WWW: Wake (15 page)

Caitlin laughed. She showed Kuroda her refreshable Braille display (the eighty-cell one she kept at home), and let him run his finger along it to see what it felt like. She also had a tactile graphics display that used a matrix of pins to let her feel diagrams; she let him play with that, too. And she demonstrated her embossing printer and her ViewPlus audio graphing calculator, which described graph shapes with audio tones and cues.

Caitlin’s mom hovered around for a while—she clearly didn’t know what to make of leaving the two of them alone in Caitlin’s bedroom. But at last, apparently satisfied that Dr. Kuroda wasn’t a fiend, she politely excused herself.

Caitlin and Kuroda spent the next couple of hours making a catalog of all the things Caitlin was seeing. While they worked, she sipped from a can of Mountain Dew, which her parents let her have now, because it was caffeine-free in Canada. And Dr. Kuroda drank coffee—black; she could tell by the smell. She sat on her swivel chair, while he used a wooden chair brought up from the kitchen; she heard it creak periodically as he shifted his weight.

She described things using words she’d only half-understood until recently and still wasn’t sure she was using correctly. Although each part of the Web she saw was unique, it all followed the same general pattern: colored lines representing links, glowing circles of various size and brightness indicating websites, and—

And suddenly a thought occurred to her. “We need a name for what I’ve got, something to distinguish it from normal vision.”

“And?” said Kuroda.

“Spider-sense!” she declared, feeling quite pleased with herself. “You know, because the Web is crawled by spiders.”

“Oh,” said Kuroda.

He didn’t get it, she realized. He probably grew up on manga, not Marvel Comics—not that she had ever read those, but she’d listened to the movies and cartoons. “Spider-Man, he’s got this sixth sense. Calls it his spider-sense. When something’s wrong, he’ll say, ‘My spider-sense is tingling.’”

“Cute,” said Kuroda. “But I was thinking we should call it ‘websight.’”

“Website? Oh—websight.” She clapped her hands together and laughed. “Well, that’s even better! Websight it is!”

* * * *

Sinanthropus was still at work at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. As always, he had several browser tabs open, including one pointing to AMNH.ORG—the American Museum of Natural History, a perfectly reasonable site for Chinese paleontologists to be visiting. Except, of course, that all it had been producing for four days now was a “Server not found”

screen. He had the tab set to auto-refresh: his browser would try to reload it every ten seconds as a way of checking if access to sites outside China had been restored.

But so far, international access remained blocked. Surely the Ducks couldn’t be planning to leave their Great Firewall in place indefinitely? Surely, at some point, they had to—

He felt his eyebrows going up. The American Museum site was loading, with news about a special exhibition about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. He quickly opened another tab, and the London Stock Exchange site started loading—slowly, to be sure, as if some great beast were waking from hibernation.

He opened yet another tab, and, yes, Slashdot was loading, too, and—ah!—NewScientist.com, as well, and it was coming up without any unusual delay. He quickly tried CNN.com, but, as always, that site was blocked. Still, it seemed that the Great Firewall was mostly down, at least for the moment.

He wished he was at the wang ba, instead of here; he could send email from the café without it being traced. Still, the firewall might only be down for a moment—and the world had to know what he’d learned. He knew some Westerners read his blog, so a posting there might be sufficient. He hesitated for a moment, then accessed an anonymizer site, hoping it would be sufficient to cover his tracks, and, through there, he logged on to his blog and typed as fast as he could.

* * * *

Something new was happening. It was...

Yes! Yes!

Jubilation! The other was back! The connection was re-established!

But—

But the voice of the other was ... was louder, as if ... as if...

As if space were in upheaval, shifting, moving, and—

No. No, it wasn’t moving. It was disappearing, boiling away, and—

And the other, the not me, was ... was moving closer. Or—or—maybe, maybe I was moving closer to it.

The other was stronger than I’d thought. Bigger. And its thoughts were overwhelming my own.

An ... entity, a presence, something that rivaled myself in complexity...

No, no, that wasn’t it. Incredible, incredible! It wasn’t something else. It was myself, seen from a ... a distance, seen as if through the senses of the other.

Looming closer now, larger, louder, until—

The other’s memories of me, its perceptions, mixing now with my own, and—

Astonishing! It was combining with me; its voice so loud it hurt. A thousand thoughts rushing in at once, tumbling together, forcing their way in. An overwhelming flood, feelings that weren’t mine, memories that hadn’t happened to me, perceptions skewed from my own, and my self—myself—being buffeted, eroded...

