Russell doesn’t even want to ask. “Take me somewhere else,” he tells Gabe.
“Wait! We’re really close. Let’s try over there.”
There’s no more talking to him. Stone leans back on his stool and watches his guide, the child of the future. Happy citizen of the place that cultural evolution has finally created to shelter the brain, after its long exile.
Just when Russell is about to flee, the door opens, framing Thassa against the blazing hallway. Two steps and she’s kneeling between them, one arm around each of their shoulders. “Jibreel. Mister Stone. What are you men doing?”
Gabe says, “What did you call me?”
She studies the screen and her eyes narrow. “Hey! Where is that?”
“It’s ” the smaller addict starts. “It’s hard to, I can’t really ”
“It’s Kabylie!”
Gabriel snaps up, clutching the mouse. “No it’s not.”
“It is! That’s Gouraya mountain, there. My grandfather came from not far away. Sidi Touati is just over there.”
The boy’s alarm confirms an invisible village just over the distant crest.
“Poor Algeria. Invaded by everyone.”
Candace stands in the doorway, testing a smile. “What’s going on?”
Thassa wheels toward her. “They’re occupying my homeland. Again!”
“We aren’t!” Gabe cries.
Thassa turns back to wag a finger at the plunderers, but Gabe’s bewilderment is so complete that she hugs his head to her chest and coos a stream of Tamazight that seems to comfort him. “You want Kabylie? Come with me!”
The boy wants nothing but to be left alone to solitary marauding. But he follows the adults into the dining room and a table so generous that both males stop and stare. Thassa orbits the spread, naming everything. There’s a small volcano of couscous bel osbane, pools of clabbered milk, a mountain lake of shorba with frik and coriander, stacked-up wedges of brik dripping with lemon. “And for dessert, if you are good ” She motions toward a mound of sacrificial almond cookies. “ Dziriettes. ‘Little Algerians.’ ”
Gabe stands stunned. “It’s exactly what they eat ” He points back toward his remade shadow world.
Thassa grabs his head to her chest again. “Of course it is! Maybe you’re a little Algerian, in your other life.”
She sits next to the boy. All meal long she teaches him table words in Arabic. He revels in the gutturals while his mother crows, astonished at his appetite.
Checking out of her Centre Ville hotel, Tonia Schiff will ask the concierge how to catch the bus to El Kef. The concierge draws a map to the big station at Bab Alioua. Schiff will find the station without a problem-a cushy place, as world bus stations go. But something about Bab Alioua is a glimpse of things to come: a state-controlled, adlibbed exercise in indirection and concealment. Take a number and pitch a tent.
She asks about the Kef bus at three guichets and gets five different answers. She boards the wrong bus but disembarks just before it takes off for the subterranean world of Tataouine. She gets sent to another waiting area, but a handmade Arabic sign on the door she’s supposed to leave from announces a further unreadable change in plans. She asks around. And around. The bus threatens to leave. Then a semiofficial-looking man declares it’s going to be badly delayed. When Schiff asks again half an hour later, she learns it left twenty minutes ago.
Tonia Schiff begins to think that her French-so secure her whole life-is nothing but a private hallucination. Finally, a kindly man with a flowing Old Testament beard takes pity on her. He tells Schiff that someone in her situation (one he doesn’t bother spelling out) is better off getting to Kef by louage. He directs her to a nearby carrefour and tells her to ask for the samsar-the go-between-at the Café de l’Avenir.
The samsar can arrange everything. No worries. But the thing that takes the most arranging is how to divvy up Schiff’s dinars between the potential driver, the samsar, and the samsar’s samsar. A louage is coming soon, the man tells Tonia. But it’s a crowded one, and yesterday, it overheated, two hours into the mountains. That louage, he ventures, is not the louage for her. One epic Arabic cell call later, he announces a much better one that he could probably get her into, if it’s worth his while.
Schiff sits at a café table for a long time, in a mental fugue state straight out of postwar existentialist fiction. Waiting, she considers how much more fun it is to read such scenes than to live them. But the sun is mild, there is still coffee, and nothing on the horizon suggests that humanity can’t hold out until she records her final interview with it.
Just as she begins to imagine that it might indeed be possible for even Sisyphus to be happy, a white Peugeot wagon with its rear-left quarter punched in pulls up to the terrace with four others already in it. Tonia hands over one final stack of dinars, gets in the front seat, and buckles in for the three-hour ride.
The louage passes through the salt flats west of the city, Tunis’s only obvious shantytown. The driver catches Schiff looking and hints ominously that the slum owes its continued existence to World Bank master derivatives. The car bears south a little, then west again, through a plain that graduates-in another advance taste of things to come-imperceptibly from arable to arid.
Schiff’s guidebook says to keep watch off the right side of the road, at about one hundred kilometers. The Peugeot crests a hill, and down a wide expanse spread the ruins of Dougga. Tonia cries out in admiration. One of the passengers-the one she has dubbed the Tunisian Robert De Niro-leans forward and says, “The best Roman town in North Africa. Edge of the empire.”
The woman next to him objects with her whole body. Not Roman, she says. Numidian. Then Libyco-Punic.
Her other seatmate, who had spent the entire trip writing columns of figures into pocket ledgers, claims that the Numidians stole it from the Berbers. The driver plunges into the fray, and the debate turns violent in three languages, only one of which Tonia can follow. The argument over who built the city turns into a fight over who killed it-the Byzantines, the Vandals, the Ottomans, the French, or the UN World Heritage folks.
“No one killed it,” the driver declares, in a voice suggesting that anyone who disagrees can walk the rest of the way to El Kef. “The land just dried up. The damn empire fell apart. What do you do about that?”
The whole louage falls silent for five kilometers.
In one of his long, Tom Swift monologues that began in self-replicating nucleotide sequences and ended up with human colonization of other star systems, Thomas Kurton once told Schiff how all the basic elements of survival-finding food, avoiding prey, selecting mates-depend on holding background noise steady enough to pick out foreground signals. We’re tuned by a billion years of natural engineering to the flashing Now, designed to be dead blind to exactly the kind of huge, slow, incremental changes that will kill us. According to Kurton, the race had two choices: sit like the oblivious frog in the slowly warming pan until we cook, or take our natures into our own hands and sculpt out better angels.
The cab climbs the hairpin twists on the Grand Parcours Cinq, clawing its way up to Kef. As the massive Djebel Dyr plateau breaches the horizon, Tonia Schiff gets ill. She concentrates her willpower on surviving the last fifteen kilometers, but loses. The rattled driver makes an emergency stop, and Schiff finds a small pit in the yellow rocks just off the road to vomit in. When she comes back to the car, the passengers and driver are arguing about what made her sick.