Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18

by Robert Silverberg (ed)

  The next morning Hal and Judy Vendelmans took Leo, Ramona, and Attila aside and held a long conversation with them. I was busy in a different part of the compound with Gonzo, Mimsy, Muffin and Chump, but I glanced over occasionally to see what was going on. Hal looked radiant— like Moses just down from the mountain after talking with God. Judy was trying to look radiant too, working at it, but her grief kept breaking through: once I saw her turn away from the chimps and press her knuckles to her teeth to hold it back.

  Afterward Leo and Grimsky had a conference out by the oak grove. Yost and Charley Damiano watched it with binoculars, but they couldn’t make much sense out of it. The chimps, when they sign to each other, use modified gestures much less precise than the ones they use with us; whether this marks the evolution of a special chimp-to-chimp argot designed not to be understood by us, or is simply a factor of chimp reliance on supplementary nonverbal ways of communicating, is something we still don’t know, but the fact remains that we have trouble comprehending the sign language they use with each other, particularly the form the alphas use. Then, too, Leo and Grimsky kept wandering in and out of the trees, as if perhaps they knew we were watching them and didn’t want us to eavesdrop. A little later in the day Ramona and Alice had the same sort of meeting. Now all five of our alphas must have been in on the revelation.

  Somehow the news began to filter down to the rest of them.

  We weren’t able to observe actual concept transmission. We did notice that Vendelmans, the next day, began to get rather more attention than normal. Little troops of chimpanzees formed about him as he moved—slowly, and in obvious difficulty—about the compound. Gonzo and Chump, who had been bickering for months, suddenly were standing side by side staring intently at Vendelmans. Chicory, normally shy, went out of her way to engage him in a conversation—-about the ripeness of the apples on the tree, Vendelmans reported. Anna Livia’s young twins Shem and Shaun climbed up and sat on Vendelmans’ shoulders.

  “They want to find out what a dying god is really like,” Yost said quietly.

  “But look there,” Jan Morton said.

  Judy Vendelmans had an entourage too: Mimsy, Muffin, Claudius, Buster, and Kong. Staring in fascination, eyes wide, lips extended, some of them blowing little bubbles of saliva.

  “Do they think she’s dying too?” Beth wondered.

  Yost shook his head. “Probably not. They can see there’s nothing physically wrong with her. But they’re picking up the sorrow-vibes, the death-vibes.”

  “Is there any reason to think they’re aware that Hal is Judy’s mate?” Christensen asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Yost said. “They can see that she’s upset. That interests them, even if they have no way of knowing why Judy would be more upset than any of the rest of us.”

  “More mysteries out yonder,” I said, pointing into the meadow.

  Grimsky was standing by himself out there, contemplating something. He is the oldest of the chimps, gray haired, going bald, a deep thinker. He has been here almost from the beginning, more than thirty years, and very little has escaped his attention in that time.

  Far off to the left, in the shade of the big beech tree, Leo stood similarly in solitary meditation. He is twenty, the alpha male of the community, the strongest and by far the most intelligent. It was eerie to see the two of them in their individual zones of isolation, like distant sentinels, like Easter Island statues, lost in private reveries.

  “Philosophers,” Yost murmured.

  Yesterday Vendelmans returned to the hospital for good. Before he went, he made his farewells to each of the fifty chimpanzees, even the infants. In the past week he has altered markedly: he is only a shadow of himself, feeble, wasted. Judy says he’ll live only another few weeks.

  She has gone on leave and probably won’t come back until after Hal’s death. I wonder what the chimps will make of her “going away,” and of her eventual return.

  She said that Leo had asked her if she was dying too.

  Perhaps things will get back to normal here now.

  Christensen asked me this morning, “Have you noticed the way they seem to drag the notion of death into whatever conversation you’re having with them these days?”

  I nodded. “Mimsy asked me the other day if the moon dies when the sun comes up and the sun dies when the moon is out. It seemed like such a standard primitive metaphor that I didn’t pick up on it at first. But Mimsy’s too young for using metaphor that easily and she isn’t particularly clever. The older ones must be talking about dying a lot, and it’s filtering down. ” “Chicory was doing subtraction with me,” Christensen said. “She signed, ‘You take five, two die, you have three.’ Later she turned it into a verb: ‘Three die one equals two’” Others reported similar things. Yet none of the animals were talking about Vendelmans and what was about to happen to him, nor were they asking any overt questions about death or dying. So far as we were able to perceive, they had displaced the whole thing into metaphorical diversions. That in itself indicated a powerful obsession. Like most obsessives, they were trying to hide the thing that most concerned them, and they probably thought they were doing a good job of it. It isn’t their fault that we’re able to guess what’s going on in their minds. They are, after all—and we sometimes have to keep reminding ourselves of this—only chimpanzees.

  They are holding meetings on the far side of the oak grove, where the little stream runs. Leo and Grimsky seem to do most of the talking, and the others gather around and sit very quietly as the speeches are made. The groups run from ten to thirty chimps at a time. We are unable to discover what they’re discussing, though of course we have an idea. Whenever one of us approaches such a gathering, the chimps very casually drift off into three or four separate groups and look exceedingly innocent—“We just out for some fresh air, boss.” Charley Damiano wants to plant a bug in the grove. But how do you spy on a group that converses only in sign language? Cameras aren’t as easily hidden as microphones.

