Lovelock (14 page)

“Your daughter was terrorized at that preschool you abandoned her at back in New Hampshire,” Mamie said. As if Red hadn’t also put her there.

“Terrorized isn’t what I’d call it,” Stef said. He was the only one in the room who had smiled when Carol Jeanne entered the house. Now his contradiction earned a glare from Mamie.

“They locked her in a closet, didn’t they?” said Mamie.

“It was an office, not a closet,” said Stef, “and Lydia
had
hit a kid over the head with a chair.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” cried Lydia. “I
hate
you, Grandpa!”

Finally Red spoke up. “Lydia! Go to your room!”

Wailing, Lydia staggered off to her room to suffer in melodramatic solitude. Emmy, inspired by Lydia, began to scream at twice the volume. Red stood up to carry her out of the room, but paused long enough to speak coldly to his wife. “It would have been nice if you could have managed to come home on time on your first day.”

“I had a lot to do,” said Carol Jeanne, equally coldly.

“They’ve managed for all these months without you,” said Red. “But I’m sure that everything was on the verge of collapse until you arrived.” He stalked out of the room, carrying Emmy’s siren howls with him.

In the relative quiet, Mamie remembered Stef’s earlier offense. “Someday perhaps I’ll understand your sadistic streak, Stef, but today I don’t.”

Stef sighed.

“Bringing up that business with the chair, when you
know
that Lydia was provoked by that horrible child.”

“There were two adult witnesses who said that the boy was playing quietly by himself and hadn’t done anything to Lydia.”

“Maybe not that
day
,” said Mamie. “But you’re always so eager to blame women for everything. It could
never
be the
boy’s
fault, oh, no, it’s always the female who wasn’t
patient
enough, while the boy is always perfectly innocent.”

Stef got up and walked out of the room.

“That’s right, Stef, walk away from the truth, walk away from everything. There are people in this world who stay and face things, and people who are always running away from the truth or staying late at work while other people take care of their families for them.”

Now that Mamie had come back to listing Carol Jeanne’s offenses, it was time for us to leave. We heard her still grumbling behind us as we walked down the hall.

Just another wonderful night in the Todd household.

Only this time, instead of automatically thinking how obnoxious Red and Mamie were, I found myself thinking that Carol Jeanne could easily have gone home on time, since there wasn’t a thing she was doing those last ninety minutes that couldn’t have been done in a week or a month. There was no commuter traffic to avoid here on the Ark, either. To Red it had to look as though she were deliberately staying away from him. And, if he thought so, maybe he was right.

Well, why
should
she hurry home? She was a genius, living in a household full of inferiors. Except me. I was the only one in the household who understood her work and her needs and her very
soul
.

When we walked into her office, Pink was asleep on her chair again. Carol Jeanne sighed, but I knew my duty. I jumped down to the chair, bouncing it enough that Pink opened one eye. Seeing me, and knowing me as she did, she immediately stood up and started to shamble off the chair—but not fast enough to avoid me. I rammed my longest finger right up her nostril. She
hated
it when I did that. With a squeal, she bounded from the chair and out of the office.

While I got to work, cabling myself to the computer and dumping the day’s observations into memory, Carol Jeanne sat back in her chair with a sigh. “Oh, Lovelock,” she said. “Lovelock Lovelock Lovelock.”

Apparently my name had become her mantra of the moment.

“Two days before I can go back to work. I’ve got to get myself out of this Workday business. Look it up and see if there’s any way I can do that.”

Yes, I understood her needs. But if
I
ever had a child, I wouldn’t leave it for my spouse to raise, or total strangers.

If I ever had a child. Where did
that
idea come from? That stupid remark of Liz’s yesterday?

And to be critical of Carol Jeanne—I had never thought of her so caustically before. What was happening to me?

Bite down hard.

