The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

Fems come back, nervous. We groom ourselves and know that the two-legs are eating Esa somewhere.

  Biggest come by, try to pat me. I snarl.

  He Biggest! This thing he should have stopped.

  His eyes get big and he slap me. I slap back at him. He slam into me. We roll around in dust. Biting, yowling. Biggest strong, strong and pound my head on ground.

  Other warriors, they watch us, not join in.

  He beat me. I hurt. I go away.

  Biggest starts calming down the warriors. Ferns come by and pay their respects to Biggest. Touch him, groom him, feel him the way he likes. He mounts three of them real quick. He feeling Biggest all right.

  Me, I lick myself. Sheelah come groom me. After a while I feel better. Already forgotten Esa.

  I not forget Biggest beat me though. In front of everybody. Now I hurt, Biggest get grooming.

  He let them come and take Esa. He Biggest, he should stop them.

  Someday I be all over him. On his back.

  Someday I be Bigger.

  * * *

  “When did you bail out?” Kelly asked.

  “After Biggest stopped pounding on me … uh, on Ipan.”

  They were relaxing in brilliant sun beside a swimming pool. The heady smells of the forest seemed to awaken in Leon the urge to be down there again, in the valleys of dust and blood. He trembled, took a deep breath. The fighting had been so involving he hadn’t wanted to leave, despite the pain. Immersion had a hypnotic quality.

  “I know how you feel,” she said. “It’s easy to totally identify with them. I left Sheelah when those raboons came close. Pretty scary.”

  “Why did anybody develop them?”

  “Plans for using raboons as game, to hunt, Ruben said. Something new and challenging.”

  “Hunting? Business will exploit any throwback primitivism to—” He had been about to launch into a little lecture on how far humanity had come, when he realized that he didn’t believe it anymore. “Um.”

  “You’ve always thought of people as cerebral. No sociohistory could work if it didn’t take into account our animal selves.”

  “Our worst sins are all our own, I fear.” He had not expected that his experiences here would shake him so. This was sobering.

  “Not at all.” Kelly gave him a lofty look. “I’ve been reading some of the Station background data on our room computer. Genocide occurs in wolves and chimps alike. Murder is widespread. Ducks and orangutans rape. Even ants have organized warfare and slave raids. Chimps have at least as good a chance of being murdered as do humans, Ruben says. Of all the hallowed hallmarks—speech, art, technology, and the rest—the one which comes most obviously from animal ancestors was genocide.”

  “You’ve been learning from Ruben.”

  “It was a good way to keep an eye on him.”

  “Better to be suspicious than sorry?”

  “Of course,” she said blandly. “Can’t let Africa soften our brains.”

  “Well, luckily, even if we are superchimps, throughout human society, communication blurs distinctions between Us and Them.”

  “So?”

  “That blunts the deep impulse to genocide.”

  She laughed again, this time rather to his annoyance. “You haven’t understood history very well. Smaller groups still kill each other off with great relish. In Bosnia, during the reign of Omar the Impaler—”

  “I concede, there are small-scale tragedies by the dozens. But on the scale where sociohistory might work, averaging over populations of many millions—”

  “What makes you so sure numbers are any protection?” she asked pointedly.

  “Well—without further work, I have nothing to say.”

  She smiled. “How uncharacteristic.”

  “Until I have a real, working theory.”

  “One that can allow for widespread genocide?”

  He saw her point then. “You’re saying I really need this ‘animal nature’ part of humans.”

  “I’m afraid so. ‘Civilized man’ is a contradiction in terms. Scheming, plots, Sheelah grabbing more meat for her young, Ipan wanting to do in Biggest—those things happen in fancy urban nations. They’re just better disguised.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “People use their intelligence to hide motives. Consider ExSpec Ruben. He made a comment about your working on a ‘theory of history’ the other evening.”

  “So?”

  “Who told him you were?”

  “I don’t think I—ah, you think he’s checking up on us?”

  “He already knows.”

  “We’re just tourists here.”

  She graced him with an unreadable smile. “I do love your endless, naive way of seeing the world.”

  Later, he couldn’t decide whether she had meant that as a compliment.

