The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  My grandfather used to claim, with a forgiving chuckle, that his wedding night had been the biggest disappointment of his life. I thought bleakly of him the September evening of the annual cocktail party given by the dean of arts and sciences so that the standing faculty could make the acquaintance of their newly hired colleagues. A lot of people knew about Sally Barnes, of course, and among psychologists she was really famous, a prodigy; everybody wanted to meet her, and more than a few wanted to be there when I met her, to witness the encounter. I was exasperated with myself for being so nervous, as well as annoyed that the meeting would occur under circumstances so public, but when the moment arrived and I was actually being introduced to Sally—the dean had stationed himself beside her to handle the crush, and did the honors himself—these feelings all proved maddeningly beside the point.

  There she stood, the Chimp Child of all my theories and fantasies: a small, utterly ordinary-seeming and sounding young woman who touched my hand with purely mechanical courtesy. The plain black dress did less than nothing for her plain pale face and reddish hair; history’s only rehabilitated feral child was a person you wouldn’t look at twice in the street, or even once. That in itself meant nothing; but her expression, too, was indifferent and blank, and she spoke without any warmth at all, in an “educated” English voice pitched rather high: “How d’you do, a pleasure to meet you…” There she actually stood, saying her canned phrase to me, sipping from her clear plastic container of white wine, giving away nothing at all.

  I stared at the pale, round, unfamiliar face whose shape and features I knew so well, unable to believe in it or let go of the hand that felt so hard in mine. The room had gradually grown deafening. Bright, curious eyes had gathered round us. The moment felt utterly weird and wrong. Dean Eccles, perhaps supposing his difficult charge had failed to catch my name, chirped helpfully, “Of course Janet is the author of that fascinating book about you,” and beamed at Sally as if to say, There now, you lucky girl!”

  Only a flicker of eyelids betrayed her. “Oh, I see,” she said, but her hand pulled out of mine with a little yank as she spoke, and she looked pointedly past me toward the next person in the receiving line—a snub so obvious that even the poor dean couldn’t help but notice. Flustered, he started to introduce the elderly English professor Sally’s attention had been transferred to.

  We had hardly exchanged a dozen words. Suddenly I simply had to salvage something from the wreck of the occasion. “Look—could I call you in a week or two? Maybe we could get together for lunch or a drink or something after you’re settled in?”

  “Ah, I’m afraid I’ll be rather busy for quite some time,” said the cool voice, not exactly to me. “Possibly I might ring you if I happen to be free for an hour one afternoon.” Then she was speaking to the old gentleman and I had been eased out of the circle of shoulders and that was that.

  I went home thoroughly despondent and threw myself on the sofa. An hour or so later, the phone rang: John, who had witnessed the whole humiliating thing. “Listen, she acted that way with everybody, I watched her for an hour. Then I went through the line and she acted like that with me. She was probably jet-lagged or hates being on display—she was just pretending to drink that wine, by the way, sip, sip, sip, but the level never went down the whole time I was watching. You shouldn’t take it personally, Jan. I doubt she had any idea who you were in that mob of freakshow tourists.”

  “Oh, she knew who I was, all right, but that doesn’t make you wrong. O.K., thanks. I just wish the entire department hadn’t been standing around with their tongues hanging out, waiting to see us fall weeping on each other’s necks.” Realizing I wasn’t sure which I minded more, the rejection or its having been witnessed in that way, made me feel less tragic. I said good night to John, then went and pulled down the foldable attic stairs, put on the light, and scrounged among cartons till I found the scrapbook; this I brought downstairs and brooded over, soothed by a glass of rosé.

  The scrapbook was fat. The Chimp Child had been an international sensation when first reclaimed from the wild, and for years thereafter picture essays and articles had regularly appeared where I could clip or copy them. I had collected dozens of photographs of Sally: arriving at Heathrow, a small, oddly garbed figure, face averted, clinging to a uniformed attendant; dressed like an English schoolgirl at fifteen, in blazer and tie, working at a table with the team of psychologists at University College, London; on holiday with the superb teacher Carol Cheswick, who had earned a place for herself in the educators’ pantheon beside Jean-Marc Itard and Annie Sullivan by virtue of her brilliant achievements with Sally; greeting Jane Goodall, very old and frail, on one of Goodall’s last visits to England; in her rooms at Newnham College, Cambridge, an average-looking undergraduate.

