by John Jakes
Teacher nodded slowly and turned to the gorillas. “I… I’m sorry. The writing you destroyed was by Caesar’s son. I… did not want you to suffer Caesar’s anger.”
Aldo snarled at the name. “What do I care for Caesar’s anger? Let me give you a taste of mine!” The big gorilla lifted up a block of wood and hurled it at Teacher’s head. Taking their cue, the other gorillas began to run joyfully amok, roaring and screaming. They overturned Teacher’s desk and ripped up the papyruses. And then they headed for Teacher.
Teacher ran from the classroom. The gorillas boiled after him like bees swarming out of a hive. He lurched out into the street, stumbled, caught his footing and ran. The gorillas chased after him, and the rest of the students, seeing the excitement, came tailing after.
Teacher panted as he ran—he wasn’t used to this kind of exercise-—his lungs ached from the effort; he charged through stalls of fruit and vegetables. The gorillas came barreling after, upsetting baskets and tables. Aldo was in the lead, shouting and roaring. The shoppers and stall-tenders screamed as they leapt out of his way.
Teacher dodged and whirled, around a house, down a street. There, ahead of him! There was a work area where humans were plaiting screen walls for houses. Maybe he could hide there! But the gorillas had already seen him. They came crashing through the screens after him.
Teacher tried to hold onto his glasses as he ran. He took off again, this time in a different direction— toward Caesar’s house. Caesar would help him!
But he wasn’t fast enough. Aldo came roaring down on him like a freight train and threw him roughly to the ground, pushing him into the dirt.
Grinning fiercely, Aldo drew his sword from his belt. It was broad and flat and short. He raised it high over his head.
Teacher tried to raise one arm in protest. Apes and humans alike gasped in shock.
And then someone, an ape, cried, “Stop!”
All heads, whirled to look—it was Caesar, standing in his doorway. He was a tall, strong chimpanzee; he had the bearing of a leader. Just behind him stood MacDonald, his chief human adviser.
The gorillas stared at Caesar. Aldo glared sullenly at him, his sword still raised over Teacher.
Caesar stepped down from the doorway, his stare fiercer than Aldo’s. “I said… stop… Aldo.”
Their eyes locked. Aldo burned with a fierce red anger, but Caesar’s quieter strength was more effective. Aldo averted his eyes. He looked around for support, but there was none from the other gorillas; they were too thoroughly cowed by Caesar’s authority. And there was certainly none from any of the chimpanzees and orangutans in the crowd; they were eyeing the gorillas with cold disdain and Caesar with love and respect.
At last, slowly, Aldo lowered his sword. But he waved in the direction of the Teacher, shouting his frustration. “He broke the Law! With his own mouth he broke the First Law!”
Caesar seemed to grow. “I am the Law,” he said sternly. “And if I find that he has broken it, I shall pass judgment. What has he done?”
Virgil pushed forward through the crowd. “I can tell you. I was there.”
Caesar turned to him, his tone softening, “Yes, Virgil…?”
“I was there,” Virgil said breathlessly; he too was still panting from the chase. “Teacher only… only… reverted to type under provocation. He spoke like a slave master from the old days of servitude. He spoke the negative imperative used for the conditioning of mechanical obedience.”
Caesar smothered a smile. MacDonald grinned broadly. Caesar said, “Put that in words which even Caesar can understand.”
“He said, ‘No, Aldo, no!’”
The crowd gasped at that, the apes in anger, the humans in fear.
MacDonald stepped forward and began to help Teacher up. “Teacher, you’re old enough to be well aware that ‘No’ is the one word a human may never say to an ape, because apes once heard it said to them a hundred times a day by humans.”
“Yes,” Teacher nodded. “I am old enough.”
“Then what was the provocation?”
Teacher was uneasy. He swallowed hard. He looked back and forth between Caesar, Aldo, and MacDonald. Finally, he managed to say, “General Aldo tore up a writing exercise written especially for me by Caesar’s son. It was very good and… respectfully affectionate.”
Caesar turned to Aldo and confronted him. “Why did you tear it up?”
