An Ape About the House

by Arthur C. Clarke

Granny thought it a perfectly horrible idea; but then, she could remember the days when there were human servants.

“If you imagine,” she snorted, “that I’ll share the house with a monkey, you’re very much mistaken.”

“Don’t be so old-fashioned,” I answered. “Anyway, Dorcas isn’t a monkey.”

“Then what is she—it?”

I flipped through the pages of the Biological Engineering Corporation’s guide. “Listen to this, Gran,” I said. “ ‘The Super-chimp (Registered Trade-mark) Pan Sapiens is an intelligent anthropoid, derived by selective breeding and genetic modification from basic chimpanzee stock—’ ”

“Just what I said! A monkey!”

“—and with a large-enough vocabulary to understand simple orders. It can be trained to perform all types of domestic work or routine manual labour and is docile, affectionate, housebroken, and particularly good with children—”

“Children! Would you trust Johnnie and Susan with a—a gorilla?”

I put the handbook down with a sigh.

“You’ve got a point there. Dorcas is expensive, and if I find the little monsters knocking her about—”

At this moment, fortunately, the door buzzer sounded. “Sign, please,” said the delivery man. I signed, and Dorcas entered our lives.

“Hello, Dorcas,” I said. “I hope you’ll be happy here.”

Her big, mournful eyes peered out at me from beneath their heavy ridges. I’d met much uglier humans, though she was rather an odd shape, being only about four feet tall and very nearly as wide. In her neat, plain uniform she looked just like a maid from one of those early twentieth-century movies; her feet, however, were bare and covered an astonishing amount of floor space.

“Morning, Ma’am,” she answered, in slurred but perfectly intelligible accents.

“She can speak!” squawked Granny.

“Of course,” I answered. “She can pronounce over fifty words, and can understand two hundred. She’ll learn more as she grows used to us, but for the moment we must stick to the vocabulary on pages forty-two and forty-three of the handbook.” I passed the instruction manual over to Granny; for once, she couldn’t find even a single word to express her feelings.

Dorcas settled down very quickly. Her basic training—Class A Domestic, plus Nursery Duties—had been excellent, and by the end of the first month there were very few jobs around the house that she couldn’t do, from laying the table to changing the children’s clothes. At first she had an annoying habit of picking up things with her feet; it seemed as natural to her as using her hands, and it took a long time to break her of it. One of Granny’s cigarette butts finally did the trick.

She was good-natured, conscientious, and didn’t answer back. Of course, she was not terribly bright, and some jobs had to be explained to her at great length before she got the point. It took several weeks before I discovered her limitations and allowed for them; at first it was quite hard to remember that she was not exactly human, and that it was no good engaging her in the sort of conversations we women occupy ourselves with when we get together. Or not many of them; she did have an interest in clothes, and was fascinated by colours. If I’d let her dress the way she wanted, she’d have looked like a refugee from Mardi Gras.

The children, I was relieved to find, adored her. I know what people say about Johnnie and Sue, and admit that it contains some truth. It’s so hard to bring up children when their father’s away most of the time, and to make matters worse, Granny spoils them when I’m not looking. So indeed does Eric, whenever his ship’s on Earth, and I’m left to cope with the resulting tantrums. Never marry a spaceman if you can possibly avoid it; the pay may be good, but the glamour soon wears off.

By the time Eric got back from the Venus run, with three weeks’ accumulated leave, our new maid had settled down as one of the family. Eric took her in his stride; after all, he’d met much odder creatures on the planets. He grumbled about the expense, of course, but I pointed out that now that so much of the housework was taken off my hands, we’d be able to spend more time together and do some of the visiting that had proved impossible in the past. I looked forward to having a little social life again, now that Dorcas could take care of the children.

For there was plenty of social Me at Port Goddard, even though we were stuck in the middle of the Pacific. (Ever since what happened to Miami, of course, all major launching sites have been a long, long way from civilization.) There was a constant flow of distinguished visitors and travellers from all parts of the Earth—not to mention remoter points.

