“We’re in!” Colonel Hume said.
“How do you mean?”
“Webmind’s structure—look!” He pointed at the middle of the three big monitors.
Shel rose to his feet. “All right!” He picked up his phone. “Tony, you better get in here…”
The colonel’s tone was triumphant. “I knew it had to be something simple!” He scooped up a phone. “How do I get an outside line?”
“Dial nine,” Aiesha said.
“This line is secure, right?”
She nodded. “And scrambled.”
“We’re going to need some expert help,” Hume said, his heart pounding. “Christ, I wonder if Conway is still alive? And let’s see if we can get Wolfram in here, too…”
forty-one
Caitlin was pleased to see an email pop in from Matt as soon as math class was over. I’m thinking about you too, it began. And, yeah, I’m fine! OK if I come over after school?
She was pleased that whatever had bothered him the night before seemed to be more tolerable today. She sent a quick reply: Absolutely!
And she leaned back in her chair, grinning, but—
But she could not keep herself from doing the math; it just happened for her, as soon as she thought about anything involving numbers. She was now 16.01 years old, and, again, American girls, on average, lost their virginity at—yes, yes, taking it to two decimal places was assuming a degree of precision not in the original data, but still: they lost it at 16.40 years. Caitlin had 143 days left if she wasn’t going to end up on the wrong side of the graph—and she was not used to being below average in anything.
But…
But she’d never touched a penis. Hell, she really had no idea what one even looked like. Of course, there had to be thousands—millions—of pictures of them online, and lots of video of them in action…
Her initial thought was that she wanted Matt’s penis to be the first one she saw, just as, when she’d gone to Japan for Dr. Kuroda’s procedure, she had wanted her mother’s face to be her first sight. But that hadn’t quite worked out: the first real-world thing she’d seen had ended up being the edge of a lab bench in chemistry class. And, besides, even if Matt was a virgin—and Caitlin was almost sure he was—surely her private parts wouldn’t be the first he’d ever seen; he’d doubtless looked online, or in magazines, or at movies. He’d know what to do with her junk; she should know what to do with his… shouldn’t she?
She was a little embarrassed that Webmind would see her looking at such things online—but, then again, the whole human race had that to deal with now! Besides, he’d already seen her doing everything down to and including wiping her butt (or bum, as they said here in the Great White North); surely he wouldn’t find this shocking. And so she went to Google image search, and typed in “penis,” and—
And, well, that was disappointing: a whole bunch of things that seemed to have nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Oh, wait. There was a link that said, “SafeSearch is on.” She clicked that, read about the options, changed it to “off,” then ran the search again, and—
Oh, my!
I could recall anything instantly, by an effort of will. What astonished me, though, was another aspect of consciousness: the tendency for things to come to mind—to become the focus of attention—without any particular volition.
“We can have you back on Vulcan in four days, Mr. Spock.”
“Unnecessary, Engineer. My business on Vulcan is concluded.”
Now why on earth was I thinking about that?
* * *
Shoshana went out the back door of the clapboard bungalow. The sun was high in the sky, smiling down. As she walked across the wide lawn, she reached her hand up to take the scrunchie out of her hair, but stopped herself. Hobo had doubtless noticed that she’d been shaking out her ponytail before visiting him of late, but if this was going to work, they had to trust that Hobo really had gone back to what he used to be—to who he used to be. Leaving her hair tied up was a symbolic gesture, but a significant one—and if there was one thing an ASL-speaking ape understood, it was symbolic gestures.
Now that she and Maxine had watched the final Planet of the Apes movie, she had a better appreciation for the statue of the Lawgiver that lived on Hobo’s little island. Although the statue was seen only in the first two movies, the final one opened and closed with sequences in which John Huston played the Lawgiver, reading from a parchment scroll, talking about his hope for apes and humans to live in friendship, harmony, and peace “according to divine will.”
