Lovelock (29 page)

I understood now why he could look at my situation with such compassion. Untouchability was no longer the same kind of hopeless serfdom that it had once been, but it still gave Neeraj a taste of isolation and undeserved inferiority. He knew what my life might be like. He was at least able to imagine it.

Not that untouchability explained everything about Neeraj. Plenty of people in his situation would have been angry and bitter. Many would have reacted by
insisting
on marrying a Brahmin, just to prove that they were just as good as anybody else. No, Neeraj’s compassion and sensitivity arose from himself. Untouchability had perhaps served as his teacher, but it was not the source of his character.

He smiled grimly. “I did marry, eventually. She was terminally ill and didn’t want to die alone. I needed a wife in order to be allowed to come on the Ark. It was a fair bargain, and we were very good friends until she died. I even loved her, but I was also aware of why she could bear to marry an untouchable—she knew she’d never have to face her family again.” He looked wistfully away from me. “And her condition prevented her from having children.”

The hardest thing for him, apparently, was that he had not been able to reproduce. Surely he could understand my need to have children. For a moment I was tempted to tell him my plan, to ask for his help, so I wouldn’t have to bear the burden entirely alone. But then I came to my senses. He might be kind, perceptive, fair-minded—but he was still a human, and I was not. I could not entrust the precarious future of my species to him.

Now, though, I could answer him without harshness. “I’m an untouchable, too,” I typed. This was as close as I could come to telling him my yearnings. “Yet you have touched me,” I added.

In answer, he groomed my fur again.

Later that day, he came to Carol Jeanne’s office and told her. He was gracious enough to treat it as happy information that he wanted to tell her himself, and not as some serious news that he had to “break” to her. “We’re not doing a big wedding thing,” said Neeraj. “We’re both too old for that. But I imagine rumors will start flying in Mayflower even before we make it legal and I move in to Dolores’s house. So I wanted you to hear the good news from me.” It was his way of explaining that she wouldn’t have to put up with his wedding as a social event in Mayflower, but that he
would
be living there.

“Congratulations,” she said cheerfully. “You need to be married, Neeraj, and I think you’ll be good for those children. They’re so bright, and so lonely.”

His eyes lingered on her for a moment too long. Some remnant of his love for her? I thought not. No, his silent gaze was a substitute for saying the obvious: That Carol Jeanne, too, was so bright, and so lonely. That he would have been good for her, too, if only she had chosen to accept him.

But by marrying him, Dolores was providing her children with a substitute for a father who was already gone. Carol Jeanne would have had to take her children away from a father who was still very much present. There was no analogy. Both Dolores and Carol Jeanne might have been in love, but they also acted for the benefit of their children, as best they understood it.

Carol Jeanne knew all of that. But a few minutes after Neeraj left, she asked me to lock the door. I did. Before I could even turn around, she was crying into her folded arms, leaning across her desk. I sat on her arm and groomed her hair, but I don’t think I was much comfort to her.

My betrothed emerged from the incubator with an attitude. Specifically, an attitude of unrelenting hostility.

I was ready to let the primate cuteness response take over. A tiny-fingered, big-headed, fuzzy, wide-eyed youngling with jug ears and a button nose—I felt a surge of positive emotions as the endorphins in my brain rewarded me for being kind and nurturing toward the cute little tyke.

But my baby capuchin had a chip on her shoulder from the start. It was as if she knew that she was not just illegitimate but illegal, and resented the disadvantages this would cause her. I knew, of course, that such thoughts were really a projection of my worries and fears and feelings of guilt. But she really did seem annoyed at everything I did and didn’t do.

I wasn’t ignorant. I had read the books. But I’m not a female, and so I don’t have a lot of instinct on my side. Primate males are predisposed to protect and play and even, proudly, to provide. But feeding, cuddling—we can do it, but it isn’t with the same inborn ease that females usually bring to it. Plus we don’t have the same urgency to feed the infant that comes from the pressure of milk in the breast, and there’s no pleasure response from suckling. At best I was going to be a substitute for the real thing.

