by Maurice
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
TM & © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
Illustrations by Zachary Baldus
Cover design by Amanda Kain
Cover copyright © 2018 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
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First Edition: October 2018
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Production by Stonesong Press
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LCCN: 2018946514
ISBNs: 978-0-316-48539-5 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-48538-8 (ebook)
E3-20180830-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Caesar’s Birth and Early Years
The Shelter
Caesar Becomes Caesar
Rocket’s Tale
How Caesar Led Us Out
Hila’s Tale
The Battle of the Orange Bridge
Our First Days in the Forest
The Humans Hunt Apes
The First Ape Council
The Meeting with Hunters
About Koba
The Day and Night of Flame
The Red Flowers: Oak’s Tale
The Fire: Rocket’s Tale
After the Fire
Caesar Courts Your Mother
Tinker’s Tale
How the Gorilla Guard Came About
Caesar Becomes a Father
The Rise of the Midwives
We Begin the School
How We Tamed the Horses: Barbar’s Tale
How Blue Eyes Was Wounded
The Monsters Arrive: River’s Tale
What Koba Counseled; What Caesar Decided
What the Humans Wanted
Your Birth: Tinker’s Tale
What Happened at the Dam
How Koba Played the Fool
How Your Mother Was Cured
How Koba and Caesar Fought
The Lights Return
What Koba Did
Koba’s War: River’s Tale
How Ape Killed Ape: Spear’s Tale
How Ape Caged Ape
What Happened to Caesar
Blue Eyes Fools Grey
Caesar’s Plan
Caesar and Koba Fight Again
Why We Stayed in the City
How the War Began
Blue Eyes Travels South
Two Battles
On the Beach: Oak’s Tale
The Humans Strike Back
Why the Women and Children Returned to the Woods
The Third Battle of the Orange Bridge
The Charge Toward the Woods
We Find a New Home
Why Blue Eyes Traveled South Again
The War Begins Again
The Battle in the Trench: River’s Tale
Blue Eyes Returns
Blue Eyes Returns: Lake’s Tale
Our Home Is Invaded
Caesar’s Rage: Rocket’s Tale
How Caesar Left to Seek Revenge; How I Found Nova
What Winter Told Us
Bad Ape
We Find the Colonel’s Base
Apes in Cages: Lake’s Tale
The Holy War
The Human Girl: Lake’s Tale
The Way In; the Way Out
We Free the Children: Rocket’s Tale
Human War Begin: Bad Ape’s Tale
Caesar’s Revenge
Our Journey
Newsletters
Introduction
I am Maurice.
I am the teller, not the tale. The story exists without me; it is there before I tell it; it is there long after I am done. After I breathe no more and follow the sun beneath the sea, the story remains. This story is for you, Cornelius.
It is the story of Caesar, our first king. Your father. I am in it, and you, your mother, your brother, Blue Eyes, are all in it. We chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans—we apes—all of us are in it, and our children, and their children for as long as the seasons pass.
The story itself is invisible. It is silent. To share it, someone must give it voice.
This can be more difficult than it sounds. Imagine the story is like a spear a blind ape is touching with his hands. He is asked to describe it. If he touches only the blunt end, he will describe a wooden stick. If he feels only the sharp end, he might perceive it to be a knife. Only by holding it, guiding his hands over the entire weapon, would he be able to describe a spear. And the tale of Caesar is much larger, with many more parts than a spear.
I am the blind ape; I can describe what I saw and heard and felt. But that is not enough. And so I also record the things Caesar told me—and Cornelia, and Blue Eyes, and even Koba the Betrayer, for they all knew things I did not witness. And there are yet those among us who survived our trials who have their own part of the tale. Yet even their testimony does not reveal the entire story of your father. There are parts of it even he did not know, and more he knew but never told. The story is there, but some pieces of it will be forever invisible, eternally silent.
Others are telling Caesar’s story, other blind apes who have observed little or nothing of what really happened. They make the error of thinking the spear is a stick or a knife—or a gun, or a bomb. They know nothing, but as more time passes, the more their errors are believed to be the story itself. I have begun to fear what our history will say in the years to come.
Already, some are telling things about your father that are not true. That he was born a human but was Changed by a medicine into one of us. That he appeared, fully grown, in the shelter where I first met him. That he was born of a lightning strike. They say these and stranger things. Given time and many tellings by hand and voice, the real story will be replaced by a fantastic one. Voice and hand talk cannot preserve what I know after I am gone.
But there is a way, as you see.
