Lovelock Read online

  Beds and linens were not part of the furniture allotment we had brought with us. Instead, standard-issue inflatable mattresses lay on the floor, covered with sheets that had been washed so often that the floral pattern was faded to the point of near-invisibility. It took only moments to get the girls undressed and tucked into bed, and they were asleep immediately, almost a miracle in itself. Then Carol Jeanne headed straight for a bedroom that had a large enough bed for her and Red to share, and I scrambled around the room, identifying the packing boxes and scratching on the one that had Carol Jeanne’s nightgowns. But she didn’t hear me. She, too, had fallen asleep at once, wearing her street clothes.

  Red was not so lucky. Ever the dutiful son, he went into the front room and, with Mamie directing thoughtfully, he moved furniture back and forth until she was satisfied. I heard them going at it as I prowled the rest of the house.

  Pink was asleep in the office, right on Carol Jeanne’s chair, of course. I was tired myself, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to accomplish a few things in privacy. I found the box with the computer equipment, opened it, and pulled out the cable that I used to link my own i/o port with the computer. Then I found the little electronic trinket that I had slipped into the box back in New Hampshire, when Red wasn’t looking. It was an adapter for the computer end of the cable, turning it into another witness connection. I plugged myself into the cable and slipped the other end into the port on the back of Pink’s neck. I’m deft and Pink is sluggish, so she didn’t wake up. I activated the useful little snoop program that I had downloaded from one of the computers in the Witness Training Center back when I was a mere lad, and perused Pink’s memories.

  Poor thing. She’d had a miserable, humiliating trip from the time she left Earth. People kept treating her like an animal. And she didn’t even get to pee all over them first.

  But I was looking for something else. Sure enough, Nancy had got Pink to the house while the workers were still carrying in the furniture. And even though Pink was too stupid to know the implications of what she was seeing, there was one little bit of business that caught my eye. Pink had been dozing in the office when she opened one eye to watch one of the movers open up Carol Jeanne’s computer and quickly replace one of the control chips with a larger chip that had a tiny antenna on it. Apparently someone wanted to be able to monitor all of Carol Jeanne’s computer activity.

  It took me only half an hour to open up the computer, figure out what the chip was doing, sever two of the pins that connected it to the motherboard, and connect them together with a short length of wire I cannibalized from elsewhere in the computer. Now nothing would be routed through their little chip unless I made the computer send it there.

  Then I wrote a small program to ride on top of the operating system and feed scrambled keystroke and data information to the parasite chip. It would monitor computer activity, all right—but it would give them no readable information about the content of Carol Jeanne’s activity.

  With that job finished, I had to figure out who was doing the spying and make a guess at why. I used the computer to access the Ark photo directory. It took a while, since I had no idea of the name of the man who had done the doctoring job on Carol Jeanne’s computer, and he wasn’t an employee of Materials Management. That in itself was no surprise—Materials Management had a couple of administrators and then relied on duty-hours “volunteers” to do the actual labor. But it meant that I had to look at picture after picture after picture until I found him. Fortunately, I have excellent powers of recognition and I was able to cycle through the directory far faster than any human could have done.

  The chip doctor was a man named Pavlos Koundouriotes. His official job title was Assistant to the Director of Physical Fitness Training. That was the department that ran the mandatory exercise program. The whole department was probably a front for the secret police—it would give them a cover and explain why they worked so hard to remain stronger and faster than anybody else. Officially, discipline was handled in each village by two elected constables. But of course the administrator would have to have his own police to watch out for signs of trouble. In a place like the Ark, with so many ethnic groups mixed together, it would be absurd to trust in good will and volunteer constables to keep the peace. Resentments were bound to grow here and there; there would be incidents. The chief administrator had to have somebody keeping watch for plots and troublemakers.

  So there was a good chance that the little broadcast chip was not directed against Carol Jeanne in particular, but rather was a routine precaution taken with all the privately owned computers on the Ark. If that was the case, then there was no chance that they would have time to monitor everything that was done on every computer on the Ark. But they might have a program that scanned all the computers they were monitoring to find anomalous patterns—and if Carol Jeanne’s computer seemed to be putting out completely random keystrokes and datafiles, that might call attention to itself.

  So I went back into the little program I had written and revised it. Now, instead of randomizing keystrokes and datafiles, it would cause the parasite chip to capture and broadcast excerpts from Carol Jeanne’s published works. It would look like language, and probably wouldn’t flag the alarms in the monitoring program. Until and unless someone specifically looked into Carol Jeanne’s computer activity, she would have privacy.

  In the meantime, I’d check the computer every day for the first week to see if my doctoring of their parasite chip had been discovered and tampered with. If the first week was OK, then I’d only check once a week thereafter.

  Why did I do this? At the time it couldn’t have occurred to me that I could have any motive but Carol Jeanne’s protection. Yet now I wonder if perhaps I already had an unconscious understanding that sometime in the future my own survival would depend on my being able to use Carol Jeanne’s computer without anyone else knowing what I was doing. There was no earthly reason why Carol Jeanne would ever need to protect herself from the chief administrator’s snoops. The whole expedition depended on her ability to understand the biosystems of the new planet and find a way to fit human society into it without destroying anything crucial. The security forces would do anything to protect her and nothing to interfere with her. She would never need the privacy I had created for her.

