Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Ophy gasped. Aggie made a strange choked noise. The others were silent, with no breath for speech.

  Slowly, Tess pulled the veil from her face to stand before them naked-faced, naked-armed. They saw scaled skin, very fine scales, so fine as to be almost invisible on the face and throat; hair that was not so much fur as feathers, on the head and shoulders and down the backs of the arms; no ears, but a definite tympanum at each side of the head; eyes that were protuberant and individually mobile, lashless, with vertical slits; the mouth more muzzlelike than their own, but with mobile lips.

  Faye focused on the hands. They were bonier than human hands, and the nails, claws, were triangular in cross section, stronger than human nails. The teeth were sharper, too. At least those in the front of the mouth were. She assured herself that at a small distance the figure would appear quite human. That was important, though she couldn’t say why. It was important that the figure should appear human because … because Sophy, well … It was important that Sophy had been human. Wasn’t it? Except for the narrower shoulders, Tess looked human. Under the loose shift, or in profile, Tess might appear quite inhuman, of course. Which was, for this moment at least, unthinkable.

  Jessamine wondered, might they have tails? No good reason they should, but it did rather go with scales. There was a folded structure around the neck and back of the head, possibly erectile.…

  “Exactly the kind of person one would extrapolate arising from a saurian ancestor rather than a primate one,” she murmured, not realizing she was speaking aloud.

  “Would you like me to take off my shoes and shift?” Tess asked, her voice noticeably less tense than before she had disrobed. “I will if you like.”

  Ophy looked up sharply, realizing that Tess had been really afraid of them. Of them!

  “Only if you would not be disturbed by it,” she said in her gentlest voice.

  Tess dropped the shift, kicked off her soft shoes, actually more like foot socks, with soft soles, then turned slowly so they could see all sides, gradually relaxing as she preceived their interest. They were surprised, yes, but they were not angry, or fearful enough to become angry—except for Faye. She seemed more shocked than the others. And Aggie more dumbfounded.

  They saw an incurved remnant of a tail, a stubby thing, rather graceless. The scales on Tess’s back were individually larger and more ornamental than on the arms, making a definite though subtle pattern. The belly was even more finely scaled than the arms, almost silver in color. The shoulders were definitely narrower than human, the neck longer. No breasts. Not a mammal. No pouch. Not a marsupial. Nothing like a vulva. Whatever was down there was protected by the incurved tail. Now exposed, the feet were long-toed like a lizard’s.

  “No horns,” giggled Aggie hysterically.

  Ophy patted her shoulder. “May I?” she asked, holding out her hand toward Tess.

  “Of course.” Tess submitted to being touched lightly; stroked lightly. Her crest rose, broad at the sides and high behind, elegantly patterned. Jessamine thought of the frilled lizard of Australia. Faye thought of a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, with her extravagant ruff. Around her neck Tess wore a simple chain with a heavy pendant. She touched it now, stroking it, like one touching a talisman.

  “What are you?” breathed Agnes from the depth of her private nightmare.

  Tess shrugged, a weirdly human shrug from this inhuman form. “Not devils, friend Agnes. We are what we are. Another branch of the bush. Another twig on the evolutionary tangle. I am as earthly as you are. We are saurian, not mammalian. Not monkeylike, but lizard-bird-like, though we can’t fly any more than you can still swing through the trees. Our lineage separated from the saurian-avian branch a long time before yours separated from the primates, so we’ve come a bit farther from our nearest kin.”

  “But you can talk!” cried Bettiann.

  “So can parrots,” Tess said softly.

  “But you left no fossils,” cried Jessamine. “No remnants of cities!”

  “The fossils are there, you just haven’t known they were us. And we never lived in cities.” She lifted her hands, an age-old gesture, her eyes swiveling to light upon each of them. “Since men started swarming about, we’ve been careful to destroy what older traces were left and not to leave new ones.”

