by Ann Halam
And still there was no news.
She had lied to Rei, and to the counselor. She knew what they were asking about. It was the packet Clint had insisted they take with them when they left the burned-out wreck of the refuge and drove into the wake of the fire. Maybe, she thought, that packet had held notes about Uncle, explaining why he was a person, not an animal. But Tay was convinced that Clint’s notes were at the bottom of the Waruk River, and she didn’t want to talk about it. She did not believe the terrible things she’d nearly believed, the night before she left the Marine and Shore. She knew Lifeforce would never be involved in cruel experiments on the orangutans. She must have been dreaming; all those things she’d thought Uncle could do and feel must have been hallucinations. Realizing this was like losing her last friend in the world, but it didn’t hurt. The only thing that still hurt, in her deadened mind, was the certainty that Pam had lied to her. She didn’t know why she still felt that way, if Uncle really was just an ordinary ape, but she did: and the pain was unbearable. She had to shut it out, she had to get away from everything to do with her gene mother: even if it meant spending her life in gray England.
Uncle would be all right. The people at the San Diego ape center would be kind to him.
Her second meeting with the counselor was a few days of shopping and resting after the first, and she went back purely because she didn’t want any fuss. If they wanted her to see a counselor, she would see a counselor. It would be all over soon, anyway. The tickets were booked, and she and Aunt Helen were going to England.
The only thing that scared her was the drug that would destroy her painful memories. She had images of Dr. Soo-yin suddenly producing a hypodermic and sticking it in her arm. But really she knew that wouldn’t happen, and of course it didn’t. Dr. Soo-yin didn’t mention the drug. She didn’t say anything about the way Tay had shouted at her at the end of the last session. She just started asking the same sort of gentle questions as before.
“Dr. Soo-yin, what if I wanted to see a counselor who didn’t work for Lifeforce?”
“We could arrange that,” said the doctor with unfailing calm. “I think you should go on seeing someone like me, a professional stranger to whom you can say anything, when you are in England. But Tay. . . . there is a difficulty. It would not be fair to ask someone to try to help you, and keep something important from them—”
“You mean the doctor would have to know I’m a Lifeforce Teenager.”
“Well, yes—”
Tay felt sick. So there was another lie. Aunt Helen had said no one would know, but of course that couldn’t happen. Being a clone, being one of the Lifeforce Teenagers, was going to follow her all her life. But why couldn’t people understand that the last thing she wanted was to talk about it. Talking wasn’t going to make Tay not a clone, or bring Mum and Dad and Donny back. She nodded, and sat with her head down, waiting to endure the next questions, whatever they might be—
It was several minutes before she realized that Dr. Soo-yin wasn’t sitting opposite her on the couch anymore. She looked up and saw that the counselor had quietly moved away, her high heels making no sound on the thick Chinese rug. She was sitting at her desk at the other end of the room, doing something on her computer.
It looked as if she’d given up on the session.
Suddenly Dr. Soo-yin gave a little chuckle. It was such a strange sound in this situation that Tay was curious in spite of herself. She got up and went slowly to the desk.
“Ah,” said Dr. Soo-yin. “Would you like to see?”
Tay shrugged and went round the desk so that she could see the screen over the doctor’s shoulder. There were no printed words, just a kaleidoscope of bright colors that dipped and darted around on a clear blue background.
“What is that meant to be?”
“It’s my hobby, Tay. You can call it computer art if you like. I just think I’m making patterns. This one I call Hummingbird. I thought you might be interested to see some of my work because I know you’re good at art.”
“No,” said Tay. “It was Donny who was good. I’m just neat.” She looked up and realized that the “paintings” on the walls were actually prints of computer pictures like this one. “Are those your pictures on the walls?”
“Yes. Only amateur, but I enjoy making them.” Dr. Soo-yin looked very human, suddenly. Just like Donny, when he knew he’d done something good and went all shy about it. Tears pricked Tay’s eyes; she swallowed hard.
“They’re very nice,” she croaked.
