And so we flew to England; and now my part of the story is nearly finished.
Sally did not quite feel ready to come out, as it were, to the extent of going anywhere in my company at school, though she’d smile now with some naturalness when our paths would cross there, and even exchange a few words in passing. We arrived separately at the airport. But from that point on, we were indeed “traveling together,” and she never tried to make it seem otherwise.
She had wanted a couple of days in Cambridge before tackling the records of her unique education, as if to work backward in time by bearable degrees, and so it was together that we climbed the wide stairs on a Tuesday afternoon early in June to look into her first-year room in Newnham College. Unfortunately the present occupant knew the Chimp Child had once been quartered in her room and recognized Sally immediately; she must have felt perplexed and dismayed at the grimness of the famous pilgrim, who glared round without comment, refused a cup of tea, and stalked away leaving me to render thanks/apologies on behalf of us both. I caught Sally on the stairs. Nothing was said till we had proceeded the length of two green courts bordered with flower beds and come out into the road. Then: “God, I was wretched here!” she burst out. “I went through the whole three years in a—in a chromatic daze, half unconscious except in the lab, and going through that door again—it was as if all the color and warmth began to drain out of a hole in the floor of the day, and I could only stand helplessly watching. The very smell of the place means nothing but death to me. What bloody, bloody waste.”
And “What a waste,” more thoughtfully the next morning, as we walked back to the station from our bed-and-breakfast across the river and the common with its grazing Friesians and through the Botanical Gardens. “One sees why other people could manage to be so jolly and smug here, while I’d go skulking down to Grantchester at five in the morning to work out in the only wood for miles, terrified every day I should be caught out, and skulking back to breakfast every day relieved, like an exhibitionist who thinks, ‘Well, there’s one more time I got away with it.’” A few minutes later she added, “Of course it got much better when I was working on my thesis … only those years don’t seem real at all when I try to remember them. All I can remember is the lab, I expect that’s why.”
“Why it got better, or why it’s unreal?”
“Both, very likely.”
She was pensive on the train. I fell asleep and woke as we were pulling into Liverpool Street, feeling tired and headachy, the beginnings of the flu that put me to bed for a crucial week when I might otherwise have done something, just by staying well, to affect the course of events. By late afternoon of that Wednesday, I felt too miserable to be embarrassed at imposing myself on Dr. Snyder’s wife and filling their tiny guest room with my awkward germiness. For four or five days, I had a dry, wheezy cough and a fever so high that Mrs. Snyder was beginning to talk rather worriedly of doctors; then the fever broke and my head, though the size of a basketball, no longer burned, and I rallied enough to take in that Sally was gone.
She had spent the early days of my illness at University College, reading, asking occasional questions, searching—as it seemed—for something she couldn’t describe but expected to recognize when she found it. Late on the fourth day, the day my temperature was highest, she came in and sat on the bed. “Listen, Jan. I’m off to Africa tomorrow.”
I swam wearily to the surface. “Africa? But … don’t you have to get, uh, inoculations or something? Visas?” I didn’t wonder, within the remoteness of my fever, why she was going. Nor did I much care that evidently she would be going without me.
“Only cholera and yellow fever, and I’ve had them. Before we left, just in case; and yesterday afternoon I bagged the last seat on a tourist charter to Dar es Salaam. The flight returns in a fortnight, by which time you should be fit again, and we can go on up north then or wherever you like.” When I didn’t reply, she added, unnecessarily, “I’ve got to visit the school, Malosa School, and sort of stare the forest in the face again. It’s terribly important, though I can’t say just why. Maybe when I’ve got back, when you’re better. Only, I’ve made my mind up to take this chance while it’s going, because I do feel I’ve absolutely got to go through with it, as quick as I can.”
My eyes ached. I closed them, shutting out the floating silhouette of Sally’s head and shoulders. “I know. I wish…”
“Never mind. It’ll be all right. Sorry I didn’t tell you before, but first I wanted to make sure.” I felt her hand beneath my pajama jacket. “God, you’re hot,” she said, surprised. “Perhaps I ought to leave it till you’re a bit better.”
