Lovelock (24 page)

Thanks to the things I learned while tracking Peter’s little bee animation, it was no trouble at all to discover that Liz had indeed opened the message from Carol Jeanne within moments after she received it. That had to mean she was already on the computer at the time and so heard the tone that signaled the arrival of mail. What was she doing? Why, she was reading another message which she had opened only moments before. A message from Red.

I scanned her whole correspondence record for the day and discovered that Red had already sent Liz one message early in the morning before church, and then two messages right after his quarrel with Carol Jeanne. Liz had answered all of them almost as soon as they were sent. But then came Carol Jeanne’s message.

Red would have erased all his messages—he knows the computers in the house can’t keep secrets from Pink or me. But Liz had erased nothing. I read the whole correspondence. Red’s and Liz’s morning messages were damning evidence—along the lines of, Oh my darling how I wish I could have awoken in your sweet arms and it drives me mad to remember how it feels to have your breasts/manhood pressed against my chest/loins. The after-the-quarrel messages were much more therapeutic, but no less disloyal, with Red pouring out his frustration with his cold, unloving wife who can’t see anything more important in life than her own work and she cares nothing at all for the life that her family has to live in Mayflower and if I had known how passionless my life would be I would have chosen a different woman to be the mother of my children but in those days she was a different person and she had time for love and caring but those days are gone. Liz, for her part, was all You poor dear and I understand.

Then came the panicked message—Red, darling, she just sent
me
a message. She wants to talk to
me
what will I
do?

And the answer: Talk to her of course. Try to help her understand that she needs to put her family first. That she needs to take some role in the life of the village. Heck, I’ll even do the
work
if she’ll just take some kind of position so the embarrassment will end.

I could hardly believe this. If Red had said anything half this strong to his mother about
her
need to take a job, his father might still be living at home. But apparently he only had such wisdom and good advice for his wife.

I wanted to kill Liz. I wanted to kill Red. I wanted to rush to Carol Jeanne and lay before her the evidence of their perfidy.

And then I thought: Will that make Carol Jeanne happy? Will it make her more effective in her work?

But she would want to know. Carol Jeanne was not the kind of woman who would want to be deceived.

I knew this, and yet I still felt this driving impulse: Will this make her more effective in her work?

This situation had never come up before. Until now, Carol Jeanne’s interests always coincided with the promotion of her career. But at this moment, what Carol Jeanne would want—to know the truth about her husband and her “friend”—would tear her apart, which would doubtless make her completely useless at work for days, perhaps weeks.

And at this moment, what was my deep, inmost conditioning telling me to do? To give preference to
what was good for her work
.

Giving her a witness had been valuable, yes. But I was not programmed to be her friend. I was programmed to help keep her productive. I was an agent of the authorities. I was a Trojan horse and never suspected it.

And here I thought I was
her
slave. Turns out that we’re all slaves to somebody, aren’t we, Carol Jeanne?

Well, she had consented to it, hadn’t she? Whatever they did to me, she had gone along with it from the start. I was just a machine to her. So if my programming told me not to tell her the truth, why not just go along? What did I really owe to her? Had she ever been my friend?

A part of me answered, Carol Jeanne
needs
a friend right now, since the one she has, Liz, is betraying her.

But was that the part of me that was making the decisions?

I went to see Stef.

Carol Jeanne was taking a nap, and I was free. I went out the bathroom window and dropped down into the tube and rode to the residential area where Stef had his new bachelor’s quarters. He let me in, immediately hiding his surprise at seeing me.

“Couldn’t Carol Jeanne come herself?” he asked.

Of course I couldn’t answer until I had access to his computer, which wasn’t even connected. Why should it be? Stef wasn’t tied to the intellectual life of the Ark the way Carol Jeanne was. Computer programs weren’t an important part of his world. He was of another time.

