The Family Tree

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The cage’s occupant glared at her from piggy eyes in which all sign of intelligence had been overlaid by anger and shame.

  “Squee-uink,” said Prince Sahir.

  31

  At Randall Pharmaceuticals

  When the Randall Pharmaceutical truck showed up half an hour later, complete with animal cage in the back, Dora and Abby waited until Sahir had been loaded—silently—then followed the truck to the lab. Just inside the gate it turned to the right and drove down the lane that led past the animal pens. Using her badge to get past the gate, Dora directed Abby to follow them. Beside the last pens she saw the driver leaning out of his window, talking to Joe Penton.

  “Oyk and Irk,” she said softly. “When we get down there, you see if you can wander around the pens very quietly and assess what’s going on. Do any of those animals talk? Are they intelligent? The men seem to be putting the prince in with the other pigs. Let’s hope he makes friends easily.”

  Abby parked between the truck and the pens. Dora got out on the side nearest the men while the dogs left quietly on the other side and trotted away. Abby got out to lean nonchalantly against the car while Dora strolled over to join Joe and the driver.

  “Joe,” she said, raising a hand. “How’s things?”

  “Hi, Sergeant,” he said. “You still working on this case?”

  “Still am. Actually, it’s my day off, but my friend over there lost his pet pig, and when we found it at the pound, the guy there said Randall had claimed it. You know anything about that?”

  Joe shook his head in disgust. “It’s Bill, you know, Bill Twenzel? He gets this call, and he thinks it’s some kinda practical joke, so he plays along, he says sure, if it talks, it’s our pig. Then it turned out it wasn’t a joke, they really had a pig that talked, so by this time one of the muckety-muck lab guys here, Marsh McGovern—who’s a VIP, Very Idiotic Pain in the Ass—he hears this conversation about a talking pig. So this guy, Marsh, he sends the truck, and here we are with one of the bosses innerested in this pig.” He unlatched the gate of the pen and held it open while the driver manhandled Sahir through it, then shut and latched it once more. The driver raised a hand in farewell, then took himself and truck back the way he had come.

  Dora persisted, “So you’re saying even though he belongs to a friend of mine, you can’t let us have him?”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but you know, orders is orders. I can’t let him go, not until Marsh sees him. Prob’ly tomorrow. I’ll explain it and the guy’ll let me turn him over to you.”

  “Well, it was a joke, sort of,” said Dora, quite loudly, hoping Sahir would pay attention. “He swallowed a microphone, like in a cordless phone, you know, so he must have sounded like he was talking.”

  “I be damned. Marsh McGovern, he’ll probably want to X-ray him.”

  “Today?” asked Dora, trying not to betray the panic this announcement provoked.

  “Nah. He’s all tied up today. Tomorrow, like I say. He’ll see the mike on the film, and he’ll know it was a false alarm. Ordinarily, it wouldn’a happened, but Marsh’s got this wild hair, you know. He’s just sure one of these days, some animal is going to mutate and start talking. The other lab people, they laugh at him, but I guess he’s smart enough, except for believing in UFOs.”

  “Why UFOs?” drawled Abby, who had walked over to the pigpen and was reaching his hands through the wire to scratch the backs of two friendly inhabitants. Prince Sahir sat in one corner, naked, morose and scowling. “What have UFOs got to do with animal mutations?”

  “Well, he figures that’s where the mutation will come from, you know? He’s positive men didn’t evolve here by themselves. He thinks ETs came, millions of years ago, and they mutated an ape so we’d evolve. And now it’s time for some other animal to make a great leap forward, that’s how he talks.”

  “Well, I guess tomorrow is good enough. One day away from home won’t kill him.” Dora dug the side of her shoe into the soil. “Say, Joe, my friend has to run an errand. Is it okay if I stay here and look at the animals until he gets back?”

  Joe shrugged, cast a quick look up the hill, and said, “I don’t guess anybody’ll mind. If they do, just say you’re still investigating, you know.”

  He wandered on about his duties. Dora and Abby had a whispered conversation, after which Abby took off in his car, stopping at the gate to explain he’d be returning. Dora, meantime, wandered among the pens, looking for Oyk and Irk.