  * * *

  Ruben invited him to try a combat sport the Station offered, and Leon accepted. It was an enhanced swordplay using levitation through electrostatic lifters. Leon was slow and inept. Using his own body against Ruben’s swift moves made him long for the sureness and grace of Ipan.

  Ruben always opened with a traditional posture: one foot forward, his prod-sword making little circles in the air. Leon poked through Ruben’s defense sometimes, but usually spent all his lifter energy eluding Ruben’s thrusts. He did not enjoy it nearly as much as Ruben. The dry African air seemed to steal energy from him too, whereas Ipan reveled in it.

  He did learn bits and pieces about chimps from Ruben, and from trolling through the vast Station library. The man seemed a bit uneasy when Leon probed the data arrays, as though Ruben somehow owned them and any reader was a thief. Or at least that was what Leon took to be the origin of the unease.

  He had never thought about animals very much, though he had grown up among them on the farm. Yet he came to feel that they, too, had to be understood.

  Catching sight of itself in a mirror, a dog sees the image as another dog. So did cats, fish, or birds. After a while they get used to the harmless image, silent and smell-free, but they did not see it as themselves.

  Human children had to be about two years old to do better.

  Chimps took a few days to figure out that they were looking at themselves. Then they preened before it shamelessly, studied their backs, and generally tried to see themselves differently, even putting leaves on their backs like hats and laughing at the result.

  So they could do something other animals could not—get outside themselves, and look back.

  They plainly lived in a world charged with echoes and reminiscences. Their dominance hierarchy was a frozen record of past coercion. They remembered termite mounds, trees to drum, useful spots where large water-sponge leaves fell, or grain matured.

  All this fed into the toy model he had begun building in his notes—a chimp sociohistory. It used their movements, rivalries, hierarchies, patterns of eating, and mating and dying. Territory, resources, and troop competition for them. He found a way to factor into his equations the biological baggage of dark behaviors. Even the worst, like delight in torture and easy exterminations of other species for short-term gain. All these the chimps had. Just like today’s newspaper.

  * * *

  At a dance that evening he watched the crowd with fresh vision.

  Flirting was practice mating. He could see it in the sparkle of eyes, the rhythms of the dance. The warm breeze wafting up from the valley brought smells of dust, rot, life. An animal restlessness moved in the room.

  He quite liked dancing and Kelly was a lush companion tonight. Yet he could not stop his mind from sifting, analyzing, taking the world before him apart into mechanisms.

  The nonverbal template humans used for attract/approach strategies apparently descended from a shared mammalian heritage, Kelly had pointed out. He thought of that, watching the crowd at the bar.

  A woman crosses a crowded room, hips swaying, eyes resting momentarily on a likely man, then coyly looking away just as she apparently notices hi
s regard. A standard opening move: Notice me.

  The second is I am harmless. A hand placed palm up on a table or knee. A shoulder shrug, derived from an ancient vertebrate reflex, signifying helplessness. Combine that with a tilted head, which displays the vulnerability of the neck. These commonly appeared when two people drawn to each other have their first conversation—all quite unconsciously.

  Such moves and gestures are subcortical, emerging far below in a swamp of primordial circuitry … which had survived until now, because it worked.

  Did such forces shape history more than trade balances, alliances, treaties? He looked at his own kind and tried to see it through chimp eyes.

  Though human females matured earlier, they did not go on to acquire coarse body hair, bony eye ridges, deep voices, or tough skin. Males did. And women everywhere strove to stay young-looking. Cosmetics makers freely admitted their basic role: We don’t sell products; we sell hope.

  Competition for mates was incessant. Male chimps sometimes took turns with females in estrus. They had huge testicles, implying that reproductive advantage had come to those males who produced enough to overwhelm their rivals’ contributions. Human males had proportionally smaller testicles.

  But humans got their revenge where it mattered. Of all primates, humans had the largest penises.

  All primates had separated out as species many millions of years ago. In DNA-measured time, chimps lay six million years from humans. He mentioned to Kelly that only 4 percent of mammals formed pair bonds, were monogamous. Primates rated a bit higher, but not much. Birds were much better at it.