“Now, this is a new trick I’ve learned. Let me see if I can make it work—”
The “hummingbird” vanished. Two thin beams of light shot out from the tiny Webcam eyes on the top rim of the screen, and a new image, a spinning green sphere, seemed to jump out of a dark background. It seemed to hang in the air where the beams of light meshed. The green ball separated into segments like an orange, and then each segment burst into shining drops that danced around each other, like chips of emerald.
“Hey, that’s wonderful!” cried Tay.
“It would be better with three-D glasses,” said Dr. Soo-yin modestly.
“What’s it meant to be?”
“Only a pattern. I call it Emerald Storm.”
The green star flowers were swimming in the night. Tay’s heart gave a painful leap. Where had she heard that? Where had she seen the green stars? Oh yes. . . . on the beach by that stream, when Donny had first been ill. She had woken in the night to find her little brother sitting up beside her, gazing at the fireflies. Donny had woken because he had a fever, but he had turned to her, with such a beautiful light in his eyes, and he had said, How unbelievably great to see that—
My little brother Donny. He was so brave. He was such a brilliant kid.
“I’ve seen something just like that,” she whispered aloud. “When we were on the run, and my brother Donny was very ill. We saw a swarm of fireflies one night.”
Dr. Soo-yin turned round, leaving the program to run. She pulled up another chair and Tay sat down, hardly realizing what she was doing.
“What was he like, your little brother?”
“He . . . he had black hair and blue eyes, like Mum. He was nearly as tall as me. He wasn’t terrifically good at things like English and maths and science, but he was truly good at art. And he was just, brilliant fun. He was just, my best friend.” She looked at the neatly folded pink cotton handkerchief that had suddenly appeared in her hand.
“What’s this for?”
“Because you’re crying.”
“Oh.” She wiped her eyes. “You see, the forest was such a wonderful place to live. Sometimes people visit the rain forest and they say it’s boring. You do see animals. You see the gibbons, and you see birds, and masses of butterflies, and monkeys sometimes. There were otters in the creek near our clearing until it dried up, and there was a mouse deer, but it was very shy. But it’s not like a wildlife safari. Usually it’s just the trees. Trees, and creepers, and big plants growing under them, and it’s very silent. But it’s not boring: it’s subtle. It grows on you. You never want to be anywhere else.”
She wiped her eyes again, but the tears kept flowing. “I loved the silence. I used to walk out, off the path where the ground was clear, and sit down and just be. Oh, and there were the apes. You think you know the apes, when you’ve watched them for years. I thought I knew. But I didn’t, until I was alone with Uncle.”
“He was your faithful friend, I know.”
Tay shook her head. “No. He was not my friend, and he was more than my friend. He was himself. It was what Mum and Dad used to say. A privilege. A privilege to be near them, because they are like us. They don’t talk, but you can feel there’s a person, a different kind of person, with a mind but not like yours. It’s like nothing else in the world. I can’t explain.”
“I think you explain very well.”
Tay nodded and scrubbed her eyes. She swallowed hard. “I think,” she said, “I think I want to go now,
Doctor. I’ll c-call a car from the lobby desk. Thank you for showing me your art. You sh-shouldn’t call it just my hobby like that. It’s really great.”
“Thank you.”
“H-here’s your handkerchief.”
It was a sodden gray lump. Dr. Soo-yin smiled. “Ah, you may keep it, Tay.”
She leaned down, slipped a disk into her computer’s drive, tapped a few keys and took it out again. Then she tucked it into a square white envelope and held it out.
“Here you are.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s a copy of Emerald Storm. I would be honored if you would accept it, brave Tay.” Tay took the envelope, feeling confused. Dr. Soo-yin smiled. “Oh, and there’s something else I meant to give you. Here, it’s a master key card for Conservation Projects. In case you wanted to visit there and not have to bother asking, before you go to England.”
As she headed for the door, Dr. Soo-yin came with her and said hesitantly, “I have been proud to meet you, Tay. You are a very special person, you know.”
