Mamie and Red took the girls and walked ahead of Carol Jeanne and me on the way to church, widening the psychological distance between us. Pink trotted behind Red and left a few well-placed farts in our path. I was disgusted, not by the bodily functions, but by her egregious partisanship when her master was so clearly in the wrong. True, Pink’s loyalty had been programmed into her; but I had also been programmed to love only Carol Jeanne, and that hadn’t stopped me from seeing the truth about her. Having been enlightened, I was naively impatient with others of my kind who were still deluded. I felt that Pink and I should have been allies; instead we were strangers to one another. She was a sentient being; how could she be so content in her servitude? I could only conclude that pigs were innately inferior to primates, so that even when enhanced they remained a lesser order of being.
I watched her little piggy butt jiggle as she trotted complacently after Red, and I was disgusted by her obsequiousness. It never occurred to me then that my own scampering, my begging for treats, my infernal cuteness telegraphed the same contentment to others that I found so distasteful in her. I knew by then that when I did those things, I was merely pretending to be a happy slave. It did not occur to me that perhaps all happy slaves are pretending, some perhaps doing it so well that they deceive even themselves.
Mamie preceded the rest of us into the chapel, leading the procession with her adoring family in her wake. She pushed herself into a partially occupied pew instead of an empty one, so that once she had spread herself out on the bench with her dear boy at her side and her loving grandchildren vying for her lap, there was no room for Carol Jeanne and me. For the benefit of those who watched, Mamie raised her hands in dismay as though it were all an oversight. She clucked for Carol Jeanne to sit in the row behind them, and Carol Jeanne was too surprised to do anything else. It was a nasty thing to do. Even in her time of trouble, Mamie could find time to vent her malice. Perhaps she was thinking that if she couldn’t have a husband beside her, nobody should. Or perhaps she thought that if Carol Jeanne and Red were together, Mamie would look like the lonely extra person. Even though it was Mamie who had lost her husband, she apparently felt it more appropriate for Carol Jeanne to look the part of the single woman.
Finally, though, I realized that Mamie was fighting for survival in the little community of Mayflower, and her analysis of what would help her achieve that goal was excellent. Carol Jeanne was famous, but it was Red who was well liked and personally admired by the people of Mayflower. On the Ark as a whole, Carol Jeanne was a far greater asset than Red; in Mayflower, the situation was reversed. Mamie was determined that people picture her in Red’s company.
I understood this, but of course Carol Jeanne was oblivious. She was annoyed at having been shunted off, but she had no idea of what it really meant. And even if I had explained, it was quite likely that she would have shrugged. What did she care, then, how the meaningless little community of Mayflower felt about her? Unlike Red, Carol Jeanne hadn’t grasped the fact that life in the Ark was a significant change from life in America. There, your professional community was your neighborhood, and you hardly cared where your house was. In the Ark, the professional community was far smaller and the physical neighborhood mattered far more. It had been planned this way, so that during the hard early years of colonization, people would be able to work together smoothly in creating many small, agriculturally self-sufficient communities. On the new planet, there would be no cheap, fast transportation to link the towns. If you didn’t have friends in your own community, you wouldn’t have friends at all.
Carol Jeanne, if asked, probably would have said that she didn’t need friends, that her work was her life. But it would have been a lie. Even the most profound introverts need somebody. What else would explain her bizarre friendship with Neeraj? Carol Jeanne was desperate for a friend—but only on her own terms, which meant that she could only be close with someone who understood and valued her work.
That could have been me, and if it had been, I would be writing a very different account, if I were writing one at all. But Carol Jeanne, who had once seemed to be the beginning and the end of the world to me, was clearly not the sort of person who can perceive hidden value in others. In her own way, she was as much of a user as Mamie. She was merely less conscious of what she was doing as she ignored the love of her best, most loyal friends and bestowed what love she offered on the undeserving.
Maybe that’s the only kind of human being there is. Certainly the people at church valued Red even though he was a parasite. Why? Because Red went through the motions of assuring others that he valued them and their community and its stupid little rituals and rules. Men nodded and women waved at him from across the church, and although there may have been one or two knowing glances, Mamie could easily fool herself into thinking that the affection Red had won belonged as much to her.
Carol Jeanne, not Mamie, was the pariah. Nobody waved or even smiled at her. They snubbed her, just as she had snubbed them from the beginning. She and I were alone.
For most of my life, being alone with Carol Jeanne had been my fondest dream. But she had made it plain that I was no more to her than a sentient toaster, and I was bitterly aware that when she was with me, she thought of herself as being utterly alone. While the prelude music was being played I groomed her hair to distract her attention from the Mayflowerites who preferred her husband to herself, but I did this more out of habit than affection. She detected no difference. Why should she? The toaster was popping out toast just as it had been programmed to do.
Once the services began, I allowed myself to relax. I have never had much use for human religions—I knew who my maker was, and it was not an omniscient being. Lately I’d been discovering that my maker might not have been omnipotent, either. But there was no religion in it.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the weekly Presbyterian services as much as Carol Jeanne loathed them. She needed the solemn rituals of mass, but I preferred the greater casualness of Protestant worship. Would old Mrs. Burke drop her hymnal on the organ keyboard during prayers? Would Mr. Watters snore through the sermon again? These were variables that were sorely lacking in the Catholic religion.
