by David Brin
Robert refrained from commenting. He hated the restrictive treaties, but he still had trouble with what Elsie’s colleagues had been doing at the Howletts Center. It had been arrogance to take the decision into their own hands. He could see no happy outcome to it.
As they approached the hot springs, he saw chims moving about seriously on various errands. Here one peered into the mouth of a huge gorilla easily six times her mass, probing with a dental tool. There another patiently taught sign language to a class of ten gorilla children.
“How many chims are here to take care of them?”
“Dr. de Shriver from the Center, about a dozen of the chim techs that used to work with her, plus about twenty guards and volunteers from nearby settlements. It depends on when we sometimes take ’rillas off to help in the war.”
“How do they feed them all?” Robert asked as they descended to the banks of one of the springs. Some of the chims from his party had arrived ahead of them and were already lounging by the humid bank, sipping at soup cups. A small nearby cave held a makeshift storage chamber where resident workers in aprons were ladling out more steaming mugs.
“It’s a problem.” Elsie nodded. “The gorillas have finicky digestions, and it’s hard to get them the right balance of foods. Even in th’ restored ranges in Africa, a big silver-back needs up to sixty pounds of vegetation, fruit, an’ insects a day. Natural gorillas have to move around a lot to get that kind of forage, an’ we can’t allow that.”
Robert lowered himself to the damp stones and released the gorilla infant, who scampered down to the poolside, still chewing his ragged strip of plastic. “It sounds like quite a quandary,” he said to Elsie.
“Yeah. Fortunately, Dr. Schultz solved the problem just last year. I’m glad he had that satisfaction before he died.”
Robert removed his moccasins. The water looked hot. He dipped a toe and pulled it back quickly. “Ouch! How did he do it?”
“Um, beg your pardon?”
“What was Schultz’s solution?”
“Microbiology, ser.” She looked up suddenly, her eyes bright. “Ah, here they come with soup for us, too!”
Robert accepted a cup from a chimmie whose apron must have come from cloth woven on the gorillas’ looms. She walked with a limp. Robert wondered if she had been wounded in some of the fighting.
“Thank you,” he said, appreciating the aroma. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. “Elsie, what d’you mean, microbiology?”
She sipped delicately. “Intestinal bacteria. Symbionts. We all have ’em. Tiny critters that live in our guts, an’ in our mouths. They’re harmless partners, mostly. Help us digest our food in exchange for a free ride.”
“Ah.” Of course Robert knew about bio-symbionts; any school kid did.
“Dr. Schultz managed to come up with a suite of bugs that helps the ’rillas eat—and enjoy—a whole lot of native Garth vegetation. They—”
She was interrupted by a high-pitched little cry, unlike anything an ape might produce. “Robert!” shrieked a piping voice.
He looked up. Robert grinned. “April. Little April Wu. How are you, Sunshine?”
The little girl was dressed like Sheena, the jungle girl. She rode on the left shoulder of an adolescent male gorilla whose black eyes were patiently gentle. April tipped forward and waved her hands in a quick series of signs. The gorilla let go of her legs and she climbed up to stand on his shoulder, holding his head for balance. Her guardian chuffed uncomplainingly.
“Catch me, Robert!”
Robert hurried to his feet. Before he could say anything to stop her, she sprang off, a sun-browned windmill that streamed blond hair. He caught her in a tangle of legs. For a moment, until he had a sure grip, his heart beat faster than it had in battle or in climbing mountains.
He had known the little girl was being kept with the gorillas for safety. To his chagrin he realized how busy he had been since recovering from his injuries. Too busy to think of this child, the only other human free in the mountains. “Hi, Pumpkin,” he said to her. “How’re you doing these days? Are you taking good care of the Villas?”
She nodded seriously. “I’ve gotta take good care of th’ ’rillas, Robert. We gotta be in charge, cause there’s just us.”