As Stef hooked up his computer, I inspected his quarters. He and the few other singles had been housed in makeshift apartments in the area that would house everyone on the Ark during changeover and launch. When the Ark had been designed, its creators had envisioned men and women boarding it two by two, like giraffes. No one had ever thought that a giraffe might rebel against its mate and elect to go forward as a single entity. It was only when the strain of Ark life started causing marriages to shatter that the singles’ quarters had been erected. Large common rooms were partitioned into tiny studio apartments that were barely worthy of being called home. The apartment was cramped almost as if by design. Perhaps the humans who created the singles’ quarters hoped that the closed environment would inspire their occupants to sally forth, finding new mates and once again moving into the larger Ark community.

But Stef’s room didn’t look like temporary housing. I could easily imagine that he intended to remain hidden away in this small bunker for the rest of his life. Looking around his spare room I saw homely touches. Books were left lying open, some of them even dogeared. Mamie would never have permitted such sloppiness—everything had to be put away, or at least everything of Stef’s. His shoes had been kicked off into a corner of the room and he was in his stocking feet—another unthinkable act. He was free at last. But such a tiny freedom it was, such pathetic little acts of rebellion he now allowed himself.

Except they weren’t acts of rebellion, were they? They were simply natural human actions without any reference to Mamie at all. His servitude was over. When he kicked off his shoes, it wasn’t to rebel against her. It was because he didn’t want his shoes on and there was no particular reason to put them neatly away. Someday I would be free like that.

When his computer was running, I hopped up and logged in, then pulled up a memo screen and wrote to him.

“Carol Jeanne doesn’t know I’m here.”

He looked surprised. “I thought you were…tied to her.”

“She’s having trouble at home. Mamie and Red.”

He hooted. “Poor Carol Jeanne. Well, I set the example, if she has the courage to follow it.”

“Is your solution the best for everyone?” I wrote.

“No, of course not,” he said. He looked annoyed. “What does any of this have to do with me? I’m divorcing Mamie—she’ll get the official notice of it tomorrow. I rather imagine she’ll get custody of Red, so I’m not really Carol Jeanne’s father-in-law anymore. If I ever was.”

“You’re still Emmy’s and Lydia’s grandfather,” I wrote.

“Oh, I’m
sure
they’ll grow up with a great deal of love and understanding for
me
. Mamie will see to
that
.”

“Do you only love the people who love you back?” I wrote.

“Did they program you to be a self-righteous asshole?” he asked me.

“No, I’m a volunteer,” I wrote.

He laughed and sat down on the edge of his bed. He could still see the screen. “All right, yes, I still love my grandkids even if they
do
remind me too much of their grandmother. And I love my son, even if he lets Mamie run him around on the end of a stick. He had my example to follow, didn’t he? So what are you here for, Lovelock? What’s the game?”

“Red is having an affair.”

Stef took that in silence for a while. Then he said, “The little shit.”

“I can’t tell Carol Jeanne,” I wrote.

“Oh, and I’m supposed to? No thanks, Lovelock.”

“She needs to know that she can’t trust the woman she thinks is her best friend. Liz. Do you remember her?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“All you need to do is raise the suspicion in Carol Jeanne’s mind. So she won’t open her heart to this woman anymore. Can’t you do that much?”

“Why did you think of
me
?” asked Stef. “What did I ever do to make you think I could do something subtle and clever with a woman?”

“Who else but you?” I wrote.

He thought about that. “I’ll try. If you can get her to come to me, or send me a message, or something.”

“I can’t,” I wrote.

“Well shit then,” he said. He thought some more. “OK, I’ll send her a message. Telling her about the divorce so she can prepare the children. How’s that? And in the message I’ll drop some hint about Red and how she should tend to her own backyard, too.”

I wrote: “Mention that Red is sometimes tempted to get involved with some of his love-starved, emotionally needy patients. Liz fits the description.”

“Red never talks to me about things like that.”

“She won’t know that,” I wrote. “Do it, so she has a shot at keeping her marriage together. For your grandchildren’s sake.”

“You manipulative little son-of-a-monkey.”

