- Lucy listened to the crickets talking about what had happened that day and the day before and during their long history on earth. They had very high voices but Lucy could slow them down and understand. They sounded like a choir singing Gregorian chants. Her father had taught her: The crickets collect their memories and sing about them. They talk so much because they have so much to say. Some birds do that, too, and Lucy liked to sit out in the morning and listen to them reminisce about the days of the dinosaurs.
- She wanted to know who all these people were and where they were going with such sound and fury. But they seemed to have lost all curiosity about others. She felt sorry for them. Losing curiosity was like losing the ability to love.
- Lucy thought that wrestling was such an odd pursuit: To take someone off his feet. It was all about status. For millions of years people had walked upright. It was one of their special gifts. To take a person down to the ground was so elemental. She understood why the crowds reacted as they did. At the wrestling meets everyone entered The Stream and received the powerful messages that the players sent by way of their actions on the mat. The triumph of one human over another. To turn a person into a beast. And she saw that sports provided a means for those lonely people to communicate more deeply.
- "I kissed her. In the woods."
- Jenny felt her heart ache deeply for them.
- "Dude," Amanda said, "you really know how to turn a bitch's world upside down."
- "Don't let me harsh your mellow."
- "Would I like to study Lucy? Of course I would. Do I think that ought to be allowed? No, I don't. In the most important ways, you see, Lucy is just like you and me. Would you want your teenage daughter to be studied by a bunch of scientists? So the issues here revolve around her father's decision to bring her into the world, which most of us would agree was a very bad decision from an ethical point of view. But we must keep that ethical issue separate from the very good outcome of that bad decision. Lucy is a remarkable person. Her father did something reprehensible, but that in no way detracts from her value as a human being. I think her biggest problem is not going to come from any legitimate scientist, though. It's going to be the religious crackpots and government zealots. If history is any guide, her worst nightmare is going to be some completely innocuous-seeming beaurocrat who can't think and always goes by the rule book."
- Harry said, "He's right, you know. It was those kind of people who made the Third Reich possible."
- "Well, Lucy, it's my intention to submit a bill to Congress declaring that you are human and that you have all the rights of any normal human. Is there anything you'd like to say for the record in support of that idea?"
- "Yes. I am human. As any legitimate scientist will tell you, a human is a type of ape. All people are closely related to the chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee--the bonobos, as they're now called. A few million years ago there was a hominid called Australopithecus. Then later there was Paranthropus and Homo habilis and erectus and ergaster. Those were all new types of humanoid apes or early people. So I, too, am a new type of human. And so I say: Yes, I am human, and I am ape. You are, too, as is everyone in this room. Once, perhaps one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years ago, your kind were new to this earth. I merely happen to be newer. I'm very proud of my heritage."
- "Is there anything else you'd like to say to those who might argue that you do not deserve all the rights of a human but perhaps should be protected under the Animal Welfare Act or maybe even studied by scientists?"
- Lucy answered without hesitation. "Yes, there is. I would say this: _The quality of mercy is not strain'd,/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;/ 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: It becomes/ The throned monarch better than his crown..._"
- Jenny held back tears as Lucy finished. "And if you put all of the bonobos in all the world into a room for all the ages of history. And if you gave them all the training you could give. They would still never quote Shakespeare to you. I can. I will. I do."
- When Lucy was eleven years old, he had made her read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As she read and gradually realized what was going on and what those people were going to do to other people, she had begged him not to make her go on reading. "Read," he commanded. "I want you to know what you're up against. Those people are not all Hitler, are they? One man you can dismiss. But almost eight thousand men and women oversaw Auschwitz. Can you dismiss all of them as being, by chance, criminal psychopaths? No. They're human beings. That's their trouble."
- "Because when you die, you go," Lucy had said. "But where does your voice go? Nothing else in the world can make those particular sounds. Just like when a thunderstorm goes, there will never be exactly the same thunderstorm again. Every day, things happen that have never happened before. And there are things that happen that will never happen again." She paused, then said, "Like me."
- She remembered a conversation she'd once had with her father about prayer. She had been reading about prayer and he told her that since they didn't believe in gods, they didn't pray. But Lucy had argued with him. She said that she prayed even without believing in gods. "To what? To whom?" he had asked.
- "To the forest," she said. "I pray to the forest to arrange things in a beneficial way."
- He had paused deep in thought and said, "I never thought of it that way. I never called it prayer, but I do that, too. The forest is the source of everything. Yes, I guess you're right," he said, and laughed at himself. "I guess we all pray even if there are no gods."
- Lucy's father used to say that there was a natural beauty in the world and that salvation lay in finding it, embracing it. Don't let it go, he would say. Because when the bad things come--and they always do--it's all there is to sustain you. Without it, you'll be sucked down into a darkness from which there is no escape.
- "Death comes," he would say. "Death always comes. It's coming now. It's on its way. There's nothing you can do but see the beauty."
- It was about ten in the morning on a cold bright day when Jenny stood in her kitchen and saw the sunlight illuminating the expensive stainless steel appliances that her mother had bought. Jenny thought, This is so not me. And instantly another thought came to her: That's Amanda talking. I have Amanda's voice inside me now. Amanda and Lucy. She knew from her scientific reading that when you repeat in your head the words that someone else has said, your vocal cords move just as that person's moved when she said those words, a movement as unique as a fingerprint. Thus do those you love hold the strings as if you were a puppet. Even from beyond the grave.
- Lucy wore a silver party hat and was laughing uproariously at the bad jokes that Harry was telling. "How can you tell the trombone player's children on the playground?" he had asked her.
- "I don't know," Lucy said. "How?"
- "Because they don't know how to use the slide and they can't swing."
jan 12 2011 ∞
jan 12 2011 +