Aldo sullenly refused to answer. From the crowd, a young chimpanzee called, “Because Teacher said that, the general’s writing was very bad.”
The chimpanzees and orangutans in the crowd laughed. The gorillas didn’t; they fumed in silent embarrassment, and one or two curled their lips in anger.
Caesar said, after a pause, “General Aldo is a very good rider. My son is not, though he wishes to be. But my son is a very good writer. General Aldo is not. Apes cannot excel at everything,” he said, smiling obliquely at Virgil, “with very few exceptions. That is all there is to it. The matter will be forgotten. Now go back to school.”
“The schoolroom has been wrecked, Caesar,” Virgil said. “By the gorillas.”
Aldo snorted triumphantly. “Class ended! Schoolroom closed! Now we go back to riding horses!” There was an approving bark from the gorilla group behind him, but it was quickly checked as Caesar advanced to within an inch of the general’s face.
Caesar’s voice was firm. “You and your ‘friends’ will go back and put the schoolroom in order.”
Their eyes locked. Aldo glared back, not quite totally defiant, not yet. He fumed, but he sheathed his sword.
Caesar turned on his heel and headed back toward his house, summoning MacDonald to his side with a curt gesture.
MacDonald caught up to him, frowning. This might be a good time to broach the subject of what happened on the road. He offered, “Caesar, I think that Aldo’s hatred is not confined to humans.”
Caesar was charitable; he shrugged it off. “Aldo still remembers the old days.”
MacDonald couldn’t be that charitable. “I think he’d like to bring them back.”
Caesar looked at him curiously, but he did not ask the man to explain his odd remark.
2
Caesar’s house was large and airy, its architectural style simple and clean. It was decorated with wood and paper and plaited screens. The impression was that of a rich tropical forest brought indoors.
Caesar’s wife, Lisa, a pretty young chimpanzee, was preparing a meal of fruit, nuts, and vegetables for her husband and his adviser, MacDonald. A young, attractive serving girl was working with her.
Occasionally, Lisa would cast a motherly glance out the window. Directly outside was a collection of swings, vines, and perches on which Cornelius was playing with a human boy.
At the moment, Cornelius was poised on a perch. “Hey, Jimmy, d’you want to play follow-my-leader?” And with that, he executed a series of complicated flips, landing easily on a lower limb.
Jimmy watched sourly. When Cornelius stopped and looked at him questioningly, he made a disgusted face. “No. You’re always the leader.” He reached down and picked up a stick about rifle length; he pointed it at Cornelius, “Tchang, tchang! I got you!”
Cornelius clutched his breast, fell backward off the limb to the ground, uttering a loud cry of agony.
Almost immediately, Lisa stuck her head out the window. Seeing Cornelius lying on the ground, she hurried outside. “Cornelius, are you hurt?”
Cornelius rolled over and opened his eyes. He looked up at her. “No, Mother. I’m just dead.”
“Dead?”
At this, Jimmy hid the makeshift gun behind his back, then dropped it quietly to the ground.
Cornelius grinned and explained, “We were playing gorillas.”
Lisa frowned. First at her son, then at Jimmy. Was this human child teaching Cornelius bad habits? Jimmy sidled off backward, looking ashamed and defensive. “You were playing what?” she asked.
Cornelius stood up. “We were play
ing war.”
“War?” Now Lisa was upset. She straightened abruptly. The sudden motion startled Jimmy. Already thoroughly intimidated, he turned and ran. Lisa watched him go in annoyance, then turned back to her son. She spoke icily. “Cornelius, hasn’t your father explained to you many times that war isn’t a game, except to pear-shaped old generals sticking colored pins in a map three thousand miles behind the firing lines?”
Cornelius looked properly abashed. “Yes, Mother.”
“And hasn’t he forbidden you to play with guns or to make a game of killing?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Then you’ll stop it?”
“Yes, Mother.”
Satisfied, Lisa turned and reentered the house. Caesar and MacDonald had come in while she was dealing with Cornelius. They had seated themselves at the dining room table and were talking quietly. Lisa moved to help the serving girl finish the dinner preparations.