Distantly amused at this display of superego, I said, “You know a fever’s always highest at night, old virologist. Anyway, you can’t do any good here. We’ll have a doctor in soon if it doesn’t go down.” I made a truly tremendous effort. “It’s probably a good idea, Sally, the trip. I hope you can find whatever it is you’re looking for.” Clumsily I patted the hand inside my pajamas. “But don’t miss the plane coming back, I’ll be dying to hear what happened.”
“I shan’t, I promise you,” she said with relief; and when I woke the next morning, she had gone.
We know that Sally reached Dar es Salaam after an uneventful flight, spent the night in an airport hotel, flew Air Malawi to the Chileka airfield the next morning, and hired a driver to take her the 125 kilometers overland to Machinga and the Malosa Secondary School, where she was greeted with pleased astonishment by those of the staff who remembered her—everyone, of course, knew of her connection with the school. She stayed there nearly a week, questioning people about the details of her early childhood and of exactly what had happened when the church officials brought her in, in the weeks before she had been whisked to London. She spent hours prowling about the grounds and buildings, essentially the same as thirty years before despite some modest construction and borrowed the school’s Land-Rover several times to drive alone into the countryside of the Shire Highlands and the valley beyond. Her manner had been alternately brusque and preoccupied, and she had impressed them all as being under considerable strain.
The school staff confirmed that Sally had been driven back to Chileka by a couple, old friends of her parents, who at her request had dropped her at the terminal without coming in to see her off. She had told them she intended to fly back to Dar that evening in order to catch her charter for London the next day, and that she hated a dragged-out good-bye; the couple had no way of knowing that her ticket had specified a two-week stay abroad. Inside the terminal she bought a round-trip ticket for Ujiji, in Tanzania.
From Ujiji a helicopter shuttle took her to Kogoma on Lake Tanganyika. Once there, Sally had made inquiries, then gone straight to the town’s tiny branch of Bookers Ltd., a safari agency operating out of a closet-sized cubbyhole in the VW dealership. She told the Bookers agent—a grizzled old Indian—that she wanted to hire two men to help her locate the place where a plane had crashed in the mountains east of the lake, some thirty years before. She produced detailed directions and maps; and the agent, though openly doubtful whether the wreckage would not have rusted into the ground after so long, agreed for a stiff price to outfit and provision the trip. He assigned his cousin to guide her, and a native porter. Forty-eight hours later this small expedition set off into the mountains in the agency’s battered four-wheel-drive safari van.
The cousin had parked the van beside the road of ruts that had brought them as far as roads could bring them toward the area marked on Sally’s maps, much nearer than any road had approached it on the day of the crash, but still not near. They had then followed a footpath into the forest for several kilometers before beginning to slash a trail away from it to the westward, toward the site where the plane had gone down. Something like fifty kilometers of rain-forested mountainous terrain had to be negotiated on foot, a difficult, unpleasant, suffocating sort of passage. Sally must have been assailed by frustration at the clumsiness of their progress; the guide
called her a bad-tempered bitch, probably for good reason. On the third morning her patience had evidently snapped. When the men woke up, Sally was not in camp. They waited, then shouted, then searched, but she never replied or reappeared. And I knew what they could not; that she must have slipped away and taken to the trees, flying toward a goal now less than fifteen kilometers distant.
I had gone out to meet Sally’s plane, due into Gatwick on the same day the reporters got hold of the story of her disappearance. When she proved not to be aboard, and to have sent no word, all my uneasiness broke out like sweat, and back in the city I must have hurried past any number of news agents’ before the Guardian headline snatched at my attention: WILD WOMAN MISSING IN JUNGLE, SEARCH CONTINUES. I bought a paper and stood shaking on the pavement to read: “Dodoma (Tanzania), Tuesday. Sally Barnes, the wild girl brought up by chimpanzees, has been missing in the mountains of Tanzania since Friday … two companions state … no trace of the Chimp Child … police notified and a search party…” and finally: “Searchers report sighting several groups of wild chimpanzees in the bush near the point of her disappearance.”
