Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Sovawanea murmured, “The Alliance members have been well satisfied with their system, until now.”

  Carolyn said, “The workers seem dismayed about something, but I can’t make out the words.”

  “I can,” Sovawanea said. “They are dismayed because Webster is angry with them. They are unable to impregnate the sleepers. Inside the pods the women’s breasts have shrunk and their ovaries have become quiescent. The epidemic has come to the Redoubt itself.”

  She led them back toward the door, and as they went, Carolyn read the labels on the pods nearest them. Each bore a long code number, then the words: genetic output of so-and-so. With a sense of horrid surprise she saw Albert Crespin’s name; then, in the next rank, that of Jake Jagger.…

  “Ah,” Carolyn cried, her eyes fixed on the small sleeper within, “here is Helen’s child!”

  “Hush,” whispered Sovawanea, grasping her painfully by the arm. “He’ll hear you!”

  She looked up and they followed her gaze. A figure had come out onto the festooned balcony, someone who stood tall and high-shouldered behind the parapet, his head bent forward as he peered down toward them. At this distance Carolyn could not see who it was, but the vulturine posture infuriated her. Here he was, to feast upon these, who might as well be dead! She felt her own anger growing. She warned herself, she tried to calm herself, but it was too late. If her surprise had not drawn his attention, her anger had. He seemed to see them, to be following the growth of her fury with his eyes.…

  “Out quickly,” whispered Sovawanea. “Withdraw. He feels our presence. He knows outsiders are here.”

  They walked swiftly in the directions they knew, the way they had come. From behind them an alarm sounded, a wailing shriek, as from a banshee throat. Men began to run. As they neared the door, Ophy tried to avoid one of them, stumbling and falling, her helmet rolling away. The man who had tripped her leaped to his feet, glaring around him, looking past Ophy, then back, curiously, then angrily.

  “A woman loose in here,” he howled at the top of his lungs. “Here, a woman loose!”

  From around the huge room came answering shouts. The man who had cried the alarm grabbed for Sovawanea and drew back with a scream of astonishment, his arm slashed to the bone.

  “Quickly,” breathed Sovawanea, licking his blood from her fangs. “Out the door!”

  They slipped through, and the door slid shut behind them in time for half a dozen men to crash into it from the inside.

  “She bit me!” howled a voice from beyond the door.

  “Shut up,” said another voice, deeper, more authoritative. “That’s a knife cut, you fool. Get that door open.”

  The tumult behind the door was echoed by another alarm, a blaring horn. They ran for the escalator, racing up the moving stairs, their hearts pounding, only to hear men’s voices coming toward them down the opposite flight. Behind them a noise of pursuit gathered. They were cut off.

  “Off, here,” Sovawanea ordered, pulling them away at the top of the second flight and leading them in a headlong scramble down a narrow corridor.

  They stopped at a corner while Sovawanea cautiously looked around it.

  “Can’t keep up,” moaned Aggie from behind her. “Can’t. Go on. You go on without me.”

  “No!” breathed Sovawanea. “We can’t. You know too much about us, Agnes McGann.” She took Aggie’s arm, and with Jessamine on the other side, they managed a stumbling run down the left-hand way.

  “Where are we?” breathed Carolyn.

  “We can’t go through the central hall,” whispered Sovawanea. “Not that level. Too many there. We’ll go this way, and hurry!”

  She led them down a side corridor, one obviously little used. The sound of pursuit fell behind them. They came to a cluster of doors, small ones, of ordinary size. Sovawanea gave up her place at Aggie’s side, letting Bettiann fill in as she fiddled with keypads, opening one of the doors to disclose a flight of narrow stairs.

  They went up, stumbling, breathing hard, and then into a chain of small rooms equipped as living and sleeping rooms, now empty, awaiting tenants during the last days. Locking the door behind them, Sovawanea let them pause in one of these to catch their breaths. “I think we’re one level below the main entry.”

  “Did they see us?” Carolyn panted. “How did they know?”