The music director was a treat to watch. She was a large woman, not as tightly built as Penelope or Mamie, and her fat billowed underneath her clothes. She favored pastel linen suits that were more transparent than she realized, and the torso that peeked through the fabric resembled the face of a surprised man. When she waved her arms to lead the music, the eyes rolled around and scrutinized the congregation. Apparently no one else had thought to inform her of the need to change her wardrobe; or perhaps they had, and she was a closet exhibitionist.
What I liked best about the service was the spying—no, data-gathering—I got to do when the plate was passed. Money wasn’t a big commodity on the Ark, so instead of putting coins in the plate, churchgoers dropped promises there instead. There were pads of paper and blunt-tipped writing implements behind every pew, and while the offertory was sung people wrote their offerings down. The idea was to volunteer service to the church or the community, or to make a promise of some kind to God.
Whenever the plate was passed on Sunday, I took advantage of my monkeyhood and my rights as a witness, and moved around, ostensibly stretching one last time before the sermon. Nobody seemed conscious of how good my eyesight was, and therefore how far away I could be and still read what people wrote. Usually the offerings were as pedestrian as the people who made them. A woman would promise not to speak sharply to her husband, or a man would vow to spend more time with his children. These offerings held little interest for me except that they confirmed the dullness of the offerers’ lives.
Sometimes, however, my observations yielded more interesting results. I once saw a man write an anonymous note promising God to give up his mistress. He was a little gnome of a human, and the thought that he had two women on a string was both surprising and appealing. Another man vowed to do a better job pleasing his wif
e sexually, even though, as he added nastily, she made no effort to please him. Thus was an intimate complaint cleverly disguised as a loving promise. I stored these nuggets away as part of my ongoing effort to understand human behavior. Once I had told myself—and believed—that I studied humans in order to be better able to serve Carol Jeanne. By then, however, I knew better. I studied them to try to understand what it meant to be a person. If Carol Jeanne had ever asked me what kinds of things people wrote in their offerings, I would have told her—my conditioning was too strong for me to do otherwise. But she was not other-centered enough to ask. And I was not so stupid as to volunteer what I knew; if she had known how much I learned about Mayflower from spying on their offerings, she probably would have told me to stop.
Some offerings were signed and some were not. Promises made to God were always anonymous because they were nobody’s business but the worshipper’s and his maker’s. But community commitments were signed with the name of the person making the offering. When a member of the congregation vowed to weed the nasturtium patch in front of the chapel, the minister needed to know who it was who had signed up.
Mamie’s favorite offering was to invite Pastor Barton’s family to dinner on Freeday—a safe proposition to make because there were five hundred eager villagers and only one minister. On almost every occasion Mamie made this particular offer, Pastor Barton called with the sad news that his time was already taken by another member of the congregation. Thus Mamie got credit for asking without having to take the trouble of fulfilling the offer.
Carol Jeanne’s notes almost invariably said nothing. She merely scribbled on the paper, shielding her meaningless doodles from prying eyes before folding the slip neatly in quarters as ritual demanded and dropping it into the plate. She was not the only one to do this; few had the cheek to openly write nothing. Today, though, she sighed as she reached for her pad of paper, a sure sign to me that she was going to write something real. I craned my neck to read the words.
“I miss You,” she wrote, and the capitalization told me, to my surprise, who it was she missed. Perhaps sitting there alone on the bench had reminded her that along with Earth, she had also abandoned the God of her youth. As much as I loved Carol Jeanne, I had long been aware that at an unconscious level she was deeply superstitious, despite her achievements as a scientist. Naturally she was uncomfortable attending Presbyterian services instead of the Catholic ones of her childhood. But this was hardly the true cause of her unhappiness in everyday life. It never would have occurred to her that if she wanted to know the source of her unhappiness, she should look, not to God, but to herself, for having made a bad marriage and not having had the wisdom to end it before leaving on this voyage.
Unlike the others, of course, Carol Jeanne knew exactly how well I could see, and when she noticed me looking at her note, she shielded it from my eyes. That stung. I was her witness, after all; I was supposed to look. But I feigned indifference by jumping off her shoulder and landing on the back of Red’s pew. I loped to the end of the pew and jumped to the one in front, and then the one in front of that. Few people even noticed me anymore, because I always gamboled this way when the organ played. Those who had complained at first that it was disrespectful to have “pets” playing around in church had long since become resigned to the fact that the witness laws took precedence over decorum in the sanctuary. And some even looked my way and smiled. Even the toaster knew how to make himself more likable than Carol Jeanne.
One person I knew I had to check out was Peter, the kid who put the bee animation on our household computer. He and his sister Diana were sitting with Dolores, their mother, near Penelope. It was tricky getting near them, since both Penelope and Dolores had taken an active dislike to me. But the kids liked me well enough, and Peter would have no way of knowing that I had sussed his anonymous message. To get there I scooted along under the pews until I got behind theirs, then scrambled up the back of the pew by getting a grip on the hymnal holder. I ended up directly between Peter and Diana and held very still, so Dolores and Penelope wouldn’t notice me. This was easy enough, since, like Mamie, they were spending all their effort trying to look pious and cheerful.
