The Best of Kage Baker

Hanuman





So there I was playing billiards with an Australopithecus afarensis, and he was winning.

I don’t usually play with lower hominids, but I was stuck in a rehab facility during the winter of 1860, and there was nothing else to do but watch holoes or listen to the radio programs broadcast by my owner/employer, Dr. Zeus Incorporated. And the programs were uniformly boring; you’d think an all-powerful cabal of scientists and investors, having after all both the secrets of immortality and time travel, could at least come up with some original station formats. But anyway…

Repair and Rehabilitation Center Five was neatly hidden away in a steep cliff overlooking a stretch of Baja coastline. Out front, lots of fortunate convalescing operatives sprawled on golden sand beside a bright blue sea. Not me, though. When you’re growing back skin, the medical techs don’t like you sunbathing much.

Even when I looked human again, I couldn’t get an exit pass. They kept delaying my release pending further testing and evaluation. It drove me crazy, but cyborgs are badly damaged so seldom that when the medical techs do get their hands on a genuine basket case, they like to keep it as long as possible for study.

Vain for me to argue that it was an event shadow and not a mysterious glitch in my programming that was to blame. I might as well have been talking to the wall. Between tests I sat interminably in the Garden Room among the bromeliads and ferns, thumbing through old copies of Immortal Lifestyles Monthly and trying to adjust my bathrobe so my legs didn’t show.

“Oh, my! Nice gams,” said somebody one morning. I lowered my magazine, preparing to fix him with the most scathing glare of contempt I could muster. What I saw astonished me.

He was about four and a half feet tall and looked something like a pint-sized Alley Oop, or maybe like a really racist caricature of an Irishman, the way they were being drawn back then. Tiny head, face prognathous in the extreme, shrewd little eyes set in wrinkles under heavy orbital ridges. The sclerae of his eyes were white, like a Homo sapiens. White whiskers all around his face. Barrel chest, arms down to his knees like a chimpanzee. However, he stood straight; his feet were small, narrow and neatly shod. He was impeccably dressed in the fashion of the day, too, what any elderly gentleman might be wearing at this very moment in London or San Francisco.

I knew the Company had a few cyborgs made from Neanderthals in its ranks—I’d even worked with a couple—but they looked human compared to this guy. Besides, as I scanned him I realized that he wasn’t a cyborg. He was mortal, which explained the white whiskers.

“What the hell are you?” I inquired, fairly politely under the circumstances.

“I’m the answer to your prayers,” he replied. “You want to come upstairs and see my etchings?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s because I’m a monkey, isn’t it?” he snapped, thrusting his face forward in a challenging kind of way.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, at least you’re honest about being a bigot,” he said, subsiding.

“Excuse me!” I slammed my magazine down in my lap. “Anyway, you aren’t a monkey. Are you? You’re a member of the extinct hominid species Australopithecus afarensis.”

“I love it when you people talk like computers,” he mused. “Sexy, in a perverse kind of way. Yes, Afarensis, all right, one of Lucy’s kindred. Possibly explaining my powerful attraction to ditzy redheads.”

“That’s an awful lot of big words to keep in such a teeny little skull,” I said, rolling up my magazine menacingly. “So you think cyborgs are sexy, huh? Did you ever see Alien?”

“And you’re a hot-blooded cyborg,” he said, smiling. “Barely suppressed rage is sexy, too, at least I find it so. Yes, I know a lot of big words. I’ve been augmented. I’d have thought a superintelligent machine-human hybrid like yourself would have figured that out by now.”

I was almost startled out of my anger. “A mortal being augmented? I’ve never heard of that being done!”

“I was an experiment,” he explained. “A prototype for an operative that could be used in deep Prehistory. No budget for the project, unfortunately, so I’m unique. Michael Robert Hanuman, by the way.” He extended his hand. It had long curved fingers and a short thumb, like an ape’s hand. I took it gingerly.

“Botanist Grade Six Mendoza,” I said, shaking his hand.

“A cyborg name,” he observed. “What was your human name, when you had one?”

“I don’t remember,” I told him. “Look, I haven’t been calling you a monkey during this conversation. How about you stop throwing around the word cyborg, okay?”

“No c-word, got it,” he agreed. “You’re sensitive about what you are, then?”

“Aren’t you?”

“No, oddly enough,” said Hanuman. He sat down in the chair next to mine. “I’ve long since come to terms with my situation.”

“Well, three cheers for you,” I said. “What are you doing in rehab, anyway?”

“I live here, at Cabo Rehabo,” he said. “I’m retired now and the Company gave me my choice of residences. It’s warm and I like the sea air. Also—” He fished an asthma inhaler from an inner pocket and waved it at me. “No fluorocarbons in the air during this time period. One of the great advantages to living in the past. What are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“There was an accident,” I said.

“Really! You malfunctioned?”

“No, there was an error in the Temporal Concordance,” I explained. “Some idiot input a date wrong and I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been when a hotel blew up. Just one of those things that happen in the field.”

“So you’re—say! Would you be the one they brought in from Big Sur? I heard about you.” He regarded my legs with renewed interest.

“That was me,” I said, wishing he’d go away.

“Well, well.” His gaze traveled over the rest of me. “I’d always heard you people never had accidents. You’re programmed to dodge bullets and anything else that comes flying your way.”

“You try dodging a building,” I muttered.

“Is that why you’re so angry?” he inquired, just as a repair tech stuck his head around the doorway.

“Botanist Mendoza? Please report to Room D for a lower left quadrant diagnostic.”

