Battle for the Planet of the Apes - Gerrold David - Страница 4

“Yes,” Teacher nodded. “I am old . . . enough.”

“Then what was the provocation?”

Teacher was uneasy. He swallowed hard. He looked back and forth between Caesar, Aldo, and MacDonald. Finally, he managed to say, “General Aldo tore up a writing exercise written especially for me by Caesar’s son. It was very good and . . . respectfully affectionate.”

Caesar turned to Aldo and confronted him. “Why did you tear it up?”

Aldo sullenly refused to answer. From the crowd, a young chimpanzee called, “Because Teacher said that the general’s writing was very bad.”

The chimpanzees and orangutans in the crowd laughed. The gorillas didn’t; they fumed in silent embarrassment, and one or two curled their lips in anger.

Caesar said, after a pause, “General Aldo is a very good rider. My son is not, though he wishes to be. But my son is a very good writer. General Aldo is not. Apes cannot excel at everything,” he said, smiling obliquely at Virgil, “with very few exceptions. That is all there is to it. The matter will be forgotten. Now go back to school.”

“The schoolroom has been wrecked, Caesar,” Virgil said. “By the gorillas.”

Aldo snorted triumphantly. “Class ended! Schoolroom closed! Now we go back to riding horses!” There was an approving bark from the gorilla group behind him, but it was quickly checked as Caesar advanced to within an inch of the general’s face.

Caesar’s voice was firm. “You and your ‘friends’ will go back and put the schoolroom in order.”

Their eyes locked. Aldo glared back, not quite totally defiant, not yet. He fumed, but he sheathed his sword.

Caesar turned on his heel and headed back toward his house, summoning MacDonald to his side with a curt gesture.

MacDonald caught up to him, frowning. This might be a good time to broach the subject of what happened on the road. He offered, “Caesar, I think that Aldo’s hatred is not confined to humans.”

Caesar was charitable; he shrugged it off. “Aldo still remembers the old days.”

MacDonald couldn’t be that charitable. “I think he’d like to bring them back.”

Caesar looked at him curiously, but he did not ask the man to explain his odd remark.

TWO

Caesar’s house was large and airy, its architectural style simple and clean. It was decorated with wood and paper and plaited screens. The impression was that of a rich tropical forest brought indoors.

Caesar’s wife, Lisa, a pretty young chimpanzee, was preparing a meal of fruit, nuts, and vegetables for her husband and his adviser, MacDonald. A young, attractive serving girl was working with her.

Occasionally, Lisa would cast a motherly glance out the window. Directly outside was a collection of swings, vines, and perches on which Cornelius was playing with a human boy.

At the moment, Cornelius was poised on a perch. “Hey, Jimmy, d’you want to play follow-my-leader?” And with that, he executed a series of complicated flips, landing easily on a lower limb.

Jimmy watched sourly. When Cornelius stopped and looked at him questioningly, he made a disgusted face. “No. You’re always the leader.” He reached down and picked up a stick about rifle length; he pointed it at Cornelius, “Tchang, tchang! I got you!”

Cornelius clutched his breast, fell backward off the limb to the ground, uttering a loud cry of agony.

Almost immediately, Lisa stuck her head out the window. Seeing Cornelius lying on the ground, she hurried outside. “Cornelius, are you hurt?”

Cornelius rolled over and opened his eyes. He looked up at her. “No, Mother. I’m just dead.”

“Dead?”

At this, Jimmy hid the makeshift gun behind his back, then dropped it quietly to the ground.

Cornelius grinned and explained, “We were playing gorillas.”

Lisa frowned. First at her son, then at Jimmy. Was this human child teaching Cornelius bad habits? Jimmy sidled off backward, looking ashamed and defensive. “You were playing what?” she asked.

Cornelius stood up. “We were playing war.”

“War?” Now Lisa was upset. She straightened abruptly. The sudden motion startled Jimmy. Already thoroughly intimidated, he turned and ran. Lisa watched him go in annoyance, then turned back to her son. She spoke icily. “Cornelius, hasn’t your father explained to you many times that war isn’t a game, except to pear-shaped old generals sticking colored pins in a map three thousand miles behind the firing lines?”

Cornelius looked properly abashed. “Yes, Mother.”

“And hasn’t he forbidden you to play with guns or to make a game of killing?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Then you’ll stop it?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Satisfied, Lisa turned and reentered the house. Caesar and MacDonald had come in while she was dealing with Cornelius. They had seated themselves at the dining room table and were talking quietly. Lisa moved to help the serving girl finish the dinner preparations.

MacDonald was saying, “You handled that situation with Aldo very adroitly, Caesar.”

Caesar sighed and shook his head. “I wish I had been educated to be a ruler.”

MacDonald looked puzzled. Didn’t Armando . . .?”

Caesar shook his head again. “My dear, dead human foster-father—when he wasn’t training me to be a bareback rider in his circus—taught me the sum of all human virtues. Which is that we must love one another or die. The lion-tamer was allowed to crack his whip, provided he didn’t whip the lion.”

“And if the lion attacked the tamer?”

“The lion never did. That’s how I thought it would be in the world outside. If my father and mother had only lived, they might have taught me whether it was right to kill an evil enemy so that good should prevail.”

“Well,” said MacDonald. “History shows . . .”

Caesar cut him off sharply. “Human history! Not ape history. Ape never kills ape!”

Chastened, MacDonald shut up.

Caesar said, a little more slowly, reaching out to his friend, “We are making a new kind of world, MacDonald. We cannot replace one master with another; we must do away with those old human ideas of masters and slaves altogether. There must be no killing, no violence, no oppression of any kind. Human history says it’s all right to kill. Apes must make a new kind of history, and we have no precedents to guide us, man friend.”

MacDonald bit his lip; he wanted to speak but was holding himself back. He knew that Caesar was wrong on this point. There had been good men and noble precedents in human history—there would always be good men; apes could not have freed themselves without the help of good men. MacDonald’s own brother had once aided Caesar, saved him from the governor of the city.

But there was no way he could convince Caesar that there were noble precedents in human history. Caesar was convinced he was bringing a new idea to the world. MacDonald sighed to himself. He wished he could get it through to the chimpanzee that what he thought was new thinking was only ignorance of the past.

Lisa brought the food to the table then. The bowls were rough cut out of wood, as was the table, almost refectory style. She and the serving girl placed the meal, totally vegetarian, before the chimpanzee and the man.

MacDonald took advantage of the interruption to try to change the mood. He exclaimed hungrily, “Mmm, I could eat a horse.”

Lisa stopped in startlement and looked at him. “A horse?”

Caesar looked up, realizing her misconception, and joked, “You remember, Lisa. They used to eat all sorts of things—dead cattle, dead chickens, dead pigs, dead fish . . .”

“Fish I can understand, just barely,” said Lisa. “But horses! If horses, why not hippos? Where do you draw the line?”

MacDonald sighed. He took a nut and looked knowingly at the serving girl. She caught his look but turned away. Caesar was watching. MacDonald crunched the nut slowly while thinking what to say. He’d been through this argument before with other apes. Chimpanzees and orangutans couldn’t understand that human beings liked meat, that meat was one of the foods that men needed because they had evolved to need it. He muttered, “If there were any hippos around, Lisa, they would be safe now. Now we eat fruits and nuts at our master’s command.”