Lovelock (26 page)

I found myself making mental speeches to that little chunk of ice in a tube as I carried it through the crawlspaces to the gestation chamber I had chosen. Come on, babe, stay cool, stay cool. We got a date in a few months. Got to get you prettied up for the prom. Got to raise you from a pup till you’re a full-fledged bitch. Oh, if only I had a voice, how clever I would have sounded, chattering away in my nervousness.

But I got to the gestation chamber without mishap and put her smoothly into the incubator I had rewired and reprogrammed. The robot machinery was ready to extract and thaw the embryo, then provide it with nutrients and the proper environment until it was mature enough to pop the bun out of the oven. All untouched by human hands. Or even mine. I closed the door, sealed it, and then told the computer to start. I got one minute of feedback from the computer, telling me that everything was working perfectly. Then, as my program was designed to do, the computer seemed to shut down. There was no visible outward sign that this one was any different from the hundreds of idle incubators. Only if you went around randomly trying to open doors would you find out that
this
door wouldn’t open. In the meantime, if someone tried to open the door I would be notified wherever I was on the network, and I would have to come up with some kind of plan to deal with it. But I wasn’t worried. My protection was that nobody had any reason at all to enter the gestation chambers. They weren’t even cleaned, since the atmosphere there was so perfectly controlled that there wasn’t any dust.

Just whatever monkey hair I shed while putting my baby in the box. Baby, baby, baby, baby, I need your lovin’. Baby I’m-a want you. Come to papa come to papa come to papa do. There had to be something vaguely pathological about that long phase of American pop music in which lovers spoke to each other as if one were a parent wanting to have sex with his or her little child. Sick as it was, with its implications of pederasty and incest, such song lyrics described my situation almost perfectly.

My baby, my girl, my date, my bride, my wife, my chattel, my property, my dumb little monkey bitch, my hope, my only hope, the mother of my offspring—she was in the pot, nine days old, and there was nothing for me to do but pretend to be a normal witness and trust to the machinery to bring my future to pass.

“Delays,” said Neeraj. “They’re having some unnamed trouble with the new network and they won’t even authorize final preparations for launch until they’re resolved.”

Of course I perked up at
that
. Was it possible that the unnamed trouble was my sleeper program? No, not likely.

“Delays are good,” said Carol Jeanne. “When we launch, our deadline becomes firm. We have to hit the ground running, and we don’t even know what the ground is going to be. So I don’t mind having time to come up with alternate strategies.”

“Delays are good for gaiology,” said Neeraj. “But as for my own self, my biological clock is ticking.”

Carol Jeanne laughed. “Men don’t have biological clocks.”

“Yes we do,” said Neeraj. “It requires us to fall in love with fertile women.”

Carol Jeanne fell silent. I knew what this was. This was a continuation of a conversation they had had in my absence.

“Well, there’s no shortage of fertile women,” said Carol Jeanne.

“But the discriminating male chooses the best available genes.”

“He also chooses the most nurturing female to raise the babies.” Obviously she had warned him that she wasn’t the most conscientious of mothers.

“Or perhaps he doesn’t give a damn about his biological clock and has simply fallen in love, mindlessly, hopelessly, with a woman that his parents would never, never have chosen for him, and who would never have chosen him for herself, either.”

“Not now, Neeraj.”

Oh, this was so stupid, her trying to keep this a secret. Did she think that I didn’t know?

So I popped up onto her desk and typed on her computer, “Eyewhay otnay ooze-yay ig-pay atin-Lay?”

She laughed. I liked that sound. It still filled me with pleasure, even then, when I had begun my rebellion in earnest. Such is the power of programmed love.

“Lovelock is telling us that he’s already guessed that there is an emotional connection between us,” Carol Jeanne said.

“I told you that all the subterfuge was unnecessary,” said Neeraj.

“I wasn’t worried about the fact that
he
would guess. I don’t keep secrets from Lovelock. It’s just that when I die…if this didn’t come to anything, Neeraj, I didn’t want it to be on the record.”

