Gibbon's Decline and Fall (19 page)

She went out into the sun once more, spotted the car with Hal's bulky silhouette in the front seat, head down, either dozing or still occupied with Sophy's stories. Hal was seventy-three, and for the last two or three years he'd been in the habit of these little catnaps. Still, aside from the broken leg, he was hearty and hale. Maybe he'd have some idea, some strategy, some good sense where Carolyn herself could find, at the moment, only pity and dismay, added to that kernel of terror that was associated, somehow, with that room full of pods. She, normally among the most skeptical of women, had actually perceived it as an omen.

L
ATE AFTERNOON IN
S
ALT
L
AKE
City. The California Memorial Labs basked whitely in the glow of a cloudless sky. Inside, on the second floor, Jessamine Iolantha Ortiz-Oneil, M.S., Ph.D. fished a key from her pocket and unlocked one side of a large double door. The sound of the latch was almost inaudible, but by the time she pushed the door open, the apes were boiling through the far wall into the inside cages, gibbering, howling, ha-ha-hoo-hoo.

She signed a greeting. “Good afternoon, children.” She closed and locked the door behind her before walking between the two large community cages toward the windowed west wall, where enclosed gangways overhead gave access to the huge tree-filled compounds in which the apes spent most of their time. As she approached the tall window at the end of the aisle, dozens of pairs of eyes watched her eagerly, quieting abruptly when she stopped to stare out into the sun-dazzle, pretending she didn't notice them. To her left were the refrigerator, the food cupboards, the sinks and counters, all gleaming in stainless steel. Every ape in the room was familiar with this routine.

“Ach-a-a-a-a,” said Don Juan from his place in the pygmy-chimp cage. His tone said clearly, “Don't mess around.”

She turned and signed to them. “Fruit,” she said. “You want some?”

A cacophony of acquiescence, bonobos on one side going hoo-hah, siamangs on the other howling and leaping. There were bananas, apples, and oranges in the cooler along with a huge sack of Mexican mangoes. Jessamine spilled a selection into a basket and carried it back past the cages, offering treats to all and sundry. Priapus and Don Juan, the two largest males, were not at all shy. They not only accepted the fruit she gave them but grabbed for the basket as well.

“Grabby,” she chided them in signs, mimicking their toothy grimaces. “You guys act like monkeys, huh?”

Priapus cocked his head at her, a habit of his, as though he were deciding what to say in reply. He gripped his mango tightly in one foot to free his hands, placed his right thumb under his chin and drew it forward, tickled his ribs, stroked his penis. “Not monkey, Priapus.” He did the ribs again, then gestured toward the opposite cage. “Monkey there.”

Jessamine made the monkey sign, pointed at Priapus, laughed, and Priapus laughed with her, pointing back at her, lips pulled back to make a fangy grin. You're a monkey. All the apes in this compound had been raised on sign language, a small vocabulary stringently taught and uniformly required from all handlers in lieu of speech. One-to-one sign teaching had never gone very far, but there had turned out to be an interesting synergy when a whole group was raised from infancy on signs. They even signed to one another, though not anything past the babble stage. Their interests seemed to be restricted to food and petting, and perhaps intragroup status, though they had no signs for that. Two words in a string was about it, except for Priapus, who occasionally surprised her.

Don Juan concentrated on his banana, pretending she didn't exist. If she turned her back, he'd reach through the bars like lightning and grab her hair or shoulder. He'd never bitten her, but he liked to make her think he would. Sometimes he looked at her from the back of the cage, tapping his lip with finger and thumb, the sign for delicious. Val and Pinto thought it was funny. Jessamine wasn't so sure. He hadn't done it lately, so maybe he didn't consider her tasty anymore.

The siamangs were in a way noisier and more active, but at the same time more orderly and polite. They each waited a turn, then retreated to their special perches, couples affectionately huddled, singles in small groups. Bottom, one of the
older youngsters, stayed at the front of the cage, sticking his arm through and begging for more. Jessamine tickled him, and he leaped away across the cage floor, giggling to himself, a dry sound, like the rubbing of leaves together. The siamangs were monogamous, so they didn't need the constant sexual social negotiations and reinforcements that took up so much of the bonobos' time. Bonobos, the so-called pygmy chimps, shared sex in total promiscuity, using it to reinforce social bonding. Oridinary chimps had sexual attitudes more comparable to human ones: alpha males mated with whomever they wished while trying to keep other males from getting any at all; females and subordinate males sneaked around; every tribe member bounced uneasily between biology and social position.

Lily, one of the new mothers among the bonobos, sat in the corner against the bars with her infant, and when Jessamine offered her a mango, she reached through the bars to take Jessamine's hand instead, peering up at her with a look of pain, or perhaps longing.

“What is it, sweetheart?”

Pulling her hand between the bars, laying it on the infant, pressing it to her own lips. Lily. And that look again. Which might mean help me, see me, talk to me.

“I see you,” Jessamine signed, her first and second fingers moving outward from her eyes. “I see you, Lily. I see Lily's baby.” A rocking motion for baby.

And the hand again, pulling her hand through the bars to touch the baby. Then the right hand coming out, circling, coming back. And the eyes again, looking out, through the bars, at the bars as though to say, Take me with you.

What was it? Lily knew how to sign, though she wasn't as good at it as some of the others. Still, she knew the signs for food and drink and warmth and feeling sick and baby and a dozen other things. “What, Lily?”

Only the eyes and that circling hand, as though she said, Oh, take me with you, I am weary of this place. As though someone were trapped in there. Inexplicably, Sophy's face was there, superimposed over the chimpanzee features, Sophy's eyes over those other eyes.

