Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Hello, Thursday,” Barbara signed.

  “Hello, Barbara friend,” Thursday signed back. “Work learn today?”

  “No, no. Today for rest,” Barbara replied. It was Sunday, and there was only a skeleton staff on duty. That was all to the good, and part of the reason Barbara had chosen today for this little chat.

  “Rest outside?” Thursday asked hopefully. “Go out, see sky?”

  “Cold, cold today.” Barbara cautioned.

  “Thursday good. Thursday put on coat, promise.”

  “Not take coat off? Promise?” Barbara asked. This was a breakthrough of sorts. Not only was Thursday volunteering to put the coat on, which was a first—she had made the associational jump between it being cold and having to wear warm clothes. It had taken a month of daily wheedling to get that far. Progress with her was like that—sometimes so tiny and subtle that you could barely notice it. Every day a word or two more, every day the old words used a little better, every day a tiny surprise. And it all helped, it certainly helped. It made Barbara feel she was right, gave some purpose to the risk, focused her attention. It was good therapy for Barbara. She was taking care of herself again, paying attention to how she dressed and looked. That helped, too, gave her the confidence for what she was planning.

  “Promise,” Thursday said, nodding her head and looking most sincere.

  “Outside, then.”

  <>

  They dug Thursday’s coat—an enormous army-surplus trenchcoat with a warm lining—out of the closet and got it on her. Thursday let Barbara fuss with the buttons and zippers, and waited patiently while Barbara buttoned her own coat back up. She watched her friend, and wondered again about her. Barbara was the only real link between her old place and this one. Thursday knew Barbara felt things about her that no one else did, though she did not know why.

  Thursday did not understand many things, but that didn’t bother her much. She had an almost fatalistic lack of curiosity about some things, among them why she was here, what this place was, why the people here did such strange things with her. She had never questioned why she had been with the others, the Utaani. That had been part of the natural order of things, the way it had always been. She had managed to transfer that attitude to new circumstances. It never occurred to her to question such matters, any more than she wondered about why the sky was blue or why the air smelled good outside. The world was what it was. It swirled around her, did with her what it would, and it never occurred to her she might have a voice in how it treated her.

  Deep inside her the instinct for escape, for freedom was still there. That would be with her no matter where she went, whatever she did. But now, today, being all alone with these strange new ones, and in spite of their sometimes strange and cruel tricks, she was now freer than she had ever been. For the moment, at least, that satisfied her. Besides, the worst of the cruel times here seemed to be over. Barbara and Michael were always there to stop the others from doing things that scared her or hurt her too much.

  She followed Barbara through the door, down the hallway, and then down the stairs. Stairs were still a little tricky for her, but she was getting used to them. Another hallway, another door, and they were outside. Thursday stopped on the threshold and closed her eyes, breathing deep, drinking in the cold, crisp, clean air.

  <>

  Barbara turned to watch her friend, and smiled. Thursday so obviously delighted in the outdoors, the spare beauty of a late-winter day. It must be so different for her, a whole new range of sensations impossible in the jungles. Barbara shivered a bit, and thought once again how the cold didn’t seem to bother Thursday. In some ways, she was better adapted to it, of course. She had a built-in fur coat, for one thing, and her heavily callused feet seemed immune to the cold. That was probably just as well—it would probably be impossible to get Thursday into shoes.

  At last, Thursday opened her eyes and looked about herself, at the empty trees and sleeping earth. Barbara reached out and took her hand, and the two of them began to stroll the grounds of the hospital. They made a strange pair, the carefully coifed and elegantly dressed scientist in her trim and stylish jacket, hand in hand with the gawky, ambling barefoot figure in an oversized trenchcoat.

  They came to a wooden bench and sat down. Here, away from prying eyes, Barbara hoped she could talk—or sign, rather—to Thursday in private.

  “Thursday, I ask question. Do you wonder why we do the things we do to you?”

