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It was entirely usual for some or all of the remaining marriage partners to accompany the Rainmakers on these trips. Anyone who felt in need of a change of scene was likely to regard it as a good opportunity. On the trip that led to tragedy, Grizel and I went with Axel and Mi
I had not only learned to swim after so nearly losing my life in the Coral Sea but had become rather fanatical about it. It was not that I enjoyed it, particularly—although I certainly found it great fun if my mood and the circumstances were right—but that I had come to think of it as one of the most essential accomplishments of a New Human. Given that drowning was one of the few ways in which a New Human could perish with relative ease, it seemed to me to be necessary for every member of that race to make sure that he or she could fight such a fate with all his—or her—might.
Grizel knew my opinion, and did not mock me for it, but she could not take the matter quite so seriously. She enjoyed swimming in a pool, but she saw no need to make strenuous efforts to learn to counter all the vagaries and treacheries of fast-flowing water. To her, I suppose, the seemingly slow-moving Kwarra must have appeared to be merely a big pool, which held no particular hazards.
To tell the truth, when we went down to the water on the fateful day, even I had not the least inkling of any danger. The day was clear and windless and the surface of the river seemed utterly docile, despite that its level was higher than normal. Axel and Mi
As Grizel and I hid from the heat and the bright sun in the shaded shallows, our conversation was all to do with the lack of natural hazards in the immediate vicinity. Grizel, who always described herself as an “ecological purist,” thought the policies of the LDA, and Camilla’s department in particular, rather pusillanimous. She didn’t really want to see the return of such awkward water-borne parasites as bilharzia and the guinea worm, but she was entirely serious about wanting to restock the New Kwarra with crocodiles.
“Crocodiles were around far longer than the other once-extinct species we’ve brought back,” she argued. “If any large-size species had security of tenure, it was them. They’d really proved their evolutionary worth, until we came along and upset the whole applecart. Anyway, they’re essentially lazy. They wouldn’t bother chasing people.Like most so-called predators they prefer carrion.”
I didn’t bother trying to challenge her admittedly eccentric view of ecological aesthetics; I’d learned from long acquaintance that it was much safer to stick to practical matters. “They could still bite,” I pointed out, “and I doubt if they’d be particular if anyone strayed too close to their favorite lurking places. They were somewhat given to lurking, weren’t they?”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You’re a historian and should know better. If you care to consult the figures, you’ll see that far more old humans were crushed by hippos than were ever chewed by crocodiles—but we loveour hippos, don’t we? The hippopotamus was one of the first species we brought back out of the banks when we started rebuilding African river ecologies.”
I pointed out that we hadn’t brought the hippos back because they were harmless—after all, we’d also brought back lions, leopards, and cheetahs in the first wave of ecological readjustments—but because such danger as they posed was clearly manifest and easily avoidable. She wasn’t impressed.
“It’s just puerile mammalian chauvinism,” she said. “Childish fur fetishism. Putting crocodiles at the bottom of the list is just antireptilian prejudice.”
I didn’t bother to argue that the New Human fondness for birds gave the lie to the charge of mammalian chauvinism, because she’d simply have added feather fetishism to her list of psychological absurdities. Instead, I pointed out that we had been only too willing to resurrect cobras and black mambas. She was, alas, as happy as ever to shift her ground. “Once we were safely immune to their bites,” she scoffed. “Snakes are so much sexierthan crocodiles—according to phallocentric fools.”
She didn’t say in so many words that the category of phallocentric fools was one to which I belonged, but the implication was there. It wasn’t that which drew us apart, though; we were just drifting. As ever, she was happy to shift her ground as a matter of routine, even in the water. I let her go. I didn’t want to continue the verbal contest, and I let her go.
On this occasion, she shifted and drifted too far. Although the surface seemed perfectly placid, the midriver current was quite powerful; once in its grip, even the strongest swimmer wouldn’t have found it easy to get out again.
When Grizel found that the current was bearing her away she could have called for help, but she didn’t. She assumed that the worst that could happen to her was that she’d be carried a few hundred meters downstream before she could get back to the shallows. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred she would have been right, but not this time. As well as being more powerful than it seemed, the midriver current was carrying more than its fair share of debris—including waterlogged branches and whole tree trunks that might have traveled all the way from Adamouwa.
When I became aware that Grizel was no longer near me she was still clearly in view. When I shouted after her, she just waved, as if to reassure me that all was well and that she’d rejoin me soon enough. I set out after her regardless. I didn’t have any kind of premonition—I just didn’t have enough confidence in the power of her arms and legs. I thought she might need my help to get back to the bank.
I never saw the piece of wood that hit her. I don’t suppose she did either; it must have slid upon her as quietly and as insidiously as a crocodile. Logs in water are weightless, but they pack an enormous amount of momentum, and if a swimmer is trying with all her might to go sideways….
I didn’t even see her go down.
It can’t have been more than three or four seconds afterward when I realized that she was no longer visible, but even with the current to help me it took a further fifteen to get to the point at which I’d last seen her. I dived, but the water was very murky, clouded with fine silt.
I ducked under again and again, moving southward all the time, but I calculated later that she was probably fifty or a hundred meters ahead of me and that I hadn’t made enough allowance for the velocity of the current. At the time, I was in the grip of a panicky haste. I was madly active, but I achieved nothing. I just kept ducking under, hoping to catch sight of her in time to drag her head out of the water, but I was always in the wrong place. It was like a nightmare.
In the end, I had to give up, or exhaustion might have made it impossible for me to beat the undertow. I had sanity enough to save myself from sharing Grizel’s fate—and I felt guilty about that for years.
TWENTY
Grizel’s body was eventually washed up at Onitsha, twenty kilometers downriver. There was a sharp bend there, left over from the days when the old Kwarra had been called the Niger, and the current couldn’t carry her around it.
Her limbs had been chewed by something—not a crocodile, of course—and they’d been broken by rocks she’d encountered when she drifted briefly into white water. All that had happened after she was dead, though; she hadn’t been conscious of the mutilation.