Wake

Chapter 20

Shoshana Glick sat in the living room of the clapboard bungalow that housed the Marcuse Institute. An oscillating electric fan was running, periodically blowing on her. She was looking at the big computer monitor, reviewing the video of Hobo and Virgil chatting over the webcam link.

Harl Marcuse, meanwhile, was sitting in his overstuffed chair, facing a PC. Although their backs were to each other, Shoshana knew he was checking his email because he periodically muttered, “the jerks” (his usual term for the NSF), “the cretins” (most often a reference to the money people at UCSD), and “the moron” (always a reference to his department head).

As she watched the video frame by frame, Shoshana was pleased to see that Hobo was better than Virgil at properly forming signs, and—

“The assholes!”

That was one Shoshana hadn’t heard from the Silverback before, and she swiveled her chair to face him. “Professor?”

He heaved his bulk to his feet. “Is the video link to Miami still intact?”

“Sure.”

“Get Juan Ortiz online,” he said, stabbing a fat finger at the big monitor in front of Shoshana’s chair. “Right now.”

She reached for the telephone handset and hit the appropriate speed-dial key. After a moment, a man’s voice with a slight Hispanic accent came on. “Feehan Primate Center.”

“Juan? It’s Shoshana in San Diego. Dr. Marcuse is—”

“Put him on screen,” the Silverback snapped.

“Um, can you open your video link there, please?” Shoshana said.

“Sure. Do you want me to get Virgil?”

She covered the mouthpiece. “He’s asking if—”

But Marcuse must have heard. His tone was still sharp. “Just him. Now.”

“No, just you, Juan, if you don’t mind.”

And Juan must have heard Marcuse, because he suddenly sounded very nervous.

“Um, ah, okay. Um, I’ll hang up here and come on there in a second…”

About a minute later, Juan’s face appeared on the computer monitor, sitting on the same wooden chair Virgil had occupied before. He was only a couple of years older than Shoshana, and had long black hair, a thin face, and high cheekbones.

“What the hell did you think you were doing?” Marcuse demanded.

“Excuse me?” said Juan.

“We agreed,” Marcuse said, “that we’d announce the interspecies Web chat jointly. Who’d you speak to?”

“No one. Just, um…”

“Who?” roared Marcuse.

“Just a stringer for New Scientist. He’d called up for a quote about the revised endangered-species status for Sumatran orangs, and—”

“And after talking to you, your stringer went to the Georgia Zoo for a quote about Hobo — and now Georgia wants him back! Damn it, Ortiz, I told you how precarious Hobo’s custody is.”

Juan looked terrified, Shoshana thought. Even if they worked thousands of miles apart and with different kinds of apes, getting badmouthed by the Silverback would hurt any primate-language researcher’s career. But perhaps Juan was reflecting on the physical distance, too, and was emboldened by it. He stuck out his jaw. “Custody of Hobo isn’t really my problem, Professor Marcuse.”

Shoshana cringed, and not just because Juan had mispronounced the Silverback’s name, saying it as two syllables rhyming with “confuse” instead of as mar-KOO-zeh.

“Do you know what the Georgia Zoo wants to do with Hobo?” Marcuse demanded.

“Christ, I’ve been trying to keep him off their radar, hoping — God damn it!

You’ve — I’ve invested so much time, and you — !” He was spluttering, and some of his spit hit the monitor. Shoshana had never seen him this angry before. He threw up his hands and said to her, “You tell him.”

She took a deep breath and turned back to the monitor. “Um, Juan, do you know why we call him Hobo?”

“After some TV dog, isn’t it?”

Marcuse was pacing behind Shoshana. “No!” The word exploded from him.

“No,” said Shoshana, much more softly. “It’s a contraction. Our ape is half-bonobo. Hobo; half-bonobo — get it?”

Juan’s eyes went wide and his jaw fell slack. “He’s a hybrid?”

Shoshana nodded. “Hobo’s mother was a bonobo named Cassandra. There was a flood at the Georgia Zoo, and the common chimps and the bonobos ended up being briefly quartered together, and … well, um, boys will be boys, whether they’re Homo sapiens or Pan troglodytes, and Hobo’s mother was impregnated.”