Robert gave her a close hug. At that moment he suddenly felt terribly lonely. He had not realized how badly he missed human company. “Yup. It’s just you and me up here,” he said softly.
“You an’ me an’ Tymbimmie Athaclena,” she reminded him.
He met her eyes. “Nevertheless, you’re doing what Dr. de Shriver asks, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Dr. de Shriver’s nice. She says maybe I might get to go see Mommy and Daddy, sometime soon.”
Robert winced. He would have to talk to de Shriver about deceiving the youngster. The chim in charge probably could not bear to tell the human child the truth, that she would be in their care for a long time to come. To send her to Port Helenia now would be to give away the secret of the gorillas, something even Athaclena was now determined to prevent.
“Take me down there, Robert.” April demanded with a sweet smile. She pointed to a flat rock where the infant gorilla now capered before some of Robert’s group. The chims laughed indulgently at the little male’s antics. The satisfied, slightly smug tone in their voices was one Robert found understandable. A very young client race would naturally feel this way toward one even younger. The chims were very proprietary and parental toward the gorillas.
Robert, in turn, felt a little like a father with an unpleasant task ahead of him, one who must somehow break it to his children that the puppy would not remain theirs for long.
He carried April across to the other bank and set her down. The water temperature was much more bearable here. No, it was wonderful. He kicked off his moccasins and wriggled his toes in the tingling warmth.
April and the baby gorilla flanked Robert, resting their elbows on his knees. Elsie sat by his side. It was a brief, peaceful scene. If a neo-dolphin were magically to appear in the water, spy-hopping into view with a wide grin, the tableau would have made a good family portrait.
“Hey, what’s that you’ve got in your mouth?” He moved his hand toward the little gorilla, who quickly shied back out of reach. It regarded him with wide, curious eyes.
“What’s he chewing on?” Robert asked Elsie.
“It looks like a strip of plastic. But … but what’s it doing here? There isn’t supposed to be anything here that was manufactured on Garth.”
“It’s not Garth-made,” someone said. They looked up. It was the chimmie who had served them their soup. She smiled and wiped her hands on her apron before bending over to pick up the gorilla infant. It gave up the material without fuss. “All the little ones chew these strips. They tested safe, and we’re absolutely positive nothing about it screams ‘Terran!’ to Gubru detectors.”
Elsie and Robert exchanged a puzzled look. “How can you be so sure? What is the stuff?”
She teased the little ape, waving the strip before its face until it chirped and grabbed it, popping the well-masticated piece back into its mouth.
“Some of their parents brought shredded bits of it back from our first successful ambush, back at the Howletts Center. They said it ‘smelled good.’ Now the brats chew it all the time.”
She grinned down at Elsie and Robert. “It’s that super-plastic fiber from the Gubru fighting vehicles. You know, that material that stops bullets flat?”
Robert and Elsie stared.
“Hey, Kongie. How about that?” The chimmie cooed at the little gorilla. “You clever little thing, you. Say, if you like chewing armor plating, how about taking on something really tasty next? How about a city? Maybe something simple, like New York?”
The baby lowered the frayed, wet end long enough to yawn, a wide gaping of sharp, glistening teeth.
The chimmie smiled. “Yum! Y’know, I think little Kongie likes the idea.”
54
Fiben<
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“Hold still now,” Fiben told Gailet as he combed his fingers through her fur.
He needn’t have said anything. For although Gailet was turned away, presenting her back to him, he knew her face bore a momentary expression of beatific joy as he groomed her. When she looked like that—calm, relaxed, happy with the delight of a simple, tactile pleasure—her normally stern countenance took on a glow, one that utterly transformed her somewhat ordinary features.
It was only for a minute, unfortunately. A tiny, scurrying movement caught Fiben’s eye, and he pounced after it on instinct before it could vanish into her fine hair.
“Ow!” she cried when his fingernails bit a corner of skin, as well as a small squirming louse. Her chains rattled as she slapped his foot. “What are you doing!”
