Taylor Five Read online

  “Hi! Always something new on orangutan TV! Sit down! Bring on the popcorn.”

  Five “teenage” orangutans, nearly ready to be introduced back to the wild, were sitting together in the section of the clubhouse that had a climbing gym of tree branches, ropes and swings (like a sofa and armchairs to orangutans, Tay thought). An ape called Potter was up in the tree; another ape called Genevieve was there too. Bima, the most dominant of the adolescents, was sitting with two young apes known as Juju and Henry. The human children weren’t allowed near the babies, and they were supposed to keep away from the older apes (though they could sometimes earn pocket money cleaning out the clubhouse). It was very important that the animals didn’t get used to humans: they weren’t pets. But Donny and Tay had watched a huge amount of “orangutan TV.” It was their favorite entertainment. They sat down to watch: Clint making careful notes of the apes’ interaction with each other.

  “Don’t you ever wish you could just ask them what’s going on?” wondered Tay. “I bet our orangutans are clever enough to learn sign language.”

  Clint shook his head. “Maybe, but that’s not our job. Already these young apes have been changed too much. They have been stolen from their mothers to be sold as pets, or orphaned when their mothers were killed by human activity, in one way or another. They have learned to depend on each other for company, when they should be solitary creatures. They will become solitary again, if we can return them to the forest. . . . No, Tay. I don’t want them to learn to ‘talk’ like fake human beings. I want them to be orangutans.”

  “Why’d you say if?” asked Tay, picking on this word uneasily. “Of course we’re going to release them.”

  “Of course,” said Clint with a sigh. “Of course, yes, for a while longer. We have the Sultan of Kandah on our side. But who knows what the future will bring?”

  “If the rebels win, do you think they’ll want to close us down?” Donny wondered.

  “Ha! I don’t think they will ever agree on what they want. But with luck, please God, none of those outlaw bands is going to ‘win.’ They’ll just back down again—”

  The door of the studio opened and another orangutan ambled in. Unlike the apes on the screen, he was an adult: and he was different in other ways. If you knew anything about orangutans, the shape of his cheek jowls told you that he came from Sumatra, not Borneo. This was Uncle, the refuge’s mascot. Uncle had been sent to the Lifeforce Refuge when one of the last orangutan rehabilitation centers in Sumatra had to close down. The staff there had tried and failed to return him to the forest: Uncle had just kept coming back to them. Now it didn’t matter if he spent his time with humans, and it didn’t matter that he didn’t belong in Borneo, because he was too old to be released. He had the run of the compound, but Clint was his special friend.

  Uncle pushed out his lip to the children in greeting and stood knuckling the ground with one hand while he scratched his throat with the other. He gazed severely at Clint.

  “Ah! My secretary!” exclaimed Clint. “It must be time for the team meeting.”

  He glanced at Tay. “Donny, will you go and tell your mum and dad and the others I’ll be there in a few minutes? I want to show Tay how to continue noting this interaction—”

  “Sure thing, pardner.”

  Donny left. Clint put his laptop in front of Tay. “Excuse an old friend, my dear girl, but I’ve heard rumors that you may be having a tough time right about now?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Uh-huh.” Clint leaned back and tipped the brim of an imaginary hat over his eyes. “You know, Tay, I think you have to ask yourself one question about all of this.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  She didn’t want to talk about it, but there was something in his tone that was new—

  “You want to be a scientist, I do believe. You want to be out at the edge of human knowledge, making the first footprints into the unknown? So, you have to ask yourself this. If someone had made you an offer, all those years ago, that meant you could be part of something risky but very exciting, something wild and strange that had never been tried before, what would you have said?”

  “That’s two questions.”

  “True,” said Clint, smiling but serious. “You can answer them both.”

  “I want to be a major scientist,” said Tay. “And yes. I would probably have said yes.”

  Clint nodded. “I think you would have said yes. Think of that. Remember that.”

