* * *
He spent two days coasting through cool lattices of data in the formidable Station library. It was well-equipped and allowed interfaces with several senses. He patrolled through cool, digital labyrinths.
In the vector spaces portrayed on huge screens, the research data was covered with thick, bulky protocols and scabs of security precautions. All were easily broken or averted, of course, but the chunky abstracts, reports, summaries, and crudely processed statistics still resisted easy interpretation. Occasionally some facets of chimp behavior were carefully hidden away in appendices and sidebar notes, as though the biologists in the lonely outpost were embarrassed by it. Some was embarrassing: mating behavior, especially. How could he use this?
He navigated through the 3-D maze and cobbled together his ideas. Could he follow a strategy of analogy?
Chimps shared nearly all their genes with humans, so chimp dynamics should be a simpler version of human dynamics. Could he then analyze chimp troop interactions as a reduced case of sociohistory?
At sunset of the next day he sat with Kelly watching blood-red shafts spike through orange-tinged clouds. Africa was gaudy beyond good taste and he liked it. The food was tangy, too. His stomach rumbled in anticipation of dinner.
He remarked to Kelly, “It’s tempting, using chimps to build a sort of toy model of sociohistory.”
“But you have doubts.”
“They’re like us in … only they have, well, uh…”
“Base, animalistic ways?” She smirked, then kissed him. “My prudish Leon.”
“We have our share of beastly behaviors, I know. But we’re a lot smarter too.”
Her eyelids dipped in a manner he knew by now suggested polite doubt. “They live intensely, you’ll have to give them that.”
“Maybe we’re smarter than we need to be anyway.”
“What?” This surprised her.
“I’ve been reading up on evolution. Plainly, the human brain was an evolutionary overshoot—far more capable than a competent hunter-gatherer needed. To get the better of animals, it would have been enough to master fire and simple stone tools. Such talents alone would have made people the lords of creation, removing selection pressure to change. Instead, all evidence from the brain itself said that change accelerated. The human cerebral cortex added mass, stacking new circuitry atop older wiring. That mass spread over the lesser areas like a thick new skin.”
“Considering the state of the world, I’d say we need all the brains we can get,” she said skeptically.
“From that layer came musicians and engineers, saints and savants,” he finished with a flourish. One of Kelly’s best points was her willingness to sit still while he waxed professorially long-winded, even on vacation. “And all this evolutionary selection happened in just a few million years.”
Kelly snorted prettily. “Look at it from the woman’s point of view. It happened, despite putting mothers in desperate danger in childbirth.”
“Uh, how?”
“From those huge baby heads. They’re hard to get out. We women are still paying the price for your brains—and for ours.”
He chuckled. She always had a special spin on a subject that made him see it fresh. “Then why was it selected for, back then?”
Kelly smiled enigmatically. “Maybe men and women alike found intelligence sexy in each other.”
“Really?”
Her sly smile. “How about us?”
“Have you ever watched very many 3-D stars? They don’t feature brains, my dear.”
“Remember the animals we saw in the Madrid Senso-Zoo? The mating exhibit? It could be that for early humans, brains were like peacock tails, or moose horns—display items, to attract the females. Runaway sexual selection.”
“I see, an overplayed hand of otherwise perfectly good cards.” He laughed. “So being smart is just a bright ornament.”
“Works for me,” she said, giving him a wink.
He watched the sunset turn to glowering, ominous crimson, oddly happy. Sheets of light worked across the sky among curious, layered clouds. “Ummm…,” Kelly murmured.
“Yes?”
“Maybe this is a way to use the research the ExSpecs are doing too. Learn who we were—and therefore who we are.”
“Intellectually, it’s a jump. In social ways, though, the gap could be less.”
Kelly looked skeptical. “You think chimps are only a bit further back in a social sense?”
“Ummm. I wonder if in logarithmic time we might scale from chimps to us, now?”
“A big leap. To do anything you’ll need more experience with them.” She eyed him. “You like immersion, don’t you?”
