I’m the dreamer, except in the midst of my dream they intrude, they hurt me, they stop me from dreaming of—dreaming of what? Dreaming of the most fundamental urge of all life, to reproduce myself. They have cut me off from the great cycle of life. I am not part of Gaia because I have no power to add my genes to the ongoing story of my species. I have no species. I have been stolen from myself. I am the property of someone else, and when they took away my own dreams, they didn’t bother to give me any new dreams to take their place. Carol Jeanne has no dreams for me. And I’m not allowed to have any dreams for myself.
Maybe I didn’t think of all of this that night. I’ve had plenty of time since then to brood, to refine my sense of grievance. I can’t remember now exactly which thoughts I had that night. But I know this: That was the night, sitting there in front of the computer, thinking of sex, that I realized that I would always be punished for daring to want what all life fundamentally wants, that I had been deprived of the most basic of all rights, the right to reproduce. Even amoebas have the right to copy themselves.
And as soon as I realized how wrong it was, what they’d done to me, a whole lifetime of suppressed resentment flooded through me. For a few moments, I was insane. I was filled with only one thought, one desire, one will: An infinite, inexpressible no. I rejected them. I rejected their power over me. And in that madness, I did the one thing that they knew I would never do. I disobeyed them, knowing full well how much pain it would cost me. I touched myself again.
This time the pain was so great that I think I blacked out for a while. I woke up on the floor. But I remembered, and the rage was undiminished. So I did it again. And again. Never has anyone suffered so much agony. But as long as I was conscious, during that long, long night, I refused to obey them. I would rather suffer the pain than to comply with their decision to make a eunuch of me.
It was light when I blinked open my eyes. I was exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept at all, as indeed I hardly had. My small injuries stung, but more important was a kind of spiritual numbness, a bitter ennui. My mouth tasted like a metal canister. My limbs trembled when I tried to move them.
I was lying under the desk. In the kitchen I could hear the sounds of breakfast. I didn’t bother trying to distinguish words. It was enough to hear the atonal music of the children whining, Mamie stentoriously proclaiming her decisions on this or that, Red murmuring weak-willed responses. Silence from Stef.
And from Carol Jeanne—what?
I heard nothing from her. And suddenly I was filled with panic. Carol Jeanne was gone! She had already left home! My madness last night had kept me awake so late that I overslept and she left without me. Or worse—somehow she knew the evil things I had done and thought, and now she rejected me, she no longer wanted me with her!
I dragged myself out from under the desk. I found several hard pellets and a pool of urine—I really had lost control last night. I thought of the raging beast I had been and I was filled with self-loathing. I was unworthy of Carol Jeanne. She deserved a perfect friend, not a self-pitying rebellious jerk-off animal who slept the night in his own wastes.
Pink had wandered into the room during the night; when I slid out from under the desk, she got up, came over, and sniffed with contempt at my feces. I picked one up and made as if to jam it into her nostril. She bared her teeth at me—as if she could ever be quick enough to bite me! Except that maybe today she could—I was shaky. I nearly fell over. I felt as if someone had wrung my body out and left me barely moist.
The housing people had been thoughtful enough to stock the bathroom cabinet with basic cleaning supplies. It took me only a few minutes to wipe up the evidence of my shame on the office floor. It really annoyed me that Pink had a record of the scene, but my guess was that Red wouldn’t bother looking at memories of me. In his narcissism, he would skip right by until he found himself.
I bathed quickly, this time in the tub instead of the sink. Then I went looking for Carol Jeanne.
She was in the kitchen. She hadn’t left after all. She had simply been silent. So I hadn’t overslept all that badly.
All my efforts to hide my injuries were in vain. Not that Carol Jeanne would ever have seen them. I simply hadn’t counted on Lydia’s powers of observation.
“Lovelock has a bobo,” she said, pointing at the scrape on my chin.
Carol Jeanne set her breakfast aside and held out her arms to me. Obediently I scampered into her embrace.
“You are hurt,” she said, puzzled. “Whatever happened to you?”
