Invisible Beasts (6 page)

Truth Bats

P
EOPLE RARELY DISCUSS
how one's voice changes after telling a lie, because no one wants to admit to falsehood. I will confess, however, that I once told my sister a premeditated, consequential lie. My voice changed instantly: my small-talk became robotic, my heartfelt words sounded plagiarized, and even phrases muttered to myself had a disingenuous tone. Like everyone whose voice is deserted by the “ring of truth,” I had lost my bats. We owe the ring of truth in the human voice to Truth Bats, an invisible subspecies of vampire bat, and thereby hangs (upside down) the tale of how I was inspired to write this book.

Vampire bats are a superior species, surpassing humans in their altruism and their ability to tell truth from lies. Consider: a vampire bat must feed every couple of days, or die. When a bat's hunting goes badly, though, it doesn't worry—it can turn to the luckier bats hanging with it, upside down, from a roost. The hungry bat visits each, emitting a begging call, and the others disgorge a donation of blood so their friend won't starve. But since the
savvy bats also recognize voices, they know who is begging, and if a hungry bat has not helped other bats in the past, it is unlikely to receive charity. This is the Golden Rule, with teeth. Who wants to regurgitate hard-earned blood to someone who'll ignore you the next time you're in need? And if a callous, greedy bat should die of hunger, those genes are no loss to the species, which as a whole benefits from generosity. Even more impressively, when a bat lies—when it goes begging despite a full belly—by various means, the other bats know the difference. For Truth Bats, the key is in the voice.

It's a pity that Truth Bats are invisible, because they're so cute—like furry plum pits with mouse ears, three-inch wingspans, and expressions of pipsqueak ferocity. They live in small clusters, lap the blood of nocturnal moths, and roost, by day, on the bodies of large mammals. They are clean, easy guests, dining and digesting elsewhere, bringing only their need to sleep safely, and a tendency to chatter among themselves. Like our eyelash follicle mites, they go unnoticed. But when it comes to humans, Truth Bats are picky: they will only adorn the hair or clothes of a truthful person. How do they know?

When we tell a lie, our larynx muscles contract, producing an inaudible signal sometimes used in lie detection. Truth Bats hear this signal and fear it; their small, tight-knit society really cannot afford bloodsucking liars in its midst, so the lie signal is a strong negative stimulus. When it emanates from their own roost—everywhere in
their house!—they leave in a hurry. Their departure has consequences. Truth Bats chatter as they hang together, and their continuous piping makes a background to our speech that we don't hear, but feel—something like the tingling echo of a waterfall just before your ears catch it. This is the “ring of truth.” When your bats depart, scattering into the air as you trot out some whopper of a lie, your voice loses its reassuring background, and people feel that. You have more trouble persuading them; you have trouble persuading yourself. Until your Truth Bats return, you feel forlorn, lonesome, awkward, and unreal. Of course, there are liars who revel in their mendacity and don't miss the bats one bit; it's a kind of deficiency. But forlorn, lonesome, awkward, and unreal was how I felt on the day I went to visit my cousin Helen, because of a lie I had told.

“D
O
I
SOUND FUNNY TO YOU
?” I demanded, looking up at Helen. She sat on her porch, spinning silk on her hi-tech spinning wheel, a compact disk the height of her knee. Helen and I are cousins many times removed, but we've always been close, as the two oddballs in a large clan of scientists: Helen went into the arts, while I, of course, am the invisible-beast spotter. For years, we've shared our peculiar ways of seeing things. Helen belongs to a worldwide fiber arts collective called the Fibettes; all around the globe, Fibettes pick sticky cocoons off trees and ship them to other Fibettes, who spin them. Through Helen's
hands pass the silks of many latitudes, to become a single, fine, homespun thread. Except for the modern wheel, my cousin resembles her great-grandmother, a Chippewa-Irish farmer, with black braids down her back, a work-hardened body in a cotton shift, and patient eyes.

“You sound . . . not yourself, Sophie. What's wrong?”

I climbed the porch steps feeling wretched, though it was a lazy July afternoon, and the porch was shaded by a canopy of honeysuckle, pagoda-shaped, fragrant, and loud with floating bees.

“I'd like your advice,” I said, “and I brought you something.” I held out a basketful of Grand Tour cocoons. Helen stopped her treadle action, lifted her worn fingers from the thread, and took the basket, peering in. I put one of the invisible cocoons in her palm, and soon she was plucking them out by touch alone.

“Get me a bushel of these and an emperor,” she smiled. “What's up?” I slumped on the steps, swiping away tears, and confessed how I had lied to my sister Evie when she unearthed an Asian honeybee from the Pleistocene epoch, mysteriously preserved in North America. Because I'd feared for the Keen-Ears' safety if their existence became generally known, I had not revealed that invisible animals turn visible in death, or that Evie's puzzling bee had come to the New World with invisible humans who still farmed its descendants for honey.

Helen listened (patiently, considering the irritating, unnatural voice in which I spoke) and spun. There was
going to be a long stretch of invisibility in her thread, where the Grand Tour cocoons spun out, and I wondered what she'd use it for. In her braids' tips hung some dark, wrapped objects resembling cigars for dolls, and I envied her—artistic, enjoying life, with Truth Bats.

“I had no choice,” I sniffled. “I deliberately misled Evie about those bees. What else could I do? Was I supposed to open the door to genocide? So I lied. My bats disappeared. All my life I've had Truth Bats. Now they're gone, and anything I say, like ‘all my life I've had Truth Bats'—it doesn't
sound
true. It sounds like I don't know what. Helen, you know, the bats are not even comfortable with social fibs, and I've gone and told a
big
lie to my sister. That doesn't sound true either. God, I want my bats back!”

“Poor old God,” Helen murmured, guiding her evolving thread. “Well. What will bring your bats back?”