My role as Carol Jeanne’s witness kept me at her side during her waking hours, but at bedtime she removed me like a pair of shoes. If I had come equipped with an off switch, she would have turned me off when she went to bed at night. Or maybe she wouldn’t have bothered. She had no use for me when she was asleep, and therefore it didn’t occur to her that I might have a use for myself.

And during those first few days on the Ark, I shared her attitude. Carol Jeanne was my life. When she was asleep, there was nothing for me to do. My own thoughts bored me, unless they had some reference to her. My single-mindedness might have been programmed into me genetically or it might have been a natural consequence of my love for her. The result was the same: I was only alive when I was serving Carol Jeanne.

Or was I? On Earth, I had slept when Carol Jeanne slept. But for some reason on the Ark I could not sleep. I was agitated. I was unhappy. I told myself at the time—I believed it, too—that I was upset because my loss of self-control during weightlessness had caused embarrassment to Carol Jeanne. Null gravity would happen several times during the voyage—just before launch, at changeover, and again when we reached our destination—and I was determined not to lose control of myself. I had to train myself, for Carol Jeanne’s sake.

Or so I told myself. But it was never true.

For Carol Jeanne’s sake? Why couldn’t I have realized that as far as Carol Jeanne and my creators were concerned, I had already
been
trained? Like a computer program, I was supposed to endlessly play out the same activities until the end of my life. After all, ordinary monkeys live out the same pattern over and over again, and they’re perfectly happy. It didn’t occur to them that by juicing up my intellectual abilities, they were also making me hungrier for knowledge and accomplishment. I was no longer a happy jungle monkey, but they refused to know that. No, I was supposed to be content to learn only the data that I acquired in service of Carol Jeanne. I was definitely
not
intended to embark on a program of self-education. After all, I was a tool. In a metaphorical sense, Carol Jeanne had bought a hammer; she had no need for it to learn how to be a saw. So from the start, no matter what I told myself at the time, my night activities were not for her. They were for me.

And there was another reason why I should have realized that my whole enterprise was bogus: There was no chance, after what had happened on the shuttle, that I would be left unrestrained during null gravity. If Carol Jeanne didn’t have me strapped down tight, others in authority would see to it for her.

Why didn’t that obvious fact enter my mind at the time? Now, thinking back, I can clearly remember how single-minded I was about my plan to train myself to endure weightlessness. Why? Did I already know, at some level of unconsciousness, that I would
not
be restrained during one of the passages through null gravity? Did I realize that this could only happen because I was no longer Carol Jeanne’s single-minded servant? Did I already know—perhaps because she compared me to a beast of burden—that I meant nothing to her? Was my loyalty already leaching away?

I must have known all of this. Or why else would I have been so careful to conceal from her what I was doing? Why else would I have refrained from telling her about the parasite chip they put in her computer? Keeping secrets was the beginning of freedom. There was now a place in my own mind that did not belong to Carol Jeanne.

I had always told her everything. That was what I
did
. Telling Carol Jeanne everything was built into my conditioning back at the monkey factory, as the human trainers charmingly referred to the witness training facility.

My conditioning. Maybe that was what I was avoiding, by lying to myself. At that point, if I had consciously realized what I was already planning to do, if I had admitted my rage, my feelings of betrayal, then my conditioning would have kicked in and I would either have suppressed those feelings or gone mad.

(I must consider the possibility that in fact I did go mad. That I am crazy now.)

However I talked myself into it, here is what I did:

I waited until all the lights were out in the house and the whispering had subsided. Then I lingered an additional half hour, until I was sure my human family was unconscious. Only then did I wriggle out of bed and hop to the open window. My training program was under way.

Despite the unfamiliar terrain of the Ark, I had no trouble finding my way at night. The “sun” went to its night setting promptly at 2100 hours, dimming so the humans could sleep, but staying alive enough that people could still get around without extra outdoor lighting. During all our years on the Ark, no one would spend a moment in utter darkness outdoors.