“It’s been fun,” I told Michael Robert Hanuman, and made my exit gratefully. He watched me go, his small head tilted on one side.


But I saw him the next day, waiting outside the lounge. He wrinkled his nose at my flannel pajama ensemble, then looked up and said, “We meet again! Can I buy you a drink?”

“Thanks, but I don’t feel like going down to the bar dressed like this,” I told him.

“There’s a snack bar in the Rec Room,” he said. “They serve cocktails.”

I had just been informed I faced a minimum of two more months of tests, and the idea of dating a superannuated hominid seemed slightly less degrading than the rest of what I had to look forward to. “Why not?” I sighed.

The Rec Room had two pool tables and a hologame, as well as an entire wall of bound back issues of Immortal Lifestyles Monthly. There were tasteful Mexican-themed murals on the walls. There was a big picture window through which you could look out at the happy, well-rested operatives sunning themselves on the beach instead of having intrusive repair diagnostics done. Cocktails were available, at least, and Hanuman brought a pair of mai tais to our card table and set them down with a flourish.

“Yours has no alcohol in it,” I said suspiciously, scanning.

“Can’t handle the stuff,” he informed me, and rapped his skull with his knuckles. “This tiny little monkey brain, you know. You don’t want me hooting and swinging from the light fixtures, do you? Or something even less polite?”

“No, thank you,” I said, shuddering.

“Not that I swing from anything much, at my age,” he added, and had a sip of his drink. He set it down, pushed back in his chair and considered me. “So,” he said, “What’s it like being immortal?”

“I don’t care for it,” I replied.

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not? Is it the Makropolous syndrome? You know, an overpowering sense of meaninglessness with the passage of enough time? Or does it have to do with being a cyb—sorry, with feeling a certain distance from humanity due to your unique abilities?”

“Mostly it’s having to be around monkeys,” I said, glaring at him. “Mortal Homo sapiens, I mean.”

“Touché,” he said, raising his drink to me. “I can’t say I’m crazy about them, either.”

“I’m happy when I’m alone,” I continued, and tasted my drink. “I like my work. I don’t like being distracted from my work.”

“Human relationships are irrelevant, eh?” Hanuman said. “How lucky you’ve met me, then.”

“You’re human,” I said, studying him.

“Barely,” he said. “Oh, I know my place. If the Leakeys had had their way I wouldn’t even get to play in the family tree! I’m just a little animal with a lot of wit and some surgical modification.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, and shrugged.

“So it isn’t being immortal that bothers you, it’s the company you have to keep?” he inquired. “Immortality itself is good?”

“I guess so,” I said. “I certainly wouldn’t want to have a body that decayed while I was wearing it. And I’ve got way too much work for one human lifespan.”

“What do you do? Wait, you’re a botanist. You were doing something botanical in Big Sur?”

“I was doing a genetic survey on Abies bracteata,” I told him. “The Santa Lucia fir. It’s endangered. The Company wants it.”

“Ah. It has some terribly valuable commercial use?” He scratched his chin-whiskers.

“Why does the Company ever want anything?” I replied. “But if it was all that valuable, you’d think they’d let me out of here to get back to the job.”

“They probably sent another botanist up there in your place,” Hanuman pointed out. “And, after all, you haven’t recovered yet. Have you? How are your new hands working? And the feet?”

“They’re not new hands,” I said irritably, wondering how he knew so much. “Just the skin. And some other stuff underneath. What do you care, anyway?”

“I’m wondering how well you’d be able to hold a billiards cue,” he said. “Feel like a game?”

“Are you kidding?” I felt like laughing for the first time since I’d been there. “I’m a cyborg, remember? You’re only a mortal, even if you have been augmented. I’d cream you.”

“That’s true,” he said imperturbably, draining his glass. “In that case, what would you say to playing with a handicap? So a poor little monkey like me has a chance?”

Like an idiot, I agreed, and that was how I found out that augmented lower hominids have all the reflexes that go with the full immortality process.

“Boy, I’m glad we’re not playing for money,” I said, watching gloomily as he completed a ten-point bank shot and neatly sank three balls, clunk clunk clunk.

“How could we?” Hanuman inquired, hopping down from the footstool. “I’ve always heard the Company doesn’t pay you people anything. That’s one of the reasons they made you, so they’d have an inexpensive work force.”

“For your information, we cost a lot,” I snapped. “And I suppose you get paid a salary?”

“I did, before I retired,” he told me smugly, chalking his cue. “Now I’ve got a nice pension.”

“What’d you get paid for?” I asked. “You told me you were a prototype that never got used.”

“I said the program budget got cut,” he corrected me, climbing up for his next shot. “You ought to know the Company finds a use for everything they create. I gave them thirty years of service.”

“Doing what?”

He took his time answering, frowning at the table, clambering down, kicking the stool around to a better spot and climbing up to survey the angles again. “Mostly impersonating a monkey, if you must know,” he said at last.

I grinned. “Dancing while an organ grinder played? Collecting change in a tin cup to augment somebody’s departmental budget?”

He grimaced, but it didn’t throw his shot off, click, clunk, and another ball dropped into a corner pocket.

“No, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I worked on some delicate missions. Collected sensitive information. Secrets. You wouldn’t believe the things people will say in front of you when they think you’re not human.”

“Oh, wouldn’t I?” I paced around the table, trying to distract him while he took aim again. It didn’t work; another flawless bank shot, and it was clear I was never going to get a turn. He straightened up on the stool, now at eye level with me.

