Taylor Five

by Ann Halam

  Pam nodded. “I know what you mean. He’s imprinted on humans. That’s why we have him in that double cabin, so there can be someone next door all the time. But he can’t have the freedom he had at the refuge. I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. I’m not in charge here, you know. I don’t know if it would make a difference anyway. Animals can mourn, Tay, like human beings. I think he loved Clint very deeply. They’d been together for years. Uncle is just very, very sad.”

  Tay thought of the crossing of the Waruk River. How Uncle had tied the knots, how totally human he’d been in his terror of the water. She thought about the worst time of all, in the savannah, when she had really been falling apart. Uncle had taken the knife from her when she was cutting herself open to see the wires. She had cried on his shoulder!

  “You don’t understand,” she blurted out. “At the refuge I didn’t know, I thought he was just very tame. On the trek he couldn’t hide what he is, he had to let me find out. I told you how he was our guide, and how he looked after us. It was more than that, more than a faithful dog or something. I don’t understand what’s going on, but you have to believe me. Uncle isn’t an ordinary orangutan.”

  “I know he’s not ordinary. He’s a hero—”

  “No, you have to listen. He knows things. He came after us when we went to the caves because he knew something terrible was going to happen. He understands when you talk to him. He brought medicine leaves when Donny was ill and showed me what to do, and he stopped me giving Donny the morphine until it was the last resort. He helped me bury my brother! He talked to me! He explained being a clone to me!”

  “Tay, calm down—”

  Tay shook her head impatiently. “Oh, I don’t mean he spoke English! I know he can’t do that. He doesn’t have the right kind of mouth or anything. It isn’t sign language either, it isn’t something he’s been trained to do. He didn’t talk out loud, but he talked and I understood. He didn’t read aloud, either, but I saw him turning over the pages. It’s because he’s intelligent. I don’t know how it happened, but he’s intelligent like a person!”

  “Tay,” said Pam. She took Tay’s hand, led her to the bunk and sat down with her. “What are you saying? You are not making sense, my dear.”

  Tay had a sinking feeling: she knew she had started this all wrong.

  “I know how it sounds, but I’m not making this up. I’ve lived with orangutans half my life. I know what they can do, and what they can’t do.” She drew a breath and spoke very carefully and reasonably. “On the journey here with me, Uncle was more than a smart ape. He did things that no animal would do. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s the truth. And it’s just horrible for anyone to treat him like an animal. It must make him feel terrible. That’s why he’s the way he is!”

  She was gripping Pam’s hand too fiercely. She let go and tried hard to look calm.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Pam. “Except you can see him again tomorrow. We’ll take him out on deck. He’ll have to be on a collar and lead . . . but maybe that will help.”

  “You aren’t listening!”

  “I am. I’m hearing that you are very tired, and full of shock and grief. You’ve been through a tremendous physical and mental ordeal that would have floored anyone but you, and so has Uncle. You are still exhausted, and you’re not thinking clearly. I hate to see Uncle suffering: I hope we can help him. I hope he can forget his sorrows and have a long, happy life. But now I want you to lie down and let me give you a mild sedative.”

  Tay didn’t protest. She felt terribly confused.

  Days passed, and still there was no real news about the refuge staff. The Kandahnese government was winning. The rebels were in retreat, and they were talking to Red Cross officials about the hostages, but they would only say that the refuge staff were safe, and no one knew if it was true. They wouldn’t give a list of names, and they wouldn’t say where the prisoners were being held. The weather stayed calm and hot and dry: a stillness that seemed to mock the terrible anxiety of this waiting. Tay did not let herself cry. She was determined not to break down. She just wished she could stop herself from hoping that Mum and Dad were still alive. . . . When she’d been on the Marine and Shore for a week, Pam came to find her one morning, in the station’s library. Tay was helping the librarian, doing some online filing. Everyone was trying to keep busy, though most of the station’s research work was at a standstill. The librarian, after a brief word from Pam, went away and left them alone.

