I’ll never call a caveman stupid again, he vowed as one of the creatures lazily bared impressive fangs at him. Paranoid, yes. Cavemen must’ve been real paranoid. But paranoia ain’t so dumb.
At least the troop appeared calm and well fed. But that was deceptive. Back in the main ark Nelson had come to compare life in a baboon troop with an ongoing—often violent—soap opera without words.
He saw one senior male rock on his haunches, watching a pregnant female seek tasty grubs under nearby rocks. Rhythmically smacking his lips, the patriarch pulled in his chin and flattened his ears, exposing white eyelid patches. The female responded by ambling over to sit by him, facing away. Methodically, he began picking through her fur, removing dirt, bits of dead skin, and the occasional parasite.
Another female approached and began nudging the expectant mother to move over and share the male’s attention. The screeching fit that ensued was brief and inconsequential as such things went. In a minute the two had been cuffed into silence and all three monkeys turned away, minding their own business again.
Nelson’s job was to sample monkey droppings for a routine microflora survey—whatever that was. As he approached, he recalled what Dr. B’Keli had told him after his first, unpleasant encounter with baboons.
“Don’t ever look them in the eye. That was exactly the wrong thing to do! The dominant males will take it as a direct challenge.”
“Fine,” Nelson had answered, wincing as the nurse sutured two narrow bites on his posterior. “Now you tell me!”
But of course, it really had all been in the introductory tapes he was supposed to have watched, back when his funds first ran out and he found himself willing to take a job, any job. Those painful bites reinforced the then startling revelation that tape learning might actually have practical value, after all.
Tutored by experience, he now kept the electroprod ready, but pointed away in a nonthreatening manner. With his other hand, Nelson pushed the sticklike dung sampler into a brown mass half hidden in the grass. Buzzing flies rose indignantly.
I don’t like Dr. B’Keli. For one thing, despite his “authentic” sounding name, the biologist’s caramel features were suspiciously pale. He even had light-colored eyes.
Of course whites could legally work in all but two of the Federation’s cantons. And nobody else, from the director on down, seemed to care that a blanke held high position among the Ndebele. Still, Nelson nursed resentment over the subtle discrimination his settler parents used to suffer from whites, back in the Yukon new town of his birth, and had imagined the tables would be turned here, where blacks ruled and even U.N. rights inspectors were held at bay.
Now he knew how naive he’d been, expecting these people to welcome him like a long-lost brother. In fact, Kuwenezi was a lot like those boom town suburbs of White Horse. Both seethed with ambition and indolence, with rising and falling hopes … and with authority figures insisting on hard work if you wanted to eat.
Hard work had turned his parents’ filthy refugee camp into bustling, prosperous Little Nigeria—commercial center for the new farming districts scattered across the thawing tundra. Little Nigeria’s immigrant merchants and shopkeepers turned their backs on Africa. They sang “Oh, Canada” and cheered the Voyageurs on the teli. His folks worked dawn to dusk, sent money to his sister at that Vancouver college, and politely pretended not to hear when some drunkard patronizingly “welcomed” them to a frontier that belonged as much to them as to any beer-swilling Canuck land speculator.
Well I didn’t forget. And I won’t.
The sampler finished digesting its bit of dung and signaled. Nelson shook loose the brown remnant. After the initial sensation of his arrival the baboons had settled down again. Calm prevailed. Momentarily, at least.
Strange, how over the last few weeks he had grown so much more confident in his ability to “read” the moods of his animal charges. Behaviors that had been opaque to him before were now clear, such as their never-ending struggle over hierarchy. The word was used repeatedly in those dreary indoctrination tapes, but it had taken personal contact to start seeing all the ladders of power running through baboon society.
The males’ struggles for dominance were noisy, garish affairs. Their bushy manes inflated to make them seem twice their size. That, plus snarling displays of teeth, usually caused one or the other to back down. Still, over in the main ark Nelson had witnessed one male savannah baboon spilling a rival’s entrails across the gray earth. The red-muzzled victor screamed elation across the waving grasses.
