Gibbon's Decline and Fall (20 page)

“What base pairs?”

“CCG's, over and over and over.”

“Strings of CCG's are junk. Meaningless.”

“Right. That's what we thought, which was all very interesting. The A-BBBB-C sequence had something to do with smell, and here our chimps had the two ends of the sequence, but the middle was degraded or lost. Smell and reproductive behavior are very strongly connected in a lot of species.…”

“You thought you had a clue to chimp sexual behavior!”

“Other way around, actually. I thought it might be a clue as to why wolves and siamangs mate for life while bonobos are totally promiscuous. I assumed, for purposes of experiment, that it did have something to do with smell, maybe the development of an organ that would bind to a unique pheromone. A specific he-wolf, for example, might imprint on the smell of a specific she-wolf, and after that no other mate would smell right. Just like goslings imprint on the first moving thing they see after they hatch.

“So I did some baseline tests on smell acuity on a couple of the chimps; then I built a cut-and-paste RNA sequence to unzip the
X
's and insert the
B
's, and I attached it to the viral carrier we were using then—”

“It still wouldn't affect an adult,” he objected. “You'd have to insert it in a fertilized egg.”

“I planned to do that, but since some tissues can be affected even in an adult, and since I had the stuff, I decided to try it. I sprayed the stuff into the nostrils of a couple of the chimps to see if the sequence would incorporate in their nasal cells and modify sensitivity to smell or change their sexual behavior.…”

“What happened?”

“They showed no increase or decrease in detecting odors, they didn't sniff each other any more or less than formerly, and the fornication rate remained constant.” She seated herself before her own terminal and stared at the blank screen.

“Can chimps fornicate?” he asked, straightfaced.

“Can they ever!”

Both of them laughed, Jessamine shaking her head ruefully. It had been so disappointing! For all the progress they'd made in transliterating the genetic code into its sequence of bases, large-scale translation of real meanings was still elusive. DNA was not a blueprint for an organism; it was a set of instructions for growing one in a constantly changing environment, and the environment was an essential part of the instructions.

Val's brow creased. “So then you went on to try it in an embryo? Right?”

Jessamine caught her breath. Even after three years she felt her mind recoil, the gates clang down, not to be reminded. Her older daughter Carlotta, dead. Her new little granddaughter, dead. She swallowed, took a breath, and made herself answer.

“It was ninety-seven, Val. The quake happened. The lab was destroyed. The computers, my records, everything. The apes were all right, they were at an inland facility, one of the breeding farms set up to maintain the species when they went extinct in the wild. I never tried my sequence on an embryo because all the records were gone. I'd have had to start from scratch again, and I didn't have the heart.”

Val, hearing the strain in Jessamine's voice, made an apologetic grimace.

Jessamine went on. “Also, they made the viral carriers illegal that next year. You were in Japan, so you missed all the wonderful details. A whole tribe of the Army of God descended on Washington to say the quake was a sign, that Christ was coming back to raise the dead, and he wouldn't know which creatures to raise if there was human genetic material mixed into other creatures.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. Some of us tried to tell the legislators we shared most of our DNA with mice and ninety-nine percent of it with chimps, that there was only one percent difference between us and apes and only one hundredth of one percent between individual people, but the legislators got thoroughly confused, or maybe they just decided not to fight it. Some of them are probably millenarians, too.”

“Like the guys in the mall this morning. One of them leaned in my window and told me ten more years. That's all we've got before the world ends. I thanked him for his advice and got out of there. They could be right about the end of the world. We've lost half the species in the world just this century.”

And half the remaining species lived on in a kind of twilight world. It was a frightening thought, one she preferred not to dwell on. She sat at her own console and began sorting through the papers stacked to one side. Before her the do-now pile grew taller as she added stuff that should have been done yesterday. Behind her Val tapped and muttered.

“Another day, another sequence,” he said.

“Umm.” She stared over her screen to the window.