  But I would.

  I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know anything. And yet I must have known it all. There are depths to me that no one has glimpsed, not even me.

  “What is that monkey doing?” demanded Mamie from the doorway. Apparently the furniture had finally been set up to her satisfaction.

  “He’s doing a memory dump,” said Red.

  She whispered to him, “I have always hated the thought of that thing snooping through the house when we’re all asleep. Sneaky, prying little dwarf. It has such tiny hands.”

  Did she think I couldn’t hear her, just because she was talking so softly?

  “He’s doing his job,” said Red. “Even for an enhanced capuchin, he’s unusually conscientious. One of the best they ever produced. It was quite a feather in Carol Jeanne’s cap when Lovelock was assigned to her.”

  “It keeps touching her,” said Mamie, her voice getting nasty. “Very possessively. Like a lover.”

  Red said nothing.

  “Like an obscene, filthy, dwarfish, black, mute, vile, satanic lover,” said Mamie.

  “Monkeys groom each other,” said Red.

  “And pigs rut,” said Mamie. “But I don’t see Pink doing that with you.”

  “Mother.”

  “If I were a man I wouldn’t tolerate that little lucifer touching my wife.”

  Lucifer. Light-bringer. A term for an old-fashioned match. What an apt choice of epithet, O thou aging bitch, thought I.

  “Mother,” said Red again. “His hearing is very good. He probably hears everything you’re saying.”

  “That’s fine with me,” said Mamie.

  “And everything he hears, he tells to Carol
Jeanne.”

  “Then maybe when he tells her this, she’ll realize how disgusting it looks to decent people, to see the way that monkey is with her.”

  “Lovelock isn’t her lover,” said Red. “But he watches her all the time. He knows things about her that I’ll never know. So yes, I’m jealous, but not the way you’re thinking. I’m jealous because I can never love and understand my wife as well as her witness can.”

  Mamie chuckled grimly. “Since men never understand women in the first place, I’m not surprised.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  I could hear the resentment in his voice. She must have said things like this to him all his life, and he didn’t like it—but he also knew enough not to argue with her.

  “Men are so cocksure of themselves, but they always run roughshod over women’s tender feelings,” said Mamie. “Your father has never had a moment’s compassion for me. And you’re hardly any better.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mother.” Another ritual phrase.

  “I don’t mind,” said Mamie. “It’s a woman’s lot in life. We work and serve our men, and in return we get more and more demands and no understanding.”

  He said nothing.

  “You always liked her hair long,” said Mamie, resuming the attack on Carol Jeanne. “But she cut it for the monkey.”

  “She cut it because Lovelock kept getting his hands tangled in it when he groomed her.”

  “The monkey is more important in her life than you are, Red. You pretend not to mind, but I know it bothers you.”

  “Go to bed, Mother.” I heard him walk away from her and go into Carol Jeanne’s room.

  Immediately I disconnected from the computer and leapt straight toward Mamie, who was still standing in the door. She gave a little screech and backed out into the hall. I ignored her and headed on into Carol Jeanne’s bedroom, where Red was just sliding his shoes off.

  Behind me I could hear Mamie muttering—loudly enough that I suspected Red could hear her perfectly well. “It just goes to show you that certain kinds of people are not that far removed from the jungle.”

  I slept then, because I was at least as exhausted as anybody else. And I dreamed. I’m sure that my dream was triggered by what Liz had said to Carol Jeanne, about every creature having a hunger to reproduce. I dreamed of myself as a parent, but absurdly enough I saw myself as a human parent, with a smooth stupid hairless baby who couldn’t even hold on to my fur. And the baby in my dream was large, so that I couldn’t pick him up, but had to drag him along the ground. And when I climbed a tree and jumped from one branch to another, the baby was so heavy that together we dropped like an overripe fruit; the baby splatted horribly on the concrete floor when we landed. I was surprised that there was concrete in the jungle, but when I looked around it wasn’t a jungle anymore after all, it was a cage, with humans all around me, looking disgusted at the oozing mess that had been my baby. Only now it wasn’t a human baby, it was a little capuchin, and its skull had split open in the fall and it was dead. I felt a terrible grief well up inside me and I kept yanking at the dead baby’s arm, trying to get it to wake up. Finally the thought came to me: This is a really terrible dream, and I really ought to wake up and end it. And so I did.

  I was trembling. It had seemed so real. I lay there in my temporary nest among the stacked-up boxes, thinking, What will my child be? Enhanced like me, or simply an ordinary stupid capuchin? How many of the genetic changes they had introduced in me were actually present in my gametes, to be passed on to my children? Did any part of what I am depend on specific in utero treatments that caused me to overdevelop in certain ways? I would have to look into this before I sired a child.

  And then I came fully awake and realized the absurdity of what I was thinking. A child? What was I thinking of? I was a witness. There was no room in my life to have a child.