  Thursday frowned a surprisingly human frown that puckered up her forehead. “A little. But what is, what is.” A typically fatalistic answer for Thursday.

  “Let me try and tell,” Barbara signed. “Your kind and mine. They are different, are the same. Do you see that? Some ways same, some ways not?”

  Thursday nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, yes. Look same, walk same, hands same. Not—”she hesitated”—not make words inside same.”

  “Make words inside—that is called think.”

  “Not think same. Not do same.”

  “Not do same,” Barbara agreed. “That is why we do things to you. To see what we do same and different. Is blood same? Is hair different? Is thinking, making-words-inside, all different, or is some the same?”

  “Why must know? Why try you so hard?” Thursday asked.

  Barbara hesitated, trying to find a way to explain, trying to make it clear without frightening her. “I tell why, but it might scare you. Don’t be scared. I not let them hurt you. Will you be not-scared?

  “Not-scared. Tell why.”

  “We need know—are your kind like dog, like cat, like squirrel, like monkey—or like humans, our kind?” Thank God for flash-cards. Thursday had enjoyed learning the names of animals, and looking at the pictures. “Those animals—cat, dog, monkey, all others, not think, not make-words-inside at all like our kind.”

  Barbara hesitated once again. They had got the idea of rules across to Thursday, but not right or wrong, and of course, they had not even tried to explain law, or justice. Thursday regarded good and bad not as ethical standards, but questions of how a thing tasted or felt. When Barbara needed to say a thing was good or bad, fair or unfair, right or wrong, the best she could do was to tell her what the rules were, and Thursday had a disturbing tendency to a knee-jerk, instinctive obedience to the rules—if there were a chance she would get caught. She would and did break every rule in sight if she could get away with it. So, instead of morality or ethics, Barbara had to explain the situation in terms of authority. It was a most unsatisfactory solution, but the best they could do. “The rules say that humans can do things to animals that are not-humans. We can make them work hard, we can kill them and eat them, we can do a thing to them first to see if it would hurt humans. It is against the rules to do that with humans. Humans can go places, do things other animals not allowed to do. Those are the rules.”

  “If I human, I do many things?”

  “Yes, many, many.”

  “If they learn I not-human, rules say I be like old ones made me. Word is?”

  “Word is slave.” That summed it up pretty well. She and the other australopithecines would indeed be what the old ones, the Utaani, had made them—slaves, of one sort of another. Test animals, freak show gimmicks, who knows, maybe even real, honest to God household slaves. Damn it, right or wrong, mad or sane, she would not be a party to that. She would do what she had to, and damn the consequences. “Yes, but not you. Never, never you. You will never be slave. I promise, like you promise to wear coat. I will stop that, even if I break every rule there is to do it.” Barbara stopped, got hold of herself. She was signing too fast, and the sentences were too complex. There was no way Thursday could follow it all. I stop them making you slave. But I cannot protect all your kind. More people visit old ones, take more of your kind. Those others, I cannot break the rules for all of them.

  “No. Too many, lots of rules.”

  “Are you sad because your kind will be slaves?”

  “Sad. Sad-sad.”r />
  “You can help. You make rules that your kind is human.”

  “Make rule?”

  “Show you like me. Me human, so you human. Against rules for human be slaves.”

  Thursday stared at her for a long time, tilting her head this way and that, thinking, puzzling out the logic. “Yes, yes,” she signed at last. “Make me like you. Good. Good.”

  Barbara looked at her friend. That was the first time she had described an intangible thing as good. Another breakthrough.

  “Damn straight it’s good,” she said out loud, not bothering to sign what she was saying, simply talking so the sound of her own voice would make her feel better. “No matter what we have to do to get it done.” Was she as brave as she was trying to sound? “No matter what,” she repeated. “Come on, let’s get back inside.”

  <>

  THURSDAY A LEGAL HOT POTATO

  (UPI) WASHINGTON, D.C. No one in government knows what to do with Thursday, the australopithecine recently presented to the public. Is she an animal or a person? That question must be answered before anything can be done about her, and pressure to do something is growing from a number of groups.

