Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18

by Robert Silverberg (ed)

  Naked and shivering, he entered the clearing beneath the tree house, sat down on the matted grass, and averted his face from the ladder that Babington would soon be descending. Blair, his aide, could offer him no physical assistance until the rite was concluded.

  The songs of the Kikembu women, the bawdy masculine repartee at his back, and the anxious hiccuping of his heart isolated him from the reality of what was happening. This was not happening to him. Only, of course, it wras.

  Then Babington was there, kneeling before him with a knife, and Joshua put both fists to the right side of his neck, placed his chin on one fist, and stared out into the savannah. The cutting began. Joshua clenched his teeth and tightened his fists. Doggedly refusing to yip or whimper, he caught sight of a pair of tourist minibuses rolling over the steppe from the vicinity of the guest lodge. That morning while boarding the Land Rover, he recalled, he had seen them parked inside a courtyard next to the lodge. Somehow the tour guide had learned of the approaching ceremony. When the minibuses pulled abreast of the acacia grove, clouds of dust drifting away behind them, Joshua wanted to scream.

  The faces in the windows of the two grimy vehicles belonged primarily to astonished Caucasians, many of them elderly women in multicolored head scarves, out-of-fashion pillbox hats, or luxuriant wigs much too youthful for their wearers. The cutting momentarily ceased. Passengers from both vans dismounted at the outer picket of trees and filtered inward to stand behind the swaying and ululating Kikembu women.

  “Jesus,” Joshua murmured.

  “Hush,” cautioned Babington. “Or I will deprive you of much future pleasure and many descendants.”

  A portly, middle-aged tour guide with a florid complexion used a megaphone to make himself heard over the singing and hand-clapping Africans.

  The cutting had begun again. Joshua shut out the man’s spiel to concentrate on the waves of pain radiating through him from the focus of the knife.

  The eyes of the female tourist nearest the guide, Joshua noticed, had grown huge behind her thick-lensed glasses. She was a stout ruin of a woman whose magenta head scarf resembled a babushka. Her body appeared to sway in time with those of the svelte, graceful Africans. Her swaying and the guides ceaseless patter distracted Joshua from the pain of the circumcision rite.

  “Finished,” Babington announced.

  “Don’t leave Ngwati,” Blair countered. “Remove it, please.”

  Babington snorted his contempt for this command, but swiftly removed the offending string of flesh.

  In celebration of the successful irua, a chorus of voices echoed through the grove and across the steppe. Now Joshua could look down. He saw blood flowing from him into the grass like water from a spigot. Blair steadied him from behind and wrapped the immaculate white robe around his shoulders.

  Now people were dancing as well as singing, extolling the initiate’s courage as they wove in and out among the trees in a sinuous daisy chain of bodies. Some of the tourists had joined the conga line, and the two groups, Africans and foreigners, were suddenly beginning to blend. The Kikembu waved their arms in encouragement, and more tourists—sheepish old white people—snaked their way into the celebration.

  Joshua, afraid he would faint, held the front of his robe away from his groin to keep from staining the garment. The woman with the magenta scarf approached him from the edge of the grove and addressed him in the flat, Alf Landon accents of a native Kansan.

  “I’ll give you twenty dollars for that robe.”

  Joshua gaped.

  “Tell him twenty dollars for the robe,” the old woman commanded Blair. “Another five if he’ll let me take a Polaroid. Our tour guide said to ask before I took a Polaroid.”

  “Mrs. Givens!” Joshua exclaimed. “Kit Givens from Van Luna, Kansas!” He had last seen the old woman at his grandfather’s funeral fourteen years ago, piously occupying a rear pew in the stained-glass, apricot-and-umber ambiance of the First Methodist Church. She was seventy-two if she was a minute. Her withered cheeks and chin were tinted all the iridescent colors of a mandrills mask.

  “I’ve never seen him before,” Mrs. Givens told Blair, as if sharing a confidence. “I don’t know how he could know my name.”

  “You pulled my hair in my grandfather’s grocery when I was a baby.”

  The old woman rallied. “You’re an impudent little nigger. I wouldn’t pay you five dollars to mow my yard.”