  The Newnham pictures were not very good, or so I had always thought. Only now that I’d seen her in person … I turned back to the yellow newspaper clipping, nearly twenty years old, of a wild thing with matted, sawed-off hair; and now for the first time the blank face beneath struck me as queerly like this undergraduate’s, and like the face I had just been trying to talk to at the party. The expressive adolescent’s face brought into being sometime during the nineties—what had become of it? Who was Sally Barnes, after all? That precocious, verbally gifted little girl … I closed the cover, baffled. Whoever she was, she had long since passed the stage of being studied without her consent.

  Yet I wanted so badly to know her. As fall wore on to winter, I would often see her on campus, walking briskly, buttoned up in her silver coat with a long black scarf wrapped round her, appearing to take no notice of whatever leaves or slush or plain brickwork happened to be underfoot, or of the milling, noisy students. She always carried reading equipment and a black shoulder bag. Invariably she would be alone. I doubt that I can convey more than a dim impression of the bewilderment and frustration with which the sight of her affected me thoughout those slow, cold months. I knew every detail of the special education of Sally Barnes, the dedication of her teachers, her own eagerness to learn; and there had been nothing, nothing at all, to suggest that once “restored to human status,” she would become ordinary—nothing to foreshadow this standoffish dullness. Of course it was understandable that she would not wish to be quizzed constantly about her life in the wild; rumor got round of several instances when somebody unintimidated by her manner had put some question to her and been served with a snappish “Sorry, I don’t talk about that.” But was it credible that the child whom this unique experience had befallen had been, as her every word and action now implied, a particularly unfriendly, unoriginal, bad-tempered child who thereafter had scuttled straight back to sour conventionality as fast as ever she could?

  I simply did not believe it. She had to be deceiving us deliberately. But I couldn’t imagine why, nor entirely trust my own intuition: I wanted far too badly to believe that no human being who had been a wild animal for a time, and then become human again, could possibly really be the sort of human Sally seemed to be.

  And yet why not (I would argue with myself)? Why doubt that a person who had fought so hard for her humanity might desire, above all else, the life of an ordinary human?

  But is it ordinary to be so antisocial (I would argue back)? Of course she never got in touch with me. A couple of weeks after the party, I nerved myself up enough to call her office and suggest meeting for lunch. The brusqueness of that refusal took some getting over; I let a month go by before trying again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But what was it you wanted to discuss? Perhaps we could take care of it over the phone.”

  “The idea wasn’t to discuss anything, particularly. I only thought—new people sometimes find it hard to make their way here at first, it’s not a very friendly university. And then, naturally I’d like to—well, just talk. Get acquainted. Get to know you a bit.”

  “Thanks, but I’m tremendously busy, and in any event there’s very little I could say.” And then, after a pause: “Someone’s come
to the door. Thanks for ringing.”

  It was no good, she would have nothing to do with me, beyond speaking when we met on campus—I could, and did, force her to take that much notice of me. Where was she living? I looked it up, an address in the suburbs, not awfully far from mine. Once I pedaled past the building, a shabby older high-rise, but there was no way of telling which of the hundreds of windows might be hers. I put John up to questioning his committee acquaintance in Biology, learning in this way: that Sally had cooly repulsed every social overture from people in her department, without exception; that student gossip styled her a Britishly reserved but better-than-competent lecturer; that she was hard at work in the lab on some project she never discussed with anybody. Not surprisingly, her fellow biologists had soon lost interest. She had speedily trained us all to leave her alone.

