by Alex Irvine
They came close, peering down at him and signaling to each other as they screeched. He was amazed how loud they could be.
The sound changed as his body was dragged. Without warning he was on harder, packed earth—and stone, he realized as a protruding rock gouged its way up his back and dug into his shoulder blade. Still there were apes all around, and ape houses everywhere… it was astonishing what they had done.
Abruptly the ape that was dragging him flung him around. Malcolm got to his hands and knees, not sure if he could stand. But when he saw the point of the harpoon in front of his nose, he decided to try. He managed, although his head still spun, and the one-eyed ape gestured with the harpoon, nudging him forward.
Malcolm turned around and was amazed all over again. Before him was an immense crowd. Chimps, gorillas, orangutans, all watching him. Some of them looked curious, some angry, others laughed and joked with one another. He saw young apes ducking and weaving through the group to get a better look at him, and it occurred to him that he was probably the first human they had ever seen.
The butt of the harpoon prodded him in the back and Malcolm started walking. The sea of apes began to part, leaving him a narrow path forward. He walked, hearing them sniff at him as he passed, seeing the intelligence in their eyes as they watched him watching them. Most of them looked hard and hostile.
He didn’t maintain eye contact for very long with any individual, remembering a movie he’d seen once where a biologist stayed alive by lowering her head. He wasn’t going to do that. These weren’t just apes. They were rational—something had been done to them. The jungle rules of submission didn’t apply here, in a village built by their own hands.
The body of apes finished dividing in two, and ahead of him Malcolm saw the leader, standing alone before a stone wall. On the stone wall he saw words. APE SHALL NOT KILL APE jumped out at him. Then he saw APES TOGETHER STRONG. There was a third line he didn’t catch because the one-eyed chimp shoved him forward again and then cracked him across the backs of his legs with the harpoon butt. Malcolm dropped to his knees. He was about eye level with the chimp leader.
“Please,” he said. “Please don’t kill me until you hear what I have to say.”
The chimp said nothing. He stared stone-faced at Malcolm. Whatever understanding he had thought they shared that morning, it was gone. Malcolm thought again that he might just have gotten himself into a hole way too deep to climb out of.
“I know you said not to come back,” he said. “I get it, I understand why… what you’ve been through. It’s just…” He got one foot under him and started to stand. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t absolutely—unh!”
The one-eyed chimp smashed the harpoon shaft down on Malcolm’s shoulder, driving him back to the ground.
“Please!” he cried. His arm was numb. “There’s something I need to show you, it’s not far, if I could just—”
“Human lies,” the one-eyed chimp said.
“No, no, I swear—”
Stepping past Malcolm, the one-eyed chimp signed to the leader. Malcolm didn’t know sign language, but he recognized the violence of the gesture. One-Eye wanted to kill him, and was asking permission. He’d bet… well, he’d bet his life on it.
“Please,” he said again. “If I could just show you why we came up here. Then you’ll understand.”
The leader had not moved. His expression had not changed. The orangutan that had ridden next to the leader outside the Colony hooted softly, but the leader did not look at him. One-Eye dropped the point of his harpoon until it was level, pointed straight at Malcolm’s sternum. Malcolm held the leader’s gaze. If he was going to die, he was going to do it with a little dignity.
The leader raised one hand. Nothing else about him changed. One-Eye paused, his harpoon still leveled at Malcolm and his face a mask of frustrated hate. A long moment passed. Malcolm looked steadily at this chimpanzee that held Malcolm’s life in his hands.
“Show me,” the leader said.
28
They cut along the canyon’s edge, Malcolm on a horse led by an ape who appeared to be one of the leader’s inner circle. When they reached the base of the canyon, Malcolm spoke up.
“We should walk from here,” he said. The ape leader nodded, and they dismounted—he and a group of apes including One-Eye, who still looked like he wanted to dig his harpoon around in Malcolm’s guts. He led them down the face of the canyon to a logjam choking the river, with the roar of a waterfall just beyond it. Soon it was too loud to speak and be heard, so Malcolm waved everyone forward and started working his way out across the logs.
It was a tricky scramble, slippery with a long drop on one side and rolling water on the other that would trap you under the logjam long after you’d drowned. Mist from the waterfall swirled all around them. Malcolm picked his way to the middle of the jam, and looked down.
Here’s where I start to spring my own surprise, he thought.
He jumped… and landed on a catwalk six feet below the logjam. He looked up to see the apes’ heads appear, puzzled at first and then surprised as they saw Malcolm standing unharmed.
He waved for them to join him. They climbed down and looked over the dam’s vast spillway and the concrete retaining walls built to anchor the structure. Surely the apes must have seen this before, thought Malcolm. But if they had, they’d never been on the catwalk—at least not this group. They looked around in wonder and stuck close to Malcolm as he led them to the far side of the walkway, with a hundred-foot slope of concrete below them and the mossy face of the dam above. Water surged down the front of it. In its ruined state, it was a spectacular sight—maybe even more spectacular than it would have been when it was in good repair.