“Eating,” he muttered as he cracked the wriggling thing between his teeth. Even then, it didn’t quite stop struggling.
“You’re lying,” she said, in an unconvincing tone of voice.
“Shall I show it to you?”
She shuddered. “Never mind. Just go on with what you were doing.”
He spat out the dead louse, though for all their captors had been feeding them, he probably could use the protein. In all the thousands of times he had engaged in mutual grooming with other chims—friends, classmates, the Throop Family back on Cilmar Island—he had never before been so clearly reminded of one of the ritual’s original purposes, inherited from the jungle of long ago—that of ridding another chim of parasites. He hoped Gailet wouldn’t be too squeamish about doing the same for him. After sleeping on straw ticks for more than two weeks, he was starting to itch something awful.
His arms hurt. He had to stretch to reach Gailet, since they were chained to different parts of the stone room and could barely get close enough to do this.
“Well,” he said. “I’m almost finished, at least with those places you’re willing to uncover. I can’t believe the chimmie who said pink to me, a couple of months ago, is such a prude about nudity.”
Gailet only sniffed, not even deigning to answer. She had seemed glad enough to see him yesterday, when the renegade chims had brought him here from his former place of confinement. So many days of separate carceral isolation had made them as happy to see each other as long-lost siblings.
Now, though, it seemed she was back to finding fault with everything Fiben did. “Just a little more,” she urged. “Over to the left.”
“Gripe, gripe, gripe,” Fiben muttered under his breath. But he complied. Chims needed to touch and be touched, perhaps quite a bit more than their human patrons, who sometimes held hands in public but seldom more. Fiben found it nice to have someone to groom after all this time. Almost as pleasurable as having it done to you was doing it for somebody else.
Back in college he had read that humans once restricted most of their person-to-person touching to their sexual partners. Some dark-age parents had even refrained from hugging their kids! Those primitives hardly ever engaged in anything that could be likened to mutual grooming—completely nonsexual scratching, combing, massaging one another, just for the pleasure of contact, with no sex involved at all.
A brief Library search had verified this slanderous rumor, to his amazement. No historical anecdote had ever brought home to Fiben so well just how much agnosy and craziness poor human mels and fems had endured. It made forgiveness a little easier when he also saw pictures of old-time zoos and circuses and trophies of “the hunt.”
Fiben was pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of keys rattling. The old-style wooden door slid open. Someone knocked and then walked in.
It was the chimmie who brought them their evening meals. Since being moved here, Fiben had not learned her name, but her heart-shaped face was striking, and somehow familiar.
Her bright zipsuit was of the style worn by the band of Probationers that worked for the Gubru. The costume was bound by elastic bands at ankles and wrists, and a holo-projection armband picted outstretched birds’ talons a few centimeters into space.
“Someone’s comin’ to see both of you,” the female Probie said lowly, softly. “I thought you’d want to know. Have time to get ready.”
Gailet nodded coolly. “Thank you.” She hardly glanced at the chimmie. But Fiben, in spite of his situation, watched their jailer’s sway as she turned and walked away.
“Damn traitors!” Gailet muttered. She strained against her slender chain, rattling it. “Oh, there are times when I wish I were a chen. I’d … I’d …”
Fiben looked up at the ceiling and sighed.
Gailet strained to turn and look at him. “What! You’ve maybe got a comment?”
Fiben shrugged. “Sure. If you were a chen, you just might be able to bust out of that skinny little chain. But then, they wouldn’t have used something like that if you were a male chim, would they?”
He lifted his own arms as far as they would go, barely enough to bring them into her view. Heavy links rattled. The chafing hurt his bandaged right wrist, so he let his hands drop to the concrete floor.
“I’d guess there were other reasons she wishes she was male,” came a voice from the doorway. Fiben looked up and saw the Probationer called Irongrip, the leader of the renegades. The chim smiled theatrically as he rolled one end of his waxed mustache, an affectation Fiben was getting quite sick of.