“Telling Evie the truth. Until I do, my voice is polluted by deceptive stress,” I explained with unnerving glibness.

“Then tell. Trust Evie. Don't you trust your sister?”

“She has an obligation to science.” Helen tut-tutted as if the ambiguous ethics of scientific research were a minor tangle in her skein. Her voice, I noted wistfully, was mild, full, and wholesome as sweetgrass.

“Sophie, in your shoes, I would figure it this way. I would rather get back my bats, and have Evie find out about the Keen-Ears, than live with a lie and wait for some unknown person to discover them. You know it will come. You can't hide a natural fact.” She licked her thumbs
to feel the invisible thread as it passed through them. I threw back my head, inhaled the honeysuckle scent, and shut my eyes. After a while, the purr of the spinning wheel paused and Helen said, “Why don't you go down to the barn and call her now?”

A
FTER
I'
D CALLED
E
VIE
from Helen's barn, I ran up the porch steps, and my cousin rose to hug me. My joints were trembling as if I'd dropped a loaded barbell, but I had no time to linger. My sister, grasping only that I had urgent business, had said to drop by now, while she had an opportune moment. Helen wished me good luck. As I drove into town and hunted for a parking space around Evie's campus, I rehearsed aloud phrases of apology and ethical pleas, all of which sounded like excuses and false promises; they left me feeling vaguely felonious as I trotted down the corridors of the Life Science Center, through the noise mix of freezers and centrifuges, past office doors, laboratories, and the absentminded or cordial faces of Evie's colleagues and students. I found Evie in a small workroom adjacent to her main lab.

“Come in,” she said. “Let's talk while I feed the Worm.”

Entering, my nostrils contracted. The dim room smelled of mold, with substenches that evoked thoughts of continents passing through the guts of earthworms. Around the walls, floor to ceiling, ran shiny brown tubing like a coiled snakeskin: this was the Worm. If you uncoiled
it, you'd have a torus—a donut-shaped tube filled with silts, clays, sands, loams, and small wildlife: bacteria, fungi, nematodes. The Worm helped Evie to experiment with soil gases. Its “skin” was her invention, a polymer sheath containing molecular valves and electronic sensors. As soil gases within hit the valves, thumbtack-sized “scales” covering the Worm changed attitude, like ailerons, so that segments of it bristled or lay smooth, in recognizable patterns. Meanwhile, the sensors, through remote pickups, fed blooms of data into a digital console, where my sister sat dangling her short legs from an ergonomic stool. In the artificial twilight, Evie's white lab coat was an eerie noncolor that reached behind my eyes. Wielding an automatic pipette, she squirted ingredients through a filtering lid into a large glass retort filled with nutrient slurry.

“Evie,” I declared, “I have an apology to make, and an explanation.”

“Oh?” said Evie. “Shoot.” While I had my say (sounding much like an inflight announcement of unavoidable delays) she completed her mixture, discarded the filter, screwed the lid tighter on the retort, and set it on a magnetic stirrer. The slurry began to form a sluggish vortex, and the magnet at the retort's bottom, unseen, made repetitive whacking sounds. After I'd finished talking, Evie turned to me with a bright smile of affection.

“No problem, I'm glad you told me all this. You're sweet.”

For a few moments, I watched my sister's precise
movements as she checked the output of dials and LED displays. Then I asked, “What are you going to do with the information I just gave you?” (The question had a distinct soap-opera tone.)

“Nothing,” Evie said.

My thoughts were, to put it mildly, in disarray. I should have been relieved that the first impulse of Evie, and through her, science, was not to spring with full force upon the Keen-Ears . . . Yet, riffling mentally through the images that had driven me to lie—slain Keen-Ears roped to hunters' trucks, caged Keen-Ears in military labs, their bees scattered in dying colonies—I felt, instead of relief, shock; and as it passed, hopelessness. Ironically enough, my life was premised on the belief that science would someday take over the study of invisible animals. I'd always assumed that this transition would happen, in a vague green future. It had to happen, that was the premise. Someday, somehow, nations would be wiser, and invisible animals would be studied. But if Evie thought nothing of my information—
nothing
—where did that leave my work and the meaning of my life?

“But,” I said, in a tone so strange that my sister stopped her activities and drew her sandy brows together.

“But what.” Evie's emotions were simple, like four colored stripes: warmth, self-regard, impatience, and curiosity. Right now I was seeing the middle two in her eyes, like half a plaid.

“I gave you the key to researching invisible animals,” I
said. “It doesn't seem to have registered. Do you think I'm telling fairy tales?”

“Oh, come
on
.” One stripe, impatience, glinting. “I don't deserve this. When did I call ever them ‘fairy tales'? When did I
ever
not make time to talk with you and give you information?”

I rubbed my face, in a sad muddle. Evie was right—whether from our family tradition of tolerance toward the invisible-beast spotter, or sisterly affection, or both, she had always given me her best professional guesses about invisible beasts. She spoke sincerely, I knew, because in her coat pocket's corner, beside a pair of latex gloves, hung four Truth Bats who must have felt exactly like balls of lint. I apologized again, this time for having doubted her open-mindedness, and my sister—the gold stripe of warmth flashing from her hazel eyes—told me to forget it, shaking her bangs (impatiently) as I made to rise.

“Sit down, sit! I never see you, Soph. You could be invisible yourself.” I obeyed. My sister tore the wrapper from a sterile nozzle, twisted it into the retort's lid, popped the nozzle into the pump that supplied the Worm, and began pouring in nutrient slurry. Her students had decorated the Worm's pump to resemble the dragon's head in a Chinese New Year parade; its red tongue lolled at Evie, tipping slurry down its throat, like the Hound of the Baskervilles being shown a T-bone steak.