  Defiant despite his weakness, Joshua doffed his robe and handed it to Mrs. Givens. “Here. I want you to have this. Take it back to Van Luna—the sooner the better.”

  Mrs. Givens took the robe from the bleeding man, backed away from him clutching it, and turned again to the paleoan-thropologist. “You’ll walk me back to the tour bus, please. I’ve never met this man in my life.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Givens.”

  As Blair directed the old woman through the rowdy throng to the bus, Babington helped Joshua climb the ladder into the tree house. Many of the Kikembu from Nyarati had brought banana leaves to the ceremony, and the old Wanderobo had already arranged the leaves into a pallet upon which Joshua could rest without fear of exacerbating his wounds. His penis would not stick to the banana leaves as to linen or other sorts of bedding, and the wounds would therefore heal more readily.

  Lying on this pallet, Joshua saw Babingtons creased face staring down at him. A face that seemed to have been created in the same way that wind sculpts sand dunes or rain erodes channels into the hardest rock.

  “Everyone wants a piece of the sacred,” Joshua whispered. “Even if it isn’t sacred. Dreaming makes it so, and the dreaming goes on and on until it’s a habit.”

  “Go to sleep, Joshua,” the old man said.

  Three weeks passed before Joshua felt strong enough to resume his survival training. For two nights, despite the antibiotics that Blair had brought to Lolitabu from the hospital at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, he was delirious. In his delirium he was visited by the lacerated ghost of his adoptive father, as well as a gnomish Spanish woman who opened her blouse and let him nurse like a baby, a young black infantryman with no head, and the robed figure of Mutesa David Christian Ghazali Tharaka, President of Zarakal. This last visitor, Joshua learned from Babington, had actually been there.

  “Why was he here? What did he say?”

  Babington handed Joshua an autographed picture of the President. “He said he was very proud of you. You are bridging a chasm between Zarakals pluralistic tribal beginnings and its modern aspirations. That you, an American black man, submitted to the knife bespeaks the fullness of your commitment to our dream.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He gave me a photograph, too.” Babington pointed at the wall of the tree house, where he had hung another copy of the same photograph. This one bore an inscription to the Wanderobo. Joshua could not see it from where he lay, but he could tell that it had made Babington very happy.

  At first it disturbed Joshua that he was taking so long to heal, but Babington explained that he himself had suffered intense pain and then a throbbing tenderness for well over a month after his irua. By mid-October, just as his mentor had predicted, they were stalking game again, digging tubers, picking fruit, and diving ever deeper into wilderness lore. Joshuas glans was no longer so sensitive that simply to urinate was to conduct electricity. He was himself again.

  Joshua paid attention to Babingtons lessons. He learned how to alter his upright silhouette by tying foliage about his waist, how to move on a wily diagonal while stalking game, how to club a stick or wounded animal to death without exhausting himself or making an ugly mess of his kill, and how to eat raw meat, birds eggs, and insects without nausea or qualm. The time in Lolitabu passed quickly.

  The night before Joshua was to return to Russell-Tharaka for additional study—textbook and simulator work, with reviews of the paleontological information he had digested last spring and summer—he awoke and went to the door of the tree house. Babington, silhouetted on the ed
ge of the grove, was reciting from Poe:

  “Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day,

  In a vision, or in none,

  Is it therefore the less gone?

  All that we see or seem

  Is but a dream within a dream.”

  The Pope of the Chimps - by Robert Silverberg

  A look at contemporary chimpanzee intelligence studies carried just a short way into the future—with some thoughts about how chimp-human interactions may inadvertently bring about the evolution of religious beliefs among our primate cousins—in this story from Alan Ryans anthology Perpetual Light. Robert Silverberg and Samuel R. Delany are the only writers who have won four Nebula awards: Silverbergs award-winning stories are “Passengers” (1969), “Good News from the Vatican” (1971), A Time of Changes (1971), and “Born with the Dead” (1974).

  Early last month Vendelmans and I were alone with the chimgs in the compound when suddenly he said, “I’m going to faint. ’ It was a sizzling May morning, but Vendelmans had never shown any sign of noticing unusual heat, let alone suffering from it. I was busy talking to Leo and Mimsy and Mimsy’s daughter Muffin and I registered Vendelmans’ remark without doing anything about it. When you’re intensely into talking by sign language, as we are in the project, you sometimes tend not to pay a lot of attention to spoken words.