Humans, for all their many faults, were clever. We apes awoke only a few hands of years ago, but humans were changed when the world was young. They contrived countless ingenious things. Much of what they devised they turned to evil. Indeed, this cleverness may have ultimately been their downfall. But even a blighted tree might bear a little fruit.
Humans developed methods to make stories visible for anyone to see. They made marks to represent words and ideas; they drew pictures and made images that move like living things. These marks and images do not change with time, as spoken words do. Now I take a human tool and turn it to work for apes. To preserve our history better and longer than memory, to defend it from error, strange thin
king, and deliberate lies.
I write this story for you, Cornelius. I draw it for you. And when you are old enough and have been taught to read, you will learn from what I wrote and drew the story of your father. Long after I and everyone who knew Caesar is less than a memory, you will know. Your sons and daughters will learn it as well.
You should have known him as we did, but you did not get the chance. Here I do what I can to make that right.
Caesar’s Birth and Early Years
To begin with, your father was no fantastical being. He did not spring from the stone of our prison, adult and fully formed. He was not the result of lightning striking a tree. He was not born human.
But he was raised by humans. He was raised as one.
We know his mother was a chimpanzee, and that she was born—as many apes were—in the Forest of Fruit, where the trees bore food of all kinds. She could reach up and pluck a fig, a banana, a durian from the very plants that they grow on. We know much of this from your mother, Cornelia, who was also born in our faraway homeland. It was always warm there, she said, never bitter cold as our home in the north was each winter. Rivers and lakes did not harden; ice never fell from the sky. The birds, the trees, the four-footed creatures were all different than those we know. The air was sweet with the smell of a hundred kinds of flower. Some believe the Forest of Fruit isn’t real, that it was only a dream apes had before the Change. Before we came awake.
But it was real, and it was not a perfect place. Your mother also told of giant cats and snakes, of terrible beasts in rivers and streams, of many other dangers. And there were times when the rains did not come, and the fruit did not grow in abundance. When that happened, apes ate what they could find. Sometimes they hunted and killed for meat, a practice that helped us survive in these lands with very little fruit. The Forest of Fruit was not paradise, but it was the place where the apes of old were born to live, where they knew how to survive and were at home. And free. Not one of us knows where it is. Perhaps we will find it again one day. Perhaps it is lost to us forever.
The greatest danger in the forest was man. Humans killed apes for meat and for fun. They captured us and carried us far away. Some apes were put in cages to be gawked at and taunted. Others—like me—were taught tricks to amuse humans. Some were tortured to discover medicines to help humans to live longer.
We know Caesar’s mother was named Bright Eyes, but not much more. He never knew her. Will—the human who raised Caesar—told him that she had died shortly after he was born. He also did not speak much of this. But from what we know, Bright Eyes was given the same strange medicine as we, the breath that went into us, woke us up, made us Changed from what we were before. And Caesar was a child inside of her when this happened.
Caesar was the first of us to be born Changed. As you were, Cornelius. As all apes are now born. Caesar had green eyes as a result of the medicine, and they were one of his most striking features.
He did not know that he was Changed at the time, of course. Caesar did not know any other apes. He only knew humans. And as strange as it might sound to you, these humans loved him, and he loved them. Will was his father, and Caroline his mother. Will’s father, Charles, was his grandfather. This part of the story was hard for me to understand; the humans who kept me were not so kind and treated me only as an animal. For others—such as Koba—it was impossible to believe. Many apes hold only hatred in their hearts for humans, for good reason.
But I believed Caesar. I came to see that as not all apes are good, and not all humans are bad. We are, unfortunately, far too similar.
Your father was raised much as a human child. He wore human clothing, he played with the same toys as human children. He had a room in a human house full of wonderful things, and a window through which he observed the world outside. But over time, he began to understand that other humans did not see him as one of them. One day, through his window, he saw human children playing. He wanted to join them. But when he tried to play with them, they were afraid, and their father hurt Caesar. They didn’t see a human boy, but something else, something they didn’t like.
Because he was hurt, his human father took Caesar to a doctor, and where the doctor was he saw other apes for the first time. He wasn’t sure what they were. They looked something like him, but nothing else about them seemed right. The doctor was Caroline, and she would eventually become his human mother.
I cannot tell you everything your father felt when his parents first took him to the forest across the Orange Bridge. When I asked him, he simply said, “Free.” But I know he loved that place, and I know how I felt when I first entered it. I felt small and large at the same time, and content, like being able to finally scratch an itch I had never been able to reach before. His human parents took him there many times, over the years of his childhood. But always they returned to the house in the City, which to Caesar felt smaller each day.
And each day he was less sure of what he was, where he fit in. When he finally asked Will this question, his father took him to Gen-Sys Laboratories, the place where Will worked. Where Caesar was born and his mother died.
