None of the others followed him. They just stood watching Charlie uncertainly as he climbed down—uncertainly, though not yet in submission. There was still hostility in the air. He was going to have to hurt one or maybe two more before they got the message.
He glanced up toward the glassed-in observation post he’d noticed earlier. The silhouetted figures still stood there, watching. Some of them now had binoculars to their eyes.
Turning back to the apes, Charlie saw that this brief distraction had been taken as a sign of weakness by at least two of them. One held out his hand to another, and the other moved closer. They were forming an alliance. Two or three more shuffled into positions behind them.
Charlie looked at the ground. He needed a weapon to get this over fast. He saw a stone, shaped almost like a small club. He picked it up, curling his fingers around it, ready for action.
Then suddenly he felt a hand take his. He looked and saw one of the older female apes standing next to him. She had approached unobtrusively, without any menace or bad intent. She met his gaze directly, and there was a deep intelligence in her eyes. It seemed to be seeking out the intelligence in his. She was offering reason in place of madness.
Very gently she began uncurling his fingers from around the stone. He put up no resistance. He knew somehow that there would be no more fighting if he made this gesture, allowing her to disarm him while still standing his ground and challenging any of the males to try their strength against his.
None did. The old female walked a little way with the stone, then tossed it aside. She knew it wouldn’t be needed anymore. A moment later the group leader who had thrown the first stone at Charlie came loping back through the trees. He made straight for Charlie, but there was no threat in the way he moved. Instead, once he got up to him, he crouched down low so that he had to look up to make eye contact with Charlie. Then he emitted a series of soft grunting sounds that, Charlie realized, was the ape’s open acknowledgment of Charlie’s superiority. It was Charlie’s cue to draw himself up to his full height, at the same time making his hair stand on end to exaggerate his size and underline the dominance-submission, giant-dwarf roles that they had now adopted. Then he realized, as though recalling some half-forgotten ritual not performed for so long that the memory of its details had begun to fade, that something more was required of him. The ape before him continued to cower low on the ground and now raised his hands as though to protect his head. But it wasn’t any kind of blow or further attack that he feared. Rather, Charlie suddenly knew, it was an invitation to him to perform the final symbolic affirmation of his victory. Without further thought or hesitation, he swung his leg high and stepped boldly over the crouched figure of his former attacker.
Immediately afterward, the others he had fought presented themselves in similar fashion, and Charlie went through the same ritual with them. It seemed natural now. This was how things were done, the way life was lived among these creatures. He knew that.
There was only one nagging question on his mind: How did he know?
Chapter 31
LATIMER WEST’S OFFICE was on the top floor of the main building. She imagined, when she thought about it, that the view must be impressive, but she never seemed able to take note of it when she was there. It was like an office in a private apartment, not some corporate place. She suspected there were living quarters attached, though she didn’t know if this was his permanent home, at least while he held the job, or whether he had some other place of his own. Somehow she imagined him in New York, on the Upper East Side, leading an elegant bachelor existence and going to cocktail parties and the opera with women older than himself. She wondered if he was gay, and decided he was simply sexless. Intimacy, she suspected, would be as disturbing and repulsive to Latimer West as it would to any other unfortunate individual involved—although, she reminded herself as the elevator slowed, this was perhaps a biased view.
The elevator doors opened directly into West’s office, and closed behind her as she stepped out onto the thick, soft carpet. He was expecting her, so he made no pretense of being too engrossed in work to acknowledge her arrival. He didn’t get to his feet but looked up from his desk with a smile—the kind she thought of as a diplomatic smile, suggesting that as both right and might were on his side, this interview was going to be pretty much a formality.
“Well, Susan,” he began, leaning back and steepling his fingers in a way that she had always thought should carry a capital penalty, “what’s so urgent that you have to talk to me this afternoon? I’m really rather busy.”
“Why don’t you take a wild guess?” she said, abandoning every resolution she had made on the way up to avoid losing her temper. “It’s just possible you may hit something not too far from the bull’s-eye, something you said we’d get around to discussing when I’d done what you wanted me to do. Now I’ve done it, so if it’s all the same to you, I’d like my life back, and with it my son and my father.”
He continued to lean back looking up at her, his smile not slipping an inch, his fingers apparently glued at their tips. “Nothing was ever said,” he intoned piously, “about a specific time frame. Your work has been first-class, I’m genuinely grateful for all you’ve done. I know at times it hasn’t been easy.”
As though to forestall any remark she may have been about to make, he swung his chair around and slid his elbows onto the edge of his desk. It was a maneuver of such fluid, practiced grace that, to her annoyance, she found herself almost admiring it.
“But let’s be sensible about this, Susan. The project’s not complete yet, and your work isn’t over. You’ve seen your son, he’s being well looked after and he’s quite happy—especially now that he has his grandfather with him. Maybe you’re not able to see him as often as you’d like, but you see him often. So I’m afraid that for the time being our present arrangements will have to remain in place.”
