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.”
Caesar frowned. “We are not your masters,” he said angrily.
MacDonald was unabashed. He looked calmly back at Caesar. “We’re not your equals.”
Caesar did not take it as a rebuke. The remark had not been intended as such. He returned MacDonald’s even stare. “MacDonald, I believe that when you come truly to know and trust a person as I know and trust you, you can’t help but like him. Once my people come to know and trust yours, we shall all become equals and stay so . . . until the end of the world.”
MacDonald nodded glumly. “That may be sooner than you think.”
The statement caused an abrupt silence. Lisa was just dismissing the serving girl, but she turned to stare. Caesar paused with his hand halfway to his mouth. Something about the way MacDonald had said it . . . “You’re a pessimist.” But he said it without force.
“Or a prophet,” corrected MacDonald.
Lisa came back to the table smiling. “You’ve been at the fermented coconut milk again,” she chided. “They say it makes you very happy at night and very gloomy in the morning.”
“Now that apes are at the helm,” Caesar said, “Earth will sail safely through space until the end of time. And Virgil says that time is circular, that it has no end.” Caesar declared almost petulantly, “I don’t believe what you say.”
“Would you believe it if you heard it from the lips of your own parents?” Almost immediately MacDonald regretted saying the words.
Caesar looked at him stunned. “That’s not possible.” And then, “Is it?”
MacDonald bit his lip. He had said too much already.
“Is it?” demanded Caesar. “Is it possible?”
MacDonald nodded, almost imperceptibly, and whispered, “It is.”
Caesar leaped to his feet, and his chair fell behind him with a crash. He leaned over the table toward MacDonald. “Are my parents still alive?”
“No. But their images and their voices are.”
“MacDonald, don’t talk in riddles! Can I see them? Can I hear them? Armando told me only that they came out of the future. Can they give me . . . knowledge?”
MacDonald straightened up. There was no way to hide this from Caesar. And he did have a right to know. “You can see them,” he said. “And you can hear them. And they can give you knowledge.”
“How?”
“Under the dead city,” the man explained, “in the archives near the old command post, there are tapes, sealed tapes of Cornelius and Zira being examined by officials of the American government. When my brother was Governor Breck’s assistant, he told me about them. I know where they are. And I know that they concern Earth’s future, from which your parents came.”
“But the city was flattened. The bombs left nothing.”
MacDonald’s face creased thoughtfully, the black skin wrinkling into a frown. “The archives section—indeed, many sections of the underground city—were designed to survive the impact of a ten-megaton blast. I suspect . . .” he let the sentence trail off.
But Caesar caught his meaning anyway. “Then the tapes and the pictures of my parents . . .”
“Yes,” MacDonald said. “They might still be down there.”
Caesar was excited now. “I want to see what they looked like, MacDonald. I want to hear what they thought and knew.”
“The city is still radioactive.”
Caesar waved that away in annoyance. “I want to go anyway. Besides, who among your people knows anything about radioactivity?”
MacDonald sighed. Most of the real scientists had been killed nine years ago in the ape uprising. “No one,” he admitted.
“And,” chided Caesar, “among my people, is there one?”
MacDonald knew what Caesar was driving at. “Who knows everything about everything?”
“Right. Go find Virgil.” Caesar made a decision. “We will leave before dawn.”
MacDonald nodded in acquiescence. He didn’t like it, he didn’t want to go, but he knew that Caesar would not be satisfied until he had found the truth about his parents and his future. Virgil, of course, would be delighted—Virgil was always pleased at the prospect of discovering new knowledge. But MacDonald had misgivings. He didn’t know why, but he felt uneasy about the whole venture. Perhaps it was because of the danger—not to himself, but to Caesar and to Ape City. If anything were to happen to the chimpanzee leader, there would be no one; there would be nothing to stop General Aldo from taking over.
And if that happened, it would not be good for anyone. Not for humans, not for chimpanzees, not for orangutans. Only for General Aldo and his gorillas.
MacDonald’s misgivings stayed with him all evening. Even after he returned home. Doctor, who lived in the same house as MacDonald, noticed his troubled demeanor immediately and left him alone. And when Teacher showed up for dinner, he too noticed MacDonald’s brooding, but he said nothing.
The house was crude, cruder than the average ape house. The room was plain with a rough fireplace. On the mantel were a few fresh flowers in an antique Coke bottle and a yellowing photograph of Martin Luther King in a corroded frame. Above the mantel hung a diploma from a black university, long since crumbled into ashes. There was also a photo of MacDonald’s dead brother, the one human being who had helped Caesar. MacDonald had loved his brother—and he loved Caesar now—but there had been many moments since the ape uprising when he had longed for the old days.
MacDonald knew that slavery was wrong, he knew it instinctively, but if there had to be slaves and masters, he would much prefer to be a master. But then, every time he found himself thinking that way, he remembered a statement that Abraham Lincoln had made around 1851 or so, that if there was to be a difference between the black race and the white race, he, Abe Lincoln, would much prefer that the white race be the superior. The thought always made MacDonald smile. History had conveniently forgotten that statement of Lincoln’s and remembered him primarily for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Caesar was a lot like Lincoln, too. He wanted apes and humans to be equal, but if there had to be slaves and masters, he would much prefer to be among the masters. The sentiment was universal, and because of it there were times when MacDonold’s longing for the old days was especially fierce.
Like now, for instance.
The table was set for three. A single candle glowed in its center. There were rusty knives and forks and chipped enamel plates.
Teacher was putting two blankets over the window. “Apes have such an acute sense of smell,” he was muttering.
MacDonald smiled and cautiously shut the outer door. He tested it and put a chair under the handle so no one could enter abruptly. Then he moved to the window and double-checked Teacher’s precautions.
Satisfied, he opened the door to the other room and called, “Okay, Doctor, we’re ready. Bring it in.”