  But then Leo began to sign the trouble sign at me and I turned around and saw Vendelmans down on his knees in the grass, white-faced, gasping, covered with sweat. A few of the chimpanzees who aren’t as sensitive to humans as Leo is thought it was a game and began to pantomime him, knuckles to the ground and bodies going limp. “Sick—” Vendelmans said. “Feel—terrible—”

  I called for help and Gonzo took his left arm and Kong took his right and somehow, big as he was, we managed to get him out of the compound and up the hill to headquarters. By then he was complaining about sharp pains in his back and under his arms, and I realized that it wasn’t just heat prostration. Within a week the diagnosis was in.

  Leukemia.

  They put him on chemotherapy and hormones and after ten days he was back with the project, looking cocky. “They’ve stabilized it,” he told everyone. “Its in remission and I might have ten or twenty years left, or even more. I’m going to carry on with my work.”

  But he was gaunt and pale, with a tremor in his hands, and it was a frightful thing to have him among us. He might have been fooling himself, though I doubted it, but he wasn’t fooling any of us: to us he was a memento mori, a walking death s-head-and-crossbones. That laymen think scientists are any more casual about such things than anyone else is something I blame Hollywood for. It is not easy to go about your daily work with a dying man at your side—or a dying man’s wife, for Judy Vendelmans showed in her frightened eyes all the grief that Hal Vendelmans himself was repressing. She was going to lose a beloved husband unexpectedly soon and she hadn’t had time to adjust to it, and her pain was impossible to ignore. Besides, the nature of Vendelmans’ dyingness was particularly unsettling, because he had been so big and robust and outgoing, a true Rabelaisian figure, and somehow between one moment and the next he was transformed into a wraith. “The finger of God,” Dave Yost said. “A quick flick of Zeus’ pinkie and Hal shrivels like cellophane in a fireplace.” Vendelmans was not yet forty.

  The chimps suspected something too.

  Some of them, such as Leo and Ramona, are fifth-generation signers, bred for alpha intelligence, and they pick up subtleties and nuances very well. “Almost human,” visitors like to say of them. We dislike that tag, because the important thing about chimpanzees is that they aren’t human, that they are an alien intelligent species; but yet I know what people mean. The brightest of the chimps saw right away that something was amiss with Vendelmans, and started making odd remarks. “Big one rotten banana,” said Ramona to Mimsy while I was nearby. “He getting empty,” Leo said to me as Vendelmans stumbled past us. Chimp metaphors never cease to amaze me. And Gonzo asked him outright: “You go away soon?”

  “Go away” is not the chimp euphemism for death. So far as our animals know, no human being has ever died. Chimps

  die. Human beings “go away.” We have kept things on that basis from the beginning, not intentionally at first, but such arrangements have a way of institutionalizing themselves. The first member of the group to die was Roger Nixon, in an automobile accident in the early years of the project, long before my time here, and apparently no one wanted to confuse or disturb the animals by explaining what had happened to him, so no explanations were offered. My second or third year here Tim Lippinger was killed in a ski-lift failure, and again it seemed easier not to go into details with them. And by the time of Will Bechstein’s death in that helicopter crackup four years ago the policy was explicit: we chose not to regard his disappearance from the group as death, but mere “going away,” as if he had only retired. The chimps do understand death, of course. They may even equate it with “going away,” as Gonzo’s question suggests. But if they do, they surely see human death as something quite different from chimpanzee death—a translation to another state of being, an ascent on a chariot of fire. Yost believes that they have no comprehension of human death at all, that they think we are immortal, that they think we are gods.

  Vendelmans now no longer pretends that he isn’t dying. The leukemia is plainly acute and he deteriorates physically from day to day. His original this-isn’t-actually-happening attitude has been replaced by a kind of sullen angry acceptance. It is only the fourth week since the onset of the ailment and soon he’ll have to enter the hospital.

  And he wants to tell the chimps that he’s going to die.

  “They don’t know that human beings can die,” Yost said.