She looked down at him coldly. It was odd: She actually had the sensation of a physical chill behind her eyes, like a splinter of ice where his image struck her retina.
“One day,” she said, and realized that her lips were dry. She darted her tongue over them, annoyed by what she knew would be seen as a display of weakness. “One day,” she began again, more deliberately this time, “you’ll pay for what you’re doing now. Believe me, you’ll pay for this abuse of my work, and other people’s work.”
“We’ve had this discussion before, Susan. I’ve tried to make you see that knowledge is nobody’s private property. To pretend that some piece of knowledge is yours and yours alone is a far worse theft than anything you’re accusing us of here. Scientists don’t create knowledge: We uncover it, but it was always there, waiting for somebody to lift up that corner of the map.”
“I never claimed to own anything. All my work has been done out in the open, published and talked about. Anyone could use my work the way you have, but most people wouldn’t want to, and society wouldn’t let them.”
The smile on his face grew a little thinner and the impatience growing behind it began to show.
“There’s no point in you and I debating the morality of this, Susan. We see things differently. That’s all there is to say.”
“Maybe we can agree on one thing.”
He looked up at her. Was this a trap? The setup for some parting insult? He didn’t much care.
“Tell me.”
“From now on stick to ‘Dr. Flemyng.’ I don’t like your using my first name.”
“As you wish, of course.”
He tipped his head in a slight bow. It was a gracious gesture, yielding her the point, though he remained seated.
“Just tell me one thing, Dr. Flemyng. Despite all your abstract moral objections, aren’t you just a little bit excited by all this, as a scientist? Just the tiniest bit?”
She felt the anger mount inside her like a surge of electricity. This was the moment at which she risked losing all control, lashing out or throwing something, inflicting whatever damage she
could and damn the cost. She recognized the moment, and as soon as she did she knew it was over. She held in her anger and maintained an icy equanimity.
“When what you are doing here becomes known, Dr. West. even though my part in it was under duress, I shall be deeply ashamed.”
“Rest assured, Dr. Flemyng, it never will become known. At least not until society takes such things for granted, which it will very soon, just as it now accepts spaceships and television. It’s progress, Dr. Flemyng. Evolution. There’s no stopping it.”
She realized that as he spoke he had pushed himself up from his desk and walked over to the window. Her eyes had followed him every inch of the way. They were still fixed on him when he turned to face her, standing in partial silhouette against the light.
“Stopping it,” he said with the finality of an emperor delivering judgment, “is the only thing that can’t be done.”
On her way down in the elevator, Susan reflected that she had yet again failed to ascertain whether the view from his office was as she supposed it must be.
Chapter 32
CHARLIE PONDERED THE question. How had he known? How had he known that stepping over his beaten adversary was the way to seal his victory? Why was this whole strange experience starting to feel like coming home and resuming old habits, slipping into comfortable and well-worn clothes?
The thought of clothes made him look down at himself again, at the thick black hair and alien body, which, strangely, didn’t feel quite so alien anymore.
Meanwhile the rituals continued. One of the males he had fought brought him a branch with some leaves that, mysteriously again, Charlie knew were edible. He tasted one; it had a rich and satisfying flavor. Someone else gave him a handful of twigs; he didn’t know the significance of that, apart from its being a gift, but then he saw there was a certain delicacy in the arrangement of the tiny branches. It was a work of art, a creation, a treasured object.
Another gave him a piece of dried fruit. Others, males and females, approached him nervously at first, then embraced him, planting kisses on his face and stroking him with unexpected tenderness. It seemed that once the issue of dominance had been settled, all-around affection and companionship were the natural order of things, often expressed in the most tactile of ways.
Suddenly he realized that one of the younger females was presenting herself to him in a manner that left nothing to doubt and little to the imagination. She was backing toward him while looking over her shoulder to make sure that she had his attention. Her genitalia were red and hugely swollen, like some inflated rubber doughnut growing out of her nether regions.
But it was the shock of his response that shook Charlie more profoundly than anything that had happened so far. He felt an abrupt stirring in his groin, and looking down saw that his penis was erect. But it was a thin, long, spiky thing, not the robust human penis he was accustomed to. And yet it had a life of its own, and he was attached to it, and he knew what it was about to make him do.
Something shifted in his head, an abrupt change of mental perspective from immediate detail to a more comprehensive awareness. With it came a terrible sense of panic, the worst he had experienced since this whole episode began. He felt for the first time that he was trapped in something from which he might never escape. All his psychological defenses fell like a house of cards. He could no longer pretend this was a game, or a dream, or a test. All those mechanisms that had allowed him to step back from the experience and view it with an outsider’s detachment had vanished with that visceral sexual impulse that had just so irresistibly and unstoppably run through him. He was, he realized, what he seemed to be, and nothing more.
