Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition

by Gardner Dozois

  ###

  Early last month Vendelmans and I were alone with the chimps in the compound when suddenly he said, “I’m going to faint.” It was a sizzling May morning, but Vendelmans had never shown any sign of noticing unusual heat, let alone suffering from it. I was busy talking to Leo and Mimsy and Mimsy’s daughter Muffin, and I registered Vendelmans’s remark without doing anything about it. When you’re intensely into talking by sign language, as we are in the project, you sometimes tend not to pay a lot of attention to spoken words.

  But then Leo began to sign the trouble sign at me, and I turned around and saw Vendelmans down on his knees in the grass, white-faced, gasping, covered with sweat. A few of the chimpanzees who aren’t as sensitive to humans as Leo is thought it was a game and began to pantomime him, knuckles to the ground and bodies going limp. “Sick—” Vendelmans said. “Feel—terrible—”

  I called for help, and Gonzo took his left arm and Kong took his right and somehow, big as he was, we managed to get him out of the compound and up the hill to headquarters. By then he was complaining about sharp pains in his back and under his arms, and I realized that it wasn’t just heat prostration. Within a week the diagnosis was in.

  Leukemia.

  They put him on chemotherapy and hormones, and after ten days he was back with the project, looking cocky. “They’ve stabilized it,” he told everyone. “It’s in remission and I might have ten or twenty years left, or even more. I’m going to carry on with my work.”

  But he was gaunt and pale, with a tremor in his hands, and it was a frightful thing to have him among us. He might have been fooling himself, though I doubted it, but he wasn’t fooling any of us: to us he was a memento mori, a walking death’s-head-and-crossbones. That laymen think scientists are any more casual about such things than anyone else is something I blame Hollywood for. It is not easy to go about your daily work with a dying man at your side—or a dying man’s wife, for Judy Vendelmans showed in her frightened eyes all the grief that Hal Vendelmans himself was repressing. She was going to lose a beloved husband unexpectedly soon and she hadn’t had time to adjust to it and her pain was impossible to ignore. Besides, the nature of Vendelmans’s dyingness was particularly unsettling because he had been so big and robust and outgoing, a true Rabelaisian figure, and somehow between one moment and the next he was transformed into a wraith. “The finger of God,” Dave Yost said. “A quick flick of Zeus s pinkie and Hal shrivels like cellophane in a fireplace.” Vendelmans was not yet forty.

  The chimps suspected something, too.

  Some of them, such as Leo and Ramona, are fifth-generation signers, bred for alpha intelligence, and they pick up subtleties and nuances very well. “Almost human,” visitors like to say of them. We dislike that tag, because the important thing about chimpanzees is that they aren’t human, that they are an alien intelligent species; but yet I know what people mean. The brightest of the chimps saw right away that something was amiss with Vendelmans, and started making odd remarks. “Big one rotten banana,” said Ramona to Mimsy while I was nearby. “He getting empty,” Leo said to me as Vendelmans stumbled past us. Chimp metaphors never cease to amaze me. And Gonzo asked him outright: “You go away soon?”

  ###

  “Go away” is not the chimp euphemism for death. So far as our animals know, no human being has ever died. Chimps die. Human beings go away. We have kept things on that basis from the beginning, not intentionally at first, but such arrangements have a way of institutionalizing themselves. The first member of the group to die was Roger Nixon, in an automobile accident in the early years of the project long before my time here, and apparently no one wanted to confuse or disturb the animals by explaining what had happened to him, so no explanations were offered. My second or third year here, Tim Lippinger was killed in a ski-lift failure, and again it seemed easier not to go into details with them. And by the time of Will Bechstein’s death in that helicopter crack-up four years ago the policy was explicit: we chose not to regard his disappearance from the group as death, but mere going away, as if he had only retired. The chimps do understand death, of course. They may even equate it with going away, as Gonzo’s question suggests. But if they do, they surely see human death as something quite different from chimpanzee death—a translation to another state of being, an ascent on a chariot of fire. Yost believes that they have no comprehension of human death at all, that they think we are immortal, that they think we are gods.