Every community has its arbiter of fashion and culture, its grande dame who is resented yet copied by all her unsuccessful rivals. At Port Goddard it was Christine Swanson; her husband was Commodore of the Space Service, and she never let us forget it. Whenever a liner touched down, she would invite all the officers on Base to a reception at her stylishly antique nineteenth-century mansion. It was advisable to go, unless you had a very good excuse, even though that meant looking at Christine’s paintings. She fancied herself as an artist, and the walls were hung with multicoloured daubs. Thinking of polite remarks to make about them was one of the major hazards of Christine’s parties; another was her metre-long cigarette holder.

There was a new batch of paintings since Eric had been away: Christine had entered her “square” period. “You see, my dears,” she explained to us, “the old-fashioned oblong pictures are terribly dated—they just don’t go with the Space Age. There’s no such thing as up or down, horizontal or vertical out there, so no really modern picture should have one side longer than another. And ideally, it should look exactly the same whichever way you hang it—I’m working on that right now.”

“That seems very logical,” said Eric tactfully. (After all, the Commodore was his boss.) But when our hostess was out of earshot, he added, “I don’t know if Christine’s pictures are hung the right way up, but I’m sure they’re hung the wrong side to the wall.”

I agreed; before I got married I spent several years at an art school and considered I knew something about the subject. Given as much cheek as Christine, I could have made quite a hit with my own canvases, which were now gathering dust in the garage.

“You know, Eric,” I said a little cattily, “I could teach Dorcas to paint better than this.”

He laughed and answered, “It might be fun to try it some day, if Christine gets out of hand.” Then I forgot all about the matter—until a month later, when Eric was back in space.

The exact cause of the fight isn’t important; it arose over a community development scheme on which Christine and I took opposing viewpoints. She won, as usual, and I left the meeting breathing fire and brimstone. When I got home, the first thing I saw was Dorcas, looking at the coloured pictures in one of the weeklies—and I remembered Eric’s words.

I put down my handbag, took off my hat, and said firmly: “Dorcas—come out to the garage.”

It took some time to dig out my oils and easel from under the pile of discarded toys, old Christmas decorations, skin-diving gear, empty packing cases, and broken tools (it seemed that Eric never had time to tidy up before he shot off into space again). There were several unfinished canvases buried among the debris, which would do for a start. I set up a landscape which had got as far as one skinny tree, and said: “Now Dorcas—I’m going to teach you to paint.”

My plan was simple and not altogether honest. Although apes had, of course, splashed paint on canvas often enough in the past, none of them had created a genuine, properly com posed work of art. I was sure that Dorcas couldn’t either, but no one need know that mine was the guiding hand. She could get all the credit.

I was not actually going to lie to anyone, however. Though I would create the design, mix the pigments, and do most of the execution, I would let Dorcas tackle just as much of the work as she could handle. I hoped that she could fill in the areas of solid colour, and perhaps develop a characteristic style of brushwork in the process. With any luck, I estimated, she might be able to do perhaps a quarter of the actual work. Then I could claim it was all hers with a reasonably clear conscience—for hadn’t Michelangelo and Leonardo signed paintings that were largely done by their assistants? I’d be Dorcas’s “assistant”.

I must confess that I was a little disappointed. Though Dorcas quickly got the general idea, and soon understood the use of brush and palette, her execution was very clumsy. She seemed unable to make up her mind which hand to use, but kept transferring the brush from one to the other. In the end I had to do almost all the work, and she merely contributed a few dabs of paint.

Still, I could hardly expect her to become a master in a couple of lessons, and it was really of no importance. If Dorcas was an artistic flop, I would just have to stretch the truth a little further when I claimed that it was all her own work.

I was in no hurry; this was not the sort of thing that could be rushed. At the end of a couple of months, the School of Dorcas had produced a dozen paintings, all of them on carefully chosen themes that would be familiar to a Superchimp at Port Goddard. There was a study of the lagoon, a view of our house, an impression of a night launching (all glare and explosions of light), a fishing scene, a palm grove—clichés, of course, but anything else would rouse suspicion. Before she came to us, I don’t suppose Dorcas had seen much of the world outside the labs where she had been reared and trained.