  “Hi,” said Pam, sitting down. “Tay, I want to talk to you.”

  Tay had been back to see Uncle several times. She’d been out with him once when Chen took him round the deck on a collar and lead. She wouldn’t do that again. It had felt totally horrible. She’d tried talking to him, she’d tried sitting with him in his cabin, silent like another ape. There was no change, nothing worked.

  Nothing worked because she was never alone with him. The humans wouldn’t let her be alone with him. . . . She could understand how the rest of the crew and the staff reacted. She could see that the idea of an ape being human must sound crazy. But she couldn’t forgive Pam. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, she thought, staring at her gene mother. You know I’m telling the truth. How can you behave like this?

  Tay needed desperately for someone to believe her. All she got was soothing words and Pam basically saying she was having delusions.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about Uncle. He thinks I’ve betrayed him.”

  “Maybe we’ve all betrayed him,” muttered Pam, almost to herself. She sighed and rubbed a hand behind her neck, rumpling her golden-brown hair. Tay didn’t want to notice, but she couldn’t help seeing the shadows under Pam’s eyes and the tightness around her mouth. That’s how my face looks, she thought, when I’m trying not to cry.

  “Tay, this isn’t about Uncle. I have to . . . How much do you know about the way you came to be born? I’m sorry, I have to ask you because we’ve never talked about it—”

  “It was in the 1980s,” said Tay flatly. “Lifeforce was developing a gene therapy. That means when you inject some different DNA into someone’s cells, usually a corrected version of some DNA that’s gone wrong, or it was always wrong. It’s supposed to replace the defective gene, and they get better from whatever illness the defect gave them. Your thing was called M-389, and it worked so well on the first people that Lifeforce was very excited. But they couldn’t get the result to work in the lab, only in those people, and the people were too old. Their cells wouldn’t express the new DNA strongly enough for it to be extracted from them and made into medicine. So because it was so important, they thought of taking cells from the volunteers who got cured in the trials and growing them into human clones. And you were one of those volunteers.”

  “I suppose that’s close enough. Things were different in those days. If we were faced with the same situation now, I don’t think we’d have dreamed of trying to do what we did. But we had a fantastic breakthrough on our hands. . . . Tay, you have to understand. The science involved in creating a human clone is simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. The science involved in growing diverse human tissue in isolation, which is what we would have needed to do to develop M-389 without cloning whole individuals, would still be impossible today. And we knew that the children would be loved and wanted. Lifeforce was already working in IVF, that’s the normal test-tube-baby science, as well as in trials like M-389. . . .”

  “I know what IVF is,” said Tay sullenly. Pam nodded and went on.

  “Rei Chooi, who’s Rei Van der Hoort now, was a magician in the lab; she thought she could succeed with the nuclear transfer technique—”

  “You knew people thought it couldn’t be done. That it shouldn’t be done.”

  “Not really, not in those days. Anything seemed possible in those days. We were innocent and lucky, Tay, and we didn’t believe a human clone would be anything other than a real human individual, the same as the children IVF treatment giv
es to parents who are longing to have them. We used bone-marrow donor cells, and we thought of other treatments and precautions, which the Welcare team has rediscovered, to prevent development defects—”

  Tay shrugged. “I don’t care if I die young. I don’t want to live a long time. It doesn’t matter, does it? Everyone I love is gone already.”

  Pam stared at her with haunted eyes. “I had never wanted children. I had friends instead. People like Ben and Mary Walker, and Clint Suritobo, and Rei: they were my family, the people I loved. Ben and Mary were so cut up when they couldn’t have kids. I was so glad when—” She stopped. “I’m sorry. I meant to say, is there anything you want to ask me? I mean, about the clone project?”

  “Why are there only five clones? And why are we all different?”

  “We weren’t trying to mass-produce human beings, only to save something precious and amazing. . . . We didn’t create hundreds of failures, we wouldn’t have known how. We made only a few attempts, I will show you the whole story if you like. . . . We were very lucky that we got five of you, each of you unique, all of you producing the antibodies we were looking for. . . . Tay, we took the law into our own hands. I don’t know if that’s ever the right thing to do, even to win something like M-389. But I can’t be sorry that we did it, because now there’s you—”

  How could we be normal? Tay thought. How could we be?