Something happened after that, another thing Caesar didn’t like to discuss. Looking from his window, he saw his grandfather, Charles, threatened by the human who had hurt him as a child. Charles was old and sick. He forgot things and sometimes didn’t know what he was doing. But he was kind and loving. A good human.
Seeing Charles threatened, Caesar acted as any loyal grandchild might. He attacked the man. He bit off his finger. He defended his human family, just as he later defended us.
For the humans, that was not excusable. An ape who hurt a human, whatever the reason, was either a dead ape or an ape in a cage.
So they took him to where I lived, and Rocket lived, and many others, where we were forced to stay in cages. And it was soon after that he understood something that changed everything.
For a long time, he’d thought of himself as human. But he also knew that other humans didn’t think of him that way.
Now he understood that Will and Caroline didn’t think of him that way, either.
That was a hard lesson. But he would soon learn an even harder one.
The Shelter
The humans called it a shelter. I knew the hand sign for that word when I arrived, and even then I knew it was the wrong word for the place. Prison would have been a better one. It was dark, and it stank. Everything about it was wrong and unpleasant. Our cages were small, but there was one large room for us to move about in. In it was a tree that was not a tree; it wasn’t alive. No wind came through its branches. No birds nested in the crooks of its boughs. The walls were painted to resemble the world outside, but they were walls. Only the sunlight was real, and it came in from high above.
The humans in the shelter were not good, but one in particular was crueler than the others. His name was Dodge. He loved to hurt us, to see our pain, fear, and confusion. He had a sparking stick that he struck us with. It was painful beyond belief. It was like a small death to be hit by it. Sometimes he touched it to our cages, which were all connected, and hurt us all at once. What a noise the chimps made when he did that! Chimps are excitable still, but they were even more so then.
I was used to punishment, and rewards. That’s how they trained me in the circus. I did most of what I did out of fear of punishment. But in the shelter, punishment often seemed to come for no reason, or at least no reason I could understand. It was just a part of life in that place.
None of us was born in the shelter. We all came from elsewhere. Some of us were rescued from even worse places. Some—like me—were discarded by humans who no longer wanted us. I mostly kept to myself. That is the nature of orangutans—we prefer solitude. In the Forest of Fruit, adult male orangutans avoid even their own kind, sometimes for many days.
Most of the apes in the shelter were chimpanzees. Chimpanzees do not like solitude. They crave company; they need it. As terrible as that place was, the chimps had an order
, a society, that gave them some measure of solace.
Their ruler when Caesar arrived was Rocket. He had been the leader for a while. When a new chimp appeared, Rocket quickly let them know who was boss. It usually didn’t come to much—some shouted threats, a little shoving. The newcomers understood what was happening and gave in quickly.
I wasn’t a chimp, so Rocket didn’t care about me one way or the other. I would climb to the least crowded corner of the place and was mostly left alone to watch, to think my slow, patient thoughts. I was an observer, not a participant.
The only ape Rocket truly feared was Buck. Buck was a gorilla, and he was alone. While the rest of us were free of our cages, Buck remained in his. Gorillas are more like chimps than orangs. They like company, they like grooming and doing things together. Buck had no one to groom him, no family. And so he became angry. He was angry all the time. Rocket worried about what Buck might do if he ever got out. So did I.
And there we were, when Caesar came. Three kinds of apes, different from one another, not understanding that we were of a kind. Chimps were chimps; orangs were orangs; gorillas were gorillas. And we had as little to do with one another as possible.
When Caesar first arrived in the shelter, he was wearing clothes, like a human. I wasn’t surprised. When I was in the circus I often wore clothes. Humans thought it was funny, although at the time I never understood why. Later, after the awakening, I came to believe that humans like to see apes pretending to be humans, but stupider. Not because they hate apes, but because they hate themselves.
Dodge did hate us, but I now think he saw in us what he hated in himself. In fact, I think he hated himself so much he hated everyone and everything. It hardly matters, except to say this: he despised Caesar more than he hated any of us, immediately, on sight. He sensed, as I did, that Caesar was like no chimpanzee he had ever met before. That he was something new, different—and to Dodge, that was terrifying. On that first day, Dodge taunted Caesar as he put food in his cage. Caesar thought it was a game at first and threw some of the food at Dodge. The human then punished him with the hose. The hose shot out water very fast and very hard, so hard it could bruise an ape. Caesar lay on the floor, wet, hurt, confused. After the humans were gone, I watched him pick up a small stone and scratch a symbol on the wall—a circle with a star inside. It represented the window in his room at home, through which he gazed at the outside world.