“Well now it is,” said Neeraj. “And the people who study our lives won’t be stupid, either, you know. They’ll figure out why there are gaps. So let’s just put it on the record. I want you, tall wop woman, in my life, in my house, in my bed. Whereas you want to be friends, because after all, you have a responsibility to your children, though in fact you don’t spend much time with them and your husband is by far the more nurturing parent. Plus you confess to a weird, perverted desire to miscegenate; a dark Dravidian whose name ends in
J
, mating with a Sicilian-American Princess whose name ends in a vowel.”

“That makes me a SAP,” said Carol Jeanne cheerfully.

“And what does it make
me?
” asked Neeraj. He turned to me. “Lovelock, sometimes I envy you. You get to jump on her shoulder and pluck imaginary lice from her hair whenever you want. You can climb right up her chest, putting hands and feet in territories where I have neither passport nor visa to enter.”

“Don’t talk dirty to my witness, Neeraj,” said Carol Jeanne testily. “For heaven’s sake, just because we’re not trying to hide it from his view anymore doesn’t mean you have to make us look like horny teenagers.”

“Why not?” said Neeraj. “I
am
a horny teenager. I want to get you naked and bounce around on a bed with you. But I’d settle for long embraces and heartfelt conversations far into the night.”

Carol Jeanne was clearly miserable. Neeraj was teasing, yes, but this was obviously a crucial time in their relationship. He was pushing for an answer. That was why he had hinted so broadly about their relationship in front of me, until I made it clear that it was now in the open. He wanted things to change.

And so did Carol Jeanne. “Do you enjoy tormenting me? I haven’t had an exciting moment, not even really a loving moment, in years. I should have backed out as soon as I met his family. I should have known that he would always be another woman’s property. But it was a chance for a…a complete life. How could I have guessed that I would meet
you?
”

“I surprise everybody,” said Neeraj. “I go through life having to see people with startled faces.”

“I’ve told you, Neeraj. If I were no longer married, then I would turn to you. But I’m not going to sabotage my marriage in order to have you. If I betrayed my husband for you, then you would spend the rest of our lives wondering whether I was betraying you for somebody else.”

“So what was that hint from Stef about other women in Red’s life?”

“It wasn’t explicitly an accusation,” she said. “And even if he is having an affair, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the marriage is over. The children need a stable home.”

“I don’t get this double standard,” said Neeraj. “If
he
has an affair, that’s OK, the marriage can still be saved. But
you
can’t have an affair because it would wreck your marriage.”

“It would,” said Carol Jeanne. “Because I can’t lie. He’d know. And he would never forgive me. It would be the end of the marriage.”

“Whereas if
he
is having an affair…”

“It doesn’t matter, Neeraj. Because I’m not the kind of woman who has affairs.”

“That is such pure, highminded-sounding bullshit, my love, my darling, thou object of my erotic imaginations. You are precisely the kind of woman who has affairs—you are miserable with your unloving, disloyal, self-serving, manipulative son-of-a-bitch of a husband, and you are in love with a caring, sensitive, short dark Indian guy who does a great Gandhi imitation.”

“I won’t be the one who breaks up my marriage. And you wouldn’t be happy with an affair, anyway. You want a marriage, too. Find somebody else, Neeraj.”

“Personally,” said Neeraj, “I think Red is a homosexual who only married you because that’s what his mother expected. I think Stef is a homosexual too, who stayed with his loveless marriage because it absolutely fit his definition of what marriage was in the first place.”

“That’s why you’re a gaiologist, Neeraj, instead of a shrink,” said Carol Jeanne.

“Red’s affair right now is probably with a woman, but when his marriage with you finally breaks up—something that he has been longing for from the start, I might add—he will then break
all
restraints and finally have the longed-for relationship of his life—with a man. A very
butch
man, too, I’ll bet.”

“Damn you,” said Carol Jeanne. “This isn’t funny, not in front of Lovelock, Neeraj.”

I typed again. “I think it’s hilarious.”

