by Ann Halam
She was afraid for Uncle, and she was afraid for herself.
The helicopter settled, and Tay waited for the rotors to slow before she got down. “I hope you find him,” said the Singaporean pilot. “It would mean a lot to us if we could know poor old Uncle was safe.” The refuge mascot’s story had become important to everyone at Lifeforce Asia. People who had friends and colleagues among the hostages, who were desperately waiting for news just like Tay and like Pam, clung to the story of Uncle: the faithful orangutan who had survived. Maybe his miraculous appearance on the shore, and the way he’d led the rescuers to Taylor Walker, had become a little exaggerated: but that was understandable. People will exaggerate anything that helps in a crisis.
Pam stood waiting with Chen, the technician who’d been Uncle’s chief baby-sitter.
“Is there any news?” said Tay. It was the question everyone had been asking all the time, since the attack on the refuge. Is there any news? But this time it meant Uncle.
“No,” said Pam. “Come inside, we’ll tell you what happened.”
She didn’t try to hug Tay, and hardly even smiled. She just led the way to her office on the upper lab deck. As they walked through the lab, Tay saw that the brittle stars were still waving their tinsel arms in their row of tanks: and she had the strange feeling that she was coming home. Her lonely journey through the wilderness had not been over when she arrived at the Marine and Shore the first time. Now, maybe, it was nearly at an end. But only if Uncle was safe . . .
The three of them sat down. “It was my fault,” began Chen, looking miserable. “I’m so sorry, Tay. You see, I was trying to help him. I thought he was tame, fixed on human company. He seemed so docile, so quiet. I didn’t know he would—”
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Pam broke in. “The day after you left, the army lifted the restrictions on our position, and we were allowed to move back to our mooring. As soon as we’d made the move and reoccupied the shore camp, Chen wanted to get Uncle on solid ground again and I agreed. It was a good idea.”
“We set up a home for him in one of the storage huts,” explained Chen. “We rigged an open run in front of it. There wasn’t a padlock on the gate to the run, but it was roofed over, and there was a secure catch. Some of us were sleeping onshore: he wasn’t there by himself. He was still pining, but he seemed happier.
“We took him out and let him wander around in the daytime, but we kept him on the collar and lead. Of course he was loose at night, in his run and his sleeping quarters. The day before yesterday he was there okay when I took him his breakfast. An hour later I came back, the run was open and Uncle was gone. I thought someone had taken him for a walk. I didn’t think he would have escaped. I went looking for him, asking people. I called the ship, to see if someone had taken him back on board. So, you see, this meant it was a while before we really knew he was out on his own. Too long. He must have opened the catch somehow and climbed the perimeter fence—”
“We searched the area,” said Pam. “We couldn’t find him, but we were sure he wouldn’t have gone far. We waited, but he didn’t come back. When he’d been missing overnight, I decided we had to send for you.”
“He’s microchipped,” said Chen. “We can identify him if we find him. We’ll know him from a wild animal, even if he doesn’t know us. But that’s not much use. If only we’d thought to put a radio tracer on him. We could have done that easily, we do it to marine mammals all the time. We never imagined he would run away!”
“We can identify him anyway,” said Tay. “He’ll be the only orangutan on the savannah, it isn’t their country. And he doesn’t look a bit like a Borneo ape.”
“That’s good!” said Chen, looking doubtful. He had done his best for Uncle, thought Tay. But he was a Marine and Shore technician, he didn’t know anything about the red apes.
“I shouldn’t have left him,” Tay whispered. “I knew I shouldn’t have left him. I was the only one who knew about orangutans. It was my job to look after him. . . . It’s not your fault, Chen. I’m the person who let Uncle down.”
“Well, you’re here now,” said Pam rather stiffly. “With your help, I’m sure we’ll find him. I want you to come out with me into the savannah, Tay. We’ll take a Land Rover and go to where we picked you up when you arrived here. The chances are he isn’t far away. There are trees, there’s long grass, he’s smart. He could be hiding, watching us search. If he sees you, he might decide to show himself.”