  ###

  Vendelmans now no longer pretends that he isn’t dying. The leukemia is plainly acute, and he deteriorates physically from day to day. His original this-isn’t-actually-happening attitude has been replaced by a kind of sullen, angry acceptance. It is only the fourth week since the onset of the ailment and soon he’ll have to enter the hospital.

  And he wants to tell the chimps that he’s going to die.

  “They don’t know that human beings can die,” Yost said.

  “Then it’s time they found out,” Vendelmans snapped. “Why perpetuate a load of mythological bullshit about us? Why let them think we’re gods? Tell them outright that I’m going to die, the way old Egbert died and Salami and Mortimer.”

  “But they all died naturally,” Jan Morton said.

  “And I’m not dying naturally?”

  She became terribly flustered. “Of old age, I mean. Their life cycles clearly and understandably came to an end and they died and the chimps understood it. Whereas you—” She faltered.

  “—am dying a monstrous and terrible death midway through my life,” Vendelmans said, and started to break down and recovered with a fierce effort, and Jan began to cry, and it was generally a bad scene from which Vendelmans saved us by going on, “It should be of philosophical importance to the project to discover how the chimps react to a revaluation of the human metaphysic. We’ve ducked every chance we’ve had to help them understand the nature of mortality. Now I propose we use me to teach them that humans are subject to the same laws they are. That we are not gods.”

  “And that gods exist,” said Yost, “who are capricious and unfathomable and to whom we ourselves are as less than chimps.”

  Vendelmans shrugged. “They don’t need to hear all that now. But it’s time they understood what we are. Or rather, it’s time that we learned how much they already understand. Use my death as a way of finding out. It’s the first time they’ve been in the presence of a human who’s actually in the process of dying. The other times one of us has died, it’s always been in some sort of accident.”

  Burt Christensen said, “Hal, have you already told them anything about—”

  “No,” Vendelmans said. “Of course not. Not a word. But I see them talking to each other. They know.”

  ###

  We discussed it far into the night. The question needed careful examination because of the far-reaching consequences of any change we might make in the metaphysical givens of our animals. These chimps have lived in a closed environment here for decades, and the culture they have evolved is a product of what we have chosen to teach them, compounded by their own innate chimpness plus whatever we have unknowingly transmitted to them about ourselves or them. Any radical conceptual material we offer them must be weighed thoughtfully, because its effects will be irreversible, and those who succeed us in this community will be unforgiving if we do anything stupidly premature. If the plan is to observe a community of intelligent primates over a period of many human generations, studying the changes in their intellectual capacity as their linguistic skills increase, then we must at all times take care to let them find things out for themselves, rather than skewing our data by giving the chimps more than their current concept-processing abilities may be able to handle.

  On the other hand, Vendelmans was dying right now, allowing us a dramatic opportunity to convey the concept of human mortality. We had at best a week or two to make use of that opportunity: then it might be years before the next chance.

  “What are you worried about?�
� Vendelmans demanded.

  Yost said, “Do you fear dying, Hal?”

  “Dying makes me angry. I don’t fear it; but I still have things to do, and I won’t be able to do them. Why do you ask?”

  “Because so far as we know the chimps see death—chimp death—as simply part of the great cycle of events, like the darkness that comes after the daylight. But human death is going to come as a revelation to them, a shock. And if they pick up from you any sense of fear or even anger over your dying, who knows what impact that will have on their way of thought?”

  “Exactly. Who knows? I offer you a chance to find out!” By a narrow margin, finally we voted to let Hal Vendelmans share his death with the chimpanzees. Nearly all of us had reservations about that. But plainly Vendelmans was determined to have a useful death, a meaningful death; the only way he could face his fate at all was by contributing it like this to the project. And in the end I think most of us cast our votes his way purely out of our love for him.

