I looked at Carol Jeanne and saw that she, too, was enjoying this. In fact, she could hardly keep from laughing.
“Yes,” said Stef. “That’s exactly what I intend to become. A common man. A regular ordinary citizen of the Ark.”
“Well, I won’t have it!” cried Mamie. “You can’t do this to me! You can’t drag me down into the muck with you!” You would have thought he had proposed group sex with a flock of diseased sheep.
“I’m not dragging you anywhere,” said Stef. “You can stay home and hibernate if you want.”
“No husband of mine is going to—”
“That’s really your choice,” said Stef.
“So you’re leaving it up to me?” said Mamie. “Good. You’re not doing it.”
“No, Mamie,” said Stef. “I mean that it’s your choice whether I do it as your husband or not. But I will do it.”
“You will not do it! I forbid it! You made a solemn covenant with me!”
“For richer or for poorer,” said Stef. “In sickness and in health. Well, I stayed with you through a lifetime of sickness. Now I’m poor, just like everybody else.”
“Not me!” said Mamie. “I am not poor, I will never be poor, and if you insist on living like a poor man then I’m done with you.”
Stef turned to Red. “I’ve been reading the Compact, as I should have done long ago. I hereby declare myself to be no longer a member of your household. I’ll be in bachelor quarters for the time being, and I’ll petition to have myself associated with another village. I’ll be packed and out of here in an hour.”
“Father, you don’t have to leave,” said Red.
“You don’t understand,” said Stef. “I want to leave.”
“You’re just trying to make me do what you want, you manipulative, controlling, dictatorial…man!” cried Mamie.
“Not at all,” said Stef. “I’m just sick of sleeping on the damned couch.” He walked out of the room.
Mamie, red-faced and furious, looked back and forth from Red to Carol Jeanne. “And you’re just going to sit there? You’re just going to let this happen?”
“I’ve been reading the rules of life here,” said Carol Jeanne, “and he has a perfect right to go if he wants to.”
Mamie curled her lip and turned away from her. “Red, this is our family here. This is your father who is going to humiliate us in front of everybody by making this silly family tiff a public matter. The gossip will be dreadful. You’ve got to talk to him and get him to see reason.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Red.
“What do you mean?” said Carol Jeanne. “Stef’s not the one who’s being unreasonable.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” said Mamie.
“Carol Jeanne, please let me handle this,” said Red.
“Your father wants to do what is required of every adult male on this Ark—have a job. And you’re going to ask him to see reason?”
Mamie squared off for battle. “Stay out of family matters that don’t concern you, Carol Jeanne.”
“Excuse me,” said Carol Jeanne, “but I’m a part of this family.”
“Maybe it’s all right for Cocciolones to walk out on their marriages,” said Mamie, “but Todds don’t.”
“I think the evidence at hand indicates that Todds do,” said Carol Jeanne.
“Carol Jeanne,” said Red. “Drop this discussion at once.”
“Let her talk,” said Mamie, confident because Red was so clearly on her side. “Obviously family means nothing to her.”
Carol Jeanne rose to her feet. “If family meant nothing to me, Mamie, then you wouldn’t be here, because the only reason I allowed you to follow me into the Ark and continue to live in the same house with me was because I care about family. If you weren’t my husband’s mother I would never even have met you, because I have never wasted my time going to the kind of parties where people like you show up to fawn over celebrities. Yet I’ve had you in my house and endured your whims and your snobbery and your vicious comments about Italians and Catholics and Cocciolones because I love Red and because you are the grandmother of my children. So don’t tell me that I don’t care about family.”
It was a speech that was about seven years overdue. I jumped onto Carol Jeanne’s shoulder and applauded and hooted.
Mamie looked from Carol Jeanne to me and back again, and then burst into tears and fled the room. I continued hooting and clapping. The tyrant had been pulled down from her throne.
Red was not taking it well, however. Since he couldn’t argue with anything Carol Jeanne said, he struck back the only way a coward like him could think of. He reached for me.
What he had in mind I’ll never know, because Carol Jeanne caught his arm before he could touch me.
“Don’t,” she said.
“That damned monkey is laughing at my mother!”
“Don’t you ever try to lay a hand on my witness again,” said Carol Jeanne.
It was an interesting choice of words. She didn’t call me Lovelock or even “that damned monkey.” She called me her witness, which meant that she was reminding Red that the law absolutely forbade anyone to interfere with a witness doing its job. It was an outrageous thing for a wife to say to a husband—it was reducing him to the intimacy of a stranger. I loved it.
“You had no right to interfere between my parents,” said Red.
“I didn’t interfere.”
“You took sides!” Red insisted.
“So did you,” said Carol Jeanne. “The difference is that I sided with the man who was asking nothing more than to live with dignity as a full citizen of the Ark. And you were siding with the woman who was using her connection with me as a way of raising herself above other people, which is foolish and self-destructive and I kept waiting for you to say something, for you to do anything to get your mother under control and you never did, not even when your father was walking out on her because he couldn’t take her psychotic hunger for control any longer.”
