Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Jessamine shook her, though gently. “Aggie. It’s possible. But unlikely. Besides, the virus by itself is harmless. What we used it for was to carry pieces of genetic information into living cells, to change the cells by changing the genetic code inside them. There are still some permitted usages, like using it to cure genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis.”

  “You brought something to show-and-tell, in San Francisco in ninety-seven. What was that?”

  “I brought a vial containing a solution of viral carrier in which I’d incorporated a stretch of genetic information. It was a siamang-wolf match. I thought it had to do with detection of pheromones, with the sense of smell.…”

  “You said it had something to do with reproductive behavior.”

  “I said I thought it might, yes. Because both siamangs and wolves are monogamous. But when I tried it on the bonobos, it had no effect, Aggie.”

  “You tried to … infect the chimpanzees with it, right?”

  “I don’t like the word ‘infect.’ We tried it on the nasal mucosa of a couple of chimps to see if their smell acuity or reproductive behavior would change. It didn’t.”

  Aggie was silent, still very pale. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, God.”

  Carolyn poured a cup of coffee and held it to Aggie’s lips. “Hey, Aggie. Come on.”

  “This is why,” said Bettiann in a dull voice, looking up from the paper. “It’s why William’s been like that. It’s why Charley tried to kill himself.”

  “Who?” asked Ophy, suddenly alert. “Who?”

  Bettiann babbled. Agnes stared into the coffee cup as though mesmerized, mumbling something about the Vatican must have known, that’s why they’d called the conference.

  The phone rang: Stace.

  The phone rang again: Simon calling Ophy from Paris.

  And yet again: Patrick calling Jessamine from Nuevo Los Angeles.

  “No, Patrick,” she said. “I didn’t know.… No, I didn’t want to get pregnant because I didn’t want to carry some other woman’s child just to massage your ego. It had nothing to do with this.… Patrick, why are you yelling at me! I didn’t do it.”

  “Yes, you did,” said Aggie.

  Jessamine turned on her angrily. “Aggie. For God’s sake!”

  Aggie’s face was gray and hard as stone. “Not for God’s sake. No. You did it, Jessamine. Out of pride. Out of hubris! Thinking you know more than God.…”

  “Patrick, give me your number. I’ll call you back, maybe tonight.” She turned back from the phone. “Aggie, what’s with you?”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you, you did it. In 1997. You brought it to show-and-tell. It was a little vial with a black seal at the top. I can see it, see you holding it. I can still hear your voice. Genetic material, you said. Viral carrier, you said.…”

  “And I told you, it wasn’t what I thought it was—”

  “It was what you thought it was when you brought it. But when you left the meeting, it was water.”

  “What are you.… !”

  “Sophy took it.”

  Sudden silence.

  Aggie sobbed dryly. “I saw her. Everyone was getting coffee. She took it from the table where you’d set it. She emptied it into a little bottle. She filled the vial from the water pitcher. She put the top back on. She looked up and saw me watching. She smiled at me and put her finger to her lips.…”

  “Aggie! And you didn’t tell me,” Jessamine cried.

  “I couldn’t tell you! She was so bright, with this light around her. I saw … like, wings, scales, strangeness! I got dizzy; I thought there was something awesome there; I could see the gleam of eyes, something like … rainbows. She was shining. And when it was over, I thought, oh, I’d been hysterical and it was only some kind of joke. Or she knew something we didn’t and she was protecting us from ourselves, protecting you from yourself, Jessamine.…”

  “And now you think she … she what? Used it to infect humans? What humans? Us? You think she infected us with the stuff?”

  “There was a literacy conference in Rio the fall of ninety-seven,” said Aggie. “I attended it. Last year Faye was all over Europe and around the Mediterranean, researching her commission. Two years ago you and Hal went to Hawaii, Carolyn, to visit your boys. Bettiann, you and William took a Pacific cruise in January of ninety-eight, didn’t you?”

  “Australia,” said Bettiann. “And New Zealand.”

  “I went to China,” said Ophy. “A medical meeting. And you went somewhere, Jess.”

