Planet of the Apes Omnibus 2 Page 35

  Farther on, a young male tootled merrily on something that looked like an oversized flute, as a group of his friends gathered around him grinning and laughing. The melody vaguely reminded Davidson of something he’d heard before. He groped for it… but nothing came. The notion faded.

  A young female approached, smiled shyly, and dropped a coin into the hat the young ape had set in front of him. He nodded at her and kept on piping.

  Not far beyond the flutist, a chimp moved a knife in flashing strokes over a piece of wood. Davidson squinted; in the bright light it was hard to see what the ape was working on, but eventually it came clear. The chimp was carving a broadly caricatured doll in the shape of a crude human being. Finally they passed an ape juggler, amazingly accomplished, using both his hands and feet to keep a whirl of objects dancing in the air.

  Except for the fact that this was all being done by apes, the scenes could have been taking place in any primitive human city. That wasn’t what sent a curl of horror creeping up Davidson’s spine. Because it wasn’t just a city full of apes. Everywhere he looked Davidson also saw humans: pulling, lifting, dragging, carrying, but involved only in the most menial of tasks. And most of the ones he could see wore chains.

  In his school days, Davidson had once read a book called The Invisible Man. The book had affected him strongly, but nowhere near as powerfully as the reality he now experienced. For as the caravan moved through the city, for all the notice it gathered, it might as well have been invisible, too. The carts were packed full of battered, bleeding, sobbing humans, and almost nobody seemed to notice or care. Was the sight of so much misery an everyday occurrence, not even worth a second glance? What kind of horror had he stumbled into?

  But then, finally, somebody did take notice of the line of carts. Up ahead, a small, yelling crowd of youthful gorillas was playing a game that looked like soccer, except in this case, the young apes used both hands and prehensile feet to manipulate the ball. But when the carts approached, several of the gorillas broke off their game, stooped, quickly gathered stones, and began to pelt the cages. Davidson’s rage bubbled up all over again as he heard the ugly sound of rock slapping against flesh, and the sharp gasps of agony that followed.

  Then a fusillade of missiles rattled through the bars of his own cage, and Davidson hastily put his arms over his head and ducked down. But he looked up again when he heard a feminine voice berating the young gorillas.

  “Stop it! You’re being cruel!”

  Davidson peered over the backs of his fellow prisoners to get a look at this unexpected angel of mercy. She was a female chimp with dark, shoulder-length hair, whose clothing looked both stylish and well-made. And though she was angry, there was an obvious air of the upper class about her. As Davidson watched, she waded right into the group of young apes with no fear or hesitation whatsoever.

  “Open your hands!”

  The younger thugs shied away from her, but she kept right on after them, a whirlwind of anger as she slapped at their hands, knocking stones every which way. Davidson stared at her in wonder; this was the first ape he’d seen he didn’t feel an immediate urge to strangle. Instead he had to stifle an urge to stand up and cheer her on, although after a moment’s thought his sense of self-preservation reasserted itself, and he settled for just watching her with a big grin on his face. She was still tearing into them.

  “Who told you you could throw stones at humans?”

  One of the brats, braver than the rest, faced her: “My father.”

  She eyed the kid sternly. “Then you’re both wrong. And you can tell him I said so.”

  The young ape looked like he might want to argue further, but the female glared at him and his resistance crumbled. He turned and ran, followed by the rest of his little troupe. Once they’d achieved a safe distance, however, the kids stopped, turned, and faced their nemesis. The leader stuck out his tongue.

  “Human lover!”

  The chimp woman raised her head and with a single glance quelled this last rebellion. This time the young gorillas ran and didn’t look back.

  The chimp, Ari, shook her head in disgust, then glanced up as another young female joined her.

  “Do you always have to be so intense? I thought we were going shopping,” the new arrival said.

