37: LABORATORY

You could hardly call it a cage.

Five years after the Discontinuity and their capture, the man-apes were still trapped under a bit of camouflage net, thrown loosely over a conveniently hovering Eye, and weighted down with boulders. Nobody had given any thought to putting together anything better—though some quirk of the military mind had ordered the boulders to be painted white; there was always somebody who needed his attitude adjusted with a bit of pointless work.

It was under this net that Seeker spent her days, alone save for the fast-growing Grasper. Grasper was nearly six years old now. Her young mind still forming, she had adjusted to the reality of their confinement. Seeker couldn’t adjust. But she had to accept it.

The soldiers came in once a day to give her food and water and scrape out her dung. Sometimes they held her down and pushed their fat penises into her body. Seeker didn’t care about that. She wasn’t hurt, and she had learned to let her captors do what they want, while she kept an eye on Grasper. She had no idea why the soldiers did what they did. But whether she knew or not didn’t matter, of course, for she had no power to stop them.

She could break out of here. On some level she still knew that. She was stronger than any of the soldiers. She could rip open that netting with her teeth and hands or even her feet. But she hadn’t seen a single other of her kind, save Grasper, since the day of her capture. Through the holes in the net she could see no trees, no welcoming green shade. If she did break out there was nowhere for her to go, nothing waiting for her but clubs, fists and rifle butts. She had had to be taught that brutal lesson.

Suspended between animal and human, she had only a dim grasp of future and past. Her memory was like a gallery hung with vivid images—her mother’s face, the warmth of her nest, the overwhelming scent of the male who first took her, the sweet agony of childbearing, the dreadful limpness of her first child. And her sense of the future was dominated by an inchoate vision of her own death, a fear of the blackness that lurked behind the yellow eyes of cats. But there was no sense of narrative about her memories, no logic or order: like most animals she lived in the present, for if the present could not be survived the past and future meant nothing anyhow. And her present, this helpless captivity, had expanded to encompass her whole consciousness.

She was a captive. That was all she was. But at least she had Grasper.

Then, one morning, something changed.

It was Grasper who saw it first.

Seeker woke up slowly, as always clinging to her ragged dreams of the trees. She yawned hugely and stretched her long arms. The sun was already high, and she could see bright glimmers pushing through the gaps in the netting.

Grasper was staring up into the tent’s apex. There was light on her face. Seeker looked up.

The Eye was shining. It was like a miniature sun, caught in the net.

Seeker stood up. Side by side, their gazes fixed on the Eye, mother and child walked forward, fully upright. Seeker raised a hand toward the Eye. It was out of reach, but it cast shadows of the two of them, on their floor of trampled dirt. It gave off no heat, only light.

Seeker had only just woken up. She badly needed to urinate, to defecate, to groom to get rid of the night’s ticks, to get some food and water. But she couldn’t move. She just stood there, eyes wide, one arm raised. Her eyes began to prickle with dust and cold, but she couldn’t so much as blink.

She heard a soft whimpering. Seeker couldn’t even turn to look at Grasper. She had no idea how much time went by.

Her hand was before her face. She hadn’t consciously raised it; it was like looking at somebody else’s hand. The fingers clenched, opened; the thumb worked back and forth.

She was made to raise her arms and twist them at shoulders, elbows and wrists; she bent and flexed her legs. She walked up and down, as far as the netting would let her, first upright, then knuckle-walking. She probed with her fingers at every orifice in her body. She fingered her high rib cage, the shape of her skull, even her pelvis. It was as if somebody else was doing this to her, exploring her in a cruel grooming.

The man-apes were released, just for a heartbeat. Panting, hungry, thirsty, they reached for each other. But then the invisible grip closed around them again.

This time, as patterns of light pulsed over their heads, Grasper got down on her haunches and began to examine the floor, digging in the dirt. She found twigs, bits of reed. She rubbed the twigs against each other, split and folded the reed, banged pebbles together.

Meanwhile Seeker marched to the netting wall. She took hold of the net and began to climb. Her body proportions were like those of her ape-like ancestors, and she could climb better than any of her human captors. But as she clambered up the net, fear gathered, for she knew she wasn’t supposed to do this.

Sure enough, one of the soldiers came running. “Here, you! Get down from there!”

A rifle butt smashed into her face. She couldn’t even scream. Despite the grip of the Eye she fell back from the netting and clattered on her back to the ground. Her mouth full of coppery blood, she tried to raise her head.

She could see Grasper, sitting on the gritty ground. Grasper held up a reed, tied into a knot. Seeker had never seen such a thing.

Again she was forced to stand, despite the blood that dripped from her mouth, and stared up at the Eye.

There was something new again, she realized dimly. The glow of the Eye was no longer uniform: a series of brighter horizontal bands straddled an underlying grayness, a pattern that might have reminded a human of lines of latitude on a globe of the Earth. These lines swept up past the Eye’s “equator,” dwindling until they vanished at the north pole. Meanwhile another set, vertical this time, began the same pattern of emergence, sweeping from a pole on one side of the equator, disappearing on the other side. Now a third set of lines, sweeping to poles set at right angles to the first two pairs, came shining into existence. The shifting, silent display of gray rectangles was entrancing, beautiful.

And then a fourth set of lines appeared—Seeker tried to follow where they went—but suddenly something inside her head hurt badly. She cried out.

Again those unseen hands released her, and she collapsed to the ground. She rubbed the heels of her palms into her weeping eyes. For the first time she was aware of a warmth along her inner thighs. She had urinated where she stood, and never been aware of it.

Grasper was still standing, trembling but upright, gazing up at the washing lights, which cast complex patterns of shadows across her small face. A fifth set of lines—a sixth set, disappearing in impossible directions—

Grasper went rigid, her head locked back, her fingers grabbing at nothing, and then she fell, rigid as a block of wood. Seeker grabbed her child and cradled her on her own piss-soaked lap. The stiffness went out of Grasper, and she became a bundle of limp fur. Seeker stroked her and let her suckle, though her flaccid breast had been dry for years.

Even now the Eye watched them, recording the bond between mother and child, draining the man-apes of every sensation. It was all part of the test.

The respite was only brief. Soon the Eye resumed its steady, pearly glow, and it was as if unseen hands poked and prodded at Seeker’s limbs. She pushed aside her child and stood once more, her face lifted to the unearthly light.