  Clint went to his meeting. Tay settled to watch the apes, typing brief notes about what she thought was happening—notes that could be compared later with the videotape. No one could ask me, she thought. It was an amazing thing to be able to do, and they couldn’t ask me whether I would agree to be part of it. Parents can never ask their children if they want to be born, not even ordinary children. No one lied to me. They told me as much as I could understand, from the moment I was old enough to listen. They’ve been as fair as they could possibly be.

  But it’s strange how the more they tell me I’m special, the more I feel like an orphan.

  Me and the apes, she thought. We’re in the same fix. But they can be returned to the wild, where they belong, and I can’t. Clones don’t have a natural habitat.

  Hey, she told herself. Stop thinking about it!

  Uncle had stayed behind when Clint left. He sat in another chair, two places away from Tay along the observation desk, with his feet up, watching Tay out of the corner of his eye. Uncle weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds. His shambling body was full of muscle and his massive jaws were equipped with big teeth. He could have made a formidable predator, if that had been his nature. But it never crossed anyone’s mind to be afraid of him. He reached out with one of his long shaggy arms and gently patted her shoulder. Tay looked around and smiled.

  “Thanks, Uncle. You understand. I know you do.”

  Things you’ve planned for and imagined rarely turn out as well as you expected, but Mum’s birthday was an exception. The children had spent two blissful nights at Halfway Camp with Dad, supervising the release of two young apes. A successful release put everyone in a good mood; the rebel situation had calmed down, and the rosebushes had arrived safely. Tessa Mahakam, the head of the ape veterinary team, woke people up before dawn, and they went out into the forest on foot, to an outcrop where they could climb up and watch the sunrise. Tessa was a Dyak. She’d been to university in America and spent years there; but she’d been a little girl in the Kandah highlands: her grandparents still remembered a time when the tribe had had no idea that modern civilization existed. Greeting the dawn was a tradition from her childhood that the refuge had adopted for special occasions. Thirty-five grown-up humans, two children and one adult orangutan stood above a sea of trees and watched the light change, until the red-gold globe had risen safely, once more, into the blossoming sky. They cheered, and clapped, and stamped, and marched back home, singing “Rivers of Babylon,” loudly and quite tunefully.

  (It was one of Mum’s favorite songs.)

  The baby-ape carers had to leave. Everybody who could stay stayed for a special breakfast. There was ripe papaya with lime, scrambled eggs, bacon (for the non-Muslims); chilled chocolate milk, sweet bread with sticky coconut inside, and Java coffee for the grown-ups. There was one of Minah’s magnificent cakes on display (to be eaten later). It had green and yellow icing, and an orangutan made of sugar paste holding up a sign that said “Happy Birthday To Our Chief” in tiny letters. Then there were the presents, including the rosebushes: a beautiful gold-thread handwoven silk sarong from Dad and an obscure book about orangutan research from the shy German zoologist. Tessa took down Mum’s long black hair, combed it out and arranged it with the antique beaded headband that was her present and some glowing white frangipani flowers. Mum modeled the new sarong—without taking off her shorts, but you could get the idea.

  It was a perfect day; and a perfect evening later, with a party meal and a movie.

  Unfortunately, the go
od news didn’t last. Two days after the birthday celebrations they heard by radio that the movement restrictions were in force again. . . . Donny and Tay came into the bungalow kitchen at lunchtime and overheard Mum and Dad talking in low voices about “sending the children to Singapore.”

  They sneaked out before they were noticed and retired to a thorny-palm thicket at the far end of the clearing, beyond the teenage ape enclosure, where they knew they wouldn’t be disturbed. It was the middle of a very hot day, and a quivering hush had fallen like a cloud over the whole clearing. Even the gibbons were quiet.

  “I can’t believe it,” whispered Donny, outraged. “If it’s dangerous, how could we want to be out of danger, leaving Mum and Dad behind?”

  “Maybe it will blow over,” said Tay uneasily. Being sent back to Singapore in the middle of the holidays was an awful threat. The trouble must be getting serious.