I had already memorized the whole floorplan of the Ark. The sun was supported by two immense tripods, one extending from each of the two flat sides of the cylinder of the Ark. Once we were in flight, one of the tripods would rise from the floor, and the other would hang down from the ceiling, meeting the sun in the middle. But since we were still in solar orbit, with our false gravity coming from spinning the Ark, the future floor and ceiling rose up like canyon walls on either side of the ground. And the three legs of each tripod reached from one of those walls, starting about forty meters from the ground.

In flight, our pseudogravity would come from acceleration and deceleration, and there would be no region of null gravity. But now, with the Ark in spin, the higher you climbed up those canyon walls toward the tripods that held the sun, the less you weighed.

Everyone knew this, but they also knew that attempting to climb up there and fly would be stupid in the extreme, because the moment you had nothing to hold onto, you would drift toward the rim and would have no way of stopping yourself. The air currents had several shifting layers of turbulence, which would throw you arse-over-teakettle—that’s why even hang-gliding and parachuting were forbidden. But the worst thing would be landing. When you hit the ground or one of the walls, you would
not
be going at the same speed or even in the same direction as the spin of the Ark. In short, you would hit the ground as if you had thrown yourself from a speeding car, and with no control.

I wasn’t going up there to fly. I would end up as a monkeyburger in notime flat.

No, I was going to climb the canyon walls toward the tripod, and then climb a leg of the tripod toward the sun, not so I could fly, but so I could make myself terrified and sick. Greater love hath no primate than this, that he puke up his guts for his master.

(I don’t feel insane. Terrified, yes, and lonely, but not insane.)

No place on the Ark was far from one of the side walls, and I reached it soon enough. Behind the wall that would someday be the floor, there was a three-meter space through which the transportation tubes and sewers ran, though of course they would not be used until we were in flight. Behind the other wall, the one that would be the ceiling, ran the ventilation system, and since this wall would never be a floor, it served that function whether we were in orbit or in flight.

If I could have got inside either crawl space, the climb would have been much easier. But those areas were strictly off-limits to all but the qualified maintenance workers, and I had not yet added lock-picking and other such subterfuges to my repertoire of skills. So for me, reaching weightless regions required an outdoor climb on surfaces that weren’t designed for climbing.

Which was fine, I thought. I’m a monkey.

What I’m not is a spider, and that’s what it would have taken to climb the ceiling. No handholds, nothing. Just air vents here and there, and the nozzles that sprayed rain. There was an access door near the foot of each leg of the tripod, but that was no help to me.

The wall-that-would-be-a-floor was better. It was laced with the drainage pipes. But those pipes were specifically designed
not
to be climbable. After all, they didn’t want children plunging to their deaths. I’m a good jumper, but not four meters, not from the ground.

So I didn’t jump from the ground. I found a potted tree that was near enough to the wall, climbed it, and took a flying leap. I even remembered to allow for the Coriolis effect. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember it until I was already on the ground, breathless and dazed from having slammed into the wall half a meter from where I had intended to end up. But on the second try, I found myself clinging to one of the soil drainage pipes.

I had thought to get up near the sun, but on this first climb I didn’t even reach the leg of the tripod. Huge as the Ark is, it’s small enough that you don’t have to climb far up the wall before losing most of the centrifugal effect of the spin. Well, not so much losing it as having it change. Down on the ground, I couldn’t feel the rotation, only the sense of gravity. But up on the wall, I began to get a sense of motion. I also began to feel lighter and lighter. I began to lose my sense of where down was.

For every gram of body weight I shed, I lost an equivalent amount of fearless determination. Panic rose in my gullet, and I found myself baring my teeth in abject fear. Eventually my hold on the drainage pipe gave me absolutely no sense of security: Up didn’t feel like up anymore.