  “India,” said Jessamine. “A human genome conference. My boss was supposed to go, but his wife was ill.…”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered,” murmured Agnes. “Maybe by then your boss carried it, too. Maybe it spread by itself.”

  “You’re saying Sophy infected—”

  “You don’t like the word ‘infected,’ ” Agnes interjected in a shrill, unnatural voice.

  “You think Sophy put the stuff in our coffee?” Jessamine cried.

  Bettiann screeched something; everyone began babbling.

  Carolyn yelled at the top of her voice, “All of you, shut up. Hush. Now, sit down here, quietly. All of you. Aggie, tell us calmly, precisely, quietly!”

  Aggie rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “In 1997. We met in San Francisco, at Jessamine’s house. For show-and-tell we all had one thing or another. I remember all of it, I’ve thought about it over and over. God, I haven’t been able to think about anything else! Jessamine, you brought this vial of stuff from your laboratory. You talked about pheromones, about maybe having found the genetic basis for monogamy, and Faye laughed and said not for her, thanks, and somebody made a joke. I remember it all. Every word!

  “We left our show-and-tell things on the table when we went into the kitchen for coffee, all but Sophy. She never drank coffee. I came back to the living room first, and she had the vial in her hand—she was emptying it into a little bottle, like a pill bottle. Then she picked up the pitcher on the table and poured water into the vial, and put her hand over the top of it—I thought putting the top back on—and then she set the vial back where it had been. There was this confusion around her, light, aureoles, feathers, sparkling, I said her name, Sophy, and she looked up smiling and put her finger on her lips.…” Aggie showed them, putting her own finger upright against her lips, the universal sign of silence.

  “What did you think she was doing?” Carolyn challenged.

  “At the time? I thought … there was something awesome there, with her. Something … not human. At the time I thought maybe something angelic. Or I told myself that. Father Girard thinks it could have been something diabolical. Later I told myself she was … telling Jessamine … not to interfere with nature. Later I convinced myself she’d been making … a gesture. An … admonition. Later I thought … she felt it would be better if such things weren’t done, and she was telling Jessamine so.”

  “And you more or less agreed with that?”

  Aggie wept. “The whole thing was so strange! The feeling of it, the light. There was something else in the room, something besides Sophy. And she wanted me not to say anything. So I couldn’t tell you, and if I did, you’d think I was crazy. I didn’t even confess it then, for fear Father Girard would think I was crazy. And if I wasn’t crazy, then that meant Sophy was … was possessed? Or something. And then later I told myself yes, if Sophy was telling us not to interfere, I did more or less agree. You know my feelings about those things. I’ve always felt we trifle too much with things we should let alone! And then later, after Sophy was lost, gone, the only reason I could think of for her to kill herself was if … if she had been possessed by something evil and done something with that stuff, or maybe even if she’d thought it was harmless, then found out it hadn’t been harmless at all.… Maybe she had done something … something she couldn’t live with. But by then it was too late.”

  Jessamine cried, “So you believe that when I took the vial back to the lab, all it had
in it was water?”

  Aggie cried, “I thought you’d notice the seal was broken. I knew it was sealed, and I thought you’d notice, or that Sophy would tell you, or … or something.”

  “God,” whispered Ophy, awed. “Lord. Jessamine …”

  Jessamine shouted, “Damn it, the vial was still sealed when I got it back to the lab.” She frowned angrily. “Ophy, honest to God, it was still sealed.” It had been! She remembered slitting the seal with a knife.

  Carolyn sat stone-faced while they murmured around her. Mysteries. Why? How? The how was a tiny mystery compared to the other. So the vial had been sealed. Either Sophy had pretended to do something with the contents, leaving the vial sealed, or she’d actually done something with the contents, somehow resealing the vial. Or she’d palmed the vial and substituted a like one. “What did you use to seal it with, Jessamine?”

  “It’s a common material,” breathed Jessamine. “A liquid polymer. You dip stuff into it, and it dries into a hard plastic coating. We use it in the lab to make seals airtight, to cover metal parts, to make them nonreactive. It’s used in workshops, labs, factories. Even hobby shops. You can buy it lots of places.”

  Carolyn asked, “When there was no effect, didn’t you test the contents of the vial? To see if it was still … what you thought it was?”