  She was thinking that this stillness felt like the moment before a thunderstorm. When the Walkers had moved to Kandah, there’d been thunderstorms nearly every day, all the year round. Though summer was called the dry season, you’d hardly been able to tell it from the slightly wetter winter. For the last few summers there’d been drought conditions. It was a problem, because of the risk of fires.

  “If they tell us we have to go,” she said, “we’ll argue our case. We must be prepared.”

  “Right. Let’s think of things to say, to convince them we don’t have to leave.”

  Before they could come up with anything, they heard a strange, sharp ringing sound, with an echo. And another—

  Crack . . . zing—

  “That sounds like a gun!” exclaimed Donny.

  It was a gun. When they looked out from the thicket, they saw Clint, wearing his treasured black cowboy hat and his Dyak poncho, leaping about in the secluded space between the Land Rover garage and the perimeter fence. Uncle was there too. Clint had set up a row of cans on a fallen tree trunk. He was firing at them with a long-barreled pistol: then gathering up the ones he’d hit and starting again. The children approached, fascinated. There were shotguns at the refuge. Tay knew how to use one: Donny would be taught too, now that he was twelve. But they were kept locked up.

  “What are you doing?” said Tay, when they were close enough. “Is that a real gun?”

  “Yep, it’s real,” said Dr. Suritobo, tipping the brim of his hat with the barrel of the pistol, like the Man With No Name. He reloaded and spun around.

  Wham! Wham, wham, wham, wham, wham!

  Uncle put his hands over his ears. Two cans went down, another wobbled but stayed upright. . . . “Hmm. I need to practice.”

  “Where did you get it from? Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I’m Indonesian. A crazy Indonesian rain forest cowpuncher, pardners.”

  Tay wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly chilled.

  “You mean because you’re a foreigner?” said Donny. “Do you think the rebels will come and kill you? Oh, wow. Do you think they’ll kill us too?”

  Clint blew away cordite smoke and shook his head.

  “I think nothing will happen. Don’t tell your mother about my target practice.”

  “I’m sure she knows,” said Tay. “She’ll have heard the shots.”

  Clint just laughed. “Do you know why Uncle wouldn’t let them return him to the forest?” he asked them. “It’s because he knows it’s over. In a few years there will be no orangutans left except in zoos. You know it, don’t you, Uncle? But we’ll fight to the last.”

  “Don’t say that!” cried Tay. “There’s hundreds and thousands of miles of forest still. The apes can have a share. Why can’t human people ever share?”

  Clint started to reload his big old-fashioned handgun; and suddenly the rain came down, with a hiss and a roar. The children were drenched in seconds, gouts of white, shining water streaming from their T-shirts and shorts. Uncle, his fur equally streaming, ambled over to replace the cans and then stood there with his arms around his head, peering out at the children from between his elbow and his forearm.

  Ordinarily Donny and Tay would have enjoyed the rain. But suddenly there was no fun in getting drenched. They went indoors to change their clothes, leaving the ape and Dr. Suritobo to their ominous game.

  a week went by and nothing happened, except that once more they didn’t get their mail drop. Only army planes and helicopters were allowed to fly over the forest. The refuge staff prepared for the worst—contacting other refuges, and even zoos, and generally working out how they would cope if they had to evacuate the apes in a hurry. But they meant to hold on. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” said Dad. “If we leave because of a temporary crisis, we might lose the reserve forever.”

  Nothing more was said about sending Tay and Donny to Singapore. On Friday, a week and a half after Mum’s birthday, Tay asked if they could go out by themselves for a whole day’s adventure. Mum agreed, on the usual conditions. Take a survival kit and a radiophone. Leave an itinerary posted on the common-room notice board. That means you say who you are, where you’re going and when you expect to be back, and you don’t change your minds and go somewhere else once you’re out in the forest. Phone in if you are going to be late, and don’t be out after dark for anything less than a real emergency.

  “Obey these sacred instructions,” said Mum, as she always did, “and all will be well. If you break any of the rules, and I find out, you are grounded for life.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” said Tay, saluting smartly. The clone business was buried, they just weren’t going to talk about it for a while. It was bad about the rebels but great to be back to normal: to be Mum and Tay again.