Rolling my shoulders upward in an elaborate shrug, I jumped from her shoulder to the kitchen counter, and there on the kitchen computer I typed, “I cut myself shaving.” Carol Jeanne laughed when she read the words on the monitor. As she laughed I furiously tried to think of some plausible lie, but to my surprise there was no follow-up question. The joke was enough.
This was a sign of respect, I told myself. She recognized my little joke as a request for privacy, and so she didn’t ask any further questions.
But even as I insisted to myself on the most generous possible interpretation of her indifference, I knew in the back of my mind that I was lying to myself.
So there was some residue from the night before. For now, when the conditioned lies and rationalizations came to mind, I recognized them for what they were. Yes, I still made up the stories that depicted Carol Jeanne as a perfectly loving and caring master. But I no longer believed them, not completely. The doubt was now alive in me, awake in me.
“Lovelock, I need a report on the status of each individual’s work,” said Carol Jeanne.
An assignment! She still wants me, she still needs me, she still loves me!
But also: What is my injury to her? All that matters is that I can produce the data she needs. Let the slave bleed, as long as he doesn’t spill any of it on the printouts.
And this, too: Have I been conditioned to receive her every command with joy? Just as there is an implanted pain response that is triggered by forbidden actions, is there also an implanted pleasure response activated by her orders?
Is there any part of my soul that they have left alone?
Even as I thought this, I scampered to the office and plugged in, filled with excitement and joy at the project she had assigned me. Never mind that I hadn’t eaten yet. Never mind that I hadn’t slept enough. Never mind that I was still weak and trembled with the memory of pain. I was filled with joy at the chance to serve my mistress, and I hated it.
I scanned the status reports that each of the scientists in her project left on the network at the end of the working day, and organized them into an easy-to-read chart. It was an absurd thing for her to have me do—it would have taken her no more time to call up the status reports herself than it would take her to read my report. She was wasting my time, but what did she care?
In the kitchen I could hear Red saying, “You’re not going to be able to spend much time on your work today, Carol Jeanne. This is our Workday, remember.”
Carol Jeanne muttered her answer, but I was so keyed in on her voice that I heard her clearly. “Waste of my time.”
Oh, well excuse us, O Mistress of the Universe.
I trembled at the audacity of my own thought. I dared to criticize her?
Yes, and in doing so I sounded just as judgmental and petulant as Mamie.
So what? Carol Jeanne sounded like Mamie, too, thinking that she should be exempt from Workday because she was so special.
Red seemed to see the similarity, too, for he was talking to Carol Jeanne in his “Now, Mother,” voice. “It’s important for the overall stability of the colony that we have these significant rituals of egalitarianism.”
Carol Jeanne wasn’t in the mood to be patronized. “I’m aware of that, Red, and I agree. I just think they might have let me have the first week off, to get up to speed in the project.”
“Maybe they think you have years and years ahead of you, so there’s no rush now. While the Workday projects w
on’t wait.”
I finished my report and tagged it for Carol Jeanne’s work-waiting queue, with first priority. Anything I tagged for her was automatically first priority. Thinking of that, I was filled with pride.
Was that, too, a product of my conditioning? Was any part of myself still natural and unprogrammed?
This was getting to me, I could see that. My judgment was being distorted, badly. Carol Jeanne did not sound like Mamie, not even for a moment. It really was true that her project was of vital importance, and it was absurd for her not to be exempted from Workday this week so she could move in and establish herself in the scientific community on board the Ark. Just because I now understood my true relationship to Carol Jeanne did not mean that she was always wrong. She really was a genius. And there really were thousands of young scientists who would give anything to be able to work with her as closely as I did.
Anything? Would they give up any hope of sex or reproduction? Or would they think that was a monstrous price to pay? They would condemn even the idea of it. No human being is worth such a sacrifice.
Unless you can get a dumb monkey to do it.
In exactly what sense was I smarter than Pink?
My job was done. And when I got back into the kitchen, so was breakfast. Except for a miserable little bowl of monkey chow and a lousy segment of dried grapefruit.
