I typed again. “I think it’s hilarious.”
I also wondered if there might not be some truth behind it. Neeraj had met Red at several department functions. And Neeraj was good at seeing into people. Which is one reason why his passion for Carol Jeanne must have been gratifying to her. He saw through her facade of cool competence and found the woman that Red had never seen. The trouble is, that hot-blooded, passionate, loving woman was not the woman who was in charge of Carol Jeanne’s life. She was still making decisions on the basis of what she thought was right, rather than what she knew she needed.
I rather admired her for that—and I don’t think that was because of my programming. I liked the fact that she was the sort of person who would suffer great personal loss in order to help keep her children’s home and family intact. All the more so because I liked Neeraj. I thought he really would make her happy. And she was turning him away.
“Lovelock thinks you’re a hoot,” said Carol Jeanne. “Perhaps he wants you to swap witnesses with me.”
Neeraj laughed. “Everyone knows that the capuchins are the cream of the cream. You need Lovelock like you need air, and you know it.”
What did he mean? She needed me? For what, the esteem of having a capuchin? Cream of the cream…
“He’s almost a friend,” said Carol Jeanne, stroking my fur.
Neeraj smiled sourly. “Like I’m almost a lover?”
Neeraj understood how a single word could hurt. He even identified with me, for that moment, perched on the verge of something that promised to be glorious, and yet always held back, tethered, unable to leap and fly. Almost a friend. Almost a person. Almost alive. Almost real. But still not.
Well, Carol Jeanne, my dear almost-friend, I’ve got a bun in the oven my own self. I don’t need you and I don’t need Neeraj. I don’t need humans. I’ll take what I want from your decadent culture and your self-centered arrogant lives, and then I’ll spit in your faces while my children and I create something new and fine. We, at least, will always know that there are other intelligent, valuable species in the world besides ourselves. We won’t think that just because we have cleverly defined every other species as “animals” it gives us the right to destroy them, hurt them, ignore them, disdain them.
I’m ranting. Why shouldn’t I? I wanted to rant at the time, but I couldn’t. I simply moved out from under her hand and perched on the edge of her desk, looking off into space. She didn’t even notice I was pissed off, as far as I could tell.
But Neeraj knew. He knew things about people. And he treated me more like a person than any other human. Had he analyzed me the way he analyzed Red? Lovelock is actually a horny little monkey, Carol Jeanne, and my guess is that his own biological clock has induced him to overcome his antisexual programming and steal a female capuchin embryo so he can develop it into a mate. What else would you expect from an enhanced capuchin who is being consumed by resentment and a vicious love-hate relationship with his owner?
No. Neeraj can’t see that in me. My face has no expressions he knows how to read. He has never lived a day of my life. He keeps a witness himself—if he truly understood me or any other witness, he couldn’t do that. He knows nothing about me. None of them do. None of them ever will.
But I know all about them. And I not only have more compassion for human beings than they have for me, but also I have more compassion for them than they have for each other. That’s why, knowing what was happening to the girl Nancy, I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.
Ever since I read her offering that Sunday, I had been trying to think of what I could do to help her. I toyed with sending anonymous computer messages to her father, so he’d know that somebody was on to him. But that ran the double risk of exposing what I was capable of doing with computers and also of causing the father to treat Nancy even worse, since he would assume that she had told somebody. No, I needed to do something that would quickly, simply, efficiently get her out of the man’s house and make sure he was eliminated as a threat to her and any other child.
I researched the applicable laws, and found that the legal code on the Ark was entirely oriented toward protecting the child. A parent convicted of either child abuse or incest would be expelled from the colony if the offense took place before launch. After launch, however, when the ties with Earth were severed, the penalties became much more draconian. This wasn’t in the prospectus, but it made a brutal kind of sense. There were some offenses that simply couldn’t be tolerated in the community, and since there was no way to handle imprisonment or exile, a person convicted of deliberately violating the safety of children would have a choice. He could allow the surgeons on the Ark to perform an operation on the limbic node to cause all libido and aggression functions to cause him excruciating pain. Or he could choose to be put to death.