But at least I knew what was needed. And everything worked according to plan. I went through the process of separating her from the umbilicals by the book, and everything went smoothly—as it should have, since, next to life support during the voyage, the gestation chambers were the most vital system on Ark. When I got her out of the fluids, I bathed her and dried her. Of course she cried and fussed in protest, but soon I had her clinging to my fur, which she took to naturally, and I tried to ignore the immediate crawling search for a nipple. Time enough for that at the nest I had made, where formula and water were stockpiled.

It was night, and I made sure to follow the patterns that I had established for my freefall practice. Since I had been smuggling objects up the wall for weeks, it was even easier to carry her, since she clung to me.

I had rigged a room in an area where an array of pipes and electrical conduits crossed over and under each other. Some of the pipes stood almost a foot away from the surface of the wall here, and it had been simple to build a secure structure behind them. It wasn’t as good as human daycare and
way
worse than a careful mother, but I wouldn’t have to worry about the kid falling out and landing wherever the low gee environment allowed her to land. And since the basis of the structure was a heavy-gauge wire box designed for locking dangerous switches or breakers that still had to remain visible, I could see in and she could see out. She would get brightening and darkening that would help establish the rhythms of the day for her. She would get a sense of space. And it was still low enough on the wall that she was getting more than half the gravity effect that we got down near the surface.

The trouble was that we didn’t even get a full gee at the surface, either, and that meant she felt as though she were in orbit from the start. As I climbed to the cage, her grip on my fur got tighter and more frantic. Then, inside the cage, when I pried her off of me and tried to get her to cling to the hugger, she didn’t take it well. She cried and, to my shock,
let go
. She dropped, rather slowly, to the bottom of the nest, and her arms kept jerking around. This is a maladaptive response, I thought. Until I realized that what I was seeing was the startle reflex, over and over and over again. It was hard to distinguish it from a seizure.

I held her again. Now her clinging was even more desperate, and she no longer rooted for a breast. She just hung on, her heart racing.

What could I do? I had already established the nest at the lowest elevation on the wall where it could remain completely hidden. She would
have
to adapt.

I had already mixed the infant formula and soon managed to get the nipple into her mouth. Her sucking was not strong and in her fear she kept forgetting to suck on it. It took an hour before she got even the tiny amount that the book said she should be expected to get so soon after birth.

It was a good thing she wasn’t nursing from me. The hormones of fear and anxiety would have been at intoxicating levels in my milk, if my body had known how to make any. Things had gone so smoothly, too. I just hadn’t counted on the fact that my betrothed might not take to high elevations. She just wasn’t acting as I needed her to act.

And what did I expect? Even if she had been an enhanced capuchin like me, she was still an
infant
. Primates have such big skulls, to hold all those brains, that they have to be born earlier in the brain’s development than lesser animals, so the head can still get through the birth canal without killing the mother. That means that they’re stupider at birth than, say, baby horses, even though they have more mental potential in the long run. An adult monkey, even unenhanced, is quite adaptable to different environments, as long as there’s a recognizable food supply. But she was no adult. Under the stress of low gravity, she needed a parent for constant comfort.

Well, that’s what she got. For about twelve hours. Dangerous as it was to disappear for so long, I stayed with her until she slept, and then when she woke she ate a little better than before. Finally she was calm enough that I could put her on the hugger and she would cling to it instead of going into that startle reflex reaction and dropping to the floor of the nest. I could leave.

Not that she liked it. I could hear her mewling cries half the way down the wall. The flip side of that cuteness response is that the sound of an infant crying is the most unbearable sound a primate can hear. The anxiety level is amazing. You feel like you have to
do
something. That’s why humans hate the sound of a crying baby on an airplane. It causes fantastic levels of anxiety at an already-anxious time, and there’s nothing they can
do
. Well, that’s the sound I heard, and believe me, all I really wanted to do was climb back up and hold the baby so she’d be quiet.

