by Rich Handley
She, too, gazed up at it then, not understanding what he saw in it.
“Let go,” he said, freeing himself and stepping away.
He took a few steps, still staring at the figure, his back turned to her. She looked at both, one at a time between the two, uncomprehending.
“How can you be so cold?”
He turned to her, finally. “With you? Easy.”
She took in his face, the lean features, the prominent jaw, the once-warm eyes roaming over not her face, but her body. She saw him take in her tight uniform skirt, her shapely legs, the light blue dress blouse stretched taut over her breasts underneath her service jacket, and her raven-black hair.
Undressing her with his eyes; some things never changed.
“We could…” she said, a warmth flooding her belly despite the cool February air.
“I’m leaving, Nora. Tomorrow morning. Leaving you and the miserable human race behind. Pretty simple.”
The heat in her shifted. She felt her cheeks warming, her anger igniting.
“But not alone, Taylor.”
She saw the instant bemusement on his face at her name for him—never “George,” only “Taylor.”
He hung his head, wagging it from side to side and smiling. “Stewart’s a qualified professional—”
A flash of insight. “You bastard,” she swore, her fingers balling into fists. “You—you made sure of that! You made sure it was her and not me. That bitch.”
“There’s that face,” he said, still smiling. “The face that launched a thousand starships, or maybe just mine. My supernova on two legs…”
She stepped up to him, her face now hot, her lips parting to speak.
He held up a hand to cut her off, began turning away from her. “Save it. It’s done. I’m off to Cape Canaveral tomorrow morning and off this rock six hours later. It was fun, the sex was good—very good—but that’s that, Nora.”
“Was that what you told your wife, too?” It was lame, but it was all that came to her in the moment.
Taylor stopped smiling. His eyes narrowed to slits.
“This is pointless, but if it pleases you, I’ll try to picture you and not my wife when I’m talking to Stewart.”
“Screwing her, you mean,” she spat. “I hope you’ll be very happy with your space princess—which one of you gets her first?”
Silence.
It wasn’t like him not to have an immediate, sharp retort to her gibes. She stared at him, her face still hot, and now her eyes wet. He stared back at her.
Slowly, hesitantly, she reached out with open hands to lay them on his broad chest. He was still hard, hard as a rock, as unmoving as the statue above them, as the little island they stood upon, the meeting spot that used to mean something to them both.
“Taylor,” she said, low and warm. “Please. I’m sorry. I’m… I’m distraught… they’re talking about reassigning me. They’re saying…”
She paused, internally assessing his mood. He simply stared back at her, still silent.
Nora’s fingers found his dog tags, just underneath his half-unzipped leather jacket. She saw his eyes dart down to them, then back to her face.
“You—you can’t leave anything behind of yourself,” she said. It was meant to be a question, but it came out a statement. “Why can’t you leave one damn thing behind, for me? You’ve got to take everything—”
His hand sprang up and snatched the tags from her fingers effortlessly, slipping them back into his jacket. His jaw moved from side to side, his eyes colder than before.
“So help me God, I’m actually glad I don’t have to listen to your voice anymore.”
He turned away from her fully, looking back up at the statue again. The island seemed suddenly devoid of all life to her, a desolate hunk of stone in the middle of a great, barren desert.
He took a step, and then another, walking away.
“Goodbye, Nora,” he threw back to her with a weak flip of a hand. “Have a… well, have a life, I guess.”
The figure of him wavered in her liquid vision, tears now rolling down her burning cheeks. She found she couldn’t speak. Three years of frustration and anger and disappointment welled up inside her, like a dam, blocking her, cutting her off from humanity.
Her entire body shook, quavering in the chilly air.
“Taylor!”
It came out nearly inarticulate, barely a word; a name. It came out as a strangled remnant of her sanity, a dam breaking to release her pent-up rage.
“Damn you, Taylor! God damn you!”
He stopped, turned his head to the side, glancing back at her.
“Blasphemy, Nora?” he tsked. “In front of Lady Liberty?”
Shaking his head, he continued on his way. He might even have been chuckling, too.
She stood alone in the shadow of the giant statue, the water lapping around her, her body still vibrating, her hands empty.
She had no more words.
* * *
The gorilla squinted in the harsh, antiseptic light, its nostrils twitching as it steamed the glass with its breath and peered inside the room.
It wore one of the standard red jumpsuits, now stained and torn; she didn’t want to know what the stains were. In one meaty, hairy hand, it toted a wooden club that appeared to be a notched and battered police baton. It clunked against the glass as the ape leaned in for a look.
Suddenly seeing her—she wasn’t trying to hide—its eyes widened slightly and its free hand came up to press at the glass. Then, it jabbed the hand spasmodically in the air, pointing at the door next to the glass wall. The gorilla’s entire body bobbed up and down from the action.
Not for the first time, she shook her head ruefully over how a once fairly peaceful species had grown so aggressive in such a short time.