“Well, ah, that’s interesting, but I don’t see—”

“Tell him what Georgia will do to Hobo if they get him back,” commanded Marcuse.

Shoshana looked over her shoulder at her boss, then back at the webcam eye. There was no need to tell Juan that common chimpanzees and bonobos were both endangered in the wild. But, because of that, zoos felt it was imperative to keep the bloodlines pure in captivity. “Cassandra’s pregnancy was to have been quietly aborted,” Shoshana said, “but somehow the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got word that she was pregnant — not with a hybrid, but just pregnant, period — and the public became very excited about that, and no one wanted to admit the mistake, and so Hobo was brought to term.” She took another deep breath. “But they’d always planned to sterilize him before he reached maturity.” She looked over her shoulder once more. “And, um, I take it they’re planning on doing that again?”

“Damn straight!” said Marcuse, wheeling now to face her. “It was only my bringing him here, where he’s isolated from other apes, that saved him from that. They almost got him back from me when he started painting — they smelled the money that ape art could bring in. I only got to keep him by agreeing to give Atlanta half the proceeds. But now that he and Virgil are poised to be—”

He turned, looked at his own monitor, and read from it in a sneering tone, “‘Internet celebrities,’ those bastards are saying, and I quote, ‘he’d be better off here, where he can properly meet his public.’ Jesus!”

Shoshana spoke to Marcuse rather than to Juan. “And you think they’ll sterilize him if they get their hands back on him?”

“Think it?” bellowed Marcuse. “I know it! I know Manny Casprini: the moment he gets Hobo back — snip!” He shook his massive head. “If I’d had a chance to prepare Casprini properly, maybe this could have been avoided. But eager-fucking-beaver there in Florida couldn’t keep his goddamned trap shut!”

Juan was still trying to fight, Shoshana saw. How could a primate researcher know so little? Back down, she thought at him. Back down. “It’s not my fault, Professor Marcuse” — two syllables again. “And, besides, maybe he should be sterilized, if—”

“You don’t sterilize healthy endangered animals!” shouted Marcuse. His neck had turned the color of an eggplant. “We may well lose both species of genus Pan in the wild this decade. If another outbreak of Ebola or bird flu tears through the DRC, all the remaining wild bonobos could be wiped out, and there aren’t enough captive ones as is to keep the line viable.”

Shoshana agreed. She had grown up in South Carolina, and the unfortunate echoes of what the zookeepers had said in the past disturbed her: tainted bloodlines, forced sterilization to keep the species pure, strictures against miscegenation.

Chantek, who had been enculturated by ApeNet’s Lyn Miles, was also an accidental hybrid, in his case of the two extant orangutan species. The purists — a word that, to Shoshana’s ears, didn’t sound so pure — wanted him sterilized, too.

When they’d received the Lawgiver statue, Shoshana had sought out the original five Planet of the Apes films. The statue appeared only in the first two (although the Lawgiver was a character in the fifth film, played by none other than John Huston). But it was the third film that had put Shoshana on the edge of her seat as she and her boyfriend watched it on DVD in her cramped apartment.

In it, a talking female chimpanzee was to be sterilized, if not outright murdered, along with her chimp husband. The president of the United States, played by that guy who’d been Commodore Decker on the original Star Trek, said to his science advisor, played by Victor from the Y R, “Now, what do you expect me and the United Nations, though not necessarily in that order, to do about it? Alter what you believe to be the future by slaughtering two innocents, or rather three, now that one of them is pregnant? Herod tried that, and Christ survived.”

And the science advisor had said, absolutely cold-bloodedly, “Herod lacked our facilities.”

Shoshana shook her head as she thought back to it. There were real scientists like that; she’d encountered plenty of them.

“And, damn it,” continued Marcuse, looking at Juan on the monitor, “Hobo is the only known living chimp-bonobo hybrid. That arguably makes him the most-endangered species of all! If anyone — if your own goddamn mother! — asks you a question about Hobo, you don’t say word one until you’ve cleared it with me, capisce?”

Juan looked down and to the right, averting his eyes from Marcuse’s on-screen gaze, and he bowed his head slightly, and when he spoke it was barely more than a whisper. “Yes, sir.”