“My memoirs would make interesting reading, I can tell you. What about yours?”

I shivered. “Boring. “Unless you’d be spellbound by my attempts to produce a maize cultivar with high lysine content.”

“I’d be interested in hearing how you happened to be in a hotel when it blew up,” he said, surveying the table for his next shot. “Especially in the wilds of Big Sur.”

“I was looking for a glass of iced tea,” I said.

“Really.” Smack, clunk, another ball down.

“With lemon,” I said, taken by the stupidity of it in retrospect. “I was miles from the nearest humans, working my way along a ridge four thousand feet above a sheer drop into the Pacific…and suddenly I had this vision of a glass of iced tea, with lemon.” For a moment I saw it again, with all the intensity of hallucination. “The glass all beaded in frost, and the ice cubes floating, and the lemon slice, with its white cold rind and stinging aromatic zest, and the tart pulp in the glass lending a certain juicy piquancy to the astringent tea…God, I was thirsty.

“I went back to my base camp, but I guess I’d been away a while. Lichen was growing on my processing credenza. My bivvy tent was collapsed and full of leaves. Raccoons had been into my field rations and strewn little packets of stuff everywhere.”

“No tea, eh?” Hanuman jumped down, circled the table and leaned up on tiptoe for a shot.

“Nope,” I said, watching him sink another ball. “And then I got to thinking about other things I hadn’t done in a while. Like…sitting at a table and eating with a fork and knife. Sleeping in a room. Having clean fingernails. All the things you take for granted when you don’t live out of a base camp.”

“And this was enough to make you go into a hazard zone, and endure the company of the mortal monkeys you so despise—” Hanuman set up for another shot, “—the refinements of civilization?” Whack! Clunk.

“It sounds so dumb,” I said wonderingly, “but that’s how it was. So I broke camp, cached my stuff, picked the moss out of my hair and took a transverse ridge down to Garrapatta Landing.”

“The town that exploded?” Hanuman cleared the table and jumped down. “I win, by the way.”

“The town didn’t explode; it burned to the ground after the hotel exploded,” I explained. “Garrapatta Landing was only about three shacks anyway. Nasty little boom town.”

“And how,” chuckled Hanuman. “Care for another game?”

“No, thank you.” I glared at the expanse of green felt, empty but for the cue ball.

“We could play for articles of clothing.”

“Not a chance in hell.” I set my cue back in its rack.

“Okay.” Hanuman set his cue beside mine and waved for another round of cocktails. “I’m still curious. How did the hotel explode? I thought you Preserver drones were programmed to avoid hazardous structures.”

“It wasn’t hazardous when I got there,” I said. “And I don’t like the word drone either, all right? I knew the place was doomed, but because the Concordance had the date wrong on when it was set to blow, I thought I’d be safe going there when I did. What happened was, some miners going into the south range came into town late with a wagonload of blasting powder. Damned mortal morons parked it right under my window. I don’t know how the explosion happened. I was asleep at the time. But it happened, and the whole hotel sort of leaned over sideways and became a mass of flaming wreckage.”

“With you in it? Ouch,” commented Hanuman.

“Yes. Ouch,” I said, sitting down again. “Look, I’m tired of explaining this. Why don’t we talk about you, instead? What did the Company do with an operative disguised as a monkey?”

“Lots of things,” he said, sitting down too. “But I’ve never been debriefed, so I can’t tell you about them.”

“Okay; but can you tell me why the Company decided it needed to resurrect an Afarensis, rather than just taking a chimpanzee for augmentation?” I persisted. “If they needed a talking monkey? And how’d they do it, anyway?”

Hanuman looked thoughtful. It was amazing how quickly I’d adjusted to seeing human expressions in his wizened face, human intelligence in his eyes. They fixed on me now, as he nodded.

“I can tell you that,” he said. The waiter brought our drinks, and Hanuman leaned back in his chair and said:

“You know the Company has a lot of wealthy clients in the twenty-fourth century. Dr. Zeus takes certain special orders from them, fetching certain special items out of the dead past. Makes a nice profit off the trade, too. You Preservers think all the stuff you collect goes for science, or to museums; not by a long shot, honey. Most of it goes into private collections.”

“I’d heard that,” I said. Not often, but it was one of the rumors continually circulating among operatives. “So what?”

“So somebody placed an order once for Primeval Man,” Hanuman went on. “And the Company needed to know what, exactly, was meant by primeval. Was he talking cavemen? Little skinny monkey-faced fellows scavenging hyena kills? Bigfoot? What? But the plutocrat placing the order had trouble being specific. He wanted something that walked upright, but he wanted…an animal. An animal perhaps a little smarter than a performing dog.”

“This is so illegal,” I said.

“Isn’t it? But the client could afford to make it profitable for Dr. Zeus. The only trouble was nailing down the definition of the merchandise. Finally the Company sent him an image of a reconstructed Afarensis. Was that primeval enough? Yes! That was what he’d had in mind. Fifteen breeding pairs, if you please.”

“This is SO illegal,” I said. He smiled at me, not the gum-baring grin of a chimpanzee but tight-lipped, pained.

“Big money,” was all he said.

“I guess so! What was he going to do with them once he had them?”

“Play God, one assumes.” Hanuman shrugged. “Or perhaps Tarzan. In any case, I suppose you’ve heard that the Company has a genetic bank on ice somewhere, with reproductive tissue and DNA from every race the planet’s ever produced? Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Crewkerne, the whole works?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. They have Afarensis in there too?”

