Lovelock (5 page)

But what did that matter to Mamie? I was only an animal, and she was a
human
. In fact, as
she
saw it anyway, she was the most important person in the world, the person whose comfort, whose dignity, whose any passing whim mattered more than the life or death of any other living soul. If she had confessed to having set me loose, she would have had to endure another hour of resentment from the rest of the passengers—people that she would never see again in her life, who would all be dead of old age by the time we were a year into our interstellar voyage. And she could have assuaged most resentment with a quick, sincere apology: I’m sorry, I had no idea that letting the monkey loose would cause such a problem, please forgive me. But such a simple condescension was impossible for her. Mamie Foxe Todd,
apologize?

The attendants were apologetic but firm. “I’m sorry, Dr. Cocciolone, but your witness will have to be removed from the cabin.”

Bless her, she tried to keep me. “I’ll be with him the whole time,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”

“I’m sure you’re aware that the situation here was extremely dangerous,” said the attendant. “I have no room for maneuvering here. If I let the monkey remain in the cabin now that we know he can get free of the harness, I would certainly lose my job and could possibly go to jail.”

“If you must,” said Carol Jeanne. She was not one to insist when there was nothing to be gained by it. Into the hold I would go—we both knew it.

Mamie didn’t have the decency to stay out of the situation she had created. “Where
is
the little fellow, anyway?” she asked.

There I was, peering out of Carol Jeanne’s blouse not half a meter from Mamie’s face, and right at her eye level. It was too good an opportunity to miss. I screeched and lunged at her.

She screamed, of course. To have me suddenly appear right in front of her face, teeth bared and reaching for her with my long arms—well, she would have been surprised and frightened under any circumstances. But I’d like to think that her fear was also partly the result of guilt and shame for having made me bear the brunt of her lie. I’m not above taking petty revenge.

Naturally, Carol Jeanne gripped me all the tighter. “You’re being very bad, Lovelock,” she said. But she didn’t punish me. She didn’t say the painword. And that told me that she must have known the truth, that she must have sympathized with my plight, and she was only going along with Mamie’s lie in order to keep peace in the family.

You can always let the monkey suffer in order to keep the family from quarreling. Thus did I learn my first lesson about our mutual loyalty.

I spent the rest of the voyage in a box. As boxes go, I suppose it wasn’t a bad one—plenty to eat and drink, a soft floor, a bright light that I could turn on and off myself, and a few books to read. But I don’t care what you do to a box, it’s still a box.

My only consolation was that after we got to Grissom Station and transferred to Ironsides, the interplanetary shuttle,
they
all had to ride in boxes, too. Unlike the Ark, which would offer us kilometers of interior space, Ironsides was cramped in size and packed tight. There was no way to handle a hundred passengers and all their belongings during a month-long flight, even though acceleration and deceleration gave us an almost constant artificial gravity. Instead everybody was catheterized, drugged to the gills, and packed in “slumber chambers” that were suspiciously like my own little casquette. We would all be equals on
that
voyage.

During the long month when Ironsides made its journey to the Ark, I dozed, then woke, then dozed again in my box. I preferred the dozing; when I was awake, all I could think about was my humiliation in the subbo, as if it had only just happened. Was this going to happen to me every time we went into freefall? On the Ark I’d be free to roam—except at the changeover points, when they’d
have
to lock me in a box or strap me down, just to keep me from engaging in revolting behavior. Each time I would be reminded of my weakness. Which was bitterly unfair—most of the time it was the humans who revolted
me
, and no one locked
them
in boxes or strapped
them
down.

I knew that my feelings of persecution were absurd. I wasn’t being persecuted in particular. I simply belonged to an oppressed species. Which, on Earth at least, included every species that wasn’t human. Most nonhumans didn’t mind, of course. Most nonhumans didn’t even
know
they were being exploited, domesticated, dominated, and spiritually annihilated by the master race. Only I and a handful like me.

If there
was
anyone in the universe like me. Or was I, I wondered, alone? Was I in fact the only thinking entity that existed? Were human beings nothing but imaginary tormentors spawned by my own self-hatred? And if I only came to accept my hairy little self for what I was, would they then go away—or turn kind, or even loving?

Did Pink have wings?

In such moments of despondency, I remembered that there was one who cared for me. The only thing that kept her from coming to me, from opening the door of my miserable cave and setting me free, was the fact that she too was locked into the prison of human customs and laws and so she could not save me. But she
would
come. I clung to that hope, and perhaps that was why I kept my sanity.

Or, more likely, my sanity was never at risk, and all my mad half-waking thoughts were merely the products of the drugs that dripped into me to keep me artificially calm during Ironsides’ interminable voyage.

At last I felt the ship movements that told me that Ironsides was jockeying into position at its final destination. I knew from my advance reading that Ironsides would come to rest against the outer surface of the cylindrical Ark, held in place by powerful magnets. The passengers would be herded into the transfer carton. A vast door would open in the side of the Ark and a long mechanical arm would reach out, pluck the carton like a louse off the skin of the Ark, and draw us into the hungry mouth of the cargo bay. How very like
me
the Ark behaved.

