Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

SICK MONKEYS

This is a dangerous planet. Only a politician would try to tell you otherwise. And I'm not talking about wars—we're America, we win our wars. There are earthquakes, storms, volcanoes. Plagues can appear out of nowhere and slaughter millions of people. Blights can wipe out our crops. A meteor the size of a bus could hit the earth and send us back to the Stone Age. An extraordinary solar flare could destroy our electronics or heat our atmosphere so much our crops all die and we starve.

And whom do we put in charge of helping us prepare to cope with such disasters? People whose only talent is for getting elected, and whose entire future consists of the run-up to the next election. It's not their fault—anybody who doesn't think and act that way won't win. It's the fundamental problem with democracy. No long-range thinking. So we're just sitting ducks, waiting for the next disaster.

If you want to know what destroyed the Roman Empire, it was two plagues, a century apart, that killed about thirty percent of the population each time. That's why there weren't enough soldiers to keep the legions at full strength. That's why the emperors had to invite in the barbarian tribes to farm the abandoned land and fill the abandoned cities.

Only now we're talking about the whole world. Whom do we invite in to settle the empty land when it's the whole world that's been depopulated?

Chinma was the fourth son of the third wife of the aging chief of his small tribe in the Kwara state of Nigeria. There was no shortage of other sons, most of them adult, and nothing much was expected of Chinma. People constantly told him to shut up, even his mother, even when he wasn't saying anything.

He got the idea at quite a young age that his very presence was annoying to everyone.

The easiest way to avoid getting cuffed or shoved or slapped or yelled at was to disappear. And the easiest way to disappear was to go up. People didn't look up very much. He could go up into the trees and keep company with the monkeys. They yelled at him, too, and threw things at him, but they were more afraid of him than he was of them, so it was actually fun.

That's why by the time he was twelve years old Chinma could climb any tree to the smallest branches that could bear his weight, and catch monkeys by enticing them with fruit while holding very, very still and looking in another direction until they were close enough for Chinma to make his grab.

All of this was useless to everyone until the happy day when Ire, the second son of the first wife, came back to the village from the big city, Ilorin, with news. "They're paying money for white-face monkeys, especially if you can get the whole family."

Ire sat there in the yard in front of the big house, telling Father and the important brothers how much money, and who was paying, and how he found out about it, and then they started arguing about how they could go about catching the monkeys.

Meanwhile, Chinma ran to a good white-face monkey tree, climbed it, caught the papa monkey, scampered back down, and brought the monkey to Ire.

All the men fell silent.

"What's your name?" asked Father.

"Monkey-catcher," said Ire. And that became Chinma's new name.

Father was against paying Chinma anything for the monkeys he caught. "We've been feeding him for all these years, it's about time he started earning his way." But Ire said it was business, and in business you pay everybody something, so they'll work harder.

So now Chinma was important and had money, a hundred naira for every monkey, five hundred for the papa monkeys, two thousand if he brought in a whole family. He almost always got the families—once he got the papa monkey, it was pretty easy to get the babies, and once he had the babies, he could use them as bait to get the mamas.

Ire bought cages for the monkeys and it didn't take many weeks before all the white-face monkeys in their neighborhood were gone or hiding.

So they got in the family truck and began to range far out into the country. Father and Ire had bribed all the right people, so there was no trouble with police—or the roaming gangs of thugs and brigands who, as often as not, were the police out of uniform, or their brothers-in-law. It seemed like a safe way to make money—and it all depended on Chinma's knack for climbing trees, winning the trust of monkeys, and bringing them down in good condition, every member of the family.

Ire said that somewhere far away—South Africa or Great Britain or America—scientists were studying the white-face monkey because its cries seemed to be like language. "Not our language," said Father, and everyone laughed. Only it wasn't really all that funny, since only about three thousand people spoke their language, Ayere, and all of them lived right there in Kwara state.

They knew that other tribes had lost their language, for to survive in Nigeria you had to know at least one of the major languages—Ibo, Yoruba, Hausa—and if you had any hope of becoming educated, you had to learn English as well. How many languages could one head hold?

"They ought to take us to America and study our language," said Ire.

"With our luck," said Father, "they'd take us to Liberia."

But the truth was they were very lucky. This white-face monkey trade was bringing in cash, which there had never been very much of in their village of Oyi. "Our oil well," Father called it. But he meant the monkeys—not Chinma, even though Chinma caught every single monkey they sold.

When he mentioned this thought to Mother, she slapped his shoulder, twice, and very sternly told him, "And who drives the truck? And who found out that these monkeys were worth something? And who fed you all your life till now? You think you're so important."

He apologized. But he was important, and he knew it. Nobody told him to shut up now, nobody in the family forgot his name. He was Monkey-catcher, and when the family was making money, he was right there, up a tree, catching it and bringing it down to them.

Until one day, in a remote stand of trees, not even large enough to call it a woods, surrounded by grassland on all sides, Chinma climbed a tree and found a troop of white-face monkeys that had no timidity at all. They did not scamper away from him. He did not have to coax them. They just sat there, waiting for him. The papa monkey hissed and showed his teeth. He snapped at Chinma, too. But he did not run away.