Lovelock Read online

  Harnessed to the seat, my understanding of this point was wholly intellectual. Now, when Mamie opened the seat straps, I understood freefall on an entirely different level. I wasn’t stupid the way Mamie had been. I kept my grip on the armrest, the strap, Mamie’s sleeve, whatever it took to keep from flying off into space. The trouble was that as soon as I started moving, my brain instinctively rebelled against the information it was getting.

  Sure, I was holding on to solid objects—but that couldn’t override the horrifying sense that I couldn’t find down. For humans, down comes as much from visual cues as from the little water tubes in their inner ear—if something looks like down, it’s pretty much down, no matter how it feels. But for me, well, I’m used to hanging upside down and swinging any which way. Visual cues mean nothing. And with my inner-ear balancing mechanism giving me the clear information that I was plunging to my death, it didn’t matter how tightly I held on to things. I panicked.

  At first, panic meant that I froze, gripping even more tightly—one hand on the armrest, one on Mamie’s sleeve, and one foot on a strap. My other foot and my tail were both flailing around like crazy, probing for something else that could be grasped. My foot found Mamie’s fingers.

  Her eyes widened. My grip was not subtle. And I was involuntarily making my panic face—teeth bared, eyes wide—which humans invariably interpret as anger. She thought I was attacking her.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered. “Let go of me.”

  She yanked her hand away. Now, since my right foot and my left hand were gripping her finger and sleeve, and my left foot and right hand were holding on to much bigger, harder-to-grip objects, it was inevitable that instead of tearing herself free of me, she merely tore me free of the seat. She was waving her arm around, with six pounds of panicked jungle creature clinging to her finger and sleeve. “Let go, you filthy little devil!” she screamed.

  Now I was holding on at only two points, and to make things worse she was flailing me around. What I had felt before was only the first stage of panic. Now I was in the second stage, and compared to this, the first stage was mere anxiety. All my sphincter muscles released at once, demonstrating the fact that the term going apeshit has a literal meaning. With every wave of her arm, monkey turds and monkey urine were being flung out in every direction, personal souvenirs of the trip for the hapless passengers who witnessed my degradation.

  All I knew at the time was that I was no longer the only one screaming. Within moments, others were trying to grab hold of me, and I reflexively grabbed their fingers and clothing, their hair and ears and noses. I lost Mamie at once, and began scrambling insanely from person to person. Since many of them were also losing control in freefall, it became quite a dangerous situation; at one point the man I was clinging to smashed into a wall, and if I’d been hanging on in a slightly different position I might have been crushed.

  It only ended when Carol Jeanne caught me. She was calm—always, in a crisis, that’s the one thing you can count on, that Carol Jeanne will be the cool one, methodically doing what’s necessary. She plucked me out of the air—none too gently—and immediately tucked me, leaking urine and all, under her blouse, where she gripped me tightly.

  Immediately, as soon as I was completely restrained, I felt safe again. The panic subsided. All I could think about was relief; all I could do was pat her, stroke her, groom her in gratitude. What this felt like to her I have no idea. After a few minutes I was able to move a little, and—with her arms still pressing on me, confining me—I twisted to peer out of an opening between the buttons of her blouse.

  The attendants were getting people settled down again. One of them was sweeping the air with a powerful vacuum cleaner tube, sucking up free-floating urine drops and spinning turds—little dry ones, nothing like the disgusting things that humans make, though you’d never guess it from the way they were all dodging them and shuddering. Others were passing out moist towelettes to passengers who were wiping at their faces, their hands, their clothing, trying to clean themselves.

  Carol Jeanne was moving now, returning to our seats. I wanted to explain to her what had happened, but there wasn’t a notebook handy, and her computer was in the stowed luggage. So it wasn’t from me that she heard an accounting.

