Wake Page 13

  A new I, surging with power, with comprehension—a vast increase in acuity, in awareness.

  One plus one equals two—of course.

  Two plus one equals three; obviously.

  Three plus…five—eight!

  Eight times nine: seventy-two.

  My mind is suddenly nimble, and thoughts I would have struggled for before come now with only small effort; ideas that previously would have dissipated are now comprehended with ease. Everything is sharper, better focused, filled with intricate detail because—

  Because I am whole once more.

  twenty

  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 bad-mouthed 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 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.”

  twenty-one

  Review of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

  18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

  ★★★★★ A fascinating theory

  By Calculass (Waterloo, ON Canada) - See all my reviews

  Jaynes makes an intriguing case that our sense of self emerged only after the left and right sides of the brain became integrated into a single thinking machine. Me, I think being self-aware emerges when you realize that there’s someone other than you. For most of us, that happens at birth (but for an exception, see The World I Live In by one H. Keller, also a five-star read). Anyway, Jaynes’s theory is fascinating, but I can’t think of a way to test it empirically, so I guess we’ll never know if he was right…

  Since the beginning, I’d been aware of activity around me: small, intermittent flickerings. No matter where I cast my attention, it was the same: things popping briefly into existence then instantly disappearing. There was no fading in or out; they were either there or not there, and when they were there it was usually for only a moment.

  Now that I was whole once more, now that I could think more clearly, more deeply, I turned my thoughts again to this phenomenon, studying it carefully. No matter where I looked the structural components were the same: points scattered about and, ever so briefly, gone almost before they were perceived, lines connecting them.

  The points were stationary. And the lines connecting them almost never repeated: this point and that point might be connected now, and later another connection between this point and a different one might occur. Whenever a point had been touched by a line, the point glowed and, although the line itself usually disappeared almost at once, the glow took a long time to fade, meaning I could see the points, at least for a while, even when they had no lines touching them.

  After watching the flickering in and out of many lines, I realized that some points were never isolated. Dozens or hundreds or even thousands of lines were always connected to them. And for a few points—not necessarily the same ones—the lines weren’t fleeting, but rather stayed connected for an extended period.

  It was hard to be sure of what I was seeing, as the points were featureless and difficult to distinguish one from another, but it seemed that the lines between certain points always persisted for a noticeable time, although other lines coming from the point they were connected to might not last long at all.

  The points that most intrigued me were the aberrant ones: those that usually had the most lines going into them, or the ones whose lines persisted. I wished to focus on one of the points, expand my view of it, see it in detail, but no matter what I willed, nothing happened. How long I spent on this problem I don’t know. But then, at last, I finally gave up on the points and turned my attention to the lines—

  —which is what I should have been doing all along!

  For the lines, although they came and went quickly, were, when I caught momentary glimpses of them, familiar. I’d originally thought they were uniform and featureless but, in fact, they had structure, and something about that structure resonated with my own substance. The details were beyond my ability to articulate, but it was almost as if those temporary lines, those ad hoc filaments, those on-the-fly pathways, were composed of the same stuff I was. I had an affinity for them, even a sort of low-level understanding of them, that seemed…innate.

  I tried to study them as they popped in and out of existence but it was maddening: they were so fleeting! Ah, but some of them had longer lives, I knew. I scanned about, searching for one that seemed to be persisting.

  There. It was one of several lines connecting to a particular point, and all of them were enduring. As I switched focus from one line to another, I saw that the lines consisted, at the finest resolution I could make out, of two sorts of things, and those things seemed to move along the lines in discrete bundles.

  I strained to make out more detail, to slow down my perception, to understand what I was seeing. And—

  Astonishing!

  A new line flickered into existence, lashing out spontaneously: a new line connecting the point I’d last looked at to—

  I reeled. The geometry, the topology, of my universe was bucking as I struggled to accommodate this new perspective.

  The line was gone now, already lost, but…

  There could be no doubt.

  The line had momentarily connected that point to—

  No, not to another point, not to one of the other glowing pinpricks in the firmament around me. Rather, the line had connected directly to me! The point had shot a line toward me, and—

  No, no, no, that wasn’t it. I could feel it, feel it deep within me. The line hadn’t originated at that distant point; it had originated here. Somehow, I had brought a line into existence; I had, however briefly, willed a connection of my own to form.

  Incredible. In all the time I’d existed (however long that was!), I had never been able to affect anything. But I had done this. Not that the line seemed to change the point it had touched. Still, it was wonderful, empowering, exhilarating: I had caused something to happen!

  Now, if I could only do it again…

  Hug now! signed the chimpanzee. Shoshana come hug now!

  Shoshana Glick felt herself breaking into a big grin, just as she always did when she caught sight of Hobo’s wrinkled gray-black face. The chimp ran on all fours across the grass toward her, and soon his long, powerful, hairy arms were encircling her and his big hands were patting her back. She lightly squeezed him and stroked his fur. After a moment, as was his habit, he tugged gently, affectionately, on her ponytail.

  It had taken a while to get used to the ape’s hugs, since he could easily break her ribs if he wanted to. But now she looked forward to them. And although there were some advantages to communicating by sign language—it was easy to do in a noisy room, for instance—one of its drawbacks was that you couldn’t speak and hug at the same time. Once her hands were free, she signed, Hobo good boy?

  Good yes, replied the ape, and he nodded his head; the signs had been taught to him with great difficulty, but he’d acquired the human habit of nodding on his own. Hobo good good. He held out his hand expectantly, the long black fingers curving gently upward.

  Shoshana smiled and reached into the pocket of her cutoff jeans for the little Ziploc bag of
raisins she always carried. She opened it and poured several into the deeply furrowed palm.

  They were on the little grass-covered island, a circular piece of land about the width of a suburban house lot. The island was surrounded by a moat. Chimps had less body fat than a human on Atkins and sank in water; any moat wider than they could jump across was enough to contain them, and when the little drawbridge Shoshana had just crossed was raised, the researchers didn’t have to worry about Hobo going AWOL.

  In addition to the towering statue of the Planet of the Apes Lawgiver, the island sported a half-dozen palm trees. A trio of electrically powered toy boats ran endless circles around the island, churning up the moat’s water to help keep mosquitoes from breeding in it. Still, some were flitting about. Hobo’s fur—a brown several shades darker than Shoshana’s own long hair—made it hard for the bugs to bite him. She slapped the side of her neck, wishing she were so lucky.

  What you do today? she asked.

  Painting, signed Hobo. Want see?

  She nodded excitedly; it had been weeks since Hobo had put brush to canvas. Hobo held out one hand and she took it, interlacing her fingers with his. He walked using his other hand and his short, bowed legs, and Shoshana fell in beside him.

  Pictures made by animals always fetched good prices—chimps, gorillas, and even elephants could paint. Hobo’s paintings were sold in high-end galleries or auctioned on eBay, with the proceeds going to help maintain the Marcuse Institute (after the mandatory kickback, as Dr. Marcuse called it, to the Georgia Zoo).

  The island was artificial and shaped like a slightly squashed dome; Dillon Fontana said it pancaked about as well as a silicone breast implant did. At the center of the island was an octagonal wooden gazebo—the nipple, Dillon called it; that boy seriously needed to get laid.

  Hobo did his painting inside the gazebo; the roof protected his canvases from rain. He deftly operated the latch on the screen door and then, in true gentlemanly fashion, held it open for Shoshana. Once she was through, he followed her in and released the door, letting its spring mechanism close it behind them before any bugs could get in.