After the battle, what an ANN reporter had disdainfully called Caesar’s “small struggle,” she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. Only a few weeks following her nineteenth birthday and she was out of a job—the only real job she’d ever had. So one morning, frustrated with sitting in her little apartment in the great city, she got up, got dressed, and made her way through the so-called Exclusion Zone and to her workplace.
Surprisingly, Caesar allowed some humans to travel through the part of the city he’d claimed. The word went out that men would be stopped and searched for weapons and perhaps even followed in some circumstances, but the most important of his decrees—the chimp emphasized this one—was that no human must speak in the streets, and most especially not to an ape.
The penalty for breaking the rule wasn’t spelled out, but she didn’t worry over its alleged harshness, for she couldn’t imagine what she’d have to say to armed apes roaming the city anyway.
So, quietly and discreetly, she returned to Ape Management, to the nursery.
It was all she really knew, her job. Fresh off the farm at seventeen, she’d begged her mother to let her move to the city and seek a career in a field she was good at. On the family farm she’d been good with the animals, caring for them and, to her mind, making their small lives better. Her mother scoffed at first, but grew tired of the argument and watched as her only daughter left for the big city, a world she herself had abandoned.
After only a week, she secured a position as midwife at Ape Management, in the Breeding Annex nursery. She was working with animals, caring for them, and, hopefully, making their lives better.
The apes had ignored the nursery in the aftermath of Caesar’s rebellion, for the most part. She knew the automated machines there would keep the current crop of infants alive for up to two weeks without human supervision, but in all good conscience, she felt she needed to check on them, should they still be there.
Upon entering the nursery for the first time since the revolution, she was somewhat surprised to find the infant apes—all nine of them—still in their cribs, still in the same place she’d left them when the fighting had broken out. They hadn’t been moved by the conquering adult a
pes, whisked away to be raised beyond the taint of human technology.
Her face grew warm as she looked over her nine charges and thought maybe they’d been forgotten. Or, more likely, Caesar wasn’t even aware they existed.
Which was ironic in a way, because she knew that at least three of the infants were his.
The mothers were gone, of course, swept up in the tide of revolution, but she remembered delivering the children of two female chimps that could be traced to Caesar’s studding, and one of them had twins. If the conquering king knew he’d spawned or guessed he had little princes, there was no indication of it. The babies seemed abandoned, forgotten. The thought of it made her burn inside.
The gorilla, not waiting for her to open the door to the inner room, tried the latch and found it unlocked. Loping into the room after throwing open the door, it eyed her with a wary look. She drew back, putting a large table between her and the ape, unsure of what it wanted.
It poked and prodded instruments with its club, sniffing the air with its coal-black nose and twisting its head in question, just the way she recalled dogs did when they were curious. She could tell the gorilla was keeping one eye on her as it made its way around the room.
Outside, beyond the nursery, she could hear the sounds of other apes in the building. She felt her position slipping away, realizing that they had finally come to secure it.
The gorilla’s hand moved toward a console near where she stood, and the sight of it shook her from her reverie. The ape’s fingers reached out to caress a dial there, then another.
Panic zigzagged through her body.
“No!”
It came organically, unbidden. She foresaw the result of the gorilla’s unknowing handiwork at the panel and reacted without thinking. Her shout rang around the room.
In a flash—she never saw it begin to move—the gorilla sprung at her, swinging one big arm to backhand her across the face. To her, it was like dynamite had gone off across her cheek.
She struck the wall behind her, bouncing off it and to the floor in a heap. The impact of the ape’s knuckles on her sounded like a gunshot to her ears.
Automatically, she glanced up immediately to the large window on the wall she’d struck and the opaque blinds drawn down over it. Behind it rested nine infant chimpanzees, sleeping away in their crèches. The gorilla, she assumed, knew nothing of them at all, or that it had almost destroyed them.
In a wink, it was over her, glaring down at her with big, black eyes. It sniffed once, then snorted, the hand gripping the club swinging back and forth, back and forth.
She could tell she was bleeding. Her face felt like it was five times its normal size. Tears dripped down her cheeks, mingling with the blood.
The ape looked like it suddenly noticed something and reached out toward her with its free hand. She felt frozen in place, confused and dazed, her body unresponsive, save for her eyes. She saw the gorilla reach down to finger the collar of her Ape Management uniform shirt.
It came away with dog tags dangling from the chain around her neck.
She bit back on shouting again. She couldn’t risk that word, any admonition to stop a second time.
Inwardly, she saw her mother handing her the tags, nearly three years before, on her sixteenth birthday. She had asked for them, knowing they belonged to her late father, and her mother had reluctantly relinquished them. From that moment on, the tags rested around her neck, never once removed in the three years.
She’d heard her mother call them “my prize” more than once when she was a child, and knew that she’d received them from her father when he retired from the service. They were precious to her mother, something that reportedly made her feel whole after a dark time in her life, before she’d had a child—a bad break-up with a man her mother would only refer to as “that bastard.” Her father had been there to cushion the blow, and they got married soon after.
“Please,” she whispered to the gorilla in the most pleasing tone she could muster. “Please don’t take them…”
The ape reared back, rage in its eyes, snorting great bursts of air out its nostrils.