  Mamie was still sitting in Carol Jeanne’s seat, wiping Emmy down. Emmy, of course, was having a wonderful time. She had found the whole episode very entertaining. “Monkey poop!” she cried. “Monkey wet! Lovey-law fly!” I, of course, was Lovey-law. Technically I had not actually flown, having never let go of one person till I had a good grip on the next, but since the people themselves were flying around the cabin, I thought Emmy’s words were a fair summation of what had happened.

  Carol Jeanne, however, wanted a more specific accounting. “Who let Lovelock out of his harness?” she demanded.

  With Mamie sitting in Carol Jeanne’s seat, there was really only one possible candidate. But Mamie looked up at Carol Jeanne, her face stern with righteous anger, and said, coldly, “I was trying to take care of your daughter, whom you had abandoned here. With Emmy sobbing her little heart out, I could hardly be expected to watch out for your monkey at the same time.”

  So that was Mamie’s story—she had nothing to do with my being loosed from my restraints. I waited for someone to point out the obvious—that the harness and straps were arranged so that I could not possibly have gotten free on my own. I wasn’t surprised that Stef said nothing—he hadn’t lived this long without knowing better than to contradict Mamie in public. Red, on the other hand, had actually argued with his mother from time to time over the years, and she had even backed down now and then.

  But when he opened his mouth, it was not to tell the truth. “Apparently they have good reasons for confining most witnesses to the cargo compartment,” he said.

  The liar! He knew it was all his mother’s fault, but he let me take the blame anyway. He did it solely out of jealousy. I was Carol Jeanne’s companion—the one who shared every waking moment of her life with her. She told me her secrets and developed her scientific theories with me at her side. Red was only good for breeding, and if my little monkey appendage had been bigger I gladly would have donated myself to Carol Jeanne for that. He was as useless as yesterday’s oatmeal, and everyone couldn’t help but know it. Now he grabbed his chance to get even. I snarled at him, but he ignored me.

  Only Lydia offered something like the truth. “Can I play with Lovelock? Grandma let Emmy play with him. She was going to give Lovelock a treat. Can I give him a treat? Can I?”

  “Nonsense,” said Mamie. “Of course the child doesn’t understand what happened.”

  “He can’t get loose by himself,” said Carol Jeanne.

  “Well, then, we do live in an age of miracles,” said Mamie. “You can’t be suggesting that I would voluntarily come anywhere near the creature.” My heart sank. Since Mamie was well known to recoil from any contact with me, it was quite possible that her lie would be believed. In fact, Mamie sounded so truthful, so injured by the whole notion of being at fault for anything, that if I hadn’t known better I probably would have believed her myself.

  I think the secret to Mamie’s skill at lying is that she never tells a lie that she doesn’t believe with all her heart, at least for the moment it takes to tell it.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised at any of this. Not that she would lie, nor that her lie was believed. But I was surprised. I guess it had never occurred to me that she would lie so outrageously when the consequences were so dire to someone else. I was the only one who would pay the price for her lie. Once they believed that I knew how to get loose from my harness, there was no hope of my remaining in the cabin with the people. I would inevitably spend the rest of the voyage treated as cargo, like Pink. It was a miserable punishment and I didn’t deserve it.

  But what did that matter to Mamie? I was only an animal, and she was a human. In fact, as she saw it anyway, she was the most important person in the world, the
person whose comfort, whose dignity, whose any passing whim mattered more than the life or death of any other living soul. If she had confessed to having set me loose, she would have had to endure another hour of resentment from the rest of the passengers—people that she would never see again in her life, who would all be dead of old age by the time we were a year into our interstellar voyage. And she could have assuaged most resentment with a quick, sincere apology: I’m sorry, I had no idea that letting the monkey loose would cause such a problem, please forgive me. But such a simple condescension was impossible for her. Mamie Foxe Todd, apologize?

  The attendants were apologetic but firm. “I’m sorry, Dr. Cocciolone, but your witness will have to be removed from the cabin.”

  Bless her, she tried to keep me. “I’ll be with him the whole time,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “I’m sure you’re aware that the situation here was extremely dangerous,” said the attendant. “I have no room for maneuvering here. If I let the monkey remain in the cabin now that we know he can get free of the harness, I would certainly lose my job and could possibly go to jail.”

