I hurried toward home, planning to hide my treasures in a tree near the house and then return to the food line for more. As I approached the outskirts of the common, I spied the children I had met at Odie Lee’s funeral. My first impulse was to detour around them, accomplish my mission to hide these bananas, and get back to steal a half-dozen others. But my curiosity took precedence over my instinct for survival, and I chose the tree Peter was leaning against to hide my stash.
Neither Peter nor Diana heard the leaves rustle as I scaled the tree. I balanced my bananas in the crook of a branch and lowered myself through the foliage until I saw their faces. Diana had tears on her cheeks. As Peter stood above her he chewed an apple, apparently oblivious to her misery. I’d observed adolescent males enough to know this was only a pose, however. I already knew from watching the two of them together that Peter did care about Diana, even though his concern remained a secret even from himself.
Diana wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her words were unintelligible for a moment, but then I did hear the end of her complaint. “She hates us. She always has. You know she doesn’t want us here.”
Peter took a bite of apple and barely chewed it before swallowing. He scooped up a dribble of juice from the apple skin with a forefinger and then sucked the juice from his fingertip. Then, “She doesn’t hate us, Diana. We’re not Hansel and Gretel, all right? How often do I have to tell you that?”
“But she doesn’t want us here.”
“Maybe not.”
“Then why did she fight so hard for us? We could have stayed with Father, if we’d known. At least, I would have.”
“Not me,” said Peter. Then, noticing Diana’s crestfallen face, he added, “And I would have brought you with me, Virgin Huntress. You can’t go to another world by yourself. At least, I can’t. It wouldn’t be any fun.”
“Mother wanted to come alone.”
“That she did. But she really doesn’t hate us. Sometimes when people mess up their lives and want to make a fresh start, the way they do it is to go somewhere nobody knows them. You can be a different person, because nobody remembers the mistakes you made or how nasty you used to be. It’s just like erasing a computer’s memory. Once you reformat the memory drive, nobody knows what used to be there; all they care is what’s on the drive now.”
What a compassionate attitude he seemed to have toward his mother. I wondered how he really felt.
Diana put her hand on Peter’s knee. It was the first time I’d seen her touch him with tenderness, and she looked like a miniature adult. “Peter, what happened to Dill Aaronson wasn’t your fault. That hovercar came out of nowhere. You were lucky you weren’t killed too.”
“We aren’t talking about me. We’re talking about Mother. Back on Earth, Mother always rubbed everyone the wrong way. She didn’t mean to; she just didn’t know how to be nice to people.”
“She still doesn’t—or haven’t you noticed?”
“That’s the point, Diana. We are who we are. We can change habits, maybe, but our character is as much a part of us as our fingerprints. Mother is Mother; she’ll never change. But she didn’t know she wasn’t going to change when she left Earth, and that’s why she wanted to leave us behind. Some people want so much to start over again that they’ll do anything—even leaving their families behind on Earth, if that’s what it takes.”
Diana took a lock of hair and held it in front of her face, frowning as she inspected the ends. She singled out one strand and bit it off, throwing the end to the ground before she looked for another damaged hair. Then she said, “You can’t be right. Not about Mother. All she had to do was tell us to stay home, and we would have done it. Even you.”
“But she’s our mother. She had to fight for us. What would people think?”
“She didn’t have to fight so hard.”
Peter shrugged.
“Father’s dead by now,” Diana said. “If we’d stayed home, we’d be dead too.”
“Not yet. Time won’t really change until the Ark takes off. Then Father will be dead. Then we would have been dead. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be dead. I want to be on the Ark, going to a new planet that nobody’s ever seen before. I wish Father had come with us, but I’d rather be here with Mother than back on Earth with him.”
“I’d rather be here with Father, and Mother back on Earth.”
What a wise and perceptive child, I thought. Most children don’t come to understand how loathsome their parents are until they’re much older. But Dolores had made her daughter into a precocious mother-hater rather early in life.
