Lovelock (12 page)

It took me only half an hour to open up the computer, figure out what the chip was doing, sever two of the pins that connected it to the motherboard, and connect them together with a short length of wire I cannibalized from elsewhere in the computer. Now nothing would be routed through their little chip unless I made the computer send it there.

Then I wrote a small program to ride on top of the operating system and feed scrambled keystroke and data information to the parasite chip. It would monitor computer activity, all right—but it would give them no readable information about the content of Carol Jeanne’s activity.

With that job finished, I had to figure out who was doing the spying and make a guess at why. I used the computer to access the Ark photo directory. It took a while, since I had no idea of the name of the man who had done the doctoring job on Carol Jeanne’s computer, and he wasn’t an employee of Materials Management. That in itself was no surprise—Materials Management had a couple of administrators and then relied on duty-hours “volunteers” to do the actual labor. But it meant that I had to look at picture after picture after picture until I found him. Fortunately, I have excellent powers of recognition and I was able to cycle through the directory far faster than any human could have done.

The chip doctor was a man named Pavlos Koundouriotes. His official job title was Assistant to the Director of Physical Fitness Training. That was the department that ran the mandatory exercise program. The whole department was probably a front for the secret police—it would give them a cover and explain why they worked so hard to remain stronger and faster than anybody else. Officially, discipline was handled in each village by two elected constables. But of course the administrator would have to have his own police to watch out for signs of trouble. In a place like the Ark, with so many ethnic groups mixed together, it would be absurd to trust in good will and volunteer constables to keep the peace. Resentments were bound to grow here and there; there would be incidents. The chief administrator had to have somebody keeping watch for plots and troublemakers.

So there was a good chance that the little broadcast chip was not directed against Carol Jeanne in particular, but rather was a routine precaution taken with all the privately owned computers on the Ark. If that was the case, then there was no chance that they would have time to monitor everything that was done on every computer on the Ark. But they might have a program that scanned all the computers they were monitoring to find anomalous patterns—and if Carol Jeanne’s computer seemed to be putting out completely random keystrokes and datafiles, that might call attention to itself.

So I went back into the little program I had written and revised it. Now, instead of randomizing keystrokes and datafiles, it would cause the parasite chip to capture and broadcast excerpts from Carol Jeanne’s published works. It would look like language, and probably wouldn’t flag the alarms in the monitoring program. Until and unless someone specifically looked into Carol Jeanne’s computer activity, she would have privacy.

In the meantime, I’d check the computer every day for the first week to see if my doctoring of their parasite chip had been discovered and tampered with. If the first week was OK, then I’d only check once a week thereafter.

Why did I do this? At the time it couldn’t have occurred to me that I could have any motive but Carol Jeanne’s protection. Yet now I wonder if perhaps I already had an unconscious understanding that sometime in the future my own survival would depend on my being able to use Carol Jeanne’s computer without anyone else knowing what I was doing. There was no earthly reason why Carol Jeanne would ever need to protect herself from the chief administrator’s snoops. The whole expedition depended on her ability to understand the biosystems of the new planet and find a way to fit human society into it without destroying anything crucial. The security forces would do anything to protect her and nothing to interfere with her.
She
would never need the privacy I had created for her.

But
I
would.

I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know anything. And yet I must have known it all. There are depths to me that no one has glimpsed, not even me.

“What is that monkey doing?” demanded Mamie from the doorway. Apparently the furniture had finally been set up to her satisfaction.

“He’s doing a memory dump,” said Red.

She whispered to him, “I have always hated the thought of that
thing
snooping through the house when
we’re
all asleep. Sneaky, prying little dwarf. It has such tiny
hands
.”

Did she think I couldn’t hear her, just because she was talking so softly?

“He’s doing his job,” said Red. “Even for an enhanced capuchin, he’s unusually conscientious. One of the best they ever produced. It was quite a feather in Carol Jeanne’s cap when Lovelock was assigned to her.”

“It keeps touching her,” said Mamie, her voice getting nasty. “Very possessively. Like a lover.”

Red said nothing.

“Like an obscene, filthy, dwarfish, black, mute, vile, satanic lover,” said Mamie.

“Monkeys groom each other,” said Red.

“And pigs rut,” said Mamie. “But I don’t see Pink doing that with
you
.”

“Mother.”

“If I were a man I wouldn’t tolerate that little lucifer touching my wife.”

Lucifer. Light-bringer. A term for an old-fashioned match. What an apt choice of epithet, O thou aging bitch, thought I.

“Mother,” said Red again. “His hearing is very good. He probably hears everything you’re saying.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Mamie.

“And everything he hears, he tells to Carol Jeanne.”

“Then maybe when he tells her this, she’ll realize how disgusting it looks to decent people, to see the way that monkey is with her.”

“Lovelock isn’t her lover,” said Red. “But he watches her all the time. He knows things about her that I’ll never know. So yes, I’m jealous, but not the way you’re thinking. I’m jealous because I can never love and understand my wife as well as her witness can.”

Mamie chuckled grimly. “Since men never understand women in the first place, I’m not surprised.”

“Yes, Mother.”

I could hear the resentment in his voice. She must have said things like this to him all his life, and he didn’t like it—but he also knew enough not to argue with her.

“Men are so cocksure of themselves, but they always run roughshod over women’s tender feelings,” said Mamie. “Your father has never had a moment’s compassion for me. And you’re hardly any better.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mother.” Another ritual phrase.

“I don’t mind,” said Mamie. “It’s a woman’s lot in life. We work and serve our men, and in return we get more and more demands and no understanding.”