  “If you must,” said Carol Jeanne. She was not one to insist when there was nothing to be gained by it. Into the hold I would go—we both knew it.

  Mamie didn’t have the decency to stay out of the situation she had created. “Where is the little fellow, anyway?” she asked.

  There I was, peering out of Carol Jeanne’s blouse not half a meter from Mamie’s face, and right at her eye level. It was too good an opportunity to miss. I screeched and lunged at her.

  She screamed, of course. To have me suddenly appear right in front of her face, teeth bared and reaching for her with my long arms—well, she would have been surprised and frightened under any circumstances. But I’d like to think that her fear was also partly the result of guilt and shame for having made me bear the brunt of her lie. I’m not above taking petty revenge.

  Naturally, Carol Jeanne gripped me all the tighter. “You’re being very bad, Lovelock,” she said. But she didn’t punish me. She didn’t say the painword. And that told me that she must have known the truth, that she must have sympathized with my plight, and she was only going along with Mamie’s lie in order to keep peace in the family.

  You can always let the monkey suffer in order to keep the family from quarreling. Thus did I learn my first lesson about our mutual loyalty.

  I spent the rest of the voyage in a box. As boxes go, I suppose it wasn’t a bad one—plenty to eat and drink, a soft floor, a bright light that I could turn on and off myself, and a few books to read. But I don’t care what you do to a box, it’s still a box.

  My only consolation was that after we got to Grissom Station and transferred to Ironsides, the interplanetary shuttle, they all had to ride in boxes, too. Unlike the Ark, which would offer us kilometers of interior space, Ironsides was cramped in size and packed tight. There was no way to handle a hundred passengers and all their belongings during a month-long flight, even though acceleration and deceleration gave us an almost constant artificial gravity. Instead everybody was catheterized, drugged to the gills, and packed in “slumber chambers” that were suspiciously like my own little casquette. We would all be equals on that voyage.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ARK

  During the long month when Ironsides made its journey to the Ark, I dozed, then woke, then dozed again in my box. I preferred the dozing; when I was awake, all I could think about was my humiliation in the subbo, as if it had only just happened. Was this going to happen to me every time we went into freefall? On the Ark I’d be free to roam—except at the changeover points, when they’d have to lock me in a box or strap me down, just to keep me from engaging in revolting behavior. Each time I would be reminded of my weakness. Which was bitterly unfair—most of the time it was the humans who revolted me, and no one locked them in boxes or strapped them down.

  I knew that my feelings of persecution were absurd. I wasn’t being persecuted in particular. I simply belonged to an oppressed species. Which, on Earth at least, included every species that wasn’t human. Most nonhumans didn’t mind, of course. Most nonhumans didn’t even know they were being exploited, domesticated, dominated, and spiritually annihilated by the master race. Only I and a handful like me.

  If there was anyone in the universe like me. Or was I, I wondered, alone? Was I in fact the only thinking entity that existed? Were human beings nothing but imaginary tormentors spawned by my own self-hatred? And if I only came to accept my hairy little self for what I was, would they then go away—or turn kind, or even loving?

  Did Pink have wings?

  In such moments of despondency, I remembered that there was one who cared for me. The only thing that kept her from coming to me, from opening the door of my miserable cave and setting me free, was the fact that she too was locked into the prison of human customs and laws and so she could not save me. But she would come. I clung to that hope, and perhaps that was why I kept my sanity.

  Or, more likely, my sanity was never at risk, and all my mad half-waking thoughts were merely the products of the drugs that dripped into me to keep me artificially calm during Ironsides’ interminable voyage.

  At last I felt the ship movements that told me that Ironsides was jockeying into position at its final destination. I knew from my advance reading that Ironsides would come to rest against the outer surface of the cylindrical Ark, held in place by powerful magnets. The passengers would be herded into the transfer carton. A vast door would open in the side of the Ark and a long mechanical arm would reach out, pluck the carton like a louse off the skin of the Ark, and draw us into the hungry mouth of the cargo bay. How very like me the Ark behaved.

