arrogance that Il-Ororen and Corgie shared. It had bound them; it could sever them, too. A truly arrogant people were easily dissatisfied and individually ambitious. They would have a high leadership turnover. Corgie had been among Il-Ororen for five years, and that struck Gray more and more as a long time.
Several times a year Corgie had a church service.
“What if I don’t want to go?” Gray asked that morning. All around them Il-Ororen were painting themselves with colored clay and plaiting braids; it reminded Gray too vividly of Sunday mornings when she would pull the covers over her head while her mother put on makeup and fixed her hair with grotesque cheerfulness.
“Gray, darling,” said Charles as he prepared himself for the service, trying on his red baseball cap at different angles in his airplane mirror. “When you’re the one giving the party, you don’t get to decide whether or not to show. You’re on the program. How’s that?” He turned to her with the visor off to the back.
“Little Rascals.”
“Perfect. Now, Kaiser, you old cow, what are you wearing?”
Gray spread her hands. As usual, she was in khaki work clothes.
“You have no sense of celebration,” Charles chided.
“What’s there to celebrate?”
“Nothing more nor less than ourselves, Gray dear.” Charles was bouncing around the cabin so that the structure shook. “For you,” he added, “a tie.” He proceeded to tie a Windsor knot around his bare neck. In some wacky way, with the red cap, it was cute. Once Charles threw on his flight jacket, laced his boots over his pants, strapped on his Air Force goggles, and, the final touch, hung one of those long, hand-rolled cigarettes out the side of his mouth, he stood before Gray for inspection.
“You look—absolutely—insane,” she said, laughing until she fell over