  ###

  We rearranged the schedules to give Vendelmans more contact with the animals. There are ten of us, fifty of them; each of us has a special field of inquiry—number theory, syntactical innovation, metaphysical exploration, semiotics, tool use, and so on—and we work with chimps of our own choice, subject, naturally, to the shifting patterns of subtribal bonding within the chimp community. But we agreed that Vendelmans would have to offer his revelations to the alpha intelligences—Leo, Ramona, Grimsky, Alice, and Attila—regardless of the current structure of the chimp-human dialogues. Leo, for instance, was involved in an ongoing interchange with Beth Rankin on the notion of the change of seasons. Beth more or less willingly gave up her time with Leo to Vendelmans, for Leo was essential in this. We learned long ago that anything important had to be imparted to the alphas first, and they will impart it to the others. A bright chimp knows more about teaching things to his duller cousins than the brightest human being. The next morning Hal and Judy Vendelmans took Leo, Ramona, and Attila aside and held a long conversation with them. I was busy in a different part of the compound with Gonzo, Mimsy, Muffin, and Chump, but I glanced over occasionally to see what was going on. Hal looked radiant—like Moses just down from the mountain after talking with God. Judy was trying to look radiant, too, working at it, but her grief kept breaking through: once I saw her turn away from the chimps and press her knuckles to her teeth to hold it back.

  Afterward Leo and Grimsky had a conference out by the oak grove. Yost and Charley Damiano watched it with binoculars, but they couldn’t make much sense out of it. The chimps, when they sign to each other, use modified gestures much less precise than the ones they use with us; whether this marks the evolution of a special chimp-to-chimp argot designed not to be understood by us, or is simply a factor of chimp reliance on supplementary nonverbal ways of communicating, is something we still don’t know, but the fact remains that we have trouble comprehending the sign language they use with each other, particularly the form the alphas use. Then, too, Leo and Grimsky kept wandering in and out of the trees, as if perhaps they knew we were watching them and didn’t want us to eavesdrop. A little later in the day, Ramona and Alice had the same sort of meeting. Now all five of our alphas must have been in on the revelation.

  Somehow the news began to filter down to the rest of them.

  We weren’t able to observe actual concept transmission. We did notice that Vendelmans, the next day, began to get rather more attention than normal. Little troops of chimpanzees formed about him as he moved—slowly, and in obvious difficulty—about the compound. Gonzo and Chump, who had been bickering for months, suddenly were standing side by side staring intently at Vendelmans. Chicory, normally shy, went out of her way to engage him in a conversation—about the ripeness of the apples on the tree, Vendelmans reported. Anna Livia’s young twins, Shem and Shaun, climbed up and sat on Vendelmans’s shoulders.

  “They want to find out what a dying god is really like,” Yost said quietly.

  “But look there,” Jan Morton said.

  Judy Vendelmans had an entourage, too: Mimsy, Muffin, Claudius, Buster, and Kong. Staring in fascination, eyes wide, lips extended, some of them blowing little bubbles of saliva.

  “Do they think she’s dying, too?” Beth wondered.

  Yost shook his head. “Probably not. They can see there’s nothing physically wrong with her. But they’re picking up the sorrow vibes, the death vibes.”

  “Is there any reason to think they’re aware that Hal is Judy’s mate?” Christensen asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Yost said. “They can see that she’s upset. That interests them, even if they have no way of knowing why Judy would be more upset than any of the rest of us.”

  “More mysteries out yonder,” I said, pointing into the meadow. Grimsky was standing by himself out there, contemplating something. He is the oldest of the chimps, gray-haired, going bald, a deep thinker. He has been here almost from the beginning, more than thirty years, and very little has escaped his attention in that time.

  Far off to the left, in the shade of the big beech tree, Leo stood similarly in solitary meditation. He is twenty, the alpha male of the community, the strongest and by far the most intelligent. It was eerie to see the two of them in their individual zones of isolation, like distant sentinels, like Easter Island statues, lost in private reveries.

  “Philosophers,” Yost murmured.