“And I’d like to be grown-up and handsome and rich,” said Peter. “Wishes are a waste of time, Diana. They only make you unhappy.”
Diana sighed. She opened her mouth to say something, but a rustling in the tree branches drew her attention. I looked upward to the source of the noise, barely in time to dodge a banana that had slid loose from its hiding place and was toppling to the ground.
My presence thus betrayed, I had no choice but to make an appearance. I somersaulted out of the foliage, landing squarely atop Peter’s head. Peter yelped and Diana laughed. Temporarily their misery was forgotten.
“What were you doing here?” Peter asked.
I concealed my face behind my hands. Hiding, of course.
“Why didn’t you come out in the open?”
Gestures couldn’t convey that my presence would have ended the conversation, so I pantomimed an elaborate shrug. I don’t know.
“It would help if we had a clipboard,” Peter said. “We can’t talk to him without a clipboard.”
Diana rolled her eyes. “Sure you can, stupid—unless that notebook you keep in your pocket is for decoration.” She turned to me. “Peter thinks he’s Mr. Scientist. He’s got a notebook welded to his rear end, and he writes all his important discoveries in there. I think the notebook is empty. The only discovery he’s made is that Carolee Engebritson has breasts.”
Peter leapt at Diana. Unless I intervened, they’d be rolling on the grass within moments. I wasn’t in the mood for playing, so I ran down Peter’s back and pulled the notebook from his back pocket. I leapt with it to a lower branch of my banana tree, and the sudden movement knocked my remaining banana to the ground.
As Diana had suspected, the notebook was empty of important discoveries. But there was a pen on a string attached to the spiral binding, and I uncapped the pen to write a note.
Sticking my tongue firmly between my teeth—my helpless-hardworking-monkey pose—I wrote, “Help me get bananas.” It wasn’t War and Peace, but there wasn’t much else I could say. I didn’t know how to erase Diana’s anguish. If Peter was right, Dolores really didn’t want her children with her in Mayflower, and there wasn’t an easy solution for that.
Diana giggled. “You already have bananas, silly. They’re all over the ground.”
“He wants more,” Peter said, and I bowed in agreement. “He wants zillions of bananas,” he added, and I put the notebook under my armpit as I clapped my hands.
Diana and Peter were so malleable that I didn’t have to do anything from then on but sit in the tree and wait for them to return with armfuls of precious cargo. I was gratified to see that they were smart enough to choose bananas of varying degrees of ripeness. I’d be able to return to the hiding place for days, feeding myself as each fruit reached its peak of goodness.
Peter was wedging one of the last bananas into the crotch of a tree branch when Dolores cleared her throat from below him.
“Peter! You are too old and too big to be climbing trees. Do I have to watch you every minute?”
“Yes, Mother. I mean, no, Mother.” The child’s countenance withered, so much that if I had estimated his height then I would have guessed him to be several inches shorter than my previous approximation. He shoved the rest of the bananas aside and jumped from the rim of the tree pot, and I hid behind the tree trunk to spare Diana and Peter from an extra dose of Dolores’s wra
th.
Diana wasn’t so easily intimidated, however. “But Mother—we were only playing with—” She winced as Peter pinched her from behind, but she lamely finished with, “—the tree.”
Dolores sighed. “I’m sure you’ve had an enlightening time, but I’m ready to go home. Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” said Peter, even as Diana said, “No.”
“Then get a plate, Diana. Peter, since you lied about it, you’ll go without. Come on. Let’s go home.”
Hiding behind Peter, I pulled a banana from my store and slid it down inside his trousers, hooking the stem over the waistband. He would have some dinner tonight, no thanks to Dolores, and what he ate would doubtless be more palatable than the overcooked mess I’d seen on the picnic tables.
