She makes her situation sound so awful, Fiben thought. And^yet there must be fewer than twenty other chims on the planet regarded as highly by the Board. To a member of a client race, it’s the highest honor.
Still, maybe he understood after all. She would have come home to Garth knowing one fact. That no matter how brilliant her career, how great her accomplishments, it would only make her ovaries all the more valuable … only make more frequent the painful, invasive visits to the Plasm Bank, and only bring on more pressure to carry as many as possible to term in her own womb.
Invitations to join group marriages or pair bonds would be automatic, easy. Too easy. There would be no way to know if a group wanted her for herself. Lone male suitors would seek her for the status fathering her child would bring.
And then there would be the jealousy. He could empathize with that. Chims weren’t often very subtle at hiding their feelings, especially envy. Quite a few would be downright mean about it.
“Irongrip was right,” Gailet said. “It’s got to be different for a chen. A white card would be fun fora male chim, I can see that. But for a chimmie? One with ambition to be something for herself?”
She looked away.
“I …” Fiben tried to think of something to say, but for a moment all he could do was sit there feeling thick-headed, stupid. Perhaps, someday, one of his great-to-the-nth grandchildren would be smart enough to know the right words, to know how to comfort someone too far gone into bitterness even to want comforting anymore.
That more fully uplifted neo-chim, a few score more generations down the chain of Uplift, might be bright enough. But Fiben knew he wasn’t. He was only an ape.
“Um.” He coughed. “I remember a time, back on Cilmar Island, it musta been before you returned to Garth. Let’s see, was it ten years ago? Ifni! I think I was just a freshman. …” He sighed. “Anyway, the whole island got all excited, that year, when Igor Patterson came to lecture and perform at the University.”
Gailet’s head lifted a little. “Igor Patterson? The drummer?”
Fiben nodded. “So you’ve heard of him?”
She smirked sarcastically. “Who hasn’t? He’s — ” Gailet spread her hands and let them drop, palms up. “He’s wonderful.”
That summed it up all right. For Igor Patterson was the best.
The thunder dance was only one aspect of the neo-chimpanzee’s love affair with rhythm. Percussion was a favorite musical form, from the quaint farmlands of Hermes to the sophisticated towers of Earth. Even in the early days — back when chims had been forced to carry keyboard displays on their chests in order to speak at all — even then the new race had loved the beat.
And yet, all of the great drummers on Earth and in the colonies were humans. Everyone until Igor Patterson.
He was the first. The first chim with the fine finger coordination, the delicacy of timing, the sheer chutzpah, to make it alongside the best. Listening to Patterson play “Clash Ceramic Lighting” wasn’t only to experience pleasure; for a chim it was to burst with pride. To many, his mere existence meant that chims weren’t just approaching what the Uplift Board wanted them to be, but what they wanted to be, as well.
“The Carter Foundation sent him on a tour of th’ colonies,” Fiben went on. “Partly it was as a goodwill trip for all the outlying chim communities. And of course it was also to spread the good luck around a bit.”
Gailet snorted at the obviousness of it. Of course Patterson had a white card. The chim members of the Uplift Board would have insisted, even if he weren’t also as wonderfully charming, intelligent, and handsome a specimen of neo-chimpanzee as anyone could ask to meet.
And Fiben thought he knew what else Gailet was thinking. For a male having a white card wouldn’t be much of a problem at all — just one long party. “I’ll bet,” she said. And Fiben imagined he detected a clear tone of envy.
“Yeah, well, you should’ve been there, when he showed up to give his concert. I was one of the lucky ones. My seat was way up in back, out of the way, and it happened that I had a real bad cold that night. That was damn fortunate.”
“WhatB^-GaiTet’s eyebrows came together. “What does that have to do with… Oh.” She frowned at him and her jaw tightened. “Oh. I see.”
“I’ll bet you do. The air conditioning was set on high, but I’m told the aroma was still overpowering. I had to sit shivering under the blowers. Damn near caught my death—”
“Will you get to the point?” Gailet’s lips were a thin line.
“Well, as no doubt you’ve guessed, nearly every green-or blue-card chimmie on the island who happened to be in estrus seemed to have a ticket to the concert. None of ’em used olfa-spray. They came, generally, with the complete okay of their group husbands, wearing flaming pink lipstick, just on the off chance—”
“I get the picture,” Gailett said. And for just an instant Fiben wondered if he saw her blink back a faint smile as she pictured the scene. If so, it was only a momentary flicker of her severe frown. “So what happened?”
Fiben stretched, yawning. “What would you expect to happen? A riot, of course.”
Her jaw dropped. “Really? At the University?”
“Sure as I’m sitting here.”
“But—”
“Oh, the first few minutes went all right. Man, old Igor could play as good as his rep, I’ll tell you. The crowd kept getting more and more excited. Even the backup band was feelin’ it. Then things kinda got out of hand.”
“But—”
“Remember old Professor Olvfing, from the Terragens Traditions Department? You know, the elderly chim who sports a monocle? Used to spend his spare time lobbying to get a chim monogamy bill before the legislature?”
“Yes, I knew him.” She nodded, her eyes wide open.
Fiben made a gesture with two hands.
“No! In public? Professor Olvfing?”
“With th’ dean of th’ College of frigging Nutrition, no less.”
Gailet let out a sharp sound. She turned aside, hand to her breast. She seemed to suffer a sudden bout of hiccups.
“Of course, Olvfing’s pair-bond wife forgave him later. It was that or’lose him to a ten-group that said they liked his style.”
Gailet slapped her chest, coughing. She turned further away from Fiben, shaking her head vigorously.
“Poor Igor Patterson,” Fiben continued. “He had problems of his own, of course. Some of th’ guys from the football team had been drafted as bouncers. When it started getting out of hand, they tried using fire extinguishers. That made things slippery, but it didn’t slow ’em down much.”
Gailet coughed louder. “Fiben …”
“It was too bad, really,” he mused aloud. “Igor was getting into a great blues riff, really pounding those skins, packin’ in a backbeat you couldn’t believe. I was groovin’ on it … until this forty-year-old chimmie, naked and slick as a dolphin, dropped straight onto him from th’ rafters.”
Gailet doubled over clutching her belly. She held up a hand, pleading for mercy. “Stop, please. …” she whimpered, weakly.
“Thank heavens it was the snare drum she fell through. Took her long enough gettin’ untangled for poor Igor to escape out the back way, just barely ahead of the mob.”
She toppled over sideways. For a moment Fiben felt concern, her face was so flushed and red. She hooted, slapping the floor, and tears streamed from her eyes. Gailet rolled over onto her back, rocking with peals of laughter.
Fiben shrugged. “And all that was just from playin’ the first number — Patterson’s special version of the bloody national anthem! What a pity. I never did get to hear his variation on Tnagadda Da Vita.’ ”