The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

couldn’t understand or construct conditional clauses, but Premack in California taught a chimpanzee called Sarah how to, and Dinah and I have duplicated his work. So why not time?”
    “I see. What else?”
    “Well, the Sultan is very anxious to make a breakthrough with an experiment for which he can claim some credit, and his idea is that Dinah should have a baby, and then we can see how much she teaches it of what she’s learnt from me.”
    “Will she even look at a male chimp? Doesn’t she think she’s human, living all the time with you?”
    “We don’t know, yet. She spent her first three years at Bristol with other chimps, including her mother, only coming out for tests and lessons. Since then she’s lived with me, but I’ve never treated her as a human—I mean dressed her in clothes or let her eat with a knife and fork. She doesn’t sleep in a cot, but as near as I can arrange to a jungle nest. She’s got her own room—that’s essential, so that I can shut her up if I have to do something without her—but it isn’t at all like a human room. She even wears a leash sometimes, though she hates it. Nowadays she spends a bit of her time with a family group of near-wild chimps we’ve imported, and my impression is that she recognises them as being the same species as herself. For instance, one of the females was in season a few weeks ago, which meant that her sex organs swelled to a large pink mound on her rump. Dinah saw it, and spent a lot of time inspecting herself for the same symptoms.”
    Anne laughed and stretched. Morris found himself relaxing slightly, but when he started to lean back in his chair Dinah grabbed his hand and re-applied it to the bit of her shoulder he had been working on.
    “So that’s why you’re in Q’Kut,” she said. “For bread.”
    “Not entirely,” said Morris. “I mean, I don’t need all that money. I do like having an unlimited budget for my research, of course. On the other hand I miss the kind of colleagues I could talk things over with. I didn’t realise it till I got here, but the real attraction of Q’Kut is the marshmen.”
    “And the marshwomen?”
    “No, as a matter of fact, not. Oh, I see, you mean sexually. Not that either.”
    “You’ll have to explain.”
    “Well, there are about a dozen languages left in the world which are not dialects of other languages and are spoken exclusively by a coherent group of people. By ‘exclusively’ I mean they are monoglots. They don’t speak any other language. There’s a few in New Guinea, a few in Brazil, and a remarkable tribe in the Andaman Islands called the Jarawa. There may be something still in Central Asia, but I doubt it. But the Q’Kuti marshmen are easily the largest and most uncontaminated of such groups, apart perhaps from the Jarawa. From a psycholinguist’s point of view, Q’Kut is the most exciting place in the world.”
    “It doesn’t look it.”
    “No, but the marsh language . . .”
    “Can you speak it? How the hell many languages can you speak? You hissed away in Japanese, didn’t you, that day I came? Can you speak Chinese? Have you read Chairman Mao in the original?”
    “I’ve only read his thoughts,” said Morris, rather bowled over by this sudden spate of eager questions, and afraid that it might signal a metamorphosis to some other role, terrorist or vamp or ardent student. He felt better able to cope with her as she was.
    “That’s great,” she breathed.
    “I don’t know. I mean, you can understand a language without understanding what somebody is saying. That’s one of the things psycholinguistics is about.”
    “Please go on about that,” she said, politely laying the ghost of Chairman Mao.
    “Oh, well, the marshmen have a very interesting language. It contains a number of unique elements, but it lacks a number of other things which we would regard as normal, if not essential. For instance, there are no words and no grammatical structures with which to