I found Carol Jeanne and spent the rest of the evening with her. She had left Liz to her own family and stood at the periphery of the crowd that Red had drawn to himself. By now, Red’s followers constituted a group of at least fifty humans who were so gullible that they mistook his extroversion for brilliance and goodness. He was particularly attractive to the children of Mayflower, who constituted a wave of humanity around his knees.
None of the adoring parents noticed how Red gave Emmy to Carol Jeanne for diaper duty, or how, when Lydia got cranky or tired, he shunted her off to Carol Jeanne too. The only comments I heard were murmured compliments, as parents asked each other the identity of the fascinating newcomer who was so good with their children.
I was glad when the sun dimmed and Carol Jeanne took me home. I was already in bed, fresh from the memory of her goodnight kiss, when I remembered that my day was not over. Despite my exhaustion, the sun’s null gravity beckoned me. My most important task of the day was yet to begin.
I was going back up the wall tonight. If I could master my responses to null gravity, I could master anything. Maybe even the pain of fatherhood.
We saw the monkey again today and stole bananas for him and he put a banana in Peter’s pants which looked really stupid from behind, like he had dumped a load in his underwear, but he never has a sense of humor about his own personal appearance so I only mentioned it a couple of times.
I still wish I was on Earth. The only good thing about the Ark is Peter and the monkey. If I was older I could babysit for the Cocciolones or whatever the dad’s name is. He’s such a barfhead. Making stupid jokes and talking to me and Peter like we were brain dead. Of course the other kids ate it up because they’re all dumb as a thumb, Peter’s the only person here worth talking to. Peter and the monkey. I wish he could talk. I bet Nancy will be their babysitter. I wonder if the monkey wanted the bananas so he can run away from home. But that’s stupid because if you ran away, you’d still be on the Ark! I wish I could run away. Hide on the last Ironsides trip home, so they couldn’t send me back. I wish I wish I wish. If wishes were fishes I’d stink like a fishmarket, Peter says, because all my wishes are getting old and rotten and I need some new ones. All right, I wish Lovelock could be my monkey. I’d steal fruit for him all the time and Mother would never know.
Of course Lovelock probably wouldn’t want to be my monkey anyway. Why should he? I’m probably going to grow up to be just like Mother and who would want to belong to me then?
CHAPTER SEVEN
REBELLION
Pink and I might have been the only slaves in our household, since we had been purchased, but that did not mean that everyone else was free. During the weeks that I struggled to break the shackles of my conditioning, others, too, found that our new life on the Ark might provide an opportunity to slip out of bondage. We were no longer in the same society that we had lived in before, and therefore we could no longer fill the same roles. What had been bearable before might be unbearable now.
I had only been at the business of climbing the walls for a few days when I was startled out of my exhausted sleep one morning by Emmy’s shrieking. “Bees!” she cried. “Bees! Bees!”
I had visions of a swarm of Africanized bees stinging her to death, which did not seem an unmitigated tragedy. But the quiet reaction of the adults told me that it was no emergency. I got up and loped into the kitchen, where Emmy was jumping up and down in front of the household computer. Sure enough, there were bees pictured on the screen. It was a little animation program, apparently sent to our house over the network. A sort of message.
And not a very subtle one, either. When I arrived, Red and Pink were already in the kitchen with Emmy and Lydia, and soon Carol Jeanne, Mamie, and Stef emerged from the back of the house to see what was going on. The animation was simple enough. A flower appeared somewhere on the screen. Worker bees discovered it, swarmed over it, and then flew back to the hive. On top of the hive were two sleeping bees. The workers came and deposited their honey inside the hive. As if it were a translucent tank, we could see the hive filling up with honey. Then the worker bees flew off. Immediately the two sleeping bees woke up, flew to the hive entrance, and drank the honey until the hive was empty again. Then the hive sank out of sight and a new flower appeared.
After about three flowers, however, there was a change. When the workers came back to find the hive empty again, they picked up the two sleeping bees, carried them off, and dropped them in front of a giant human shoe, which came down hard and squished them. As the workers flew back to the hive, buzzing happily, a message crawled along the bottom of the screen: “Drones are thieves, but they can’t steal the workers’ honey forever.”
