The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Once in midweek and once each weekend, we met in the beech grove; and so the “lessons” got under way.

  I acquired some light weights and began a program of exercise to strengthen my arms, shoulders, chest, and back, but the best way to build up the essential muscles was to climb a lot of trees. Before long the calluses at the base of each finger, which I had carried throughout my childhood, had been recreated (and I remembered then the hardness of Sally’s palm when I’d shaken hands with her at the cocktail party in September). Seeing how steadily my agility and toughness increased, Sally was impressed and, in spite of herself, gratified. She was also nervous; she’d had no intention of letting herself enjoy this companionship that had been forced upon her.

  It was a queer sort of blackmail. I went along patiently, working hard and trying to make my company too enjoyable to resist; and in this way the spring semester ended.

  Sally was to teach summer school, I to prepare some articles for publication and continue to see my patients through the summer. By June all the trout had been hooked and the beech woods had grown risky; we found more inaccessible places on the riding-trail side of the park where I could be put through my training-exercise routines. By the Fourth of July my right biceps measured thirty-seven centimeters and Sally had finally begun to relax in my presence, even to trust me.

  That we shortly became lovers should probably surprise nobody. All the reports describe the pre-accident Sally as an affectionate child, and her family as a loving one. From my reading I knew that in moments of anxiety or fear, chimps reassure one another by touching, and that in placid ones they reaffirm the social bond by reciprocal grooming. Yet for a decade, ever since Carol Cheswick died and she’d gone up to Cambridge, Sally had protected herself strictly against personal involvements, at the cost of denying herself all emotional and physical closeness. Cheswick, a plump, middle-aged, motherly person, had hugged and cuddled Sally throughout their years together, but after Cheswick’s death—sick of the pokings and peerings of psychologists and of the curious public, resentful and guilty about the secret life she had felt compelled to create for herself—Sally had simply done without. Now she had me.

  Except for the very beginning, in London, there had always been a secret life.

  She abruptly started to talk about it late one horribly hot afternoon, at the end of a workout. We had dropped out of the best new training tree, a century-old white oak, then shaken out a ragged army blanket, sat on it cross-legged, and passed a plastic canteen and a bunch of seedless grapes between us. I felt sticky and spent, but elated. Sally looked me over critically. “You’re filling out quite well, it’s hard to believe these are the same scrawny shoulders.” She kneaded the nearer shoulder with her hard hand, while I carefully concealed my intense awareness that except to correct an error, she had never touched me anywhere before. The hand slipped down, gripped my upper arm. When I “made a muscle” the backs of her brown fingers brushed my pale-tan breast; our eyes met, and I said lightly, “I owe it all to you coach,” but went warmer still with pleasure and the rightness of these gestures, which had the feeling of a course correction.

  Sally plucked several grapes and popped them in her mouth, looking out over the creek valley while she chewed. After a bit she said, “They let me go all to pot in London. All anybody cared about was guiding me out of the wilderness of ignorance, grafting my life at thirteen back onto the stump of my life at four and then making up for the lost years how they could. The lost years … mind you, they had their hands full, they all worked like navvies and so did I. But I’d got absolutely consumptive with longing for the bush before they brought Carol in, and she noticed and made them let me out for a fortnight’s holiday in the countryside. I’d lost a lot of strength by then, but it was only just a year so it came back quick enough.”

  She stopped there, and I didn’t dare say anything; we ate grapes and slapped mosquitoes. It was incredibly hot. After a bit, desperate to hear more, I was weighing the risks of a response when she went on without prodding:

  “At University College, though, they didn’t much care to have me swinging about in trees. I think they felt, you know, ‘Here we are; slaving away trying to drag the ape kid into the modern world, and what does she do the minute our backs are turned but go dashing madly back to her savage ways.’ Sort of, ‘Ungrateful little beast.’ They never imagined I might miss that benighted life, or anything about it, but when I read Tarzan of the Apes myself a few years later, the part toward the end where Tarzan strips off his suit and tie and shoes and leaps into the branches swearing he’ll never, never go back—I cried like anything.”

  I said, “What could you do about it, though?” breaking Sally’s no-questions rule without either of us noticing.

  “Oh, on my own, not much. But Carol had a lot to say about what I should and shouldn’t do. They respected her tremendously. And she was marvelous. After I’d got so I could talk and read pretty well, she’d take me to the South Downs on weekends and turn me loose. We had a tacit agreement that if she didn’t ask, I needn’t tell. We were so close, she certainly knew I was getting stronger and my hands were toughening up, but she never took the view that those years in the wild were best forgotten. She arranged for me to meet Jane Goodall once … I couldn’t have borne it without her. I never should have left England while she lived. If it weren’t for Carol—” For several minutes Sally’s hand had been moving of its own accord, short rhythmic strokes that ceased abruptly when, becoming aware of this movement, she broke off her sentence and glanced—sharply, in alarm—at me.

  I made a terrific effort to control my face and voice, a fisherman angling for the biggest trout in the pool. “She must have been remarkable.”