  We do our best with binoculars. But what little we’ve been able to observe has been mystifying. The chimp-to-chimp signs they use at these meetings are even more oblique and confusing than the ones we had seen earlier. It’s as if they’re holding their meetings in pig-latin, or doubletalk, or in some entirely new and private language.

  Two technicians will come tomorrow to help us mount cameras in the grove.

  Hal Vendelmans died last night. According to Judy, who phoned Dave Yost, it was very peaceful right at the end, an easy release. Yost and I broke the news to the alpha chimps just after breakfast. No euphemisms, just the straight news. Ramona made a few hooting sounds and looked as if she might cry, but she was the only one who seemed emotionally upset. Leo gave me a long deep look of what was almost certainly compassion, and then he hugged me very hard. Grimsky wandered away and seemed to be signing to himself in the new system. Now a meeting seems to be assembling in the oak grove, the first one in more than a week.

  The cameras are in place. Even if we can’t decipher the new signs, we can at least tape them and subject them to computer analysis until we begin to understand.

  Now we’ve watched the first tapes of a grove meeting, but I can’t say we know a lot more than we did before.

  For one thing, they disabled two of the cameras right at the outset. Attila spotted them and sent Gonzo and Claudius up into the trees to yank them out, I suppose the remaining cameras went unnoticed; but by accident or deliberate diabolical craftiness, the chimps positioned themselves in such a way that none of the cameras had a clear angle. We did record a few statements from Leo and some give-and-take between Alice and Anna Livia. They spoke in a mixture of standard signs and the new ones, but, without a sense of the context, we’ve found it impossible to generate any sequence of meanings. Stray signs such as “shirt,” “hat,” “human,” “change” and “banana fly,” interspersed with undecipherable stuff, seem to be adding up to something, but no one is sure what. We observed no mention of Hal
Vendelmans nor any direct references to death. We may be misleading ourselves entirely about the significance of all this.

  Or perhaps not. We codified some of the new signs and this afternoon I asked Ramona what one of them meant. She fidgeted and hooted and looked uncomfortable—and not simply because I was asking her to do a tough abstract thing like giving a definition. She was worried. She looked around for Leo, and when she saw him she made that sign at him. He came bounding over and shoved Ramona away. Then he began to tell me how wise and good and gentle I am. He may be a genius, but even a genius chimp is still a chimp, and I told him I wasn’t fooled by all his flattery. Then I asked him what the new sign meant.

  “Jump high come again,” Leo signed.

  A simple chimpy phrase referring to fun and frolic? So I thought at first, and so did many of my colleagues. But Dave Yost said, “Then why was Ramona so evasive about defining it?”

  “Defining isn’t easy for them,” Beth Rankin said.

  “Ramona’s one of the five brightest. She’s capable of it. Especially since the sign can be defined by use of four other established signs, as Leo proceeded to do.”

  “What are you getting at, Dave?” I asked.

  Yost said,' “ Jump high come again might be about a game they like to play, but it could also be an eschatological reference, sacred talk, a concise metaphorical way to speak of death and resurrection, no?”

  Mick Falkenburg snorted. “Jesus, Dave, of all the nutty Jesuitical bullshit—”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s possible sometimes to be too subtle in your analysis,” Falkenburg said. “You’re suggesting that these chimpanzees have a theology?”

  “I’m suggesting that they may be in the process of evolving a religion,” Yost replied.

  Can it be?

  Sometimes we lose our perspective with these animals, as Mick indicated, and we overestimate their intelligence; but just as often, I think, we underestimate them.

  Jump high come again.

  I wonder. Secret sacred talk? A chimpanzee theology? Belief in life after death? A religion?

  They know that human beings have a body of ritual and belief that they call religion, though how much they really comprehend about it is hard to tell. Dave Yost, in his metaphysical discussions with Leo and some of the other alphas, introduced the concept long ago. He drew a hierarchy that began with God and ran downward through human beings and chimpanzees to dogs and cats and onward to insects and frogs, by way of giving the chimps some sense of the great chain of life. They had seen bugs and frogs and cats and dogs, but they wanted Dave to show them God, and he was forced to tell them that God is not actually tangible and accessible, but lives high overhead although His essence penetrates all things. I doubt that they grasped much of that. Leo, whose nimble and probing intelligence is a constant illumination to us, wanted Yost to explain how we talked to God and how God talked to us, if He wasn’t around to make signs, and Yost said that we had a thing called religion, which was a system of communicating with God. And that was where he left it, a long while back.

  Now we are on guard for any indications of a developing religious consciousness among our troop. Even the scoffers— Mick Falkenburg, Beth, to some degree, Charley Damiano— are paying close heed. After all, one of the underlying purposes of this project is to reach an understanding of how the first hominids managed to cross the intellectual boundary that we like to think separates the animals from humanity. We can’t reconstruct a bunch of Australopithecines and study them; but we can watch chimpanzees who have been given the gift of language build a quasi-protohuman society, and it is the closest thing to traveling back in time that we are apt to achieve. Yost thinks, I think, Burt Christensen is beginning to think, that we have inadvertently kindled an awareness of the divine, of the numinous force that must be worshipped, by allowing them to see that their gods—us—can be struck down and slain by an even higher power.

