Monkeys

Monkeys are the primates that the Brin 2 facility carried in a lander called the Barrel, as breeding stock for Doctor Avrana Kern’s uplift experiment on the green world. Ten thousand of them were loaded. None reached the ground. Later in the story the word covers two other things: the people Kern believes she is uplifting, and the humans of the ark ship, whom she calls monkeys as an insult.

The cargo

The Barrel was one end of the Brin 2’s central needle, with the Flask beside it. Kern described the contents as “monkeys and the future”. The Barrel held a cargo of ten thousand primates, the chosen few who would inherit the planet if not the Earth. The Flask held the uplift virus.

The biotechs expected thirty or forty monkey generations to bring the cargo to the point where it could answer the Sentry Pod. Infected animals would produce offspring with greater brain size and complexity, greater body size to carry it, more flexible behaviour and swifter learning. The virus would also recognize infection in other individuals, so that the best of the best bred together. Kern told the committees on Earth that it would produce sentient aides and servants, though her own interest was the monkeys and what they might become.

The burning

Sering, a Non Ultra Natura agent, cut the reactor safeties of the Brin 2 and rigged the escape pods while Kern gave her speech. Kern got out in the Sentry Pod and ordered the Barrel launched. The blast had pushed it off its planned course, and it burned as it hit the atmosphere, streaking “like a meteor” over the green world. Kern felt the deaths of the primates more than the deaths of her colleagues, because they died in fear and in ignorance. Her consolation was a private joke: “We can always get more monkeys.”

The Flask fell at a gentler angle and delivered its virus to a world with no monkeys left on it. In cold sleep Kern told the pod to wake her when the monkeys answered. When she woke fourteen years later she found Earth silent, and all she could think was that the monkeys had burned, all for nothing.

The word after the Barrel

Kern never stops calling the inhabitants of her planet her monkeys. In orbit above it she tells the crew of the Gilgamesh that they are “monkeys, nothing but monkeys”, and that they are not even her monkeys, because hers are pure and undergoing uplift. When the ark ship leaves she tells them to go take their barrel of monkeys elsewhere.

Holsten Mason has to explain the word to Lain on the ark ship: monkeys are a sort of animal, the Empire used them in scientific experiments, and they looked something like people. Lain calls them funny little critters. The crew wonders what on the planet will answer the signals. When a drone is destroyed by a spider a metre long, Karst says the creature was no monkey.

Kern teaches her monkeys a common language, a simplified form of Imperial C, and finds that they run away with it. She wants to meet her arboreal people in person, and complains that the monkeys have made draggingly slow progress. Then the first image arrives from the surface, a web city full of spiders, and the monkey mask is lifted. She remembers that the monkeys burned and the virus got through, and she weeps for them. By the end of the same chapter she accepts the spiders as her children.

Why spiders were uplifted

Kern’s experiment called for monkeys, and the planet was shaped around them. The vertebrates that her chosen were meant to interact with were built to reject the virus, so that close cousins would give them no competition. Nobody gave thought to the invertebrates. The virus, which was meant for a primate, found the spiders instead.

The virus had also been fitted with safeguards, so that its protégés could not become superhuman monkey gods. It was written for a primate host, and its programmed end state is one Portia labiata can never reach. Unable to finish its task, the virus kept mutating and kept working, and the spiders rose in the millennia that followed.

Unanswered questions

• What species the cargo belonged to. They are only ever primates that looked something like people, with no other detail.
• How the ten thousand were chosen.
• Whether every other terraforming project also received a Barrel, or whether Kern’s was the only one that failed this way.

Trivia

• The first chapter is called “Just a Barrel of Monkeys”, a phrase Kern uses about humanity as a private joke.