Lovelock (13 page)

On
his
shoulder was an apricot-colored cockatoo, his witness. A cockatoo was a good choice for a witness, I soon learned—as good in his own way as a monkey. His claws weren’t as flexible as my hands, of course, but he was dexterous enough to be able to operate a simplified computer quite rapidly. And he had one talent that I would have given up a thumb for: power of speech. His enhanced voice was birdlike, of course, but he was no imitative parrot. He spoke as intelligently as I would have if I had been able to talk. I envied him; at the same time, I liked him. Equally important, I liked a man who was practical enough to choose such a useful witness.

The stranger carried a coconut in his left hand and a machete in his right. Bowing low, he set the coconut on the floor of Carol Jeanne’s office and, before she could protest, he sliced the coconut in half with a deft stroke of the machete. One coconut half landed upside-down, and he wiped up spilled milk with a handkerchief he produced from his pocket. An errant shard had flown across the room, and the cockatoo took flight to retrieve it. He picked it up off a desk with one claw, balancing on the other as he pulled coconut meat from the shell with his beak.

The other coconut half remained upright and full of milk. The stranger held out that half to Carol Jeanne, who accepted the offering in bafflement.

“What is
this
?”

“This is the ceremony of the coconut—my means of welcoming you here. I am Neeraj Bhushan, chief xenobiologist.”

“Yes, I know your work. I didn’t realize that you also had a thing with machetes and coconuts.”

He laughed lightly, as if her words had been a joke instead of a jab. “Back in India I would have thrown the coconut to the floor to break it. Here the coconut only bounces. Welcome to the Ark.”

Carol Jeanne didn’t return his smile. She glared at him for a moment before setting the coconut half on her desk. “I don’t
like
coconut,” she said. She liked it well enough. She was lying to show her displeasure.

He apparently was oblivious to complaint. “No matter. Ramanujan will eat it. The welcome is the important thing. I trust you had a safe journey.”

“I’m
here
. Anything that goes seriously wrong in space kills you.”

“So I see.” He reached up and caught my eye, and his smile widened. He bowed his head in greeting to me before returning his attention to Carol Jeanne. “A witness with hands. I was so torn, choosing between a witness with a voice and one with hands. Does he find his speechlessness an inconvenience?”

He moved his fingers in an incomprehensible mishmash of signs that were directed at me. I automatically recorded his gestures; later, when I looked up tables of sign language, I was able to interpret them. “Hello, friend,” his hands said. “I will enjoy working side by side with you.”

Neeraj was the first human being who treated me as an equal, but because I had not been taught Ameslan, I didn’t recognize the kindness that he offered. Instead I extended my hands, palms up, in the universal human gesture that means “I don’t understand you.” That is, when it doesn’t mean “I’m stupider than you think.”

“I don’t use sign language with him,” Carol Jeanne explained. There was a touch of impatience in her voice. “He understands everything I say, and he can write up his reports and point things out on the computer. If he could speak, he’d be chattering to me all the time and I’d have to keep looking at him to understand what he was saying and then I couldn’t be doing anything else, could I?”

I had never heard her explain this before. I had been kept from learning sign language because I might talk too much? Well, pardon me. The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me that she felt that way. Didn’t it occur to her that perhaps
I
might want to be able to speak and have someone understand me?

“I know,” said Neeraj. “At the training center they discourage new owners from trying to work with sign language. But I thought all their reasoning was specious, didn’t you? I suspect that the real reason they don’t want the witnesses with hands using sign language is because then there would be no way to distinguish them from mute humans. And if they are indistinguishable from mute humans, how are we entitled to treat them as slaves?”

I felt the stiffening of the muscles in her shoulders. Carol Jeanne was angry. But why, I wondered? He hadn’t said anything against
her
. Besides, I wasn’t her slave. I was her friend.

A friend that she had decided to deprive of speech because it might annoy her. Suddenly
I
was angry, and to a degree that took me by surprise.

“That is absurd,” said Carol Jeanne. “Enhanced animals are hardly slaves. Whatever extra capabilities they have been given, they were given in order to serve particular functions. Like shoeing a horse to make it a better beast of burden.”

