Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

“Do tell me about your zoo,” she said.

“Well, I’m not really a zoologist. My field is psycholinguistics . . .”

“Oh.”

(She meant “Oh?”)

“It’s rather a vague subject—it’s the study of the effect of language on the mind, and one way you can tackle it is by researching into the linguistic abilities of non-human creatures. I happened to start working with a particularly intelligent female chimpanzee at Bristol, but about eighteen months ago when the Sultan was in London he asked me to come up and have dinner—we used to live on the same staircase at Oxford and got on pretty well—and I told him what I was doing. He offered me a fantastic salary to come out here with my chimp and look after the zoo as a sideline.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“God knows. When you’re that rich you don’t have motives any longer—or rather any motive is as good as any other motive, since you can satisfy them all. I think he likes having me about. And he’s a bit obsessed with Oxford—he never sat his finals, you see. And if Dinah really comes up to scratch we actually might one day hit the academic headlines.”

“That’s a slave name.”

“I didn’t choose it. And I don’t think of it like that.”

“You think you don’t think of it like that. What are you actually doing with her?”

Morris clicked. Instantly Dinah exploded from her nest to the top of the bookshelf, then sprang, whirling like a falling sycamore seed, down to his lap, where she sat pouting at the stranger.

“This is Dinah,” he said. “My name’s Wesley Morris, but everyone calls me Morris. I’m afraid I don’t know yours.”

“I’ve got a lot of names. You’d better call me Galayah.”

He repeated the name, but couldn’t help correcting her pronunciation.

“Bloody hell!” she said, flushing. “All right, call me Anne. I used to answer to that.”

Dinah stopped pouting and shifted round until she could pick at Morris’s shirt-buttons. She had never discovered a satisfactory way of grooming him, except in the sparse and unrewarding strip of hair that circled his bald patch. This was only a sign that she would like to be groomed herself, which in turn meant that she wanted reassurance. That makes two of us, he thought, starting to pick systematically along the fur of her forearm.

“Well,” he said, “currently I’m setting up an experiment to investigate Dinah’s ability to cope with the idea of time.”

“Animals don’t have one.”

“So people say. We’ll see. If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said that animals couldn’t understand or construct conditional clauses, but Premack in California taught a chimpanzee called Sarah how to, and Dinah and I have duplicated his work. So why not time?”

“I see. What else?”

“Well, the Sultan is very anxious to make a breakthrough with an experiment for which he can claim some credit, and his idea is that Dinah should have a baby, and then we can see how much she teaches it of what she’s learnt from me.”

“Will she even look at a male chimp? Doesn’t she think she’s human, living all the time with you?”

“We don’t know, yet. She spent her first three years at Bristol with other chimps, including her mother, only coming out for tests and lessons. Since then she’s lived with me, but I’ve never treated her as a human—I mean dressed her in clothes or let her eat with a knife and fork. She doesn’t sleep in a cot, but as near as I can arrange to a jungle nest. She’s got her own room—that’s essential, so that I can shut her up if I have to do something without her—but it isn’t at all like a human room. She even wears a leash sometimes, though she hates it. Nowadays she spends a bit of her time with a family group of near-wild chimps we’ve imported, and my impression is that she recognises them as being the same species as herself. For instance, one of the females was in season a few weeks ago, which meant that her sex organs swelled to a large pink mound on her rump. Dinah saw it, and spent a lot of time inspecting herself for the same symptoms.”

Anne laughed and stretched. Morris found himself relaxing slightly, but when he started to lean back in his chair Dinah grabbed his hand and re-applied it to the bit of her shoulder he had been working on.

“So that’s why you’re in Q’Kut,” she said. “For bread.”

“Not entirely,” said Morris. “I mean, I don’t need all that money. I do like having an unlimited budget for my research, of course. On the other hand I miss the kind of colleagues I could talk things over with. I didn’t realise it till I got here, but the real attraction of Q’Kut is the marshmen.”

“And the marshwomen?”

“No, as a matter of fact, not. Oh, I see, you mean sexually. Not that either.”

“You’ll have to explain.”

“Well, there are about a dozen languages left in the world which are not dialects of other languages and are spoken exclusively by a coherent group of people. By ‘exclusively’ I mean they are monoglots. They don’t speak any other language. There’s a few in New Guinea, a few in Brazil, and a remarkable tribe in the Andaman Islands called the Jarawa. There may be something still in Central Asia, but I doubt it. But the Q’Kuti marshmen are easily the largest and most uncontaminated of such groups, apart perhaps from the Jarawa. From a psycholinguist’s point of view, Q’Kut is the most exciting place in the world.”

“It doesn’t look it.”

“No, but the marsh language . . .”

“Can you speak it? How the hell many languages can you speak? You hissed away in Japanese, didn’t you, that day I came? Can you speak Chinese? Have you read Chairman Mao in the original?”

“I’ve only read his thoughts,” said Morris, rather bowled over by this sudden spate of eager questions, and afraid that it might signal a metamorphosis to some other role, terrorist or vamp or ardent student. He felt better able to cope with her as she was.

“That’s great,” she breathed.

“I don’t know. I mean, you can understand a language without understanding what somebody is saying. That’s one of the things psycholinguistics is about.”

“Please go on about that,” she said, politely laying the ghost of Chairman Mao.

“Oh, well, the marshmen have a very interesting language. It contains a number of unique elements, but it lacks a number of other things which we would regard as normal, if not essential. For instance, there are no words and no grammatical structures with which to formulate notions of cause and effect. It can be done, but you have to go a long way round, using very clumsy expressions to achieve it. There are almost no general nouns, either. You see, the marshes are a closed world, in which almost everything is known, and has its own name. They have a few general nouns for things that seem to them mysterious, such as foreigners and particularly witchcraft. But you can’t say ‘plant’, for instance. You can’t even say ‘reed’. You have to name the particular type of reed.”

“That must make life difficult.”

“They get along. Then there’s another aspect of the linguistic-cultural nexus that particularly interests me. You speak the language in sentences, but the sentences are made up not of words but of word-accretions . . .”

“Like those long words in German?”

“A bit like that. But all the word-accretions are constructed round roots of relationship . . .”

“Cousins and things?”

“Not that kind of relationship—or not only. We tend to build up our sentences round verbs. That’s to say our central notions are notions of action. They accrete their words round particular roots which describe the relationship between the various parts of the accretion. Their central notion seems to be a notion of everything’s position in a very complicated network of relationships.”