  Jessamine persisted. “And have I understood correctly, from the seeming absence of any males at all, that you’re parthenogenic!”

  “That’s true.”

  “What does that mean?” demanded Agnes, eyes darting wildly.

  “It means we have children without males. It means we are identical mothers and daughters, with a few males every tenth generation or so, to allow genetic variation.”

  They stared for a long time, wordlessly.

  “Have you seen enough?”

  Her voice was not offended, merely patient. Something about it reminded Faye strongly of Sophy. Sophy, who did not mind being painted or sculpted in the nude, so long as the work did not resemble herself. Not self-conscious, merely modest.

  She asked, “Sophy … she is, was, one of you?”

  “Her mind was, yes,” said Tess, resuming the light shift that covered her body from shoulder to ankle but left her taloned feet bare. “Though it happens rarely among us, once in a great while a very large egg is laid, and twins come from it, each able to share what the other feels and knows. So Sovawanea was twinned in the egg, each twin to know what the other knew and feel what the other felt. One twin kept her own body, but we grew a human body for Sophy.”

  “How?” breathed Jessamine.

  “We borrowed some human people to get the cells we needed. We always returned the people, of course, with memories, if any, of quite some other creature than ourselves. It took us a long time to find the right way to do it, to make, as it were, a chimera … a mosaic, a human body with another’s mind, but at last we succeeded in creating grace and beauty. We were too proud to let one of us go among you in an ugly form, but her perfection was a mistake. Pride is always error. She drew too much attention until you helped her become plain.”

  “Why?” cried Agnes. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “Because we needed to find the enemy! We could look from this place and see what was happening among you, but that wasn’t enough. We could hear your voices, but that wasn’t enough, either. If we were to find your enemy and ours, one of us had to be among you and feel it. One of us had to live it.”

  Carolyn whispered, “They were both Sovawanea?”

  “Both of them, yes.”

  “And our friend, she … you think she died?”

  Tess paused; her eyes swiveled. They could not read the expression on that unfamiliar face, but the voice seemed uncertain. “I don’t know what to believe. You believe you have heard her, seen her. And what seems even stranger to me, Agnes has seen our Goddess, though she still half believes we are demons and is a sworn bride of your male God! How could that be? Such a thing is unkown!”

  She shook her head, obviously baffled. “So what is true about Sophy? I don’t know. You must ask Sovawanea.”

  “May we go to her?” Carolyn asked.

  A moment’s silence while she pondered. “Now that we are sure she will not be … endangered, she will come to you.”

  Tess picked up her robe and sandals and went away, down the dusty street. Across the road, in a paddock, old Josephus was currying a mule. Down the street three robed forms were hoeing a garden. As Tess passed, they looked up, nodded, then took off their robes, hung them across the fence, and went back to their work. They, too, wore simple ankle-length shifts. Their scales varied in color: soft green, ivory, gray.

  “I wonder why they wear anything at all,” Faye said in a dull voice. “They have no sexual parts to conceal.”

  “Perhaps as we do, for protection. Or for warmth,” suggested Jessamine.

  “But aren’t they cold-blooded?” asked Bettiann. “Like snakes?”

  “She is warmer than the air,” said Ophy, st
aring at the hand that had stroked the scaled skin.

  Carolyn said, “Like birds, Bettiann. And, as she said, egg laying.”

  Jessamine nodded. “Which would make fiddling around with fetal DNA much easier than when it’s in a womb inside someone’s body.”

  During all this Agnes had said nothing, had merely stared, paling, breathing more quickly, clasping her arm as though it hurt her. Seeing her distress, Ophy beckoned to Jessamine, and together they lifted Aggie onto one of the cushioned benches along the wall.

  Ophy used her stethoscope, muttered instructions to the others to help Aggie lie down and put pillows under her feet. She rummaged among bottles in the bottom of her bag, coming up with a small pill that went under Aggie’s tongue.

  “What?” Carolyn asked, drawing her away to speak privately.

