The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “But will you? I think you’re getting a taste for adventure.”

  She was right, but he wasn’t going to concede the point. If he wanted a little escape from his humdrum mathematician’s routine, so much the better. “I like being out of Helsinki’s endless corridors.”

  Ruben gave Kelly a confident smile. “And we haven’t lost a tourist yet.”

  “How about research staff?” she shot back.

  “Well, that was a most unusual—”

  “What happened?”

  “A chimp fell off a ledge. The human operator couldn’t bail out in time and she came out of it paralyzed. The shock of experiencing death through immersion is known from other incidents to prove fatal. But we have systems in place to short-circuit—”

  “What else?” she persisted.

  “Well, there was one difficult episode. In the early days, when we had simple wire fences.” The ExSpec shifted uneasily. “Some predators got in.”

  “What sort of predators?”

  “A primate-pack hunter, Carnopapio grandis. We call them raboons, genetically derived in an experiment two decades ago. They took baboon DNA—”

  “How did they get in?” Kelly insisted.

  “They’re somewhat like a wild hog, with hooves that double as diggers. Carnivores, though. They smelled game—our corralled animals. Dug under the fences.”

  Kelly eyed the high, solid walls. “These are adequate?”

  “Certainly. They’re from a genetic experiment. Someone tried to make a predator by raising the earlier baboon stock up onto two legs.”

  Kelly said dryly, “Evolutionary gambling.”

  Ruben didn’t catch the edge in her voice. “Like most bipedal predators, the forelimbs are shortened and the head carries forward, balanced by a thick tail they use for signaling to each other. They prey on the biggest herd animals, the gigantelope—another experiment—and eat only the richest meat.”

  “Why attack humans, then?” she asked.

  “They take targets of opportunity too. Chimps, even. When they got into the compound, they went for adult humans, not children—a very selective strategy.”

  Kelly shivered. “You look at this very … objectively.”

  “I’m a biologist.”

  “I never knew it could be so interesting,” Leon said to defuse her apprehension.

  Ruben beamed. “Not as involving as higher mathematics, I’m sure.”

  Kelly’s mouth twisted with wry skepticism. “Do you mind if guests carry weapons inside the compound?”

  * * *

  He had a glimmering of an idea about the chimps, a way to use their behaviors in building a simple toy model of sociohistory. He might be able to use the statistics of chimp troop movements, the ups and downs of their shifting fortunes.

  He talked it over with Kelly and she nodded, but beneath it she seemed worried. Since Ruben’s remark she was always tut-tutting about safety. He reminded her that she had earlier urged him to do more immersions. “This is a vacation, remember?” he said more than once.

  Her amused sidewise glances told him that she also didn’t buy his talk about the toy modeling. She thought he just liked romping in the woods. “A country boy at heart,” she chuckled.

  So the next morning he skipped a planned trek to view the vast gigantelope herds. He immediately went to the immersion chambers and slipped under. To get some solid work done, he told himself.

  * * *

  The chimps slept in trees and spent plenty of time grooming each other. For the lucky groomer a tick or louse was a treat. With enough, they could get high on some peppery-tasting alkaloid. He suspected the careful stroking and combing of his hair by Kelly was a behavior selected because it improved chimp hygiene. It certainly calmed Ipan, also.

  Then it struck him: Chimps groomed rather than vocalizing. Only in crises and when agitated did they call and cry, mostly about breeding, feeding, or self-defense. They were like people who could not release themselves through the comfort of talk.

  And they needed comfort. The core of their social life resembled human societies under stress—in tyrannies, in prisons, in city gangs. Nature red in tooth and claw, yet strikingly like troubled people.

  But there were “civilized” behaviors here too. Friendships, grief, sharing, buddies-in-arms who hunted and guarded turf together. Their old got wrinkled, bald, and toothless, yet were still cared for.

  Their instinctive knowledge was prodigious. They knew how to make a bed of leaves as dusk fell, high up in trees. They could climb with grasping feet. They felt, cried, mourned—without being able to parse these into neat grammatical packages, so the emotions could be managed, subdued. Instead, emotions drove them.