“I know,” said Tay, her heart closing up again. “I’m a clone girl.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Out in the quiet corridor, Tay put the disk away in her backpack and pressed her hands to her tearstained cheeks. She didn’t want anyone to see her crying, she just wanted to get away and hide. But she was going back to England. This might be the last time she would ever be inside the Lifeforce Asia tower.
Her feet took her to the lifts, and then her finger pressed the familiar number. Floor forty-one, Conservation Projects. When she stepped out on that floor, everything was so familiar it was like walking into a sad dream. Left from the lifts and then right by the big weeping fig in its planter . . . and here was the corner room that had been Mum and Dad’s office since Tay was seven. There was a joke about orangutans, a tatty newspaper cutting, still taped up on the door. How many hours had Donny and Tay spent hanging around here: squabbling because they were bored, running races up and down the corridors? How many times had the four of them gathered for a rushed meal before the flight home to Kandah, among heaps of books and files, eating Hokkien food out of cardboard take-away boxes—
She stared at the office door, pierced by a shaft of grief as clear and true as a laser beam. They were dead. Mum and Dad were dead. Maybe there was some hope for the other staff, but Mary and Ben were dead. If only Tay could stop hoping . . . The cruel secret was that she had pretended to give up hope, but she couldn’t—
She could not bear it. She backed away from the door as if it had demons behind it.
Clint’s office was down the corridor. The door was still adorned with a sketch of a sombrero smoking a cheroot. She used the key card and shut the door behind her very quietly. The venetian blinds were closed, the air-conditioning was cool but not chilly. Thin fingers of burning sun lay across the floor and across the shelves of books: weighty tomes on animal behavior and a shelf of tatty paperback Westerns. A pack of cigarettes, his thin black cheroots, was still lying on the desk.
For a moment his presence was so strong she felt as if she had come to see Clint, the way she would have done at the refuge: to sit with him in the young apes’ clubhouse, and just know he understood that she was feeling bad. But already there was a film of dust over everything. Already it was like walking into a tomb. She remembered Clint with Uncle, taking potshots at tin cans in the rain. In her memory he seemed so alive. How could someone so alive be dead?
She sat down at his desk and powered up the computer. She knew no one would mind. She wasn’t going to mess with anything, or look at anything private. She just wanted to feel close to everything she’d lost. Just once more . . . A window appeared, prompting her to enter Clint’s office password. She smiled. People were supposed to change their passwords regularly, but Clint didn’t accept you weren’t supposed to get attached to a password, and he never changed his. . . . It used to drive Mum mad. There were eight spaces for her to fill. Eight spaces, eight letters.
EASTWOOD
The screen cleared to Clint’s start-up page.
Mohammad Yamin K. Suritobo . . . You couldn’t imagine Dr. Mohammad Yamin K. Suritobo wandering around in a poncho, pretending to be in a Western. There were icons for all of Clint’s books and a huge folder on the refuge, with records for every orangutan that had passed through Clint’s care. She opened the folder with her own name on it.
Here were e-mails she and Clint had sent to each other. Here were childish pictures she had drawn, and games and puzzles saved from when she was a little girl: things she’d typed with one finger, sitting in this office while Mum and Dad were busy and Clint was baby-sitting. . . . She found an old packet of e-mails from ten years ago: the kind of thing that gets stowed away on a big computer system, like a box of papers in a corner of the garage, and never thought of again. Ben and Mary Walker, Clint Suritobo and Pam Taylor: all talking about founding the orangutan refuge. But they weren’t just talking about the red apes. They were talking about a little girl and a baby boy. How would the children feel?
Would Tay be happy in the forest? Would it be a good thing for her?
“She loves the outdoors,” wrote Mary Walker. “We want her to be free—”
“I just want her to be happy,” wrote Pam—
“I was,” whispered Tay aloud, her tears falling fast. “Oh, I was. I was happy—”
She shut the folder, feeling like an eavesdropper. But now she couldn’t bear to leave Clint’s desk. She opened the Kandah Refuge folder and started looking at the orangutan records: which Clint called his rogues’ gallery, or sometimes “The Kandah Refuge Yearbook.” There was the young orangutan who’d been called Melissa, a famous thief and escapologist . . . with a caption on her photo, from Clint, saying he didn’t know Melissa’s name for the psychologist at the orphanage, but he was sure it was something very rude, and he knew she would prosper in her future career because she had a fine criminal mind—
There was a file for Uncle.