“No, I’m a son-of-a-test-tube.”

“Yeah, I’ll do it.”

I logged off and watched him as he wrote his message. It was good, it was clear, it would do the job. “OK?” he asked me.

I nodded. Then, on impulse, I jumped up onto the desk in front of him and held out my hand. With only the slightest hesitation, he took it and shook hands with me. Like a man.

Carol Jeanne must have awoken and received the message before I got back, because she already had a haunted look on her face and she was surly with me. Yet the message had the effect I wanted. She had made the connection between Stef’s remarks about love-starved, emotionally needy patients and Liz. She was worried now about keeping her marriage together, not just smoothing over a quarrel about involvement in the life of Mayflower.

I had to know how things were going to work out, didn’t I? So I hid in their bedroom, under the bed.

Sure enough, Carol Jeanne broke the silence between them. It was abject. I was humiliated for her. She apologized to him as if everything were her fault. She told him that she was sorry she had been so caught up in her work that she hadn’t given him the love and affection he needed. She told him that she realized now how important the life of Mayflower was for him, and that she had asked Penelope for a position they could do together. And then she blew me away.

“Red,” she said, “the colony is going to need more children, and we’ve made some rather splendid ones together, haven’t we?”

That was a matter for some debate, I thought.

“Red, it’s the right time of the month for me. Let’s make another baby.”

They went through the rigmarole of foreplay and all of that, but I didn’t care. I was just lying there under the bed, thinking, She’s going to try to bring another child into the world just so she can hold on to her husband. What a miserable, stupid thing to do. What if it doesn’t work? What do you do with the kid then? And yet I knew that from time immemorial, people—even people reputed to be intelligent—had been doing exactly the same thing, over and over.

What really galled me was not any concern about the kid they might make together, I’ll tell you that right now. What stuck in my craw was that when she was worried and upset she could get laid—and Red was good at relaxing her, I’ll give him
that
. But I couldn’t. Carol Jeanne was trying to fix her marriage by doing the very thing that I was most deeply prohibited from doing. It really pissed me off.

I wanted nothing more, in that moment, than to be able to have sex. Not because I was feeling any lust, or had an estrous female to mount, or anything rational like that. I wanted sex specifically because I had been forbidden to do it.

I grabbed myself as I had done that terrible night and started to arouse myself, and of course at once I was swept by as much pain as if—no, more agony than if Carol Jeanne had used the painword on me. It was all I could do to keep from crying out.

Why not cry out? That would stop Carol Jeanne and Red in their tracks, wouldn’t it, to find out I was under the bed! But no, I mustn’t do anything to interfere with
their
pleasure, must I. I had to let them get it on because my whole purpose in life was to keep Carol Jeanne happy…happy and
productive
. I guess making a baby would be included in
that
idea, wouldn’t it.

Then, in one glorious moment of enlightenment, I realized how I might be able to overcome my conditioning against sexual pleasure. Arousing myself caused pain, but thinking about giving happiness or pleasure or contentment to Carol Jeanne had been programmed to be my greatest source of joy. If I thought of pleasing Carol Jeanne while I masturbated, I might be able to use one aspect of my programming to defeat another.

Taking a deep breath for courage, I thought, not of mating with a fellow capuchin, but of what was going on between the humans on the bed above me. I imagined that I was giving pleasure to the human I had been programmed to love, and therefore
did
love. I reached down to touch my erection, and yes, pain did sweep over me like a wave, but it wasn’t as terrible as it had been before. I could bear it, and besides, there in the background, in the shadows of the pain, there was also sexual pleasure. For the first time in my life, I caught a glimmer of what that might feel like.

I not only didn’t lose consciousness, I also maintained my sexual arousal. Maintained it, increased it, by picturing them on the bed above me, picturing myself jammed into Carol Jeanne and filling her with myself, my seed, my hunger, my will to dominate, my desire to please her. At last my generative organ leapt in my hand even as I doubled over in agony.