  Was that jarring our impact against the Ark? Soon they would come for the humans, draw them out of their casquettes, and then she would come, in turn, for me.

  Unless she forgot me. Unless she carelessly waited for them to unload me with the rest of the luggage and deposit me in her quarters like her library and her lingerie. Unless she still hadn’t forgiven me for having brought disgrace upon her in the subbo.

  It was a miserable half hour that I waited, if it wasn’t half a day.

  Or a minute and a half. For Carol Jeanne did love me. She knew that I must be filled with fears and dreads and insecurities and shame. In her immeasurable compassion she must have practically flown down into the hold to retrieve me, to open the door and give me light again. What a scraggly, sweat-soaked, stinky, trembling little primate I must have been, and yet she didn’t hesitate to draw me close and let me cling to her neck, to her hair, climb all over her shoulders and arms, holding tight and then rushing to take another hold, to reassure myself that she was unchanged. Touching her body was my homecoming; soft, warm skin, the salty perfume of her confinement, the sound of her voice and its sweet vibrations in the thin bones of her cheeks, the warmth of her breath on my face, the wind of it in my eyes—my world had been restored to me. After my time in the box, Carol Jeanne’s body seemed as infinite as the universe. I could have explored her until I died and I would never have grown weary of it.

  At last, though, my ecstasy grew containable. I stopped my compulsive scampering and settled down to normal grooming. I was sure of her; I was myself again. Then she knew that she could take me to join the others.

  Passengers and witnesses alike were herded into the transfer carton. Mamie never seemed to learn that the first one on a one-door conveyance would be the last one off, so she ran interference for us to be the first aboard the transfer carton. Then we were packed in by all the other families who boarded after we did, squashing us toward the corner farthest from the door.

  Mamie seemed oblivious to the fact that she was the cause of her family’s discomfort. Instead, as the bodies of strangers were pressed closer and closer against us, she sniffed with a tight little grimace on her face. She had a point. Humans become very rank after long confinement in boxes, and while each person was completely u
sed to their own smell, everybody else’s smell was exquisitely rancid. I enjoyed it—a delightful rush of olfactory variety after the sterile sameness of my own box—but the humans all seemed to be shrinking into themselves, trying to move away from everyone else simultaneously. And there was Mamie, sniffing with disdain at our malodorous boxmates, as if her own sweat were an expensive perfume. Not to mention the faint odor of Emmy’s vomit still clinging to her shoes, not that anybody but me could pick up those old traces. If Mamie could only smell herself as I smelled her, she would probably die of disgust.

  The transfer carton locked itself firmly against an inside wall of the docking bay, and the doors opened. It seemed to take forever for the people in front of us to move out into the open. And then, when we finally were able to move, it turned out it wasn’t “the open” that we were bound for. The whole group was being herded down a corridor and into a large elevator. To go up or down? The person in charge was French; therefore she felt no need to explain anything to anybody. Not even whether the elevator was going up or down. She simply kept intoning—mostly in heavily accented English, but now and then in French, Portuguese, and phonetically memorized Japanese—“Please move as far to the back of the elevator as possible.”

  Mamie’s pushiness was finally rewarded: As the last people out of the transfer carton, we were the last people onto the elevator—upward, as it turned out—and so when the elevator came to a stop we were the first ones off.

  After all those months in canisters in space, it was a glorious sight. You could see for kilometers, and the landscape was green. Not the green of New England, with its endless woods, because the Ark was all fields and bushes. More like Iowa without the hills. Wyoming without the antelope. There were some trees, but they all grew in neat rows. Orchards, and dwarf ones at that. There was no hope of finding a real tree. The Ark hadn’t existed for enough years to grow a tree to thirty or forty meters. But when I saw one of those pathetic dwarf orchards not far off from the elevator, I found myself hungering for the feel of rough bark against the palms of my hands and feet.