  Hunger was the strongest. They found and ate leaves, fruit, insects, even fair-sized animals. They loved caterpillars.

  Each moment, each small enlightenment, sank him deeper into Ipan. He began to sense the subtle nooks and crannies of the chimp mind. Slowly, he gained more cooperative control.

  That morning a female found a big tree and began banging it. The hollow trunk boomed like a drum and all the foraging party rushed forward to beat it too, grinning wildly at the noise. Ipan joined in and Leon felt the burst of joy, seethed in it.

  Later, coming on a waterfall after a heavy rain, they seized vines and swung among trees—out over the foaming water, screeching with joy as they performed twists and leaps from vine to vine. Like children in a new playground. Leon got Ipan to make impossible moves, wild tumbles and dives, propelling him forward with abandon—to the astonishment of the other chimps.

  They were violent in their sudden, peevish moments—in hustling available females, in working out their perpetual dominance hierarchy, and especially in hunting. A successful hunt brought enormous excitement—hugging, kissing, pats. As the troop descended to feed the forest rang with barks, screeches, hoots, and pants. Leon joined the tumult, sang, danced with Sheelah/Kelly.

  In some matters he had to restrain his feelings. Rats they ate head first. Larger game they smashed against rocks. They devoured the brains first, a steaming delicacy. Leon gulped—metaphorically, but with Ipan echoing the impulse—and watched, screening his reluctance. Ipan had to eat, after all.

  At the scent of predators, he felt Ipan’s hair stand on end. Another tangy bouquet made Ipan’s mouth water. He gave no mercy to food, even if it was still walking. Evolution in action; those chimps who had showed mercy in the past ate less and left fewer descendants. Those weren’t represented here anymore.

  For all its excesses, he found the chimps’ behavior hauntingly familiar. Males gathered often for combat, for pitching rocks, for blood sports, to work out their hierarchy. Females networked and formed alliances. There were trades of favors for loyalty, alliances, kinship bonds, turf wars, threats and displays, protection rackets, a hunger for “respect,” scheming subordinates, revenge—a social world enjoyed by many people that history had judged “great.” Much like an emperor’s court, in fact.

  Did people long to strip away their clothing and conventions, bursting forth as chimps?

  Leon felt a flush of revulsion, so strong Ipan shook and fidgeted. Humanity’s lot had to be different, not this primitive horror.

  He could use this, certainly, as a test bed for a full theory. Learn from our nearest genetic neighbors. Then humankind would be self-knowing, captains of themselves. He would build in the imperatives of the chimps, but go far beyond—to true, deep sociohistory.

  * * *

  “I don’t see it,” Kelly said at dinner.

  “But they’re so much like us!” He put down his spoon. “We’re a brainy chimp—that’s a valuable insight. We can probably train them to work for us, do housekeeping.”

  “I wouldn’t have them messing up my house.”

  Adult humans weighed little more than chimps, but were far weaker. A chimp could lift five times more than a well-conditioned man. Human brains were three or four times more massive than a chimp’s. A human bab
y a few months old already had a brain larger than a grown chimp. People had different brain architecture, as well.

  But was that the whole story? Give chimps bigger brains and speech, ease off on the testosterone, saddle them with more inhibitions, spruce them up with a shave and a haircut, teach them to stand securely on hind legs—and you had deluxe-model chimps that would look and act rather human. They might pass in a crowd without attracting notice.

  Leon said curtly, “Look, my point is that they’re close enough to us to make a sociohistory model work.”

  “To make anybody believe that, you’ll have to show that they’re intelligent enough to have intricate interactions.”

  “What about their foraging, their hunting?” he persisted.

  “Ruben says they couldn’t even be trained to do work around this Excursion Station.”

  “I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s master their methods together.”

  “What method?”

  “The basic one. Getting enough to eat.”

  She bit into a steak of a meaty local grazer, suitably processed and “fat-flensed for the fastidious urban palate,” as the brochure had it. Chewing with unusual ferocity, she eyed him. “You’re on. Anything a chimp can do, I can do better.”