“Sorry. I couldn’t help but overhear that last part, folks.”
Gailet’s upper lip curled in contempt. “So you were listening. So what? All that means is you’re an eavesdropper, as well as a traitor.”
The powerfully built chim grinned. “Shall I go for voyeur, also? Why don’t I have you two chained together, hm? Ought to make for lots of amusement, you like each other so much.”
Gailet snorted. She pointedly moved away from Fiben, shuffling over to the far wall.
Fiben refused to give the fellow the pleasure of a response. He returned Irongrip’s gaze evenly.
“Actually,” the Probationer went on, in a musing tone, “it’s pretty understandable, a chimmie like you, wishing she was a chen. Especially with that white breeding card of yours. Why, a white card’s damn near wasted on a girl!
“What I find hard to figure,” Irongrip said to Fiben, “is why you two have been doin’ what you were doin’—running around playing soldier for the man. It’s hard to figure. You with a blue card, her with a white—jeez, you two could do it any time she’s pink—with no pills, no asking her guardian, no by-your-leave from the Uplift Board. All th’ kids you ever want, whenever you want ’em.”
Gailet offered the chim a chilled stare. “You are disgusting.”
Irongrip colored. It was especially pronounced with his pale, shaved cheeks. “Why? Because I’m fascinated by what’s been deprived me? With what I can’t have?”
Fiben growled. “More like with what you can’t do.”
The blush deepened. Irongrip knew his feelings were betraying him. He bent over to bring his face almost even with Fiben’s. “Keep it up, college boy. Who knows what you’ll be able to do, once we’ve decided your fate.” He grinned.
Fiben wrinkled his nose. “Y’know, the color of a chen’s card isn’t everything. F’rinstance, even you’d probably get more girls if you just used a mouthwash once in a whi—”
He grunted and doubled over as a fist drove into his abdomen. You pay for your pleasures, Fiben reminded himself as his stomach convulsed and he fought for breath. Still, from the look on the traitor’s face he must have struck paydirt. Irongrip’s reaction spoke volumes.
Fiben looked up to see concern written in Gailet Jones’s eyes. The expression instantly turned to anger.
“Will you two stop it! You’re acting like children … like pre-sentient—”
Irongrip whirled and pointed at her. “What do you know about it? Hm? Are you some sort of expert? Are you a member of the goddam Uplift Board? Are you even a mother, yet?”
“I’m a student of Galactic Sociology,” Gailet said rather stiffly.
Irongrip laughed bittterly. “A title given to reward a clever monkey! You must have really done some beautiful tricks on the jungle gym to get a real-as-life, scale-model, sheepskin doctorate!”
He crouched near her. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, little miss? Let me spell it for you. We’re all goddam pre-sentients! Go ahead. Deny it. Tell me I’m wrong!”
It was Gailet’s turn to change color. She glanced at Fiben, and he knew she was remembering that afternoon at the college in Port Helenia, when they had climbed to the top of the bell tower and looked out over a campus empty of humans, filled only with chim students and chim faculty trying to act as if nothing had changed. She had to be remembering how bitter it had been, seeing that scene as a Galactic would.
“I’m a sapient being,” she muttered, obviously trying to put conviction into her voice.
“Yeah,” Irongrip sneered. “What you mean to say, though, is that you’re just a little closer than the rest of us … closer to what the Uplift Board defines as a target for us neo-chims. Closer to what they think we ought to be.
“Tell me, though. What if you took a space trip to Earth, and the captain took a wrong turn onto D-level hyperspace, and you arrived a couple hundred years from now? What do you think would happen to your precious white card then?”
Gailet looked away. “Sic transit gloria mundi.” Irongrip snapped his fingers. “You’d be a relic then, obsolete, a phase long bypassed in the relentless progress of Uplift.” He laughed, reaching out and taking her chin in his hand to make her meet his eyes. “You’d be Probationer, honey.”