All the rest is a matter of record. Day by day the newspapers repeated it: No trace, No trace, and at last, Presumed dead. The guide and porter were questioned but never tried for murder. In print and on the video news, it was noted that Dr. Barnes had vanished into the jungle only a few kilometers east of the spot where she had emerged from it twenty years earlier. Investigators quickly discovered that Sally and I had been together in Cambridge and London, and I, too, was forced to submit to questioning; I told them we had met on the plane and spent a few days as casual traveling companions, and that when I fell ill, her friends had kindly taken me in. I denied any closer connection between us, despite my having studied her case professionally—mentioning that she was well known at the university for her solitary ways. Sally herself had said nothing in particular to the Snyders about us, and I had been too sick. No one was alive in all the world to contradict the essential factors of this story, and, as it appeared to lead nowhere, they soon let me alone. (Some years later, however, I told Dr. Snyder the whole truth.)
It developed that no one had any idea why Sally had gone to Tanzania, why she was looking for the site of the plane crash.
For me that fall was hellish. By the time I returned to the States, only a few days before the new semester was to get under way, Sally’s apartment—the apartment I had never seen, though she had called me from it two or three times during the final weeks of spring—had been stripped of its contents by strangers and her effects shipped to the Liverpool sister. At school, people were overheard to suggest, only half jokingly, that Sally had rejoined the chimps and was living now in the jungle, wild again. Such things were freely voiced in my presence; indeed, the loss of Sally, so shocking, so complete, was the more difficult to accept because not a single person on my side of the Atlantic could have the least suspicion that I had lost her.
My acting, I believe, was flawless. Though I went dazedly about my work, nobody seemed to see anything amiss. But might-have-beens tormented me. Save for my interference, Sally would almost certainly still have been alive. Or (more excruciating by far), had she not met defeat in the jungle, her search would almost certainly have left her healed of trauma, able to fit the halves of her life together. I had nearly freed her; now she was dead, the labor come to nothing, the child stillborn. I did believe she was dead. Yet I felt as angry with her, at times, as if she had purposely abandoned and betrayed me, disdained the miracle of healing I had nearly brought off—as if she had really chosen to return to the wild. For now neither of us could ever, ever complete the crossing into those worlds each had been training the other to enter for the preceding year.
I did not see how I was going to survive the disappointment, nor could I imagine what could possibly occupy, or justify, the rest of my life. The interlude with Sally had spoiled me thoroughly for journeyman work. It would not be enough, any longer, to divide my time between educating healthy minds and counseling disturbed ones. Long before that bleak winter was out, I had begun to cast about fretfully for something else to do.
* * *
This document has been prepared in snatches, over many evenings, by kerosene lanternlight in my tent in the Matangawe River Nature Reserve overlooking Lake Malawi, 750 kilometers northwest across the immense lake from Sally’s birthplace. The tent is set up inside a chimp-proof cage made of Cyclone fencing and corrugated iron. Outside, eleven chimpanzees of assorted ages and stages of reacclimatization to independent survival in the wild are sleeping (all but the newest arrival, who is crying to get in). A few of these chimps were captured as infants in the wild; the rest are former subjects of language and other learning experiments, ex-laboratory animals or animals who were reared in homes until they began to grow unmanageable.