Except, but, still, and always—no. It wasn’t possible. As though physically tearing himself from the fabric of this new-reality, he turned about, then turned again, his gaze clawing the air for some sign of something else. He saw the cameras, and the silhouettes of those people still watching from behind their glass partition. He picked up another stone, smaller than the one the older female had taken from him, and flung it with all his strength at those impassive observers. It bounced harmlessly off the glass, which was obviously unbreakable. No one on the far side flinched.
There was a chattering of excitement around him. Some of the other chimpanzees also picked up stones and flung them up at the glass. It was, he got the impression, an occasional pastime they were accustomed to, which they were indulging in now as a courtesy to the new number one in their group, who seemed to find it amusing. He turned away in tired despair, and saw again the strolling figures of the public on the distant far side of the moat.
It was then that, among them, he suddenly saw Kathy. She stood watching him, not moving, her gaze fixed on his with a stillness that was almost hypnotic.
Charlie gave a cry of recognition. It burst from his lips as a howl of something close to pain. Kathy didn’t budge as he began loping toward her at a rolling all-fours gallop. He felt his lips curl back as he trumpeted his anguish, his need for someone to explain how long all this was going on, and why.
She did no more than watch as he approached the moat, but at the last moment, as it became obvious he wasn’t going to stop but plunge headlong into the water, she thrust out her arms in a gesture of alarm, as though trying to hold him back.
He took no notice, pressing on as the smooth floor of the moat slipped steeply away beneath his feet. As the water closed around his chest, he pushed off and began to swim—and sank, struggling and choking, beneath the surface.
For a moment he didn’t know what had happened. Some stupid miscalculation, a lack of familiarity with this new physical form that he was saddled with, had made him slip and stumble, miss his stride, and bungle his normally powerful swimming stroke. But that could happen to anyone. Charlie was a champion swimmer. All he had to do was move his arms and legs in the usual way and his head would break the surface, then he would cover the last few yards to Kathy in seconds.
Except that whatever he tried, he couldn’t find the surface. No matter how he writhed and turned, he remained just a flailing mass of limbs, no more able to direct his movement than to float. He felt himself sinking helplessly to the wide V-shaped bottom of the moat. He tried to scramble up one side, then the other—which was which no longer mattered to him. All he needed was to reach the air and fill his bursting lungs. But the surface was too smooth to give him purchase. All that happened every time he struggled up a painful inch or two was that he slid down and landed, rolling over, on the bottom.
He knew with a sudden and terrible clarity that he was going to drown. If there was any way out of this, he told himself, he would have found it by now. All that remained was to await the point at which his self-control would break and give way to the final scream of dying rage that would fill his lungs with water. The swirling blues and whites and slashes of shadow that he saw now would fade to darkness. His heart would stop, his brain would die, and the body that would eventually be fished out would be no more than a lifeless hulk: Man or beast, what matter?
Suddenly he felt the hard surface on which he was lying give way beneath him. As he fell he gave an involuntary gasp of shock, gulping water, but found that with it there was air. He landed in a huge curved pan of stainless steel or something similar. It sat at an angle so that the water still pouring from the moat onto his head drained off into a narrow trench beyond his feet. He shifted to one side and looked up. The section of the moat that had opened to let him out was already swinging shut like a powerful jaw closing on the cascading water. In a moment it was back in place, and everything was silent.
All he could think of at first was what an extraordinary piece of engineering this was. He could see now that the whole underside of the moat was constructed in sections, each one of which presumably could open as the one above him just had to free a drowning… what?
He looked down at his matted, wet, hairy black body. So, he thought, it continues. He tried to stand up, but the polished steel surface was too slippery. H
e slid down, ending up with one foot in the narrow drainage trench and the other on the concrete floor beyond. He stepped over and looked around. There appeared to be only one way out of the area, an opening about the size of an average door, and a lighted corridor beyond. He started up it, no longer hesitant or cautious: Fear was something that belonged in another, more rational life. So far as this life he found himself in now was concerned, Charlie was all “feared out.”
The walls and ceiling of the corridor were again made of some prefabricated substance in a dull beige color, with lighting from a strip embedded in the ceiling. After a few yards it turned abruptly to the right, and came to an end. He looked for some crack in the blank wall facing him that might indicate a hidden door, but there was nothing.
A sound behind him made him turn. He saw a panel sliding swiftly across and closing off the corridor behind him. He was boxed into a space about six feet square. Instinctively he ran back and threw his weight against this new, fourth wall, but it didn’t budge.
Still he didn’t panic. All he felt now was a kind of stoic acceptance of his fate.Something, he told himself, of which he had no knowledge was taking its course, and it was a course over which he had no control.
He sensed movement, a brief pressure beneath his feet. The box he was trapped in was moving upward, like an elevator. After about fifteen seconds it stopped, and the wall that had just slid shut now opened again. Before him was a round tunnel, about six feet in diameter. He was obviously expected to step into it, but he didn’t move, just to find out what would happen.
The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Page 15