  Ari nodded absently at her friend, Leeta, but her gaze moved to the carts passing by. Davidson watched her scan the load of human misery groaning past her vantage point. It was hard to believe, but he couldn’t dispute what he saw: there were tears welling in the female chimp’s eyes. And for one strange instant, he found himself looking directly into her gaze. He felt a spark of—what? He didn’t know. And it seemed to shake her, too, because she turned away. Then his own cart creaked past her and she was gone.

  Ari began to walk quickly after the carts.

  Leeta stared at her in disbelief, then reluctantly followed. “Ari, wait! You’re going to get in trouble again.”

  Davidson didn’t see Ari hurrying to catch up with the cages. His initial awe at the strange city of the apes was rapidly fading as the squalor and misery of his fellow captives became too much to ignore. When he tried to shift around, his foot bumped against something soft, and he glanced down to see that he had been kicking a corpse. He looked up in horror, but either nobody had noticed what he’d done, or nobody cared.

  Somebody was watching him, however. On the other side of the cage the skinny teenager who had fought the apes so valiantly was staring at him with a level, steady gaze. And though the boy’s face was a mask of dried mud and blood, Davidson could sense a bright flame of intelligence burning beneath. Before Davidson could pursue this notion, however, the line of carts abruptly veered to the side of the street. Davidson put his face up next to the bars of his cage and peered out, looking for whatever had caused the detour. It wasn’t hard to find. Now passing by them was a line of apes garbed in sober robes, their faces wrapped in scarves, chanting softly.

  The measured approach of this stately procession galvanized the big gorilla named Attar. He pulled away from his position at the head of the column and approached the monks with great reverence. The line of holy men came to a halt and the leader faced the big ape soldier. He raised his hands and offered the gorilla his divine blessing, as Attar bowed his head, a beatified expression on his craggy features. Even Davidson was impressed by the deep sense of spirituality he felt emanating from the gorilla. It shook him more than he wanted to admit, that something which looked so much like an animal could also seem so human.

  He turned away from the scene and approached one of his fellow captives, a man hunkered down with his face in his hands.

  “Where am I?” Davidson whispered urgently.

  The man raised his face from his hands, gave Davidson a terrified glance, then jerked away from him as if he had some deadly contagious disease.

  Davidson stared at the man in disbelief, then tried again, this time with an old woman huddled against the opposite wall of the cage.

  “What is this place?”

  The woman stared at him dumbly, obviously too terrified even to reply. Davidson wanted to shake her, but knew that would make matters only worse. But his frustration at his own ignorance was almost impossible for him to control, and before he could stop himself, he blurted, “Somebody’s got to tell me where I am!”

  The old woman only shrank away from him, but the raw urgency in his voice did finally attract the attention of someone willing to speak to him. At the front of the cage, the old man whom Davidson had first seen leading these people in the forest roused himself and pushed toward him. As he approached he looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and then said, “Head down! Mouth shut! You’ll get us all killed!”

  Davidson wanted to protest, at least ask a few questions, but then he saw the blond barbarian woman hovering behind the old man’s shoulder glaring at him, and decided to let it drop. He was in enough trouble here. No sense in making needless enemies.

  Then the gorilla, Attar, re
turned to his position at the head of the column, let out a guttural shout, and the carts creaked into motion again. Davidson sank down and huddled with his chest against his knees, feeling as hopeless and depressed as he ever had in his life.

  * * *

  The quadrangle was a wide dirt square enclosed with high sturdy walls. In the center of the quadrangle stood a single orangutan, a squat little figure with orange fur. With a measured beat he slapped an ugly little flexible club called a sap against the palm of his hand as he watched Attar lead the first carts of the column through the open gates into his courtyard.

  The chimp’s name was Limbo. He stared without expression as the rest of the train straggled in and ground to a halt in a rough line before him. Only once all motion had ceased did he finally stop tapping his nasty-looking weapon against his hand and stride toward the carts. He moved up and down the line, peering into the cages, his sharp, cruel gaze evaluating their contents as emotionlessly as an accountant adding up a column of figures. Davidson felt the chimp’s attention pass over him almost like a cool whispering lash. He shivered and crouched lower. It was the first time in his life another living being had looked at him in that cold, dispassionate manner, as if he were nothing more than a side of meat for the carving.