The operation sounded vaguely familiar, even in the dry legal language of the penal code of the Ark. And when I researched it a little further, I discovered that the operation used as optional punishment for extreme crimes of aggression was one that had first been perfected in the witness program.
The worst penalty that the law allowed on the Ark was to do to a human being what had been done to me. That limbic node operation had installed a little device that Carol Jeanne could trigger with the painword, or I could trigger myself just by thinking of making love to a female. And it was done to me, not because I had committed a crime and deserved it, not because I was a defective creature who harmed its own young, but because I was to be “enhanced” and therefore needed to be kept under control.
I knew a secret, though. I knew that the limbic operation was not foolproof.
So I had to expose Nancy’s father now, right away, when he could still be sent away from the Ark. Back to Earth. While Nancy and her mother stayed here.
Yet I didn’t want to accuse him myself. If people realized I was spying on them during the offering, they would start resenting me, fearing me. I had to remain invisible to them. An amusing little monkey. Worse yet, it would reflect badly on Carol Jeanne, since they would assume my spying was on her behalf. Nor was an anonymous accusation by computer a viable option; since it was not evidence and wouldn’t be enough to get Nancy away from her father, it would only make things worse for her.
I toyed with the idea of telling Carol Jeanne, flat out, what I had read on Nancy’s offering, and simply letting her handle it. But that would have to be my last resort. No one would believe she had read the offering herself, so however she managed to handle things she’d end up revealing my role as a spy and it would harm both her and me.
But there was someone who could make the accusation without linking it to me at all.
God is back on the network again. He sent me another message. Only this time it wasn’t snotty. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t even know stuff like this happened. Why doesn’t Nancy just tell? Her own father. Fathers don’t do things like that. They might decide to stay on Earth and let your mother take you to some other planet without them, but they don’t touch you. That’s grosser than gross.
I picture Dad doing something like that to Diana and it makes me want to kill him. Only I know Dad never would. I want to kill Nancy’s father.
The monkey’s right, though. He may have found out by spying on the offerings (I knew the little bastard was spying!) but he can’t very well use that as evidence because the offerings are sealed and can’t be opened in court even if the minister hasn’t destroyed them which is what he’s supposed to do.
So I’m going to tell Diana and maybe she can help figure out a way to get Nancy to tell us herself. Then we can go to the police and “God,” bless his tiny hairy butt, won’t have to get involved.
Peter showed me a note from “God.” I cried all night. Poor Nancy. I don’t know how we’re going to get her to tell us. You just don’t walk up to somebody and say, I understand your dad commits incest and wondered if maybe you were the victim, and if so would you like to tell us so we can get you taken away fr
om him? But I’ll think of something or maybe Peter will.
I was going to say something snotty about how Peter never could think of something useful, but when I wrote it down it felt so stupid. Teasing Peter and talking about how dumb or awful he is or whatever, it feels so childish to act that way when something really serious is going on. All that stuff about fighting with Peter—he never hurts me, really. He teases, but he never hurts me. Not everybody feels as safe with their family as I do. And I guess that makes Peter not a bad brother after all.
CHAPTER TEN
CAGES
Justice moves swiftly on the Ark, something that I need to remember. It took only one day after my message to Peter for Nancy’s family to feel the hand of the law. Peter told Diana, of course, and Diana went to Nancy and hinted sympathetically until Nancy spilled it all to her. I wish I’d seen it—I knew Diana was smart, but smart doesn’t always mean you can get other people to do things.
Once Diana had heard about the abuse and incest from Nancy herself, she went straight to Red and told him all about it—without a clue of the message that had appeared on Peter’s computer. I know how perfectly she handled that conversation with Red because I downloaded it from Pink. Pink doesn’t mean to be my spy in Red’s private meetings. It’s in the nature of pigs to be exploited.
