Lovelock (34 page)

So all through the funeral, I kept thinking of Faith’s body in the coffin. Much of what they said applied to her—ironically, bitterly. And when the minister talked about hope of the resurrection, I yearned to be able to weep. But it wasn’t in my physical vocabulary. Hope of the resurrection. If there was a God, if Jesus really did raise the dead as these people said, what hope of resurrection would there be for Faith? She was only an animal. She had never had a soul. Not by any theology
I
had ever heard of.

And I had the insane thought: What will I tell my children? That death is the end? That there is no soul? Never mind that any hope of having children was definitely on hold right now. I could only think that it was the fact of intentional burial with food bowls and weapons that was taken as a sign of real sentience in prehistoric humans. You know that someone is intelligent when he believes that there’s a life after death. Which suggested something rather unfortunate about the agnosticism of science. But not really; even those who denied the literal existence of the soul nevertheless had to live as if there were one. As if life mattered. As if individual humans had a free will that was not the product of genes and upbringing. You can have whatever opinion you like on the matter, but if you’re going to live with other people in a community you have to believe that all individuals are volitional, and when it comes down to it, that means a soul, or something like it. Something that could be judged in moral terms; something precious, that had to be respected. It was the very fact that they did
not
think of me that way, that they implicitly denied my soul, that had burned in me so long.

Maybe the soul is nothing but other people’s belief in you as a moral being. Maybe it’s just a creation of the community, which becomes real only when other people believe in it. Maybe when, someday, people begin to believe that
I
am a moral being, capable of being judged and worthy of respect, I will actually get a soul for the first time. I wonder what it will feel like. Maybe I won’t notice it at all. But I will teach my children that there is something in them that is more than a mere organism. Something that chooses freely what to do, what to become, what to create, what to destroy. And because I believe in their souls, maybe they will have them. And they will believe in mine, and so I will have a soul whether any humans believe in it or not.

What children? What children ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever

So I sat there on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder at the funeral, feeling her stiffen as flaming hypocrites like Penelope “spread the word” about a man they had slandered or ignored in life. And I tried very hard to believe in Faith’s soul, so that perhaps she would have one. A posthumous sort of immortality.

At the end of the service, I wrote Carol Jeanne a note. “Want to follow body to recycling,” it said.

“Isn’t that a little morbid?” she asked.

“Yes,” I wrote. “Please.”

She looked at me oddly, but then nodded.

There was no further service after the funeral—no displays of his handiwork, I’m happy to say. No big dinner, either—there was no time for that. There were workmen ready to deflate the meetinghouse as soon as everyone was out of it. Most people were already living in the cramped launch quarters, double-bunked, because their houses were now deflated and rolled up in warehouses.

I rode on top of the coffin as a guy from recycling pushed the cart to an elevator and on down into the corridor leading to the recycling center. I didn’t pay much attention to him. All I could think about was that I had to watch for my chance to snatch Faith’s body out when he wasn’t looking and get it into the chemical bath that dissolved off all the hair and fleshy parts and whatever organs hadn’t already been salvaged for the transplant banks. Then more chemicals were added and the bones also dissolved. Nobody examined the contents of the bath until the entire process was complete. Once her body was in there, I was safe.

If he thought it was odd to have me along for the ride, he didn’t give a sign of it. Didn’t talk to me. That was all right. A lot of people were shy with witnesses, because they knew that we recorded everything that we saw and heard.

The recycling room wasn’t large. The chemical bath was about two meters long and a meter wide—pretty much the size it needed to be. It could be closed and sealed during the process of dissolving the body, so that it wouldn’t matter when the orientation of the room changed during launch. In fact, the bath was against the correct wall, was exactly as tall as it was wide, and—yes, as I guessed—it could be opened from the front when the ship reoriented and what was now the front became the top. Very good design. Stef and Faith would go in one way, but when the bath was reopened to draw out the chemical soup in which all their basic elements would be recycled, it would be through another door. There was something deeply symbolic in that, I was sure, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it might be symbolic
of
.

The recycling guy was standing there, looking at me. I realized that he wanted me to get off the coffin so he could open it. Well, say something, why don’t you?
I’m
the mute, not you, buddy.

Wordlessly I got off and watched from a table as he opened both lids of the coffin and then dropped its front wall, too, so that Stef’s body could be rolled off and dropped into the chemical bath.

With a sigh, the recycling guy took off his funeral suit and put on a pair of watertight coveralls and a lightweight full-head helmet with a plastic mask. I was so fascinated watching his precautions to avoid getting any of the chemicals splashed on him that I didn’t realize that I was letting my only chance pass me by. And in fact it wasn’t really a chance at all, because he was facing Stef’s body the entire time, perfectly able to see anything I might do. Besides which it occurred to me that if he was going through these precautions to avoid getting any of this stuff splashed on him, it must be pretty potent stuff. What were the chances I could toss Faith’s body into the mix without getting any of it on me?

So from my perch on the table, I watched in horrified fascination as he came over to Stef’s body and, without so much as taking off the shirt and tie, began to roll it off into the bath. For a moment I hoped that somehow Faith’s body might be pinned between Stef’s legs so that she would be carried into the bath along with him and he wouldn’t even notice, or if he thought he saw something it would be too late to examine it.

