Watch w-2

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Well, he doesn’t practice, and we don’t keep kosher.”

  “But you’re Jewish?”

  “Under Jewish law, you are what your mother is, but… yeah, sure. Decter is an Israeli name.”

  “Oh. You always looked, I dunno, Polish or something to me. I thought your name was a shortening of something longer.”

  “Well, it used to be Decterpithecus, but we changed that about five million years ago.”

  Caitlin had hoped for a laugh, but Bashira’s tone was earnest. “And your mother’s a Unitarian?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Which is… what?”

  Caitlin shrugged a little. “To tell you the truth, I don’t actually know. She doesn’t talk about it much. But I know it’s popular with academics and intellectuals.”

  “And you—you said you’re ‘nothing.’ Don’t you believe in God?”

  Caitlin shifted in her chair. “I’m not large on the big G, no.”

  “I don’t know how you can’t believe in him,” Bash said. “I see him all around us, in a thousand details every day.”

  She thought about that. There were things in math that she saw when others didn’t—things that were so very clear to her but that her classmates couldn’t see. Could God be like that? Could Bashira really be detecting something that, for whatever reason, Caitlin just wasn’t wired to see? Hell, for most of her life, she hadn’t been wired to see anything—but she’d had no trouble accepting that others did see; she never for a moment thought it was all some big con job, some lie or delusion. It never occurred to her to say to Stacy, “Oh, yeah, sure you see the moon, Stace. And can you see the monkeys flying out of my butt?”

  But she knew in her bones that Bashira was wrong about this. And yet, Bash was bright, and so were her parents. “Does your dad believe in God?” Caitlin asked.

  “Sure, of course. Prays facing Mecca five times a day.”

  Caitlin still wasn’t good at mental pictures, but the thought of Dr. Hameed doing that at the Perimeter Institute did strike her as incongruous.

  “In fact…” said Bashira, but then she stopped.

  “Yes?”

  Bashira tipped her head. “Well, we left Pakistan for a reason, you know. My dad worked for the government there.”

  “A civil-servant physicist?” said Caitlin. “You mean he was at a public university?”

  “No,” said Bashira softly. “The government. The military. He worked on nuclear weapons.”

  Caitlin’s voice was suddenly soft, too. “Oh.”

  “And he couldn’t keep doing that. The Qur’an says, ‘Fight in the Way of God against those who fight you, but do not go beyond the limits. God does not love those who go beyond the limits.’ ”

  Caitlin considered this. “I’ve often thought that if the people with the highest IQs stopped doing what those with the lowest IQs wanted them to do, the world would be in a lot better shape. Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, Zyklon B…” She paused, then said, “If God existed, we’d know it. But, instead, we have things like the Holocaust.”

  Bashira made an expression Caitlin hadn’t yet seen on any other face—but she guessed it was what a person must look like when tiptoeing through a minefield. “But, Cait, God can’t interfere in Man’s doings; if he did, there’d be no such thing as free will, right?”

  “There are times,” Caitlin said quietly, “when free will isn’t the most important thing.”

  Bashira frowned but didn’t reply.

  Caitlin took off her glasses; sometimes it was easier for her to think when everything was a blur instead of a distracting mess of visual details. “And,” she said, “even setting aside free will, what about natural disasters, then? Like earthquakes or hurricanes? Or that outbreak of bird flu in China? Those weren’t Man’s doing; they were God’s doing—or, at least, if he didn’t actively cause them, surely, if the God you’re talking about exists, he could have stopped them, right? But he didn’t. So… so… do you guys read Mark Twain here in Canada?”

  “Not much,” said Bashira. “There’s this old Canadian humorist named Stephen Leacock. We read him in English class instead.”

  In Caitlin’s admittedly brief experience living here, anyone labeled as “Canada’s answer to…” followed by the name of an American was bound to disappoint. “Well, Twain said, ‘If there is a God, he is a malign thug.’ That stuff in China—or New Orleans, or Mexico City, or…” And now she felt her facial muscles moving, and she imagined she’d adopted that tiptoeing look Bashira had had a moment ago. “…or in Pakistan.”