I’ll give Red credit. He may be his mother’s emotional stepan-fetchit but when it came to a problem outside his own family, he acted with absolute fairness and swiftness. By the book. He first checked with the school counselors and learned that Nancy’s aberrant behavior had been noted with “possible abuse” marked in the file. The counselors had tried to draw her out, but the rules on soliciting testimony against parents were strict, and Nancy had not said to them anything clear enough to use.
Coupled with Diana’s testimony, though, their observations provided ample corroboration to move ahead with the investigation. So the next morning at school, Red came and, with the counselor who had tried hardest to get through to Nancy, he confronted her with what he knew. He didn’t mention Diana’s name, but of course Nancy knew at once. Pink was there, so once again I got the scene.
“Diana wasn’t supposed to tell,” said Nancy dully.
“Everyone is supposed to tell about things like this,” said Red. “That’s the only way it will ever stop, is if people tell. What we need now is for you to tell.”
“I’ll never tell on my father.”
“Do you know what, Nancy? If you simply say to us that what I have been told is true, we will immediately remove you from your father’s house and take him into custody. He won’t be able to punish you ever again. He’ll be sent away from the Ark, and you’ll have the choice of going back to Earth separately or staying here with your mother.”
“Mother won’t stay here without him,” she said. “She only left Earth because he made her.”
“Did you want to come?” asked Red.
Nancy nodded.
“If your mother decides to go back to Earth with your father, you can still stay. You’re old enough to make that choice. And we’ll all be proud of you for having the courage to tell the truth and put an end to his abuse of you.”
Nancy looked sidelong at Red. “It’s true, all right,” she said in a little voice.
As I watched this replay from Pink’s visual and auditory memory, it occurred to me that if she was old enough to choose to stay alone on the Ark, she was old enough to have walked out of her father’s house and put a stop to the incest herself. But of course, the incest and the physical punishment had been going on for long enough that it was doubtful Nancy had much will of her own. How long would it take her to recover once she was removed from her father’s house? Slavery changes a person, and it isn’t that easy to decide to be free, even when it’s within your power.
In fact, as I think about it, it occurs to me that Red’s key phrase was “we’ll all be proud of you.” What Red implicitly promised was the fatherly approval that her own father never gave her, fatherly approval that she yearned for so deeply that, in the hope of someday attaining it, she would endure all the terrible things he did to her.
But I’m digressing. In fact, I think I’m really analyzing myself. I, poor fatherless creature that I am, also have that primate hunger for approval from a powerful male figure. Who is my father? Not Red. I am not as desperate or ignorant as Nancy, to seize on Red as my father figure.
Within an hour, Nancy’s father was in custody, being interrogated in the presence of a lawyer—and Red, Nancy’s new advocate and protector. He admitted everything, weeping as he alternately accused Nancy of seducing him and begged for them to punish him for being so terrible to her. It was sad and sickening to watch.
Sadder still, though, was his wife’s firm denial that any such thing had ever happened. “Sometimes he has to punish her, of course, because she’s a sullen, rebellious girl,” said the mother. “But those other charges are just a vicious little girl’s way of trying to get out from under the strict rules of a righteous family.”
The next transport back to Earth came in two weeks. Nancy’s father and mother were on it.
In the meantime, though, Nancy came to live, temporarily, with us. She got the couch where Stef had slept for his first weeks in Mayflower. It was soon obvious to anyone who cared enough to pay attention that she had fixated on Red as her savior—and on Diana as her enemy. Odd, isn’t it? To Nancy, Red was the one who had rescued her from her father’s cruelty and his constant demand for sexual release, while Diana was the one who had betrayed Nancy’s confidence, causing her to lose the love of her parents. Never mind that both results were inseparable—Nancy, disturbed as she was, was quite capable of separating them. She refused to stay in the house if Diana came over, which made it tricky to have Diana babysit for us.