  The psych department lost interest also, not without a certain tiresome belaboring of me, jokes about making silk purses out of chimps’ ears and Ugly Chimplings and the like. John overheard a sample of this feeble mailbox badinage one day and retorted with some heat, “Hey, Janet only said she’s human in that book. If education made you nice and personable, I know lots of people around here besides Sally Barnes who could stand to go back to school.” But John, embroiled in a romance with a first-year graduate student, now found Sally a dull subject himself; besides, what he had said was true. My thesis had not been invalidated, nor Carol Cheswick and the team at University College overrated. It was simply the case, in fact, that within six months of her arrival, Sally—billed in advance as an exotic ornament to the university—had compelled us all to take her for neither more nor less than the first-rate young microbiologist she had come among us to be.

  My personal disappointment grew by degrees less bitter. But still I would see the silver coat and subduedly fashionable boots, all points and plastic, moving away across the quad and think: Lady, had it been given unto me to be the Chimp Child, by God I’d have made a better job of it than you do!

  * * *

  Spring came. Between the faculty club and the library, the campus forsythia erupted along its straggling branches, the azaleas flowered as usual a week earlier in the city than in my garden fifteen miles away. Ridley Creek, in the nearby state park, roared with rains and snowmelt and swarmed with stocked trout and bulky anglers; and cardinals and titmice, visible all winter at the feeders, abruptly began to sing. Every winter I used to lose interest in the park between the first of February and the middle of March; every spring rekindled my sense of the luck and privilege of having it so near. During the first weeks of trout season, the trails, never heavily used, were virtually deserted, and any sunny day my presence was not required in town I would stuff a sandwich, a pocket reader, and a blanket into a daypack and pedal to the park. Generally I stayed close to the trails, but would sometimes tough my way through some brambly thicket of blackberry or raspberry canes, bright with small new chartreuse-colored leaves, to find a private spot where I could take off my shirt in safety.

  Searching for this sort of retreat in a tract of large beech trees one afternoon in April, I came carefully and painfully through a tangle of briars to be thunderstruck by the sight of young Professor Barnes where she seemed at once least and most likely to be: ten meters up in one of the old beeches. She was perfectly naked. She sat poised on a little branch, one shoulder set against the smooth gray bole of the bare tree, one foot dangling, the opposite knee cocked on the branch, the whole posture graced by a naturalness that smote me with envy in the surreal second or two before she caught sight of me. She was rubbing herself, and seemed to be crying.

  One after another, like blows, these impressions whammed home in the instant of my emerging. The next instant Sally’s face contorted with rage, she screamed, snapped off and threw a piece of dead branch at me (and hit me, too, in the breastbone), and was down the tree and running almost faster than I could take in what had happened, what was still happening. While part of my brain noted with satisfaction. She didn’t hear me coming! a different part galvanized my frenzied shouting: “No! Sally, for God’s sake, stop! Stop! Come back here, I won’t tell anybody, I won’t, I swear!. Sally!” Unable to move, to chase her, I could only go on yelling in this semihysterical vein; I felt that if she got away now, I would not be able to bear it. I’d have been heard all over that side of the park if there had been anybody to hear, outside the zone of noise created by the creek. It was the racket I was making, in fact, that made her come pelting back—that, and the afterthought that all her clothes were back there under the tree, and realizing I had recognized her.

  “All right, I’m not going anywhere, now shut up!” she called in a low, furious voice, crashing through undergrowth. She stomped right up to me barefoot and looked me in the eye. “God damn it to hell. What will you take to keep your mouth shut?” Did she mean right now? But I had stopped shouting. My heart went right on lurching about like a tethered frog, though, and the next moment the view got brighter and began to drift off to the right. I sat down abruptly on something damp.

  “I was scared witless you wouldn’t come back. Wait a second, let me catch my breath.”

  “You’re the one who wrote that book, Morgan,” she said between her teeth. “God damn it to hell.” In a minute she sat down, too, first pushing aside the prickly stems unthinking. The neutral face that gave away nothing had vanished. Sally Barnes, angry and frightened, looked exactly as I had wished to see her look; incredibly, after so much fruitless fantasy, here we were in the woods together. Here she sat, scratching a bare breast with no more special regard than if it had been a nose or a shoulder. It was pretty overwhelming. I couldn’t seem to pull myself together.