  So this, he thought, is what the steer feels like as it passes under the eye of the butcher on its way into the slaughterhouse…

  Limbo finished his inspection and ambled over to one of Attar’s soldiers. As he approached he sighed heavily.

  “Are you trying to put me out of business? These are the skankiest, scabbiest, scuzziest humans I’ve ever seen.”

  “You don’t want them?”

  Limbo sighed in mock resignation. “I’ll take the whole lot. I’ll have to make it up in volume.”

  As he spoke, several new apes approached from the far reaches of the courtyard, evidently menials or employees of some kind.

  Limbo noticed them and waved one arm casually toward the cages.

  “Get them out, get them cleaned!”

  Evidently this was nothing new. The handlers, all huge gorillas, their faces shrouded in germ prevention masks, swarmed over the carts in a tidal wave of fur. They moved with the speed and ease of long practice, as they ripped open cage doors and waded into the clots of cowering humanity. They worked without passion, dragging the humans out and down to the dirt of the quadrangle, then sorting out men, women, and children into separate groups.

  Only this last seemed to finally rouse the numbed humans from the stupor that had gripped them in the cages. Men fought and howled as they tried to keep their families together. Women screamed as their husbands were dragged away, and children cried in panic as they were tom from their mothers’ arms.

  As Davidson struggled with one gorilla, he saw another drag the old man and the blond woman away from each other. The woman fought even more viciously than before; but with the same futile results.

  The old man stretched out his shaky arms as she was jerked away. “Daena, don’t be afraid!” he called to her.

  “I’ll find you…” she cried back to him.

  Limbo strolled up as this pathetic scene was playing out, and eyed the pair sardonically.

  “Very touching,” he said. “Really. I can’t see for the tears in my eyes.”

  Then, with a brutal savagery that belied the calm tone of his words, he reached out, twined his fingers in Daena’s hair, dragged her to a nearby pen already filling up with other women, and threw her inside. She landed in a twisted heap and glared up at him.

  The old man, Karubi, struggled against his own handlers, trying to reach her, but they yanked him backward with equal brutality toward a different cage and threw him bodily inside, nearly breaking his arm in the process. Karubi shrieked as the pain hit him, tottered a couple of steps, and then fell writhing to the ground.

  Worst of all were the children, because they were the most helpless. Davidson could barely watch as the ape slave masters dragged them from their families and shoved them into their own pens. But he forced himself to look, because in the back of his mind he was promising himself revenge for those kids, somehow, someday.

  Davidson found himself in a male pen with the man he’d seen carrying the little girl in the forest. He thought he’d heard somebody call the man Gunnar. More apes came right behind dragging the boy, Birn, whose fighting spirit was still not even slightly quenched. Davidson watched as one of the gorillas tried to get a better grip on the boy’s head, and the kid sank his teeth deep into the soft meat of the ape’s palm. The ape let out a roar, grabbed Birn by his scrawny shoulders, and shook him like a dishrag. Davidson could almost hear the boy’s teeth rattling in his skull. After a few seconds of this, Birn was limp enough for the gorilla to throw him into the pen, where he landed on the hard-packed earth with a soft thud.

  The head chimp wandered over in time to see the outcome, which he watched with an uncannily human expression of amusement on his grinning face. Davidson had never felt his own hatred as strongly as this. It frightened him and at the same time lifted him up, gave him a reason to keep on fighting.

  Limbo glanced at Davidson, then at the handlers. “How many times do I have to tell you? When you handle humans, wear your gloves.”

  “Are you softening, Limbo?”

  Davidson saw the chimp whirl to see the big boss himself, the Golden General on horseback called Thade, bearing down on him. In that one short instant Limbo transformed himself from a preening, sneering slave master to a cowering toady. He seemed to physically shrink as he stared up at the imposing figure looming over him.