I also wondered if there might not be some truth behind it. Neeraj had met Red at several department functions. And Neeraj was good at seeing into people. Which is one reason why his passion for Carol Jeanne must have been gratifying to her. He saw through her facade of cool competence and found the woman that Red had never seen. The trouble is, that hot-blooded, passionate, loving woman was not the woman who was in charge of Carol Jeanne’s life. She was still making decisions on the basis of what she thought was right, rather than what she knew she needed.

I rather admired her for that—and I don’t think that was because of my programming. I liked the fact that she was the sort of person who would suffer great personal loss in order to help keep her children’s home and family intact. All the more so because I liked Neeraj. I thought he really would make her happy. And she was turning him away.

“Lovelock thinks you’re a hoot,” said Carol Jeanne. “Perhaps he wants you to swap witnesses with me.”

Neeraj laughed. “Everyone knows that the capuchins are the cream of the cream. You need Lovelock like you need air, and you know it.”

What did he mean? She needed me? For what, the esteem of having a capuchin? Cream of the cream…

“He’s almost a friend,” said Carol Jeanne, stroking my fur.

Neeraj smiled sourly. “Like I’m almost a lover?”

Neeraj understood how a single word could hurt. He even identified with me, for that moment, perched on the verge of something that promised to be glorious, and yet always held back, tethered, unable to leap and fly. Almost a friend. Almost a person. Almost alive. Almost real. But still not.

Well, Carol Jeanne, my dear almost-friend, I’ve got a bun in the oven my own self. I don’t need you and I don’t need Neeraj. I don’t need
humans
. I’ll take what I want from your decadent culture and your self-centered arrogant lives, and then I’ll spit in your faces while my children and I create something new and fine.
We
, at least, will always know that there are other intelligent, valuable species in the world besides ourselves.
We
won’t think that just because we have cleverly defined every other species as “animals” it gives us the right to destroy them, hurt them, ignore them, disdain them.

I’m ranting. Why shouldn’t I? I wanted to rant at the time, but I couldn’t. I simply moved out from under her hand and perched on the edge of her desk, looking off into space. She didn’t even notice I was pissed off, as far as I could tell.

But Neeraj knew. He knew things about people. And he treated me more like a person than any other human. Had he analyzed me the way he analyzed Red? Lovelock is actually a horny little monkey, Carol Jeanne, and my guess is that his own biological clock has induced him to overcome his antisexual programming and steal a female capuchin embryo so he can develop it into a mate. What
else
would you expect from an enhanced capuchin who is being consumed by resentment and a vicious love-hate relationship with his owner?

No. Neeraj can’t see that in me. My face has no expressions
he
knows how to read. He has never lived a day of my life. He keeps a witness himself—if he truly understood me or any other witness, he couldn’t do that. He knows nothing about me. None of them do. None of them ever will.

But I know all about
them
. And I not only have more compassion for human beings than they have for me, but also I have more compassion for them than they have for each other. That’s why, knowing what was happening to the girl Nancy, I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.

Ever since I read her offering that Sunday, I had been trying to think of what I could do to help her. I toyed with sending anonymous computer messages to her father, so he’d know that somebody was on to him. But that ran the double risk of exposing what I was capable of doing with computers and also of causing the father to treat Nancy even worse, since he would assume that she had told somebody. No, I needed to do something that would quickly, simply, efficiently get her out of the man’s house and make sure he was eliminated as a threat to her and any other child.

I researched the applicable laws, and found that the legal code on the Ark was entirely oriented toward protecting the child. A parent convicted of either child abuse or incest would be expelled from the colony if the offense took place before launch. After launch, however, when the ties with Earth were severed, the penalties became much more draconian. This wasn’t in the prospectus, but it made a brutal kind of sense. There were some offenses that simply couldn’t be tolerated in the community, and since there was no way to handle imprisonment or exile, a person convicted of deliberately violating the safety of children would have a choice. He could allow the surgeons on the Ark to perform an operation on the limbic node to cause all libido and aggression functions to cause him excruciating pain. Or he could choose to be put to death.

The operation sounded vaguely familiar, even in the dry legal language of the penal code of the Ark. And when I researched it a little further, I discovered that the operation used as optional punishment for extreme crimes of aggression was one that had first been perfected in the witness program.