  “I think that first man fell over Ophy,” Sovawanea said. “He saw Ophy, but he didn’t see the rest of our faces. His superior officer told him he had a knife cut. I’m grateful for that. I pray he didn’t realize we weren’t all alike. He already knows about you, but my people must remain hidden. We are too few to fight him.” She cracked a door and peered out into a narrow and empty hall. “We can’t delay long. The longer we stay inside here, the more likely he is to find us.”

  “I’m all right,” breathed Aggie, clutching her side.

  “No, you’re not,” said Ophy. “But there’s nothing I can do about it here.”

  Sovawanea opened the door more widely and said, “Quickly, to our left, and up at the next stairs.”

  The stairs gave upon a side corridor, which meandered for some distance before making an abrupt turn to intersect the main corridor, debouching beside a depot where a row of empty carts was parked.

  “Speed, or sneakiness?” Sovawanea asked them, her voice calm but her figure tense with apprehension.

  “Speed,” said Faye. “They may think we are on official business, but once they shut the main portal …”

  Sovawanea gestured them into the nearest cart, and she herself got behind the controls. “They are simple devices,” she muttered. “I have watched them being driven.” One knobbed stick and a foot pedal seemed to control everything, and she sent the cart racing toward the entrance. Far behind them voices shouted questions without answers. A gate fell across the corridor some distance behind them, then another, close enough that they felt the shudder, and Sovawanea pushed the control knob to its highest position. “When we get out, think of something like grass or trees,” she demanded. “I’ll try to hide us.…”

  They raced for the portcullis as it too began to drop, and they went under it like liquid sucked through a straw, slurped out through an impossibly narrow opening, crouching, feeling the vehicle shudder as the portcullis slammed down, hearing the scream of metal on metal. They left the cart stalled against tumbled stone and ran, gasping, panting, across the rough rocks to the pale circle of light that awaited them. Guards gathered at the portcullis, looking out at the cart, puzzled faces turning this way and that, seeking the person or persons who had driven it.

  In the circle the women clustered, feeling rather than seeing the circle spin to enclose them, feeling the earth flow away around them, closing their eyes at the giddy swim of space, breathing, feeling breath slow, hearts slow, fear diminish, finally opening their eyes once more in the comfortable room, before the stove, where the fire burned warmly. The small device on the floor was now dull, its sparkle dimmed.

  Sovawanea staggered. Carolyn reached out to her, steadied her. In a moment Sova leaned over, picked up the device, and put its chain around her neck. Her face was haggard and gray; her eyes were sunken. “At the end I was afraid they would track us by our fear. Our own emotions were masked, however, for the men there were also feeling anger and fear. The enemy could not locate us among all that hubbub. We moved too quickly for him to follow us, but he knows someone was there. Perhaps he does not know who. Perhaps he has not identified you yet.”

  “Were we really there?” begged Jessamine. “It wasn’t some hypnotic trick or some virtual-reality thing?”

  “We were really there,” said Sovawanea, laughing shortly. “I would not be this weary if we had not been.”

  “Sophy actually went in there alone?” asked Carolyn. “As we did?”

  “Not as we did, no. She really traveled there, as you might travel, in her flesh, in her own body, in real time. She went across those mountains, hiked there; she went in there alone, and somehow
she came out again. I don’t know how. Though I had felt everything else she had felt and experienced everything else she had done since we were born, I did not feel or experience that. Perhaps the Goddess protected her. I know of no other way she could have done it.”

  “But you knew about it,” said Carolyn.

  “I saw in Sophy’s mind her memory of what she had seen, the way memories are seen, in fragments, in disorder. I saw no detail of how she got there, or got out, but I saw enough that it seemed to me Sophy had done what she had been sent to do, that her purpose had been achieved. She knew who and where the enemy was. I told Tess and the others. They decided there was no reason for her to stay among you any longer, no reason for her to risk her life.

  “So I went to San Francisco to bring my sister home.”

  “Ah,” whispered Agnes.

