But in the last analysis, does it matter? You see, he has jerked off into her sandwich and she has eaten it. Telling her about it will not change it, only destroy her. And now I know that Raptor, not yet named or acknowledged, lurks within me.
Thus, when the current need arises, I become him. Ah, what relief! As Raptor, I can let the discarded shards of myself pierce the barrier. And afterwards… Well, afterwards, I need only activate my shut-off mechanism to be pleased at the cleverness with which I have slaughtered, is it not so? Rather than suffer any afterthoughts, bad dreams, sleepless nights?
Aha, say you, but Raptor has such insomnias, regrets, nightmares. What if you have rent the temple veil from top to bottom, have left the fabric of your life tattered around you? What then, murderer?
But that is nonsense. I am my profession. To prove it, I go now to kill again. After that will be time to stop.
If I can.
CHAPTER FORTY
“If I can,” said Will, “I want to stay with the great apes. The first one known, thirty-pound Aegyptopithecus (28 m.y. ago), once was believed to be ancestral to all living monkeys and apes. But we now know the hominoid line began about the same time he did, rather than descended from him: some twenty-two pithecoid species, scattered over Africa, Europe, and Asia, now are known. Yet only the line of Dryopithecus (12 m.y. ago) survived-by devising a whole new way of getting around.
“Brachiation.
“Brachiation means swinging beneath the branches by the arms, rather than running around on top of them on all fours. Evolutionists call brachiation ‘utterly adaptive’-which means that if you were an ape, you learned to brachiate or you died. In a world of shrinking forests, brachiation gave us new function and anatomy to go with our innate primate playfulness.
“Function: developing amazing gymnastic skills to swing through the trees, to hang by an arm while reaching out to the tips of branches for ripe fruit. This required judgment — how far away is that next limb-and concentration. Lose your concentration, misjudge, you miss your grip and fall. And die.
“Anatomy: the torso is straightened, the arms and upper body are strengthened, the hands and wrists become fluid, the pelvis begins its adaptation for eventual upright walking. The ape could retain his bulk while expanding his brain and remaining in the trees where, for the time being, all the fun was.
“This is most important: there is the same joy in an ape’s swift flight through the forest as there is in a bird’s soaring flight over it; and it was this sense of fun, of adventure, that helped certain hominoids walk out into that unknown veldt.
“Between those Miocene pithecoids we have been talking about and the modern apes we want to talk about, the fossils showing homin oids becoming homin ids are, as William Howells says, ‘no more than mutterings in the dark-a piece of jaw here, a piece of arm bone there.’ We hear not even mutterings about the ancestors of gorillas and chimps, except a single bone from the Samburu Hills in Kenya some 6 to 9 m.y. ago.
“The gibbons and siamangs are the most joyful, perhaps the brainiest of the surviving great apes. But by one of those double whammies of which Nature is so fond, they ‘chose’ a life of wondrous dexterity and delight in the tops of the trees-thereby removing themselves from this discussion.
“The orangutan’s direct affinity to us is tenuous: he packed his bags for Borneo about the time Proconsul (22 m.y. ago) appeared in Africa. But he is a hominoid, and when we talk about our direct ancestors we find some of his ways suggestive.
“The basic orang social unit is blood-related females who stay together in a single area. Once a young male is driven away from the band, he rapes any female he runs across. It is true rape, by the way-she is not ready to receive him.
“When he is full grown, he seeks females who are receptive, mates with them, and then leaves. He is solitary and his relationship with all other males is antagonistic: meeting, they invariably fight until somebody backs down or is seriously hurt.
“Gorillas, in their mountain habitats in Central Africa, are different: they travel in fairly stable social groups of females and infants led by a dominant ‘silverback’ male. Most imam ture males, as they mature, are driven off as the young male orang is. The young gorilla loner also will grab any females he can find, but his intent is very different. He keeps them to form his own harem-thus establishing a new basic social group.
“Big daddy silverback defends his harem against such seducers with violent displays in over 75 percent of the encounters, with actual physical battle 50 percent of the time. He must, because a low-ranking female often will run off with one of these traveling salesmen: in his new harem she will have the status she lacked in the old.
“Chimps and gorillas have a shared morphology that suggests species closeness; the complexities connected with knuckle-walking are even more compelling. Nobody but chimps and gorillas do it, and both species do it exactly the same. So… a shared common ancestor well after the human line had split off?
“Not so, says DNA-structuring and amino-acid analysis: almost identical human/chimp DNA suggests their split was only about 5.5 m.y. ago, while our single ape fossil from the Samburu Hills suggests the gorilla split off 6 to 9 m.y. ago.
“The basis of chimpanzee society is a male kin-group with one or more alpha males; it is the females who are the strangers. If the band splits up, there is no bond among the females; they disperse until they find new male bands. And they mate with as many of the males in their community as they can so the males, never knowing if they are the father of any given infant, will usually be solicitous of all.
“Chimps live mainly on fruit, so they have to travel in small bands of four to eight because the availability of ripe fruit dictates how often they get together. Separation can be for several weeks, and upon remeeting they have elaborate reunion reactions-hugs, kisses, back-slapping… sound familiar?
“Nobody can see anything much in a rain forest, so basic communication is by the so-called pant-hoots PBS specials have made so familiar to most of us. Every voice is unique-chimps can recognize each other over long distances of for est. These calls are usually territorial or to announce a major food source.
“Males travel with other males, aggressive to protect against aggression. They view their environment as hostile and patrol the peripheries of their territory in stealth and in numbers, always ready for war.
“So here we are at long last, at the edge of the trees with the chimps and the direct hominid forerunner of Lucy whom many anthropologists picture as a timid plant-eater forced from the trees by bad weather and bad neighbors. Sure, the Pliocene was dry after the wet Miocene, and the forests were shrinking; but anthropologist Owen Lovejoy targets bipedalism as an absolutely enormous anatomical change, one not for the faint-hearted.
“So was it the weak, or the strong, who crept down out of trees into the unknown-and survived? Common sense gives us the answer. For those who don’t believe in common sense, the chimpanzee is here as a prime source about our earlier selves, because he is so close to us, and because he obviously has changed less than we since we shared the edge of the savannah.
“Only a third of a century ago, Robert Ardrey could write with a straight face: ‘Every modern primate, whether gorilla or macaque, chimpanzee or vervet monkeys or gibbon or baboon, is inoffensive, non-aggressive, and strays no further from the vegetarian way than an occasional taste for insects.’
“Ardrey was wrong about the chimps. The chimp, so close genetically to man, is a hunting ape, the only hunting ape apart from ourselves. He does it for fun, not necessity; for pleasure, not for profit. He does not need the protein supplement to his diet to survive. So, why hunt?”
Will drank water, and Dante realized with a start that he had been so caught up in the story that he had again forgotten his central function of looking out for danger. Of being constantly alert like a chimp patrolling the perimeter of his territory. This lecture hall, right now, was Dante’s territory. He had better be ready to defend it against Raptor.
“Bloodlust? Dudley Young believes, and I agree, that the chimp’s hunting is at once something much simpler and much more profound. He hunts for the hell of it. Because it is fun, because it wards off boredom. That chimps get bored and hatch convoluted political and domestic plots within the troop is well known. That they are clever is undisputed: given an electronic board in place of their unevolved vocal apparatus, some chimps use large
