She stood up and moved to wipe the chalkboard clean, but the aquatint next to it caught her attention. It was a true work of art, bought by Paulo at a printing shop in Ingria. She approached it slowly, wondering what about it felt so intriguing. It was printed in Finnish, which she couldn’t read, and only a few of the names sounded recognizable to her. Chimpenze. Ingagi. Makaku. Orang-Utang. She had seen some of those creatures in the flesh, but she’d never gotten too close. They could hurt people quite badly. She touched the paper and imagined passing her hand over the fur of those powerful beasts.
Then she noticed she still held a piece of chalk in her hand, and looked for a rag to clean the poster. But when she looked at the image again, a new chain of thoughts was put into motion. She applied the chalk to it again, retouching the smudge she’d made. Just like she’d done before, she drew a line under each simian head and, following habit, made them converge at a root. She liked the way it made sense. Beasts were related too. She thought of horses and donkeys, of lions and tigers. There had to be more branches elsewhere.
Making a mental note to pursue that idea later, she turned toward the exit, but she remembered the chalkboard she’d meant to clean.
There was that shape Neema had made. The human shape.
With well-proportioned forehead, nose, and lips.
Rukkamma blinked.
Her eyes moved toward the poster and back to the outline.
With her heart bloated to the size of her chest, she raised her hand again and drew a vertical line under the human face.
She continued it out of the chalkboard, across the wall, and all the way to the root of the simian family.
She had seen some of those creatures in the flesh. She had noticed their hands, their ears.
It had always been true. It just hadn’t been obvious.
Now that the thought was born, it occurred to her that it ought to have been obvious. Humans who built their cities in other lands, where they never met with a simian, may have had an excuse. But here, mere steps from the jungle, the truth was clear to anyone who looked.
The feeling of one idea pointing the way to another was particularly pleasant for Rukkamma. She leaned against the wall, too excited to trust her own feet, and let the conclusions pile up. What had she told herself a moment ago? There had to be more branches elsewhere. She went back to the root she’d made at the base of the simian tree and extended that line out of the poster, and let her gaze follow the line outward, in the direction of some unknown progenitor lost to time.
Then her gaze fell on the drawings of tadpoles.
She staggered to the drawings and drew a vertical line. Her grip on the chalk was growing unsteady, but she managed to link the line from the tadpoles to the simian one. The suggestion broke every standard she’d believed existed for blasphemy. Out of an ingrained instinct she looked around, hoping there would be no government agents spying at the door. And she noticed the orchid from Darién.
All restraint thrown away, she laughed out loud as she ran around the classroom, tracing a long, winding line on the walls linking the tadpoles to the orchid and, by implication, to the entire family of plants. Once that final connection that unified all of life was made, she wasn’t able to stop: like a child who’s just learned to scrawl, she celebrated by filling the rest of the wall with arabesques, passing the chalk over every poster and every window and completing her dancing route at the other end of the chalkboard.
Which had an illustration of chemical reactions.
She let out a scream and dropped the chalk. Neema opened the door and saw her mother fall to her knees.
“What is it? What happened?”
Rukkamma was unable to speak. She felt an idea the size of a universe forcing its way into her mind. Everything fit together. The pieces made perfect sense. She was overcome with understanding.
“What happened? Talk to me!” Neema asked louder, and had to shake her out of her state.
Rukkamma noticed her daughter and hugged her fiercely.
“Are you all right? You’re scaring me.”
“I’m fine. I’m just… spent. Let’s go home.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened to you?”
“I will. Yes, I will. Not tonight.”
Part 7: Collision
Were it not for the random fluctuations in the motions of elementary particles, no event in the world would ever happen.
When the future depends on conscious will, multiple outcomes are possible.
Morning, July 2 (Julian), 1985
Munkhaven
For most of Neema’s adult life, convincing representatives from every colonized region of the world to gather in one place and exchange proposals for their liberation had sounded like an impossible dream. When she walked, announced with praises and received with applause, into the austere but spacious hall the Novadanians had built and furnished for that purpose, she silently thanked her father for the extended absences she’d resented as a child. The road to that day had been prepared laboriously, with small, careful moves, every time Paulo Farnana had visited an imperial province, met with each clandestine independence movement, and discussed the idea of an international union. She thanked him for not abandoning the cause during the many years it had taken to build the network of ties that had made that day possible.
The excitement of the reception made her heart strain to beat faster, and she almost fainted as she forced her feet to keep moving toward the center of the stage. She hadn’t yet turned sixty, but she felt half again as old. Despite her lifelong precautions, her work was gradually killing her.
When she reached the podium, she grabbed it to keep herself standing. She searched in her coat pocket and took out her speech. The pallor of her hands distracted her as she unfolded the paper. She closed her eyes to refocus. Her health was not the issue of the day. It didn’t matter next to the bigger problems they were gathered to talk about. She glanced at the sound recorder on the podium, connected to amplifiers all over the room, and smiled. Then she noticed the artificial lights on the ceiling. The sight brought fond memories; it had been her students who had learned to tame lightning a generation before. Of the powerful nations, Novadania had been the most open to the fruits of the Likasi Renaissance, even at the cost of foreign relations. Iberian authorities were livid that there weren’t enough Inquisitors to eliminate the impious profusion of ideas that had spawned from under their noses.
The thought of so much effort ending in vain brought her mind back to her duties. She put on her eyeglasses and started reading, “It is customary to introduce this kind of event by repeating a premade phrase, such as ‘good morning.’ But I cannot say that. None of us can. The reasons that have brought us here are anything but good. Our reasons for meeting here are sad, and horrific, and soul-crushing, and outrageous.”
Her assistant, Gilberto, had deemed that opening too dark for the occasion, which she’d taken as being precisely the endorsement it needed. As the translators spread her words through the audience, she confirmed she was getting the desired effect.
“I am old, but I hadn’t been born when the Peace of Rome was signed. Even my parents were still children. When I talked to people who lived through those times, they told me the same thing: life seemed to have come to a halt. The three great empires no longer faced the problem of butchering each other, and since then they’ve turned their eyes and their whips more intensely on us. Since then, the established world order became ossified. For the better part of this century, history took residence at a horrible place and has refused to move from there.”