On the other hand. Vendelmans was dying right now, allowing us a dramatic opportunity to convey the concept of human mortality. We had at best a week or two to make use of that opportunity: then it might be years before the next chance.
“What are you worried about?” Vendelmans demanded.
Yost said, “Do you fear dying, Hal?”
“Dying makes me angry. I don’t fear it; but I still have things to do, and I won’t be able to do them. Why do you ask?”
“Because so far as we know the chimps see death—chimp death—as simply part of the great cycle of events, like the darkness that comes after the daylight. But human death is going to come as a revelation to them, a shock. And if they pick up from you any sense of fear or even anger over your dying, who knows what impact that will have on their way of thought?”
“Exactly. Who knows? I offer you a chance to find out!” By a narrow margin, finally we voted to let Hal Vendelmans share his death with the chimpanzees. Nearly all of us had reservations about that. But plainly Vendelmans was determined to have a useful death, a meaningful death; the only way he could face his fate at all was by contributing it like this to the project. And in the end I think most of us cast our votes his way purely out of our love for him.
We rearranged the schedules to give Vendelmans more contact with the animals. There are ten of us, fifty of them; each of us has a special field of inquiry—number theory, syntactical innovation, metaphysical exploration, semiotics, tool use, and so on—and we work with chimps of our own choice, subject, naturally, to the shifting patterns of subtribal bonding within the chimp community. But we agreed that Vendelmans would have to offer his revelations to the alpha intelligences—Leo, Ramona, Grimsky, Alice and Attila—regardless of the current structure of the chimp-human dialogues. Leo, for instance, was involved in an ongoing interchange with Beth Rankin on the notion of the change of seasons. Beth more or less willingly gave up her time with Leo to Vendelmans, for Leo was essential in this. We learned long ago that anything important had to be imparted to the alphas first, and they will impart it to the others. A bright chimp knows more about teaching things to his duller cousins than the brightest human being.
The next morning Hal and Judy Vendelmans took Leo, Ramona and Attila aside and held a long conversation with them. I was busy in a different part of the compound with Gonzo, Mimsy, Muffin, and Chump, but I glanced over occasionally to see what was going on. Hal looked radiant—like Moses just down from the mountain after talking with God. Judy was trying to look radiant too, working at it, but her grief kept breaking through: once I saw her turn away from the chimps and press her knuckles to her teeth to hold it back.
Afterward Leo and Grimsky had a conference out by the oak grove. Yost and Charley Damiano watched it with binoculars, but they couldn’t make much sense out of it. The chimps, when they sign to each other, use modified gestures much less precise than the ones they use with us; whether this marks the evolution of a special chimp-to-chimp argot designed not to be understood by us, or is simply a factor of chimp reliance on supplementary nonverbal ways of communicating, is something we still don’t know, but the fact remains that we have trouble comprehending the sign language they use with each other, particularly the form the alphas use. Then, too, Leo and Grimsky kept wandering in and out of the trees, as if perhaps they knew we were watching them and didn’t want us to eavesdrop. A little later in the day, Ramona and Alice had the same sort of meeting. Now all five of our alphas must have been in on the revelation.
Somehow the news began to filter down to the rest of them.
We weren’t able to observe actual concept transmission. We did notice that Vendelmans, the next day, began to get rather more attention than normal. Little troops of chimpanzees formed about him as he moved—slowly, and in obvious difficulty—about the compound. Gonzo and Chump, who had been bickering for months, suddenly were standing side by side staring intently at Vendelmans. Chicory, normally shy, went out of her way to engage him in a conversation—about the ripeness of the apples on the tree, Vendelmans reported. Anna Livia’s young twins, Shem and Shaun, climbed up and sat on Vendelmans’s shoulders.
“They want to find out what a dying god is really like,” Yost said quietly.
“But look there,” Jan Morton said.
Judy Vendelmans had an entourage too: Mimsy, Muffin, Claudius, Buster, and Kong. Staring in fascination, eyes wide, lips extended, some of them blowing little bubbles of saliva.
“Do they think she’s dying too?” Beth wondered.
Yost shook his head. “Probably not. They can see there’s nothing physically wrong with her. But they’re picking up the sorrow vibes, the death vibes.”
“Is there any reason to think they’re aware that Hal is Judy’s mate?” Christensen asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Yost said. “They can see that she’s upset. That interests them, even if they have no way of knowing why Judy would be more upset than any of the rest of us.”
“More mysteries out yonder,” I said, pointing into the meadow. Grimsky was standing by himself out there, contemplating something. He is the oldest of the chimps, gray-haired, going bald, a deep thinker. He has been here almost from the beginning, more than thirty years, and very little has escaped his attention in that time.
Far off to the left, in the shade of the big beech tree, Leo stood similarly in solitary meditation. He is twenty, the alpha male of the community, the strongest and by far the most intelligent. It was eerie to see the two of them in their individual zones of isolation, like distant sentinels, like Easter Island statues, lost in private reveries.
“Philosophers,” Yost murmured.
Yesterday Vendelmans returned to the hospital for good. Before he went, he made his farewells to each of the fifty chimpanzees, even the infants. In the past week he has altered markedly; he is only a shadow of himself, feeble, wasted. Judy says he’ll live only another few weeks.
She has gone on leave and probably won’t come back until after Hal’s death. I wonder what the chimps will make of her “going away,” and of her eventual return.
She said that Leo had asked her if she was dying, too.
Perhaps things will get back to normal here now.
Christensen asked me this morning, “Have you noticed the way they seem to drag the notion of death into whatever conversation you’re having with them these days?”
I nodded. “Mimsy asked me the other day if the moon dies when the sun comes up and the sun dies when the moon is out. It seemed like such a standard primitive metaphor that I didn’t pick up on it at first. But Mimsy’s too young for using metaphor that easily and she isn’t particularly clever. The older ones must be talking about dying a lot, and it’s filtering down.”
“Chicory was doing subtraction with me.” Christensen said. “She signed, ‘You take five, two die, you have three.’ Later she turned it into a verb: ‘Three die one equals two.’”
Others reported similar things. Yet none of the animals were talking about Vendelmans and what was about to happen to him, nor were they asking any overt questions about death or dying. So far as we were able to perceive, they had displaced the whole thing into metaphorical diversions. That in itself indicated a powerful obsession. Like most obsessives, they were trying to hide the thing that most concerned them, and they probably thought they were doing a good job of it. It isn’t their fault that we’re able to guess what’s going on in their minds. They are, after all—and we sometimes have to keep reminding ourselves of this—only chimpanzees.