No such luck. He rolled Stef’s corpse into the bath. The liquid was fairly viscous and splashed very little—none of it reached the table where I was, though some did get on his coveralls and face mask, since he was so close. Still, I instinctively turned away to protect my eyes from the splash—or perhaps because I couldn’t bear to watch the actual moment when Stef’s body was consigned to oblivion—and when I turned back, there it was, Faith’s dark little body, lying alone on the white satin of the coffin.

I wanted to disappear, to flee from the room, to die, to kill him—something. But I did nothing at all. I sat there, frozen. He, too, was immobile for a moment. Then he turned slowly and looked at me.

What could I do? What could I say?

I could speak only with gestures, and the only one I could think of was the truth. I was overcome with grief and shame and despair. I covered my face with my hands and bowed my body.

How long I held that position I don’t know. When I looked up, he was no longer watching me. He was holding Faith’s little body in his hands. He glanced at me, saw that I could see. And then he gently laid her body into the bath, his own gloved hands going well down into the mix so there was no splash at all. A gentle parting. A moment of tenderness. Then he looked at me, bowed his head gently, and walked to the shower to wash the chemicals off his helmet and coveralls before undressing.

Only then did I find myself in control of my body again. I fled the recycling room and returned here, to Carol Jeanne’s office, where her computer, bolted to a desk which is bolted to the floor, remains connected to the network when most others are already in storage for the reorientation of the ship at launch.

I searched for his picture, this recycling worker, and found it among the recycling staff. His name was Roberto “Bêto” Causo, and he was on the Ark because his wife was a top scientist with life support. There was no other information about him, except for raw meaningless facts of birth and education in Salvador, Bahia, Brasil. His entry tests showed him to be a psychologically healthy introvert of above-average intelligence and below-average ambition. None of this meant anything to me. All I knew was that he knew my secret. My life was in his hands. I had no idea what he was going to do, whom he was going to tell.

And yet I also knew, looking into his eyes just before he lowered Faith’s body into the recycling bath, that he would never tell. Somehow this young man, who had never seen me before, had understood that whatever it was that I was doing, it was not his responsibility to stop me, to punish me, to report me. Instead he understood something of my grief and guilt and he chose to be kind.

Could I trust him?

I had no other choice. At any time in the next four years as the Ark journeyed toward our new world, he could decide to tell what he had seen, and in that day I would surely die. Till then, though, I would live.

It was something I never thought possible, that a human being could look at me and see, not a strange or dangerous or even cute little animal, but a person to be pitied or respected or—or whatever, I don’t know. What was his silence on the whole ride to the recycling room? I had thought it was fear of me or a failure to think of me as a sentient being. But perhaps Causo’s silence was something better than that. Respect for my grief. Sensitivity.

I have spent almost every waking moment since then writing and writing. Carol Jeanne is so busy overseeing the storing away of all the other equipment that she hardly notices me. In these days I have filled out the rest of my account. I’ve tried to remember how I felt at any given moment, though I suspect my anger and fear and bitterness have colored everything. But underneath everything there is this constant thread of hope, given to me by this stranger, Causo. Hope that I might not be as utterly alone as I thought.

Perhaps there are human beings I can trust. Perhaps, after launch, I can bring new children out of the freezers—enhanced capuchins this time, my own kind. Not just one this time, but three or four, so they can keep each other company. And instead of a cage high on the wall, perhaps, just perhaps, I can take some human or humans into my confidence. Perhaps I can get some help.

One thing I have learned, for certain. I can’t do it alone. So if I’m going to stake my life one more time on trying to defy the rules and create a free tribe of my own people, I will take the risk of asking for help. Perhaps Causo. Perhaps Neeraj. I don’t know. I’ll watch, I’ll think, I’ll try to find some clever way to sound them out. Whatever it takes, my future children will not have to cower in a lonely cage for their entire lives. If the person or people I confide in are worthy of trust, then my children will thrive in human company, learning human speech by hearing it. I will teach them sign language as well, so they have a way of speaking to me and so I can speak to them, too.

And if the whole enterprise fails because some human could not be trusted, then at least this time I won’t have to take my child’s life. It will be my body that gets lowered into the chemical bath.

It’s time to close this account now. It isn’t complete. There’s a lot that I’ve left out. I’ve been unfair in my depiction of some of these people, Carol Jeanne probably most of all. Isn’t that just too damn bad. It’s not as if I had a lot of time to think about this as I wrote it. It’s how I felt, and that’s as valid a part of the data as any of the objective facts of what happened. If you’re reading this, it’s because I’m dead, so I won’t much care what you think of me. All I care about is that you know how much freedom meant to me, how deeply I longed for the right that you all take for granted: To have a family, to live among my own free people.

Maybe your reaction will be to destroy all your witnesses. Maybe they’d prefer it to lives spent in hopeless captivity.

Or maybe your reaction will be to bring my fellow sapients into a life of freedom, letting them develop their own lives and cultures without shackles.

Or maybe you’ll never read this at all. Maybe someday I will reread this account myself, remembering how fearful and hopeful and ashamed and guilty and angry and bitter I felt at this moment. I will remember, and smile to think of how far I’ve come, with all my plans successful, my people thriving. I will give the command that erases the entire record, as I prepare to lead my people off to a life of freedom in the wilderness of the new world.

We both would like to thank:

Kathryn H. Kidd also recognizes:

Orson Scott Card also recognizes: