by David Brin
The urge passed and he shook his head. Later, he thought. When it will hurt them more.
Patting Tycho’s neck, he led the horse through the lighted area by the guard post and beyond the gate into the industrial part of town. The streets between the warehouses and factories were quiet—a few chims here and there hurrying about on errands beneath the scrutiny of the occasional passing Gubru patrol skimmer.
Taking pains not to be observed, Fiben slipped into a side alley and found a windowless storage building not far from the colony’s sole iron foundry. Under his whispered urging, Tycho pulled the floating hover over to the shadows by the back door of the warehouse. A layer of dust showed that the padlock had not been touched in weeks. He examined it closely. “Hmmm.”
Fiben took a rag from his belt apron and wrapped it around the hasp. Taking it firmly in both hands, he closed his eyes and counted to three before yanking down hard.
The lock was strong, but, as he’d suspected, the ring bolt in the door was corroded. It snapped with a muffled “crack!” Quickly, Fiben slipped the sheaf and pushed the door along its tracks. Tycho placidly followed him into the gloomy interior, the truck trailing behind. Fiben looked around to memorize the layout of hulking presses and metalworking machinery before hurrying back to close the door again.
“You’ll be all right,” he said softly as he unhitched the animal. He hauled a sack of oats out of the hover and split it open on the ground. Then he filled a tub with water from a nearby tap. “I’ll be back if I can,” he added. “If not, you just enjoy the oats for a couple of days, then whinny. I’m sure someone will be by.”
Tycho switched his tail and looked up from the grain. He gave Fiben a baleful look in the dim light and let out another smelly, gassy commentary.
“Hmph.” Fiben nodded, waving away the smell, “You’re probably right, old friend. Still, I’ll wager your descendants will worry too much too, if and when somebody ever gives them the dubious gift of so-called intelligence.”
He patted the horse in farewell and loped over to the door to peer outside. It looked clear out there. Quieter than even the gene-poor forests of Garth. The navigation beacon atop the Terragens Building still flashed—no doubt used now to guide the invaders in their night operations. Somewhere in the distance a faint electric hum could be heard.
It wasn’t far from here to the place where he was supposed to meet his contact. This would be the riskiest part of his foray into town.
Many frantic ideas had been proposed during the two days between the initial Gubru gas attacks and the invaders’ complete seizure of all forms of communication. Hurried, frenzied telephone calls and radio messages had surged from Port Helenia to the Archipelago and to the continental out-lands. During that time the human population had been thoroughly distracted and what remained of government communications were coded. So it was mainly chims, acting privately, who filled the airwaves with panicked conjectures and wild schemes—most of them horrifically dumb.
Fiben figured that was just as well, for no doubt the enemy had been listening in even then. Their opinion of neo-chimps must have been reinforced by the hysteria.
Still, here and there had been voices that sounded rational. Wheat hidden amid the chaff. Before she died, the human anthropologist Dr. Taka had identified one message as having come from one of her former postdoctoral students—one Gailet Jones, a resident of Port Helenia. It was this chim the General had decided to send Fiben to contact.
Unfortunately, there had been so much confusion. No one but Dr. Taka could say what this Jones person looked like, and by the time someone thought to ask her, Dr. Taka was dead.
Fiben’s confidence in the rendezvous site and password was slim, at best. Prob’ly we haven’t even got the night right, he grumbled to himself.
He slipped outside and closed the door again, replacing the shattered bolt so the lock hung back in place. The ring tilted at a slight angle. But it could fool someone who wasn’t looking very carefully.
The larger moon would be up in an hour or so. He had to move if he was going to make his appointment in time.
Closer to the center of Port Helenia, but still on the “wrong” side of town, he stopped in a small plaza to watch light pour from the narrow basement window of a working chim’s bar. Bass-heavy music caused the panes to shake in their wooden frames. Fiben could feel the vibration all the way across the street, through the soles of his feet. It was the only sign of life for blocks in all directions, if one did not count quiet apartments where dim lights shone dimly through tightly drawn curtains.