“Maybe I should come along?” offered Chen. “He knows me best of all the crew. We’ll need a net, and a dart gun if he comes near: and you’ll need help.”
Tay and Pam looked at each other. He means well, said their glance—
“No,” said Pam. “We won’t go after him with a net and tranquilizer darts, not yet. We’ll try to get him to trust us again, try to make him believe that we’re his friends. That would be best.” She was looking at Tay as she spoke, smiling sadly.
Tay felt herself blushing.
“Come on,” said Pam. “Let’s go. He’s been missing for two days and there isn’t much water out there. Or much that an ape would eat. We have a few hours of light left.”
Marine and Shore was linked to the beach by a bridge of floating pontoons. Chen went over with Tay and Pam. He showed Tay the run the crew had made. It had been put together with care and roofed with panels of heavy wire mesh: but the catch on the gate was pathetic. It wouldn’t have puzzled a monkey, never mind an orangutan. Some of the shore-camp staff came hurrying to greet Tay and tell Pam how things were going. They’d been in touch with the East Kandah National Park headquarters: the people there were sending a tracker. But it was a hundred kilometers away, and every vehicle that moved on the roads had to have an army escort—
We have to find him ourselves! thought Tay, dismayed. If he sees people in uniform hunting him down, he’ll never, never come near. He’ll die out there—
They got into the Land Rover and drove into the golden landscape, leaving the huddle of huts and the tall fence behind them. Neither of them said a word as Pam left the trail and they went jolting through the dry grass. At last she pulled up, in the shade of a half-starved acacia tree.
“Is this where you found me?” said Tay. “I don’t remember anything—”
“It’s roughly the place. Tay, before we go any further you’d better tell me, do you still think we’re looking for an ape with superintelligence? A ‘human’ ape?”
Everything that she’d gone through with Uncle on the trek was clear in Tay’s mind, and everything was true, but it looked different now, after those few days in Singapore. She had been with the kind Van der Hoorts, doing ordinary things. She had talked to Dr. Soo-yin, and she knew that had done her good. But what happened to her in Clint’s office still seemed like a kind of miracle. Clint had made the world come straight again, just the way he always used to do. . . .
“Why didn’t you want me?” she said at last. “I was bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh. Nothing can change the way I feel about Mum and Dad, but I was your baby. Why did you let Lifeforce take me away? Was there no room for me in your life?”
Pam didn’t tell Tay that they were supposed to be talking about Uncle.
“You want to know that now? Tay, I was fifty-three when I started taking M-389—”
Tay glanced at her, startled. There was gray in Pam’s golden-brown hair: but Tay had always assumed her gene mother was younger than Mum.
“Yes, fifty-three, and I was developing arthritis in my hands.” She lifted them from the steering wheel and flexed her strong, tanned fingers. “That’s not a good thing for a lab scientist. It’s gone now. . . . But in those days no one tested drugs on women of childbearing age. Like the other women among the M-389 volunteers, I was too old to bear my own child. Of course, anything’s possible now, but we didn’t even consider the idea. But there was another reason, Tay. We were sure it would be wrong. What would that be like, having an identical twin for a parent? We thoug
ht it would be unbearable. I believed it was for the best. I wanted Ben and Mary to have you. But when I held you in my arms for the first time, oh, it was very hard to let you go—”
“I think you never thought about the consequences. I think you never thought about how it would feel to be us. Me, and the other four clones.”
“Maybe we couldn’t imagine that. What we thought of was . . . all the diseases that can be treated by M-389. It’s to do with ageing, Tay. I’ve always looked younger than my age, and yet I was developing arthritis at fifty-three. That’s one of the things that made me a suitable candidate for M-389. I was young enough to respond, but I obviously had the defect. But I wasn’t young enough for the altered DNA to express strongly enough. . . . It’s complicated. The drugs we’ve developed will preserve and enhance something called collagen. That will reduce signs of ageing, even in healthy people. But the important thing is that we can prevent autoimmune disease from taking hold. Arthritis can be treated effectively, as never before. The many variants of arthritis. Multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy. Lupus. Scleroderma. Transplant rejection. There are many more effects—”
“All right, all right . . . When I was in Singapore, I heard them saying on the TV it was like discovering penicillin.”
