Now, though, it seemed she was back to finding fault with everything Fiben did. “Just a little more,” she urged. “Over to the left.”
“Gripe, gripe, gripe,” Fiben muttered under his breath. But he complied. Chims needed to touch and be touched, perhaps quite a bit more than their human patrons, who sometimes held hands in public but seldom more. Fiben found it nice to have someone to groom after all this time. Almost as pleasurable as having it done to you was doing it for somebody else.
Back in college he had read that humans once restricted most of their person-to-person touching to their sexual partners. Some dark-age parents had even refrained from hugging their kids! Those primitives hardly ever engaged in anything that could be likened to mutual grooming — completely nonsexual scratching, combing, massaging one another, just for the pleasure of contact, with no sex involved at all.
A brief Library search had verified this slanderous rumor, to his amazement. No historical anecdote had ever brought home to Fiben so well just how much agnosy and craziness poor human mels and ferns had endured. It made forgiveness a little easier when he also saw pictures of old-time zoos and circuses and trophies of “the hunt.”
Fiben was pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of keys rattling. The old-style wooden door slid open. Someone knocked and then walked in.
It was the chimmie who brought them their evening meals. Since being moved here, Fiben had not learned her name, but her heart-shaped face was striking, and somehow familiar.
Her bright zipsuit was of the style worn by the band of Probationers that worked for the Gubru. The costume was bound by elastic bands at ankles and wrists, and a holo-projection armband picted outstretched birds’ talons a few centimeters into space.
“Someone’s comin’ to see both of you,” the female Probie said lowly, softly. “I thought you’d want to know. Have time to get ready.”
Gailet nodded coolly. “Thank you.” She hardly glanced at the chimmie. But Fiben, in spite of his situation, watched their jailer’s sway as she turned and walked away.
“Damn traitors!” Gailet muttered. She strained against her slender chain, rattling it. “Oh, there are times when I wish I were a chen. I’d … I’d …”
Fiben looked up at the ceiling and sighed.
Gailet strained to turn and look at him. “What! You’ve maybe got a comment?”
Fiben shrugged. “Sure. If you were a chen, you just might be able to bust out of that skinny little chain. But then, they wouldn’t have used something like that if you were a male chim, would they?”
He lifted his own arms as far as they would go, barely enough to bring them into her view. Heavy links rattled. The chafing hurt his bandaged right wrist, so he let his hands drop to the concrete floor.
“I’d guess there were other reasons she wishes she was male,” came a voice from the doorway. Fiben looked up and saw the Probationer called Irongrip, the leader of the renegades. The chirri smiled theatrically as he rolled one end of his waxed mustache, an affectation Fiben was getting quite sick of.
“Sorry. I couldn’t help but overhear that last part, folks.”
Gailet’s upper lip curled in contempt. “So you were listening. So what? All that means is you’re an eavesdropper, as well as a traitor.”
The powerfully built chim grinned. “Shall I go for voyeur, also? Why don’t I have you two chained together, hm? Ought to make for lots of amusement, you like each other so much.”
Gailet snorted. She pointedly moved away from Fiben, shuffling over to the far wall.
Fiben refused to give the fellow the pleasure of a response. He returned Irongrip’s gaze evenly.
“Actually,” the Probationer went on, in a musing tone, “it’s pretty understandable, a chimmie like you, wishing she was a chen. Especially with that white breeding card of yours. Why, a white card’s damn near wasted on a girl!
“What I find hard to figure,” Irongrip said to Fiben, “is why you two have been doin’ what you were doin’ — running around playing soldier for the man. It’s hard to figure. You with a blue card, her with a white — jeez, you two could do it any time she’s pink — with no pills, no asking her guardian, no by-your-leave from the Uplift Board. All th’ kids you ever want, whenever you want ’em.”
Gailet offered the chim a chilled stare. “You are disgusting.”
Irongrip colored. It was especially pronounced with his pale, shaved cheeks. “Why? Because I’m fascinated by what’s been deprived me? With what I can’t have?”
Fiben growled. “More like with what you can’t do.”
The blush deepened. Irongrip knew his feelings were betraying him. He bent over to bring his face almost even with Fiben’s. “Keep it up, college boy. Who knows what you’ll be able to do, once we’ve decided your fate.” He grinned.
Fiben wrinkled his nose. “Y’know, the color of a chen’s card isn’t everything. F’rinstance, even you’d probably get more girls if you just used a mouthwash once in a whi—”
He grunted and doubled over as a fist drove into his abdomen. You pay for your pleasures, Fiben reminded himself as his stomach convulsed and he fought for breath. Still, from the look on the traitor’s face he must have struck paydirt. Irongrip’s reaction spoke volumes.
Fiben looked up to see concern written in Gailet Jones’s eyes. The expression instantly turned to anger.
“Will you two stop it! You’re acting like children… like pre-sentient—”
Irongrip whirled and pointed at her. “What do you know about it? Hm? Are you some sort of expert? Are you a member of the goddam Uplift Board? Are you even a mother, yet?”
“I’m a student of Galactic Sociology,” Gailet said rather stiffly.
Irongrip laughed bittterly. “A title given to reward a clever monkey! You must have really done some beautiful tricks on the jungle gym to get a real-as-life, scale-model, sheepskin doctorate!”
He crouched near her. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, little miss? Let me spell it for you. We’re all goddam pre-sentients! Go ahead. Deny it. Tell me I’m wrong!”
It was Gailet’s turn to change color. She glanced at Fiben, and he knew she was remembering that afternoon at the college in Port Helenia, when they had climbed to the top of the bell tower and looked out over a campus empty of humans, filled only with chim students and chim faculty trying to act as if nothing had changed. She had to be remembering how bitter it had been, seeing that scene as a Galactic would.
“I’m a sapient being,” she muttered, obviously trying to put conviction into her voice.
“Yeah,” Irongrip sneered. “What you mean to say, though, is that you’re just a little closer than the rest of us… closer to what the Uplift Board defines as a target for us neo-chims. Closer to what they think we ought to be.
“Tell me, though. What if you took a space trip to Earth, and the captain took a wrong turn onto D-level hyperspace, and you arrived a couple hundred years from now? What do you think would happen to your precious white card then?”
Gailet locked away. “Sic transit gloria mundi.” Irongrip snapped his fingers. “You’d be a relic then, obsolete, a phase long bypassed in the relentless progress of Uplift.” He laughed, reaching oui and taking her chin in his hand to make her meet his eyes. “You’d be Probationer, honey.”
Fiben surged forward but was caught short by his chains. The jolting stop sent pain shooting up from his right wrist, but in his anger Fiben hardly noticed. He was too filled with wrath to be able to speak. Dimly, as he snarled at the other chen, he knew that the same held for Gailet. It was all the more infuriating because it was just one more proof that the bastard was right.