It raised the club, and in her mind’s eye she saw it caving in her skull, the dog tags leaving with the ape.
“No!”
She wasn’t sure if it was she who had spoken the word again. Slowly, it dawned upon her that it was a male’s voice from behind the gorilla. Her assailant turned toward the voice, club raised, and in so doing allowed her to see who had dared to speak.
A chimpanzee in green coveralls. Caesar himself.
“Stop,” he said to the gorilla in an even tone. “Go back.” He pointed out the door. “Help the others.”
The ape bowed its massive head and shuffled past him and out the door. Caesar watched him go, then turned to her, frowning.
“Get up. Leave here and never come back. I will ensure your passage. You won’t be molested.”
She didn’t reply, didn’t speak, but pulled herself up off the floor. Caesar’s face eased, but he shook his head slightly at the sight of her swollen, bloody face, and let go a sigh. Turning toward the door, he exited the room, glancing left and right into the outer area as he did so.
Following him, she paused at the console with which the gorilla had started to fiddle. Darting a quick glance at Caesar’s back, she reached out and flipped a switch on the board. A green telltale lighted, and at a soft hum she entered a code on a keypad. A small beep told her it was accepted.
A large dial ringed with increasing numbers around its circumference held her attention for a brief moment. Then she twisted it, turning it up to its maximum range. She thought she could hear the released gas, but told herself she was imagining it.
It was the one piece of nursery equipment she thought she’d never use, let alone touch or even contemplate. It existed for the use of higher beings than her, those who made the decisions regarding which infants were needed, and which were not.
Everything had changed for her in the last few minutes. Once, she could never have made that decision. After seeing her blood on her hand and on the floor, being denied the right to speak, and the underlying arrogance of Caesar, everything turned around. The farm girl lay dead on the floor behind her, her skull caved in.
No more kings, she thought to herself as she left the room clutching her dog tags. The princes were silenced forever.
* * *
The rain had begun to come down in sheets, so she called for the covered carriage. The weather made her middle-aged bones ache, but she wanted to go and see him—no, needed to see him.
As she rode out of the city, she fretted over this and that. She wasn’t supposed to leave the city limits, but wasn’t she the queen? Queen of nothing, it could be argued (and was, in some boroughs), but she intended to live the part to the bitter end.
Up in the low hills, she exited the carriage and entered a cave, listening to her voice raspy and strained as she told the carriage men to stand ready. It was nothing to fuss over, she mused; weren’t all humans’ voices raspy and strained these days?
On a simple wooden bed in the cave lay a dying ape.
“You’ve come,” he said simply, his voice sounding better than hers, despite his worsening condition. “Thank you.”
“Nothing would have stopped me, Boniface,” she told him truthfully, smoothing back her still-black hair from her face.
The small ape on the bed was different from the rest of the simian population, but not just in size and physical make-up; a chimpanzee, but not a chimpanzee. He was different, in that way she could always spot, ever since she was little. Something would be lost when he was gone, something important, though intangible. She realized the thought probably showed on her face, and she wondered what he might think of it.
“It is the end,” the small ape said, nodding, as if remarking upon her thoughts. “I have something to say to you.”
She resisted the urge to smooth down the wild, long hair on his head and simply gazed at his dark f
ace, the once-pink lips now nearly white, and his kind eyes.
He’d been an advisor to her family for many years, one of the only apes who lived in the city, until the army came and everything changed. He once told her he wasn’t like the gorillas and the orangutans and the chimpanzees—his people were apart from those others. And, many years later, he confided in her that he was the very last of his kind.
The thought sprang again into her mind: the world would be at a loss after his passing. And then an even stronger idea: He might have changed the world had he not served us in the city.
Boniface didn’t agree with the followers of Caesar, or with many of the Lawgivers who had followed him, or with much of the wider ape world. Her mentor—yes, that’s what he was—had different ideas, peaceful ones mainly, but still strong and unbending. If only more had heard them…
She inwardly registered disgust from the image of Caesar that came to mind. It had always been so, though she was unclear on why that was.
Boniface reached out a tiny, wrinkled hand and touched the metal pieces that hung from a chain around her neck. The remnants of words could still be seen on their surfaces, once deeply embossed, now barely legible. He, like she, had always liked shiny things, material things. It was one of the subjects they enjoyed discussing.
“The sign of a great warrior, my queen.” He coughed; bloody spittle appeared on his thin lips. “Ancient, but still powerful.”
“Queen of nothing,” she intoned, narrowing her eyes. “Queen of slaves.”
The ape let the metal pieces slide from his hand. His eyes watered over and he coughed again.
“Tell your daughter and her daughter to keep hope in the years to come,” he told her in earnest. “To keep the faith, but always be wary. The age of mankind is coming to a close… but not the end of their spirit. Tell them that.”
Boniface died a moment later, to the sound of a thunderclap. After briefly reflecting upon his lifeless face, she stood up and returned to her carriage. Behind her, his attendants covered him with a blanket from head to toe, forever ending their conversation.
The last ape she could talk to was gone.