  ###

  Yesterday Vendelmans returned to the hospital for good. Before he went, he made his farewells to each of the fifty chimpanzees, even the infants. In the past week he has altered markedly: he is only a shadow of himself, feeble, wasted. Judy says he’ll live only another few weeks. She has gone on leave and probably won’t come back until after Hal’s death. I wonder what the chimps will make of her “going away,” and of her eventual return.

  She said that Leo had asked her if she was dying, too.

  Perhaps things will get back to normal here now.

  Christensen asked me this morning, “Have you noticed the way they seem to drag the notion of death into whatever conversation you’re having with them these days?”

  I nodded. “Mimsy asked me the other day if the moon dies when the sun comes up and the sun dies when the moon is out. It seemed like such a standard primitive metaphor that I didn’t pick up on it at first. But Mimsy’s too young for using metaphor that easily and she isn’t particularly clever. The older ones must be talking about dying a lot, and it’s filtering down.”

  “Chicory was doing subtraction with me,” Christensen said. “She signed, ‘You take five, two die, you have three!’ Later she turned it into a verb: ‘Three die one equals two.’”

  Others reported similar things. Yet none of the animals were talking about Vendelmans and what was about to happen to him, nor were they asking any overt questions about death or dying. So far as we were able to perceive, they had displaced the whole thing into metaphorical diversions. That in itself indicated a powerful obsession. Like most obsessives, they were trying to hide the thing that most concerned them, and they probably thought they were doing a good job of it. It isn’t their fault that we’re able to guess what’s going on in their minds. They are, after all—and we sometimes have to keep reminding ourselves of this—only chimpanzees.

  ###

  They are holding meetings on the far side of the oak grove, where the little stream runs. Leo and Grimsky seem to do most of the talking, and the others gather around and sit very quietly as the speeches are made. The groups run from ten to thirty chimps at a time. We are unable to discover what they’re discussing, though of course we have an idea. Whenever one of us approaches such a gathering, the chimps very casually drift off into three or four separate groups and look exceedingly innocent—“We just out for some fresh air, boss.”

  Charley Damiano wants to plant a bug in the grove. But how do you spy on a group that converses only in sign language? Cameras aren’t as easily hidden as microphones.

  We
do our best with binoculars. But what little we’ve been able to observe has been mystifying. The chimp-to-chimp signs they use at these meetings are even more oblique and confusing than the ones we had seen earlier. It’s as if they’re holding their meetings in pig Latin, or double-talk or in some entirely new and private language.

  Two technicians will come tomorrow to help us mount cameras in the grove.

  ###

  Hal Vendelmans died last night. According to Judy, who phoned Dave Yost, it was very peaceful right at the end, an easy release. Yost and I broke the news to the alpha chimps just after breakfast. No euphemisms, just the straight news. Ramona made a few hooting sounds and looked as if she might cry, but she was the only one who seemed emotionally upset. Leo gave me a long deep look of what was almost certainly compassion, and then he hugged me very hard. Grimsky wandered away and seemed to be signing to himself in the new system. Now a meeting seems to be assembling in the oak grove, the first one in more than a week.

  The cameras are in place. Even if we can’t decipher the new signs, we can at least tape them and subject them to computer analysis until we begin to understand.

  Now we’ve watched the first tapes of a grove meeting, but I can’t say we know a lot more than we did before.

  For one thing, they disabled two of the cameras right at the outset. Attila spotted them and sent Gonzo and Claudius up into the trees to yank them out. I suppose the remaining cameras went unnoticed; but by accident or deliberate diabolical craftiness, the chimps positioned themselves in such a way that none of the cameras had a clear angle. We did record a few statements from Leo and some give-and-take between Alice and Anna Livia. They spoke in a mixture of standard signs and the new ones, but, without a sense of the context, we’ve found it impossible to generate any sequence of meanings. Stray signs such as “shirt,” “hat,” “human,” “change,” and “banana fly,” interspersed with undecipherable stuff, seem to be adding up to something, but no one is sure what. We observed no mention of Hal Vendelmans nor any direct references to death. We may be misleading ourselves entirely about the significance of all this.