But if she and I were to survive at all—and, with us, any hope of a tribe of free enhanced capuchins—then I had to keep us from being discovered. And that meant getting down the wall and back into more normal patterns of life. She would have to live with less frequent feedings than she needed sometimes. She would have to live with low gravity. And I would have to leave her crying sometimes. Maybe often. Maybe every time.

Perhaps Carol Jeanne would have noticed my frequent long absences, except that her own life suddenly became overwhelmingly confused. It began the third day of my betrothed’s life. I had been monitoring Pink’s memory regularly, mostly to get information about Nancy and to make sure Red and Carol Jeanne weren’t discussing any strange behavior on my part when I wasn’t there. But on that day I noticed that there were a lot of long gaps in Pink’s data. A lot of times when Pink wasn’t with Red.

This was disturbing. It suggested that Red was afraid that I was doing exactly what I was doing—monitoring Pink. Who else could? And he was doing something he didn’t want me to know about.

No, strike that. He was doing something he didn’t want Carol Jeanne to know about. Red didn’t think of me as a person; he never had. He was afraid that if Pink was witness to whatever he was doing during these two- and three-hour blocks of time, Carol Jeanne would get wind of it.

So I followed him. I was going to visit the baby for another frustrating feeding in which she would sullenly refuse to eat enough until I coaxed and coerced the right amount down her throat. Needless to say, it was emotionally painful enough that I didn’t mind delaying a bit to find out where Red was going without Pink.

I had assumed that he was carrying on an affair, and I was pretty sure that it was with Liz. But to my surprise, Red headed for his father’s apartment in the singles’ quarters. It had to be his father he was going to see—there were only a couple of dozen single adults on the Ark, and Red didn’t know any of them except for Stef. Could it be that Red was simply making time for a closer relationship with his father? Could he actually be less dominated by his mother than I had thought?

But when he got there and knocked on the door, it wasn’t Stef who opened it. Of course it wasn’t. Stef was at work. Red was simply using his apartment for his clandestine meetings with his lover. It
was
an affair. And, when naked arms reached out to embrace him and pull him into the apartment, I also heard a voice uttering sweet nothings with surprising enthusiasm. The enthusiasm I couldn’t comprehend, but the voice I knew well enough. It was Liz.

Just as I had expected, after all.

The only surprise was when I went back down the corridor and turned a corner and ran into Neeraj.

He reached down for me and brought me up to his shoulder, where we could converse quietly. Well, where
he
could converse.

“So Stef is playing at Pander,” he said. “Dolores was sure Liz was having an affair with Red, but I told her that was just malicious gossip. I have to hand it to Mayflower village. Their gossips may be spiteful and voyeuristic, but they’re also fairly accurate.”

I nodded. That had been my observation as well.

“So now what, Lovelock? Do we tell Carol Jeanne, or let her go on thinking that Red actually wants their marriage to succeed?”

I shrugged elaborately, then cocked my head and looked at him sideways. Being Neeraj, he understood the gesture.

“Ah, there it is. What is
my
motive? Do I want to disrupt Carol Jeanne’s marriage so that I can perhaps marry her after all? The answer is no, Lovelock. My commitment to Dolores is final. Partly because I do love her. And partly because I am not a man like Red—even if I change my mind later, even if I fall in love with another woman, I will keep my word to Dolores. Carol Jeanne knows that, too. Even if in her anger she thinks I am being vengeful or trying to get her away from Red, she will soon realize that is not in my nature.”

I shrugged. He was giving Carol Jeanne credit for more reasonableness than I thought she would manage. I was quite sure that whoever told her about Red’s affair would become loathsome to her for a long time to come.

I pointed at Neeraj.

“Yes, of course, it would be better if the news came from me,” said Neeraj. “I won’t have to face her every day afterward for the rest of my life. Well, actually, I will, won’t I, given our two careers. But she won’t have absolute power over me, and if she cuts me off emotionally, I have other resources. So it’s me, I agree with you.”