  Bashira looked like she was about to object again, but Caitlin pushed on, finishing her point. “No, if God existed, we’d know it: the world would be a better place.”

  But then she paused and took a breath. It was time, she knew, to shift the conversation to something less volatile. She gestured at the present Bashira had given her. “So, um, speaking of books, what do you think of that new one we just started in English class?”

  “It’s okay, I guess,” Bash said.

  Caitlin nodded and put her glasses back on; they weighed less than the sunglasses she’d worn when she’d been blind. She’d read electronic copies of all the assigned books for the coming year over the summer. The class was doing dystopias just now; Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would be followed by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Mrs. Zed had spent the whole class yesterday drawing parallels between what Orwell wrote about and the modern world, comparing Big Brother to our “surveillance society,” as she kept calling it.

  “I thought Mrs. Zed made a good point,” Bashira continued, rotating her chair a little. “Everyone being watched all the time, everything being recorded and tracked. Webcams, security cameras, phone records, cell phones with GPSs, all of that.” She looked at Caitlin. “Did you know that Gmail retains your deleted email messages?”

  Caitlin shook her head, but it didn’t surprise her. Storage was dirt cheap.

  Bashira went on. “She might be right. The Web might be Big Brother incarnate.”

  “Mrs. Zehetoffer is old,” Caitlin said.

  Bashira nodded. “Yeah, she must be in her forties. But I still think she might be right. I don’t want everything I say and do to be tracked.”

  “I don’t know,” said Caitlin. “When I was blind, it was comforting to know there were security cameras in public areas. I mean, they were like magic to me; I didn’t have any sense of what vision was, but knowing that I was being watched over was relaxing.”

  “Yeah, but you are—you were—a special case. And Mrs. Zehetoffer thinks we’re very close to having Big Brother, if he isn’t here already.”

  “So?” Caitlin said—and she surprised herself with how sarcastic she sounded.

  “Hey, Cait… chill.”

  “I’m just saying,” said Caitlin sharply.

  “It’s just a book, babe.”

  But it wasn’t, Caitlin realized. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not just a novel but rather what Richard Dawkins called a meme—or a series of memes: ideas that spread and survived like genes, through reproduction and natural selection. And Orwell’s meme that surveillance is evil, that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism, that it invades privacy, that it constrains normal behavior, and that it is fundamentally corrupt, had won out over every other possible take on those issues. It was impossible to discuss such matters without people almost immediately invoking Big Brother, confident that merely raising the specter of Orwell’s world would be enough to win any argument.

  “Big Brother got a bum rap,” Caitlin said.

  “What?”

  “You know, I never had one—a big brother—but my friend Stacy does. And he always looks after her. There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone knowing everything, some caring person keeping tabs on you and making sure you’re safe.”

  “But if he’s corrupt—”

  “He doesn’t have to be corrupt,” Caitlin said.

  Bashira looked at her. Caitlin supposed other peo
ple had always looked at her while thinking of what to say next, but it was disconcerting; she averted her eyes, understanding, for a moment, what her dad must feel all the time.

  “ ‘Power corrupts,’ ” Bashira said gently. “ ‘And absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ ”

  “It doesn’t have to turn out that way,” Caitlin said.

  “Of course it does,” said Bashira. “Humans are imperfect and subject to corruption. The only thing that isn’t imperfect is the divine, and you said it yourself, my beloved infidel friend: you don’t believe in the divine.”

  fifteen

  “You can’t go back out there again,” Dr. Marcuse said to Dillon, as he and Shoshana entered the bungalow. “Hobo has voted you off the island.”

  Dillon had taken off his soaking-wet shirt, shoes, and socks, but he was still wearing his black jeans. “But he’s my thesis subject!” he protested.

  Dr. Marcuse had brought in the painting Hobo had made, and had set it on a worktable, leaning against the wall. “Look at it,” he said to Dillon.

  “Yes?” Dillon replied, peering at the canvas.