  “You used to hack off a limb,” the general observed.

  “Yes, General. But he’s worth more intact.”

  The general tilted his head back and stared haughtily down his nose at the slaver, then proceeded to ignore him as beneath notice.

  Commander Attar, who had followed the general over, now approached the men’s pen and gave Davidson a fast once-over. He obviously didn’t seem to like what he saw. He glanced at Limbo.

  “Don’t turn your back on this one. He’s feisty.”

  Davidson didn’t know how he felt about this unwanted attention, but he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Karubi, battered and nursing his twisted arms, had suddenly looked over and fixed him with an intent stare.

  What’s that all about? Davidson wondered.

  Limbo was chattering nervously at the two soldiers. “These ones raiding the orchards, sir? I know an old country remedy that never fails. Gut one and string the carcass up…”

  General Thade gave the chimpanzee a look of disdain. “The human rights faction is already nipping at my heels.”

  Limbo obviously saw an opportunity to kiss some gorilla butt. He almost stumbled over his own tongue before he managed to say, “Do-gooders! Who needs them? I’m all for free speech… as long as they keep their mouths shut.”

  Evidently General Thade approved of the sentiment, because he left off staring at the obsequious chimp and urged his mount toward a pen filled with weeping, terrified children. He rode right up to the fence and looked over, appearing for all the world like a mildly interested window shopper.

  “I promised my niece a pet for her birthday.”

  Limbo, his merchant’s nose twitching hard on the scent of a possible profit, hopped right over and said fawningly, “Excellent. The little ones make wonderful pets. But make sure you get rid of them by puberty. If there’s one thing you don’t want in your house, it’s a human teenager.”

  A small female ape accompanied by her protective mother approached the pens. General Thade looked down from his horse and nodded in approval. The little girl walked up to the fence of the children’s pen, glanced shyly up at her uncle, and when he nodded again, she began to examine the children on the other side with all the excitement any kid would show given free run of a pet store.

  Finally her attention settled on one of the “pets.” She raised her hand and pointed at the little girl Davidson
had seen Gunnar carrying through the woods earlier.

  “Excellent choice,” Limbo said with greasy approval.

  General Thade glanced at Commander Attar. The huge gorilla immediately entered the children’s pen, extricated the weeping girl, and patting her head like a puppy, carried her back to the waiting ape girl. Carefully he settled the child into the ape’s arms while her mother looked on with an expression Davidson thought was noncommittal at best.

  Probably wondering if she’ll be the one who winds up having to housebreak the kid, Davidson thought. He was astonished at the depth of the bitterness he felt. The innocent evil of the female ape child frustrated him enormously. There was no way she could understand the horror of what she was doing, but the horror was being done anyway.

  Then, as mother and child walked away with their new pet, they did something that nearly blasted Davidson’s sanity right out of his brain. As the girl ape coddled the wailing child, the mother reached into a bag, took out a collar and leash, and fitted the little girl with them.

  Speechless, Davidson looked at the pen holding the adult women, expecting to see the girl’s mother in hysterics. But the woman was simply standing quietly, staring dully at the ground, her eyes as empty of expression as polished granite marbles.

  Behind her, though, the blond woman, Daena, who was standing in equally stiff silence, held rage enough for both of them. Davidson could see the inner fire boiling in her eyes, and knew that while he might have problems doing it, this savage woman could slaughter the little ape girl without a second thought. The thought made him shiver, and yet he knew that he would not be the one to hold Daena back if she got her chance to wreak vengeance. These were monsters who treated human children as nothing more than cuddly animals to be petted, and loved… and leashed.

  General Thade watched his sister and niece depart with the newest member of their little family. After they had vanished beyond the gates of Limbo’s compound, he wheeled his horse, took a final survey of the slave pens, then headed for the gate himself. Limbo evidently couldn’t resist one final chance to ingratiate himself and scurried after the general, fawning words dripping from his rubbery lips.