MacDonald was saying, “You handled that situation with Aldo very adroitly, Caesar.”
Caesar sighed and shook his head. “I wish I had been educated to be a ruler.”
MacDonald looked puzzled. “Didn’t Armando…?”
Caesar shook his head again. “My dear, dead human foster-father—when he wasn’t training me to be a bareback rider in his circus—taught me the sum of all human virtues. Which is that we must love one another or die. The lion-tamer was allowed to crack his whip, provided he didn’t whip the lion.”
“And if the lion attacked the tamer?”
“The lion never did. That’s how I thought it would be in the world outside. If my father and mother had only lived, they might have taught me whether it was right to kill an evil enemy so that good should prevail.”
“Well,” said MacDonald. “History shows…”
Caesar cut him off sharply. “Human history! Not ape history. Ape never kills ape!”
Chastened, MacDonald shut up.
Caesar said, a little more slowly, reaching out to his friend, “We are making a new kind of world, MacDonald. We cannot replace one master with another; we must do away with those old human ideas of masters and slaves altogether. There must be no killing, no violence, no oppression of any kind. Human history says it’s all right to kill. Apes must make a new kind of history, and we have no precedents to guide us, man friend.”
MacDonald bit his lip; he wanted to speak but was holding himself back. He knew that Caesar was wrong on this point. There had been good men and noble precedents in human history—there would always be good men; apes could not have freed themselves without the help of good men. MacDonald’s own brother had once aided Caesar, saved him from the governor of the city.
But there was no way he could convince Caesar that there were noble precedents in human history. Caesar was convinced he was bringing a new idea to the world. MacDonald sighed to himself. He wished he could get it through to the chimpanzee that what he thought was new thinking was only ignorance of the past.
Lisa brought the food to the table then. The bowls were rough cut out of wood, as was the table, almost refectory style. She and the serving girl placed the meal, totally vegetarian, before the chimpanzee and the man.
MacDonald took advantage of the interruption to try to change the mood. He exclaimed hungrily, “Mmm, I could eat a horse.”
Lisa stopped in startlement and looked at him. “A horse?”
Caesar looked up, realizing her misconception, and joked, “You remember, Lisa. They used to eat all sorts of things—dead cattle, dead chickens, dead pigs, dead fish…”
“Fish I can understand, just barely,” said Lisa. “But horses! If horses, why not hippos? Where do you draw the line?”
MacDonald sighed. He took a nut and looked knowingly at the serving girl. She caught his look but turned away. Caesar was watching. MacDonald crunched the nut slowly while thinking what to say. He’d been through this argument before with other apes. Chimpanzees and orangutans couldn’t understand that human beings liked meat, that meat was one of the foods that men needed because they had evolved to need it. He muttered, “If there were any hippos around, Lisa, they would be safe now. Now we eat fruits and nuts at our master’s command.”
Caesar frowned. “We are not your masters,” he said angrily.
MacDonald was unabashed. He looked calmly back at Caesar. “We’re not your equals.”
Caesar did not take it as a rebuke. The remark had not been intended as such. He returned MacDonald’s even stare. “MacDonald, I believe that when you come truly to know and trust a person as I know and trust you, you can’t help but like him. Once my people come to know and trust yours, we shall all become equals and stay so… until the end of the world.”
MacDonald nodded glumly. “That may be sooner than you think.”
The statement caused an abrupt silence. Lisa was just dismissing the serving girl, but she turned to stare. Caesar paused with his hand halfway to his mouth. Something about the way MacDonald had said it… “You’re a pessimist.” But he said it without force.
“Or a prophet,” corrected MacDonald.
Lisa came back to the table smiling. “You’ve been at the fermented coconut milk again,” she chided. “They say it makes you very happy at night and very gloomy in the morning.”
“Now that apes are at the helm,” Caesar said, “Earth will sail safely through space until the end of time. And Virgil says that time is circular, that it has no end.” Caesar declared almost petulantly, “I don’t believe what you say.”