  She found them outside a cage housing a small black bear and two cubs. Both kanni looked up alertly when Dora came around the corner, and Oyk—who was slightly larger and had a curlier tail—came trotting over.

  “She talks,” he said. “Six kanni talk. The scuinans in with the prince talk. That’s all so far.”

  “My God,” whispered Dora.

  “Who is your god?” asked Oyk. “You speak of it often.”

  Dora gritted her teeth. “Another time, Oyk. Right now I’ve got to figure out…do the people here know that the animals…that is, the…ah, other tribes can talk?”

  “They say their protector knew. They called him Daddy Eddy. But he taught them not to talk to anyone but him.”

  “What other creat—that is, people might be here? Raccoon, ah…armakfatidi?”

  “There is one, but she grummels.”

  “From something Dr. Winston did?”

  “No. I think all armakfatidi grummel, always have grummeled. Just, no one could hear them before our time.”

  “Onchiki?”

  “The scuinans say the onchiki were taken inside.”

  Oyk watched her fixedly while she frowned at her feet, murmuring, “We’ll have to get them out of here somehow. They’re not safe here, not in the long run, not with Edgar Winston dead.”

  They started down the next line of cages, Oyk trotting ahead and eyeing the inhabitants of each pen with interest. He went around a corner, was out of sight for a few moments, then came speeding back. “Pheleda,” he said, turning once more and looking over his shoulder at Dora. “Wants to talk to you.”

  She hurried, stopping short as she rounded the corner and confronted the large cat who awaited her. Lynx, she said to herself. Not quite that large, but otherwise, much like. So like Soaz as to be his sister. Oyk murmured to the big cat, and she came close to the fence. “Is it true you have a male with you?” she purred, rubbing herself against the wire. “The dog says you do.”

  “Yes,” whispered Dora.

  “I’d like to meet him. It’s very lonely here. I’m all by myself.”

  She went back to her sheltered bed and lay down, fixing Dora with wide, golden eyes. “Tell him,” she called.

  Dora moved away, shaking her head, trying to get her tumbling thoughts into an order that made sense. Edgar Winston had done whatever he had done, had created whatever he had created, and then the Woput killed him. But the Woput didn’t kill the creations. So, possibly, the Woput didn’t know Winston had yet succeeded. And he mustn’t know!

  Oyk came to walk beside her, then Irk. They did not talk. The three of them strolled, trying to appear casual, stopping outside each cage to inspect the inhabitants, whispering to them, but receiving no further response. It was impossible to know whether the animals could not or would not talk, and Dora felt her frustration growing.

  It was Irk who heard Abby returning. They met him at the corner, where he sat in the car, making a great crumple of a paper bag and a small box.

  “You got one,” said Dora.

  “I got one,” he confirmed, displaying the small battery powered receiver-transmitter assembly. “It’s the smallest one they had. A pig might be able to swallow it.”

  Dora took it from him and went to the corner pen, where seven pairs of eyes watched her curiously. “This device,” she said, displaying it, “should be found in your pen. It should look chewed, and it should be found in your…droppings. It will explain how one of you seemed to be talking when, in fact, we all know you can’t.”

>   She reached through the wire and laid the device on the ground. One of the pigs, not Sahir, came to pick it up and carry it to the back of the pen. Several pairs of eyes looked it over carefully before returning to Dora.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said someone. It was the same voice she had heard earlier in the summer saying, “Poor guy.”

  “We’ll be back,” she remarked. “We think it would be a good idea to get you out of here.”

  “We can dig out anytime. Any of us,” said the same voice. “We can even hide the holes.”

  “Why haven’t you?” she asked, carefully not looking at the pen.

  “Nowhere to go,” said the voice. “We figure, we’d have to have someplace to go. Daddy Eddy said it isn’t safe out there.”

  Dora nodded, then raised her voice and called, “Joe?”

  His voice came from up the hill. “Over here. You need something?”

  She walked toward the voice. “Just saying good-bye. Hey, this is really a marvelous collection of animals. Almost a zoo.”

  Joe emerged from behind a feeder and leaned against a post, becoming expansive as he gestured widely at the pens. “This’s only part of it, Sergeant. Dr. Winston, when he finished with some of his experiments, he used to give some of the animals to friends of his, like pets, you know? Even with all these here, I bet he gave twice that many away.”