“Where did you get this silly program, Red?” asked Mamie.
“It isn’t a program,” said Red. “It’s a message.”
“You mean somebody sent this to us?” said Mamie. “But they didn’t even sign it. What does it mean?”
Could she really have been so oblivious? I think she expected everyone to protect her from the nastiness of the message, so that she didn’t have to admit that she understood.
Stef answered her, and his voice was not nice. “This message is from one of our neighbors,” he said. “Someone who thinks that nobody should be excused from working as long as they have their health. Someone who thinks that it’s a shameful thing for you and me to do nothing.”
“Well, that’s envy,” said Mamie. “Envy is an ugly thing.”
“I know something uglier,” said Stef.
His words hung in the air, unanswered.
Finally, Carol Jeanne said, “Lovelock, I expect you to track down who sent this message. The network surely has some way to trace the mail.”
“Pure nastiness,” said Red. “This sort of thing is what tears apart fragile communities. It has to be stopped.”
“Just what I think,” said Mamie.
“Well, it’s not what I think,” said Stef.
“Oh, so you think vicious anonymous hate mail is civilized behavior?” asked Mamie witheringly.
“I think what’s tearing apart the community is the insistence of some people that they’re above work,” said Stef. “Well, I don’t think I’m above work. There are jobs I could do.”
“At your age?” said Mamie. “What have you ever done, except call your broker about your investments and go to board meetings once a year where you rubberstamp the decisions of real businessmen? There’s not much call for that here. We are not the kind of people who do the kind of work that is required in this little…village.”
“Maybe you’re not,” said Stef. “But I am. Even if it’s only permanent sanitation detail, I can do it.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Mamie. “We didn’t come here in order to sink back into the lower classes.”
“No,” said Stef. “We came here so you could continue to coast on the achievements of your daughter-in-law.”
“That is so offensive it’s not even worthy of—”
Stef, having left such thoughts unsaid for so many years, must have been unable to stem the flow of words. “Well, Mamie, you miscalculated. This is a society that values people for what they accomplish, and not for whom they’re related to. You should ha
ve stayed on Earth.”
“And lose my son and my grandchildren, all taken away into space?” Mamie’s voice trembled.
“You’re both making too much of this nasty little anonymous message,” said Red, trying to make peace.
“This nasty little anonymous message only forces the issue,” said Stef. “I’ve put up with complete indolence long enough. Whoever sent that message is right. It’s an offense against everything that this Ark is supposed to represent, to have Mamie and me be completely unproductive. And I, for one, am bored out of my mind with nothing to do.”
Mamie answered with immediate contempt. “It’s not my fault if you have such poverty of imagination that you—”
“It’s not my poverty of imagination that makes my life intolerable,” said Stef. “It’s you.”
I was astonished but also delighted. I had never realized that Stef had it in him to say such a thing.
Neither, for that matter, had Mamie. She gasped. Her face reddened. “How can you say such a cruel, heartless—”
“Heartless is insisting that I be as lazy as you,” said Stef, “and earn the contempt of everyone around me when it’s completely unnecessary. You only keep me home to feed your vanity, so that you can be the only woman on the Ark whose husband doesn’t have to work for a living. Well, I have news for you. I want to earn a living. I always have. And now I’m going to.”
“No you’re not,” said Mamie. Her voice was savage. This was as angry—as desperate?—as I had ever seen her.
“I’m going today to find an assignment they’re willing to train me for.”
“Perhaps you should think about this for a while,” offered Red.
“Shut up, Red,” said Stef.
“There!” cried Mamie triumphantly. “Is this what we’ve come to? Rudeness and hate! Low-class behavior!”
“That’s right,” said Stef.
“You don’t even care that you are becoming…common!” Obviously it was the cruelest thing Mamie could think of to say.
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