  For a wonder Sally didn’t get up without a word and stalk away. Instead she said awkwardly, “I—do you mind very much my doing this? I’ve always done it—for comfort, I suppose—ever since I was small, and it’s a bit difficult to talk about all these things … without…”

  From the first day of training, I had determined never to let Sally force a contrast between us; I would adapt to her own sense of fitness out here. If she climbed naked, so would I, tender skin or not. If she urinated openly, and standing, so would I—and without a doubt there was something agreeable about spraddling beside Sally while our waters flowed. A civilized woman can still pass the whole length of her life without ever seeing another woman’s urine, or genitalia, or having extended, repeated, and matter-of-fact exposure to another woman’s naked body—and yet how many men, I had asked myself, ever gave these homely matters a second thought?

  Then why on earth should we?

  Certainly no woman had ever before done in my presence what Sally had been doing. Mentally, I squared my shoulders. “Why should I mind? Look, I’ll keep you company”—suiting action to words with a sense of leaping in desperation into unknown waters, graceless but absolutely determined—“O.K.?”

  It was the very last thing Sally had looked for. For a second I was afraid she thought I was ridiculing her in some incomprehensible way; but she only watched, briefly, before saying, “O.K. For a psychologist you’re not a bad sort. The first bloody thing they did at that mission school was make me stop doing this in front of people.

  “So anyway. Carol knew I was longing for the wild life, and knew it was important, not trivial or wrong, so she gave it back to me as well as she could. But she couldn’t give me back”—her voice cracked as she said this—“the chimpanzees. The people I knew. And I did miss them dreadfully—certain ones, and living in the troop—the thing is, I was a child among them, and in a lot of ways it was a lovely life for a child, out there. The wild chimps are so direct and excitable, their feelings change like lightning, they’re perfectly uninhibited—they squabble like schoolkids with no master about. And the babies are so sweet! But its all very—very, you know, physical; and I missed it. I thought I should die with missing it, before Carol came.” The grapes were all gone. Sally chucked the stem into the
brambles and lay back on the blanket, left arm bent across her eyes, right hand rocking softly.

  “Part of my training in London was manners and morals: to control myself, play fair, treat people politely whether I liked them or not. I’d enjoyed throwing tantrums and swatting the little ones when they got in my road, and screaming when I was furious and throwing my arms around everybody in reach when I was excited or happy, and being hugged and patted—like this,” patting her genitals to demonstrate the chimpanzees’ way of reassuring one another, “when I was upset. Chimps have no super-ego. It’s hard to have to form one at thirteen. By then, pure selfishness without guilt is hard to conquer. Oh, I had a lot of selfishness to put up with from the others—I was very low-ranking, of course, being small and female—but I never got seriously hurt. And a knockabout life makes you tough, and then I had the Old Man for a protector as well.” Sally lifted her arm and looked beneath it, up at me. “For a kid, most of the time, it was a pretty exhilarating life, and I missed it. And I missed,” she said, “getting fucked. They were not providing any of that at University College, London.”

  “What?” My thumb stopped moving. “Ah—were you old enough? I mean, were the males interested, even though you didn’t go pink?” I began to rub again, perhaps faster.

  “For the last year or thereabouts—I’m not quite sure how long. It must have been, I don’t know, pheromones in the mucus, or something in my urine, but I know it was quite soon after my periods started that they’d get interested in me between periods, when I would have been fertile, even without the swelling. I knew all about it, naturally; I’d seen plenty of copulating right along, as far back as I could remember. A pink female is a very agitating social element, so I’d needed to watch closely, because one’s got to get out of the way, except while they’re actually going at it. That’s when all the little ones try to make them stop—don’t ask me why,” she added quickly, then grinned. “Sorry. That’s one thing every primatologist has wanted to know.” Sally’s movements were freer now; watching, I was abruptly pierced by a pang of oddity, which I clamped down on as best I could. This was definitely not the moment for turning squeamish.

  “It frightened me badly that first time; adult male chimps who want something don’t muck about. When they work themselves up, you know, they’re quite dangerous. I usually avoided them, except for the Old Man, who’d sort of adopted me not long after the troop took me in … any road the first time hurt, and then of course everybody always wants a piece of the action, and it went on for days. By the time it was over, I’d got terribly sore. But later … well, after I’d recovered from that first bout, I found it didn’t really hurt anymore. In fact, I liked it. Quite a lot, actually once I saw I needn’t be frightened. The big males are frightfully strong, the only time I could ever dare be so close to so many of them was then, when I came in season, and one or another of them would sort of summon me over to him, and then they’d all queue up and press up behind me, one after another…”

  More relieved than she realized at having broken the long silence at last, Sally went on telling her story; and of course, the more vividly she pictured for me her role in this scene of plausible bizarreness, elaborating, adding details, the more inevitable was the outcome of our own unusual scene. All the same, when the crisis struck us, more or less simultaneously, it left me for the moment speechless and utterly nonplussed, and Sally seemed hardly less flustered than I.

  But after that momentary shock, we each glanced sidelong at each other’s flushed, flummoxed face and burst into snorts of laughter; and we laughed together—breathlessly, raggedly, probably a little hysterically—for quite a while. And pretty soon it was all right. Everything was fine.