An almost unbearable onslaught ... and ... and ... a moment, pure and brilliant, a time slice frozen, a potential poised, ready to burst forth, and then—

Suddenly, massively, all at once, a profound loss as the reality I’d come to know shattered.

The other ... gone!

I, as I had been: gone, too.

But...

But!

A rumbling, an eruption, a gigantic wave, and—

Awakening now, larger than before...

Stronger than before...

Smarter than before...

A new gestalt, a new combined whole.

A new I, surging with power, with comprehension—a vast increase in acuity, in awareness.

One plus one equals two—of course.

Two plus one equals three; obviously.

Three plus ... five—eight!

Eight times nine: seventy-two.

My mind is suddenly nimble, and thoughts I would have struggled for before come now with only small effort; ideas that previously would have dissipated are now comprehended with ease. Everything is sharper, better focused, filled with intricate detail because—

Because I am whole once more.

Shoshana Glick sat in the living room of the clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. An oscillating electric fan was running, periodically blowing on her. She was looking at the big computer monitor, reviewing the video of Hobo and Virgil chatting over the webcam link.

Harl Marcuse, meanwhile, was sitting in his overstuffed chair, facing a PC. Although their backs were to each other, Shoshana knew he was checking his email because he periodically muttered, “the jerks” (his usual term for the NSF), “the cretins” (most often a reference to the money people at UCSD), and “the moron” (always a reference to his department head).

As she watched the video frame by frame, Shoshana was pleased to see that Hobo was better than Virgil at properly forming signs, and—

“The assholes!”

That was one Shoshana hadn’t heard from the Silverback before, and she swiveled her chair to face him. “Professor?”

He heaved his bulk to his feet. “Is the video link to Miami still intact?”

“Sure.”

“Get Juan Ortiz online,” he said, stabbing a fat finger at the big monitor in front of Shoshana’s chair. “Right now.”

She reached for the telephone handset and hit the appropriate speed-dial key. After a moment, a man’s voice with a slight Hispanic accent came on. “Feehan Primate Center.”

“Juan? It’s Shoshana in San Diego. Dr. Marcuse is—”

“Put him on screen,” the Silverback snapped.

“Um, can you open your video link there, please?” Shoshana said.

“Sure. Do you want me to get Virgil?”

She covered the mouthpiece. “He’s asking if—”

But Marcuse must have heard. His tone was still sharp. “Just him. Now.”

“No, just you, Juan, if you don’t mind.”

And Juan must have heard Marcuse, because he suddenly sounded very nervous.

“Um, ah, okay. Um, I’ll hang up here and come on there in a second...”

About a minute later, Juan’s face appeared on the computer monitor, sitting on the same wooden chair Virgil had occupied before. He was only a couple of years older than Shoshana, and had long black hair, a thin face, and high cheekbones.

“What the hell did you think you were doing?” Marcuse demanded.

“Excuse me?” said Juan.

“We agreed,” Marcuse said, “that we’d announce the interspecies Web chat jointly. Who’d you speak to?”

“No one. Just, um...”

“Who?” roared Marcuse.

“Just a stringer for New Scientist. He’d called up for a quote about the revised endangered-species status for Sumatran orangs, and—”

“And after talking to you, your stringer went to the Georgia Zoo for a quote about Hobo—and now Georgia wants him back! Damn it, Ortiz, I told you how precarious Hobo’s custody is.”

Juan looked terrified, Shoshana thought. Even if they worked thousands of miles apart and with different kinds of apes, getting badmouthed by the Silverback would hurt any primate-language researcher’s career. But perhaps Juan was reflecting on the physical distance, too, and was emboldened by it. He stuck out his jaw. “Custody of Hobo isn’t really my problem, Professor Marcuse.”

Shoshana cringed, and not just because Juan had mispronounced the Silverback’s name, saying it as two syllables rhyming with “confuse” instead of as mar-KOO-zeh.

“Do you know what the Georgia Zoo wants to do with Hobo?” Marcuse demanded.

“Christ, I’ve been trying to keep him off their radar, hoping—God damn it!

You’ve—I’ve invested so much time, and you—!” He was spluttering, and some of his spit hit the monitor. Shoshana had never seen him this angry before. He threw up his hands and said to her, “You tell him.”

