by David Brin
Fiben surged forward but was caught short by his chains. The jolting stop sent pain shooting up from his right wrist, but in his anger Fiben hardly noticed. He was too filled with wrath to be able to speak. Dimly, as he snarled at the other chen, he knew that the same held for Gailet. It was all the more infuriating because it was just one more proof that the bastard was right.
Irongrip met Fiben’s gaze for a long moment before letting go of Gailet. “A hundred years ago,” he went on, “I would’ve been somethin’ special. They would’ve forgiven, ignored, my own little ‘quirks and drawbacks.’ They’d have given me a white card, for my cunning and my strength.
“Time is what decides it, my good little chen and chimmie. It’s all what generation you’re born in.”
He stood up straight. “Or is it?” Irongrip smiled. “Maybe it also depends on who your patrons are, hm? If the standards change, if the target image of the ideal future Pans sapiens changes, well …” He spread his hands, letting the implication sink in.
Gailet was the first to find her voice.
“You … actually … expect … th’ Gubru …”
Irongrip shrugged. “Time’s are a changin’, my darlings. I may yet have more grandkids than either of you.”
Fiben found the key to drive out the incapacitating anger and unlock his own voice. He laughed. He guffawed. “Yeah?” he asked, grinning. “Well, first you’ll haveta fix your other problem, boyo. How’re you going to pass on your genes if you can’t even get it up to—”
This time it was Irongrip’s unshod foot that lashed out. Fiben was more prepared and rolled aside to take the kick at an angle. But more blows followed in a dull rain.
There were no more words, though, and a quick glance told Fiben that it was Irongrip’s turn to be tongue-tied. Low sounds emerged as his mouth opened and closed, flecked with foam. Finally, in frustration, the tall chim gave up kicking at Fiben. He swiveled and stomped out.
The chimmie with the keys watched him go. She stood by the door, looking uncertain what to do.
Fiben grunted as he rolled over onto his back.
“Uh.” He winced as he felt his ribs. None seemed to be broken. “At least Simon Legree wasn’t able to perform a proper exit line. I half expected him to say: ‘I’ll be back, just you wait!’ or somethin’ equally original.”
Gailet shook her head. “What do you gain by baiting him?”
He shrugged. “I got my reasons.”
Gingerly, he backed against the wall. The chimmie in the billowing zipsuit was watching him, but when their eyes met she quickly blinked and turned to leave, closing the door behind her.
Fiben lifted his head and inhaled deeply, through his nose, several times.
“Now what are you doing?” Gailet asked.
He shook his head. “Nothin’. Just passin’ the time.”
When he looked again, Gailet had turned her back to him again. She seemed to be crying.
Small surprise, Fiben thought. It probably wasn’t as much fun for her, being a prisoner, as it had been leading a rebellion. For all the two of them knew, the Resistance was washed up, finished, kaput. And there wasn’t any reason to believe things had gone any better in the mountains. Athaclena and Robert and Benjamin might be dead or captured by now. Port Helenia was still ruled by birds and quislings.
“Don’t worry,” he said, trying to cheer her up. “You know what they say about the truest test of sapiency? You mean you haven’t heard of it? Why it’s just comin’ through when the chimps are down!”
Gailet wiped her eyes and turned her head to look at him. “Oh, shut up,” she said.
Okay, so it’s an old joke, Fiben admitted to himself. But it was worth a try.
Still, she motioned for him to turn around. “Come on. It’s your turn. Maybe …” She smiled weakly, as if uncertain whether or not to try a joke of her own. “Maybe I can find something to snack on, too.”
Fiben grinned. He shuffled about and stretched his chains until his back was as close to her as possible, not minding how it strained his various hurts. He felt her hands working to unknot his tangled, furry thatch and rolled his eyes upward.
“Ah, aahh,” he sighed.
A different jailer brought them their noon meal, a thin soup accompanied by two slices of bread. This male Probie possessed none of Irongrip’s fluency. In fact, he seemed to have trouble with even the simplest phrases and snarled when Fiben tried to draw him out. His left cheek twitched intermittently in a nervous tic, and Gailet whispered to Fiben that the feral glint in the chim’s eyes made her nervous.
Fiben tried to distract her. “Tell me about Earth,” he asked. “What’s it like?”
Gailet used a bread crust to sop up the last of her soup. “What’s to tell? Everybody knows about Earth.”
“Yeah. From video and from GoThere cube books, sure. But not from personal experience. You went as a child with your parents, didn’t you? That’s where you got your doctorate?”
She nodded. “University of Djakarta.”
“And then what?”
Her gaze was distant. “Then I applied for a position at the Terragens Center for Galactic Studies, in La Paz.”
Fiben knew of the place. Many of Earth’s diplomats, emissaries, and agents took training there, learning how the ancient cultures of the Five Galaxies thought and acted. It was crucial if the leaders were to plan a way for the three races of Earth to make their way in a dangerous universe. Much of the fate of the wolfling clan depended on the graduates of the CGS.
“I’m impressed you even applied,” he said, meaning it. “Did they … I mean, did you pass?”
She nodded. “I … it was close. I qualified. Barely. If I’d scored just a little better, they said there’d have been no question.”
Obviously, the memory was painful. She seemed undecided, as if tempted to change the subject. Gailet shook her head. “Then I was told that they’d prefer it if I returned to Garth instead. I should take up a teaching position, they said. They made it plain I’d be more useful here.”
“They? Who’s this ‘they’ you’re talking about?”
Gailet nervously picked at the fur on the back of her arm. She noticed what she was doing and made both hands lay still on her lap. “The Uplift Board,” she said quietly.
“But … but what do they have to say about assigning teaching positions, or influencing career choices for that matter?”
She looked at him. “They have a lot to say, Fiben, if they think neo-chimp or neo-dolphin genetic progress is at stake. They can keep you from becoming a spacer, for instance, out of fear your precious plasm might get irradiated. Or they can prevent you from entering chemistry as a profession, out of fear of unpredicted mutations.”
She picked up a piece of straw and twirled it slowly. “Oh, we have a lot more rights than other young client races. I know that, I keep reminding myself.”
“But they decided your genes were needed on Garth,” Fiben guessed in low voice.
She nodded. “There’s a point system. If I’d really scored well on the CGS exam it would’ve been okay. A few chims do get in.
“But I was at the margin. Instead they presented me with that damned white card—like it was some sort of consolation prize, or maybe a wafer for some sacrament—and they sent me back to my native planet, back to poor old Garth.
“It seems my raison d’être is the babies I’ll have. Everything else is incidental.”
She laughed, somewhat bitterly. “Hell, I’ve been breaking the law for months now, risking my life and womb in this rebellion. Even if we’d have won—fat chance—I could get a big fat medal from the TAASF, maybe even ticker tape parades, and it wouldn’t matter. When all the hooplah died down I’d still be thrown into prison by the Uplift Board!”
“Oh, Goodall,” Fiben sighed, sagging back against the cool stones. “But you haven’t, I mean you haven’t yet—”
“Haven’t procreated yet? Good observation. One of the few advantages of being a fem
ale with a white card is that I can choose anyone blue or higher for the father, and pick my own timing, so long as I have three or more offspring before I’m thirty. I don’t even have to raise them myself!” Again came the sharp, bitter laugh. “Hell, half of the chim marriage groups on Garth would shave themselves bald for the right to adopt one of my kids.”
She makes her situation sound so awful, Fiben thought. And yet there must be fewer than twenty other chims on the planet regarded as highly by the Board. To a member of a client race, it’s the highest honor.
Still, maybe he understood after all. She would have come home to Garth knowing one fact. That no matter how brilliant her career, how great her accomplishments, it would only make her ovaries all the more valuable … only make more frequent the painful, invasive visits to the Plasm Bank, and only bring on more pressure to carry as many as possible to term in her own womb.
Invitations to join group marriages or pair bonds would be automatic, easy. Too easy. There would be no way to know if a group wanted her for herself. Lone male suitors would seek her for the status fathering her child would bring.
And then there would be the jealousy. He could empathize with that. Chims weren’t often very subtle at hiding their feelings, especially envy. Quite a few would be downright mean about it.