It had taken a bit longer to realize that females, too, battled over hierarchy … seldom as extravagantly as the males, and involving not so much simple breeding rights as food and status. Still, their rancor could be longer lasting, more resolute.
The troop’s dominant male stared at him, a huge brute massing at least thirty-five kilos. Scars along the creature’s grizzled flanks sketched testimony of former battles. Wherever he moved, others quickly got out of his way. The patriarch’s expression was serene.
Now there’s a bloke who gets respect.
Nelson couldn’t help thinking of his own triumphs and more frequent failures back in White Horse, where the flash of a knife sometimes decided a boy’s claim to the “tribal pinnacle”—or even his life. Girls, too, had their ways of cutting each other down. Then there were all the power pyramids of school and town, of work and society. Hierarchies. They all had that in common.
Moreover, not one of those hierarchies had appeared to want or value him. It was an uncomfortable insight, and Nelson hated the baboons all the more for making it so clear.
Nelson’s sweaty grip on the electroprod tightened as a pair of young adults, maybe twenty kilos each, settled down a few meters away to pick through each others’ fur. One adolescent turned and yawned at him, gaping wide enough to swallow Nelson’s leg up to his calf. Nelson edged away some distance before resuming with another pile of turds.
“I think I might like to work with animals,” he had told them when he first arrived at Kuwenezi, his one-way air ticket used up and his supply of bootlegged Whatifs spread across the placement officer’s desk.
Shortly before making the fateful decision to come here, Nelson had seen a documentary about the canton’s scientists—Africans fighting to save Africa. It was a romantic image. So when asked what work he’d like to do as a new citizen, the first thing to come to mind had been the Ark Project. “Of course I’ll want to invest my money first. I may prefer to work part-time, y’know.”
The placement officer had glanced down at the software capsules Nelson had pirated from the White Horse office of the CBC. “Your contribution suffices for provisional admission,” he had said. “And I think we can find you suitable work.”
Nelson grimaced at the recollection. “Right. Shoveling monkey shit. That’s real suitable.” But his money was gone now, lavished on instant new friends who proved stylishly fickle when the juice ran out. And back in Canada the CBC had sworn out a local warrant for his arrest.
The sampler beeped. Nelson wiped its tip and glanced back at the two young males. They had been joined by a small female carrying a baby. As he moved on in search of more dung, they followed him.
Nelson kept them in sight while he probed the next pile. The young female looked fidgety. She kept glancing back at the troop. After a couple of minutes, she approached one of the males and held out her baby to him.
After six months in the arks, Nelson had a pretty good idea what the young mother was trying to do. Adult baboons were often fascinated by babies. Top-rank females, tough mamas Nelson called them, used this to their advantage, letting others help care for their infants, as if granting their inferiors a special favor.
Other females feared uninvited attention to their offspring. Sometimes the one taking the baby never gave it back again. So a low-status mother sometimes tried to recruit protectors.
Still, this was the first time Nelson had ever seen the attempt so direct. The infant cooed
appealingly at the big male, and its mother made grooming gestures. But the male only inspected the baby idly and then turned away to scratch after insects in the soil.
Nelson blinked, suddenly experiencing one of those unexpected, unwanted moments of vivid recollection. It was a memory of one Saturday night two years ago, and a girl he had met at the New Lagos Club.
The first part of that encounter had been perfection. She seemed to dial in on him from across the room, and when they danced her moves were as smooth as a rapitrans rail and just as electric. Then there were her eyes. In them he was so sure he read a promise of enthusiasm for whoever won her. They left early. Escorting her home to her tiny coldwater flat, Nelson had felt alive with anticipation.
Meeting her elderly aunt in the kitchen hadn’t been promising, but the girl simply sent the old woman off to bed. He remembered reaching for her then. But she held him off and said, “I’ll be right back.”
