Orphan of Creation (33 page)

Barbara was the only one she would let come near. Barbara was with her, always, for those long days, always holding her hand, saying kind words. Barbara would take her to a big, bright room with nice things, and one wall with a big shiny window in it, a special window Barbara called a
mirror
. Thursday quickly learned that the
tranka
she saw in it standing next to Barbara was herself, and spent long hours staring at her own image. But they played games in the room, too. Barbara would strap a little box to her belt, and take a wire from it, and stick the plug on the end of it into her ear. Now and then, the plug would fall out of Barbara’s ear and Thursday could hear a tiny voice come from it. Once she had the wire in her ear, Barbara would show her games to play, like stacking blocks or matching shapes and colors, or teach her new words. Those were the happiest times of day for Thursday. Yet she could tell there was something sad about her friend Barbara, as if Barbara wanted it to stop and couldn’t make it happen. Barbara would glance at the mirror, frown at it.

Finally, one day, in the middle of a game, Barbara got mad. Right in the middle of showing a picture to Thursday, Barbara jumped up out of her chair, yanked the wire out of her ear, threw the picture cards up in the air, and turned to scream at the mirrored wall. “Stop it!” she cried. “Stop watching!” She picked up her chair and threw it through the mirror, smashing it to bits and revealing the watchers hiding behind it. She pulled the box off her belt and threw it on the floor. “Stop telling me what to do! Go away! Leave us alone.”

Thursday was scared, astonished, bewildered. She stared at Barbara, wondered what she should do. Barbara sagged down onto the floor and began to cry, wailing as if her heart was breaking.

Slowly, gently, Thursday sat down on the floor next to her and wrapped her shaggy arms around her friend. Barbara threw her arms around Thursday and sobbed into her chest. Thursday, frightened and confused, hugged her friend harder and rocked her back and forth, making the most soothing noises she could.

And still, through the broken window, the watchers watched.

<>

“Okay, so she cracked,” Rupert thundered back at the bland-faced doctor. “No real sleep or decent meals for a week—a week where she had to watch someone she feels responsible for being tortured and tested like an animal, a week of
helping
in the testing and torture in the name of some vague scientific ideal. She has every reporter on planet Earth breathing down her neck, and then some pencil-necked geek in the observation room tells her to try
lying
to Thursday about what the pictures on the cards are, just to see what happens. So she yanks her radio pickup and throws a chair through the snoop-mirror. I just wish she had managed to hit one of the little bastards back there. And just because it happens in your laughing academy, you lock
her
up in one of your rubber rooms. We don’t want any crap—we want her out.”

Mike Marchando nodded his head vigorously. “Damn straight we do. I’m a medical doctor, and I’m prepared to sign any release you want to get her out of her. There couldn’t be
anything
worse for her right now than being locked up.”

“Dr. Maxwell, Dr. Marchando, she is not being locked up.” The psychiatrist, a round, heavyset man with a sincere manner, spoke in a steady, calm voice. “She is sedated, yes, and in one of the hospital rooms here. Where else would we have put her? In fact, it’s the same room she’s been using right along. You’ll concede she needs rest. That is all we are giving her—a chance to actually
sleep
, instead of staring at the ceiling all night, knotted up with guilt, then waking up to another day of, as you put it, torturing a friend. The sleep comes out of a needle, yes, but it is still restful, deeply restful. We’re not regarding her as mentally ill, just exhausted. She is not officially registered as a patient. When she wakes tomorrow morning, she will be rested—and free to go.”

Mike worked his jaw, clenched and unclenched his fist. “Okay. Good. But I’m still a doctor, and I’m going to sit up with her—keep an eye on her, and on you guys. Where is she?”

The psychiatrist nodded. “All right. Nurse—could you take this gentleman down to Dr. Marchando’s room? Make sure he has everything he wants.”

“Later, Rupert,” Mike said, and left, following the nurse.

Rupert watched him go, shrugged and scratched his unshaved face. “I’m sorry, doctor. I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that—but we’re all in pretty raw shape.”

“You ought to be, with what you’ve got to handle. If you people didn’t feel the pressure—
then
I’d start to worry. Good luck, Dr. Maxwell.”

“Thanks, I guess. So long.” Rupert turned and walked back down the hallway to the very temporary office space the Saint E’s people had loaned to the anthropologists. He had a government-issue steel desk of his own, wedged into one corner of the back office of the suite. He threaded his way past the other desks to his own little nest and tried to get a start sifting through all the paperwork.

They had wanted to be accepted by the press, and they had certainly gotten their wish. Every newspaper, every TV and radio network, every magazine and rumor mill, had featured Thursday. And, as they said in the business, public response was overwhelming.