“Irongrip was right,” Gailet said. “It’s got to be different for a chen. A white card would be fun for a male chim, I can see that. But for a chimmie? One with ambition to be something for herself?”
She looked away.
“I …” Fiben tried to think of something to say, but for a moment all he could do was sit there feeling thick-headed, stupid. Perhaps, someday, one of his great-to-the-nth grandchildren would be smart enough to know the right words, to know how to comfort someone too far gone into bitterness even to want comforting anymore.
That more fully uplifted neo-chim, a few score more generations down the chain of Uplift, might be bright enough. But Fiben knew he wasn’t. He was only an ape.
“Um.” He coughed. “I remember a time, back on Cilmar Island, it musta been before you returned to Garth. Let’s see, was it ten years ago? Ifni! I think I was just a freshman.…” He sighed. “Anyway, the whole island got all excited, that year, when Igor Patterson came to lecture and perform at the University.”
Gailet’s head lifted a little. “Igor Patterson? The drummer?”
Fiben nodded. “So you’ve heard of him?”
She smirked sarcastically. “Who hasn’t? He’s—” Gailet spread her hands and let them drop, palms up. “He’s wonderful.”
That summed it up all right. For Igor Patterson was the best.
The thunder dance was only one aspect of the neo-chimpanzee’s love affair with rhythm. Percussion was a favorite musical form, from the quaint farmlands of Hermes to the sophisticated towers of Earth. Even in the early days—back when chims had been forced to carry keyboard displays on their chests in order to speak at all—even then the new race had loved the beat.
And yet, all of the great drummers on Earth and in the colonies were humans. Everyone until Igor Patterson.
He was the first. The first chim with the fine finger coordination, the delicacy of timing, the sheer chutzpah, to make it alongside the best. Listening to Patterson play “Clash Ceramic Lighting” wasn’t only to experience pleasure; for a chim it was to burst with pride. To many, his mere existence meant that chims weren’t just approaching what the Uplift Board wanted them to be, but what they wanted to be, as well.
“The Carter Foundation sent him on a tour of th’ colonies,” Fiben went on. “Partly it was as a goodwill trip for all the outlying chim communities. And of course it was also to spread the good luck around a bit.”
Gailet snorted at the obviousness of it. Of course Patterson had a white card. The chim members of the Uplift Board would have insisted, even if he weren’t also as wonderfully charming, intelligent, and handsome a specimen of neo-chimpanzee as anyone could ask to meet.
And Fiben thought he knew what else Gailet was thinking. For a male having a white card wouldn’t be much of a problem at all—just one long party. “I’ll bet,” she said. And Fiben imagined he detected a clear tone of envy.
“Yeah, well, you should’ve been there, when he showed up to give his concert. I was one of the lucky ones. My seat was way up in back, out of the way, and it happened that I had a real bad cold that night. That was damn fortunate.”
“What?” Gailet’s eyebrows came together. “What does that have to do with … Oh.” She frowned at him and her jaw tightened. “Oh. I see.”
“I’ll bet you do. The air conditioning was set on high, but I’m told the aroma was still overpowering. I had to sit shivering under the blowers. Damn near caught my death—”
“Will you get to the point?” Gailet’s lips were a thin line.
“Well, as no doubt you’ve guessed, nearly every green- or blue-card chimmie on the island who happened to be in estrus seemed to have a ticket to the concert. None of em used olfa-spray. They came, generally, with the complete okay of their group husbands, wearing flaming pink lipstick, just on the off chance—”
“I get the picture,” Gailett said. And for just an instant Fiben wondered if he saw her blink back a faint smile as she pictured the scene. If so, it was only a momentary flicker of er severe frown. “So what happened?”
Fiben stretched, yawning. “What would you expect to happen? A riot, of course.”
Her jaw dropped. “Really? At the University?”
“Sure as I’m sitting here.”
“But—”
“Oh, the first few minutes went all right. Man, old Igor could play as good as his rep, I’ll tell you. The crowd kept getting more and more excited. Even the backup band was feelin’ it. Then things kinda got out of hand.”