He faded back into the shadows as a whirring patroller robot cruised by, floating a meter above the roadway. The squat machine’s turret swiveled to fix on his position as it passed. Its sensors must have picked him out, an infrared glow in the misty trees. But the machine went on, probably having identified him as a mere neo-chimpanzee.
Fiben had seen other dark-furred forms like himself hurrying hunch-shouldered through the streets. Apparently, the curfew was more psychological than martial. The occupation forces weren’t being strict because there didn’t seem to be any need.
Many of those not in their homes had been heading for places like this—the Ape’s Grape. Fiben forced himself to stop scratching a persistent itch under his chin. This was the sort of establishment favored by grunt laborers and probationers, chims whose reproductive privileges were restricted by the Edicts of Uplift.
There were laws requiring even humans to seek genetic counseling when they bred. But for their clients, neo-dolphins and neo-chimpanzees, the codes were far more severe. In this one area normally liberal Terran law adhered closely to Galactic standards. It was that or lose chims and ’fins forever to some more senior clan. Earth was far too weak to defy the most honored of Galactic traditions.
About a third of the chim population carried green reproduction cards, allowing them to control their own fertility, subject only to guidance from the Uplift Board and possible penalties if they weren’t careful. Those chims with gray or yellow cards were more restricted. They could apply, after they joined a marriage group, to reclaim and use the sperm or ova they stored with the Board during adolescence, before routine sterilization. Permission might be granted if they achieved meritorious accomplishments in life. More often, a yellow-card chimmie would carry to term and adopt an embryo engineered with the next generation of “improvements” inserted by the Board’s technicians.
Those with red cards weren’t even allowed near chim children.
By pre-Contact standards, the system might have sounded cruel. But Fiben had lived with it all his life. On the fast track of Uplift a client race’s gene pool was always being meddled with. At least chims were consulted as part of the process. Not many client species were so lucky.
The social upshot, though, was that there were classes among chims. And “blue-carders” like Fiben weren’t exactly welcome in places like the Ape’s Grape.
Still, this was the site chosen by his contact. There had been no further messages, so he had no choice but to see if the rendezvous would be kept. Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the street and walked toward the growling, crashing music.
As his hand touched the door handle a voice whispered from the shadows to his left.
“Pink?”
At first he thought he had imagined it. But the words repeated, a little louder.
“Pink? Looking for a party?”
Fiben stared. The light from the window had spoiled his night vision, but he caught a glimpse of a small simian face, somewhat childlike. There was a flash of white as the chim smiled.
“Pink Party?”
He let go of the handle, hardly able to believe his ears. “I beg your pardon?”
Fiben took a step forward. But at that moment the door opened, spilling light and noise out into the street. Several dark shapes, hooting with laughter and stinking of beer-soaked fur, pushed him aside as they stumbled past. By the time the revelers were gone and the door had clos
ed again, the blurry, dark alley was empty once more. The small, shadowy figure had slipped away.
Fiben felt tempted to follow, if only to verify that he had been offered what he thought he had. And why was the proposition, once tendered, so suddenly withdrawn?
Obviously, things had changed in Port Helenia. True, he hadn’t been to a place like the Ape’s Grape since his college days. But pimps pandering out of dark alleys were not common even in this part of town. On Earth maybe, or in old threevee films, but here on Garth?
He shook his head in mystification and pulled open the door to go inside.
Fiben’s nostrils flared at the thick aromas of beer and sniff-hi and wet fur. The descent into the club was made unnerving by the sharp, sudden glare of a strobe light, flashing starkly and intermittently over the dance floor. There, several dark shapes cavorted, waving what looked like small saplings over their heads. A heavy, sole-penetrating beat pounded from amplifiers set over a group of squatting musicians.
Customers lay on reed mats and cushions, smoking, drinking from paper bottles, and muttering coarse observations on the dancers’ performances.
