Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (6 page)

"But there's a problem with that,” said Mullen, “isn't there."

Alencar nodded curtly. “Number 2308's behaviour aroused ...
suspicion
in a research assistant. Unfortunately, instead of bringing those suspicions to us, she then left the facility and took her story to a newsfeed. She believed 2308 exhibited intelligence."

"And the Commission,” said Ferreira, bowing to Alencar in mute apology for daring to interrupt a
Comissão
officer, “would not countenance murdering an intelligent animal for its skin."

"That is why you are here,” said Alencar. “You are here to prove this animal is not intelligent."

"It's not possible,” said Mullen, “to prove a negative."

"But your work on dolphins and bonobos proved just that."

"I published work that people with economic axes to grind later picked and chose pieces of for their own purposes,” said Mullen. “The third paper, and the third paper
only,
of my dolphin research was taken up by a Nunavut whalemeat consortium who wanted to expand their product range to include dolphin meat. And my bonobo research was used by a Kenyan company with an urgent need to clear-cut several hundred thousand square kilometres of wildlife preserve. I can't prove any one species is any more intelligent than any other. There is no reliable yardstick of animal or human intelligence."

Alencar's brow raised; she looked at De Santana severely. “But surely there's the encephalization quotient."

Mullen shook her head. “Just measures the ratio of the mass of the brain relative to that of the body, which ends up making baleen whales, for example, miss out because their brains are large, but their bodies are even larger. A certain percentage of any brain, though, has to be taken up with processing nerve signals from the skin, and whales, being streamlined, have relatively less skin, less surface area, than terrestrial mammals—hence, in one respect, they don't need brains the same size as ours. So do you alter your formula for the encephalization quotient to factor in skin area? And what about eyes? A cat's eyes are much, much bigger, relative to its body size, than a human being's, which implies that a much larger percentage of its brain must be taken up with visual cortex. And even if you do start chopping bits off the brain because they ‘just serve skin’ or ‘just serve eyes', you're still no further forward because you're assuming you know what parts of the brain actually
are
used for cognition. And I'm afraid we don't."

"But human beings are capable of simple mathematics, for example,” said De Santana. “That sets us apart from dumb animals."

Mullen smiled thinly. She rummaged in her handbag, pulled out a plastic bag full of brightly-coloured poker chips. On her shoulder, Polymath bounced awake and began to pace from side to side like a prizefighter warming up. He knew he was On.

"Apologies for carrying this much pseudo-cash around in your country, Captain.” She tipped the bag of chips out over the table with an unearthly clatter, then looked up challengingly at De Santana. “The red ones are the most valuable. They're worth five dollars in the Treasury Casino in Brisbane. How many are there on the table?"

"I don't understand."

"Count them. You have thirty seconds."

De Santana looked down at the chips in consternation. He counted silently, but with visible lip movement. Eventually he looked up.

"Twenty-eight—"

"TWENTY-
NINE,"
crowed Polymath, fluffing himself up in victory.

"Congratulations, Doctor,” said Mullen. “By your own yardstick, you're less intelligent than an African grey parrot.” She fed Polymath a chunk of crystallized mango, which he magnanimously accepted.

Ferreira was suppressing a smile with difficulty. Alencar broke the uncomfortable silence. “You'll be given all reasonable facilities you need, Doctor Mullen. We need a speedy resolution to this situation. I hope you understand."

"And I hope
you
understand that I can't give you a yes-or-no answer. The psychology of intelligence is not exact. This has been very convenient in furthering many people's agendas over many centuries. It's only been recently, for example, that women and blacks started to be regarded as being comparable in intelligence to humans."

She had been smiling when she said it, but Alencar's face had stiffened like a voodoo mask. Mullen suspected she had gone too far, and felt her fears justified when Alencar said:

"Time is limited, Doctor. The Commission has allotted two weeks. Much of the equipment you requested has already been installed. I see no reason why you should not be able to begin now."

Alencar picked up a red chip from the table, examining the play of light on the gold lettering.