Pam nodded. “Yes. It’s like penicillin, it’s as important as that. We haven’t found a cure for old age, but we can dramatically improve the quality of life in our natural life span. It’s been a long road, more complex than we could have imagined, but we are there now, and it’s because of you five clones. Your blood, your tissue, gave us what we needed. That’s another thing I want you to understand. M-389 alone wasn’t the miracle. It’s what your DNA, your genetic profile, does with the original therapy. It’s the whole complex of what happens in your cells that makes the difference.”
Tay stared at her, trying not to let any expression show, though shivers were going down her spine. She had been told the facts, often, but she’d never taken in how strange they were. My blood, my tissue, giving so much . . . “Is that why I’m rich?”
“Well, no. We made the M-389 antibodies open-source, nonprofitmaking. But we’ve made money out of other less important things. You’re rich because you’re a member of Lifeforce, you have shares in the company.”
“It’s always Lifeforce. Why do you let the company rule your life?”
Pam had been staring through the windscreen. She turned and looked at Tay, with an expression that Tay had often seen in a mirror.
“Lifeforce is me, Tay. Don’t you understand? Lifeforce is me. And Ben and Mary Walker, and Clint Suritobo, and Rei Chooi, who is Rei Van der Hoort now; and some other people you’ve met but you don’t know so well. We started the company. When Lifeforce turned into big business, Ben and Mary and Clint and I decided to branch out into conservation. Clint had always wanted to study ape behavior, instead of testing drugs on them. That’s how the Kandah Refuge project started. . . . But the clone idea was ours too. Oh, Tay, people talk about big faceless corporations being dangerous. But the faceless corporations have nothing on the danger of a group of friends with ambitions and ideals and a brand-new science to play with. We thought we could do anything. We did something that should have been impossible, to keep hold of what we’d found in M-389. . . . Maybe we were mad to do what we did, no matter what the benefits. But how can I regret it, when it gave me you?”
“I think you’re the irresponsible teenager here,” said Tay. “I think you are nuts.”
“You’re probably right.”
They hugged each other, and in that hug a lot of painful trouble was burned away.
“It was the book,” said Tay when she let her gene mum go. She knew now that she’d been half out of her mind in the days after her trek, but she felt she had a right to defend herself. “Uncle was my friend, my guide, when I had no one. When I saw him on the ship, he was like a zombie. I thought he must be pretending to be a dumb animal because he was afraid of you. And . . . there was my Shakespeare in his cage. How could he have got hold of that? I’m sure I’d thrown it away, out on the savannah—”
“It was in your pack,” said Pam abruptly.
“Oh.”
“I gave it to him, that’s the solution. I couldn’t bring Uncle to your cabin while you were recovering those first two days, because of Philippe’s attitude. I told Uncle you were safe, as best I could: and I gave him something of yours. It seemed to comfort him.”
“Okay, but there was more,” said Tay. “When I woke up on the Marine and Shore, you told me you knew I was with Uncle, because sometimes you know things about me. Like an identical twin . . . Well, when you told me Uncle was fine, I knew you were lying. I’m sorry, Pam, but I still feel it and I don’t understand. I kept saying Uncle’s a person!—and you kept saying no, but you were lying. Or hiding something—So I thought it must be something weird Lifeforce had done.”
“Uncle is a person,” said Pam. “You were right.”
“What?” Tay was shocked. “But you said . . . What do you mean?”
Pam sighed. “I mean, Uncle is a person. An orangutan person. He didn’t need to be experimented on. He was born that way, like every orangutan, like every one of the great apes. If you thought I was behaving like someone with a guilty conscience, that’s because I do have a guilty conscience. Because the woods are burning, Tay. The apes are losing their homeland, and there’s nothing I can do.”