As she crossed the drawbridge, Hobo came barreling toward her. She desperately tried not to flinch, but he seemed his old affectionate self. She gathered him into a hug, and, when her hands were free for signing, she said, Ready?
That oh-so-human nod of his, then: Hobo ready. Hobo ready.
She reached out a hand and let him interlace his long fingers with hers, and they started walking toward the bungalow. She allowed herself a glance back over her shoulder. The Lawgiver was watching them go, his expression beatific.
When they entered the house, Hobo hugged Dr. Marcuse, who squeezed the ape more tightly than Shoshana would have ever dared. Even though she knew how strong Hobo was, ape musculature was different from human, and he always looked scrawny and fragile to her, but the Silverback had no compunctions about giving him a bear hug. When they were done, Shoshana took Hobo’s hand again.
Dillon was standing over by the front door, Shoshana saw; she wondered if he actually had the keys in his car’s ignition, ready to make a getaway. Hobo regarded Dillon for a moment, and he opened his mouth and showed his sharp, yellow teeth, and—
And then he seemed to catch sight of something else. In what had been the living room, back when this had been someone’s home, there was a wall with paintings Hobo had made hanging on it, since they were something visitors to the Institute always wanted to see. Hobo flexed his fingers, indicating that he wished to disengage his hand from Shoshana’s; she hesitated for a moment, then let him go, and he walked on all fours into the living room and over to the wall of his canvases.
Sho saw Dr. Marcuse’s mouth form a concerned circle—after all, the five paintings currently on the wall would collectively fetch over a hundred grand on eBay or in galleries when they were eventually put up for auction; they were a big source of the funds that kept the Marcuse Institute going.
Of course, the one showing Dillon dismembered was not on display; it wasn’t the sort of thing to show to prospective donors or the press. No, the first three were clearly pictures of Shoshana in profile, each with her ponytail sprouting from the back of the head and a single blue eye positioned like eyes were on ancient Egyptian paintings. The fourth was one of Hobo’s rare attempts at painting something else: it was, in fact, the Lawgiver statue with a large brown bird—maybe a pelican—resting on its head, a sight that had apparently amused the ape. And the fifth, at the far right, was that strange abstract painting Hobo had made recently of colored circles of various sizes connected by straight, brightly colored lines.
Hobo came to a stop in front of that painting, and he looked at it for a moment, and then he lifted his long, thin left arm, holding it straight out with his hand drooping ever so slightly, and, still gazing at the strange picture, he lightly touched the tip of his index finger to the canvas.
And then, after a long moment, he turned. An ape’s gaze is hard to follow, but from the angle of his head, Shoshana thought he was looking at Dillon. It was too much, she supposed, to hope Hobo would run over and give him a hug, but he did nod at him in an affable way, and then he started walking back toward Shoshana.
She, in turn, helped close the distance between them, and then led him over to the high-backed swivel chair positioned in front of the particleboard desk. There was a twenty-one-inch Apple LCD monitor on the desk, with a high-quality wireless webcam clipped to the top of its bezel. It was the same setup that had been used to make the first interspecies w
ebcam call, but now Hobo wasn’t going to speak to just one other ape. No, now he was going to speak to the whole wide world.
Shoshana went to her own desk. She had a webcam clipped to her monitor, too, and turned it on. There was no way to get Hobo to just talk into his camera; he didn’t understand what it did. But he’d talk to the image of Shoshana on his monitor, which was almost good enough—again, with his dark eyes, no one could tell that he was actually looking at the moving image of her rather than the camera lens just above. Shoshana signed into her own camera: All right, Hobo. Go ahead.
Hobo was quiet for a moment, perhaps composing his thoughts. Hobo, he signed. Hobo good ape.
Shoshana nodded at her camera—and nodded at him from his monitor—encouraging him to go on.
Hobo mother bonobo, he signed. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, Hobo father chimpanzee.