They reached the end of the catwalk, where it seemed to dead-end into one of the retaining walls… until you noticed the rectangular outline and the stainless steel door handle sticking out like a bent finger. Malcolm wrapped his shirt around it to get a better grip, and twisted, then pulled the door open with a squeal that cut through the roar of the falls.
Inside, he led the apes down a cement staircase into the mechanicals room of the dam’s powerhouse. The room was maybe three stories high, with overgrown windows on one side admitting dim light. Immense pipes and valves dominated an end of it, and on the ground floor below these were the control panels, gathered around a central console with an array of knobs and dials. The rest of the room was given over to worktables and tool lockers.
“It’s what we used to call a small hydro,” Malcolm explained as the apes descended the staircase behind him, looking in wonder at the building they had never noticed so close to their village. “It was built to service areas north of here, but we’ve been working to re-route the necessary lines in the city to, um…” He cut himself off. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. See, the city, it used to run off nuclear power, but that gave out years ago. We’ve been running diesel generators, gasifiers—but we’re almost out…”
The ape leader stood before the console, looking at the panels and gauges.
“If we can just get this dam working again, we have a shot at restoring limited power to our…” Malcolm trailed off as he saw the ape leader looking hard at him. He got nervous again, his initial flush of excitement disappearing as he was put in mind of One-Eye’s harpoon. “Is any of this… making sense?” he asked.
The leader held his gaze a few seconds longer.
“The lights,” he said.
Malcolm realized he’d been holding his breath. Now he let it out and smiled. “Yes. The lights. Listen, I know this is your home up here. And we’re not trying to take it away from you, I promise. But if you could just allow us to do our work, please—”
One-Eye cut him off.
“You brought others?” he growled.
Very carefully, Malcolm measured his reply.
“Just a few.” He hoped that would satisfy them. “Look… if you still think I’m a threat, then I guess you’ll kill me. But I
swear, I wouldn’t have come back up here if I didn’t have to. I have a son…” He thought this seemed to get through to the leader, and he kept talking. “We’re just trying to survive down there. All we need is a few days, and I give you my word.
“You will never. See us. Again.”
29
The waiting was killing them. If it had been up to Carver, he would have started the truck and gotten the hell out of there the minute Malcolm was out of sight. But that wasn’t really possible with his woman and his son sitting right there. So he and Foster sat up in the front and Malcolm’s little family sat in the back, Alexander reading the same comics over and over.
Weird kid. Carver didn’t like him. He didn’t like Malcolm either. Ellie was all right, easy on the eyes and pleasant, but he’d have been just as happy to never see any of them again. What he wanted was a wrench in one hand, a beer in the other, and the sure knowledge that they’d come up here with every gun in Fort Point, then used them to put those apes in the ground.
Instead they were sitting in a truck up in the mountains with pine needles raining down all over them. At least he had a cigar. It was hand-rolled in the Colony from lousy tobacco they’d grown themselves, but it was a cigar.
Pine needles. Why were there so many…?
“Oh, shit,” Foster said, as Carver heard rustling in the trees. He pitched the cigar and rolled up the window.
“That’s it,” he said. “We’re gone. It’s probably two hours anyway.” He locked the doors and reached for the ignition as the trees around them were suddenly full of apes.
“It hasn’t been two hours,” Ellie protested. “You can’t—”
“The hell I can’t,” Carver said. “You see what’s out there? Probably one of them brought Malcolm’s head to show us.” He started the truck and jammed it into gear. Around them, the apes drew closer. They were in the mirrors, too, coming around behind the truck. Carver figured he’d have to run over some of them to get out, but that was fine with him.
“Wait! Stop!”
It was the kid. Carver looked back out the windshield and saw Malcolm being marched out of the woods, flanked by two mean-looking chimps. He thought fast and then made his decision. “Nope. We’re gone.”
But when he looked in the mirror again, the path back down the mountain was blocked by a bunch of chimps on horseback.
“Shit,” Foster said again. “We’re dead.” Carver killed the engine as Malcolm and his escorts came to the driver’s-side window. Malcolm motioned for him to roll it down. Carver hesitated, but he did it. Hell, if the apes wanted in the truck, they could get in the truck.
“Give them your guns,” Malcolm said as soon as the window was down. “That was the one condition.”
“The one condition of what?” Ellie asked.
Malcolm nodded toward the ape leader. The chimp with war paint was watching them from across the clearing, near the second truck. “He says we can stay.”
“Great,” Carver said. He wished he hadn’t tossed his cigar.
* * *
They marched up the slope toward the dam, carrying their gear and watched closely by a heavy guard of apes. Some of them rode horses, more were on foot. Kemp, Foster, and Carver stuck close together and tried not to look the apes in the eye.
Malcolm couldn’t quite believe he’d pulled it off. Well, he hadn’t—not yet. The dam wasn’t running. But he’d come back to the apes and managed not to get harpooned. That was a pretty good first step, all things considered. It was late afternoon and it looked like they would live through another day. Probably. But they still needed to be careful. There was no telling how long the ape leader’s goodwill would last, or how long One-Eye would contain his temper.
“Stay close to me,” Malcolm said to Alexander, but meaning it for both him and Ellie.