Val turned off the workstation, stood up, and pulled a jacket pocket inside out, dumping the contents onto the desktop, coins rattling. “Thank God it's Friday. I badly need a couple of days off.”

“I guess. I don't think a day off will help me much.”

“You and Patrick ought to do something fun this weekend, go someplace exciting.”

“We haven't done that lately. In fact, I've done very little with Patrick lately. He's getting hateful.”

Val cocked his head, brow furrowed. “Jessy?”

“He is,” she said defensively. “The last few weeks he's become absolutely awful.”

“He needs a job. Most people do!”

“He does indeed, but what Patrick actually says he needs is a son.”

Val was at her shoulder. “A what?”

“He listens to the news, sixty-year-old women being dosed with hormones in order to be pregnant. He tells me it could be done.”

Val turned toward her with a horrified expression. “Maybe it could be done, but, my God, Jess. Does he know what you'd have to go through?”

“He doesn't want to hear about it. He says I care more for my job than I do for him.” Being honest, she had to admit it might be true. She said tonelessly, “I don't know what to do. The idea disgusts me, Val. This poor old planet is so overcrowded already, why in hell do we need fiftyish-sixtyish women having more babies?”

“You'll do what's right for you,” he asserted, striding back to his desk, where he extricated his car control from the rat pile, discarded half the remainder into the wastebasket, and restocked his pockets with the rest. “You're not responsible for Pat's unhappiness. You didn't cause the earthquake.”

Jess shook her head apologetically. “You're right. But he's after me all the time, and sometimes I just don't want to go home.”

He looked at her, a long, weighing look, and she flushed.

“I wasn't implying—”

“I know what you weren't implying,” he said softly. “But the invitation is still open. Anytime you do imply.”

“I'm your boss, sort of. I'm your senior, in more ways
than one. I'd be arrested for harassment,” she giggled, her eyes full.

“I'll sign a waiver,” he said seriously. “Anytime.”

“Thanks, Val. You make me feel … better.” Girlish, was what she meant. He was at least ten years younger than she was. And attractive. Pleasant company but no … no bugles blowing. No bugles blowing even in fantasy for a long time, which was a little odd. Shouldn't sex drive taper off as one aged? Why had it just stopped, all at once?

Val looked pointedly at the clock. “Are we quitting, or what?”

“We're quitting. That is, you're quitting. I've got to get this stuff sorted out.”

He raised a hand in farewell and was gone, out the grilled door, past the cages. Jessamine heard his voice raised in hello, good-bye to the apes. Then silence. Through the west window, across from her workstation, she saw some of the apes returning to the compound, losing themselves among the rapidly greening trees, Priapus moving purposefully after one of the younger females.

He reminded her of Patrick. Could she do what Patrick wanted? Take some other woman's ovum, let Patrick fertilize it, then she, herself, incubate it for him? Would that satisfy him? Probably not. What he really wanted was a younger, more biddable wife with whom he could procreate and prove himself a male.

At the far side of the cage Don Juan stood silhouetted against the foliage at the end of the cage, standing erect, his arm around Lily. She was leaning on him in a way Jessamine had never seen a bonobo stand before. Almost as the siamang mates sometimes stood. If she didn't know chimpanzees better, she'd almost believe they were in love.

From her studio in the hills southeast of Denver, Faye Whittier looked across the shoulder of the girl she was embracing to see the sickle moon, newly whetted, mowing a field of early stars. The moon and the girl had certain things in common, both curvaceous and inconstant and given to cloudy moods and inattentive loveliness.

“I'm tired,” said the girl. “I'm hungry, too.”

“Just stand here a minute,” Faye urged. “I'm getting the feel of your body. We're getting a good start.”

The girl glanced sideways at the clay maquette on the table. “It looks all lumpy to me.”

“They always look lumpy at the beginning. Later on they smooth out. Like you, all smoothed out.”

She shut her eyes and ran a sculptor's hand along the girl's glistening flank, holding this shape close while thinking of quite another shape, holding this substance while evoking another substance, summoning into this reality another reality, another identity, another time, letting the summoning permeate and brew, infusing herself with memory.