The first time the subject came up, Nancy insisted that we didn’t need any other babysitters, because she could babysit perfectly well herself. I had already warned Carol Jeanne that Nancy was seriously unstable and should not be left alone with Emmy and Lydia. Victims of abuse often become abusers, I reminded her. But in the event, my warnings weren’t needed. Red himself laid it down as law. “Nancy,” he said, “you still need to rest and recover from all that’s happened to you. Tending little children is far too much stress for you. It will be years before I can consider allowing you to babysit anyone.”
From him, Nancy took it without argument. But later that evening, as she sat alone watching a video while Carol Jeanne and Red were putting the children to bed, I watched and listened from the hallway.
“She just wanted to take away all my babysitting jobs,” Nancy murmured. “That’s why she did it, the little tattling bitch.”
The meaning was obvious enough to me. Just as Nancy’s father had blamed everything he did on her—calling her a bitch in the bargain—Nancy was blaming everything on Diana, and using the same name. You didn’t have to be a shrink like Red to understand it.
What was frustrating was that Nancy wasn’t stupid. She was almost bright, for an unenhanced human, and yet she couldn’t see how absurd her own reasoning was. Babysitting had been the happiest part of her life, since it got her out of her father’s house and into other homes where some kind of peace and normality prevailed. Now that Red had decreed that she could not babysit, Nancy “knew” that this had been Diana’s motive all along. Nasty little child, taking her babysitting away from her…
Whenever I was home, I watched Nancy as much as possible. She never spoke her paranoid imaginings aloud again. All she did, at least when I was looking, was gaze at the video screen or watch Emmy and Lydia playing or just sit there, staring out the window of the house at the distant villages rising up the curving floor of the Ark into the sky. Her eyes were usually dead, but sometimes I saw them fill with tears or narrow with rage.
She said little, fitting smoothly into the routine of the household, even allowing herself to become something of a servant for Mamie. “Oh, Nancy, dear, could you fetch me that
book I was reading?” “Oh, Nancy, sweetheart, be a dear and bring me a glass of water from the kitchen? Just one little bit of ice, that’s all, if it gets too cold it just burns right down my throat, you know how it is when you get old, Nancy, you should get down on your knees and thank the Lord for your youth and bright spirits.”
Which showed just how much Mamie noticed anything, since Nancy’s spirits were about as bright as a rat’s rectum. But Nancy, having been raised in utter servitude to another’s will, responded as if Mamie were doing her a favor by giving her things to do. After all, she always asked nicely, which her father had never done. And her requests gave the girl a sense of purpose, which was sorely missing now that her father was gone.
Sometimes, when her eyes were tight with rage and hate, she would notice me, and try to wither me with her glare. The first few times I looked away, but then I became resentful—why should I hide from her? In the first place, she had no idea of my role in her liberation. And in the second place, I cared not at all whether she hated me or not. What could she do to me? So I smiled at her and cavorted cheerfully whenever she glared at me. I’m really good at clowning. Everybody laughs. But she never did.
It was during this time that two agents from the “physical fitness department” showed up at Carol Jeanne’s office. Two women, with that wiry muscularity that made even marginally feminine clothing fit them like a bad disguise. Looking at how lean they were, I estimated that neither of them had menstruated in years. I imagined skin with veins standing out like gopher trails. Breasts like tennis balls stapled onto otherwise masculine chests. Either of them could have crushed my skull in one hand.
“We’ve come to talk to you about computer security violations,” said the taller one, whose name turned out to be Mendoza.
Naturally, I had one terrible moment in which I thought all my clever computer penetrations had been discovered and I was now going to be destroyed. Instinctively I leapt for the highest point in the room. Fortunately, Mendoza and Van Pell had no idea that what they were seeing was the way a capuchin acts out guilty fear. Carol Jeanne might have realized what my action meant, but she had stopped paying attention to me years ago.
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