While waiting, he heard soft noises from the next room. The rustle of fabric heightened his sense of expectation. But when she emerged again, she was still fully dressed, and in her arms she held a two-year-old child.
“Isn’t he cute?” she said, as the infant rubbed his eyes and looked up from Nelson’s lap. “Everyone says he’s the best-behaved little boy in White Horse.”
Nelson had shelved his sexual hopes at once. His memory was vague about what followed, but he recalled a long, embarrassed silence, punctuated by fumbling words as he maneuvered the child off his lap and worked his way toward the door. But one image he recalled later with utter clarity—it was that last, unnerving, patient expression on the young woman’s face before he turned and fled.
Nelson realized later she’d been worse than crazy. She’d had a plan. And for some reason he came away from that episode feeling he was the one who had failed.
The little mother baboon turned to look directly at him and Nelson shivered at a strange moment of déjà vu. Summoning B’Keli’s injunction against direct eye contact, he found much to do, searching for more piles to check.
The expanse of superhard glass overhead might keep out the ultraviolet, but it hardly eased the savannah heat. Artificial mimicry of the greenhouse effect made it stifling, in spite of the blowing fans. As he had been doing for a few weeks now, Nelson took humidity and temperature readings from his belt monitor and noted the direction of the desultory breeze. Slowly, he was coming to recognize the way even a man-made environment had its “seasons,” its “natural” responses to unnatural controls.
His sampling path soon took him toward the edge of the habitat where slanted panes met the rim wall. Trays of cables circuited the habitat two meters high. Through the transparent barrier he could see the dun hillsides and sunburnt wheat fields of a land once called Rhodesia, then Zimbabwe, and several other names before finally becoming Ndebele Canton of the Federation of Southern Africa.
It wasn’t like any “Africa” Nelson had seen while growing up, lying prone in front of the B-movie channel. No elephants. No rhinos. Certainly no Tarzan here. At least he’d had enough sense not to flee Canada for his parents’ lamented homeland. Everyone knew what had become of Nigeria. The rains that had abandoned this land now drenched the Bight of Africa, engulfing abandoned cities there.
Deserts or drowning. Africa just could not get a break.
Closer in view were the sealed chambers below this one, a series of glistening ziggurat terraces leading step by step toward the dusty ground, each sheltering a different habitat, a different midget ecosphere rescued from the ruined continent.
The coterie of curious baboons in his trail had grown by the time Nelson came closest to the glassy wall. They went about their business—eating, grooming, scuffling—but all the time watching him with a nonchalant fascination that drew them in his wake. Each time he finished sampling a pile of feces, several monkeys would poke at the disturbed mass, perhaps curious what he found so attractive about ordinary turds.
Why are they following me? he wondered, perplexed by the monkeys’ behavior, so unlike that of their cousins in the main ark. Once, the alpha male stared directly at Nelson, who was careful not to accept the implied challenge. Nervously, he realized the entire troop now lay between him and the corridor airlock.
The little mother and her baby remained his closest adherents. Nelson noticed her anxiety grow as five larger females approached, several of them clearly high-status matriarchs, whose sleek infants rode their backs like lords. One of the newcomers handed her baby to a helper and then began sidling toward the solitary mother.
The young one screeched defiance, clutching her infant close and backing away. Her eyes darted left and right, but none of the creatures nearby seemed more than vaguely interested in her plight. Certainly none of the big, lazy males offered any succor.
Nelson felt a twinge of sympathy. But what could he do? Rather than watch, he turned and hurried several meters to another set of droppings. He wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve and put his back to the blazing sun. In the muggy heat daydreams transported him back to his own room in the cool northlands, with his own bed, his own teli, his own little fridge stuffed with icy Labatts, and his mother’s pungent Yoruba cooking wafting upstairs from the kitchen. The reverie was pleasant beyond all expectation, but it shattered in an instant when he felt a sudden sharp tug on his pants leg.