  On Saturday Tay woke Donny early, to the gibbons’ dawn chorus. It was the children’s job to help Minah the cook on Saturdays (which they didn’t mind, it was a good way to influence the Saturday-night menu). Before seven she and Donny had eaten their breakfast and were busy cleaning pans, fetching rice and beans from the storage loft in the kitchen roof and scraping fresh coconut for the creamy, sticky pudding called Gula Malacca, their favorite dessert. By eight-thirty they were free.

  Mum wasn’t around. She was in the ape clinic checking on an orphan baby who’d been taken ill in the night. Dad was in the staff common room, on the main square, holding a noisy vote for the Saturday-night movie. Traditionally it would be something ancient and cheesy: Gremlins 2 was a favorite, and so was Jurassic Park. Dr. Clint Suritobo was trying to hustle another showing of the greatest movie ever made (which meant, naturally, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), but he was being shouted down. Tay pinned her notice to the board, ignoring the rowdy scientists. It was very simple, it just said: We’re going to the caves, we’ll be back before dark. Donny and Tay.

  Dad nodded and waved, and went on with his vote counting.

  The caves were in the rocky outcrop where they’d watched the sun rise on Mum’s birthday: Clint and Tessa had discovered them. The refuge staff (those who liked being underground, at least) had been investigating the maze of caverns gradually. In the wet season there wasn’t much to see because the passages were flooded, but every dry season there was more that could be explored.

  It would be hot already out in the open, but the morning was cool under the shelter of the great trees. Donny and Tay walked silently, following the familiar red earth path. Far above, the sky in the gaps in the forest canopy was a clear and vivid blue. Butterflies flitted by. A jungle pigeon called like a chiming bell: a hornbill crossed from tree to tree, its huge yellow beak looking twice the size of the bird. Flowers shone like jewels in the deep green shadows on either side.

  If they were very quiet and very lucky, they might see a mouse deer.

  In the forest, thought Tay, it doesn’t matter what I am. I am the newest thing on earth, walking among the ancient guardians of life. Everything that makes me strange and weird vanishes into their silence. Oh, I hope we don’t have to leave. . . . TV reception at the refuge was never any good, and they often had tr
ouble getting connected to the Internet: but they could usually listen to the radio. Last night the news had sounded a little better. The sultan was negotiating with the army of rebels who had advanced into the Kandah River Region (which included both Kandah City and the orangutan reserve).

  “What does it mean when they say the sultan’s negotiating?” asked Donny.

  “It means he’s trying to bargain. You know, like in the market. The rebels say, we want this much before we’ll go away . . . and the sultan rolls his eyes and pretends that’s impossible, and then the rebels offer a slightly lower price—”

  “Eh! Tak bisa!” cried Donny, rolling his eyes. “It would be an insult to my family!”

  Tak bisa means can’t do that. It was what village market women said, whatever you offered them and whatever you were were buying. You had to haggle, they’d be offended if you didn’t play their game. Donny giggled, pleased with his impression of the sultan. “I bet he has to give them a lot of money. Do they take travelers’ checks?”

  “I don’t think it’s money they want. . . . Donny, shut up. You said you’d keep quiet. We won’t see any wildlife if you’re chattering.”

  “All right, I’ll hoot like a gibbon instead—”

  Donny hooted: not much like a gibbon, but horribly loud. Tay broke into a run to get away from him. Thrilled by her own surefooted speed, she kept on running until she burst out of the trees: and on and on, upward, into the hot sunshine.

  She sat waiting for him on a sunny rock halfway up the outcrop.

  “Cheat,” said Donny, glowering. He was puffed and sweating. “You’re used to running on rough ground. I’m not. I twisted my foot. That wasn’t fair.”

  “Excuses, excuses.”

  He sat down, and cheered up as he watched a trail of fire ants that was advancing on his left boot. “It’s so excellent living here. With killer ants and monster lizards and everything . . . I want to stay in the forest forever.”