Fiben wended his way between the close-packed, low wicker tables toward the smoke-shrouded bar, where he ordered a pint of bitters. Fortunately, colonial currency still seemed to be good. He lounged against the rail and began a slow scan of the clientele, wishing the message from their contact had been less vague.
Fiben was looking for someone dressed as a fisherman, even though this place was halfway across town from the docks on Aspinal Bay. Of course the radio operator who had taken down the message from Dr. Taka’s former student might have gotten it all wrong on that awful evening while the Howletts Center burned and ambulances whined overhead. The chen had thought he recalled Gailet Jones saying something about “a fisherman with a bad complexion.”
“Great,” Fiben had muttered when given his instructions. “Real spy stuff. Magnificent.” Deep down he was positive the clerk had simply copied the entire thing down wrong.
It wasn’t exactly an auspicious way to start an insurrection. But that was no surprise, really. Except to a few chims who had undergone Terragens Service training, secret codes, disguises, and passwords were the contents of oldtime thrillers.
Presumably, those militia officers were all dead or interned now. Except for me. And my specialty wasn’t intelligence or subterfuge. Hell, I could barely jockey poor old TAASF Proconsul.
The Resistance would have to learn as it went now, stumbling in the dark.
At least the beer tasted good, especially after that long trek on the dusty road. Fiben sipped from his paper bottle and tried to relax. He nodded with the thunder music and grinned at the antics of the dancers.
They were all males, of course, out there capering under the flashing strobes. Among the grunts and probationers, feeling about this was so strong that it might even be called religious. The humans, who tended to frown over most types of sexual discrimination, did not interfere in this case. Client races had the right to develop their own traditions, so long as they didn’t interfere with their duties or Uplift.
And according to this generation at least, Chimmies had no place in the thunder dance, and that was that.
Fiben watched one big, naked male leap to the top of a jumbled pile of carpeted “rocks” brandishing a shaker twig. The dancer—by day perhaps a mechanic or a factory laborer—waved the noisemaker over his head while drums pealed and strobes lanced artificial lightning overhead, turning him momentarily half stark white and half pitch black.
The shaker twig rattled and boomed as he huffed and hopped to the music, hooting as if to defy the gods of the sky.
Fiben had often wondered how much of the popularity of the thunder dance came from innate, inherited feelings of brontophilia and how much from the well-known fact that fallow, unmodified chimps in the jungles of Earth were observed to “dance” in some crude fashion during lightning storms. He suspected that a lot of neo-chimpanzee “tradition” came from elaborating on the publicized behavior of their unmodified cousins.
Like many college-trained chims, Fiben liked to think he was too sophisticated for such simple-minded ancestor worship. And generally he did prefer Bach or whale songs to simulated thunder.
And yet there were times, alone in his apartment, when he would pull a tape by the Fulminates out of a drawer, put on the headphones, and try to see how much pounding his skull could take without splitting open. Here, under the driving amplifiers, he couldn’t help feeling a thrill run up his spine as “lightning” bolted across the room and the beating drums rocked patrons, furniture, and fixtures alike.
Another naked dancer climbed the mound, shaking his own branch and chuffing loudly in challenge. He crouched on one knuckle as he ascended, a stylish touch frowned upon by orthopedists but meeting with approval from the cheering audience. The fellow might pay for the verisimilitude with a morning backache, but what was that next to the glory of the dance?
The ape at the top of the hill hooted at his challenger. He leapt and whirled in a finely timed maneuver, shaking his branch just as another bolt of strobe lightning whitened the room. It was a savage and powerful image, a reminder that no more than four centuries ago his wild ancestors had challenged storms in a like fashion from forest hilltops—needing neither man nor his tutling scalpels to tell them that Heaven’s fury required a reply.
The chims at the tables shouted and applauded as the king of the hill jumped from the summit, grinning. He tumbled down the mound, giving his challenger a solid whack as he passed.
