Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [176]
“Well, he’s hard to see.”
Charlie cackled at this. Nick glanced over and said, “Dad, quit drinking my hot chocolate.”
“I thought you were done with it. I only took three sips.”
“You took four sips.”
“Don’t keep Frank waiting around, go get ready.”
At the zoo they first attended a workshop devoted to learning how to knap rocks into blades and arrowheads. Frank had noticed this on the FONZ website and had of course been very interested, and Nick was up for anything. So they sat on the ground with a ranger of about twenty-five, who reminded Frank of Robin. This young man wandered around the group, crouching to show each cluster how to hit the cores with the breaker stones so that they would flake properly. With every good knap he yelled “Yeah!” or “Good one!”
It was clearly the same process that had created Frank’s Acheulian hand axe, although their modern results were less shapely, and of course the newly cracked stone looked raw compared to the patina that burnished the old axe’s broken surfaces. No matter—it was a joy to try it, satisfying in the same way that looking into a fire was. It was one of those things you knew how to do the first time you tried it.
Frank was happily knapping away a protrusion on the end of a core, enjoying the clacks and chinks and the smell of sparks and rock dust in sunlight, when he and Nick both smashed their hands at the same time. Nick’s chin trembled and Frank growled as he clutched his throbbing thumb. “Oh man. My nail is going to be purple, dang it! What about yours?”
“Forefinger,” Nick said. “Middle knuckle.”
“Big owee.”
“Yep. Ow, ow—kun chok sum!“
“Kun chok sum? Is that Khembali?”
“Yes, it’s a Tibetan curse.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Means, three jewels!”
“Three jewels?”
“Heavy eh? They have worse ones of course.”
“Kun chok sum!”
The ranger came over grinning. “That, gentlemen, is what we call the granite kiss. Anyone in need of a Band-Aid?”
Frank and Nick declined.
“You can see how old the expression ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’ must be. They’ve found knapped tools like these a million and a half years old.”
“I hope it doesn’t hurt that long,” Nick said.
After they were done they put their new stone tools in their daypacks and went over to look at the gibbons and siamangs.
All the feral primates had either died or been returned to the zoo. This morning Bert and May and their surviving kids were the family out in the triangular gibbon enclosure. They only let out one family at a time, to avoid fights. Frank and Nick joined the small crowd at the railing to observe. The people around them were mostly young parents with toddlers. “Mon-key! Mon-key!”
Bert and May were relaxing in the sun as they had so many times before, on a small platform just outside the tunnel to their inside room—a kind of porch, in effect, with a metal basket hanging over it where food was placed. Nothing in the sight of them suggested that they had spent much of the previous year running wild in Rock Creek Park. May was grooming Bert’s back, intent, absorbed, dextrous. Bert seemed zoned out. Never did they meet the gaze of their human observers. Bert shifted to get the back of his head under her fingers, and she immediately obliged, parting his hair and closely inspecting his scalp. Then something caused him to give her a light slap, and she caught his hand and tugged at it. She let go and climbed the fence to intercept one of their kids, and suddenly those two were playing tag. When they passed Bert he cuffed at them, so they turned around and gang-tackled him. When he had disentangled himself from the fray he swung up the fence to the south corner of the enclosure, where it was possible to reach through and pull leaves from a tree. He munched a leaf, fended off one of the passing kids with an expert backhand.
It seemed to Frank that they were restless. It wasn’t obvious; at first glance they appeared languid, because any time they were not moving they tended to melt into their positions, even if they were hanging from the fence. So they looked mellow—especially when sprawled