  * * *

  Kelly waved at him from within Sheelah. Let the contest begin.

  The troop was foraging. He let Ipan meander and did not try to harness the emotional ripples that lapped through the chimp mind. He had gotten better at it, but at a sudden smell or sound he could lose his grip. And guiding the blunt chimp mind through anything complicated was like moving a puppet with rubber strings.

  Sheelah/Kelly waved and signed to him. This way.

  They had worked out a code of a few hundred words, using finger and facial gestures, and their chimps seemed to go along with these fairly well. Chimps had a rough language, mixing grunts and shrugs and finger displays. These conveyed immediate meanings, but not in the usual sense of sentences. Mostly they just set up associations.

  Tree, fruit, go, Kelly sent. They ambled their chimps over to a clump of promising spindly trunks, but the bark was too slick to climb.

  The rest of the troop had not even bothered. They have forest smarts we lack, Leon thought ruefully.

  What there? he signed to Sheelah/Kelly.

  Chimps ambled up to mounds, gave them the once-over, and reached out to brush aside some mud, revealing a tiny tunnel. Termites, Kelly signed.

  Leon analyzed the situation as chimps drifted in. Nobody seemed in much of a hurry. Sheelah winked at him and waddled over to a distant mound.

  Apparently termites worked outside at night, then blocked the entrances at dawn. Leon let his chimp shuffle over to a large tan mound, but he was riding it so well now that the chimp’s responses were weak. Leon/Ipan looked for cracks, knobs, slight hollows—and yet when he brushed away some mud, found nothing. Other chimps readily unmasked tunnels. Had they memorized the hundred or more tunnels in each mound?

  He finally uncovered one. Ipan was no help. Leon could control, but that blocked up the wellsprings of deep knowledge within the chimp.

  The chimps deftly tore off twigs or grass stalks near their mounds. Leon carefully followed their lead. His twigs and grass didn’t work. The first lot was too pliant, and when he tried to work them into a twisting tunnel, they collapsed and buckled. He switched to stiffer ones, but those caught on the tunnel walls, or snapped off. From Ipan came little help. Leon had managed him a bit too well.

  He was getting embarrassed. Even the younger chimps had no trouble picking just the right stems or sticks. Leon watched a chimp nearby drop a stick that seemed to work. He then picked it up when the chimp moved on. He felt welling up from Ipan a blunt anxiety, mixing frustration and hunger. He could taste the anticipation of luscious, juicy termites.

  He set to work, plucking the emotional strings of Ipan. This job went even worse. Vague thoughts drifted up from Ipan, but Leon was in control of the muscles now, and that was the bad part.

  He quickly found that the stick had to be stuck in about ten centimeters, turning his wrist to navigate it down the twisty channel. Then he had to gently vibrate it. Through Ipan he sensed that this was to attract termites to bite into the stick.

  At first he did it too long and when he drew the stick out it was half gone. Termites had bitten cleanly through it. So he had to search out another stick and that made Ipan’s stomach growl.

  The other chimps were through termite-snacking while Leon was still fumbling for his first taste. The nuances irked him. He pulled the stick out too fast, not turning it enough to ease it past the tunnel’s curves. Time and again he fetched forth the stick, only to find that he had scraped the luscious termites off on the walls. Their bites punctured his stick, until it was so shredded he had to get another. The termites were dining better than he.

  He finally caught the knack, a fluid slow twist of the wrist, gracefully extracting termites, clinging like bumps. Ipan licked them off eagerly. Leon liked the morsels, filtered through chimp taste buds.

  Not many, though. Others of the troop were watching his skimpy harvest, heads tilted in curiosity, and he felt humiliated.

  The hell with this, he thought.

  He made Ipan turn and walk into the woods. Ipan resisted, dragging his feet. Leon found a thick limb, snapped it off to carrying size, and went back to the mound.

  No more fooling with sticks. He whacked the mound solidly. Five more and he had punched a big hole. Escaping termites he scooped up by the delicious handful.