This was another reason females seldom joined the thunder dance. A full-grown male neo-chim had most of the strength of his natural cousins on Earth. Chimmies who wanted to participate generally played in the band.
Fiben had always found it curious that it was so different among humans. Their males seemed more often obsessed with the sound making and the females with dance, rather than vice versa. Of course humans were strange in other ways as well, such as in their odd sexual practices.
He scanned the club. Males usually outnumbered females in bars like this one, but tonight the number of chimmies seemed particularly small. They mostly sat in large groups of friends, with big males at the periphery. Of course there were the barmaids, circulating among the low tables carrying drinks and smokes, dressed in simulated leopard skins.
Fiben was beginning to worry. How was his contact to know him in this blaring, flashing madhouse? He didn’t see anyone who looked like a scar-faced fisherman.
A balcony lined the three walls facing the dance mound. Patrons leaned over, banging on the slats and encouraging the dancers. Fiben turned and backed up to get a better look … and almost stumbled over a low wicker table as he blinked in amazement.
There—in an area set aside by rope barrier, guarded by four floating battle-robots—sat one of the invaders. There was the narrow, white mass of feathers, the sharp breastbone, and that curved beak … but this Gubru wore what looked like a woolen cap over the top of its head, where its comblike hearing organ lay. A set of dark goggles covered its eyes.
Fiben made himself look away. It wouldn’t do to seem too surprised. Apparently the customers here had had the last few weeks to get used to an alien in their midst. Now, though, Fiben did notice occasional glances nervously cast up toward the box above the bar. Perhaps the added tension helped explain the frantic mood of the revelers, for the Grape seemed unusually rowdy, even for a working chim’s bar.
Sipping his pint bottle casually, Fiben glanced up again. The Gubru doubtless wore the caplike muff and goggles as protection from the noise and lights. The guard-bots had only sealed off a square area near the alien, but that entire wing of the balcony was almost unpopulated.
Almost. Two chims, in fact, sat within the protected area, near the sharp-beaked Gubru.
Quislings? Fiben wondered. Are there traitors among us already?
He shook his head in mystification. Why was the Gubru here? What could one
of the invaders possibly find of worth to notice?
Fiben reclaimed his place at the bar.
Obviously, they’re interested in chims, and for reasons other than our value as hostages.
But what were those reasons? Why should Galactics care about a bunch of hairy clients that some hardly credited with being intelligent at all?
The thunder dance climaxed in an abrupt crescendo and one final crash, its last rumblings diminishing as if into a cloudy, stormy distance. The echoes took seconds longer to die away inside Fiben’s head.
Dancers tumbled back to their tables grinning and sweating, wrapping loose robes around their nakedness. The laughter sounded hearty—perhaps too much so.
Now that Fiben understood the tension in this place he wondered why anyone came at all. Boycotting an establishment patronized by the invader would seem such a simple, obvious form of ahisma, of passive resistance. Surely the average chim on the street resented these enemies of all Terragens!
What drew such crowds here on a weeknight?
Fiben ordered another beer for appearances, though already he was thinking about leaving. The Gubru made him nervous. If his contact wasn’t going to show, he had better get out of here and begin his own investigations. Somehow, he had to find out what was going on here in Port Helenia and discover a way to make contact with those willing to organize.
Across the room a crowd of recumbent revelers began pounding the floor and chanting. Soon the shout spread through the hall.
“Sylvie! Sylvie!”
The musicians climbed back onto their platform and the audience applauded as they started up again, this time to a much gentler beat. A pair of chimmies crooned seductively on saxophones as the house lights dimmed.
A spotlight speared down to illuminate the pinnacle of the dancers’ mound, and a new figure swept out of a beaded curtain to stand under the dazzling beam. Fiben blinked in surprise. What was a chimmie doing up there?
The upper half of her face was covered by a beaked mask crested with white feathers. The fem-chim’s bare nipples were flecked with sparkles to stand out in the light. Her skirt of silvery strips began to sway with the slow rhythm.