The Games (24 page)

The gladiator moved forward to the edge of the cage. Ben was careful to stay out of arm’s reach.

“Get the zapstick,” he said to the taller intern.

The gladiator moved to the back of the cage again, quickly.

That doesn’t prove a thing
, Silas thought. The zapstick had been used as a motivational device by the handlers since their arrival in the
city. It was no great leap that the gladiator could have picked up on the word. A golden retriever would have done the same thing.

Ben flashed Silas a look. “Now put the zapstick down,” he said to the intern. “And let’s haul out the feed.”

The gladiator moved to the front of the cage again in anticipation. Its wings bobbed slightly.

Still doesn’t prove anything. It heard “feed” and responded. A simple cue
.

The interns hauled out a huge slab of prey food from the supply cart, sharing the red weight of it between them.

“Now, throw the food in the cage.” Ben pronounced each word carefully. “But if the gladiator touches it, use the zapstick.”

The interns heaved the processed-meat slab through the bars, and then one of them picked up the zapstick from the floor. He held the four-foot stick loosely in his hand, just within striking distance of the food.

The gladiator didn’t move.

Its tongue came out of its mouth, and its wings bobbed faster. Its gray eyes crawled over every inch of the meat. But it didn’t make a move.

“Never mind,” Ben said. “
Don’t
use the zapstick if it eats the food.”

The handler didn’t move, didn’t change his stance in the slightest, but the gladiator rushed forward and scooped the meat up in a taloned hand. It bit a huge chunk free and swallowed it down whole.

The intern with the zapstick moved forward a step, closer to the bars. The creature was easily within striking distance of the electrified rod, but it still didn’t move away. It looked up briefly at Benjamin and Silas, then returned to its meal.

Holy shit
.

The four of them stood and watched the gladiator eat. It was gulping down the last mouthful when finally someone broke the silence. “So what do we do now?” Ben asked Silas.

Silas stared through the bars for a long time before saying anything, and when he did speak, his voice was soft. “I don’t know.”

S
ILAS WAS
numb as he walked back to his hotel. This was something he’d never suspected, this level of intelligence in the gladiator. After all these months, he’d thought he was beyond being surprised. By anything. He’d considered himself immune to the emotion. But this new piece of the puzzle had caught him off guard.

He’d long suspected the thing was smart.… But then a great many animals were merely smart. Merely.

Smart was not such a rare commodity in the animal kingdom. Lions, and wolves, and jackals, and even bears all had their own sort of animal cunning. Most predators did. But this was something different. The thing he’d watched in the cage today had
understood
, and that was a very rare thing, indeed—to understand spoken language. To understand the intricacies of human speech beyond a short list of commands. There was only one animal known that could do that,
Homo sapiens
, and it had taken quite a long time to develop the knack.

Now that the proof was in front of him, it seemed obvious. Silas wondered how he’d missed it for so long. Had the creature shown any other signs? Had there been clues that Silas was too blind to see?

Silas shook his head, oblivious to the strange looks he got on the crowded street. The thing in the cage had understood, and that shouldn’t have been possible. That was the bottom line. It shouldn’t have been possible. Just as the very existence of the creature shouldn’t have been possible.

Silas had been angry at the commission for months now about his loss of control of the project. He’d grown comfortable with that anger. He’d been frustrated and confused, but until now, he’d always felt that it was still a worthwhile endeavor that he was involved in. Even after Tay was killed, even after the confrontation with Baskov at the funeral, even after he’d lost confidence in the gladiator itself, he’d still believed in the ideals of the Games. He’d still believed he was on the right side of the science. Or at least he’d believed that the science justified
the side he was on. And he’d believed the protesters, each and every one of them, were fools. Now he wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t too sure of anything anymore.

Silas entered the lobby of his hotel and crossed to the elevators. The doors dinged open, and two minutes later he was at the door of his suite. He carded himself inside and turned on the light. He went to the window and opened the curtains. The minibar was a gravity well. He felt the pull.

The cap twisted in his hand, and he drank. It was not smooth. It was not good. But that’s what he needed at that moment, a not-good drink. Rough like cordwood. It burned going down.

Silas eyed his watch and did the math. It would be nine
P.M
. in Colorado. Not too late. He dialed the numbers and listened to rings. On the third ring, his sister answered.

“Hello.”

“Sis,” Silas said. It was all he had to say. “Silas!”

“How are things going?”

“Pretty good,” she said. “We can’t complain.”

“Good.”

“We’ve been watching you on the news.”

“Are they still running the same old picture?”

“The same one,” she said. “You walking out some door with that goofy look on your face.”

“I wish they’d update that. I’ve got at least ten percent more gray in my hair now.”

“That picture’s only a few months old.”

“Exactly.”

“Ah, it must be the pressures of fame aging you before your time.”

“Yeah. The next thing you know, I’ll be walking with a cane and tipping five percent at restaurants.”

“I’ll start checking out nursing homes for you.”

“Don’t put me out to pasture yet. So what are these news shows saying … the ones you’ve been watching—anything interesting?”