Neeraj smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes, I am aware of this line of reasoning, and it has many constituents.”

I might have detected the glint of irony in his voice, had I not been fixated on the phrase “beast of burden.”

“Besides, Neeraj,” said Carol Jeanne, “I never had time to learn Ameslan.
Your
witness speaks aloud, so I can’t imagine why
you
bothered to learn it.”

“I had a deaf colleague for several years, and I found that she had more interesting things to say than any of the people I knew who had voices. So I was well rewarded for learning to sign. Perhaps your witness—what is his name?”

“Lovelock.”

“Ah—yours is named after a scientist and mine after a mathematician. Perhaps your Lovelock would be a charming conversationalist as well.”

She laughed. “He throws dung, Neeraj. That is eloquent enough that speech would be gilding the lily.”

For a moment I was overwhelmed by rage. I leapt from her shoulder to the top of a file cabinet, and at once felt myself squeezing out a small turd. I caught it in my hand, and only then did I realize that my anger was directed at Carol Jeanne. At my friend.

No, my master.

The person I loved best in all the world.

My owner.

It didn’t matter which she was. I couldn’t possibly throw a turd at her. My conditioning was against it, for one thing. And I loved her desperately and was deeply ashamed of having let myself even contemplate doing such a derisive, offensive thing to her.

And yet my anger toward her was unabated.

So I jumped from the file cabinet down onto her desk, and gently laid the turd into the middle of the pool of milk in the middle of her coconut half.

“Lovelock, that was disgusting,” she said. “Now no one can drink the milk.”

“Such a pity he can’t talk,” said Neeraj.

I looked up at him. For a moment, Neeraj’s merry face looked sad. Then he smiled at me. “I will communicate with you, Lovelock, according to your custom. But someday I would love to understand your sense of humor. I have a feeling that the turd in the coconut is a punchline of some kind, and I regret that I didn’t get the joke.”

I liked Neeraj already. I stared into Carol Jeanne’s face, hoping she’d download the scene later and see exactly how much Neeraj’s kindly countenance contrasted with her flared nostrils and down-turned mouth. To emphasize the difference, I stood underneath her giant face and looked up into it. It was a horrible perspective. Carol Jeanne would hate seeing the still of it on her computer screen.

Finally she managed to force a smile at Neeraj. “It was awfully nice of you to greet me, but I do have to get to work. Somebody has made a mess of this office, I’m afraid.”

“So I see. Would you join me for lunch?”

Not in
this
lifetime, I was quite sure. After all, Neeraj had just proven himself to be much more compassionate toward Carol Jeanne’s witness than Carol Jeanne was herself. Not someone she would enjoy spending time with, I was sure.

“Not today,” she said. “I really do have to work. Thank you for welcoming me.” Carol Jeanne escorted him to the door and shut it firmly behind him.

“What a pompous little man!” she said when the two of us were alone.

I glared at her.

Which was fine, since she was glaring at me, too. “Lovelock, you’re supposed to be on my side. That business with the coconut milk made it look as though you agreed with his absurd remarks about witnesses.”

I bobbed my head up and down in agreement. But she was already sinking into her chair, not looking at me. For the first time I realized how often she didn’t even bother to look at me to see my reaction to what she said. I saw how very little she cared about understanding my thoughts and feelings.

Which was as it should be. I was a mere witness;
she
was the genius whose works and words needed to be so constantly recorded. Why should she look at me, to try to understand my wordless words?

Carol Jeanne laughed, oblivious to what I was thinking. “Can you believe a scientist owning a
machete
? And there’s coconut milk splashed
everywhere
. And he’s head xeno; I’ll have to have meetings with him all the time. Here I thought that all the horrible people were in Mayflower village. I’ll have to barricade myself in here, or I’ll end up grabbing his machete to use it on him.”

How could she be so wrong about Neeraj, to think this man was anything like Penelope?

“You organize the files, Lovelock, and I’ll see if the staff has provided me with the reports I asked for before I left Earth. I think I’ll schedule a staff meeting tomorrow, and tell them where to go from here.”