Hanuman nodded. He did it differently from a Homo sapiens sapiens, I guess because of the way his skull was positioned on his vertebrae. It’s difficult to describe, an odd abrupt bobbing motion of his head.

“The Company took what they had and filled the order. Produced fifteen female embryos, sixteen males. I was number sixteen.”

“Why’d they make one extra?” I inquired.

“Because they could,” said Hanuman, a little wearily. “The client was throwing ridiculous amounts of money at them, after all; why not skim a bit for R&D on a new project? The idea persons involved thought it would be great to find out whether sentience could be enhanced in a lower hominid.

“So the client got his thirty assorted Afarensis babies and I went off to a private lab for augmentation and years of training.”

“But not the immortality process,” I said.

“Prototypes aren’t made immortal,” said Hanuman. “I can see the reasoning: why risk setting a mistake in stone? If the project proposal had been approved they’d have cranked out any number of immortal monkeys, I don’t doubt, but as it was…the Company decided it didn’t need a specialized operative for Prehistory. Apparently they were already having problems integrating their Neanderthal operatives and such into human society, and the last thing they wanted was another set of funny-looking immortals. So…”

“So there was just you,” I said.

“Just me,” he agreed. “Can you wonder I’m sex-starved?”

“I’d rather not wonder, okay?” I said. “But that’s pretty awful, I have to admit. Were you raised in a cage?”

“Good lord, no!” Hanuman looked indignant. “Were you?”

“No, I was raised at a Company base school,” I said.

“Then I had a more human upbringing than you had,” he told me. “I had adoptive parents. Dr. Fabry, the head of the project, took me home to his wife. She was a primate liaison and delighted to get me. They were a very loving couple. I had quite a pleasant childhood.”

“You’re kidding. How’d they get away with it? Isn’t it illegal to keep pets up at that end of time?”

“I wasn’t a pet,” he said stiffly. “I was raised as their child. They told everyone I was microcephalic.”

“And the mortals believed that?”

“Oh, yes. By the twenty-fourth century, there hadn’t been a microcephalic born in generations, and people were a little hazy about what the word meant. Everyone I met was kind and sympathetic as a consequence.”

“The mortals were?” I couldn’t believe this.

“The twenty-fourth century has its faults,” Hanuman told me, “but people from that time can’t bear to be perceived as intolerant.”

“But they are,” I protested. “I’ve met some, and they are.”

“Ah, but you’re a—excuse me—a cyborg, you see?” Hanuman reached over and patted my hand. “Better than mortals, so of course they’re not going to waste their sympathy on you! But I had every advantage. Why, I myself thought I was a challenged human being until I hit puberty, when I was five.”

“You didn’t know you were an Afarensis?”

“I thought all the cranial operations were to compensate for my condition,” he said. “And my parents were too kind-hearted to tell the truth until I became interested in sex, at which time they sat me down and explained that it wasn’t really an option for me.”

“That’s kind-hearted, all right,” I said.

“Mm. I was crushed, of course. Went through denial. Mumums and Daddums were so dreadfully sorry because they really did love me, you see, and so they hastened to provide me with all sorts of self-image-improving material. I was told I could be anything I set out to be! Except, of course, a human being, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy a full life. Et cetera.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Raged. Rebelled. Gave poor kind Dr. and Mrs. Fabry no end of grief. Decided at last to embrace my hominid heritage and turn my back on Homo sapiens.” Hanuman picked the fruit spear out of his mai tai and considered it critically. “Demanded to meet my biological parents.” He bit off a chunk of pineapple.

“But you came out of a DNA bank,” I said.

“Yes, they pointed that out too. The best that could be managed was an interview with the host mother who had given birth to me.” Hanuman leaned forward, still munching pineapple, and waggled his eyebrows. “And, talk about illegal! It turned out that the lady in question lived at Goodall Free Township.”

I did a fast access and was shocked. “You mean the chimpanzee commune? That place set aside for the Signers after the split happens in the Beast Liberation Party? But I thought that’ll be off-limits to humans.”

Hanuman lifted his cocktail and drained it, gracefully extending one long pinky as he drank. “Of course it is,” he said, setting the glass down. “Tell me, how long have you worked for the Company now? And you still think laws matter to Dr. Zeus?”

I was speechless.

“The Company had sent in a fast-talking—or should I say fast-signing?—person to negotiate with the females at Goodall,” Hanuman said. “One of you people, I believe. A Facilitator, isn’t that what the political ones are called? He offered a contract for surrogate maternity to thirty-one chimpanzees. They were implanted with the embryos, they carried them to term and delivered as per contract. Handsomely paid off, too, though presumably not in bananas alone.”

Something beeped and Hanuman started slightly. “Oops! Excuse me a moment.” He fished a pillbox out of his vest pocket and shook a few capsules into his palm. When he looked around for something to take them with, I pushed my glass forward.

“No, thank you,” he said delicately, getting up and filling a disposable cup at the water cooler. I narrowed my eyes. Certain mortals from the twenty-

fourth century are reluctant to touch utensils or other personal items a cyborg has used. Probably he just didn’t want to take a sip of something with rum in it, but I was hair-trigger sensitive to anti-cyborg bigotry.

“You know what? I’ve just remembered I have an appointment,” I said, getting to my feet and stalking out of the room. “Great story, but we’ll have to do this some other time, okay? Bye now.”

“Aw,” he said sadly, looking after me as I stormed away.


I didn’t get the rest of the story until a week later.