  “That’s you,” Marcuse said. “With your arms ripped off.”

  “Oh,” said Dillon softly.

  “You’re not to go out there. Of course, you can still watch him all you want on the closed-circuit cameras.”

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” asked Dillon, looking first at Shoshana, and then at Dr. Marcuse.

  “He’s reaching maturity,” Marcuse said.

  “He’s too young for that,” said Shoshana.

  “Is he?” said Marcuse, giving her a withering glance. “Who knows what’s normal for a chimp-bonobo hybrid? Regardless, he’s taking after his father: when male chimps reach maturity, they become hostile loners and are very hard to handle.”

  Sho felt her heart sink. If Marcuse was right, then Hobo was going to be like this from now on.

  “His reaction to you, Dillon, is symptomatic,” continued Marcuse. “You’re another male, and adult male chimps defend their territories against intruding males. When Werner comes in on Monday, I’ll tell him the same thing—Hobo is off-limits to him, too. Maria is at Yerkes for the next two weeks, but I’ll see if maybe she can cut her trip short and get back here.”

  “What about you?” asked Dillon.

  “Werner is five-four, and sixty-seven years old—and you, frankly, are a stick insect. But I can take care of myself. Hobo knows who the alpha is around here.”

  Shoshana looked at him. Dr. Marcuse could be loud and overbearing, but he did truly adore apes and treated them well. Still, even at the best of times, he was pretty high-strung—and this was not the best of times. As soon as the world had learned that Hobo was making representational art—mostly in the form of paintings of Shoshana’s profile—the Georgia Zoo had served Dr. Marcuse with papers, demanding that Hobo be returned to them. They didn’t care about Hobo as a—yes, damn it all, thought Sho—as a person. No, all they were interested in was the money his paintings were now fetching on eBay and in art galleries. If they won their suit, they’d no doubt try to sell the one of Dillon with his arms ripped off for a particularly high price.

  Marcuse moved over to the large chair and picked up the printout he’d been reading earlier. He held it up, inviting Shoshana to look at it.

  Sho’s eyesight was good—well, at least when she had her contacts in—but the type was too small for her to make out while he was holding it. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “News coverage from June of aught-eight,” he said. He was the only person Sho had ever met who referred to the initial decade of the twenty-first century as the aughts. “Spain’s parliament committed back then to the Declaration on Great Apes.”

  Shoshana knew the declaration well. It had first been put forward in 1993, and held that great apes should be entitled to the right to life, the protection of their individual liberty, and freedom from torture. So far, Spain was the only country to have adopted its provisions. Sho was all in favor of it, and so, she knew, was Marcuse. If something is self-aware—if it can communicate, and if it passes the mirror test and all that—then it should be recognized as a person, and it should have rights.

  “And you think that’s got a bearing on Hobo’s case?” she asked.

  “Absolutely. The Declaration defines ‘the community of equals’ as ‘all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. ’ And Article Two of the Declaration says, ‘Members of the community of equals are not to be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty.’ ” He spread his arms as if his point were now self-evident. “Well, the Georgia Zoo wants to deprive Hobo of precisely that.”

  Sho thought about the high chain-link fence that surrounded the Marcuse Institute, and the moat around the island on which Hobo spent most of his time. “This isn’t Spain,” she said gently.

  He frowned. “I know that, but the point is still correct. And Hobo should have a say in the matter—and, unlike just about every other ape on the planet, he actually can speak up on his own behalf.”

  Shoshana considered this. No one had told Hobo yet about the lawsuit from the Georgia Zoo. They hadn’t wanted to upset him. Chimps were notorious for hating to travel—which made sense for territorial animals.

  Still, Georgia did have several chimps, and several bonobos, too. It wasn’t clear which group they wanted to keep Hobo with; he had been conceived when the two populations had been housed together during a flood. It probably hadn’t occurred to Marcuse in his zeal to fight the lawsuit, but Hobo might well want to be among his own kind—whichever kind that was.