  So much for subtlety! he wanted to shout. He tried writing a note for her in the dust but it was hard, forcing the letters out through his suddenly awkward hands. Chimps could handle a stick to fetch forth grubs, but marking a surface was somehow not a ready talent. He gave up.

  Sheelah/Kelly came into view, proudly carrying a reed swarming with white-bellied termites. These were the best, a chimp gourmet delicacy. I better, she signed.

  He made Ipan shrug and signed, I got more.

  So it was a draw.

  Later Kelly reported to him that among the troop he was known now as Big Stick. The name pleased him immensely.

  * * *

  At dinner he felt elated, exhausted, and not in the mood for conversation. Being a chimp seemed to suppress his speech centers. It took some effort to ask ExSpec Ruben about immersion technology. Usually he accepted the routine technomiracles, but understanding chimps meant understanding how he experienced them.

  “The immersion hardware puts you in the middle of a chimp’s posterior cingulate gyrus,” Ruben said over dessert. “Just ‘gyrus’ for short. That’s the brain’s center for mediating emotions and expressing them through action.”

  “The brain?” Kelly asked. “What about ours.”

  Ruben shrugged. “Same general layout. Chimps’ are smaller, without a big cerebrum.”

  Leon leaned forward, ignoring his steaming cup of Kaf. “This ‘gyrus,’ it doesn’t give direct motor control?”

  “No, we tried that. It disorients the chimp so much, when you leave, it can’t get itself back together.”

  “So we’re more subtle,” Kelly said.

  “We have to be. In chimp males, the pilot light is always on in neurons that control action and aggression—”

  “That’s why they’re more violence-prone?” she asked.

  “We think so. It parallels structures in our own brains.”

  “Really? Men’s neurons?” Kelly looked doubtful.

  “Human males have higher activity levels in their temporal limbic systems, deeper down in the brain—evolutionarily older structures.”

  “So why not put me into that level?” Leon asked.

  “We place the immersion chips into the gyrus area because we can reach it from the top, surgically. The temporal limbic is way far down, impossible to implant a chip and net.”

  Kelly frowned. “So chimp males—”

  “Are harder to control. Professor Matti
ck here is running his chimp from the backseat, so to speak.”

  “Whereas Kelly is running hers from a control center that, for female chimps, is more central?” Leon peered into the distance. “I was handicapped!”

  Kelly grinned. “You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Big Stick, biology is destiny.”

  * * *

  The troop came upon rotting fruit. Fevered excitement ran through them.

  The smell was repugnant and enticing at the same time and at first he did not understand why. The chimps rushed to the overripe bulbs of blue and sickly green, popping open the skins, sucking out the juice.

  Tentatively, Leon tried one. The hit was immediate. A warm feeling of well-being kindled up in him. Of course—the fruity esters had converted into—alcohol! The chimps were quite deliberately setting about getting drunk.

  He “let” his chimp follow suit. He hadn’t much choice in the matter.

  Ipan grunted and thrashed his arms whenever Leon tried to turn him away from the teardrop fruit. And after a while, Leon didn’t want to turn away either. He gave himself up to a good, solid drunk. He had been worrying a lot lately, agitated in his chimp, and … this was completely natural, wasn’t it?

  Then a pack of raboons appeared, and he lost control of Ipan.

  * * *

  They come fast. Running two-legs, no sound. Their tails twitch, talking to each other.

  Five circle left. They cut off Esa.

  Biggest thunder at them. Hunker runs to nearest and it spikes him with its forepuncher.

  I throw rocks. Hit one. It yelps and scurries back. But others take its place. I throw again and they come and the dust and yowling are thick and the others of them have Esa. They cut her with their punch-claws. Kick her with sharp hooves.

  Three of them carry her off.

  Our ferns run, afraid. We warriors stay.

  We fight them. Shrieking, throwing, biting when they get close. But we cannot reach Esa.

  Then they go. Fast, running on their two hoofed legs. Furling their tails in victory. Taunting us.

  We feel bad. Esa was old and we loved her.