  Neither Thursday herself nor the people who are, depending on your point of view, either caring for her or imprisoning her, think that anything much needs to be done about her, but that hasn’t stopped the legal speculation.

  If she is an animal, she was imported to this country illegally, and either the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the Customs Service might claim jurisdiction and impound or destroy her, according to several legal scholars.

  If she is a human being, a person, then, since she seems to have come to this country willingly but in apparent violation of the law, arguably she is an illegal alien, under the jurisdiction of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, unless she is a political refugee, in which case the Department of State is in charge. Even if jurisdiction were established, however, what action the responsible agency could or would take is not obvious.

  It can be argued that she was gulled into following Dr. Marchando out of the jungle, and so was abducted by the Federal Government. Some legal scholars, following that line of reasoning, claim that she should be repatriated to Gabon and granted monetary restitution for her illegal abduction and detention. A petition demanding her release from federal ‘custody’ and repatriation to Gabon was circulated by the American Civil Liberties Union, the World Wildlife Fund, and several other organizations. Copies of the petition, with over 100,000 signatures attached, were delivered to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

  But not every one of Thursday’s well-wishers want her sent home. Others, pointing to her willing departure from Gabon, regardless of destination, and also noting that she was held in a form of slavery in Gabon, have claimed she should be regarded as a political refugee and granted asylum, and indeed, papers to that effect have been filed in federal court.

  Despite all the hypothetical legal arguments, no government agency seems at all willing to take the lead in this case. . . .

  <>

  “Ahhh. God bless the man who invented the brewski.” Rupert lifted his bottle again and took another long slug. “This is just what the doctor ordered, isn’t it, Doctor?”

  Mike grinned. “Actually, I believe I prescribed Heineken, not Bud.”

  “Don’t bother me with details,” Rupert said.

  “This is a weird place, Rupert,” Livingston announced, having taken a good look around. He settled back a little deeper into the blown-out springs of the booth’s ancient bench seat. “Why the hell do they call it the Tune Inn?”

  “‘Cause it’s got a jukebox, I guess,” Rupert said.

  “Every place has a jukebox,” Livingston protested.

  “Yeah, but not every place has surly help, big cheeseburgers, the decor of a backwoods cracker bar four blocks from the Capitol Building, or a clientele of yuppies who don’t understand that they’re not welcome.”

  “Or the wrong end of a deer stuffed and mounted on the wall,” Livingston muttered. “So this is life in the big city.”

  The jukebox started up again, playing so loudly it was impossible to identify the song. “Shut up and enjoy the atmosphere,” Rupert shouted cheerfully. The wizened old man behind the bar cursed to himself, came out from behind the bar and reached down the back of the jukebox. The noise subsided enough that normal conversation was just barely possible.

  Mike Marchando grinned and took a sip of his own beer. In the midst of the turmoil over Thursday, he had found greater self-satisfaction, a better and clearer view of himself, than he had ever had. For the first time he could remember, his own struggling to get ahead was not, even in his own mind, the most important thing—and somehow, not being the least bit important in all the crises had taught him something without his noticing the lesson. Maybe it was simply that the grand questions Thursday inspired made his own endless struggles to prove himself and test those around him seem a lot less important. Maybe it was being part of a team, a group of equals all working toward the same thing, rather than one of a hundred medical students competing against each other. It didn’t matter. For once, Michael wasn’t interested in analyzing things too closely. He was happy with himself, and that was enough.

  “So what’s up at your end of the shop, Liv?” Mike asked.

  “Same old thing we’ve been tossing around for weeks now. What to do with the information about Thursday’s DNA. It’s got a few pretty weird implications. According to the molecular anthro honchos, it requires us to regard Homo sapien sapiens and Australopithecus boisei as conspecific.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Mike asked.