Time stopped. Breathing stopped. Her eyes blinked shut and stayed that way, shutting it out. She shuddered, forced herself to look. Nothing. Not Sophy caged. Not Sophy behind bars. Just Lily and the baby. Jessamine turned away. This had
happened before, and it was ridiculous. Nonetheless she waited for the usual concomitant. It came, a sound barely heard, as though a door had shut somewhere. A metal door, she thought. A clang, only so soft that she didn't know if she'd really heard it or imagined it. Stupid. She was doing this to herself, fantasizing all kinds of things. How silly. How ridiculous. She needed more sleep and less aggravation.

Lily called to her, but she didn't turn back. Instead she left the empty basket at the cross aisle that led behind the chimp cages to the lab and let herself through the locked metal grill.

Inside she saw her co-worker, Val Iwasaki, bent over his computer terminal like a concert pianist concentrating on fingering. He had beautiful hands and an interesting face, a mixed face, rather like her own, and a solid, muscular body hunched over the console where he was working on primatecanid genetic comparisons, their current project, one that had occupied them for the last couple of years.

He turned to wave hello. “How were the meetings?”

“Dull. A waste of time.” She glanced at her watch. “From nine to three, six totally wasted hours. Even the lunch was lousy.”

“Did you run the blockade getting here?”

“What blockade?”

“The mob in the mall. I ran into them when I came back from lunch, marching and chanting.”

“I didn't come that way. What was going on?”

“One of the Army of God bunches was chasing women out of the mall, using switches on the ones with bare legs, telling them to go home and take care of their kids. God's Faithful, I think they called themselves.”

“You're kidding! Where were the police?”

“Watching from a distance in case some militant female tried to fight back.”

“At least they're not shooting the women, like in New York,” said Jessamine, looking ruefully at her own bare legs. “Or blowing up colleges.”

“Probably not,” Val replied with a quick sideways grin.

“By the way, Val. Have you noticed anything strange about Lily lately?”

“Not Lily particularly. They've all been a little weird. You know all that touching and stroking and screwing that goes on constantly among the bonobos, all that keeping peace and negotiating
relationships? Well, lately they haven't, or not so much. And Don Juan's been moody.”

“More than usual?”

“A lot more. A lot of strange masturbatory behavior. I see him sitting in the corner, facing the corner, examining himself.”

“Is he in pain? You think … what? Some disease?”

“I don't know. I asked Pinto to sedate him next week, so we can get a blood sample and run some tests.” He leaned back, stretching. “I picked up a couple of short matches this morning. Bonobo-wolf. Outside the CoTAM list.” The CoTAM list included genetic material Common
To All
Mammals, the base blueprint, as it were, for mammalian construction. DNA matches outside that list were particularly interesting in that they sometimes spelled out characteristics of specific species.

“Don't hope too much,” Jessamine said distractedly. She stretched, running her hands across the glossy cap of her hair, smoothing it, twisting her shoulders to settle her twitchy arms. “They can be disappointing. I found a wonderful siamang-wolf match the spring of ninety-seven, before you joined us. We had a guy doing some consulting with us, and between consults he was working on a canid project he and some colleagues had dreamed up back in ninety-three, ninety-four.”

“Dogs?” He looked up. “What was that?”

“The theory behind it was that dogs have been bred for special characteristics for so long that it should be possible to find the genes for specific characteristics. Like, what's the DNA for loyalty? Or where's the shepherding gene? As I recall, they derived basic canid genomes from both wolves and cur dogs. Then they matched specific breeds against those bases to find the variations.

“My people, meantime, had been working on a problem of siamang reproductive failure—which we solved, by the way—and in the process we'd transliterated a lot of siamang DNA. I thought since the canid project claimed to be having some luck translating genetic sequences into actual behavioral traits, I'd see if any of their wolf sequences matched siamang ones. It wouldn't be any Rosetta stone, but at least it might give us a clue as to what some of the siamang DNA actually does.

“So we ran the wolf sequence against our key siamang; then we eliminated the CoTAM and concentrated on what
was left over. Theoretically, the leftovers should have been DNA that wolves and siamangs shared, but that some other mammals didn't. Bingo. We came up with a long DNA sequence shared by siamangs and wolves but not by all other mammals. It was like I'd gone to look for a needle in a haystack and had sat down on it! The whole cross-species project was new then. I was so excited.” So excited she'd burbled all about it at the DFC meeting, waving her discovery at them, thoroughly confusing them all. She smiled reminiscently.

“What significance did the sequence have? What did it control?” Val prodded.

She came back to herself. “That's what we wanted to know. I talked to the man doing the dog studies; he said the matching sequence was part of the nose-brain research they'd done trying to find the genetic difference between sight hounds and scent hounds—greyhounds and bloodhounds. He thought maybe my siamang-wolf DNA had to do with the development of the accessory olfactory bulb—”

“Pardon me?”

“It's a little structure in animal brains. It's connected to another little organ in the nose, the vomeronasal organ, which is what they detect pheromones with. Anyhow, I thought whoop-de-do, siamangs and wolves have this same gene, does the gene do the same thing in both? Does it control the same behavior? And does this same gene also exist in pygmy chimps? So I ran the sequence against what we had at that time on the bonobos.”

“And?”

“Lo and behold, the program came up with two fairly long partial matches, and when we looked more closely, they turned out to be the two ends of the long siamang-wolf sequence.”

“Wait a minute.” He turned from his console, brow furrowed. “You had a siamang sequence that matched a wolf sequence. Call that ABC—”

“No. Call the siamang-wolf sequence A-BBBB-C and call the chimp sequence A-XXXX-C. The
A
's and the C's are identical in all three animals. The siamangs and wolves have BBBB's, which made genetic sense, but the chimps' XXXX's were a long string of repeated base pairs, over and over and over.”