  Dora kept her face carefully neutral, clenching her hands into fists to hide the fact that they trembled. “What kind of animals, Joe?”

  “Oh, he had some bears, bigger ones than here, you know. Here you can’t keep anything really big. They was just cubs, but they was getting big. He has friends with a place in Alaska, and they took the bears up there. Then he had some goats, and some beavers, oh, a whole bunch of different ones. He’d been doing this research for a long time, started when he was just a young man. He was retirement age, you know, almost seventy. They let him stay on.”

  Dora said, “Well, don’t let anybody do anything to Abby’s pig, okay? Call us first.”

  “What’s your number?”

  She wrote it down for him, home and precinct. “Maybe I can save you a call? What time tomorrow you think I could see this guy Marsh?”

  Joe didn’t know. Joe would find out. Joe would call her.

  “I guess this is the best we can do right now,” said Abby as they headed out the gate. “It’s after twelve. You want to have lunch?”

  “I’ve got information for the whole family, and they’ll all be hungry,” she said, with a glance at the two dogs. “Let’s stop at the market, instead.”

  32

  Opalears: Korè Speaks

  While the umminhi were gone, I groomed the veebles and gave them apples I found in the cold box. Veebles will do almost anything for an apple. Dzilobommo and Blanche went out into the woods for, so they said, some peace and quiet. Soaz prowled from room to room, looking in closets and drawers and under furniture. Finally, he must have decided it was safe enough in the place, for he curled up on Dora’s bed and went to sleep. Izzy and the countess were having a long, long talk, and the onchiki had found they could apply soap to the bathing place and make a slide of it. I decided to sneak about a little in the trees, and I went as far as the avenue Dora had described before losing my courage and returning home. I said “home” to myself, for though Dora’s house was not my home, it had a very homely feel.

  The onchiki had finished their play when I arrived, and I told them they must clean up the soap, or someone might slip and break a bone. They did so, with much babble and splashing, then they all piled onto the bed and fell asleep beside Soaz. We were all napping by the time Dora and Abby and Oyk and Irk returned, without the prince. At the first sound of their arrival, Soaz woke and came into the outer room, glaring about himself in a threatening way, his tail thrashing. Only when he saw it was Dora did he sit and groom himself, pretending he hadn’t been startled at all.

  “All of you sit down,” said Dora. “And I’ll tell you what’s happened.”

  We sat. She and Abby told us what they had done; Oyk and Irk confirmed where they had gone, what they had seen, what they had talked of with the animals at the place where Prince Sahir was now. When Dora told us what the man had said about many of the speaking peoples being already gone, the countess exclaimed; Soaz growled; Prince Izakar asked many questions, some of them not at all pertinent; and at the end of an hour we were all sitting glumly, wondering what to do next.

  Dora said, “Obviously, some of Dr. Winston’s, ah…people are already out in the world, presumably provided for by humans he trusted. However, if your peoples are to be sure of survival, I think we must plan to get all of them away from the laboratory. It won’t do just to get them out. They themselves know they have to have a refuge, someplace they can be safe.”

  “Is anyplace safer than this?” asked the countess, waving a hand at the forest outside the window. “Ersuns live in such places. Scuini live in such places. The only problem I can think of is finding enough food….”

  “The sultana gave me gems,” I reminded them. “Even in this age, they could buy food for a long time.”

  “I have another concern,” said Dora. “You have spoken several times of cannibals in your time, that is, an intelligent animal who eats another intelligent animal? Am I right? What will the mother bear at Randall Pharmaceuticals do if we bring her to our forest and she encounters a…scuinic mother, with babies? Will she eat the babies?”

  “If you mean the one in the pen, she might,” said Oyk. “She talks, but I don’t know if anybody has taught her anything like religion.”

  “The same may be true of your…fellow tribespeople?”

  Oyk looked at Irk, who licked his nose and said, “They probably don’t have any religion, either.”

  “I’d never thought of that,” said Izzy, wide-eyed.