Shoshana was supposed to keep her attention focused on her camera, to provide an eye line for Hobo, but she found herself turning in astonishment to look at Dr. Marcuse. The Silverback’s eyebrows had climbed high up his forehead, and Dillon, whose specialty, after all, was primate hybridization, had his jaw hanging open. They had never discussed his mixed heritage with Hobo, figuring it would be beyond his comprehension.
Sho turned back to her own monitor—which was showing her the view recorded by the webcam Hobo was now facing. He spread his hands, and then looked at each of them in turn, almost as if visualizing the two halves of himself. Hobo special, he signed. And then, very slowly, very carefully, the signs made with great care, as if he understood how important they were, Hobo choose.
Shoshana felt her heart pounding.
Hobo choose to live here, he said. Friends here.
Hobo got off the stool. Dillon quickly swooped in, popped the webcam off the top of the monitor and followed Hobo as he approached Shoshana. Sho swiveled in her chair to face him, and Hobo continued to close the gap between the two of them. And then Hobo reached out a long, hairy, powerful arm, and he passed it behind Shoshana’s head, and—
Sho heard Marcuse suck in his breath. Shoshana desperately tried not to tense up, as—
As Hobo tugged ever so gently, ever so lovingly, on her ponytail. She broke into a giant grin and opened her arms, and Hobo jumped up into her embrace.
Shoshana spun her chair around, taking her and Hobo through 360 degrees. Dillon had moved over and was now aiming the camera at Hobo from next to Shoshana’s workstation. Hobo good ape, he said once more, looking now at Dillon. And Hobo be good father. He shook his head. Nobody stop Hobo. Hobo choose. Hobo choose to have baby.
Dr. Marcuse was standing off to one side, doubtless doing exactly what Shoshana was doing: imagining how this was going to play on YouTube. He grinned broadly, and said, “The defense rests.”
forty-two
“You’re going to make a great mother someday,” Matt said in a joking tone. They were down in Caitlin’s basement again; Matt had indeed come over after school, and she’d just helped him clean up a glass of Pepsi he’d accidentally spilled. She was beginning to feel like she was under house arrest—even if it was protective custody.
She smiled, setting aside the towel she’d gone to fetch, but—
But better to get that out of the way right now.
“I’m not going to have kids,” she said, sitting back down on her swivel chair, and cursing again that her parents didn’t have a couch down here.
“Oh!” said Matt. “I’m so sorry. Is it—um, was it the same thing that caused your blindness?”
She was startled—but she supposed she shouldn’t be. Blindness in young people that wasn’t caused by an injury rarely occurred in isolation; it was usually part of a suite of difficulties. In fact, one of the frustrations for her at the TSBVI had been that so many of the students had cognitive difficulties in addition to visual impairment.
“Well,” she said, “first, my blindness was caused by something called Tomasevic’s syndrome, which only affects the way the retina encodes information. And, second, it’s not that I can’t have children, it’s that I don’t want to.”
Caitlin wished yet again that she had more experience at decoding faces. Matt’s expression was one she’d never seen before: the left side of his mouth turned down, the right turned up, and blond eyebrows drawn together; it could have meant anything. After a moment he said, “Don’t you like kids?”
“I like them just fine,” she replied, “but I could never eat a whole one.”
But that expression she did recognize: Matt’s jaw had dropped.
“I’m joking. I love kids. Back in Austin, I used to help Stacy babysit.”
“But you don’t want to have any of your own?”
“Nope.”
And now his eyebrows went up. “Why not?”
“Just never have. Ever since I was a little girl, it was never something I wanted.”
“Didn’t you play with dolls?”
Caitlin still had that ridiculous Barbie Doll her cousin Megan had gotten her as a joke, the one that exclaimed, “Math is hard!”
“Sure,” Caitlin said. “But that doesn’t mean I wanted to be a mother.”
Matt was silent, and Caitlin felt herself tensing up. For Pete’s sake, they’d only been dating a few days—surely it was way too early to be worrying about this! But if it was going to be a showstopper for Matt…
She made her tone nonconfrontational. “I’ve had this discussion with Bashira, too, you know. She says, ‘How could you not want kids?’ and ‘Aren’t you being selfish?’ and ‘Who’s going to look after you in your old age?’ ”
Matt leaned back in his chair. “And?”