Telegrams, express letters, telexes, faxes. telephone messages scrawled in unreadable handwriting littered his desk—missives from every corner of the civilized world; and then some. All of them urgently requesting information, or asking that this or that sample be drawn from Thursday, or that a certain test be run on her, or else requesting—or out-and-out demanding—permission for the writer to run experiments personally on the poor old girl. Barbara was constantly occupied with Thursday, and Grossington was up to his eyeballs trying to get their paper out while running his long-ignored department
and
wining and dining the hordes of potential contributors. Livingston had gotten himself signed up with some crowd doing DNA studies, and
he
wasn’t around. It all left Rupert as the only member of the team able, if not altogether willing, to deal with all the incoming queries. Michael was willing to help, but he didn’t know the politics of the profession. Crudely put, he didn’t know who it was safe to snub and who to suck up to.

It certainly wasn’t going to be a straight case of judging the requests on the merits. Some requested tests were as simple as getting her to touch her finger to her nose with her eyes closed. Some would require vivisection to perform, and some were just out-and-out ludicrous—like the grad student who had sent along a copy of the Scholastic Aptitude Test to see how Thurs would do. Rupert shrugged. Maybe they
should
give her the SAT, just to find out what colleges would take her.

Some requests were just plain weird. “Please inform as to precise extent of webbing between test subject’s fingers and toes (and enclose calibrated photos), and report on degree of streamlining visible in her fur/hair covering.” What were they looking for, a swim-team captain? Rupert knew he wasn’t being totally fair on that one. It must be from one of the groups trying to prove humans evolved at the waterside and still retained a few semi-aquatic traits. The idea was a little weird, but you could at least call the people involved legitimate scientists—as opposed to the gen-ew-wine, accept-no-substitute, industrial-strength kooks who were writing in. The whole Thursday/Ambrose case had attracted droves of them.

“We have PROOF that the so-called ape-man came from a sector of Africa WELL KNOWN as refuge for alien spacecraft. TWELVE SITINGS of ALIEN EXTRATERRESTRIAL UFO space vehicle have been made their. We must assume so-called ape-man is ALIEN! DESPITE Project Blue Book coverup, USAF our best hope. We Urge you to contact them (Air force) at ones with ALL details of CRETURE...”

“I have a suggestion to explain the creature you have found. May be it is the result of a prehistoric atom-bomb mutation, like in the old movies. If so, may be a dose of the opposite radiation would cure it. Hope you can tell what radiation cause it, so opposite can be found . . .”

“Was the prehistoric australian pithacine alive when the dinosaurs were here? Maybe he can tell you what they were like...”

But the shortest was also Rupert’s favorite.

“How can you PROVE the australopithecine is alive?”

He sighed and got back to logging in the last of the day’s mail. Supposedly, he was to write in who had written and what action was taken. Rupert had always enjoyed listing things, organizing things, but this was ridiculous. It was impossible to read them all, never mind answering them, or trying to comply with all the more useful tests. For most of the letters, he just noted N.A.T.—No Action Taken. Just trying to handle a few of the most reasonable and sane requests—and accommodate some of the scientists who had come in person—had driven the whole team to distraction, and practically given Barbara a nervous breakdown.

Thursday herself was not in much better shape. She had been tranked or knocked out altogether for one reason or another so many times that she seemed to be losing touch, forgetting things.

It had been a pretty tough week all around. His instinct was to stop it, but that wasn’t a realistic solution. He knew there had to be better controls put on the experiments, or they weren’t going to have a sane and living australopithecine to run the experiments
on
.

Something had to give.

March

Chapter Twenty-One

The Question of Thursday

(New York Times Editorial)

All human beings are persons. Are, therefore, all persons human beings? At first glance, the answer is so obviously ‘yes’ that none of us even considers the question. Yet, this is the age when the phrase Artificial Intelligence is bandied about, and computer scientists confidentially predict the construction of a thinking computer. We have learned that chimps are more closely related to us than ever suspected, learned that chimps certainly use tools and possibly have the capacity to learn languages, learned of the impressive mentalities of dolphins and whales. This is the age in which our radio-telescopes began patiently to search the skies for signs of intelligence—seeking for signs, if you will, of personhood beyond the Solar System. In such a time, we are forced to concede at least the possibility that the indefinable something that makes us persons could also belong to a new kind of entity we are about to create, or to the great apes or cetaceans, or to beings not of this Earth. But these fascinating and disturbing possibilities have remained comfortably unrealized, and we have not been forced to confront the issue.

But now, suddenly, nonhuman personhood is more than an academic possibility, but an issue of such overwhelming importance that we devote not only this editorial of unprecedented length, but the entire Science section to the question.

Out of Africa comes a mystery named Thursday. The flabbergasted scientists who at first denied that she could possibly exist now have conceded that much. They are busily redrawing humanity’s family tree, and eagerly studying Thursday for clues to our own past appearance and behavior. These are laudable efforts, but they sidestep the main question, to wit: Is she a person?