The sun was low over the ridge when they got to a clearing at the edge of the river. The ape leader signaled a halt and pointed at the ground. Malcolm looked at him, uncertain for a moment… then he figured it out.
“You want us to camp here?” he asked. The chimp nodded. Malcolm looked to the others, who started to drop their gear and make what preparations they could before it got dark. He looked over at One-Eye, who was watching the humans with what seemed like disgust. A thought occurred to Malcolm, incongruous given the circumstances. But he thought he’d give it a try.
He walked up to the ape leader’s horse.
“Thank you,” he said. Then he placed one hand flat on his chest and said, “Malcolm.”
The chimp looked surprised. He considered Malcolm, deliberating over something. Then he tapped his own chest.
“Caesar.”
Well, of course, Malcolm thought. The leader of a renegade band of genetically enhanced apes is named Caesar. What else would it be?
Without another word or gesture, Caesar wheeled his horse around and rode off. The rest of the apes followed.
“Looks like we’re here until morning,” Malcolm said. “Let’s get some sleep.”
30
They could not burn the metal parts of the guns. Those they smashed with rocks next to the fire pit, all under Caesar’s direction. Maurice and Rocket did most of it, with Koba glowering across the fire pit. As Rocket tossed the wooden parts of the last gun into the fire, Koba stood abruptly and loped around the pit to where Caesar sat watching.
This is a mistake, he signed. Why help them?
Caesar nodded. Helping them could be dangerous. But not helping is more dangerous. Koba grunted, acknowledging this without agreeing. Caesar saw Blue Eyes looking at them.
They’re trying to save themselves, Caesar signed, making sure Blue Eyes could see. If we force them to leave, we give the humans no choice. They will attack.
Let them! Koba thumped his chest.
And how many apes will die? Caesar put an edge on his signs. We will let them do their human work. And then they will leave.
Koba grunted again, this time openly scoffing.
“Human work?” he said. He turned sideways to Caesar and gestured at the scar that ran down the length of his spine. “This human work.”
Koba’s defiance began to attract attention from the other apes gathered to watch the fire. He pointed to the scar across the base of his skull. “Human work…?” Then he stabbed a finger at his blind eye and growled, louder, “This human work!”
More of the apes were staring now, uneasy at the challenge to Caesar’s authority. Enough, Caesar thought. He would not have this. He stood and stepped to Koba, so close that their faces almost touched, locking eyes and silently daring him to continue his defiance.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackle and hiss of the fire. Then Koba took a step back and looked down.
Forgive me, he signed.
Caesar did not move.
Koba kept looking at the ground. After a hesitation, he extended a hand, palm up. Caesar looked at Koba’s hand for a long moment before he brushed his own palm across it, accepting the supplication.
Koba glanced up at Caesar, then back across the fire at Blue Eyes and the other watching apes. He looked back to Caesar and dropped his gaze once more before turning and walking away out of the firelight. Caesar watched him go, glad that Koba had not pushed him to a fight. Apes together strong, he thought. It was more important than ever now that they had the humans to think about as possible rivals, or even enemies.
Blue Eyes, too, watched Koba go. Turning back to his father, he approached.
Koba says humans are to be hated, he signed.
At last, Caesar thought. He had expected this. That is because from humans Koba learned only hate, he signed.
Blue Eyes considered this. He was torn, and Caesar could understand why. Young apes felt a powerful drive to supplant their elders. Blue Eyes felt this without understanding it. Caesar had to make sure he learned to understand it before his son’s youthful energy led him to rebel.
Without another word, Blue Eyes left. Caesar wondered if he would seek Koba.
They both needed watching, and control, but for different reasons. He looked up to see Maurice, who gestured that they should walk together. When they were out of the firelight and away from the gathered apes, Maurice stopped.
Koba’s anger is strong, he signed.
His loyalty is stronger, Caesar answered. He is an ape. They stood looking back at the burning guns, knowing the problem was more complicated than what he had said. But he must not be left alone with the humans. He may not be able to stop himself. We can’t let him start a war.
Maurice nodded, understanding that Caesar had set him this task. Yet it would take more than one ape to ensure Koba did not cause a war that only he wanted.
Caesar yawned. The guns were destroyed. Sentries watched the humans. It was time to rest. He signed good night to Maurice, who ambled back to the fire as Caesar went up the path toward his tree. He climbed up to the sleeping room and stepped softly to the bed, where Cornelia lay looking at their newborn.
Barely two days old, Caesar thought, and so much happening around him. What story will we tell of these times when he is old enough to hear it?
Cornelia smiled up at him. Her breath rattled still, maybe worse than it had been the day before. Worried, Caesar stroked her face. Her skin felt warmer than it should have… but perhaps that was because she had been tucked down into the bedding?
Blue Eyes will watch the baby tomorrow, he signed. You need rest.
She shook her head.
I’ll be fine, she signed. You’re worried. About the humans?
He looked from the baby back to her and nodded. She knew him, and would know if he tried to pretend otherwise. But nothing could be done about the humans tonight, Caesar told himself. He also needed rest. He lay down beside her and drifted off to sleep, hearing the wheeze and rattle of her breath in the darkness and thinking it was not just the humans he worried about.