  “It means we’re all one big happy species,” Liv answered. “The definition of a species is that it be a population capable of producing fertile offspring, reproductively isolated from all other species. The long human DNA-sequences in Thursday’s genes say pretty clearly that there was at least one fertile union. We can tell there was an interbreeding at least a few generations back, and Thursday herself is pretty clearly fertile. Even if she wasn’t, the DNA says she’s at least as close to humans as donkeys are to horses. They can breed to produce a hybrid, a mule—but mules are sterile. According to definition, that means horses and donkeys aren’t in the same species—but they are very close, plenty damn close enough to freak everybody out. No one has the guts to release that kind of information. I guess the most honest way to regard her would be as a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Call her Homo sapiens boisei—but are you ready for that? No one else is. If Thursday is a specimen of a subspecies of ours—then, if she is an animal, so are we all. You try selling that to John Q. Public without causing a riot.”

  “Can you get anywhere with the idea of chronospecies?” Rupert asked.

  “What’s a chronospecies?” Michael asked.

  “A species is a breeding population, right?” Rupert said. “But you couldn’t have kids with a woman who died two hundred years ago; her genes are no longer directly available. You also can’t breed with a woman who hasn’t been born yet. Both women are reproductively isolated from you by time. A chronospecies is a species projected through time, to take into account such cases. Of course, no one gets that persnickety about it. Obviously, a human being is still the same species across the distance of a few lousy centuries, and only the most anal-retentive among us would insist on saying ‘chrono’ species to talk about your grandmother.

  “But if you go back far enough, enough parent-offspring cycles for some real evolution to take place, the earliest member of the line couldn’t breed with the latest member, even if you could get them in the same room. In theory, you could trace my ancestry back through twenty million years of successful matings. If they weren’t successful, I wouldn’t be here to buy the next round. But ten million years ago, my great-great-great-and-so-on gramma looked like a lemur, and no one would say we were in the same species. Somewhere in between a hundred years back and twenty million year ago, we stopped be
ing the same species—several times, in fact. So they cooked up the rather fuzzy idea of chronospecies to account for such paradoxes. Clear as mud?”

  “Just about,” Mike said. “You going to eat those fries?”

  “Help yourself,” Rupert replied, shoving his plate into neutral territory in the middle of the table. “Anyway, Liv, maybe you can call the boiseans an earlier phase of our chronospecies. It doesn’t mean a hell of a lot, but it sounds better than saying it’s okay for your sister to marry one.”

  Livingston grinned and reached for a few of the last remaining french fries. “I’ll pass that suggestion along.”

  <>

  Sunday night was when Barbara liked to read the newspaper, lolling back in bed with the front page and the comics and the ads and the Style and Outlook sections strewn about the covers, slopping over onto the floor. For the first time in what seemed a long time, there wasn’t anything about herself, or Thursday, or australopithecines in the Post—not even a turgidly written and inaccurate piece about evolution. It was nice to be a normal, un-famous, anonymous person again. Michael wandered in from the bathroom in his boxer shorts, toweling off his face. She looked up and smiled at him. “Hi there, big boy,” she said. “Come here often?”

  He smiled back and shoved the comics out of the way to sit down on the edge of the bed. “Not often enough. I’ve missed you.”

  “I hate to admit it,” she said a bit sadly, “but I’ve missed you too. It’s nice to see you—and nice to have a little bit more of the old you back. Not worrying about what other people are thinking so much, just relaxing and being yourself.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s kind of a relief in a way. But—I don’t know. I’ve had a lot of time for thinking the last few months, and I’m not so sure this is the old me—or a new one you helped make, one that I lost for a while. Growing up, all I cared about was not getting trapped in that slummy old neighborhood. Fight, struggle, study, work late, work harder than everyone else, get that scholarship. It was always others who judged me, not myself. It was what they thought that mattered. Even the people who thought well of me treated me like a hot prospect, a great investment who would probably pay off—but maybe not. I had to impress everybody.”