This may seem an unlikely place in which to attempt the establishment of a free-living population of rehabilitant chimpanzees, for the ape has been extinct in Malawi for a couple of centuries at least, and the human population pressure is terrific, the highest in Africa. In fact, to “stare the forest in the face,” Sally was forced to go on back to Tanzania, where there was (and still is) some riverine forest left standing. Yet private funding materialized, and I’ve been here since the reserve was created, nearly fifteen years. Despite some setbacks and failures—well, there were bound to be some!—the project is doing very well indeed. At this writing, thirty-four chimps have mastered the course of essential survival skills and moved off to establish breeding, thriving communities on their own in the reserve. For obvious reasons these societies fascinate the primatologists, who often come to study them. We’ve lost a few to disease and accidents, and two to poachers, but our success, considering the problems inherent to the enterprise, might even be called spectacular. We’ve been written up in National Geographic and the Smithsonian, which in primate studies is how you know when you’ve arrived, and similar projects in several more suitable West African countries have been modeled on ours.
I started alone, with three adolescent chimpanzee “graduates in psychology” from my university who, having outgrown their usefulness along with their tractable childhoods, faced long, dull lives in zoos or immediate euthanasia. Now a staff of eight works with me: my husband, John (yes, the same John), and seven graduate students from my old department and from the Department of Biology, which used to be Sally’s. She would be pleased with my progress in brachiation, though arthritis in my hands and shoulders has begun to moderate my treetop traveling with my charges. (That skill, incidentally, has given me a tactical edge over every other pioneer in the field of primate rehabilitation.)
To all the foregoing I will add only that I have found this work more satisfying than I can say. And that very often as I’m swinging along through lush forest in the company of four or five young chimps, “feeding” with them on new leaves and baobab flowers, showing them how to build a sturdy nest in the branches, I know a deep satisfaction that now, at last, there’s no difference that matters between Sally and me.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Down and Out in the Year 2000
Kim Stanley Robinson, an alumnus of the Clarion Writers Workshop, sold his first story to Damon Knight’s Orbit 18 in 1976. He subsequently placed stories in Orbit 19 and Orbit 21, and in the last few years has gone on to become a frequent contributor to Universe and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His quietly evocative story “Venice Drowned” was one of the best stories of 1981, and was a Nebula Award finalist; his novella “To Leave a Mark” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1982. His brilliant story “Black Air” was both a Nebula and Hugo finalist in 1984, and went on to win the World Fantasy Award that year. “Black Air” was in our First Annual Collection. His excellent novel The Wild Shore was published in 1984 as the first title in the resurrected Ace Special line, and was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the year. Other Robinson books include the novels Icehenge and The Mem
ory of Whiteness, and the critical book The Novels of Philip K. Dick. His most recent book was The Planet on the Table, one of the landmark collections of the decade. Upcoming is a new novel, The Gold Coast, from Tor. His story “The Lucky Strike” was in our Second Annual Collection; his story “Green Mars” was in our Third Annual Collection. Robinson and his wife, Lisa, currently live in Switzerland.
In the story that follows, he gives us a brilliant, bittersweet look at what it’s like to be down and out in even the most glittering of futures.…
DOWN AND OUT IN THE YEAR 2000
Kim Stanley Robinson
It was going to be hot again. Summer in Washington, D.C.—Leroy Robinson woke and rolled on his mattress, broke into a sweat. That kind of a day. He got up and kneeled over the other mattress in the small room. Debra shifted as he shaded her from the sun angling in the open window. The corners of her mouth were caked white and her forehead was still hot and dry, but her breathing was regular and she appeared to be sleeping well. Quietly Leroy slipped on his jeans and walked down the hall to the bathroom. Locked. He waited; Ramon came out wet and groggy. “Morning, Robbie.” Into the bathroom, where he hung his pants on the hook and did his morning ritual. One bloodshot eye, staring back at him from the splinter of mirror still in the frame. The dirt around the toilet base. The shower curtain blotched with black algae, as if it had a fatal disease. That kind of morning.
Out of the shower he dried off with his jeans and started to sweat again. Back in his room Debra was still sleeping. Worried, he watched her for a while, then filled his pockets and went into the hall to put on sneakers and tank-top. Debra slept light these days, and the strangest things would rouse her. He jogged down the four flights of stairs to the street, and sweating freely stepped out into the steamy air.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 76