  She sniffed. “Don’t let all this biology go to your head.”

  “Oh no, I won’t let it get that far.”

  “You mean it belongs in lower places?”

  “Madam, you’ll have to be the judge of that.”

  “Ah, you and your single-entendre humor.”

  Later that evening, with her, he had ample opportunity to reflect upon the truth that, while it was not always great to be human, it was tremendous fun being a mammal.

  * * *

  They spent a last day immersed in their chimps, sunning themselves beside a gushing stream. The plane would pick them up early the next morning; Helsinki waited. They packed and entered the immersion capsule and sank into a last reverie. Sun, sweet air, the lassitude of the primitive …

  Until Biggest started to mount Sheelah.

  Leon/Ipan sat up, his head foggy. Sheelah was shrieking at Biggest. She slapped him.

  Biggest had mounted Sheelah before. Kelly had bailed out, her mind returning to her body in the capsule.

  Something was different now. Ipan hurried over and signed to Sheelah, who was throwing pebbles at Biggest. What?

  She moved her hands rapidly, signing, No go.

  She could not bail out. Something was wrong back at the capsule. He could go back himself, tell them.

  Leon made the little mental flip that would bail him out.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again. Sheelah threw dust and pebbles, backing away from Biggest. Nothing.

  No time to think. He stepped between Sheelah and Biggest.

  The massive chimp frowned. Here was Ipan, buddy Ipan, getting in the way. Denying him a fern. Biggest seemed to have forgotten the challenge and beating of the day before.

  First he tried bellowing, eyes big and white. Then Biggest shook his arms, fists balled.

  Leon made his chimp stand still. It took every calming impulse he could muster.

  Biggest swung his fist like a club.

  Ipan ducked. Biggest missed.

  Leon was having trouble controlling Ipan, who wanted to flee. Sheets of fear shot up through the chimp mind, hot yellows in the blue-black depths.

  Biggest charged forward, slamming Ipan back. Leon felt the jolt, a stabbing pain in his chest. He toppled backward. Hit hard.

  Biggest yowled his triumph. Waved his arms at the sky.

  Biggest would get on top, he saw. Beat him again.

  Suddenly he felt a deep, raw hatred.

  From that red seethe he felt his grip on Ipan tighten. He was riding both with and within the chimp, feeling its raw red fear, overrunning that with an iron rage. Ipan’s own wrath fed back into Leon. The two formed a concert, anger building as if reflected from hard walls.

  He might not be the same kind of primate, but he knew Ipan. Neither of them was going to get beaten again. And Biggest was not going to get Sheelah/Kelly.

  He rolled to the side. Biggest hit the ground where he had been.

  Ipan leaped up and kicked Biggest. Hard, in the ribs. Once, twice. Then in the head.

  Whoops, cries, dust, pebbles—Sheelah was still bombarding them both. Ipan shivered with boiling energy and backed away.

  Biggest shook his dusty head. Then he curled and rolled easily up to his feet, full of muscular grace, face a constricted mask. The chimp’s eyes widened, showing white and red.

  Ipan yearned to run. Only Leon’s rage held him in place.

  But it was a static balance of forces. Ipan blinked as Biggest shuffled warily forward, the big chimp’s caution a tribute to the damage Ipan had inflicted.

  I need some advantage, Leon thought, looking around. He could call for allies. Hunker paced nervously nearby.

  Something told Leon that would be a losing strategy. Hunker was still a lieutenant to Biggest. Sheelah was too small to make a decisive difference. He looked at the other chimps, all chattering anxiously—and decided. He picked up a rock.

  Biggest grunted in surprise. Chimps didn’t use rocks against each other. Rocks were only for repelling invaders. He was violating a social code.

  Biggest yelled, waved to the others, pounded the ground, huffed angrily. Then he charged.

  Leon threw the rock hard. It hit Biggest in the chest, knocked him down.

  Biggest came up fast, madder than before. Ipan scurried back, wanting desperately to run. Leon felt control slipping from him—and saw another rock. Suitable size, two paces back. He let Ipan turn to flee, then stopped and looked at the stone. Ipan didn’t want to hold it. Panic ran through him.