  “I would have, yes. Of course. But before I had a chance, Patrick and I went on vacation, and while we were gone, the Big One came and the labs were destroyed. All my records. All … everything. Not the animals, they were at the breeding farm, but everything else, gone.…”

  “Why?” demanded Ophy. “Damn it, why!”

  “Why what?” asked Faye. “You mean, why did Sophy do it? She did it to be like Elder Sister. To make us peaceable.” And she broke into raucous laughter. “Oh, boy, will we be peaceable.”

  “Hush,” said Carolyn, steel in her voice. “All of you.”

  Silence gathered.

  “I’d like to suggest that we all be very, very careful. It’s important that we don’t talk about this, that we make no allegations to anyone about anything, that we offer no opinions on this matter.”

  Silence.

  Then Faye: “You’re speaking as a lawyer.”

  “I’m speaking as a lawyer. You may think you know something Aggie, but you could be wrong. Saying what you think you know, however, could get Jessamine sued. Or hurt. Or even killed.”

  Aggie cried, “But we have a duty.…”

  Carolyn shook her by the shoulder. “Aggie, I’m thinking of you, too. You’re in as much danger as Jessamine is—you, your church, the abbey. If Jessamine is in any way culpable—and we’re not at all certain she is—so are you. Some people would say you had a duty to stop Sophy. Or to tell Jessamine what you’d seen, right then, at the time. But at this late date blabbing out our uncertainties to all and sundry is not a duty, it’s simply foolhardy. Particularly inasmuch as we’re not sure anything happened.”

  Ophy whispered, “But she’s right. We do have a duty—”

  “Oh, yes,” Carolyn agreed with a firm nod. “We have a moral duty to find out what happened. A moral duty and a human responsibility to find out what actually happened.”

  “How can we find out?” cried Agnes. “Sophy’s dead!”

  Faye turned a searching gaze on Carolyn, and she upon Ophy. Jessamine gathered Bettiann with her eyes, then all of them turned their eyes on Aggie in a combined stare that had almost the force of hands laid upon her.

  She shifted nervously under the stares. “What?”

  “We don’t think she’s dead,” said Faye. “We don’t think she’s dead at all.”

  And then silence again, a silence that gathered depth from their having said it, together, five of them; a silence that throbbed and hummed like a seashell held to the ear, the shush of the great sea within every self.

  Aggie whispered, “What do you mean?”

  Faye said, “We mean we see her, Aggie. Or hear her. Or feel her around. We mean she pervades our space. Or inhabits our beings. Or something.”

  “The nun,” said Aggie, hushed. “I keep seeing this young nun. She’s beautiful. She’s like Sophy. The blessed dead don’t come haunting. And that means Father Girard was right. She was a … a something evil. A devil. Devils can be lovely, you know. Tempting.…”

  “I don’t believe that!” Jessamine said. “I do not believe Sophy was capable of evil. I do believe you’ve seen her, Aggie, because the rest of us have experienced similar things. You see a young nun. Ophy talks to someone over her shoulder. Carolyn gets visited by dead sheep. Faye has a statue that dresses itself up. Bettiann writes things she doesn’t know she’s writing, verses, things that sound like Sophy. One of my research animals acts as though she’s, ah … possessed. So when you come right down to it, we don’t think Sophy’s dead. Or if she’s dead, we don’t think she’s gone. But I will not accept that she’s evil!”

  “Then what is she? Where is she?” Aggie stood up and looked around herself, almost hysterically. “Here?”

  “Shush,” said Carolyn. “Aggie, don’t have a hissy. Whatever it is, it’s benign.”

  “Benign! You say that as though you knew! You don’t know! You could look Satan in the face and call him benign, Carolyn Crespin! If she’s done this—”

  “If she’s done this, she’s done it for a reason. If she’s still here, she’s here for a reason. For God’s sake, Aggie! You knew Sophy. How could you even consider that she would do something wicked? Would she ever have hurt anyone? Did she ever hurt anyone? Sit. Calm down.”