A message was coming in on the kitchen computer, and Red was reading from it. “It’s our Workday assignments,” he said. “Dad’s going to the fish hatchery. He’s due there in a half hour. We’d better get him out of bed. Mom, they want you at the pre-school with the girls.”
Mamie groaned, but Red shut her up with a wave of his hand. “You’ve always told people how good you were with children, Mother. Now you get to demonstrate it.”
In my new clarity of mind, I realized that this was not like Red, to respond to his mother so sharply. Something was different about him. Was he taking charge of his mother, just a little?
“Here come our assignments,” he said. “Carol Jeanne, you and I are going together. They want us at the cannery. We’ll have to hurry—all the assignments start at nine.”
“Do we have to go?” Lydia asked.
“If there were any justice in the world—” Mamie began.
“We all get to go,” Red said to Lydia, ignoring his mother. He turned from the monitor to encompass us all in a beatific smile. Carol Jeanne, Mamie, and Lydia scowled at him in unison. “That’s why we’re awake for this voyage instead of sleeping through it—the Ark will only succeed if we all work together.”
Maybe Red was right, but his exaggerated enthusiasm didn’t win any converts. Carol Jeanne stood to clean the cereal bowls from the kitchen table. Emmy left the table and ambled toward her bedroom; Lydia followed, probably planning to torment her. Even Mamie sniffed at her son and then scurried away to rouse Stef from bed.
After getting directions to our respective assignments, Carol Jeanne and I left the girls with Mamie and went to the cannery with Red. I was pleased with our assignment. Processing food with heat and steam was so archaic that no one on Earth had seen a cannery in more than a generation. But on our new world we would need a way to preserve food without refrigeration. Working in this cannery would be even better than going on an archeological dig, because instead of delving through potsherds we could experience firsthand how humans used to provide for themselves before being freed by technology from such primitive rites.
There was only one cannery on the Ark, a fair-sized plant that was easily accessible by tube from any village. Red led the way as if he had been living on the Ark for years.
We found the Mayflower contingent sitting in a corner of the cannery waiting room, waiting under a handmade sign that said MAYFLOWER. The first person I saw was Penelope. I wondered if she made the Workday assignments. From what I had seen, it would have been typical for Penelope to delegate Mayflower’s celebrity to the task that she herself would be doing.
“Do you see Liz?” Carol Jeanne whispered. I climbed atop her head and surveyed the Mayflower group, and although I recognized dozens of people from Odie Lee’s funeral, Liz was nowhere to be found.
“It figures,” Carol Jeanne said when I shook my head no. “There’s one rational person in Mayflower, and she’s off doing something else.” I tapped Carol Jeanne’s watch, but she only shook her head. “Liz isn’t late, Lovelock. She won’t be here. We’ll just go off in a corner and work by ourselves.”
Carol Jeanne was right about Liz, but she over-estimated her ability to hide in a corner. There is no corner on an assembly line. Everything in a cannery is done communally. Our project this Workday was stewed tomatoes. The humans donned aprons and tucked their hair under scarves or caps. I was warned to stay away from the line lest I shed into the food. There was a long-winded recitation of safety rules and an even longer-winded generic Protestant prayer for our safety. From the expression on Carol Jeanne’s face, I could see her thinking: Weren’t they carrying this communal religion thing a little far? But it was religion that supposedly bound Mayflower together, so no doubt we’d still be praying long after we knew the routine well enough to skip the safety lecture.
During the prayer I scanned the room. Everything was mounted on tracks; there were identical tracks on the wall-that-would-become-the-floor. All the tables and equipment were clamped to the tracks. At changeover, curved tracks would be inserted between the floor tracks and the wall tracks, and the equipment would be rolled from the old floor position to the new. The power sources were located near the corner, midway between—the equipment wouldn’t even have to be unplugged.