The people responsible for my new lungs cautiously admitted that sea air might be good for them, so I was permitted to go outside if I wore a long coat, wide-brimmed hat and a face mask that made me look like Trona the Robot Woman. I reclined in a deck chair on the beach and gazed out at the sea for hours on end, telling myself I didn’t give a damn that other immortals were staring at me. The dark lenses of the mask made the sea a deep violet blue, gave everything an eerie cast like an old day-for-night shot, and I could watch the waves rolling in and pretend I was anywhere but here, anyone but me.

One morning I heard a clatter as another deck chair was set up beside mine.

“There you are,” said someone cheerfully, and turning my head I saw Hanuman settling into the chair. He was nicely dressed as usual, in a white linen suit today, with a Panama hat that must have been specially made for his little coconut head. He drew a pair of sunglasses from an inner pocket and slipped them on. “Bright, isn’t it?”

I just turned my robot face back to regard the sea, hoping its expressionlessness would intimidate him into silence.

“Strange mask,” he observed. “Not the most attractive design they could have chosen. Much more angular than, say, the police in THX 1138. Nowhere near as human as Robot Maria in Metropolis. Even the Tin Man in—”

“I think they were going for Art Deco,” I said. “Buck Rogers Revival.”

“Yes!” He leaned forward to study the mask again. “Or Flesh Gordon.”

“Flash Gordon.”

He chuckled wickedly. “I meant what I said. Did you ever see it? Surprisingly good for a porn film. Great special effects.”

I was silent again, wishing I really was a robot, one perhaps with the ability to extend an arm and fire missiles at unwelcome companions.

“I was telling you the story of my life,” he said.

“So you were.”

“Still interested?”

“Go right ahead.”

He folded his hands on his stomach and began again.


“Goodall Free Township is a grand name, but the reality’s sort of squalid. After the Signer scandal, the Beast Liberation Party gave the signing chimpanzees a thousand acres of tropical woodland for their very own, hoping they’d just disappear into the forest and return to whatever the Beast equivalent of Eden is. I had decided to go there to live, and celebrate my true Afarensis nature.

“All the way there in the car, Mrs. Fabry told me about the wonderful paradise I was going to be privileged to see, where beasts lived in dignity and self-sufficiency, and how this was only one of the modern examples of mankind atoning for its crimes against the natural world.

“So I was expecting rainbows and unicorns and waterfalls, you see, quite illogically, but I was, and when we pulled up to the big electrified fence with barbed wire at the top it was jarring, to say the least. Beyond the fence was a thicket of cane solid as a wall, nothing visible behind it, growing to left and right along the fence as far as the eye could see.

“Even Mrs. Fabry looked stunned. A ranger emerged from a little shack by the locked gate and saluted snappily, but she demanded to know why the barbed wire was there. He told her it was to keep poachers out, which she accepted at once. Personally I think—well, you decide, once you’ve heard.

“The ranger stared at me, but didn’t question. He just stepped inside and got a jotpad, which he handed to Mrs. Fabry with the explanation that she needed to state for the record that she was going in of her own free will, and released the Goodall Free Township Committee from any responsibility in the event of unpleasantness. As she was listening to the plaquette and recording her statement, I began to remove my clothes.

“At this, the ranger looked concerned and signed to me, What are you doing?

“‘What’s it look like I’m doing?’ I said indignantly. ‘Besides talking, which I can do, thank you very much.’ And I explained that I was going to meet my brothers and sisters in nature and wanted no effete Homo sapiens garments to set me apart. He just shook his head and told me I might want to reconsider.

“Mrs. Fabry, who knew more about chimpanzees than I did, kept her clothing on. Even so, the ranger advised her she’d do well to take a gift for the inhabitants. She asked him if he had any fruit and he went inside his shack, to emerge a moment later with a bottle of Biodyne.

“‘Take this,’ he said. “They got all the fruit they need.’

“Mrs. Fabry took it reluctantly. Giving renaturalized primates any kind of medical assistance was strictly forbidden, as I was later to find out, but then so were visitors to this particular paradise. Anyway, the ranger dropped the perimeter security and let us in, pointing out a tiny gap between the cane stalks where we might squeeze through; then he locked up after us and I heard the faint hummzap of the fences going back on.

“As we picked our way through the jungle (where I very much regretted I hadn’t worn my shoes), Mrs. Fabry said, ‘Now, Michael dear, when we meet the chimpanzees, it might be a good idea if you got down in a crouch. They’ll be more comfortable.’

“‘Won’t they understand what I am?’ I demanded. ‘The whole point of this is that I’m returning to my true state.’

“‘Well—’ she said, and then we were through the jungle and out in a clearing, and there they were.

“I have to admit it was sort of breathtaking, mostly because of the scenery. Forested mountains rose straight into clouds, below which four chimpanzees were doing something in a meadow. Other than the noise my fellow primates were making, there was a dull sleepy silence over everything. The chimpanzees turned to look at us, and Mrs. Fabry dropped at once into a crouch. I didn’t, which was why I got a glimpse of what they’d been doing before they noticed we were there. They’d been beating a scrap of sheet metal into a curve around the tip of a stick, taking turns hammering it with river cobbles. It looked rather like a spear.

“The minute they spotted us, however, they closed rank and one of them tossed the stick behind the big rock they’d been using for an anvil. They advanced on us cautiously and I saw they were all males. They’d been focusing on Mrs. Fabry, I suppose because she was bigger than I was, only glancing at me, but one by one they did double takes and stopped, staring.