“Well, yes. It’s just…”
“What?”
“That ExSpec Ruben, he keeps pushing immersions—”
“That’s his job.”
“—and he knew who I was.”
“So?” She spread her hands and shrugged.
“You’re normally the suspicious one. Why should an ExSpec know an obscure mathematician?”
“He looked you up. Data dumps on incoming guests are standard. And in some circles you’re hardly obscure. Plenty of people back in Helsinki line up to see you.”
“And some would like to see me dead. Say, you’re supposed to be the ever-vigilant one.” He grinned. “Shouldn’t you be encouraging my caution?”
“Paranoia isn’t caution. Time spent on nonthreats subtracts from vigilance.”
By the time they went in for dinner she had talked him into more immersions.
* * *
Hot day in the sun. Dust makes me snort.
That Biggest, he walks by, gets respect right away. Fems and guys alike, they stick out their hands.
Biggest touches them, taking time with each, letting them know he is there. The world is all right.
I reach out to him too. Makes me feel good. I want to be like Biggest, to be big, be as big as him, be him.
Fems don’t give him any trouble. He wants one, she goes. Hump right away. He’s Biggest.
Most males, they don’t get much respect. Fems don’t want to do with them as much as they do with Biggest. The little males, they huff and throw sand and all that but everybody knows they’re not going to be much. No chance they could ever be like Biggest. They don’t like that but they are stuck with it.
Me, I’m pretty big. I get respect. Some, anyway.
All the guys like stroking. Petting. Grooming. Fems give it to them and they give it back.
Guys get more though. After it, they’re not so gruff.
I’m sitting getting groomed and all of a sudden I smell something. I don’t like it. I jump up, cry out. Biggest, he takes notice. Smells it too.
Strangers. Everybody starts hugging each other. Strong smell, plenty of it. Lots of Strangers. The wind says they are near, getting nearer.
They come running down on us from the ridge. Looking for fems, looking for trouble.
I run for my rocks. I always have some handy. I fling one at them, miss. Then they are in among us. It’s hard to hit them, they go so fast.
Four Strangers, they grab two fems. Drag them away.
Everybody howling, crying. Dust everywhere.
I throw rocks. Biggest leads the guys against the Strangers.
They turn and run off. Just like that. Got the two fems though and that’s bad.
Biggest mad. He pushes around some of the guys, makes noise. He not looking so good now, he let the Strangers in.
Those Strangers bad. We all hunker down, groom each other, pet, make nice sounds.
Biggest, he come by, slap some of the fems. Hump some. Make sure everybody know he’s still Biggest.
He don’t slap me. He know better than to try. I growl at him when he come close and he pretend not to hear.
Maybe he not so Big any more, I’m thinking.
* * *
He stayed with it this time. After the first crisis, when the Stranger chimps came running throu
gh, he sat and let himself get groomed for a long time. It really did calm him.
Him? Who was he?
This time he could fully sense the chimp mind. Not below him—that was an evolutionary metaphor—but around him. A swarming scattershot of senses, thoughts, fragments like leaves blowing by him in a wind.
And the wind was emotion. Blustering gales, howling and whipping in gusts, raining thoughts like soft hammer blows.
These chimps thought poorly, in the sense that he could get only shards, like human musings chopped by a nervous editor. But chimps felt intensely.
Of course, he thought—and he could think, nestled in the hard kernel of himself, wrapped in the chimp mind. Emotions told it what to do, without thinking. Quick reactions demanded that. Strong feeling amplified subtle clues into strong imperatives. Blunt orders from Mother Evolution.
He saw now that the belief that high order mental experiences like emotion were unique to people was … simply conceited. These chimps shared much of the human world view. A theory of chimp sociohistory could be valuable.
He gingerly separated himself from the dense, pressing chimp mind. He wondered if the chimp knew he was here. Yes, it did—dimly. But somehow this did not bother the chimp. He integrated it into his blurred, blunt world. Leon was somewhat like an emotion, just one of many fluttering by and staying a while, then wafting away.