“I know the forest is burning. It’s horrible. I could see the fires from the air. I saw the satellite pictures of the whole of Kandah, on TV in Singapore—”
“I don’t mean what’s going on now. The rebels are in retreat, and the fires of this summer will be controlled. I don’t mean just the logging companies either, though they are part of it. I mean nearly all the great forests of Borneo and Sumatra are gone already, and Kandah was our last stand. And though it’s tragic how quickly, how crudely, it has happened, it had to come. There are millions of people living on these two great islands. They want farmland, and space to live, and washing machines, and cars, and roads; and hospitals and schools. Do we have the right to tell them You can’t do it? I don’t think so. Of course there’ll be reserves and national parks, where a lot of the fabulous wildlife will survive. But they’ll be small compared to the forest that was the orangutans’ home, and it won’t be enough. They’re solitary creatures, each of them needs a wide territory, and they aren’t going to change their ways. Most probably, quite soon, there will be no wild apes left.”
“That’s what Clint used to say,” said Tay. “I won’t believe it. Lifeforce is rich. You can campaign, you can tell the world, you can make the people share. . . . If you have a guilty conscience, if you care, why don’t you do something!”
“Lifeforce made a lot of money very quickly, Tay. Now we’re spending money on conservation, and on education. But we’re trying to spend it wisely. We want to help, but we’re not martyrs for a hopeless cause. We don’t fight battles we can’t win.”
“What about the people at the refuge? What about Mum and Dad? Didn’t they die for something they believed in?”
“They died by accident,” said Pam bitterly. “Because I was stupid, and I didn’t get them out of danger. They died for no reason: their deaths won’t save the great apes.”
Tay wished she could undo the things she’d said that night before she left. It would have been easier to take the bleak sadness in her gene mother’s voice and eyes if she’d known she’d done nothing to make it worse. Grief ought to be dignified. When a tragedy happens, people ought to be kind and gentle with each other. But it doesn’t always turn out that way. She took Pam’s hand, feeling so much love. She no longer felt that Pam had to have the answer to everything. I have a twin sister, Tay thought. Much, much older than me. But she’s not old. She’s not even a grown-up, not all the time. She’s just Pam, and she needs me.
“Mum and Dad died doing the work they believed in,” she said very firmly. “That doesn’t make them useless m
artyrs for a hopeless cause. They didn’t mean to die, they weren’t taking stupid risks. It was nobody’s fault except the killers’.”
They looked at each other, each of them realizing what had been said. Hope would not die, not until the very end: but they had both admitted that they were sure Ben and Mary Walker were dead. They said nothing, they just gripped hands very tight.
Sometimes silence is best.
“It wasn’t only Uncle,” said Tay said at last. “There were other things. In Singapore the counselor tried to get me to take a drug that would make me forget. I was afraid she was trying to destroy my memories of Uncle being human. . . . And she and Rei both asked me whether Clint had taken anything from the refuge, something he’d maybe tried to hide. So then I thought those must be the notes about Uncle’s secret identity—”
“Oh, boy . . . ,” sighed Pam. “Well, I can explain. Maybe Rosie and Rei shouldn’t have asked you. I’d already told them you hadn’t brought anything with you . . . but the truth is, we did hope that Clint had managed to bring out some important notes. When Ben and Mary got through to Rei, when the attack was going on, they said he was going to try.”
“He did,” said Tay. “He gave me a package. I didn’t tell Dr. Soo-yin, or Rei, because it’s no use. I’m sorry: we lost it. I think it ended up at the bottom of the Waruk.”
Pam sighed. “Oh well . . . we knew there wasn’t much chance.”
“What about the memory-destroying drug? That was very creepy.”
Pam frowned and looked guilty. “I think you should take it.”
Tay stared at her, amazed and outraged.
“Don’t look at me like that. Eumnesystin will not destroy your memories. It will break the loop that makes remembering hurt so much that you can’t bear it. . . . I watched you, Tay. Physically you recovered amazingly, but that only made it harder. I saw you shutting yourself off, refusing to cry. I was sure you were starting to believe crazy things about Uncle as a way to escape from your grief. That’s why I had to let you go—”