  Leon poured his rage into the chimp, forced the long arms down. Hands grabbed at the stone, fumbled, got it. Sheer anger made Ipan turn to face Biggest, who was thundering after him. To Leon, Ipan’s arm came up in achingly slow motion. He leaned heavily into the pitch. The rock smacked Biggest in the face.

  Biggest staggered. Blood ran into his eyes. Ipan caught the iron scent of it, riding on a prickly stench of outrage.

  Leon made his trembling Ipan stoop down. There were some shaped stones nearby, made by the ferns to trim leaves from branches. He picked up one with a chipped edge.

  Biggest waved his head, dizzy.

  Ipan glanced at the sober, still faces of his troop. No one had used a rock against a troop member, much less Biggest. Rocks were for Strangers.

  A long, shocked silence stretched. The chimps stood rooted, Biggest grunted and peered in disbelief at the blood that spattered into his up-turned hand.

  Ipan stepped forward and raised the jagged stone, edge held outward. Crude, but a cutting edge.

  Biggest flared his nostrils and came at Ipan. Ipan swept the rock through the air, barely missing Biggest’s jaw.

  Biggest’s eyes widened. He huffed and puffed, threw dust, howled. Ipan simply stood with the rock and held his ground. Biggest kept up his anger-display for a long while, but he did not attack.

  The troop watched with intense interest. Sheelah came and stood beside Ipan. It would have been against protocols for a female to take part in male-dominance rituals.

  Her movement signaled that the confrontation was over. But Hunker was having none of that. He abruptly howled, pounded the ground, and scooted over to Ipan’s side.

  Leon was surprised. With Hunker maybe he could hold the line against Biggest. He was not fool enough to think that this one standoff would put Biggest to rest. There would be other challenges and he would have to fight
them. Hunker would be a useful ally.

  He realized that he was thinking in the slow, muted logic of Ipan himself. He assumed that the pursuit of chimp status-markers was a given, the great goal of his life.

  This revelation startled him. He had known that he was diffusing into Ipan’s mind, taking control of some functions from the bottom up, seeping through the deeply buried, walnut-sized gyrus. It had not occurred to him that the chimp would diffuse into him. Were they now married to each other in an interlocked web that dispersed mind and self?

  Hunker stood beside him, eyes glaring at the other chimps, chest heaving. Ipan felt the same way, madly pinned to the moment. Leon realized that he would have to do something, break this cycle of dominance and submission which ruled Ipan at the deep, neurological level.

  He turned to Sheelah. Get out? he signed.

  No. No. Her chimp face wrinkled with anxiety.

  Leave. He waved toward the trees, pointed to her, then him.

  She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  It was infuriating. He had so much to say to her and he had to funnel it through a few hundred signs. He chippered in a high-pitched voice, trying vainly to force the chimp lips and palate to do the work of shaping words.

  It was no use. He had tried before, idly, but now he wanted to badly and none of the equipment worked. It couldn’t. Evolution had shaped brain and vocal chords in parallel. Chimps groomed, people talked.

  He turned back and realized that he had forgotten entirely about the status-setting. Biggest was glowering at him. Hunker stood guard, confused at his new leader’s sudden loss of interest in the confrontation—and to gesture at a mere fern too.

  Leon reared up as tall as he could and waved the stone. This produced the desired effect. Biggest inched back a bit and the rest of the troop edged closer. Leon made Ipan stalk forward boldly. By this time it did not take much effort, for Ipan was enjoying this enormously.

  Biggest retreated. Ferns inched around Biggest and approached Ipan.

  If only I could leave him to the fems’ delights, Leon thought.

  He tried to bail out again. Nothing. The mechanism wasn’t working back at the Excursion Station. And something told him that it wasn’t going to get fixed.

  He gave the edged stone to Hunker. The chimp seemed surprised but took it. Leon hoped the symbolism of the gesture would penetrate in some fashion because he had no time left to spend on chimp politics. Hunker hefted the rock and looked at Ipan. Then he cried in a rolling, powerful voice, tones rich in joy and triumph.