Nelson swiveled, holding the stun-prod in both shaking hands. Then he exhaled an oath. It was only the little female again—now wide-eyed and sweat-damp, wearing a grimace of fear. Still, she did not back away when he shook the rod at her. Rather, she edged forward, trembling and awkward on two feet, clasping her infant with one paw while in the other she held forth something small and brown.
Nelson broke into nervous laughter. “Great! That’s all I need. She’s offering me shit!”
Flies buzzed as she shuffled another step, extending her piquant gift.
“G’wan, beat it, eh? I got enough to sample. And it’s supposed t’be undisturbed shit, get it?”
She seemed to understand at least part of it. The rejection part. With some retained dignity she spilled the feces onto the dry earth and wiped her paw on grass stems, all the time watching him.
The other monkeys had backed away when he shouted. Now they returned to their affairs as if nothing had happened. At first glance, one might guess they were content, foraging and lazing in the warm afternoon. But Nelson could sense undercurrents of tension. The patriarch’s nostrils flared as he sniffed, then resumed grooming one of his underlings.
This is one troop of insane monkeys, all right. Nelson wondered if there were still openings hauling hay to giraffes. With a resigned sigh he moved on, calculating how many more piles of crap he had to cover before at last he could get out of here, shower, and go nurse a beer or two—or four.
Screams suddenly erupted behind him, shrill peals of panic and fury. Nelson turned, his nerves finally tipped over into anger. “Now I’ve had enough …”
The words choked off as a small maelstrom of dark brown landed in his arms. Flailing for balance, he nearly fell over as a screeching creature clawed at his dungarees, scratching his shoulders and arms. Nelson staggered backward swearing, trying to protect his face and throw the baboon off. But the creature only scrambled around behind his shoulders, enclosing his neck in a fierce constriction.
Nelson wheezed. “Damn stupid crazy …” Then, just as suddenly, he forgot all about the small monkey on his back. He gaped at the entire troop, now arrayed in a half circle around him.
Moments ticked by, punctuated by the pounding of his heart. Most of the dark animals merely watched, as if this were great entertainment. The lead male licked himself lazily.
But facing Nelson directly now were five large, grimacing beasts who appeared to have something much more active in mind. They paced back and forth, turning and barking at him, tails flicking expressively.
The troop’s dominant females, he knew quickly. But why were they angry with him? The matriarchs’ band moved
forward. Nelson did not like the gleam he saw in their eyes.
“Stay … stay back,” he gasped, and brandished the stunner-prod. At least he thought it was the prod, until a second glance showed it to be the sampler. Where had the damned prod gone!
He saw it at last several meters away. The biggest male was pressing his broad, multicolored snout against the white plastic, sniffing it. Cursing, he realized he must have dropped his only weapon in that initial moment of panic.
Nelson had more immediate problems than recovering Kuwenezi Ark property. Less savagely intimidating than adult males, the females nonetheless growled impressively. Their teeth shone saliva-bright, and he knew why even leopards and hyenas did not dare attack baboons in a group.
It wasn’t hard to figure who it was cowering on his back, pressing her infant between them. In desperation, the little mother had apparently decided to enlist his “protection” whether he offered it or not. He stepped sideways, in the direction of the exit, speaking soothingly to the angry females. “Now … take it easy, eh? Peace an’ love … uh, nature is harmony, right?”
They didn’t seem particularly interested in reason, nor in slogans borrowed from the Earth Mother movement. They spread to cut him off.
I heard they can be pretty mean in their fights between females … I even saw one kill the baby of another. But this is ridiculous! Don’t they care I’m a man? We feed them. We made this place, to save them!
He realized with a sinking sensation that only one of these monkeys had any respect for him. And that shivering creature had turned to him only because nobody more important gave a damn.
Nelson looked around. One of the outer airlocks was just thirty meters away, opening onto the roof of the habitat below. He had no sun hat or goggles, but could easily stand the harsh daylight long enough to dash to another entrance. He began sidestepping that way slowly, maintaining a soothing monologue. “That’s right … I’ll just be goin’, then … no need for trouble, eh?”