I could feel the world spinning around me, and I had no idea where down might be. I could fall in any direction. I screeched in terror. I saw my own tail, floating in the sky above my body. The sight of my tail in a location where it shouldn’t have been threw me into a frenzy. I lost my grip, just for a moment, but long enough that I began to slide along the pole. There was still enough centrifugal force to draw me inexorably toward the ground. And soon my drifting turned to skidding down the pipe much faster than I had ascended. Fortunately, this began to restore my sense of down, and I was able to regain enough presence of mind to hold onto the pole so I didn’t drift away from the wall. I slowed my fall as much as I could, but when I hit the ground, I was dazed and out of breath.

I lay panting on the grass for several minutes before daring to sit up and scrutinize my person. The friction of the slide down the drainage pipe had rubbed patches of fur from the insides of both my arms. There was a little abrasion on my chin, too. I was stiff and sore all over.

The only thing I could think of was: Carol Jeanne will notice. Carol Jeanne will realize that these injuries happened while she was asleep. But here’s how twisted my perceptions were at the time: I thought she would panic at how close I came to dying. I thought she would care. I told myself that the reason I was afraid to let her know how I got these injuries was to keep her from needless worrying about me. I loved her so much that I had to keep her from knowing of my dangerous sacrifices for her sake. Oh what tangled webs we weave.

It was apparent that I couldn’t conquer null gravity all at once. I could only subdue weightlessness by degrees, going no higher up the wall until I had achieved mastery of the gravity lower down. But I
would
triumph over weightlessness. Perhaps I was a genetic construct trained to be dependent on Carol Jeanne, but I refused to be tied by terror of natural laws.
I
refused.
I
would not tolerate this limitation on my abilities.

Was it this hunger to improve myself that lifted me from clever beast to anguished person? Was this what you wanted me to do, Gepetto?

If I cleaned myself up, maybe my superficial injuries wouldn’t be so noticeable. I went in quietly through the front door of the house—thinking kind thoughts of the designer who had not thought locks were necessary—and bathed in the kitchen sink, sudsing myself with dish soap until my fur was free of blood. Stef was snoring in the living room and Pink huffed her way through little pig dreams under the kitchen table—neither woke up. Good thing I wasn’t a burglar. Since I had only abrasions and burns, the fluffiness of my fur after I dried myself served to conceal everything. Only if Carol Jeanne looked closely would she notice anything. And I knew Carol Jeanne well enough to know that she didn’t look closely at anything that was not part of her research.

I cleaned up the kitchen, then crawled into bed, exhausted from my nocturnal endeavors. I didn’t need as much sleep as a human, but I was accustomed to Carol Jeanne’s hours. My body craved slumber, and my wounds needed time to heal.

But I couldn’t sleep. My inadequacy tonight on the wall was only the most recent in a series of failures, each of which reinforced my lifelong suspicion that I was indeed inferior to my human companions. Even Mamie handled null gravity with more aplomb than I. After all, it wasn’t
she
who spewed fecal matter and urine all over the subbo. Nor was it Mamie who lurched and bumped into things in the low gee environment of the Ark. The children bounded around oafishly, of course, but they did that on Earth. I, who had once been deft and physically sure, was now incapable of even the most modest of athletic achievements.

Carol Jeanne’s computer screen bathed the room in bluish light. It was a beacon that finally lured me from my cot. Once again my body had failed me, but my mind was still intact. Even though I couldn’t navigate in null gravity—yet—there was a world on the Ark that didn’t depend on physical agility. I need only access the computer banks, and nothing on the Ark would be hidden from my view.

The computer was connected to a node of the network that linked all the computers on the Ark. I entered my password and dived into the communal memory banks, skimming the files for interesting information. It never occurred to me that I was looking for something; but my unconscious mind was my guide, and I was attracted only by information that would later become vital to my survival.

That first night I found the entire blueprints of the Ark—much more complete than the cursory layout that was part of the Ark’s formal prospectus. It was in a restricted-access region of the network, but I had worked with this networking software before and I knew all the back doors. I downloaded the files into my own memory banks and moved on. If I had thought about it, I would have realized that I now had access to the crawlspaces of the Ark. But at the time I simply thought they were interesting and worth loading into my direct-access digital memory.