“Would you believe it if you heard it from the lips of your own parents?” Almost immediately MacDonald regretted saying the words.
Caesar looked at him stunned. “That’s not possible.” And then, “Is it?”
MacDonald bit his lip. He had said too much already.
“Is it?” demanded Caesar. “Is it possible?”
MacDonald nodded, almost imperceptibly, and whispered, “It is.”
Caesar leaped to his feet, and his chair fell behind him with a crash. He leaned over the table toward MacDonald. “Are my parents still alive?”
“No. But their images and their voices are.”
“MacDonald, don’t talk in riddles! Can I see them? Can I hear them? Armando told me only that they came out of the future. Can they give me… knowledge?”
MacDonald straightened up. There was no way to hide this from Caesar. And he did have a right to know. “You can see them,” he said. “And you can hear them. And they can give you knowledge.”
“How?”
“Under the dead city,” the man explained, “in the archives near the old command post, there are tapes, sealed tapes of Cornelius and Zira being examined by officials of the American government. When my brother was Governor Breck’s assistant, he told me about them. I know where they are. And I know that they concern Earth’s future, from which your parents came.”
“But the city was flattened. The bombs left nothing.”
MacDonald’s face creased thoughtfully, the black skin wrinkling into a frown. “The archives section— indeed, many sections of the underground city—were designed to survive the impact of a ten-megaton blast. I suspect…” he let the sentence trail off.
But Caesar caught his meaning anyway. “Then the tapes and the pictures of my parents…”
“Yes,” MacDonald said. “They might still be down there.”
Caesar was excited now. “I want to see what they looked like, MacDonald. I want to hear what they thought and knew.”
“The city is still radioactive.”
Caesar waved that away in annoyance. “I want to go anyway. Besides, who among your people knows anything about radioactivity?”
MacDonald sighed. Most of the real scientists had been killed nine years ago in the ape uprising. “No one,” he admitted.
“And,” chided Caesar, “among my people, is there one?”
MacDonald knew what Caesar was driving at. “Who knows everything about everything?”
“Right.
Go find Virgil.” Caesar made a decision. “We will leave before dawn.”
MacDonald nodded in acquiescence. He didn’t like it, he didn’t want to go, but he knew that Caesar would not be satisfied until he had found the truth about his parents and his future. Virgil, of course, would be delighted—Virgil was always pleased at the prospect of discovering new knowledge. But MacDonald had misgivings. He didn’t know why, but he felt uneasy about the whole venture. Perhaps it was because of the danger—not to himself, but to Caesar and to Ape City. If anything were to happen to the chimpanzee leader, there would be no one; there would be nothing to stop General Aldo from taking over.
And if that happened, it would not be good for anyone. Not for humans, not for chimpanzees, not for orangutans. Only for General Aldo and his gorillas.
* * *
MacDonald’s misgivings stayed with him all evening. Even after he returned home. Doctor, who lived in the same house as MacDonald, noticed his troubled demeanor immediately and left him alone. And when Teacher showed up for dinner, he too noticed MacDonald’s brooding, but he said nothing.
The house was crude, cruder than the average ape house. The room was plain with a rough fireplace. On the mantel were a few fresh flowers in an antique Coke bottle and a yellowing photograph of Martin Luther King in a corroded frame. Above the mantel hung a diploma from a black university, long since crumbled into ashes. There was also a photo of MacDonald’s dead brother, the one human being who had helped Caesar. MacDonald had loved his brother—and he loved Caesar now—but there had been many moments since the ape uprising when he had longed for the old days.
MacDonald knew that slavery was wrong, he knew it instinctively, but if there had to be slaves and masters, he would much prefer to be a master. But then, every time he found himself thinking that way, he remembered a statement that Abraham Lincoln had made around 1851 or so, that if there was to be a difference between the black race and the white race, he, Abe Lincoln, would much prefer that the white race be the superior. The thought always made MacDonald smile. History had conveniently forgotten that statement of Lincoln’s and remembered him primarily for the Emancipation Proclamation.