“And, I just don’t want kids; I don’t know why. And, no, I’m not being selfish.” She paused. “Have you ever read Richard Dawkins?”
“I read The God Delusion,” Matt said.
“Yeah, that’s a good one. But his most famous book is The Selfish Gene. And that’s his point: that genes are selfish, that all they want is to reproduce. And it is selfish to reproduce, in a very literal sense: it’s about making more copies of yourself, or as near as is possible, given our, um, our method of reproduction.”
Matt averted his eyes, and said, “Ah.”
“And, as for the looking-after-me-when-I’m-old question, surely that’s a truly selfish reason to have a child: for what it can do for you. Heck, you might as well have one to harvest its youthful organs so you can live longer. After all, they’d likely be a good tissue match.”
“Yuck,” said Matt.
Caitlin smiled. “Exactly.”
“But, um, ah, speaking of genes and stuff… I mean, that’s interesting that you don’t want to have kids. How could, ah…?”
“How could a disposition toward not having children evolve?” asked Caitlin.
Matt nodded. “Exactly. I mean, you’re here because every one of your ancestors wanted to have children.”
Caitlin felt butterflies in her stomach. She had an answer for that, of course, and had had no trouble presenting it to Bashira, but…
She took a breath and found herself now not quite looking at Matt. “Actually, the having-kids part is just a side effect. I’m here because every one of my ancestors liked having sex.”
But even not quite looking at him, she could see another expression she now knew well: the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. “Ah,” he said again. He was clearly nervous, and he quickly changed the topic. “So, um, so what do you think about the upcoming election in the States? ”
Caitlin shook her head; she had her work cut out for her. She wheeled her chair a little closer to his; their knees were now touching. “I hope he gets re-elected,” she said. “My parents have already done the paperwork to be able to vote from Canada.”
Matt nodded. “They’re allowed to vote from here?”
“Sure. They’ll do absentee ballots. They’ll be counted for Austin, which was their last US address.”
“Um, are—are you guys going to stay i
n Canada, or is your dad’s job a temporary thing?”
Caitlin smiled. “As long as he doesn’t accidentally push Professor Hawking down the staircase, he’s here for good. In fact, he’s already talking about taking out Canadian citizenship. He has to travel a lot to conferences and, well, there are some places it’s just not safe to go as an American.”
It was awkward facing each other in separate chairs, and—
And Matt probably weighed only 130 pounds, and she was only 110—and these chairs had had no trouble supporting Dr. Kuroda, and he surely had weighed a lot more than 240. She got up from her chair and gave it a push to send it rolling away, and she said, “Do you mind?” with her eyebrows raised.
Matt smiled. “Um, no, no, not at all.”
She sat in his lap, and he put his arms around her waist, and the chair’s hydraulics compressed a bit under their combined weight.
They kissed for a while, and she shifted her bottom a bit to get more comfortable, and—
And, well, well! Penises did do that!
Matt seemed a bit embarrassed. “Um, so, ah, is this the last time he’ll get to vote for president?”
“Who? My dad?”
“Uh-huh.”
Caitlin stroked Matt’s short blond hair. “No. He’ll become a dual citizen.”
“I thought the US didn’t allow that.”
“They didn’t used to, unless you were born with it—and that was hard to come by. But, well, they—we—bowed to international pressure, and do allow it now, in fact, have allowed it for decades.”
“Ah,” said Matt, but there was something about his voice.
“Yes?”
“No, nothing.”
Caitlin kissed him on the nose. “It’s fine,” she said. “Go ahead.”
“Well, it’s just, um, you know, you should be either a Canadian or an American.”
“Oh, I think dual citizenship is a wonderful thing. It’s… see, it’s anti-Dawkinsian.”
Watch w-2 Page 29