  They sat. Except for Aggie, they calmed, though the room seemed to reverberate with tension like the last echo of an enormous gong, a wavering pressure, a pounding of the pulse in the ears. Aggie felt herself withdrawing from them, utterly convinced now that Sophy, their friend Sophy, had not merely been a stranger, but had also been alien. Inimical. And the DFC had helped her do whatever it was she had done.

  “What’re we going to do?” Bettiann asked, almost a whine.

  “Find her,” said Carolyn. “We’re going to have to find her. Or at least find who she was.”

  “Ghostbuster,” giggled Bettiann. “Not exactly a big ambition of mine.” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “This is all … crazy.”

  “Admittedly,” Carolyn agreed. “Nonetheless.”

  Faye demanded, “How? How do we do it?”

  Carolyn spoke slowly, thinking it out as she went:

  “We start by remembering everything we can that she ever said about her people, places she’d been, things she’d done. We find some of those women she lived with in Vermont, and we ask them if she ever said anything about her people. The last few years, ninety-five, ninety-six, she told us she’d traveled around a lot.…”

  “A funny thing,” laughed Jessamine, almost hysterically. “Patrick said there was a dragon in her room.”

  “A what?”

  “He admitted he was drunk. That time in ninety-seven, when he made the move on all of you … all but you, Aggie. He said he didn’t get very far with Sophy because when he went to her room, the shower was on and there was a dragon in her room.”

  Aggie felt her mouth twisting. “I’m not surprised. Not now.”

  Silence. Faye laughed jeeringly. “A few weeks ago, I saw her vanish. I was leaving the studio, and I turned and spoke to her, only I thought it was her statue. And she turned her head and looked at me; then she vanished, like smoke. And there was this sound, like something far away, opening or closing.”

  “What are you saying?” demanded Carolyn. “That she’s not … not human? That she’s what? Supernatural? Or are you with Aggie? You think she was satanic?”

  “She was Native American,” said Ophy angrily. “She was. I knew her. As for Patrick, he was drunk. Faye, you were hallucinating, and, Aggie, you’re playing sour grapes! I can buy a presence, some sort of subconscious evocation—I’ve felt that myself—but I don’t buy physical manifestations and I don’t buy evil. Let’s
be logical about this. The university had to have some kind of address or location for her when she applied there. Some record of her scholarship.”

  “Tracing someone’s background can take time,” Bettiann said. “It can take ages.”

  “It can’t take ages, and we’ll all have to take the time,” Carolyn remarked. “All of us. Now. We’ve got today and tomorrow.…”

  “Jessy and I have to see your client tomorrow,” said Ophy.

  “Right. Well, some of us have two days.” Carolyn heaved a deep breath. “Starting with the university is a good idea. Unfortunately, it’s a weekend.”

  “I’m an honored alum,” breathed Bettiann. “I can get access. And you don’t need me Monday.”

  “Why, Bettiann!” Faye grinned wolfishly. “An honored alum?”

  “The Carpenter Foundation endowed a big scholarship fund.” She flushed. “I can get to the president, I know him. He’ll have somebody open up for us.”

  “We should start now.” Aggie pushed her veil over her shoulders, straightened her cuffs, and stared wildly at nothing. “We can’t wait. If the rest of you are busy, I’ll get started now.”

  Faye was standing just behind Aggie, pouring coffee, and she nodded significantly to Carolyn over Aggie’s shoulder, saying, “I’ll go with you, Aggie. Carolyn doesn’t need me.”

  “The three of us,” said Bettiann very calmly, reaching forward to clasp Aggie’s hand. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “Sophy must have given them a home address,” Faye remarked. “She had to have gone to high school somewhere. Then, when we’ve done what we can at the university, we’ll see if we can find any of the women who lived with Sophy.”

  Bettiann rose. “Aggie and I came in William’s plane. It’s still at the Santa Fe airport. William didn’t need it for anything, so it’s just sitting there. I know where the pilot’s staying.” She got up and went to find an unbugged phone.

  Aggie rose, not quite steadily, murmured something about wanting to be alone for a few moments, and went down the hall, toward the room she’d been using.

  Faye, looking after her, shook her head slowly. “Can you believe this? That Aggie didn’t tell us!”