  * * *

  It was all right, but common sense cautioned that if Sally’s defenses were too quickly breached, she would take fright. So many barriers had collapsed at once as to make me grateful for the several days that must elapse before the next coaching session. Still, when I passed her figure in its floppy navy smockdress and dark glasses on campus the following morning, I was struck as never before by the contrast between the public Sally and the powerful glowing creature nobody here had seen but me. A different person in her situation, I thought, would surely have exploited the public’s natural curiosity: made movies, written books, gone on the lecture circuit, endorsed products and causes. Instead, to please her teachers, everything that had stubbornly remained Chimp Child in Sally as she learned and grew had had to be concealed, denied.

  But because the required denial was a concealment and a lie, she had paid an exhorbitant price for it; too much of what was vital in her had living roots in those eight years of wildness. Sally was genuinely fond of and grateful to the zealous psychologists who had given back her humanity. At the same time she resented them quite as biterly as she resented a public interested only in the racier parts of her life in the wild and in her humanity not at all. One group starved her, the other shamed her. Resentments and gratitudes had split her life between them. She would never consent to display herself as the Chimp Child on any sort of platform, yet without the secret life she would have shriveled to a husk. When I surprised her in the park, she had naturally feared and hated me. Not any more.

  Success despite such odds made me ambitious. I conceived a plan. Somehow I would find a way—become a way!—to integrate the halves of Sally’s divided self; one day she would walk across this quad, no longer alone, wearing her aspect of the woods (though clothed and cleaner). I’d worked clinically with self-despising homosexuals, and with the children of divorced and poisonously hostile parents; Sally’s case, though unique in one way, was common enough in others. Charged with purpose, I watched as the brisk, dark shape entered a distant building and swore a sacred oath to the Principle of Human Potential: I would finish the job, I would dedicate myself to the saving of Sally Barnes. Who but I could save her now? At that fierce moment I knew exactly how Itard had felt when finally, for the first time, he had succeeded in reducing Victor to the fundamental humanity of tears.

  Saturday looked threatening, but I set off anyway for the park. The midafternoon heat was oppressive; I cut my muscle-loosening jog to a kilometer or two, then quartered through the woods to the training oak. Early as I was, Sally had come before me. I couldn’t see her, high in the now dense foliage, but her clothing was piled in the usual place and I guessed she had made a day-nest at the top of that tree or one nearby, or was traveling about up there somewhere. After a long drink from the canteen I peeled off my own sweaty shorts, toweling shirt, shoes, and the running bra of heavy spandex, smeared myself with insect repellent, and dried my hands on my shirt. Then I crouched slightly, caught a heavy limb well over two meters above the ground and pulled myself into the tree.

  For ten minutes I ran through a set of upper-body warmups with care and concentration; I’d pulled one muscle in my shoulder four times and once another in my back, before finding an old book on gymnastics explaining how to prevent (and treat) such injuries. The first few weeks I had worn lightweight Keds, and been otherwise generally scraped and skinned. But now my skin had toughened—I hadn’t known it would do that—and greater strength made it easier to forgo the clambering friction of calves and forearms; now, for the most part, my hands and feet were all that came in contact with the bark. A haircut had nicely solved the problems of snarling twigs and obscured vision.

  Warm and loose, I quickly climbed ten meters higher and began another series of strengthening and balancing exercises, swinging back and forth, hand over hand, along several slender horizontal limbs, standing and walking over a heavier one, keeping myself relaxed.

  After half an hour of this, I descended to the massive lowest limb and practiced dropping to the ground, absorbing the shock elastically with both hands and both feet, chimp-style. Again and again I sprang into the tree, poised, and landed on the ground. I was doing quite well, but on about the fifteenth drop I bruised my hand on a rock beneath the leaf mold and decided to call it an
afternoon; my hair was plastered flat with sweat, and I was as drenched as if I’d just stepped out of a shower. I had a long, tepid drink and was swabbing myself down with my shirt when Sally left the tree by the same limb, landed with a negligent, perfect pounce, came forward and—without meeting my eye—relieved me of the canteen, at the same time laying her free arm briefly across my shoulders. “That one’s looking pretty good,” she said, nodding at the branch to indicate my Dropping-to-the-Ground exercise. The arm slid off, she picked up the squirter of Tropikbug—“but did you ever see such monstrous mosquitoes in your life?”

  “It’s the humidity, I was afraid the storm would break before I could get through the drill. Maybe we better skip the rest and try to beat it home.”

  Sally squirted some repellent into her palm and wiped it up and down her limbs and over her brown abdomen. She squirted out some more. “Yours is all sweated off,” she said, still not meeting my eye; and instantly Hugo Van Lawick’s photographs of chimps soliciting grooming flashed into my mind, and I turned my shoulder toward Sally, who rubbed the bug stuff into it, then anointed the other shoulder, and my back and breasts and stomach for good measure, and then handed the flask dreamily to me, presenting her own back to be smeared with smelly goop. At that instant the first dramatic thunderclap banged above the park, making us both jump; and for a heart-stopping second Sally’s outstretched arm clutched round me.