There was a pause on the line. “You don’t sound good,” his sister said, ignoring the question. That’s how she was. Always concerned and considerate of her big brother.

Silas sighed. “Bad day at the office,” he said.

“Anything you can talk about?”

“No.” Now it was Silas’s turn to be quiet for a long moment. She let him be quiet. Another of her talents. Silas wanted to shift the conversation, make it about something else. “Tell me about your day,” he said.

And she did. She told him.

And it was safe, and normal, and dull, and wonderful. Her day. Her life. And that’s what he’d needed to hear. That’s why he’d called. To hear that people could live like that. To hear that people lived like that day in and day out.

They talked for half an hour. Before he got off the phone, he asked about Eric.

“He’s in bed now,” she said.

“I figured that. I was just wondering how he was doing.”

“He’s been busy with a school project lately. A paper he’s been writing. He’s actually pretty proud of it. He mentioned wanting you to read it when he was done.”

“What’s it about—genetics?”

“Of course, but it’s a little trickier than that. It’s about adaptive radiation and the American automobile.”

“The evolution of cars?”

“Something like that; he’s got it all worked out on paper, comparing the Model T to Darwin’s first finch—and then all the later models radiate out from there to fill the niches. SUVs and minivans and sports cars. Just different finches for different niches.”

“That’s deep stuff for his age.”

“Well, he’s interested in it.”

A long silence again. This time, she broke it. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

“No. But I’ve got to go, Sis. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

S
ILAS HATED
cocktail parties. He hated the clink of glass on teeth. He hated the food, served in twists of color on white china, more aesthetic than edible. Most of all, he hated the smiles.

It was after ten now, and the party was in full swing. Silas had come straight from his room when he’d gotten off the phone. He scanned the crowd.

The guests stood in loosely shifting clusters around the room, as homogeneous in their affluence as they were diverse in every other conceivable way. They were Congolese, and Canadian, and German, and Indonesian, and three dozen other nationalities, all of them patting one another on the back, trading the same stories back and forth, laughing at each other’s jokes—and all of them training their glossy smiles on him as he passed through the crowd. They came from points around the world, the people in this crowd, but really they all came from money. That was their ethnic group.

The members of this crowd didn’t point—they were too sophisticated for that—but all had smiles for him. He knew their type well, knew they were excited by their opportunity to brag of being at a party where Silas Williams was present.
That’s right
, they’d say later,
the head of U.S. biodevelopment was there. The man of the hour
.

Silas wasn’t exactly dressed for the occasion. He still wore the casuals he’d had on for the neural relaxer appointment earlier in the evening, and the gray sweats stood out in sharp relief against the angular penguin suits of the other men. It didn’t really matter, though. They probably thought he was making a fashion statement. Among the ladies, low necklines were apparently in style this season, and necklaces of pearl and diamond bobbled across the tops of the women’s breasts while they bantered with their power dates.

The vise on his head had finally begun to ease its grip somewhat, and now the pain had subsided to a kind of dull, throbbing ache at his temples. “Toxins” aside, he had to admit he’d been a little nervous
there for a while. He didn’t know what a brain aneurysm felt like, but it couldn’t feel much worse than the headache he was finally climbing out from under.

He turned sideways, sliding between several groups of people that had gathered near the enormous window that comprised the larger portion of the south-facing wall. Beyond the glass, the sky was blank. There were no stars hanging in the distance, only the lights of cars, and buildings, and glowing neon signs that spread below in a carpet of illumination. Standing alone, looking out into that inverted sky, was Baskov.

The old man didn’t look happy to see him. “How nice of you to join us,” he said. “I was afraid an oversight may have left you without an invitation.”

“I never got an invitation,” Silas said. “I’m here to see you.”

“Consider me at your service. What can I do for you?”

Silas decided to take the direct approach. “The gladiator can understand spoken words.”

Baskov’s eyes skipped toward the crowd and back again. People were taking notice of the conversation. Baskov turned toward the glass, casting Silas a look that bid him do the same.

“So does my cat,” Baskov said softly. “So what?”

“I’d bet a thousand dollars you don’t have a cat.”

“That’s quite beside the point.”

“It’s not just simple commands. I think this thing understands English, or at least bits and pieces. It understands how the word ‘don’t’ modifies a verb, and that implies an understanding of grammar.”

“What the hell are you talking about? It doesn’t imply anything. What do you want, Dr. Williams? Really?”

“I want you to reconsider using the gladiator in competition.”

“This again? Now?”

“This isn’t some animal we trained to understand commands. Whatever this thing knows, it’s picked up on its own. Do you understand what that means? This thing either is smart enough to learn English
just by listening to it or has some kind of hardwired grammar—but either way, we’re going to throw it in the pit tomorrow with a bunch of animals.”

Baskov smiled. “You’re talking about sentience.”

“That’s a word that has lost some of its meaning over the last few decades.”

“In no small part due to your
Ursus theodorus
project.”

“There are shades of gray. But yes, I think we need to at least investigate the possibility. There’s a point past which we can’t just throw a being to the wolves.”