Thursday is not a human being. So much is clear from a glance at a photograph of her, or a cursory examination of the Gowrie skulls. But as we have noted, the modern world has long since conceded that a nonhuman could be a person. Therefore, her non-humanity is no bar to personhood.

It has been demonstrated that she can think and reason, that she can understand; that she can use and learn language to a limited degree; that she can use tools, that she shares with us a whole constellation of communicative gestures, expressions, and sounds. Are these enough to make her a person?

There is no debate that her general intelligence and her language abilities are far below human-normal levels. But there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of mentally disadvantaged human beings whose abilities are far below Thursday’s, and yet these unfortunates are unquestionably one with ourselves—they are us, they are people.

No newborn human baby can reason or speak, and senility robs many elders of their faculties, and yet no one could or would deny the right of all these people to be called—and treated as—persons. Can we claim Thursday is not a person because she, too, lacks such skills? Obviously not.

Indeed, there is no objective measure of personhood wherein a bona fide human being could not be found who scored lower than Thursday. Is she, therefore, a person? Is she one of us—strangely different, but imbued with that spark a less secular age would not hesitate to call a soul?

The outside world is beginning to deal with Thursday and her species. Already, new expeditions have been dispatched to Gabon and the tribe that breeds these creatures. We must deal with them. But deal with them as what? As apes that walk upright, or as persons whose intelligence is somewhat limited and of a different nature than our own?

All human beings are persons. It has taken untold bloodshed—the catastrophe of the American Civil War, the war against Hitler, and a thousand other battles large and small, to force humanity to accept that idea. Recent history, from Ethiopia, where the starved were driven like cattle, from Cambodia where entire generations were destroyed, to Central America and its bestial violence, to the Gulags of the Soviet Union, to the United States and the hate-addled ravings of the Ku Klux Klan—that simple idea is still challenged, still fragile. Now it might face new danger, posed by a new question: Are all persons human beings?

To put that question in sharper focus: Is Thursday a person?

Our answer will affect every field of human activity from biology and psychology to religion and philosophy, from politics and labor policy to the civil rights movement and education. It is an answer we cannot afford to get wrong.

The world has learned of the strange incidents in Mississippi in 1851, and of the western world’s first contact with Australopithecus boisei. That contact came in the midst of slavery and the degradation of human life; in short, in the midst of treating humans like animals. What upheaval awaits us if Thursday is a person and we treat her kind with such arrogance? And yet, if she is an animal, what storm gates of hatred might we open by treating her like a person? It is too easy to imagine how the hatemongers might use the precedent to claim, as our ancestors did, that certain human beings were not people.

Is Thursday a person?

A more delicate and dangerous question in human relations can scarce be imagined. Misjudge Thursday’s personhood, and we threaten our own.

<>

Amanda Banks reached out once again to take Thursday’s hand, gently moving the fingers into the correct position one more time and then held up the object under discussion. “Ball,” she said, and signed the word with her free hand. “Ball.”

Thursday drew her lips back from her teeth, the very picture of concentration, and made the sign herself. “
‘Awl. ‘Awl
,” she said. Barbara watched intently, and patted Thursday on the shoulder to reassure her. Thursday turned to her and repeat the sign without trying to speak.
Ball.

“Good, very good,” Amanda said, echoing her own words in sign language. “Thursday learn fast. More next-day.”

“
‘Ore.
” Thursday agreed. “
Kood, ve-ey kood.
.”

“Bye for now. Bye bye.” Amanda forced a smile and stood up. Thursday and Barbara both took her cue and rose from their chairs.

“Dr. Marchando, could you stop back here after you see Thursday to her room?” Amanda asked. “There are a few things I’d like to ask you about.”

Barbara nodded, her face betraying no emotion at all. Leading Thursday by the hand, she left the room. Amanda closed the door behind them and instantly scrabbled in her pocketbook for a cigarette. It was tough to find the time and place where it was socially acceptable to light up around the people she worked with back in Atlanta—and even more so with this crowd up in Washington. Amanda was a language specialist at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, on a road trip to work with this new-type primate, Thursday. Amanda liked to think of herself as a tough cookie, hard to rattle, but this crowd got her nervous. It was just as well they had gotten space at Saint E’s—they
ought
to be in a loony bin. She finally found the cigarettes and dug them out. She put it to her lips, flicked her lighter, and found she needed both hands to hold the lighter steady. Great. Now
she
had the shakes.

Hell, the atmosphere around here was enough to drive anyone nuts. Amanda had sometimes worried that she and her fellow primatologists were playing God or Frankenstein with their apes—teaching them language, capriciously reshaping their behaviors just to see what would happen. But compared to what was going on here, the Yerkes crowd wasn’t involved in any issues at all. Amanda had arrived a week after Thursday made her debut. The pressure on these people—a lot of it self-imposed—was enormous. In the last few days maybe, just maybe, it was all starting to let up a little. Perhaps humanity was getting used to the idea of its new relations.