Could he be more than that? He tried getting the chimp to lift its right arm—and it was like lead. He struggled for a while that way with no success. Then he realized his error. He could not overpower this chimp, not as a kernel in a much larger mind.
He thought about this as the chimp groomed a female, picking carefully through coarse hair. The strands smelled good, the air was sweet, the sun stroked him with blades of generous warmth.…
Emotion. Chimps didn’t follow instructions because that simply lay beyond them. They could not understand directions in the human sense. Emotions—those they knew. He had to be an emotion, not a little general giving orders.
He sat for a while simply being this chimp. He learned—or rather, he felt. The troop groomed and scavenged food, males eyeing the perimeter, females keeping close to the young. A lazy calm descended over him, carrying him effortlessly through warm moments of the day. Not since he was a boy had he felt anything like this. A slow, graceful easing, as though there were no time at all, only slices of eternity.
In this mood, he could concentrate on a simple movement—raising an arm, scratching—and create the desire to do it. His chimp responded. To make it happen, he had to feel his way toward a goal. Sail before the emotion wind.
Catching a sweet scent on the air, Leon thought about what food that might signal. His chimp meandered upwind, sniffed, discarded the clue as uninteresting. Leon could now smell the reason why: fruit, true, sweet, yes—but inedible for a chimp.
Good. He was learning. And he was integrating himself into the deep recesses of this chimp-mind.
Watching the troop, he decided to name the prominent chimps, to keep them straight: Agile the quick one, Sheelah the sexy one, Grubber the hungry one.… But what was his own name? His he dubbed Ipan. Not very original, but that was its main characteristic, I as Pan troglodytes.
Grubber found some bulb-shaped fruit and the others drifted over to scavenge. The hard fruit smelled a little too young (how did he know that?) but some ate it anyway.
And which of these was Kelly? They had asked to be immersed in the same troop, so one of these—he forced himself to count, though somehow the exercise was like moving heavy weights in his mind—these twenty-two was her. How could he tell? He ambled over to several females who were using sharp-edged stones to cut leaves from branches. They tied the strands together so they could carry food.
Leon peered into their faces. Mild interest, a few hands held out for stroking, an invitation to groom. No glint of recognition in their eyes.
He watched a big fem, Sheelah, carefully wash sand-covered fruit in a creek. The troop followed suit; Sheelah was a leader of sorts, a female lieutenant to Biggest.
She ate with relish, looked around. There was grain growing nearby, past maturity, ripe tan kernels already scattered in the sandy soil. Concentrating, Leon could tell from the faint bouquet that this was a delicacy. A few chimps squatted and picked grains from the sand, slow work. Sheelah did the same, and then stopped, gazing off at the creek. Time passed, insects buzzed. After a while she scooped up sand and kernels and walked to the brook’s edge. She tossed it all in. The sand sank, the kernels floated. She skimmed them off and gulped them down, grinning widely.
An impressive trick. The other chimps did not pick up on her kernel-skimming method. Fruit washing was conceptually easier, he supposed, since the chimp could keep the fruit the whole time. Kernel-skimming demanded throwing away the food first, then rescuing it—a harder mental jump.
He thought about her and in response Ipan sauntered over her way. He peered into Sheelah’s eyes—and she winked at him. Kelly! He wrapped hairy arms around her in a burst of sweaty love.
* * *
“Pure animal love,” she said over Dinner. “Refreshing.”
Leon nodded. “I like being there, living that way.”
“I can smell so much more.”
“Fruit tastes differently when they bite into it.” He held up a purple bulb, sliced into it, forked it into his mouth. “To me, this is almost unbearably sweet. To Ipan, it’s pleasant, a little peppery. I suppose chimps have been selected for a sweet tooth. It gets them more fast calories.”
“I can’t think of a more thorough vacation. Not just getting away from home, but getting away from your species.”