“The biggest male, who had a lot of silver on his muzzle, signed, What that thing? to Mrs. Fabry, indicating me with a flick of his hand.

“She winced for me, and signed back, My baby sort of chimpanzee.

“The big male gave me an incredulous look. The younger males began to—I think it’s called displaying, where they get erections and start behaving badly? Acting in a vaguely threatening manner. Rushing at me and pulling up short, then retreating. I did a bit of retreating myself, not quite cowering behind Mrs. Fabry, and seeing their bared fangs I wished very much I’d kept my pants on at least.

“The old male ignored them, staring earnestly into Mrs. Fabry’s face. Not chimpanzee, he signed. Lie lie. Wrong feet. What that thing?

“She signed, Friend, and offered the bottle of Biodyne hopefully. He regarded it a moment, sighed, and put out his long hand and took it from her. He loped off to the big rock, dropped it, picked up something else and loped back.

“Holding the object up before her eyes a moment—it was a six-centimeter Phillips-head screw—he signed, You come again bring this. Many this. Need this. Yes?

“Mrs. Fabry hesitated, and I yelped, ‘Tell him yes, Mom!’ because one of the other youths had made another rush and snapped his fangs perilously close to my ass. The old male started up and snarled at the others, baring his own fangs. Sit stupid dirt, he signed. I talk! Whereupon the juveniles snorted but turned away, and went to groom each other beside the big rock, but they watched me balefully.

“That not chimpanzee, the old male continued, indicating me. Sound like you. Lie. Pink pink pink. Why here?

“Mrs. Fabry signed, Come visit chimpanzee Gamma 18. Which, I discovered, was my host-mother’s name.”

“I thought they all had names like Lucy and Washoe,” I said.

“Not after Beast Liberation. It was decided human names would be insulting and patronizing,” Hanuman explained. “So they went with letter-number combinations instead. As soon as the old male saw my mother’s name, an expression of sudden comprehension crossed his face. Very human looking. In some excitement he signed, Doctor babies! Old time. Babies take away. Baby big now? This thing?

“I was getting a little tired of this, so I signed, I not thing. I good ape.

“He just laughed at me—oh, yes, they laugh—and signed, You good thing. He looked back at Mrs. Fabry and signed, Come visit Gamma 18.

“By this time I was ready to turn around and go home, but Mrs. Fabry wasn’t going to waste this chance to socialize with her favorite study subjects. She grabbed my hand and we set off after our host. He led us away, detouring just long enough to grab the Biodyne from the juveniles, who had opened it and were applying it to their cuts and sores. They sulked after us, making rude noises, until the old male (Tau 47, as he introduced himself) turned back and barked at them.

“We followed a trail over a shoulder of mountain and, what a surprise! They’d built themselves a township all right: eleven huts made of corrugated tin and aluminum panels from aircraft wreckage. The huts were arranged in a rough circle, with a fire pit in the center. Yes indeed, they even had fire. Mrs. Fabry caught her breath and Tau 47 glanced up at her warily. In a defensive kind of way he signed, Fire good. Chimpanzee careful careful.

“‘I thought this was supposed to be pristine primeval wilderness,’ I said under my breath.

“‘They must have found a crash site the Goodall Free Township Committee was unaware of,’ replied Mrs. Fabry.

“There were several chimpanzees sitting in the center clearing, mostly females with young. They all looked up and stared as we came down the hillside. Some of the smaller juveniles screamed and ran, or threw things, but most of them watched us intently.

“One or two females signed Look look. Tau 47 led us right up to a female with an infant at her breast and signed, Remember doctor babies gone. Big baby now. Visit. He turned and indicated us. Mrs. Fabry crouched at once and I hastily followed suit. I couldn’t take my eyes off the female. This Gamma 18, he signed to us.

“Remarkable how different their faces are, one from another, when you see them all in a group. My host-mother had a more pronounced muzzle, and the hair on her head seemed longer than elsewhere, like a woman’s. Taken all in all the effect was a little like that famous parody of the Mona Lisa. But, you understand, by this time she no longer seemed like an animal to me. She looked like the Madonna of the Forest.

“I signed, Mother, and reached out to her, but she drew back, glancing at me sidelong. Her baby ignored us, snuffling at her long flat breast. After a moment she reached out a tentative hand and knuckled my foot.

“Funny foot, she signed. Remember. Doctor pull out, take gone. See funny foot. You my baby old now?

“I signed back, I your baby, good ape now. Mrs. Fabry had tears in her eyes.

“Gamma 18 signed Good good in an uncertain way. Then she turned to Mrs. Fabry and signed, Comb?

“We thought she was asking Mrs. Fabry to groom her, and Mrs. Fabry was breathless at the honor and acceptance that implied, but when she hitched herself closer Gamma 18 backed off and repeated Comb? And she carefully and unmistakably mimed running a comb through her hair, as opposed to a flea-picking gesture.

“Mrs. Fabry said out loud, ‘Oh, you mean you want one!’

“She happened to be wearing one of those hikers’ pouches at her waist, and she unzipped it and dug around for her comb. She handed it over to Gamma 18, and was instantly surrounded by other females who all wanted things too, and I must say asked for them very politely.

“Mrs. Fabry, looking radiantly happy, passed out tissues and breath mints and offered little squirts of cologne from a vial she had in there. Gamma 18 moved in closer, and soon they were all sitting around, Mrs. Fabry included, signing to one another and blowing their noses, or taking turns passing the comb through their hair.