  Pam drew a breath. “Tay, I know you don’t want to talk about it. I just needed to make sure you knew enough, so that if you have to see yourself discussed in the papers or on the TV, there’ll be no surprises. I really came to say . . . I want you to go back to Singapore.”

  Tay’s aunt Helen, her dad’s sister, had flown out from England the moment she’d heard about the attack. She’d been in Singapore all this time. She wanted Tay to come and join her, and come back to England to live with her family. Tay hated that idea. She had refused to leave the Marine and Shore.

  Tay felt the blood drain from her face. “I don’t want to go! You said I didn’t have to go! I don’t know Aunt Helen. She isn’t even my real relative, I’m adopted!”

  “This isn’t about your aunt Helen, and you don’t have to go back to England. But it’s dangerous here, even if the army is winning, and you need to be away from this terrible suspense. You need people, professional people who can help you deal with your grief—”

  “I have to stay and look after Uncle! What’ll happen to him if I leave?”

  Pam winced. “Uncle will be fine, Tay. We’re trying to find a new home for him.”

  “You mean another refuge? It’ll have to be somewhere we can be together—”

  “Er, probably not another refuge. That’s not going to work; he’s too old and, um, he needs special care. There are some big zoos, like the San Diego Zoo in California, that have very good ape centers—”

  A shock of dread and horror went through Tay.

  “A zoo! You’d put Uncle in a zoo?”

  “He wouldn’t be in the zoo on display. An ape center means somewhere doing research. He’d have interesting things to do, and human company—”

  “You can’t send Uncle to a zoo!” cried Tay. “He isn’t an animal!”

  “All right, all right. Look, it’s not going to happen right away. We can discuss—”

  “Don’t make me go to Singapore. I d-don’t want to see a counselor. I want to be here. Please, please let me stay. I have to be here until . . . until we know.”

  They stared at each other. Pam started to reach out, as if to give Tay a hug. But her arms fell back. “I won’t make you leave,” she said. “But I think you should. Really.”

  After Pam had gone, Tay went down to Uncle’s cabin. It was empty. The prisoner must be having his exercise. She sat on the bunk and drew her legs up. The bedding was fresh, the cabin-cage was clean, but it smelled strongly of orangutan. Uncle must hate that. The red apes don’t live packed close together in huts full of their own smell the way humans do. She knew how he must be feeling. Betrayed, betrayed . . .

  Her throat was tight with the tears she refused to shed.

  She sat there, her arms wrapped around her knees, a plan forming in her mind. There’s the dinghy, she thought. Someone takes it to the shore every night to get fresh grass and branches. I wouldn’t have to launch one of the big boats. I can get food and water. And I bet I can get hold of the right key card.

  It was two in the morning when she left her cabin. She’d found her desert boots. They were very worn and battered, but they’d be better than bare feet. She had them slung around her neck. She’d collected a survival kit by wandering around the offices and the ship’s galley, slipping things into her pockets. No one had stopped her, she was allowed to go wherever she liked. She’d had no trouble getting hold of the key card either. She’d stolen it from Chen’s jacket when she was eating dinner with him and some of the other young technicians in the station cafeteria.

  She was going to take Uncle home. They would make the same journey as they had done before, only in reverse. She could not make anyone believe that he was a real person, so this was the only solution. It would be morning before she or the ape was missed, and then the Marine and Shore would have to get official permission from the army to come ashore. By the time anyone came after them, Tay and Uncle would be far away. They could avoid the soldiers of both sides. They would cross the savannah, cross the Waruk somehow, and then they would find a corner of the refuge reserve that the fire had not touched: some patch of forest that nobody wanted. She imagined living there with Uncle, living off the fruits of the forest, among the wild things. If she couldn’t stay, if the humans tracked her down and dragged her back, at least they’d never find Uncle. He could escape into the high canopy, where humans couldn’t follow.