"TWENTY-NINE MINUS ONE,” shrieked Polymath. “TWENTY-EIGHT."

Experiment 2308 could not be described as a noble beast. From the tips of her bowlegged, weirdly hypertrophied foreclaws to the tiny, splayed-out lizard feet dragging along her afterthought of a tail, she had ‘nature's cruel mistake’ written all over her. The rainbow coat of scales that covered her seemed hardly to belong, as if she'd stolen it off a far more attractive animal. But from the beginning, Mullen was convinced she had star quality.

She was intensely interested in
everything
Mullen did, whether it had been setting up the projector screen, the counting blocks, or the box of rewards. Inside her metre-high cage, she pulsed gold and russet as her turreted chameleon eyes swivelled independently to follow Mullen's every movement.

"Her blood sugar has probably got too big,” explained the huge, thuggish, technically female veterinary nurse. “She needs regular injections of the insulin. She is diabetic.” She approached the cage; 2308 gaped, hissed, and retreated, flashing red and black like a roulette wheel. “She doesn't like it when I test her blood; she is a baby, she can't stand the prick of a pin."

"She's diabetic too?"

"Was deliberate,” said the nurse, reaching into a drawer for a blood sugar tester. “The Doctors, they make her diabetic deliberately, genetically, when they make her."

"What was the thinking behind that?” said Mullen. “No, don't tell me—diabetes is a survival characteristic among famine populations, right? It was done so the food animal they wanted to produce would need less food itself."

"Yes. She is a girl, of course, so they can get the eggs for the cloning. They are mostly making girls for that reason."

"So all the inmates in here are female."

An image of a snake poised to strike flashed up on the projection screen; 2308 hissed and grew green as grass. Despite 2308's impressive gat-toothed gape, the nurse reached into her cage, got 2308's head under one bingo-winged arm and blooded her with the sugar tester.

"Is high,” the nurse said victoriously. 2308 shrank cowed into the opposite corner of her cage.

Mullen cycled through the unique sound fragments the lexical analyzer had picked up in an hour of flashing sound and vision at 2308. A gigantic image of a tarantula appeared on the wall. 2308 hissed and throbbed red and black in response.

"PRETTY POLLY,” commented Polymath from his newly erected travel perch. One of 2308's eye turrets rotated round to watch him, whether out of intellectual curiosity or hunger, Mullen had no idea. Polymath spread himself out to full wingspan; 2308 went jet black, as quickly as if her skin had been a TV screen the power had been killed on. Polymath fluttered away with a terrified squawk.

"Don't do that, Poll,” said Mullen, “it's distracting her from the screen."

"What does it do, this thing?” said the nurse.

"Human babies,” muttered Mullen, “have a library of sound phrases—cry for unhappy, gurgle for happy, and so on. A one-month-old child already has a handful of things she can say, and that's instinctive, prior to the development of language. The first thing I require to do, when studying the linguistic development of a species, is find out what its instinctive instruction set is. Unfortunately, our patient seems to have two sounds only—hiss and no-hiss."

The nurse shrugged philosophically. “She is less trouble than the other patients, Doctor Mullen."

"Call me Liz. What's your name?"

"Leonor."

"Are the other patients less healthy, Leonor?"

"Or bigger. Or more aggressive. And the Doctors spend less money with them. Most of them are dying. Do you think you can speak her language?"

"Well, language is the problem, you see. She's a baby, as you say, and language is a learned thing. No-one's born speaking Hebrew. Not even Jesus."

Leonor crossed herself, and Mullen had to remind herself she was in a Catholic country. “How will you make her speak, if she can only make a hiss?"

"That's the billion dollar question. She's a completely new species, made by buggering about with genetics. Most of her doesn't seem to work too well. We're not guaranteed she's got any way of talking to us at all."

Mullen clicked the presentation closed; the spider faded to the splash screen of the lexical analyzer's Japanese manufacturers, a single, radially symmetrical green
mon
on a white background. In response, 2308 hissed softly and became more pastoral in colour, a single blob of green pigment wobbling on her yellow neck and head like cupric oxide slag floating on molten copper.