“But—”
“Remember old Professor Olvfing, from the Terragens Traditions Department? You know, the elderly chim who sports a monocle? Used to spend his spare time lobbying to get a chim monogamy bill before the legislature?”
“Yes, I knew him.” She nodded, her eyes wide open.
Fiben made a gesture with two hands.
“No! In public? Professor Olvfing?”
“With th’ dean of th’ College of frigging Nutrition, no less.”
Gailet let out a sharp sound. She turned aside, hand to her breast. She seemed to suffer a sudden bout of hiccups.
“Of course, Olvfing’s pair-bond wife forgave him later. It was that or lose him to a ten-group that said they liked his style.”
Gailet slapped her chest, coughing. She turned further away from Fiben, shaking her head vigorously.
“Poor Igor Patterson,” Fiben continued. “He had problems of his own, of course. Some of th’ guys from the football team had been drafted as bouncers. When it started getting out of hand, they tried using fire extinguishers. That made things slippery, but it didn’t slow ’em down much.”
Gailet coughed louder. “Fiben …”
“It was too bad, really,” he mused aloud. “Igor was getting into a great blues riff, really pounding those skins, packin’ in a backbeat you couldn’t believe. I was groovin’ on it … until this forty-year-old chimmie, naked and slick as a dolphin, dropped straight onto him from th’ rafters.”
Gailet doubled over clutching her belly. She held up a hand, pleading for mercy. “Stop, please.…” she whimpered, weakly.
“Thank heavens it was the snare drum she fell through. Took her long enough gettin’ untangled for poor Igor to escape out the back way, just barely ahead of the mob.”
She toppled over sideways. For a moment Fiben felt concern, her face was so flushed and red. She hooted, slapping the floor, and tears streamed from her eyes. Gailet rolled over onto her back, rocking with peals of laughter.
Fiben shrugged. “And all that was just from playin’ the first number—Patterson’s special version of the bloody national anthem! What a pity. I never did get to hear his variation on ‘Inagadda
Da Vita.’ ”
“Now that I think about it, though,” he sighed once more, “maybe it’s just as well.”
* * *
Power curfew came at 2000 hours, and no exception was made for prisons. A wind had risen before sunset and soon was rattling the shutters of their small window. It came in off the ocean, carrying a heavy salt smell. In the distance could be heard the faint rumblings of an early summer storm.
They slept curled in their blankets as close to each other as their chains allowed, head to head so they could hear each other breathing in the darkness. They slumbered inhaling the soft tang of stone and the mustiness of straw, and exhaled the soft mutterings of their dreams.
Gailet’s hands moved in tiny jerks, as if trying to follow the rhythms of some illusory escape. Her chains tinkled faintly.
Fiben lay motionless, but now and then he blinked, his eyes occasionally opening and closing without the light of consciousness in them. Sometimes a breath caught and held for a long moment before releasing, at last.
They did not notice the low humming sound that penetrated from the hallway outside, nor the light which speared into their cell through cracks in the wooden door. Feet shuffled and claws clicked on flagstones.
When keys rattled in the lock, Fiben jerked, rolled to one side, and sat up. He knuckled his eyes as the hinges creaked. Gailet lifted her head. She used her hand to block the sharp glare of two lamps, held high on poles.
Fiben sneezed, smelling lavender and feathers. When he and Gailet were hauled to their feet by several of the zipsuited chims, he recognized the gruff voice of their head captor, Irongrip.
“You two better behave yourselves. You’ve got important visitors.”
Fiben blinked, trying to adjust to the light. At last he made out a small crowd of feathered quadrupeds, large balls of white fluff bedecked in ribbons and sashes. Two of them held staffs from which the bright lanterns hung. The rest twittered around what looked like a short pole ending in a narrow platform. On that perch stood a most singular-looking bird.
It, too, was arrayed in bright ribbons. The large, bipedal Gubru shifted its weight from one leg to another, nervously. It might have been the way the light struck the alien’s plumage, but the coloration seemed richer, more luminous than the normal off-white shade. It reminded Fiben of something, as if he had seen this invader or one like it before, somewhere.