  But there was more to the zoo’s lawsuit than just custody. They also wanted to have Hobo sterilized—to keep the endangered chimp and bonobo bloodlines from being contaminated by his hybrid sperm. But although lots of reasonably complex ideas could be communicated to him, trying to explain the effects of castration would probably exceed his ability to comprehend.

  “Are you going to brief him about what’s at stake—assuming he’ll listen to us at all now, that is?” Sho asked.

  Marcuse seemed to mull this over for a few moments, then he nodded his great loaf of a head. “He’s likely to just get more antisocial as time goes on. Which means if we’re going to get through to him at all, there’s no time to waste—we’ve got a very narrow window here.”

  And so he and Shoshana headed back out into the sunshine, leaving Dillon behind. Marcuse led the way, taking bold steps as they crossed the bridge, his footfalls like thunder on the wooden boards. Hobo seemed to have been waiting for him, and he swayed on his spindly, bowed legs, looking at Marcuse from a dozen feet away—a standoff. Sho suppressed the urge to whistle the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

  She couldn’t see Marcuse’s face but she imagined he was again staring directly at the ape, trying to establish dominance.

  Hobo bared his teeth: large, yellow, sharp.

  Marcuse made a hissing sound, and—

  And Hobo averted his eyes and dropped his head.

  Marcuse confidently closed the distance between them, and, straining as he did so, he crouched near the ape, who was now sitting on his haunches.

  Hobo, Marcuse signed. Pay attention.

  Hobo was still looking at the ground, meaning he couldn’t see the signs. Sho gasped as Marcuse reached out to touch the bottom of Hobo’s face, afraid the ape was going to lash out at the contact, but he allowed Marcuse to lift his head.

  Do you like it here? he asked.

  Hobo was still for a time, and Shoshana was afraid the ape had given up signing altogether. But at last, he moved his hand, held in an O shape, from his mouth to his cheek. It was a sign that combined the words for eat and sleep, and it expressed the simple thought: Home.

  Yes, Marcuse signed. It’s your home. A pause. A seagull flew by overhead. But your home used to be Georgia Zoo, remember?

  Hobo nodded, a simple, and very human, gesture.

  Georgia Zoo wants you back—b
e your home again.

  Hobo briefly looked at Marcuse’s face. You there?

  No.

  He pointed questioningly at Shoshana.

  No. None of us. But: other apes!

  Hobo made no reply.

  What you want? Marcuse asked at last. Here? Or zoo?

  The ape looked around his little island, his eyes lingering for a moment on the statue of the Lawgiver, and lingering again when they came to the gazebo at the island’s center, with its screen windows and doors to keep the insects out, and his easel and work stool in the middle.

  Home, Hobo signed again, and then he spread his arms, encompassing it all.

  Okay, Marcuse replied. But others want to take you away, so you’re going to have to help us.

  Hobo made no reply. Shoshana thought Marcuse’s blue polyester trousers might give up under the strain of him crouching for so long. There will be a fight, he signed. Understand? A fight over where you will live.

  Hobo briefly looked at Shoshana, then back at Marcuse. His eyes were dark, wet.

  If you speak, Marcuse continued, you can stay here—maybe.

  Hobo looked around his little island domain again, and glanced back at the bungalow, off in the distance. Stay here, said Hobo.

  Shoshana wondered if the Silverback was going to raise the question of Hobo’s violent behavior, but he seemed to be letting that pass for now.

  That’s right—but you have to say it to other people. To strangers, or…

  He took a deep breath, then let it out. Shoshana knew there was no way Hobo could understand what Marcuse wanted to convey: Or else people will think I coached you in what to say.

  Strangers, said Hobo, and he shook his head and bared his teeth. Bad.

  It’s important… Marcuse began.

  But Hobo made the downward sign for bad once more, and then suddenly bolted away, running on all fours to the far side of the island.

  sixteen

  Bashira left around 4:00 p.m., and, after seeing her out, Caitlin went back up to her mother’s office. She was still IMing with Webmind there. “How is he?” Caitlin asked.