Peter and Diana, for their part, didn’t betray by so much as a twitch that they knew I was there. Until Diana wrote on her paper “Hi Lovelock.” Peter, however, merely shielded his—but badly, so I could read it anyway. “Mom never notices anything good I do so stuff it I won’t do her any more favors. Penelope says that thing I did caused a divorce but I don’t care. Marriage is a fake anyway.” Hostile kid.
Diana was trying to be sweet—but there was rage underneath her message, too. “I solemly vow to write to daddy once a week even tho he doesn’t ever write back even tho he promised. I will not think bad thoughts about Certain Person for making us leave daddy.” Children were young enough to tell the truth without realizing how much they were giving away.
Adding today’s clues to what I’d learned from Peter and Diana in the past, it wasn’t hard to piece together the family situation. Their mother was wanted on the Ark; their father would have been a supernumerary like Red. At the last minute he decides not to go, but Dolores insists on going anyway and takes the kids, even though she’s not that loving a mother. She took them because that’s what mothers were supposed to do. Not that the children minded going, not at first. It was a neat space voyage, as far as they knew, not realizing how permanent or painful the separation from their father would be. Now they felt guilty for wanting to go, and it made their anger against their mother and father burn even hotter.
Her message finished, Diana reached up to pet me. The movement drew her mother’s eye, of course—Dolores’s alertness to her image of piety included her children’s behavior in church. So I slipped down off the back of the pew and dangled from the hymnal holder.
The person sitting at the end of this pew was Nancy, the horsefaced girl who had taken Pink home from Odie Lee’s funeral. I had seen her across the common on Freedays and Workdays, and she always came to church. Otherwise, our paths hadn’t crossed much. Up to now, with two grandparents in the house, Carol Jeanne had seen no need for her babysitting services. But it occurred to me that with only Mamie left, Carol Jeanne would probably need to get a good babysitter now and then, and it would be helpful if I had some idea of the kind of person this Nancy was. Besides, I had just been reading kids’ offerings and extrapolating from them about their family life. I was in the mode, so why not keep going?
I had been aware of her before, as I was aware of everyone in Mayflower. She always stood as though she were trying to disappear inside herself, and today, in church, she sat hunched so far toward the edge of the pew that anyone who walked carelessly down the aisle could knock her right off the bench. She leaned over a piece of paper as she wrote her weekly offering, hiding her words from the adults sitting next to her by using her long hair as a screen.
She was one of the believers—the people who wrote at great length, pouring their hearts out. I always thought of them as secret Catholics. They needed the anonymity of a confessional, but the offertory was as close as they could get. She was shielding her paper so thoroughly that it took some real maneuvering to get a good angle. I ended up hanging from one of the arching pipes that held up ceiling light fixtures inside the balloon-structure of the meetinghouse. Even then it took some real effort to see what she wrote without making it obvious to everyone in the room what I was doing.
I promise I won’t hate my father or hope he goes to hell or Mom because she won’t believe me or my teachers because they talk to my parents and make it worse. Please forgive me for hating them before and don’t let me get pregnant unless it’s your will for me to have a holy child. Amen.
A holy child? It was sweet and sad, the daydream world she must have created for herself, to allow her to survive in what was obviously an incestuous and abusive family. The mother’s not believing her was a normal response, I knew, but apparently she had told her teachers and the
y had gone straight to the parents. What kind of idiots were they? Surely there was a prescribed response to a child’s accusation of parental abuse, and surely it didn’t include talking to the parents without protecting the child.
If she had really made such an accusation. What if she had merely told them about her fears of having a “holy child” by the will of God? Or some other half-formed daydream? They might not have understood what she was telling them. Still, I would take a look in her records.
As to having Nancy babysit Emmy and Lydia, that might be a problem. Abused children were often abusers when they got responsibility. But then, sometimes they were especially tender and nurturing. Both responses were part of the literature. And unless the issue of babysitting came up, it was none of my business. The humans were supposed to take care of this sort of thing. As usual, they were screwing up, but if I tried to fix every case I saw where humans were hurting each other, I’d have no time left for witnessing. I had my priorities—most of them forced on me by my conditioning.
Yet I knew I would still look up Nancy’s records. Was I a person, or not? The equal of the humans, or not? Civilized, or not? And if I was a civilized male person, should I not feel and respond to the same urge toward protection of the female and the child that civilized human males felt? Of course I did not think all this through at the time. I’m not sure I always remember exactly how much I understood or thought about at the time. I only know what I did, and what I think I remember that I felt and thought. It’s not always the most reliable source of information, but it’s the only one I have, and even if my memory is selective or ascribes greater wisdom and self-understanding to me than I had at any particular time, at least I’m not consciously trying to make myself look good. When I remember myself doing something stupid or slimy, I write it down along with everything else. Or so I say. You, reading this—if anyone ever reads this—what can you know of me except what I tell you? What will you do, check the computer to verify what I say? That’s a laugh.
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