  Abby sat back, his legs crossed as I have seen Izzy sometimes sit, looking very personlike. “Dora’s right, I’m afraid. There’s more to this than just letting some of your people out of the labs. If these are your ancestors, they must be fed and protected and taught to respect one another, or the big ones will eat the little ones and that will be that. None of them have learned survival skills, which means men would probably dispose of all those not lost to the wild. Or, after men are gone, as you tell us we will be gone, in the absence of an ethical framework the future will be all lions and tigers and bears, and no scuini or onchiki.”

  We got the book out again and looked at pictures of lions and tigers, though we were already familiar with bears. Every time I opened the book, I still thought the picture on the front was of Faros VII.

  During all this, Soaz had been ominously quiet. Now he spoke:

  “Perhaps it would be better to let people do as they like. Let only the strong survive.” He smiled, letting his fangs show.

  “If you don’t care what you eat,” said Izzy in a lazy voice. “If you want to live in cave instead of house. If you want to be hot in summer, cold in the winter, and walk instead of ride. Don’t forget, Soaz, it is ponjic people who do most of the construction, and it is kasturic people who cut our timber and grow our vegetables and cut wood to keep us warm in winter. It is kapriel people who tend our livestock. It is armakfatidi who do our cooking.”

  Soaz lifted his hand in front of his face and stared at it, his nose wrinkling. “Why didn’t Winston give us all fingers?”

  Dora said quietly, “Because he was interested in language. As I understand evolution, it’s a random algorithmic process, and it doesn’t produce every useful thing in every organism. I’ve always wondered why our evolutionary process didn’t give us better sense.”

  Another long silence.

  The countess cleared her throat. “We should postpone the matter of philosophy. It is too confusing for us to consider at a time when we must focus on survival. Dora and Abby remind us what Izzy told us earlier: Woput believes that his people, the umminhi, did not survive bec
ause our peoples took over in some way; he believes this because he does not know about the plague that comes. Dora and Abby say—unselfishly, in my opinion—that better some intelligence survives than that none survives. Since I am an intelligent person from the future, I agree, quite selfishly, that some intelligence should survive. In order for this to happen, we must free all our people Winston was working with and they must not eat one another. Let us talk only of how to do that.”

  “Some of Winston’s, ah…subjects are inside the building,” said Dora. “The onchiki, for instance. I don’t know how many others, or of what kind. There may be other intelligent ones outside, too, who simply wouldn’t talk to Oyk or Irk.”

  “Some kapris, I think,” said Irk. “One of them gave me very strange look.”

  A bell sounded, then, loudly and vehemently, a kind of rattling ring. The phone, Abby said it was, as Dora went to talk to it. It had not made that noise when she spoke to it before, but Abby explained that it rang to tell her someone was talking to her. I thought, not for the first time, that civilization—if this was what we were in—had some had points. That noise, for one, and the smell on the avenue for another.

  She spoke for some time to someone called Mr. Dionne. Dzilobommo and Blanche returned just as she was finishing her conversation.

  “This man I spoke to,” she said in that way she had of saying important things as though they were nothing at all, as a child does, perhaps, wishing to express urgencies but either shy or afraid of drawing attention. “This man’s name is Harry Dionne, and he belongs to a numerous family that I believe has some connection with the trees that are taking us over. I have no proof of that. I have no explanation, but I think the Dionnes are involved. Harry’s father is a priest of their religion, and I have asked Harry to get him to come here, if he will. His name is Vorn, and he lives some distance away, so it will take a day or so, even if he catches a flight here as soon as possible.”

  “A flight?” asked Soaz.

  This started yet another discussion, with more books pulled from the shelves, this time with pictures of airplanes. Izzy had seen such pictures before, but I must confess I was not greatly interested in airplanes, for they probably smell even worse than the vehicles on the avenue and are noisier than the telephone. What I was interested in was getting away from the awful thoughts I was having, all about our people maybe dying or never having existed in the first place! Or our letting the speaking creatures loose, then the Woput finding them anyway. I imagined the Woput killing me, killing Izzy. I wanted to go into the forest with Izzy and hear him tell me what he thought about all this. Or maybe hear him tell me something else, and maybe look at me in that way he sometimes did, or even pat my shoulder and tell me it would be all right.