  Sovawanea shrugged, that almost human shrug, a gesture of infinite regret. “She refused to come. I told her her job was finished, she had identified the enemy, but she said no, only the job we had given her was finished, there was another task she had set for herself. I pleaded with her, but she said she loved you and could not let you or your children go into that terrible future, to die in the feeding of that monster, or to live as his remnant will live, seed for a future harvest. She said she knew something could be done. There had to be a way.…

  “I asked her, what way?

  “She said she had faith in Sovanuan, she knew Sovanuan would answer her prayers. She knew the veils would lift. She would not let the enemy conquer womankind, for womankind had become her friends, especially you six. Though there were hundreds that she taught and helped, she cared most for you.

  “In the end, when she would not come with me, I came away alone, leaving her there among you.”

  “There in San Francisco,” Jessamine whispered. “You were in my house? You’re what Patrick saw?”

  “A carelessness on my part, but yes. I am what Patrick saw. If I had felt less tragic at leaving Sophy there, I would have thought it funny. He turned a very peculiar color, and I thought he might choke to death. His confusion did not trouble me greatly; I knew him through Sophy, and we knew what unworthiness had brought him to her room.

  “So I came back here feeling anguished and horrid and angry at Sophy and angry at myself. I could not rest. Tess gave me a drug to make me sleep, which I did, for almost a day. When I woke, the anguish was gone and in its place was this great starburst of gladness and discovery! I felt Sophy in my mind as never before, larger than herself, like a tidal wave! The Goddess had answered her prayers.”

  “That’s when I saw … whatever it was …,” whispered Agnes.

  “Tess told me. Yes. That must have been when you saw.”

  “Was it real?” Aggie cried. “Was she real?”

  Sovawanea reached out a hand and stroked her cheek. “As real as life, Aggie. Of course She’s real. You have believed in a male god all your life. Why is it so hard to believe in a female one? Have they succeeded so well in making you feel that everything female is inferior?”

  “They have,” said Aggie. “Yes. They have. They laugh at the idea of female priests. They ridicule the idea of a female pope. They mock the idea of a goddess, belittling the very thought. All the Church is male, through and through.”

  “Male, and largely homosexual,” said Sovawanea. “Whose only acceptable relationship with women is as mothers and sisters. It is not coincidental that those are the roles the Church assigns to women, mocking all others. Well, their mockery will not help them now. Sovanuan exists. She is immanent in all things, in all space and time and matter. She is Sophia, she is Wisdom.”

  “I can’t believe,” whispered Agnes.

  Sovawanea took her hand. “When I was very young, I fretted over how few we were and how many the tribes of man. Tess sat with me in the temple and asked me why I thought intelligence develops, whether there is purpose there or not. She said if there were no purpose, then we might ignore our intelligence and behave like brutes, like brutes we might worship our taste receptors or our pleasure receptors or our reproductive organs instead of our minds; we might put food or pleasure or reproduction higher than wisdom, and we might assume our deity is more interested in our cooking, our sensuality, or our ovaries than our ideas. She told me this is what the religions of man teach their followers.

  “But if there is purpose in intelligence, then we must acknowledge that purpose. We must strive toward it and believe in it. Sophia personifies it, and she lifted her veils so that your race might be saved. She did it because Sophy asked Her to.”

  They didn’t say anything. They merely stared.

  “Then what happened?” demanded Carolyn.

  Sovawanea stared blindly at the wall. “You know what happened. Your meeting ended in San Francisco. You all went home. Days passed. Months passed. From our little village here, we looked out to see a great change beginning in humankind. Men were troubled by the change. Some of them became violent, but then, as the change continued, they grew calm. Women were less driven. Peace began to creep into your affairs, scarcely noticed, and before that change could be widely noticed, there were distractions. All across the world old women began their legerdemain, drawing attention away from what was really going on, making the eyes look elsewhere. We saw Sophy’s hand in that. We looked and wondered what she was up to.

  “It was at the same time that the devil’s troops began marching, as had been long planned, and this, too, served to keep men’s attention elsewhere. Through all that time I felt Sophy in my mind, floating softly, like a leaf on a stream, full of anticipation, warm and loving and utterly certain of something wonderful that was coming.”