  Sally’s skin had turned much darker than mine already, all over—plainly this was not her first visit to the bare-branched woods. Her breasts were smallish, her three tufts of body hair reddish, and all her muscles large and smooth and well-molded as a gymnast’s. I said what came into my head: “I was a fairly good tree-climber as a kid, but I could never have gotten up one with a trunk as thick as that, and those high, skinny branches. Do you think if I built my arms and shoulders up, lifted weights or something—I mean, would you teach me? Or maybe I’m too old,” I said: “My legs aren’t in such bad shape, I run a few kilometers three times a week, but the top half of my body is a flabby mess—”

  “Don’t play stupid games,” Sally burst out furiously. “You had to come blundering in here today, you’re the worst luck I ever had. I’m asking again: Will you take money not to tell anyone you saw me? Or is there something else you want? If I can get it, you can have it, only you’ve got to keep quiet about seeing me out here like this.”

  “That’s a rotten way to talk to people!” I said, furious myself. “I was blundering around in these woods for years before you ever set foot in them. And I’m sorry if you don’t like my book, or is it just me you don’t like? Or just psychologists? If it weren’t for you, I probably wouldn’t even be one.” My voice wobbled up and down, I’d been angry with Sally for seven months. “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything. You don’t need to bribe me.”

  “Yes, but you will, you see. Sooner or later you’ll be at some dinner party, and someone will ask what the Chimp Child is like, really”—I looked slantwise at her; this had already happened a couple of times—“and you won’t be able to resist. ‘There I was, walking along minding my own business, and whomever do you think I saw—stark naked and gone right up a tree like a monkey!’ Christ,” Sally said through her teeth, “I could throttle you. Everything’s spoiled.” She got up hastily; I could feel how badly she wanted to clobber me again.

  But I was finally beginning to be able to think, and to call upon my expertise. “Well, then, make me want not to tell. Make it a question of self-interest. I don’t want money, but I wasn’t kidding: I’d absolutely love to be able to get around in a forest like a chimp does. Teach me to climb like one—like you do. If the story gets out, the deal’s off. Couldn’t you agree to that?
”

  Sally’s look meant, “What kind of idiot do you take me for?” Quickly I said, “I know it sounds crazy, but all through my childhood—and most of my adolescence, too—for whatever wacky reason, I wanted in the worst way to be Tarzan! And for the past twenty years, I’ve gone on wanting even more to be you! I don’t know why—it’s irrational, one of those passions people develop for doing various weird things, being fans or collecting stamps or—I used to know a former world champion flycaster who’d actually gone fishing only a couple of times in his life!” I drew a deep breath, held it, let it out in a burst of words: “Look—even if I don’t understand it, I know that directly behind The Chimp Child and the Human Family—and the whole rest of my career, for that matter—is this ten-year-old kid who’d give anything to be Tarzan swinging through the trees with the Great Apes. I can promise that so long as you were coaching me, you’d be safe. I’ll never get a better chance to act out part of that fantasy, and it would be worth—just everything! One hell of a lot more than keeping people entertained at some dinner party, I’ll tell you that!”

  “You don’t want to be me,” said Sally in a flat voice. “I was right the first time; it’s a stupid game you’re playing at.” She looked at me distastefully, but I could see that at any rate she believed me now.

  The ground was awfully damp. I got up, starting to feel vastly better. Beech limbs webbed the sky; strong sunshine and birdsong poured through web; it was all I could do, suddenly, not to howl and dance among the trees. I could see she was going to say yes.

  Sally set conditions, all of which I accepted promptly. I was not to ask snoopy professional questions, or do any nonessential talking. At school we were to go on as before, never revealing by so much as a look or gesture that an association existed between us. I was not to tell anybody. Sally could not, in fact, prevent my telling people, but I discovered that I hadn’t any desire to tell. My close friends, none of whom lived within 150 kilometers of the city, could guess I was concealing a relationship but figured I would talk about it when I got ready; they tended to suppose a married man, reason enough for secrecy. Sally and I both taught our classes, and Sally had her work in the lab, and I my private patients.