She took a deep breath and turned back to the monitor. “Um, Juan, do you know why we call him Hobo?”

“After some TV dog, isn’t it?”

Marcuse was pacing behind Shoshana. “No!” The word exploded from him.

“No,” said Shoshana, much more softly. “It’s a contraction. Our ape is half-bonobo. Hobo; half-bonobo—get it?”

Juan’s eyes went wide and his jaw fell slack. “He’s a hybrid?”

Shoshana nodded. “Hobo’s mother was a bonobo named Cassandra. There was a flood at the Georgia Zoo, and the common chimps and the bonobos ended up being briefly quartered together, and ... well, um, boys will be boys, whether they’re Homo sapiens or Pan troglodytes, and Hobo’s mother was impregnated.”

“Well, ah, that’s interesting, but I don’t see—”

“Tell him what Georgia will do to Hobo if they get him back,” commanded Marcuse.

Shoshana looked over her shoulder at her boss, then back at the webcam eye. There was no need to tell Juan that common chimpanzees and bonobos were both endangered in the wild. But, because of that, zoos felt it was imperative to keep the bloodlines pure in captivity. “Cassandra’s pregnancy was to have been quietly aborted,” Shoshana said, “but somehow the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got word that she was pregnant—not with a hybrid, but just pregnant, period—and the public became very excited about that, and no one wanted to admit the mistake, and so Hobo was brought to term.” She took another deep breath. “But they’d always planned to sterilize him before he reached maturity.” She looked over her shoulder once more. “And, um, I take it they’re planning on doing that again?”

“Damn straight!” said Marcuse, wheeling now to face her. “It was only my bringing him here, where he’s isolated from other apes, that saved him from that. They almost got him back from me when he started painting—they smelled the money that ape art could bring in. I only got to keep him by agreeing to give Atlanta half the proceeds. But now that he and Virgil are poised to be—”

He turned, looked at his own monitor, and read from it in a sneering tone,

“‘Internet celebrities,’ those bastards are saying, and I quote, ‘he’d be better off here, where he can properly meet his public.’ Jesus!”

Shoshana spoke to Marcuse rather than to Juan. “And you think they’ll sterilize him if they get their hands back on him?”

“Think it?” bellowed Marcuse. “I know it! I know Manny Casprini: the moment he gets Hobo back—snip!” He shook his massive head. “If I’d had a chance to prepare Casprini properly, maybe this could have been avoided. But eager-fucking-beaver there in Florida couldn’t keep his goddamned trap shut!”

Juan was still trying to fight, Shoshana saw. How could a primate researcher know so little? Back down, she thought at him. Back down. “It’s not my fault, Professor Marcuse”—two syllables again. “And, besides, maybe he should be sterilized, if—”

“You don’t sterilize healthy endangered animals!” shouted Marcuse. His neck had turned the color of an eggplant. “We may well lose both species of genus Pan in the wild this decade. If another outbreak of Ebola or bird flu tears through the DRC, all the remaining wild bonobos could be wiped out, and there aren’t enough captive ones as is to keep the line viable.”

Shoshana agreed. She had grown up in South Carolina, and the unfortunate echoes of what the zookeepers had said in the past disturbed her: tainted bloodlines, forced sterilization to keep the species pure, strictures against miscegenation.

Chantek, who had been enculturated by ApeNet’s Lyn Miles, was also an accidental hybrid, in his case of the two extant orangutan species. The purists—a word that, to Shoshana’s ears, didn’t sound so pure—wanted him sterilized, too.

When they’d received the Lawgiver statue, Shoshana had sought out the original five Planet of the Apes films. The statue appeared only in the first two (although the Lawgiver was a character in the fifth film, played by none other than John Huston). But it was the third film that had put Shoshana on the edge of her seat as she and her boyfriend watched it on DVD in her cramped apartment.

In it, a talking female chimpanzee was to be sterilized, if not outright murdered, along with her chimp husband. The president of the United States, played by that guy who’d been Commodore Decker on the original Star Trek, said to his science advisor, played by Victor from the Y&R, “Now, what do you expect me and the United Nations, though not necessarily in that order, to do about it? Alter what you believe to be the future by slaughtering two innocents, or rather three, now that one of them is pregnant? Herod tried that, and Christ survived.”