Robert Silverberg - The Pope of the Chimps

Early last month Vendelmans and I were alone with the chimps in the compound when suddenly he said, Im going to faint. It was a sizzling May morning, but Vendelmans had never shown any sign of noticing unusual heat, let alone suffering from it. I was busy talking to Leo and Mimsy and Mimsys daughter Muffin, and I registered Vendelmanss remark without doing anything about it. When youre intensely into talking by sign language, as we are in the project, you sometimes tend not to pay a lot of attention to spoken words.

But then Leo began to sign the trouble sign at me, and I turned around and saw Vendelmans down on his knees in the grass, white-faced, gasping, covered with sweat. A few of the chimpanzees who arent as sensitive to humans as Leo is thought it was a game and began to pantomime him, knuckles to the ground and bodies going limp. Sick Vendelmans said. Feelterrible

I called for help, and Gonzo took his left arm and Kong took his right and somehow, big as he was, we managed to get him out of the compound and up the hill to headquarters. By then he was complaining about sharp pains in his back and under his arms, and I realized that it wasnt just heat prostration. Within a week the diagnosis was in.

Leukemia.

They put him on chemotherapy and hormones, and after ten days he was back with the project, looking cocky. Theyve stabilized it, he told everyone. Its in remission and I might have ten or twenty years left, or even more. Im going to carry on with my work.

But he was gaunt and pale, with a tremor in his hands, and it was a frightful thing to have him among us. He might have been fooling himself, though I doubted it, but he wasnt fooling any of us: to us he was a memento mori, a walking deaths-head-and-crossbones. That laymen think scientists are any more casual about such things than anyone else is something I blame Hollywood for. It is not easy to go about your daily work with a dying man at your sideor a dying mans wife, for Judy Vendelmans showed in her frightened eyes all the grief that Hal Vendelmans himself was repressing. She was going to lose a beloved husband unexpectedly soon and she hadnt had time to adjust to it and her pain was impossible to ignore. Besides, the nature of Vendelmanss dyingness was particularly unsettling because he had been so big and robust and outgoing, a true Rabelaisian figure, and somehow between one moment and the next he was transformed into a wraith. The finger of God, Dave Yost said. A quick flick of Zeuss pinkie and Hal shrivels like cellophane in a fireplace. Vendelmans was not yet forty.

The chimps suspected something, too.

Some of them, such as Leo and Ramona, are fifth-generation signers, bred for alpha intelligence, and they pick up subtleties and nuances very well. Almost human, visitors like to say of them. We dislike that tag, because the important thing about chimpanzees is that they arent human, that they are an alien intelligent species; but yet I know what people mean. The brightest of the chimps saw right away that something was amiss with Vendelmans, and started making odd remarks. Big one rotten banana, said Ramona to Mimsy while I was nearby. He getting empty, Leo said to me as Vendelmans stumbled past us. Chimp metaphors never cease to amaze me. And Gonzo asked him outright: You go away soon?

Go away is not the chimp euphemism for death. So far as our animals know, no human being has ever died. Chimps die. Human beings go away. We have kept things on that basis from the beginning, not intentionally at first, but such arrangements have a way of institutionalizing themselves. The first member of the group to die was Roger Nixon, in an automobile accident in the early years of the project long before my time here, and apparently no one wanted to confuse or disturb the animals by explaining what had happened to him, so no explanations were offered. My second or third year here, Tim Lippinger was killed in a ski-lift failure, and again it seemed easier not to go into details with them. And by the time of Will Bechsteins death in that helicopter crack-up four years ago the policy was explicit: we chose not to regard his disappearance from the group as death, but mere going away, as if he had only retired. The chimps do understand death, of course. They may even equate it with going away, as Gonzos question suggests. But if they do, they surely see human death as something quite different from chimpanzee deatha translation to another state of being, an ascent on a chariot of fire. Yost believes that they have no comprehension of human death at all, that they think we are immortal, that they think we are gods.

Vendelmans now no longer pretends that he isnt dying. The leukemia is plainly acute, and he deteriorates physically from day to day. His original this-isnt-actually-happening attitude has been replaced by a kind of sullen, angry acceptance. It is only the fourth week since the onset of the ailment and soon hell have to enter the hospital.

And he wants to tell the chimps that hes going to die.

They dont know that human beings can die, Yost said.

Then its time they found out, Vendelmans snapped. Why perpetuate a load of mythological bullshit about us? Why let them think were gods? Tell them outright that Im going to die, the way old Egbert died and Salami and Mortimer.

But they all died naturally, Jan Morton said.

And Im not dying naturally?

She became terribly flustered. Of old age, I mean. Their life cycles clearly and understandably came to an end and they died and the chimps understood it. Whereas you She faltered.

am dying a monstrous and terrible death midway through my life, Vendelmans said, and started to break down and recovered with a fierce effort, and Jan began to cry, and it was generally a bad scene from which Vendelmans saved us by going on, It should be of philosophical importance to the project to discover how the chimps react to a revaluation of the human metaphysic. Weve ducked every chance weve had to help them understand the nature of mortality. Now I propose we use me to teach them that humans are subject to the same laws they are. That we are not gods.

And that gods exist, said Yost, who are capricious and unfathomable and to whom we ourselves are as less than chimps.

Vendelmans shrugged. They dont need to hear all that now. But its time they understood what we are. Or rather, its time that we learned how much they already understand. Use my death as a way of finding out. Its the first time theyve been in the presence of a human whos actually in the process of dying. The other times one of us has died, its always been in some sort of accident.

Burt Christensen said, Hal, have you already told them anything about

No, Vendelmans said. Of course not. Not a word. But I see them talking to each other. They know.

We discussed it far into the night. The questions needed careful examination because of the far-reaching consequences of any change we might make in the metaphysical givens of our animals. These chimps have lived in a closed environment here for decades, and the culture they have evolved is a product of what we have chosen to teach them, compounded by their own innate chimpness plus whatever we have unknowingly transmitted to them about ourselves or them. Any radical conceptual material we offer them must be weighed thoughtfully, because its effects will be irreversible, and those who succeed us in this community will be unforgiving if we do anything stupidly premature. If the plan is to observe a community of intelligent primates over a period of many human generations, studying the changes in their intellectual capacity as their linguistic skills increase, then we must at all times take care to let them find things out for themselves, rather than skewing our data by giving the chimps more than their current concept-processing abilities may be able to handle.