  The evidence so far is slim. The attention given Vendelmans and Judy; the solitary meditations of Leo and Grimsky; the large gatherings in the grove; the greatly accelerated use of modified sign language in chimp-to-chimp talk at those gatherings; the potentially eschatological reference we think we see in the sign that Leo translated as jump high come again. That’s it. To those of us who want to interpret that as the foundations of religion, it seems indicative of what we want to see; to the rest, it all looks like coincidence and fantasy. The problem is that we are dealing with non-human intelligence and we must take care not to impose our own thought-constructs. We can never be certain if we are operating from a value system anything like that of the chimps. The built-in ambiguities of the sign-language grammar we must use with them complicate the issue. Consider the phrase “banana fly” that Leo used in a speech—a sermon?—-in the oak grove, and remember Ramona’s reference to the sick Vendelmans as ‘‘rotten banana.” If we take fly to be a verb, “banana fly” might be considered a metaphorical description of Vendelmans’ ascent to heaven. If we take it to be a noun, Leo might have been talking about the Drosophila flies that feed on decaying fruit, a metaphor for the corruption of the flesh after death. On the other hand, he may simply have been making a comment about the current state of our garbage dump.

  We have agreed for the moment not to engage the chimpanzees in any direct interrogation about any of this. The Heisenberg principle is eternally our rule here: the observer can too easily perturb the thing observed, so we must make only the most delicate of measurements. Even so, of course, our presence among the chimps is bound to have its impact, but we do what we can to minimize it by avoiding leading questions and watching in silence.

  Two unusual things today. Taken each by each, they would be interesting without being significant; but if we use each to illuminate the other, we begin to see things in a strange new light, perhaps.

  One thing is an increase in vocalizing, noticed by nearly everyone, among the chimps. We know that chimpanzees in the wild have a kind of rudimentary spoken language—a greeting-call, a defiance-call, the grunts that mean “I like the taste of this,” the male chimp’s territorial hoot, and such: nothing very complex, really not qualitatively much beyond the language of birds or dogs. They also have a fairly rich nonverbal language, a vocabulary of gestures and facial expressions; but it was not until the first experiments decades ago in teaching chimpanzees human sign language that any important linguistic capacity became apparent in them. Here at the research station the chimps communicate almost wholly in signs, as they have been trained to do for generations and as they have taught their young ones to do; they revert to hoots and grunts only in the most elemental situations. We ourselves communicate mainly in signs when we are talking to each other while working with the chimps, and even in our humans-only conferences we use signs as much as speech, from long habit. But suddenly the chimps are making sounds at each other. Odd sounds, unfamiliar sounds, weird clumsy imitations, one might say, of human speech. Nothing that we can understand, naturally: the chimpanzee larynx is simply incapable of duplicating the phonemes humans use. But these new grunts, these tortured blurts of sound, seem intended to mimic our speech. It was Damiano who showed us, as we were watching a tape of a grove session, how Attila was twisting his lips with his hands in what appeared unmistakably to be an attempt to make human sounds come out.

  Why?

  The second thing is that Leo has started wearing a shirt and a hat. There is nothing remarkable about a chimp in clothing; although we have never encouraged such anthropo-morphization here, various animals have taken a fancy from time to time to some item of clothing, have begged it from its owner, and have worn it for a few days or even weeks. The novelty here is that the shirt and the hat belonged to Hal Vendelmans, and that Leo wears them only when the chimps are gathered in the oak grove, which Dave Yost has lately begun calling the “holy grove.” Leo found them in the toolshed beyond the vegetable garden. The shirt is ten sizes too big, Vendelmans having been so brawny, but Leo ties the sleeves
across his chest and lets the rest dangle down over his back almost like a cloak.

  What shall we make of this?

  Jan is the specialist in chimp verbal processes. At the meeting tonight she said, “It sounds to me as if they’re trying to duplicate the rhythms of human speech even though they can’t reproduce the actual sounds. They’re playing at being human.”

  “Talking the god-talk,” said Dave Yost.

  “What do you mean?” Jan asked.

  “Chimps talk with their hands. Humans do too, when speaking with chimps, but when humans talk to humans they use their voices. Humans are gods to chimps, remember. Talking in the way the gods talk is one way of remaking yourself in the image of the gods, of putting on divine attributes.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” Jan said. “I can’t possibly—”

  “Wearing human clothing,” I broke in excitedly, “would also be a kind of putting on divine attributes, in the most literal sense of the phrase. Especially if the clothes—”

  “—had belonged to Hal Vendelmans,” said Christensen.

  “The dead god,” Yost said.

  We looked at each other in amazement.

  Charley Damiano said, not in his usual skeptical way but in a kind of wonder, “Dave, are you hypothesizing that Leo functions as some sort of priest, that those are his sacred garments?”