Was that jarring our impact against the Ark? Soon they would come for the humans, draw them out of their casquettes, and then she would come, in turn, for me.

Unless she forgot me. Unless she carelessly waited for them to unload me with the rest of the luggage and deposit me in her quarters like her library and her lingerie. Unless she still hadn’t forgiven me for having brought disgrace upon her in the subbo.

It was a miserable half hour that I waited, if it wasn’t half a day.

Or a minute and a half. For Carol Jeanne
did
love me. She knew that I must be filled with fears and dreads and insecurities and shame. In her immeasurable compassion she must have practically
flown
down into the hold to retrieve me, to open the door and give me light again. What a scraggly, sweat-soaked, stinky, trembling little primate I must have been, and yet she didn’t hesitate to draw me close and let me cling to her neck, to her hair, climb all over her shoulders and arms, holding tight and then rushing to take another hold, to reassure myself that she was unchanged. Touching her body was my homecoming; soft, warm skin, the salty perfume of her confinement, the sound of her voice and its sweet vibrations in the thin bones of her cheeks, the warmth of her breath on my face, the wind of it in my eyes—my world had been restored to me. After my time in the box, Carol Jeanne’s body seemed as infinite as the universe. I could have explored her until I died and I would never have grown weary of it.

At last, though, my ecstasy grew containable. I stopped my compulsive scampering and settled down to normal grooming. I was sure of her; I was myself again. Then she knew that she could take me to join the others.

Passengers and witnesses alike were herded into the transfer carton. Mamie never seemed to learn that the first one
on
a one-door conveyance would be the last one
off
, so she ran interference for us to be the first aboard the transfer carton. Then we were packed in by all the other families who boarded after we did, squashing us toward the corner farthest from the door.

Mamie seemed oblivious to the fact that she was the cause of her family’s discomfort. Instead, as the bodies of strangers were pressed closer and closer against us, she sniffed with a tight little grimace on her face. She had a point. Humans become very rank after long confinement in boxes, and while each person was completely used to their
own
smell, everybody else’s smell was exquisitely rancid. I enjoyed it—a delightful rush of olfactory variety after the sterile sameness of my own box—but the humans all seemed to be shrinking into themselves, trying to move away from everyone else simultaneously. And there was Mamie, sniffing with disdain at our malodorous boxmates, as if her own sweat were an expensive perfume. Not to mention the faint odor of Emmy’s vomit still clinging to her shoes, not that anybody but me could pick up those old traces. If Mamie could only smell herself as
I
smelled her, she would probably die of disgust.

The transfer carton locked itself firmly against an inside wall of the docking bay, and the doors opened. It seemed to take forever for the people in front of us to move out into the open. And then, when we finally were able to move, it turned out it wasn’t “the open” that we were bound for. The whole group was being herded down a corridor and into a large elevator. To go up or down? The person in charge was French; therefore she felt no need to explain anything to anybody. Not even whether the elevator was going up or down. She simply kept intoning—mostly in heavily accented English, but now and then in French, Portuguese, and phonetically memorized Japanese—“Please move as far to the back of the elevator as possible.”

Mamie’s pushiness was finally rewarded: As the last people out of the transfer carton, we were the last people onto the elevator—upward, as it turned out—and so when the elevator came to a stop we were the first ones off.

After all those months in canisters in space, it was a glorious sight. You could see for kilometers, and the landscape was green. Not the green of New England, with its endless woods, because the Ark was all fields and bushes. More like Iowa without the hills. Wyoming without the antelope. There
were
some trees, but they all grew in neat rows. Orchards, and dwarf ones at that. There was no hope of finding a
real
tree. The Ark hadn’t existed for enough years to grow a tree to thirty or forty meters. But when I saw one of those pathetic dwarf orchards not far off from the elevator, I found myself hungering for the feel of rough bark against the palms of my hands and feet.

It took only a few moments, though, for the first relief at the largeness of the space inside the Ark to wear off, and then all we could see was the strangeness of it. There was no sky, though a bright “sun” shone above us. There was no horizon. Instead, far in the distance, the land curved upward before us and behind us, as if we were in a broad valley, except that the “mountains” on either side got steeper and steeper, and then sloped outward until they met in an arch overhead. If we looked up, shielding our eyes from the “sun” glowing in the middle, we could make out the fields and villages above us. We could imagine the people walking around up there. Impossibly, they did not fall toward us, screaming. When I vertiginously imagined
them
to be on the ground and us to be dangling in the air above them, it made no difference; the spin of the Ark held us tightly to its inner surface.

The curving, along with the greenery, stretched before and behind us in a band no more than a couple of kilometers wide. To either side there was a vast greyish-blue wall, crisscrossed with inexplicable lines. Each wall made a huge wheel, with the giant skeletal legs of a tripod rising like spokes from the rim of each wheel, meeting in the middle to hold the track on which the “sun” peregrinated at the center of everything.