  “Then it’s time they found out,” Vendelmans snapped. “Why perpetuate a load of mythological bullshit about us? Why let them think we’re gods? Tell them outright that I’m going to die, the way old Egbert died and Salami and Mortimer. ”

  “But they all died naturally,” Jan Morton said.

  “And I’m not dying naturally?”

  She became terribly flustered. “Of old age, I mean. Their life-cycles clearly and understandably came to an end, and they died, and the chimps understood it. Whereas you—” She faltered.

  “—am dying a monstrous and terrible death midway through my life,” Vendelmans said, and started to break down, and recovered with a fierce effort, and Jan began to cry, and it was generally a bad scene, from which Vendelmans saved us by going on, “It should be of philosophical importance to the project to discover how the chimps react, to a revaluation of the human metaphysic. We’ve ducked every chance we’ve had to help them understand the nature of mortality. Now I propose we use me to teach them that humans are subject to the same laws they are. That we are not gods.”

  “And that gods exist,” said Yost, “who are capricious and unfathomable, and to whom we ourselves are as less than chimps.”

  Vendelmans shrugged. “They don’t need to hear all that now. But it’s time they understood what we are. Or rather, it’s time that we learned how much they already understand. Use my death as a way of finding out. It’s the first time they’ve been in the presence of a human who’s actually in the process of dying. The other times one of us has died, it’s always been in some sort of accident.”

  Burt Christensen said, “Hal, have you already told th^m anything about—”

  “No,” Vendelmans said. "Of course not. Not a word. But I see them talking to each other. They know.”

  We discussed it far into the night. The question needed careful examination because of the far-reaching consequences of any change we might make in the metaphysical givens of our animals. These chimps have lived in a closed environment here for decades, and the culture they have evolved is a product of what we have chosen to teach them, compounded by their own innate chimpness plus whatever we have unknowingly transmitted to them about ourselves or them. Any radical conceptual material we o
ffer them must be weighed thoughtfully, because its effects will be irreversible, and those who succeed us in this community will be unforgiving if we do anything stupidly premature. If the plan is to observe a community of intelligent primates over a period of many human generations, studying the changes in their intellectual capacity as their linguistic skills increase, then we must at all times take care to let them find things out for themselves, rather than skewing our data by giving the chimps more than their current concept-processing abilities may be able to handle.

  On the other hand, Vendelmans was dying right now, allowing us a dramatic opportunity to convey the concept of human mortality. We had at best a week or two to make use of that opportunity; then it might be years before the next chance.

  “What are you worried about?” Vendelmans demanded.

  Yost said, “Do you fear dying, Hal?”

  “Dying makes me angry. I don’t fear it; but I still have things to do, and I won’t be able to do them. Why do you ask?”

  “Because so far as we know the chimps see death—chimp death—as simply part of the great cycle of events, like the darkness that comes after the daylight. But human death is going to come as a revelation to them, a shock. And if they pick up from you any sense of fear or even anger over your dying, who knows what impact that will have on their way of thought?”

  “Exactly. Who knows? I offer you a chance to find out!”

  By a narrow margin, finally, we voted to let Hal Vendelmans share his death with the chimpanzees. Nearly all of us had reservations about that. But plainly Vendelmans was determined to have a useful death, a meaningful death; the only way he could face his fate at all was by contributing it like this to the project. And in the end I think most of us cast our votes his way purely out of our love for him.

  We arranged the schedules to give Vendelmans more contact with the animals. There are ten of us, fifty of them; each of us has a special field of inquiry—number theory, syntactical innovation, metaphysical exploration, semiotics, tool use, and so on—and we work with chimps of our own choice, subject, naturally, to the shifting patterns of subtribal bonding within the chimp community. But we agreed that Vendelmans would have to offer his revelations to the alpha intelligences—Leo, Ramona, Grimsky, Alice and Attila— regardless of the current structure of the chimp-human dialogues. Leo, for instance, was involved in an ongoing interchange with Beth Rankin on the notion of the change of seasons. Beth more or less willingly gave up her time with Leo to Vendelmans, for Leo was essential in this. We learned long ago that anything important had to be imparted to the alphas first, and they will impart it to the others. A bright chimp knows more about teaching things to his duller cousins than the brightest human being.