Robert Sawyer - Watch

She, in turn, helped close the distance between them, and then led him over to the high-backed swivel chair positioned in front of the particleboard desk. There was a twenty-one-inch Apple LCD monitor on the desk, with a high-quality wireless webcam clipped to the top of its bezel. It was the same setup that had been used to make the first interspecies webcam call, but now Hobo wasn’t going to speak to just one other ape. No, now he was going to speak to the whole wide world.

Shoshana went to her own desk. She had a webcam clipped to her monitor, too, and turned it on. There was no way to get Hobo to just talk into his camera; he didn’t understand what it did. But he’d talk to the image of Shoshana on his monitor, which was almost good enough—again, with his dark eyes, no one could tell that he was actually looking at the moving image of her rather than the camera lens just above. Shoshana signed into her own camera: All right, Hobo. Go ahead.

Hobo was quiet for a moment, perhaps composing his thoughts. Hobo, he signed. Hobo good ape.

Shoshana nodded at her camera—and nodded at him from his monitor—encouraging him to go on.

Hobo mother bonobo, he signed. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, Hobo father chimpanzee.

Shoshana was supposed to keep her attention focused on her camera, to provide an eye line for Hobo, but she found herself turning in astonishment to look at Dr. Marcuse. The Silverback’s eyebrows had climbed high up his forehead, and Dillon, whose specialty, after all, was primate hybridization, had his jaw hanging open. They had never discussed his mixed heritage with Hobo, figuring it would be beyond his comprehension.

Sho turned back to her own monitor—which was showing her the view recorded by the webcam Hobo was now facing. He spread his hands, and then looked at each of them in turn, almost as if visualizing the two halves of himself. Hobo special, he signed. And then, very slowly, very carefully, the signs made with great care, as if he understood how important they were, Hobo choose.

Shoshana felt her heart pounding.

Hobo choose to live here, he said. Friends here.

Hobo got off the stool. Dillon quickly swooped in, popped the webcam off the top of the monitor and followed Hobo as he approached Shoshana. Sho swiveled in her chair to face him, and Hobo continued to close the gap between the two of them. And then Hobo reached out a long, hairy, powerful arm, and he passed it behind Shoshana’s head, and—

Sho heard Marcuse suck in his breath. Shoshana desperately tried not to tense up, as—

As Hobo tugged ever so gently, ever so lovingly, on her ponytail. She broke into a giant grin and opened her arms, and Hobo jumped up into her embrace.

Shoshana spun her chair around, taking her and Hobo through 360 degrees. Dillon had moved over and was now aiming the camera at Hobo from next to Shoshana’s workstation. Hobo good ape, he said once more, looking now at Dillon. And Hobo be good father. He shook his head. Nobody stop Hobo. Hobo choose. Hobo choose to have baby.

Dr. Marcuse was standing off to one side, doubtless doing exactly what Shoshana was doing: imagining how this was going to play on YouTube. He grinned broadly, and said, “The defense rests.”

“You’re going to make a great mother someday,” Matt said in a joking tone. They were down in Caitlin’s basement again; Matt had indeed come over after school, and she’d just helped him clean up a glass of Pepsi he’d accidentally spilled. She was beginning to feel like she was under house arrest—even if it was protective custody.

She smiled, setting aside the towel she’d gone to fetch, but—

But better to get that out of the way right now.

“I’m not going to have kids,” she said, sitting back down on her swivel chair, and cursing again that her parents didn’t have a couch down here.

“Oh!” said Matt. “I’m so sorry. Is it—um, was it the same thing that caused your blindness?”

She was startled—but she supposed she shouldn’t be. Blindness in young people that wasn’t caused by an injury rarely occurred in isolation; it was usually part of a suite of difficulties. In fact, one of the frustrations for her at the TSBVI had been that so many of the students had cognitive difficulties in addition to visual impairment.

“Well,” she said, “first, my blindness was caused by something called Tomasevic’s syndrome, which only affects the way the retina encodes information. And, second, it’s not that I can’t have children, it’s that I don’t want to.”

Caitlin wished yet again that she had more experience at decoding faces. Matt’s expression was one she’d never seen before: the left side of his mouth turned down, the right turned up, and blond eyebrows drawn together; it could have meant anything. After a moment he said, “Don’t you like kids?”

“I like them just fine,” she replied, “but I could never eat a whole one.”

But that expression she did recognize: Matt’s jaw had dropped.

“I’m joking. I love kids. Back in Austin, I used to help Stacy babysit.”

“But you don’t want to have any of your own?”

“Nope.”

And now his eyebrows went up. “Why not?”

“Just never have. Ever since I was a little girl, it was never something I wanted.”

“Didn’t you play with dolls?”

Caitlin still had that ridiculous Barbie Doll her cousin Megan had gotten her as a joke, the one that exclaimed, “Math is hard!”

“Sure,” Caitlin said. “But that doesn’t mean I wanted to be a mother.”

Matt was silent, and Caitlin felt herself tensing up. For Pete’s sake, they’d only been dating a few days—surely it was way too early to be worrying about this! But if it was going to be a showstopper for Matt…

She made her tone nonconfrontational. “I’ve had this discussion with Bashira, too, you know. She says, ‘How could you not want kids?’ and ‘Aren’t you being selfish?’ and ‘Who’s going to look after you in your old age?’ ”

Matt leaned back in his chair. “And?”

“And, I just don’t want kids; I don’t know why. And, no, I’m not being selfish.” She paused. “Have you ever read Richard Dawkins?”

“I read The God Delusion,” Matt said.

“Yeah, that’s a good one. But his most famous book is The Selfish Gene. And that’s his point: that genes are selfish, that all they want is to reproduce. And it is selfish to reproduce, in a very literal sense: it’s about making more copies of yourself, or as near as is possible, given our, um, our method of reproduction.”

Matt averted his eyes, and said, “Ah.”

“And, as for the looking-after-me-when-I’m-old question, surely that’s a truly selfish reason to have a child: for what it can do for you. Heck, you might as well have one to harvest its youthful organs so you can live longer. After all, they’d likely be a good tissue match.”

“Yuck,” said Matt.

Caitlin smiled. “Exactly.”

“But, um, ah, speaking of genes and stuff… I mean, that’s interesting that you don’t want to have kids. How could, ah…?”

“How could a disposition toward not having children evolve?” asked Caitlin.

Matt nodded. “Exactly. I mean, you’re here because every one of your ancestors wanted to have children.”

Caitlin felt butterflies in her stomach. She had an answer for that, of course, and had had no trouble presenting it to Bashira, but…

She took a breath and found herself now not quite looking at Matt. “Actually, the having-kids part is just a side effect. I’m here because every one of my ancestors liked having sex.”