“I sat to one side, dumfounded. Tau 47, who had been watching me, caught my eye and signed, You thing come. He paced away a little distance, looking over his shoulder at me. I got up and followed, feeling sullen and miserable. I had to stand to follow him, because I’ve never been able to walk on my knuckles very well, and of course my rising to my full height set off another round of screams and abuse from the juveniles in the group. One very little male galloped close, pulled up and signed, Ugly ugly pink pink.

“Angrily I signed back, Dirty stupid. Tau 47 stood up and snarled at the little male, who drew back at once. But he sat there watching us, and to my annoyance began to sign slyly: Pretty pretty pink pink. The other juveniles took it up too, laughing to themselves. I was nearly in tears.

“Tau 47 huffed and signed, Stupid babies. You smart thing?

“Not thing, I insisted. Good ape. Tau 47 rolled his eyes as if to say ‘Whatever’ and then signed, You see how lock work?

“I signed confusion at this. He grunted, sat down and with great care signed slowly: You go in gate. Here. You see how gate lock work? How open?

“I signed back, Not know. Sorry. You want leave here?

“I leave leave, he signed. I go back people houses.

“I was astonished. Why? I signed. This good here. I come here live. It was his turn to look astonished.

“Come here live, he repeated, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d seen. Why why why? Cold here. Wet here. Bad food. Bugs. Fight bad chimpanzees.

“I didn’t know what he meant by this, because the Goodall Free Township Committee had selected wilderness that was not only virgin, it was empty of any other chimpanzees. So I signed, Who bad chimpanzees?

“Tau 47 looked threateningly up at the mountain and signed, Bad bad Iota 34. Bad chimpanzee, friends. Fight. Eat babies. Steal. By which he meant, I suppose, that some family group had split off from the original settlement and taken up residence in a distant corner of the preserve, and now there were territorial conflicts. It didn’t surprise me; chimpanzees in the wild had used to do that, and it might be lamentable but it was, after all, natural. So I signed, Iota 34 steal food?

“He considered me a moment and then signed, Come hide quiet. So signing, he knuckle-loped away a few paces and looked back over his shoulder at me. I followed uneasily, and he led me through bushes and along a jungle trail, taking us deeper into the hills.

“Within a couple of minutes we were out of sight of the village and I began to hear warning calls from the brush around us, and glimpse here and there a chimpanzee peering down from high branches. Finally a big male dropped into the path before us, followed by two other males and a big female without young. They bared their teeth at me. Tau 47 signed, Good chimpanzee-thing no bite. He put an arm around me and made a cursory grooming motion.

“They blinked and looked away, then vanished back into the leaf cover as suddenly as they had appeared. Chimpanzees watch, explained Tau 47. I wondered what they were watching, but he led me forward and as we came out on the edge of a ravine it became clear why they guarded that patch of forest.

“There, filling the ravine and spilling down it in a river of squalor, was a trash landfill. It was overgrown with creepers, overhung with trees, which was perhaps why the Goodall Free Township Committee hadn’t known it was there. Two chimpanzees worked the heap immediately below us, poking through it with sticks and now and then pulling out a useful scrap of salvage, old wiring or broken furniture.”

“I guess it wasn’t quite virgin wilderness,” I said.

“I guess so. Something the survey parties for the Goodall Free Township Committee missed, evidently, or were bribed to overlook. I just stood there gaping at it. The two chimpanzees below looked up at me and froze; after watching Tau 47 and me a moment they seemed to accept my presence and got back to their work. Tau 47 signed to me, This secret. Good things here. Make house. Make knife. Live good. He looked up once again at the mountain and bared his teeth. Iota 34 want secret. Dirty bad bad.

“Iota 34 make house too? I signed.

“No no, signed Tau 47. Iota 34 make, and he paused and made a motion of gripping a shaft of something with both hands, stabbing with it. Then he signed, Stick knife hunt hurt.

“I saw the whole problem in a flash: it was much more than a Tree of Knowledge in Eden. It was like the twentieth-century dilemma over atomic power. Here these poor creatures had this unexpected gift, from which they could derive all sorts of comforts for their wretched existence; but it had to be prevented from falling into the enemy’s hands at all costs, or it could be used against them.”

“Though they were obviously using it to make weapons themselves,” I said.

“Naturally.” Hanuman tilted his hat forward to shade his face. “They were chimpanzees. It was in their nature. They’re decent enough people but they’re not peace-loving, you know, any more than Homo sapiens is. What a Cold War scenario, eh? Being signers, they had the ability to communicate ideas; they had seen enough of what Homo sapiens has in the way of enriched environments to want to make one for themselves, and now they had the potential to do so.

“But as long as most of their tribe’s resources had to be expended on guarding this trash pile, how much time could they afford to do anything else?”

“It’s always something,” I muttered.

“So there I was, standing on this height, and suddenly it flashed before my eyes: what if I became one of these people? What if I led them, used my augmented intelligence to give them the edge in their arms race? I might become a lower-hominid Napoleon! We’d take on the dastardly Iota 34 and force his tribe to become peaceful citizens of a new primate civilization! Made of recycled trash, admittedly, but unlike anything that had ever existed.

“Or perhaps—dare I even think it—force the Homo sapiens world to face the monstrous injustice of what had been done to these poor creatures by letting them get an earful of the Black Monolith, so to speak, and then removing any way for them to fulfill their hitherto unguessed-at potential by insisting they live like primitives?