“Psychotic?” said Red contemptuously. “Stick to your own discipline, Carol Jeanne. You don’t even know what the word means.”
“I know exactly what it means,” said Carol Jeanne. “Just because you don’t understand what I do doesn’t meant that I don’t understand your little quasi-science.”
“Mother is not a psychotic. She has serious neuroses arising out of her upbringing and some traumatic—”
“Oh, is she your patient? Isn’t it unethical for you to tell me your diagnosis of her?”
“She’s not my patient, she’s my mother!”
“And I’m your wife. Why not make the tiniest effort, maybe just one day out of the year, to actually see things from my point of view instead of always demanding that I understand her, that I be patient with her. She runs you like a puppet.”
“I can see that this is not about Mother. This is about your resentment of my ability to maintain a warm relationship with—”
“If you dare to say one more word of this manipulative diagnosis of me,” said Carol Jeanne, “you will be rooming with Stef by nightfall.”
“Is that a threat?”
“I will not have you turn your psychological jargon into a weapon to be used to win an argument. What I’m seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult. So please do keep on shielding her from any chance of ever becoming a mature, productive, empathic human being, Red. I knew that was a facet of your life when I married you. But don’t you ever dare to accuse me of being envious of the sickness that you call motherlove.”
Red walked to the door of the kitchen. “I can’t believe you created this scene in front of the children. Perhaps Mother is right, and you feel no decent concern for family. Or perhaps you are simply acting out the stress of your new assignment here at home, where you know that you are loved and will be forgiven.” He turned to the children. “Girls
, Mommy is upset and she needs a hug. Give a hug to Mommy.”
It was the sickest thing I’d ever seen Red do. Of course Carol Jeanne could not refuse to hug Emmy and Lydia when they came to her with open arms. But it had to taste like poison in her mouth, to have her children’s embraces come at Red’s orders, acting out his condescending lie.
“I’m not upset at you, Lydia,” said Carol Jeanne quietly. “Adults just get angry at each other sometimes.”
“Don’t you dare to exploit the children by trying to get them onto your side,” said Red quietly.
Carol Jeanne was flabbergasted. “What do you—I’m not—you’re the one who—”
“Come along, girls, let’s let Mommy work out her feelings in privacy.”
And Carol Jeanne had to sit there and watch as Red took Lydia and Emmy by the hands and led them out of the room. What could she do? She loved them too much to exploit them; she loved them so much she couldn’t even stop Red from exploiting them.
I went to the kitchen computer, hit the escape key in order to clear away the drone message, and typed, “Like mother like son.”
“I can’t believe this happened,” she said.
I typed: “It’s been coming for years. Not your fault.”
“Poor Stef,” she said.
“Lucky Stef,” I typed. “Poor you.”
“Enough of that,” she answered, rejecting my take on things. “Use the office computer to find out who sent that vicious message. That, at least, I can do something about.”
It was easy enough to find out where the message came from. It came from “System.” Which meant that the little bee animation had been sent with the authority of one of the system operators—the managers of the computer network on the Ark. For a moment I thought this meant that the message had been official in origin, that the government of the Ark was exerting pressure in an amazingly heavy-handed way. But then I settled on the more plausible explanation. Someone had learned how to break into the network operating system and make it look as though private messages were coming from the sysops.
So now the immediate problem wasn’t tracing the message—that couldn’t be done at the moment. The problem was figuring out how the sender had broken into the network mail program. Whoever did it must be able to break in with impunity—no one else guessing that he was doing it, or the sysops would already have taken steps. So what I had to do was find the same invisible way to enter.
Naturally, I started out using my own entry code and password. It gave me most of Carol Jeanne’s authority to access information, which meant I could explore in areas that most citizens of the Ark could never reach. The problem was that by using my legal access, I was leaving trails all over the place. So I didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t want the sysops to know about.
Why did I feel that way? Why was I already worrying about being caught? If someone asked Carol Jeanne about it, she could simply say that someone had sent an anonymous message to her household computer and she asked her witness to search out who did it and how. Innocent enough, and perfectly within her rights.
Her witness. As I searched the network databases I remembered how she had stopped Red from seizing me or striking me or whatever it was he had in mind. Don’t you dare touch my witness. It bothered me now, that she had spoken of me as an object, a possession. Her witness. Why couldn’t she have said, Don’t you dare touch Lovelock? Why did she still feel that the only fair protection of my safety was my status as a valuable piece of property, instead of speaking as if I had a right to be left alone? It was just one more sign that my relationship with Carol Jeanne was not and never had been what I thought it was. In the days of slavery in the American South, as black household slaves plaited their mistresses’ hair there must have been conversation, perhaps even intimate confessions, the mistress playing out her thoughts in front of the listening maid. And perhaps the maids even fantasized that the mistress loved them, that they were friends. But then would come the awakening. The day when the family finances were in trouble, and money had to be raised, and they talked about selling this “friend.” Or the day the maid did something wrong, or was suspected of doing something wrong, and in that instant the friend would become an enemy, an untrustworthy captive. How many “intimate friends” found themselves stripped and flogged? How many lay there bleeding on a filthy mat, suffering less from the wounds of the lash than from the realization that they were not and never had been anything but property?