It was like being inside a vast tuna-fish can. All the greenery and all the people were on the curving wall, while the bottom and the lid of the can were nothing but metal sheathed in plastic the color of a dismal winter sky.

But that was only for now, while the Ark moved in orbit around the sun—the real sun, dear old Sol, whose happy little photons had given sight to every creature that ever opened its eyes on God’s green Earth. To keep us from having to live in perpetual freefall, the Ark was spun around and all the soil and people and buildings clung to the curved wall of the tuna can. That was orbital mode. It was the way we lived in orbit around Sol, and it was the way we would live again when at last we reached our new star system, as we waited for Carol Jeanne and her crews to prepare our new planet for human habitation.

There would be two other phases to the journey—acceleration and deceleration. The voyage itself. And for those, everything would be different. There’d be no spin at all. Instead, the sense of “gravity” would come from acceleration, and all the soil and the villages and orchards would be moved from the curving wall to the flat circular floor. There we would live, bounding happily through life at about a fifth of a gee, until we reached the midpoint of the trip. Then, once again, everything would change, as the soil would be moved from the bottom to the lid of the tuna can, as deceleration put our “down” in the opposite direction.

Those changeovers—from spin to acceleration, from acceleration to deceleration, and from deceleration to spin again—would be brutal. Tons of soil plunging from one surface to another in a vast avalanche, clouds of choking dust that wouldn’t settle for days. No one could live through it.

Fortunately, we wouldn’t have to. For the curving wall of the Ark—the wall that seemed like the ground to us right now—was really a wheel-shaped building several stories thick. In huge chambers were stored the embryos of millions of animals, along with all the nutrients we would need to sustain human life during the voyage. In much smaller rooms, the humans had their offices, their computers, and the tiny rooms where they would huddle during the cataclysms of changeover.

When the Ark was being designed, there had been some talk of the wastefulness of maintaining the huge open area with its greenery. Why not pack people into a ship designed more like a vast Ironsides? If they don’t like it, sedate them and let them sleep. The voyage was only a few years, anyway, right?

But wiser heads prevailed. The goal of the voyage was not simply to get to another planet, it was to form a viable human colony there. The open farmland and villages had very practical purposes. In the fields, the people would learn the skills, the customs, the calendar of farming. And by living in villages instead of apartments, with country lanes instead of corridors leading from house to house, the people would form stable farming communities long before they reached the planet where those communities would have to work together to create a second human world.

That was the theory, anyway—to use the voyage as one long rehearsal, to create the colony as a society before they had to make it a physical reality on what might turn out to be a hostile planet. After all, what good would it do to save money by building a cheaper Ark, only to have the colony fail because the people were all strangers to each other?

That was why the Ark was subdivided into villages, their citizens grouped according to general categories of compatibility. By necessity and recent international custom, English was the common language of the Ark, but within the villages there were many languages; all would be preserved in the new world.

Dividing communities by language made sense to me. But it was a typical human absurdity that, after language, the next most important set of divisions was religious. Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Espiritistas: All had their own villages. Those groups with too few practitioners to maintain villages of their own—Baha’i, for instance, and Sikh, animist, atheist, Mormon, Mithraist, Druse, native American tribal religions, Jehovah’s Witnesses—were either thrown together in a couple of catch-all villages or were “adopted” as minorities within fairly compatible or tolerant villages of other faiths.

The whole thing struck me as absurd. Why didn’t they simply limit the colony to rational human beings who were above the petty concerns of religion, and spare themselves all these meaningless dogmas and hostilities?

The answer, of course, was that they couldn’t have found enough
rational
human beings on planet Earth to fill the Ark. A man might be a brilliant scientist, but he was still a Hindu, and there was no hope of him living peacefully with a Sikh; or he was a Jew, and the Muslims would allow him only second-class citizenship at best. A certain woman might be the greatest gaiologist in the world, and perfectly rational, but she had grown up Catholic, and so her Episcopalian mother-in-law would always look down on her and “her people.”

Even most of the “rational” people—the ones who claimed not to have a religion—were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It’s a human universal. My tribe above all other tribes. That’s what religion
is—
another name for tribalism in a supposedly civilized world.

What about me? I felt no tribal kinship with the other witnesses. Certainly not with Pink, but even as I became aware of other witnesses—Carol Jeanne was not the only colonist important enough to merit bringing her witness—I felt no particular kinship with them. Yes, we were all victims of an oppressive system, but that mattered far less to us than our deep bonding with our owners. Carol Jeanne was my tribe. It was from her that I drew my identity, it was around her that I built my hopes, it was in her that I had my life. What was another witness to
me?
I could look at them and pity them for their helpless devotion to an unworthy human. But my feelings for Carol Jeanne were different. She was
not
unworthy. She was deeply good, brilliant of mind and generous of heart, and she loved me. Our bond was stronger than blood, than religion, than language, than marriage. It was the bond of selfhood. I saw the world through her eyes, and she through mine. We—almost—were the same person.