“Good heavens, I thought to myself, it might even be a plot to keep us from moving into Man’s neighborhood! Having transmitted the divine spark of reason to us, what if Man had now regretted and sought to keep us mere animals? How dare he deny our humanity? Why, I might lead a crusade to bring apes everywhere to a higher level of being. Shades of Roddy McDowall in a monkey mask!”

“But you saw the futility of such an exercise in ego?” I inquired.

“Actually, it was the cold realization that I’d probably be remembered as Pretty Pink General,” said Hanuman. “Plus the fact that just then I felt something bite me, and looked down at myself and realized I was covered in fleas.

“Good secret, I signed to Tau 47. I quiet quiet.

“He looked out over it all, sighed and signed, You go. No stay here. Go houses.

“I signed, You miss houses?

“Miss houses, he signed back. Want good food. Good blanket good. Miss pictures. Miss music. Miss game. Good good all. I sad. Cry like baby.

“Sorry, I signed. He just huffed and looked out over the landfill.

“We went back to the village.

“The ladies were all sitting around grooming one another, Mrs. Fabry included. She looked up as we approached and said, ‘Michael, dear, I’ve been trying to explain that you want to stay with them, but—’

“I told her it was all right, that I’d changed my mind. Before she could explain this, though, Gamma 18 broke away from the group and approached me. Looking at me seriously, she signed, You no stay here.

“No stay, I agreed bitterly.

“She came closer on all fours—her baby was still hanging under her—and put her hand on my shoulder, quite gently. Then she signed, You no chimpanzee. You no man. You other thing. Sad thing here. You go houses, be happy thing.

“By which motherly advice I guess she meant that the bananas grow at the top of the tree, not at the roots, and since I didn’t belong at either end (evolutionarily speaking) I might as well climb up and eat rather than slide back down and starve. You get what life deals you, and you’d better make the best of it.

“I went back home with Mrs. Fabry. The dear woman didn’t mind all the flea bites she’d incurred on my behalf in the least; I do believe she got more out of the whole ape-bonding experience than I had. I settled down to try to be a good adoptive son to her and Dr. Fabry. Tried not to think of my chimp-mother’s plight, though I lived by her wise words.”

“And that was it? You came all that way, and that was all she had to tell you?” I demanded.

“Well, she was a chimpanzee, after all, not a vocational guidance counselor.” Hanuman looked at me over his sunglasses. “And if you think about it, it’s good advice. Certainly I’ve let it guide me through a long and occasionally trying life. You might consider doing the same.”

“I fail to see how our problems are in any way similar,” I snapped.

“Aren’t they?” Hanuman regarded me. “When I discovered I was neither an ape nor a man, I tried to be an ape. It was a waste of my time. All the advantage is on the human side.

“You—during a similar adolescent crisis, I’d bet bananas to coconuts—discovered you are neither a machine nor a woman. So you’ve tried to be a machine.”

“Go to hell, you little hominid bastard!”

“No, no, hear me out: your work habits, your preference for physical and emotional isolation, are part of your attempts to ignore your human heritage. But your heart is human so you can’t do it, any more than I could, and the stress of the conflict drove you to seek out human companionship.

“Or possibly, by sleeping in a place you knew to be hazardous, you were indulging in a covert suicide attempt. Was it really tea you were thirsty for, Mendoza?”

“I can’t believe this!” I leaped out of my chair and tore off my mask, glaring at him. “You’re one of the Company’s psychiatrists! Aren’t you?”

“Let’s just say I’m not completely retired. You must have suspected all along,” he added calmly, “clever cyborg that you are.”

“How many times do I have to tell you people, it was an accident?” I shouted, and all up and down the beach, heads turned and other operatives stared at us.

“But you’re programmed not to have accidents,” he said. “And the Company would like to know how it happened, and whether it’s likely to happen again. Is it just your neurosis that leads you to take unnecessary risks, or is it a design flaw they need to know about? They have a lot of money invested in you cyborgs, you know. Who were you hoping to find in the fire, Mendoza?”

“Oh, now we get to the truth,” I said, sitting down again. “Now we drop the crap about how I’m really human. I’m an expensive machine and the Company’s doing a diagnostic to see whether I’m still malfunctioning?”

Hanuman shrugged, holding my gaze with his own. “You look at me and all you see is a monkey, no matter how cleverly I speak. They look at you and all they see is a machine they can’t seem to repair. It’s insulting. Unfair. Yet the hard truth is, neither one of us belong in the natural world. I know it hurts; who’d know better than I? But it won’t change. I’ve accepted that. Can you?”

I put my mask back on and, without another word to him, strode away up the beach.


I managed to avoid speaking to him the rest of the time I was there, and he didn’t try to speak to me, though he watched me somberly from a distance and tipped his hat once or twice when our paths crossed. Maybe he’d found out all the Company wanted him to find out, or maybe he knew there was no way on earth I was ever going to let him any further into my head than he’d gotten already.

The Company discharged me for active service at last; they had to. They’d repaired me good as new, right? So I took off for the coastal mountains and made a new base camp up in the big trees, and got right back to work happily collecting genetic variants of Abies bracteata. I had all I wanted in the wilderness.

Stupid chimpanzees, wanting to go back to the cities of humanity! Maybe they needed an enriched environment, but not me. I’d stripped away such irrelevant nonsense from my life, hadn’t I?

I had the looming mountains to myself, and the vast empty sea and the immensity of cold white stars at night and, thank God, the silence of my own heart. It never makes a sound of complaint. It’s a perfectly functioning machine.