I’m lucky to have found out now, I thought.
Instead of searching any further on the system, where I could be traced, I accessed local memory where the code supporting the network mail system resided, and began to read it. Since it was local volatile memory, the sysops couldn’t know what I was looking at if they ever tried to trace me. And yet many secrets about how the mail system worked were there, for anyone who knew how to find them. Of course, in volatile memory it was the running program, not the source code, so it wasn’t marked up with comments that helped human programmers figure out what each section of code was doing. But that was no barrier to me. I was an enhanced capuchin, and so I was able to remember the meaning of every computer instruction and follow the logic in my head. It was almost a mechanical task to snake through the code, following it to find the place where access was given.
In my mind it felt as though I were exploring a cave, in a mountain riddled with tunnels like a cheese. I would follow one branch tunnel until it looped back into the main tunnel; then I would follow another one to see where it led. Finally I ended up with a map of the entire mountain, and then I could begin to search for the tiny jewel that someone had hidden there. Along the way, though, there were surprises.
The first surprise was the discovery that this was a very old program. It dated from the era when the Ark project had first been launched on Earth. Apparently the people working on the Ark had become locked into one computer network system and had never changed it or even significantly updated it. This meant that encryption and security were primitive and that whoever had hacked the mail system hadn’t had to be all that clever after all.
The second surprise wasn’t a surprise at all, having found the first. The sysops were aware that their software leaked like a colander, and there was a secret project to install a new, high-level system with layers of encryption and security. Whoever had sent the bee message to our house would find it a lot harder when the new software came online. No—would find it impossible.
So should I report this to Carol Jeanne? The message is anonymous because it was hacked into the system, but it won’t be a problem for long because within a week or so the new software will be up and running and the old hacks won’t work. Very well, Lovelock, she would say. Good work. And she’d give me a treat.
Give me a treat. Give me a soul-destroying animal-tricking treat. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs I was already salivating at the thought.
But I am not a dog. I don’t have to do what I have been conditioned to do.
If Stef can wake up and find a man inside the shell that he had become, why couldn’t I also find the man inside me? Not the human man, because I was better than human. But a man all the same, a male person, a citizen of the universe with natural rights and privileges like any other. If Stef could tell Mamie exactly what he thought of her and walk away, why couldn’t I?
Because Stef could go live in bachelor quarters and still function on the Ark. Whereas I would be a runaway witness, an unheard-of anomaly, a failure of conditioning, and I would be hunted down and destroyed.
So I could not come out in the open as Stef had. I would have to live as Stef had lived for so long, hiding my real feelings as he had hidden his, so that up until the moment of his actual rebellion no one had guessed that he would ever find inside himself the power to act. When he did rebel everyone was astonished; but they were astonished only because they had never known him. No one had known him.
No one knows me.
No one knows who I am or what I
can do. I’m like the hacker who sent that message. Anonymous. My disguise is perfect. I look like an animal. I can’t talk with my voice. I’m small and weak-looking. They think I’m cute. And my conditioned devotion to Carol Jeanne is considered unassailable.
The terrible thing was that it was unassailable. Even as I thought these rebellious thoughts, I still felt that deep abiding love for Carol Jeanne, that hunger to please her, that aching need to rush to her and tell her all that I had discovered in my searches through the system, so that she would know that I loved her and served her and she would give me a…
Give me a treat.
I found how the hacker had sent us the anonymous message. Sysops routinely sent system circulars, polling all the computers linked to the network and checking them for outgoing mail. It was possible to attach riders to the mail polls—the Ark government used this method to send news and notices. The system riders could also be addressed, not to any individual, but rather to groups or classes of individuals, so that notices could be sent to all the people working in the bakery, for instance, or to all the people living in Mayflower village. The hacker had simply attached a rider to the poll and had set it to be distributed to all households with members belonging to the gaiology division and counseling services who were also in Mayflower village and who had arrived within the last ten weeks. Thus the message, though technically still sent to a group, would show up only on our house computer.
But how had he attached his little animated message to the system circular? That, too, was easy enough. The ancient software had a back door. The sysops themselves signed on using their names and activating all the normal traces and record-keeping procedures. But the original programmers had built in a way to enter the system with even more authority than the sysop. It wasn’t an intuitive entry—even in the old days, they were more sophisticated than to simply allow someone to type a generic name like “program” or “entry” and get in. What I found was that the network software installed in every linked computer scanned keystrokes when it was active, and while most of the branches from the keystroke scans led to obvious places in the program, one of them did not. It checked for an awkward combination of keystrokes that no one would accidentally enter: CONTROL-A {[<^ SHIFT-BACKSPACE. If someone pressed CONTROL-A and then followed it with the rest of those keypresses, he would find himself facing the same menu choices that the sysops saw, with all the powers that the sysops had—but without the software being “aware” that he was there at all, so no tracks would be left.
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