  “Heart,” said Ophy. “I think it’s just an arrhythmia, but she’s really stressed out by this.”

  “Can’t accept it?”

  Faye joined them, murmuring, “Can’t or won’t. She was in love with Sophy. She told us, there in Vermont.”

  Carolyn nodded thoughtfully. “Of course. She’d have thought of that as sinful, wouldn’t she? She’s probably long since confessed it and expiated it, but now she doesn’t know what she was in love with, or how sinful it may have been. All the confessions and expiations are useless if Sophy wasn’t even human. And if she was a demon, well … where does that put Aggie?”

  They turned back to Aggie and were all closely huddled around her when the well-remembered voice said, “Let me see.”

  They turned, stood, looked, and looked away, then looked back even as they made room. It was Sophy. Not her face, form, eyes, features, nothing. Not her hair, breasts, hips, no. Not those sweet legs and lovely feet. No. But, still, Sophy. Her voice. Her hold upon them, whatever it had been, so strong still that it made them gasp. Sophy, in a simple white shift like the others.

  Not Sophy, they told themselves. Sovawanea.

  Sovawanea, who knelt beside Aggie and took her into her arms. “Aggie, love,” she said, patting the woman’s shoulder. “Aggie, my dear.”

  And Aggie wept, leaning upon that scaled breast, arm across that scaled shoulder, weeping as though her heart would break, while Sovawanea murmured over and over again: “It’s all right, Aggie, dear, it’s all right. I’m not some awful thing, dear, I’m not. It’s all right.…”

  Time passed. The room seemed chill. Carolyn built a fire in the tiled stove and shut the wide-flung casements against the cool. They found a kettle, heated water, and made tea, the six of them and this scaled stranger who was no stranger to any of them. For a time they dwelt in a timeless enchantment; the one they had lost was returned to them; they feared to say anything to break the spell.

  It was Faye who did so. She could not look upon this unimagined form without the shape of her own Sophy invading the space between. Her Sophy, the sculptured form in her studio, all that loveliness, all that incomparable and incorruptible beauty, hung like a ghost in this alien air, a beauty that deserved more than the talk-around chitchat, the circuitous blather they were all uttering, like so many chickens in a poultry yard. They had come, after all, to find the person they loved, had loved, in one way or another. The words crowded her throat.

  “I have to know about Sophy,” she demanded of the familiar stranger. “Tell us about Sophy.”

  The scaled one was sitting beside Agnes, holding her hand. “I wish I could tell you.”

  “You must try …,” Faye insisted.

  The scaled one squeezed Aggie’s hand. “She was reared outside our village by Padre Josephus and his old wife, visited by our robed teachers, told appropriate stories, given appropriate ideas to make her proof against losing objectivity. At first she knew me only as a voice in her mind, a presence, a ghostly companion. I knew of her as my life’s work, my reason for being. Arrangements were made to support her and keep her and educate her as you were educated, to learn of the world, to find the enemy.

  “So when she was grown, she went out into the world and met you, the six of you. She learned about women from you.” She breathed deeply, in very human distress. “She learned how very different you can be, one from the other: God loving, God rejecting, man loving, man rejecting, life loving, life rejecting. She learned of a world in which it is hard to be a woman, a world where women’s worth is undervalued, where their achievements are belittled, where their good sense and humanity are denied. She lived as a woman in a world where some men rape women and excuse themselves by saying the woman asked for that treatment. She lived as a woman in a world where some men mutilate women, and beat them, and burn them, and are excused for doing so by male religious leaders who say that all this is proper and right. She lived in a world where these same religious leaders are shown respect by other nations in the name of expedience or cultural diversity. She lived as a woman in a world where women may not be angry or resentful or they are thought strident, where women may not fight back or they are considered militant, where any assertiveness makes them bitches, where, whether Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, they are expected to be dutiful to their wombs, as Sophy herself defined it, in accordance with the Hail Mary Assumption.