  A rubber dinghy with an outboard motor was kept tied up at the stern of the station. She peered over the rail, using the thin beam of her torch to make sure the metal ladder was in place. It looked a long way down. The motion would be strange, but Uncle wouldn’t be afraid as long as he was with Tay. We’ll climb down and cast off and let the tide carry us, and then when we’re well clear, we switch on the engine, she decided.

  She left her rucksack and her boots and crept away to fetch Uncle.

  There was someone with him constantly by day, but the ape was left alone at night, locked in. It was dreamlike and strange, sneaking down the dark passageway. The key card opened the outer door, and the door to the inner cabin wasn’t locked.

  “Uncle?” she whispered. “It’s me, Tay. Come on, we’re leaving.”

  She switched on her torch, and found him and took his hand. “Nnh?” said Uncle. It was the first sound she’d heard him make since they’d reached the Marine and Shore, and her heart leapt. His hand gripped hers warmly. She knew she was doing the right thing.

  “Come on! Be very quiet!”

  She had to tug him all the way, but he followed and he kept quiet. They got out on deck and made the long trek (it felt like miles) to the stern. She switched on her torch and shone it so that it lit her face.

  “Uncle, I’m taking you home,” she whispered. “We’re going back to the forest.”

  She turned the torch beam so that she could see his face, and was overjoyed to see that Uncle was looking at her, with expression in his eyes. With his free hand he gently stroked her face, making a very sad long lip.

  “Nnh—” he sighed. She knew he was saying, We can’t go back.

  “Yes, we can!” hissed Tay. “Trust me. Come on, we’ll get over the side.”

  She touched the top of the ladder: and then all hell broke loose.

  Searchlights came on. Sirens wailed. Footsteps pounded. In seconds Tay and Uncle were surrounded by the station’s night watch: all of them armed. In minutes the whole staff and crew of the Marine and Shore seemed to have rushed to the spot.

  “What the hell’s going on?” yelled someone.

  “I’m taking Uncle home!” shouted Tay, furious with herself for not having
realized there would be people on guard. “He hates it here. You can’t keep him in a cage, he isn’t an animal, he’s a real person same as any of you, and you can’t keep him like this.”

  There was a mutter of amazement. Tay stood there shaking, clinging to Uncle’s hand. Pam Taylor came through the crowd, people making way respectfully as soon as they realized who it was.

  “Tay . . . ? What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking Uncle. We’re going home. I won’t let you send him to a zoo.”

  “We won’t send him to a zoo. Come on, come with me. We’ll talk about this in the morning.” Pam put her arm around Tay. “Okay, everyone can get back to bed, go back to sleep or whatever you were doing. No one is attacking the ship. Please disperse quietly, I’ll look after Tay and the ape.”

  “He’s not an animal!” yelled Tay, throwing off Pam’s arm. “I’m taking him back to the forest. It belongs to him, not to humans! Uncle isn’t a dumb animal! He has a right to be free. He’s as intelligent as anyone, and you can’t take his home away—”

  While she was shouting, Dr. Levier had finally appeared and pushed his way to the front. The director of Marine and Shore was wearing a lurid-patterned batik dressing gown over green silk pajamas and carrying a large wrench. He looked furious. “What are you trying to do to me, Pam?” he cried, waving the wrench. “Am I in charge here or am I not? What is this upheaval? What does this young woman think she’s saying? How long is this—this dangerous zoo animal going to stay on board!”

  “I’m very sorry about the disturbance, Philippe. Have some sympathy. Tay’s been through a lot . . . and Uncle is not dangerous. He’s as gentle as a lamb. Chen? Are you here? Please take Uncle back to his quarters.”

  “He is not an animal!” howled Tay. “You’re saying that because Lifeforce did something. Lifeforce made him superintelligent, and you’re afraid people will find out. That’s why he was so strange on the trek. That’s why you want to send him away!”