The girl moved impatiently.

“Shhh,” said Faye.

The girl relaxed, sighing. Faye let the longing well up, let it engulf her, lift her, make her weightless. She floated, in intimate contact with her other self, the self discovered in childhood when she had stood in the darkened bathroom, naked before the full-length mirror, seeing someone else in the shadowy glass who was not herself. Then she had run questioning fingers over her own shoulders, her flat bronze chest, down her hips and thighs and between her legs, seeing that other do likewise, that other smiling, accepting what Faye felt, what Faye wanted. This was the mirror feeling, the feeling of absolute acceptance and peace.

When she was older and her breasts came, the longing had become more urgent. The tenderness around the thrusting nipples, the soft furriness of her crotch, brought with them an ache deeper than these surface complexities could explain. What she felt hurt her, though it wasn't a pain. With a pain one could say it hurts here, or there, but this was pervasive, something like grief, but grief over what? Over something that was missing! Some essential substance she'd had, once, maybe in some former life, a completion that cried to her out of time, begging her to return.

This was fanciful, and she knew it, but sometimes the ache was so intense it made her want to cry, and sometimes it went on for days.

“You in some mood,” Mama had said more than once. “What's the matter with you?”

What had been the matter with her? Where had the sadness come from? Why this sense of loss when she'd never lost anything? Nobody she knew was sick. Nobody she knew had died except Daddy, long ago, when she was two, and she didn't even remember him.

“Child, what you grieving for?”

That's what Faye wanted to know. What she was grieving for had no name. And “grieving” was the wrong word. It was more than that—a wanting, an urging …

It wasn't boys. The boys had flocked around her fifteen-year-old sister, Edith, she like a shining pheasant with her bronze skin and tight black feathery cap, bird-walking flirtatiously, head first to one side then the other, eyeing the boys. They had flocked around thirteen-year-old Jill-ellen, she a little gangly yet, but with a doe-eyed sweetness about her, a smell like honey and flowers, an inviting glance. The lanky boys, the young cock birds, they'd followed after, they'd stood around, not too near, tossing admiration to Edith and Jill, like flowers cast before divas. And she, Faye, right in the middle at fourteen, her new breasts straining against her shirtfront, dizzy dreams waking her in the nighttime, was not at all interested. The male sex wasn't what bothered her.

“That Bill Harrison, he's a nice boy,” this from Mama, who had offered to make Faye a dress, a special dress for the special dance. “He asked you to go. Why not tell him you'll go, Faye? We'll pick out the material and we'll make you look so pretty!”

Mama would have done for Faye, of course, just as she did for Jill and Edith. She'd have helped Faye with her hair, straightening and curling, and she'd have counseled good manners and not letting boys get too familiar, all the stuff Faye had heard over and over and knew by heart, all that carefulness and pride masking the underlying excitement that would lead, inexorably, to babies and grandbabies.

Faye didn't want it. Her rejection was not passive but active. She rejected the boys' inviting words and their adolescent shifts of voice, rejected their strutting and prancing, finding them ludicrous and strange, like alien creatures, not human at all, not like the self in the mirror. Not like the shadow self waiting somewhere, somewhere behind veils to come to her.

Mama couldn't understand it. Faye couldn't understand it, either. And then, like a thirsty desert traveler who happens upon an oasis, she found art. Her first trip to a museum brought her face-to-face with some of what had been missing, with the image of the beloved. She saw it in marble and bronze and paint, all around her, the images that were like the mirror self. Those images were all she needed, until she met Sophy.

Sophy. Who had made everything completely clear. One look from Sophy, Sophy's hand held in her own for a brief moment, and Faye had known what she'd been waiting for. What she sometimes, as now, pretended she held: Sophy herself.

The pretense never really worked. This sweet body, however sweet, was not Sophy's. The person tenanting this flesh was not the right inhabitant. The voice was not the right voice, the touch was not the right touch. This was a fraud and a delusion, and she should not use this girl so!