I scrambled over to the computer keyboard and typed: “Not tomorrow. Workday.”

“I forgot. I have a Workday, then a Freeday. Two miserable days trapped in Mayflower doing insignificant things with annoying people, when I have work waiting for me here.”

“Liz,” I typed. “You liked
her
.”

“There’s only one Liz. Everyone else is a Penelope or a Dolores or an Odie Lee.”

“Odie Lee’s dead,” I pointed out.

“Her husband isn’t—and I’m not so sure Odie Lee is, either. Those holo images could play for years. By the time we land on Genesis, there’s going to be a whole generation of people who worship Odie Lee. Probably pray to her and have communion by eating fudge made according to her recipe.”

I rolled onto my back and pantomimed laughing uproariously. It was just like old times. I was her perfect audience. Except that even as I laughed for her, I felt a sick remnant of my anger in the pit of my stomach.

She laughed at my laughter, but then sighed. “It’s going to be a long trip,” she said, but she didn’t look at me for a response. She was already immersed in her role as chief gaiologist and ruler of everything within her reach.

After that we passed the rest of the day wrapped in our own thoughts. Most of the time was spent organizing her office. Carol Jeanne pursued this activity so single-mindedly that she never left her suite—not even to find food for us. She ignored her rumbling stomach and my plaintive looks, unwilling to venture into the hall. Could she really fear Neeraj so much?

But just because she didn’t want to leave didn’t mean I was trapped there. I took a break early in the afternoon and carried the coconut half to the toilet, where I poured out the milk and the turd. Then I rinsed the meat of the coconut and ate it ravenously. It was delicious
—real
food, not that miserable Purina Monkey Chow that was dear lazy Carol Jeanne’s idea of a perfect diet for me, mostly because it could be poured into a bowl. Neeraj must have used part of his weight allotment to bring coconuts with him from Earth, and it really was generous of him to share. If Carol Jeanne wanted to pretend she didn’t like it,
I
didn’t have to go along.

When I was full there was still plenty of coconut left. I brought it back to her office and put it at the back of one of the more lightly loaded file drawers. Carol Jeanne looked up only long enough to say, “Don’t forget you put that there. I don’t want it to rot in there and start to smell.”

But I wouldn’t forget. I’d eat it all, and not share any of it with her.

The day ended slowly. Carol Jeanne stayed after the others went home, only leaving when the voices in the hallway had died. I didn’t know whether she was avoiding seeing any of them or was simply reluctant to return to Mayflower.

We took the tube to Mayflower. People looked at us discreetly, staring when they thought we wouldn’t notice, but of course I noticed. They’d be used to us soon enough.

When we arrived home, we were late enough that our welcome was less than cheerful. Red must have got back from work early—how many clients could he have on his first day in the therapy biz here on the Ark?—and was on the larger sofa, reading
The Little Engine That Could
to Emmy and Lydia. The girls barely looked up when Carol Jeanne opened the door, and Red didn’t glance away from the pages of the book to smile at his wife. Not that he needed to look at the book. The girls had made him read it so often that he must have had the wretched book memorized by now.

Red might have been silent about Carol Jeanne’s late return from her first day at work, but Mamie was not shy about speaking up. “Here’s the queen of the Ark,” she said, “back off the throne to visit the peons. How
good
of you to come.”

But Carol Jeanne did not rise to the bait, except jokingly. “It
was
good of me, wasn’t it? Tell me—if I’m the queen, can I sit here and let you wait on me?”

“I
did
wait on you all day,” Mamie said. “I fed your children and dressed them and
baby
-sat them, too, because their mother left them without anyone to care for them.”

“We’ll figure out the day-care situation soon,” Carol Jeanne said. “And in the meantime I left them with two adults. They were hardly unsupervised.”

“Oh, of course,” said Mamie. “Why don’t we just put the children in cold storage during the day?”

“In case anyone cares,” said Red, “I found out that the preschool is over at the church. They can start on Tenday.”

“I
hate
preschool,” Lydia said. Her voice was as cold as Mamie’s. “I’m
not
going back.”