"She's got track marks here,” said Mullen. “Needle marks that haven't healed. Leonor, these legs look like a heroin addict's."

"I have to check the blood sugar always in the neck or leg,” explained Leonor. “The insulin injections too. I am not allowed to damage the hide."

"Of course,” nodded Mullen. “That would be totally unacceptable."

Leonor scowled and busied herself with the impressive array of charts on the desk beside 2308's cage. Mullen bent down close to the bars, looking into the unfathomable eyes.

"I hope you don't imagine,” she said, “that I am any sort of white knight. I am a cognitive psychologist, and it is my job to torture animals that are on the wrong side of mankind's current designated threshold of nervous complexity by cutting their nervous systems apart and watching what parts twitch. I'm not allowed to do it to monkeys any more in most countries, but sea slugs and squid are still fair game. The white coats you've met so far are just geneticists—they're child's play. But my research—every part of my research—involves identifying those parts of you that make you hurt, and hurting you in them. Still feel you want to be intelligent?"

2308's skin still glowed emerald, like a crocodile-shaped chunk of kryptonite.

"Now would be a
really
good time,” said Mullen, “to tell me everything I've ever thought about telepathy was foolish pessimism."

2308 hissed as softly as burbling surf.

The monitor at one end of the office—large, German-made, expensive—was split into two halves. The first showed 2308 in her cage, head up, attentive. The second showed an image of an oak tree, and the oak tree's number in the analyzer's image library. 2308 blazed green in response, maintaining one golden jewel of yellow pigment on her head, directly between her eyes. Did she have a parietal eye in that position? Had anyone bothered to check?

The image changed; a mare and foal, walking together. 2308's skin brightened to a buttermilk yellow, and the parietal dot separated into two green halves. Just as she had done after every slide change, she exhaled contentedly like a steam train venting.

The image changed; a clutch of eggs. The green returned, and 2308 broke out in large gold spots.

"What is the purpose of the slides?” said Captain Alencar.

"Just to elicit a variety of vocal responses. Initial results are not encouraging. She has only one response, and no matter how much I turn the tolerance up on the analyzer, I cannot split that sound into more than one. Adult crocodiles make more noises than that. If your lab assistant thought 2308 was talking to her, she probably thought her cat, her dead grandma and the Archangel Michael were too."

"Oh, she was quite mad,” said De Santana. “Delusional.” His eyes gleamed with perhaps a little bit
too
much anticipation.

"...so I'm going to switch to sign language,” said Mullen. “We've had more success with that in non-vocalizing species. Dolphins and parrots are all very well, but not everyone has a good singing voice. Chimps can't vocalize, but they can learn sign language at rates comparable to human beings."

De Santana objected. “But the Kenyan court reports clearly say neither of your two chimp subjects were ever able to talk
to each other
. They were only ever able to talk to you and your team—"

"Kong and PG Tips were only ever brought together once, by the authorities who ran their respective zoos, on an American TV show. You might be interested to know that that TV show was sponsored by the Kenyan company that wanted to destroy the wildlife preserve PG came from. The reason why they weren't able to talk to each other was that I taught Kong American Sign Language, because he came from the Central Park Zoo. PG I taught British Sign Language, because he came from Nairobi. It allowed signers from both countries to talk to PG and Kong through the bars, and it was very popular. But of course, they couldn't talk to each other. It would have been like a Frenchman meeting a German."

"British Sign Language and American Sign Language are..."

"Different languages, yes."

De Santana's jaw dropped. “How can they be? They're just,” his face split in a foolish smile, “
sign
language. What would the point be in making two different languages?"

"Ask the people who invented French and German. I have to say, I would be able to understand far better where your lab assistant's suspicions came from if I could talk to her directly."

Alencar spoke with glacial lack of emotion. “We would
also
like to talk to her directly. Evidently, like many other disillusioned souls in this country, she has lost confidence in officialdom. She does not appreciate that the Commission exists to help her, to help everybody. We will find her. But I doubt this will be possible in the time remaining to your experimental schedule."