Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (read people like a book .txt) 📕

*   *   *

Dr. Ilene Andrews had only been asleep for an hour when her phone began to ring. She considered ignoring it for a moment, until it entered her sleep-fogged brain that—in this remote location, with this degree of security—she couldn’t be receiving an outside call. Something was wrong, here, and now. She sighed, rolled over, and picked up.

“Andrews,” she said.

“Dr. Andrews,” a voice came back. She thought it was Forteson, one of the techs. “There’s been a problem. Kong breached the biodome.”

She was fully awake now.

“Breached? What do you mean ‘breached’?” She went to her bedroom window and threw open the shade, but the jungle outside closed off her view of most of the valley.

“He, uh, made a spear out of a tree and threw it at the ceiling. He put a hole in it.”

“In the ceiling,” she said. “Is he still in there?”

“Yes,” Forteson said. “But I think he’s figuring it out.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll be right there.” She was about to hang up when another thought jolted through her.

“Jia!” she called. “Jia!” Phone still in hand, she bolted to the second bedroom. The bed was empty. She put the phone back to her ear.

“Do you know where Jia is?” she demanded.

“She’s with him,” Forteson said. “We spotted her a few minutes ago.”

Of course she was.

“Should we send someone in there after her?” the tech asked.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. I’ll handle this. Get Ben and have him meet me there.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

She pulled on pants and a shirt, then grabbed her blue jacket. She had let her long brown hair down for the night. She preferred it tied up in a bun, so it didn’t get in the way, but she didn’t have time for that.

*   *   *

She saw Kong almost immediately, long before she saw Jia. He was the tallest thing in the place, with the exception of the cliff with the waterfall. He was at or near his full growth now, over three hundred feet tall.

When she spotted Jia, Ilene slowed down; the girl was standing in front of Kong. Her best guess at the girl’s age was that she was about ten; she had light brown skin, black hair, and a heart-shaped face. She was wearing a white shirt and dark pants that Ilene had given her, but she had tied her red maiden shawl over the shirt so it formed a cross on her chest. That, the leather circlet on her head, and her necklace of leafwing teeth were all that remained of her original wardrobe, and she rarely went anywhere without all three of them on.

She had seen Jia and Kong like this before, silently communing, and she had wondered if the bond was merely emotional or if they were somehow conveying real information to one another. Whatever they were doing, Ilene was afraid that if she moved nearer, it might upset the delicate balance of Kong’s mood. He tolerated Ilene, indulged her attempts to teach him sign language. But if he was in a bad mood, he was not necessarily at his best around those he considered strangers. And although she had been working with Kong for ten years, she knew that in his mind she still fit that category.

Not so Jia. Jia was a member of the Iwi, the indigenous people of the island. It had once been Ilene’s dream to study their language, or what was left of it, even though it was exceedingly hard to coax the Iwi into speaking it. They seemed to have little use for vocal communication to the point that some early observers had reported they had no spoken tongue. However, a few Iwi had demonstrated the ability to learn English, and an earlier linguist had determined that they did have a spoken tongue, but concluded that the Iwi had replaced almost all of their verbal communication with signs, facial expressions, and body language.

In her decade on the island, Ilene had confirmed that. It was a fascinating and possibly unique situation among human groups, most of which communicated primarily through the spoken word.

In the last few years, and especially since taking Jia under her wing, she had begun to develop a theory, although she wasn’t yet sure enough of it to commit it to writing, much less present it for peer review. It seemed possible that their extensive use of non-vocal communication might stem from their close relationship with Kong. The Titan’s vocal cords weren’t suited to producing anything like human language, but his facial and body expressions were as versatile as those of humans. It might be that in emulating their god, and in learning to communicate with him, they had developed an interspecies pidgin that had no verbal component and had gradually adopted it as their day-today language. Of the few words recorded before she came along, a few showed Oceanic origins, almost certainly brought to these shores relatively recently by Polynesian wanderers. But the core of their language did not seem to be related to any other Pacific languages, or indeed, any known language whatsoever. It was a puzzle she had been excited to tackle. She’d had a little success, recorded about a hundred words, and worked out a descriptive grammar of their tongue. But that took years. She’d begun to realize that the spoken language was more like a fossil than anything else, that the truly relevant questions should be about the way they actually communicated and their relationship with Kong—and then tragedy struck.

The storms that had once hidden the island from the outside world had intensified and moved inland. Massive flooding and mudslides ensued, and the dangerous species of the island went berserk for the several months it took most of them to die off from lack of sustenance. She had tried to get the Iwi to relocate, either to the biodome they were building for Kong or to another island. They resisted, and when she returned to their