  “All this made sense for a primitive, sparsely populated people, prey to disease and predators and war. But for an over-populated, scientifically advanced people, it made no more sense to Sophy than it had to us. She thought perhaps your persecution resulted from a conspiracy among males. We had considered that and rejected it, but she in her turn explored that possibility. She found that the males who would desire such a conspiracy are too xenophobic to maintain one beyond the tribal level. She looked elsewhere, discarding this notion and that, as we had before her. Finally she did what we had not done: She began tracing individual lines of influence from each persecutor to the one who had influenced him, and from that one to the next one higher, and from that one to the next one higher yet. She researched each of these, learned about them, found out, so she said, what made them tick.

  “She traveled here and there, following stories of pain, and in each of those places she traced the cause. When a crazed man shot women’s doctors, she found who had written the book or given the speech or television talk that the crazed one listened to; then she sought the teacher of the one who wrote the book or gave the speech or broadcast his venom; then the one who had influenced that one. So she went from lonely psychopaths to crackpot groups moved by preachers and commentators who were in turn moved by lords of dominion. Always it led back to the Alliance. When a few years ago your Wall Street Journal quoted the dean of an Islamic university as being in favor of mutilating women, Sophy found he had been taught by an imam who had been taught by a member of the Alliance.

  “The Alliance was headed by a man named Webster. The enemy of women was a creature named Webster.”

  She breathed deeply, staring over their heads.

  “And then?” asked Aggie.

  “Well, we are female, too. Your enemy is our enemy. If he knew of us, he would not merely eat you and leave us in peace. Knowing that one has an inexorable enemy is corrosive. It sickened Sophy, like a cancer.” Sovawanea’s body trembled in an almost human shiver. “Add to that the fact that she had always had great trouble coping with the feelings of her chimp-human body, that lusting that drives you to ignoble ends, all that passion that commits you to foolishness. Your chimp-human violence racked her. She couldn’t cope with the pain your chimp-human procreation causes, the millions of people who can find no place or use in life, the hopeless people, too many to be cared for and, thus, uncared for.

  “She suffered. I felt her suffering. And I felt her resolution when, at last, she determined to go into the lair of the beast and see for herself what he planned for womankind.”

  After a long silence Carolyn breathed, “Where?”

  “A place called the Redoubt.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “I believe many have heard of it. To t
heir pain.”

  “Have you been there?” Jessamine asked.

  Sovawanea shrugged, that oddly human shrug. “I knew she had gone there. I could not read her thoughts while she was there, but when she disappeared, I thought she might have been captured by that enemy, so I went to the Redoubt seeking her. Then I saw the place.”

  Carolyn regarded her through slitted eyes. “How did you get there?”

  “By our ways.”

  “Your ways. Like how?”

  “Like the bus.”

  “Which isn’t really a bus?”

  “No.” She frowned. “It isn’t really a bus, but when you get on a thing that looks like a bus, you expect to move with the bus in the direction it is facing. When we use our ways to travel, mental alignment is a precursor to movement, and on a bus mental alignment is automatic.”

  “What are we talking about?” Jessamine demanded. “Telekinesis?”

  Sovawanea shook her head. “No. Mentally assisted technology. A tiny device implanted in the head that amplifies certain wave patterns. The travel is technological, but it is thought controlled. Padre Josephus doesn’t really drive the bus, though it amuses him to go through the motions. He merely thinks it where he wants it to go. And since you expect it to go in whatever direction it is pointed, your own thoughts do not interfere.”

  “So you went there. You saw the place,” said Faye. “Can you take us there?”

  Sovawanea clutched her hands together, half turned, gritted her teeth with an audible sound of agitation. “I could.”

  “Will you?”

  “There is danger. Too much danger. The place is well guarded. With so many of us, we could be caught. If we are caught, we are as good as dead.”

  “But you went,” said Carolyn. “Wasn’t there danger for you?”