A joke.
Caesar laughed. He didn’t mean to—it just came out.
Maybe they all go in the water and swim away, he replied. Maybe turn into fish and leave us alone.
Maurice made a croaking sound that was probably supposed to be a laugh. Nearby apes heard them laugh and started laughing, too, just the way they did when they were playing with things.
Maybe apes still not too smart, Maurice said.
No, Caesar said, remembering a dinner party at Will’s home. Humans do this, too. Laugh when they don’t hear the joke.
Maybe humans not so smart, either.
18
“We’re prisoners, aren’t we?” Clancy asked him.
They were in the hut that served as their quarters, but it was clear that they were locked in even before he checked to make certain.
“Yes.” Malakai nodded.
“Why?”
“It’s good news,” Malakai said. “It means they’re still trying to decide what to do with us.”
“You mean as opposed to just killing us,” she said.
“You’ve worked that out,” he said. “Very good.”
“Crap,” she said. “I hoped I was kidding. Would they really kill us?”
“You had to have suspected,” he replied. “Everything so secret, no contact with anyone allowed. Does anyone even know you’re here?”
“Well, David.”
“That’s the guy you emailed the other night.”
“Yeah. But he sort of knew before. I wasn’t supposed to tell him, but I did. He and I—we hang out.”
“Hang out? What does that mean? You stand around in front of a store, drinking beer?”
“No. More like we have sex now and then.”
“So he’s your boyfriend.”
“No,” she said. “We just hang out.”
“We’re both speaking English, and yet I don’t understand you.”
“Holy shit,” she said. “That was supposed to be a joke.”
He shrugged.
“This is when you get funny?” she asked. “When you’re about to die?”
“I’ve been here a lot of times,” he said. “At some point, what else do you do?”
She was silent for a moment.
“You’re a bad guy, aren’t you?”
His first instinct was not to answer her at all, but then he saw she was really serious.
“Bad guy?” he said. “I don’t know. “Remember how I told you my uncle took me to see the gorillas when I was eight?
“Yes.”
“It was so I could learn how to kill them. And you know why we killed them? Because we were starving. And why were we starving? Because we were from the wrong tribe in the wrong place at the wrong time. So was I doing a bad thing to hunt bushmeat?”
“Gorillas are an endangered species,” she said. “And they’re as conscious as we are.”
“What did that mean to me? My family was endangered.”
“So anything you do is justified, if you do it to save yourself?”
“You see,” he said, “this is the sort of question that does not occur to you when you are there, and people are assaulting your sister before they kill her with a machete. And why it doesn’t occur to me now that I should have to justify myself to a spoiled, western child. Whatever I’ve done, it is done. Any soul-searching would be a waste of time. If you kill someone, do you think they give a shit if you feel sorry about it later? Penitence is nothing but a form of self-indulgence. Some things you cannot wash from your hands, and there’s no use in trying.”
He saw that she had tears in her eyes.
“Oh, what are you doing now?” he snapped.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“About what?”
“I’m just sorry,” she said.
Malakai lurched out of the chair, stalked out of the common room and sat on his own bed. He lifted his hands, staring at them, as if they weren’t his at all, but some sort of alien appendages that had been grafted there.
He remembered the look in the eye of the ape leader. The purpose.
He heard a knock. It was Clancy, of course.
“Do you drink?” she asked.
She was holding a bottle of Scotch.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“I brought it with me,” she said. “It wasn’t electronic, and it wasn’t a gun, so they let me keep it.”
Malakai studied the bottle for a moment.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I could use a drink.”
She produced a pair of paper cups from the lavatory, and poured them each a shot.
“To whatever the hell that was we saw today,” she said, raising her cup.
“To staying alive,” he added, and they drank.
“You’re not going to cry again are you?” he asked her, after a moment.
“You’re just so… damaged,” she said. “To see something like that—”
“Yes, yes,” he said.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve,” he said. “I was twelve.”
She took another shot.
“Can you tell me more… about your family?”
“Oh, you want a bedtime story now?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I want to know.” This is stupid, he thought. Why should I even be speaking to her?
He took another drink. It had been a while since he had whisky. It felt good in his belly.
“Very well,” he said. “If you wish.”
“I wish.”
“I was twelve, as I said,” Malakai began. “I was coming out of the hills.” He smiled. “No bushmeat, this time. My uncle had acquired a few cows, and I was bringing them down from foraging. We had food to eat, every day. My mother made this thing, you know, that everybody made—bugari. It’s just a sort of paste made from cassava or cornmeal. You roll up a ball of it and then you poke a hole, so it is like a little shot glass. And then you dip it in the stew. My mother made the best stew. In poor times, there was not much in it—a few ground peanuts, some hot chilies, coconut, maybe some caterpillars…”
He paused for a reaction from Clancy, but what he got wasn’t what he was expecting.
“Gorilla,” she added. “Chimpanzee.”
“Ah,” he said. “No. The gorilla meat we usually sold. More often than not my uncle would be asked to obtain some by a local official or rich man who would loan him a gun. Once we got to keep the head, but you don’t make stew from that, you—”
“No,” she said. “That’s enough. How could you eat something so close to a human being?”
“As a matter of fact, my mother would not eat chimp, for that very reason. But others ate it. You forget, I think, that even human meat has been on the menu in many places and times. Indeed, some people I knew just around that time were eaten by Rega warriors.”
“Right,” she sighed. “I just… Okay, go ahead. Your mom made great stew.”
“The best, but it was better if she had some meat, and that day I knew there was going to be chicken in it, and I was already imagining the taste, eager for it.” He closed his eyes. “I can still remember the taste.
“You see, we not only had the cattle, my mother and sister had found sewing jobs. There was a lot of excitement in the air, too, that year—our country had become independent just a few years before. There was a lot of turmoil, but to us it seemed far away. We were a small village, of no interest to anyone.
“My buddy Jean-Francis was with me. He was a year older, I think, a smart boy. He was Hutu and my mother was Nyanga, but that wasn’t such a big deal back then.”
“What about your father?” Clancy asked.