He said nothing.

“You always liked her hair long,” said Mamie, resuming the attack on Carol Jeanne. “But she cut it for the monkey.”

“She cut it because Lovelock kept getting his hands tangled in it when he groomed her.”

“The monkey is more important in her life than you are, Red. You pretend not to mind, but I know it bothers you.”

“Go to bed, Mother.” I heard him walk away from her and go into Carol Jeanne’s room.

Immediately I disconnected from the computer and leapt straight toward Mamie, who was still standing in the door. She gave a little screech and backed out into the hall. I ignored her and headed on into Carol Jeanne’s bedroom, where Red was just sliding his shoes off.

Behind me I could hear Mamie muttering—loudly enough that I suspected Red could hear her perfectly well. “It just goes to show you that certain kinds of people are not that far removed from the jungle.”

I slept then, because I was at least as exhausted as anybody else. And I dreamed. I’m sure that my dream was triggered by what Liz had said to Carol Jeanne, about every creature having a hunger to reproduce. I dreamed of myself as a parent, but absurdly enough I saw myself as a
human
parent, with a smooth stupid hairless baby who couldn’t even hold on to my fur. And the baby in my dream was large, so that I couldn’t pick him up, but had to drag him along the ground. And when I climbed a tree and jumped from one branch to another, the baby was so heavy that together we dropped like an overripe fruit; the baby splatted horribly on the concrete floor when we landed. I was surprised that there was concrete in the jungle, but when I looked around it wasn’t a jungle anymore after all, it was a cage, with humans all around me, looking disgusted at the oozing mess that had been my baby. Only now it wasn’t a human baby, it was a little capuchin, and its skull had split open in the fall and it was dead. I felt a terrible grief well up inside me and I kept yanking at the dead baby’s arm, trying to get it to wake up. Finally the thought came to me: This is a really terrible dream, and I really ought to wake up and end it. And so I did.

I was trembling. It had seemed so real. I lay there in my temporary nest among the stacked-up boxes, thinking, What will my child be? Enhanced like me, or simply an ordinary stupid capuchin? How many of the genetic changes they had introduced in me were actually present in my gametes, to be passed on to my children? Did any part of what I am depend on specific
in utero
treatments that caused me to overdevelop in certain ways? I would have to look into this before I sired a child.

And then I came fully awake and realized the absurdity of what I was thinking. A child? What was I thinking of? I was a witness. There was no room in my life to have a child.

No room in my life. But why not? Didn’t every creature have a hunger to reproduce? Even if it
was
only an expression of the species’ will to fill all available space.

Only what
was
my species? I was no monkey, not anymore. As far as I knew, I was one of a kind. And as for having a family, Carol Jeanne was my family. Carol Jeanne is all I need, I said to myself, over and over. But instead of the happiness that normally filled me at the thought of belonging to her, I was overcome for several minutes by an ineffable sadness. I did not understand what was happening to me, but I knew that it would not make me happy, and I wanted it to go away. And, that time, it did.

We arrived in Mayflower on a Sixday. That meant Carol Jeanne would only have Sevenday at work before having her first community workday, which in our case was Eightday, and then Nineday was our household Freeday. So Carol Jeanne would have only a single day among civilized scientists at work before she had to spend two days in a row in the dreary village of Mayflower.

As Sevenday dawned, Carol Jeanne sprang out of bed and fixed generic cold cereal from the cupboard for the few family members who were awake to eat it. Then, clutching a map that had been left us by an anonymous benefactor, she and I escaped the house.

The design of the Ark didn’t allow for penthouse offices. Everything looked alike, contributing to the egalitarian atmosphere. Carol Jeanne’s lab and office suite were no more impressive than those of any of the other scientists aboard the Ark. And for once, Carol Jeanne was treated like a scientist instead of a celebrity. After brief hellos, the other scientists returned to their work as quickly as they could. They knew that they would have plenty of time to talk to Carol Jeanne when their work brought them together. But it was their work they loved, and
her
work they admired her for, and so why not get more of it done? Besides, the rest of them had been working together for months. They had developed their own routines, and Carol Jeanne’s arrival to take the reins would not cause a disruption in their work habits unless she insisted on it. Which was not her style.

Carol Jeanne let herself in at her office door—which
had
a lock in the form of an
I.D.
panel—and inspected the sterile furniture inside. Her office library and paper files had been moved here, just as the furniture in our house had been transported. But some moron had tried to
unpack
Carol Jeanne’s important books and papers, strewing them everywhere, and now it would take her days to put things back in order. Or—and this was pure paranoia on my part—someone had examined all the papers, perhaps had even photographed and inventoried them.

“What a
mess
, Lovelock,” she said angrily. “Why couldn’t they have just left everything in the boxes? Stupid. Well, help me restore my files to their proper order—you’ll remember it better than I will.”

Before we could get well started, someone knocked on the door and then entered immediately, without waiting for Carol Jeanne’s permission. He was short and square and brown. Carol Jeanne wasn’t a tall woman, but she was several centimeters taller than
he
was. Sitting on her shoulder, I could see that his black hair was thinning on top. I could tell he was a vain man: he wore a mustache, a feature whose only functions are to stroke the vanity of the wearer and to catch little droplets of anything he drinks. And his teeth were so white that he could probably flash messages for kilometers using the light reflected off them. But there was a joy in his face and an ebullience in his step and mannerisms that I’ve seen in few humans. I knew at once that he would either be very exciting to have around or else an unbearable bore. Everything depended on whether he was intelligent along with being so happy. In my experience, happiness and intelligence didn’t come together in the same people very often.