The best of these paintings (and some of them were good—after all, I should know) I hung around the house in places where my friends could hardly fail to notice them. Everything worked perfectly; admiring queries were followed by astonished cries of “You don’t say!” when I modestly disclaimed responsibility. There was some scepticism, but I soon demolished that by letting a few privileged friends see Dorcas at work. I chose the viewers for their ignorance of art, and the picture was an abstraction in red, gold, and black which no one dared to criticize. By this time, Dorcas could fake it quite well, like a movie actor pretending to play a musical instrument.

Just to spread the news around, I gave away some of the best paintings, pretending that I considered them no more than amusing novelties—yet at the same time giving just the barest hint of jealousy. “I’ve hired Dorcas,” I said testily, “to work for me—not for the Museum of Modern Art.” And I was very careful not to draw any comparisons between her paintings and those of Christine: our mutual friends could be relied upon to do that.

When Christine came to see me, ostensibly to discuss our quarrel “like two sensible people”, I knew that she was on the run. So I capitulated gracefully as we took tea in the drawing room, beneath one of Dorcas’s most impressive productions. (Full moon rising over the lagoon—very cold, blue, and mysterious. I was really quite proud of it.) There was not a word about the picture, or about Dorcas; but Christine’s eyes told me all I wanted to know. The next week, an exhibition she had been planning was quietly cancelled.

Gamblers say that you should quit when you’re ahead of the game. If I had stopped to think, I should have known that Christine would not let the matter rest there. Sooner or later, she was bound to counter-attack.

She chose her time well, waiting until the kids were at school, Granny was away visiting, and I was at the shopping centre on the other side of the island. Probably she phoned first to check that no one was at home—no one human, that is. We had told Dorcas not to answer calls; though she’d done so in the early days, it had not been a success. A Superchimp on the phone sounds exactly like a drunk, and this can lead to all sorts of complications.

I can reconstruct the whole sequence of events: Christine must have driven up to the house, expressed acute disappointment at my absence, and invited herself in. She would have wasted no time in getting to work on Dorcas, but luckily I’d taken the precaution of briefing my anthropoid colleague. “Dorcas make,” I’d said, over and over again, each time one of our productions was finished. “Not Missy make—Dorcas make.” And.in the end, I’m sure she believed this herself.

If my brainwashing, and the limitations of a fifty-word vocabulary, baffled Christine, she did not stay baffled for long. She was a lady of direct action, and Dorcas was a docile and obedient soul. Christine, determined to expose fraud and collusion, must have been gratified by the promptness with which she was led into the garage studio; she must also have been just a little surprised.

I arrived home about half an hour later, and knew that there was trouble afoot as soon as I saw Christine’s car parked at the kerb. I could only hope I was in time, but as soon as I stepped into the uncannily silent house, I realized that it was too late. Something had happened; Christine would surely be talking, even if she had only an ape as audience. To her, any silence was as great a challenge as a blank canvas; it had to be filled with the sound of her own voice.

The house was utterly still; there was no sign of life. With a sense of mounting apprehension, I tiptoed through the drawing room, the dining room, the kitchen, and out into the back. The garage door was open, and I peered cautiously through.

It was a bitter moment of truth. Finally freed from my influence, Dorcas had at last developed a style of her own. She was swiftly and confidently painting—but not in the way I had so carefully taught her. And as for her subject…

I was deeply hurt when I saw the caricature that was giving Christine such obvious enjoyment. After all that I had done for Dorcas, this seemed sheer ingratitude. Of course, I know now that no malice was involved, and that she was merely expressing herself. The psychologists, and the critics who wrote those absurd programme notes for her exhibition at the Guggenheim, say that her portraits cast a vivid light on man-animal relationships, and allow us to look for the first time at the human race from outside. But I did not see it that way when I ordered Dorcas back into the kitchen.

For the subject was not the only thing that upset me: what really rankled was the thought of all the time I had wasted improving her technique—and her manners. She was ignor ing everything I had ever told her, as she sat in front of the easel with her arms folded motionless on her chest.

Even then, at the very beginning of her career as an independent artist, it was painfully obvious that Dorcas had more talent in either of her swiftly moving feet than I had in both my hands.

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An Ape About the House
by Arthur C. Clarke