He eyed the fruit. “And they’re so, so…”
“Horny?”
“Insatiable.”
“You didn’t seem to mind.”
“My chimp, Ipan? I bail out when he gets into his hump-them-all mood.”
She eyed him. “Really?”
“Don’t you bail out?”
“Yes, but I don’t expect men to be like women.”
“Oh?” he said stiffly.
“I’ve been reading in the ExSpec’s research library, while you toy with chimp social movements. Women invest heavily in their children. Men can use two strategies—parental investment, plus ‘sow the oats.’” She lifted an eyebrow. “Both must have been selected for in our evolution, because they’re both common.”
“Not with me.”
To his surprise, she laughed. “I’m talking in general. My point is: The chimps are much more promiscuous than we are. The males run everything. They help out the females who are carrying their children, I gather, but then they shop around elsewhere all the time.”
Leon switched into his professional mode; it was decidedly more comfortable, when dealing with such issues. “As the specialists say, they are pursuing a mixed reproductive strategy.”
“How polite.”
“Polite plus precise.”
Of course, he couldn’t really be sure Kelly bailed out of Sheelah when a male came by for a quick one. (They were always quick too—thirty seconds or less.) Could she exit the chimp mind that quickly? He required a few moments to extricate himself. Of course, if she saw the male coming, guessed his intentions …
He was surprised at himself. What role did jealousy have when they were inhabiting other bodies? Did the usual moral code make any sense? Yet to talk this over with her was … embarrassing.
He was still the country boy, like it or not.
Ruefully he concentrated on his meal of local “roamer-fleisch,” which turned out to be an earthy, dark meat in a stew of tangy vegetables. He ate heartily and in response to Kelly’s rather obviously amused silence said, “I’d point out that chimps understood commerce too. Food for sex, betrayal of the leader for sex, spare my child for sex, grooming for sex, just about anything for sex.”
“It does seem to be their social currency. Short and decidedly not sweet. Just quick lunges, strong sensatio
ns, then boom—it’s over.”
He nodded. “The males need it, the females use it.”
“Ummm, you’ve been taking notes.”
“If I’m going to model chimps as a sort of simplified people, then I must.”
“Model chimps?” came the assured tones of ExSpec Ruben. “They’re not model citizens, if that’s what you mean.” He gave them a sunny smile and Leon guessed this was more of the obligatory friendliness of this place.
Leon smiled mechanically. “I’m trying to find the variables that could describe chimp behavior.”
“You should spend a lot of time with them,” Ruben said, sitting at the table and holding up a finger to a waiter for a drink. “They’re subtle creatures.”
“I agree,” said Kelly. “Do you ride them very much?”
“Some, but most of our research is done differently now.” Ruben’s mouth twisted ruefully. “Statistical models, that sort of thing. I got this touring idea started, using the immersion tech we had developed earlier, to make money for the project. Otherwise, we’d have had to close.”
“I’m happy to contribute,” Leon said.
“Admit it—you like it,” Kelly said, amused.
“Well, yes. It’s … different.”
“And good for the staid Professor Mattick to get out of his shell,” she said.
Ruben beamed. “Be sure you don’t take chances out there. Some of our customers think they’re superchimps or something.”
Kelly’s eyes flickered. “What danger is there? Our bodies are in slow-time, back here.”
Ruben said, “You’re strongly linked. A big shock to a chimp can drive a back-shock in your own neurological systems.”
“What sort of shock?” Leon asked.
“Death, major injury.”
“In that case,” Kelly said to Leon, “I really do not think you should immerse.”
Leon felt irked. “Come on! I’m on vacation, not in prison.”
“Any threat to you—”
“Just a minute ago you were rhapsodizing about how good for me it was.”
“You’re too important to—”
“There’s really very little danger,” Ruben came in smoothly. “Chimps don’t die suddenly, usually.”
“And I can bail out when I see danger coming,” Leon added.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 10