“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 deja 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.