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CHAPTER 095

Henry Kendall was surprised that Gerard could help Dave with his math homework. But that wouldn’t last long. Eventually, Dave would probably need special schooling. Dave had inherited the chimp’s short attention span. He found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the other kids in class, particularly in reading, which was agony for him. And his physical prowess put him in another league on the playground. The other children wouldn’t let him play. So he had become an excellent surfer.

And by now, the truth was out. There had been a particularly distressing article inPeople magazine, “The Modern Family,” which said, “The most up-to-date family is no longer a same-sex family, or a blended family, or an interracial family. That’s all so last century, says Tracy Kendall. And she should know, because the Kendall family of La Jolla, California, is transgenic and interspecies-creating more excitement in the household than a barrel of monkeys!”

Henry had been called to testify before Congress, which he found a peculiar experience. The congressmen spoke to the cameras for two hours. Then they got up and left, pleading urgent business elsewhere. Then the witnesses spoke for six minutes each, but there were no congressmen there to hear their remarks. Later, the congressmen all announced they would soon deliver major speeches on the subject of transgenic creation.

Henry was named Scientist of the Year by the Society for Libertarian Biology. Jeremy Rifkin called him a “war criminal.” He had been excoriated by the National Council of Churches. The pope excommunicated him, only later to discover that he wasn’t Catholic; they had the wrong Henry Kendall. The NIH criticized his work, but the replacement for Robert Bellarmino as head of genetics was William Gladstone, and he was much more open-minded and less self-aggrandizing than Bellarmino had been. Henry now traveled continuously, lecturing about transgenic techniques at university seminars around the country.

He was the subject of intense controversy. The Reverend Billy John Harker of Tennessee called him “Satan incarnate.” Bill Mayer, noted left-wing reactionary, published a long and much-discussed article in the New York Review of Books entitled “Banished from Eden: Why We Must Prevent Transgenic Travesties.” The article failed to mention that transgenic animals had been in existence for two decades already. Dogs, cats, bacteria, mice, sheep, and cattle had all been created. When a senior NIH scientist was asked about the article, he coughed and said, “What’s the New York Review?”

Lynn Kendall ran the TransGenic Times web site, which detailed the daily life of Dave, Gerard, and her fully human children, Jamie and Tracy.

After a year in La Jolla, Gerard began to make dial-tone sounds. He had done it before, but the tones were mysterious to the Kendalls. Evidently they were the tones of a foreign telephone exchange, but they failed to identify which country. “Where did you come from, Gerard?” they would ask.

“I can’t sleep a wink anymore, ever since you first walked out the door.” He had become enamored of American country music. “All you ever do is bring me down.”

“What country, Gerard?”

To that, they never received an answer. He spoke some French, and he often talked with a British accent. They assumed he was European.

Then one day one of Henry’s graduate students from France was having dinner at their house, and he heard Gerard’s tones. “My God,” he said, “I know what he is doing.” He listened for a moment. “There is no city code,” he said. “But otherwise…let’s try.” He pulled out his own cell phone, and began to key in numbers. “Do it again, Gerard.”

Gerard repeated the tones.

“And again.”

“Life is a book, you’ve got to read it,” Gerard sang. “Life is a story and you’ve got to tell it…”

“I know this song,” the graduate student said.

“What is it?” Henry said.

“It’s Eurovision. Gerard, the tones.”

Eventually, Gerard did the dial tones. The graduate student placed the call. His first guess was to try Paris. A woman answered the phone. He said in French, “Excuse me, but do you know of a grey parrot who is named Gerard?”

The woman began to cry. “Let me speak to him,” she said. “Is he all right?”

“He is fine.”

They held the phone by Gerard’s perch, and he listened to the woman’s voice. His head bobbed excitedly. Then he said, “Is this where you live? Oh, Mother’s going to love it here!”

Gail Bond arrived to visit a few days later. She stayed a week, and then returned alone. Gerard, it seemed, wanted to stay. For days afterward, he sang:

My baby used to stay out all night long,

She made me cry, she done me wrong,

She hurt my eyes open, that’s no lie,

Tables turn and now her turn to cry,

Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now…

All in all, things were working out much better than anyone expected. The family was busy, but everyone got along. There were only two worrisome trends. Henry noticed that Dave had developed a few gray hairs around his muzzle. So it was possible that Dave, like most other transgenics, might die earlier than usual.

And one autumn day, while Dave was walking with Henry at the county fair, holding Henry’s hand, a farmer in overalls came up and said, “I’d like to get me one of them to work on my farm.”

That gave Henry a chill.