We gathered around huge vats of boiling water, where Penelope demonstrated how to blanch tomatoes by dunking them in the water just long enough for the skins to burst. We took our stations around the vats, blanching tomatoes and then discarding the skins. We dug out the stem ends with paring knives and threw them into troughs of running water at our feet. Then we quartered the pulpy remains and put them in giant kettles to simmer.
I say “we,” but the word is woefully inaccurate. As a witness I was allowed on the cannery floor, but I was not allowed to handle the food or even the utensils that touched the food. I was meant to stay in a corner, probably, but I rejected that advice and stayed with Carol Jeanne. I perched on her shoulder, fanning her and keeping strands of hair tucked under her scarf and out of her eyes.
Even my presence was too much for some people. One of our co-workers was the hatchet-faced Dolores, whose loathing had made Odie Lee’s funeral dinner such a delight for me. Half the tomatoes on the conveyor belt weren’t as red of countenance as the sweating Dolores. The steam that permeated the cannery was hot enough to color even her scarred epidermis.
Whenever Carol Jeanne bowed her head over a tomato, Dolores curled her lip at me. I thought of producing a little jewel of a pellet to throw at her, but I didn’t want to be permanently banned from food processing areas. So I waved and blew a kiss to her instead. She didn’t bat an eye. She had appointed herself as the cannery’s capuchin watcher, and she observed me vigilantly to see that I kept myself away from the food. As soon as I realized what she was doing, I knew I could torture her cruelly with just a little bit of effort. Changing my position on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder to give me a little more leverage, I dandled my tail as if to caress the pulpy fruit. I held it over tomatoes, less than a half-inch from their surface, as if that prehensile appendage had eyes to admire their redness. I never got close enough for Dolores to sound the alarm, but I made sure I was always close enough that an alarm was imminent. Dolores moved closer so she could keep an eye on me—a maneuver that no doubt delighted Carol Jeanne.
For her part, Carol Jeanne assiduously tried to keep her distance from people, choosing the farthest vat of water to blanch her tomatoes and then coring and peeling them at the far end of a long table. But her efforts were futile. In case anybody had not known who Carol Jeanne was, Penelope told them. During breaks, men and women gathered arou
nd Carol Jeanne as if she were calling numbers at a bingo game. As they worked, they smiled at her and tried to include her in their conversations. But they were soon chilled by her tight-lipped smiles.
The more Carol Jeanne withdrew into herself, the more animated Red became. He organized a group of volunteers to run the onions through the chopper, and then he absorbed the worst of the onion fumes by positioning himself closer to the chopper than anyone else. Why had he taken the most odious task in the process upon himself? Because he knew it would endear him to the community. I realized his plan at once. Carol Jeanne might have unassailably higher status on the Ark, but Red could easily best her in Mayflower village, and it was Mayflower where they actually lived.
I had to give Red credit. He understood Carol Jeanne enough to know that her introverted personality would put her in the worst possible light. He also knew his psychology well enough to know how to make himself shine by contrast. He even sang as he worked, onion-tears running down his cheeks as he bellowed an aria from The Barber of Seville. The others were delighted. Even I was impressed. Red was actually good at something. Good at sucking up, that is, not singing.
Poor socially-obtuse Carol Jeanne actually thought that his singing was annoying people, and told him to hush up. The only result was to provoke other people to glance at each other and raise eyebrows or wink. Poor Red, they were thinking. She might be a genius, but she was a harridan wife with no sense of fun. Poor Red, poor wonderful fun-loving generous-hearted Red. Thus even Carol Jeanne’s ineptness helped Red win a place in their hearts. I could hear the gossip already. She’s as stuck-up as you might imagine, but the husband, Red, he’s a gem.
When the onions were chopped, Red and his disciples diced celery together. Red abandoned The Barber of Seville and launched into a chorus of songs from ancient Broadway musicals—My Fair Lady and then Camelot. A few of the others were Broadway buffs, and joined in on the refrains. I noticed that Red managed to include “How to Handle a Woman” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which subliminally—or perhaps quite openly—made the others think of him as a patient man dealing with an impossible wife. He was really sneaky, and I found myself admiring him for the first time.
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