She didn’t want to open it. Here, if anywhere, she would find out the truth about Uncle being different. She would find out why Pam had lied to her. I’ve come this far, she muttered to herself. I might as well—
There was a photograph of Uncle with Clint, beside Clint’s cottage. Uncle was wearing the Dyak poncho, and he had a cheroot in his mouth. The caption said, “Me and My Secretary.” There were scanned documents about Uncle’s transfer from the Sumatra orangutan reserve that said he was free of TB infection and he was not to be released. There was a lot of other stuff, normal stuff, the same as for all the other apes: and a reminder from Clint to himself. He was such a scatterbrain, he was always leaving himself notes about things. It read: “Uncle and the rest of us on video, clips filed at Kandah, with disk copy of new Kandah book.”
This is strange, she thought. There’s nothing here that says he’s a weird, different ape. Everything here says he’s special because we loved him, he was our mascot, our—
She kept looking at the photograph. She’d been bitterly telling herself that she was right and Uncle was a person, but she had not thought about him, not really thought about him, since she’d left the Marine and Shore. But there he was, Uncle, her friend: not a listless sad sack of a cage animal, her friend. Suddenly, with a shock like being dumped in icy water, like a light coming on in a dark room, so bright it hurts your eyes, she realized that she’d done something terrible. She had left Uncle alone! All the time that she had desperately needed him, the ape had been there. But when Uncle desperately needed Tay, when he’d been sunk in misery, she had just walked out and left him!
It was a horrible shock. Mum and Dad and Clint and Donny had been brave and faithful to the end, but Tay had run away. . . . How awful! She felt as if she’d been sleepwalking and suddenly she was awake; as if she’d been out of her mind and suddenly she was sane. And she’d been unjust to Pam too. There was still a mystery, because Pam had still been lying, but if someone you love does something
you don’t understand, you don’t just give up on them. You tell them how you feel. She could hear Dad’s voice, so much a part of her it was like her soul talking to her: Don’t clam up, Tay. Don’t go off into one of your silent sulks. Talk about it, get it out—
Tears were running down her face. I’ll come back, Uncle. I’ll come back straightaway. I let you down, but I’ll make it up to you. I won’t go to England. I’ll argue my case, I’ll fight to keep us together—
The door behind her opened.
She turned and saw an untidy young woman clutching a stack of tatty plastic folders. On the Conservation Projects floor nobody dressed to impress.
“Hi,” said the young woman. “Tay? Remember me? Lucy Hom. General dogsbody-person for Conservation Projects. Tay, I’m so very sorry. We’re all just trying to hope—”
She came and sat down and gave Tay a tissue from her pocket. “Rosetta said I’d find you in your mum and dad’s office. When you weren’t there, I thought I’d find you in here. I knew you hadn’t left the building because you still have your security tag.”
It seemed as if Tay had to spend her life taking handkerchiefs from people.
“Hello, Lucy. Is it—is it news?” she gasped, wiping her eyes.
“No, I’m sorry. . . . It’s not that. I have a satellite call for you from Pam on the Marine and Shore. If you switch your phone on, I think I can patch it through. Pam needs you to go back. It’s Uncle. Apparently he escaped. They don’t know how, but he’s disappeared.”
the Marine and Shore laboratory ship was back at its mooring, in the deep-water bay at the tip of East Kandah. Tay’s helicopter landed on the foredeck about noon of the day after Lucy Hom had found her in Clint’s office. By the time she’d got the message the day before, it had been too late to arrange a flight back out here: the Kandahnese army wasn’t allowing Lifeforce helicopters to fly in at night. She could see Pam waiting for her. Tay had only been away a week, but she felt so different it was as if the world had turned upside down. There was a fluttering in her stomach. She didn’t know how she was going to face her gene mother, after the way they’d parted: after the things Tay had said.