Amanda considered herself in the newly replaced one-way mirror. Since Thursday clearly understood that the people on the other side could see her—she waved to them—Amanda couldn’t quite see why they had bothered to fix it. She took another look at herself and wondered why she had bothered herself. She glared at the mirror, cataloging her flaws. There was something wrong with the buttons on her white lab coat, and it kept falling open to reveal the baggy jeans and sweatshirt underneath. Her luxuriant red hair was once again escaping from the tight, professional-looking bun she was trying for. She had dispensed with makeup again today, and her pale face seemed a featureless blank under the unforgiving fluorescent lighting. And, of course, there were the usual ten or fifteen pounds that she could do without. Not what the teacher of a new race was supposed to look like, but what the hell.

The door squeaked open behind her and Barbara came back in. “You wanted to talk, Amanda?” she asked, her voice flat and neutral. She looked bad, Amanda thought, worse every day. She had stopped losing weight, but she hadn’t gained any back, and she had stopped paying much attention to her appearance. Her clothes were often wrinkled, her hair was mussed, and she wasn’t worrying about makeup anymore. Amanda had never put much stock in such things, but she knew it was a bad sign when someone who thought they were important gave up on them.

“Yeah, Barbara, I did.” Amanda hurriedly stubbed out her cigarette into the ashtray she carried around and sat down in one of rickety wooden chairs. “You’re the boss here, but your group brought me on board to do two things—to find out how significant Thursday’s language abilities were, and to teach her as much language as possible. When it’s time for language lessons, this is
my
shop—and you’re getting in the way, to put it bluntly. I am trying to teach Thursday a simplified American Sign Language, and you’re slowing the process down, simply by being here. I teach her a sign, she tries it and then she looks to you for approval. You don’t know ASL. You nod yes and tell her very good when she’s done it wrong—and she’s picked up a new bad habit to unlearn.”

Barbara sat down facing Amanda and grabbed the seat of her chair on either side, as if she were afraid of being pulled off it. She twined her feet around each other and looked down at them for a long time. “But I need to learn it, too,” she said at last. “If Thursday can talk, I need to be able to talk to her.”

“But you’re a—” Amanda stopped herself. She had been about to say her “you’re a person, a human being,” but there was no point in starting up
that
argument again. “You’re aware of what a language is,” she went on smoothly. “Thursday isn’t. As best I can tell, what she learned back with the Utaani was on the level of commands you’d teach a dog. ‘Come. Go. Fetch.’ More sophisticated than that, but not by much. She has to learn how much more language is
capable
of—which is something you already know. When you learn ASL, you’re just learning a new set of symbols that closely match up with what you already know. The ideas of grammar and syntax and word order are burned into your head already—and since ASL is patterned on English, you don’t have that many new rules to learn. Thursday has to start practically from scratch. Not just words, but the
idea
of words, the idea of abstractions. I can just show you the sign for ‘love’ or ‘justice’ or ‘danger,’ and you’d be all set. It might be months, or years, before Thursday has enough vocabulary to understand those concepts—if she ever does learn that much. I don’t know that she is capable of it.

“But that’s another issue. You, and all the other workers here, could learn more, better, faster, by letting me hold a regular, daily, ASL class—a class designed for people who can hear and understand English. You’d be doing Thursday more good that way. She’d learn faster if she just had one teacher, and no one distracting her.”

Barbara didn’t say anything.

“A separate class. Is that okay?” Amanda asked, as gently as she could.

Barbara nodded absently. “Yeah, sure. But can’t I stay here with her for her own classes with you?”

Amanda sighed and found herself wishing for another cigarette. This was getting to be like the old days, back working in special education. “Barbara, I know what you want for Thursday. You want her free—you want to find some way for her to stop being a laboratory animal. You know she’s been a slave, a work animal, all her life. But you can’t teach her to be free and still walk around holding her hand every moment. You need to let go. Leave her in class with her teacher, and trust me.”

Barbara shrugged, and seemed to relax a little. “Okay. I—I
know
, intellectually, that you’re right, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I brought her into all this, and I just feel so
responsible
for her.” She paused and then spoke quickly, as if she were afraid of the question she was asking. “Do you think she’s smart enough to learn?”

Amanda cocked her head to one side for a moment. “Slippery question. Language—language is a window on the mind. There are cases of normal, even brilliant men and women, losing all ability to speak or communicate. They were still as smart as they ever were, but a stroke or accident had taken out the parts of the brain in charge of talking, reading, writing. And there are plenty of idiots out there who can talk, God knows. Thursday could be smarter, much smarter than we think, and yet not have the tools to tell us about it. She could be full of fascinating insights we’ll never hear about.”