  No room in my life. But why not? Didn’t every creature have a hunger to reproduce? Even if it was only an expression of the species’ will to fill all available space.

  Only what was my species? I was no monkey, not anymore. As far as I knew, I was one of a kind. And as for having a family, Carol Jeanne was my family. Carol Jeanne is all I need, I said to myself, over and over. But instead of the happiness that normally filled me at the thought of belonging to her, I was overcome for several minutes by an ineffable sadness. I did not understand what was happening to me, but I knew that it would not make me happy, and I wanted it to go away. And, that time, it did.

  Dear stupid diary,

  Peter and I met a monkey at the funeral. It’s a witness and it was very cute and very smart. Peter says it’s nasty because its little weenie is hanging right out in front of everybody but that’s because all he thinks about is weenies right now except when he thinks about breasts. I think it’s a great monkey and I’m going to make friends with it. Nancy got to go in their house to take the man’s witness there, which is a pig. Next time Nancy tends us I’m going to get her to tell me all about their house. She’s the chief gaiologist and the most brilliant person in the Ark. I read about monkeys in the encyclopedia as soon as I got home from the funeral and I wonder if this one throws turds and masturbates all the time like those monkeys we saw in the zoo in San Francisco or if witness monkeys are more like people. I’m going to find out all about him and be his friend and Peter won’t know anything about him or be his friend or anything. I wonder what his name is.

  We arrived in Mayflower on a Sixday. That meant Carol Jeanne would only have Sevenday at work before having her first community workday, which in our case was Eightday, and then Nineday was our household Freeday. So Carol Jeanne would have only a single day among civilized scientists at work before she had to spend two days in a row in the dreary village of Mayflower.

  As Sevenday dawned, Carol Jeanne sprang out of bed and fixed generic cold cereal from the cupboard for the few family members who were awake to eat it. Then, clutching a map that had been left us by an anonymous benefactor, she and I escaped the house.

  The design of the Ark didn’t allow for penthouse offices. Everything looked alike, contributing to the egalitarian atmosphere. Carol Jeanne’s lab and office suite were no more impressive than those of any of the other scientists aboard the Ark. And for once, Carol Jeanne was treated like a scientist instead of a celebrity. After brief hellos, the other scientists returned to their work as quickly as they could. They knew that they would have plenty of time to talk to Carol Jeanne when their work brought them together. But it was their work they loved, and her work they admired her for, and so why not get more of it done? Besides, the rest of them had been working together for months. They had developed their own routines, and Carol Jeanne’s arrival to take the reins would not cause a disruption in their work habits unless she insisted on it. Which was not her style.

  Carol Jeanne let herself in at her office door—which had a lock in the form of an I.D. panel—and inspected the sterile furniture inside. Her office library and paper files had been moved here, just as the furniture in our house had been transported. But some moron had tried to unpack Carol Jeanne’s important books and papers, strewing them everywhere, and now it would take her days to put things back in order. Or—and this was pure paranoia on my part—someone had examined all the papers, perhaps had even photographed and inventoried them.

  “What a mess, Lovelock,” she said angrily. “Why couldn’t they have just left everything in the boxes? Stupid. Well, help me restore my files to their proper order—you’ll remember it better than I will.”

  Before we could get well started, someone knocked on the door and then entered immediately, without waiting for Carol Jeanne’s permission. He was short and square and brown. Carol Jeanne wasn’t a tall woman, but she was several centimeters taller than he was. Sitting on her shoulder, I could see that his black hair was thinning on top. I could tell he was a vain man: he wore a mustache, a feature whose only functions are to stroke the vanity of the wearer and to catch little droplets o
f anything he drinks. And his teeth were so white that he could probably flash messages for kilometers using the light reflected off them. But there was a joy in his face and an ebullience in his step and mannerisms that I’ve seen in few humans. I knew at once that he would either be very exciting to have around or else an unbearable bore. Everything depended on whether he was intelligent along with being so happy. In my experience, happiness and intelligence didn’t come together in the same people very often.

  On his shoulder was an apricot-colored cockatoo, his witness. A cockatoo was a good choice for a witness, I soon learned—as good in his own way as a monkey. His claws weren’t as flexible as my hands, of course, but he was dexterous enough to be able to operate a simplified computer quite rapidly. And he had one talent that I would have given up a thumb for: power of speech. His enhanced voice was birdlike, of course, but he was no imitative parrot. He spoke as intelligently as I would have if I had been able to talk. I envied him; at the same time, I liked him. Equally important, I liked a man who was practical enough to choose such a useful witness.

  The stranger carried a coconut in his left hand and a machete in his right. Bowing low, he set the coconut on the floor of Carol Jeanne’s office and, before she could protest, he sliced the coconut in half with a deft stroke of the machete. One coconut half landed upside-down, and he wiped up spilled milk with a handkerchief he produced from his pocket. An errant shard had flown across the room, and the cockatoo took flight to retrieve it. He picked it up off a desk with one claw, balancing on the other as he pulled coconut meat from the shell with his beak.

  The other coconut half remained upright and full of milk. The stranger held out that half to Carol Jeanne, who accepted the offering in bafflement.