  Aggie said in a dead voice, “She had decided to make us over.”

  Sovawanea sighed, a very human sigh. “Was it she who did that, Aggie? Or was it the Goddess? I believe the Goddess did it. I believe she showed Sophy how different you might be if you had branched from a slightly different place on the evolutionary bush. If you were less like the promiscuous chimpanzees and more like the monogamous gibbons, the enemy would lose his hold over you. If your natures changed, he could not control you any longer.”

  “So it’s gibbons’ decline and fall we’re in the midst of,” Agnes laughed, her voice cracking. “Gibbons’ decline and fall. How funny! How funny!” And she went on laughing, seeming actually amused. “But even the gibbons have babies, Sovawanea. Even the gibbons have young. What good is our intelligence without children to teach? Where are our children? Where is our future? Ah?”

  Sovawanea shook her head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there when the Goddess came. I felt Her, but if She spoke, it was only to Sophy. Whatever comes, I remind you that Sophy loved you and would not have chosen to hurt you. If you can hold to nothing else, keep faith in her intentions.”

  Faye demanded, “So what happened to her?”

  Sovawanea shook her head. A tiny tremor ran down her skin, from head to foot. “She had the ability to end, to stop. With all she had suffered, she had that right.”

  “She may have had the right, but I don’t think she did,” Carolyn said firmly. “We told Tess the same thing. Sophy woke me in the night a few days ago. She spoke to Faye in her studio, to Ophy at the hospital.…”

  “Who did I see but Sophy?” asked Aggie. “Who was the young nun who moved away, always away …”

  “Someone we think of as Sophy has been with us,” Jessamine said firmly, her jaw set. “It wouldn’t have happened if she was dead, so she can’t be dead.”

  “But wouldn’t I have known?” cried Sovawanea. “I felt everything she felt. Wouldn’t I have known?”

  “You didn’t know when she went into the Redoubt. You didn’t know when she saw the Goddess in the desert. Some things you didn’t know,” said Faye. “Perhaps she wasn’t only your twin. Perhaps, at least in part, she was a separate person, on her own.” Someone stronger, she thought, not saying it. Someone forged in hotter fires than these, made of stronger stuff. A h
ybrid strength, perhaps. Born of this brain in a human body.

  Carolyn stood up. “Padre Josephus said we’d been followed here. He said there were men in a helicopter, looking for us. Webster’s men. Was that Webster we saw at the Redoubt?”

  Sovawanea answered, “That was he, scenting your feelings as a coyote scents a jackrabbit. He wants you. He wants the women who have threatened his plans. He has sent his minions after you in the helicopter, but they haven’t found you or us because they know nothing about this kind of place.”

  “What do you know about him?” demanded Carolyn.

  “I know only what Tess has already told you. His like are spawned out there somewhere, among the stars. They find worlds where intelligence is evolving and they come to those worlds as gods. As gods they demand the impossible, thereby causing sorrow and pain, feeding on that sorrow and pain until they have glutted themselves. Then they leave a remnant to reseed the pasture while they move on for a time to some other world. Sometimes they cause such sorrow, such pain, that evolution stops, that people turn back on themselves, becoming animals again.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She shrugged. “We talked with people from another world. Long ago.”

  “Other worlds,” gasped Aggie. “There are people on other worlds?”

  “From time to time.”

  “Why haven’t we …”

  “You haven’t looked. You started to, but your leaders believe such a search is unimportant because man is at the center of their universe. And, too, you have not had a peaceful thousand years in which to carry on a conversation. I will not say more about that. As to Webster, we know he inhabits a natural body that becomes immortal when he moves into it. We know he cannot leave that body unless it is utterly destroyed. We know that destroying the body does not kill him. If his body is destroyed, he merely moves on to another body, somewhere else.”

  “So killing his body wouldn’t help, and killing him is impossible! So there was no Webster the elder. This creature is the same creature,” said Carolyn. “Has always been the same …”