Half Brother Read online

  Half Brother

  KENNETH OPPEL

  For my whole family

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  ONE: ZAN

  TWO: FREAKY LITTLE BROTHER

  THREE: LIFE OF THE PARTY

  FOUR: DOMINANT MALE

  FIVE: BEAVER LAKE

  SIX: SCHOOL BEGINS

  PART TWO

  SEVEN: PROJECT ZAN

  EIGHT: PROJECT JENNIFER

  NINE: GIVE HUG

  TEN: REMARKABLE RESULTS

  ELEVEN: NEW DATA

  TWELVE: THE LEARNING CHAIR

  THIRTEEN: KILLER CHIMP

  FOURTEEN: SUMMER

  FIFTEEN: UNEXPECTED FINDINGS

  SIXTEEN: WEATHER CHANGE

  SEVENTEEN: SLOW LEARNER

  EIGHTEEN: THE LAST SIGN

  PART THREE

  NINETEEN: DR. HELSON

  TWENTY: THE RANCH

  TWENTY-ONE: MAY AND JUNE

  TWENTY-TWO: CH-72

  TWENTY-THREE: STEALING ZAN

  TWENTY-FOUR: ZAN AT HOME

  TWENTY-FIVE: JUNGLE

  TWENTY-SIX: SANCTUARY

  ALSO BY KENNETH OPPEL

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  This is how we got Zan.

  He was eight days old and his mother was holding him, nursing him. He was cuddled against her and she made comforting sounds, waving the flies away with her free hand. Her back was turned so she didn’t see the gun when it fired the dart into her leg. She looked around with a grunt. She saw a man and a woman on the other side of the cage. She stared at them long and hard, still feeding her baby. She knew. It had happened once before, and she knew it was about to happen again. She shuffled deeper into the corner, held her baby tight. Then the tranquilizers kicked in and she slumped clumsily against the wall. Her eyes were still open, but had a glassy look.

  The man opened the cage and moved swiftly towards her. He wanted to get to her before she dropped the baby, or rolled over and crushed it. The mother sat, paralyzed, watching as the man pulled her whimpering baby away from her body. Outside the cage, the man passed the baby to the woman. She wrapped it gently in a soft blanket and cradled it in her arms, making shushing sounds.

  This was my mother.

  As she walked away from the cage with the baby, she sang to him, songs she’d used with me when I was little. After a few days she got on a plane with her new baby, and flew home to us.

  ONE

  ZAN

  I woke up, a teenager.

  It was six a.m., June thirtieth, and I was in a sleeping bag on the floor of my empty bedroom, in our ugly new house on the other side of the country. When you didn’t have curtains, the dawn was your alarm clock.

  I didn’t care. It was my birthday and I was thirteen years old, and there was something exciting about being up so early, seeing the first light slant across your walls, hearing the birds make a racket, and knowing you were the only one awake in the house. The day seemed huge.

  Dad had promised to take me for a swim at the lake, and then out to a pizza place for dinner. I hoped he hadn’t forgotten. Because, with Mom away, I wasn’t too sure he’d remember to get me anything. I’d mentioned a new bike, but he’d never been much good at things like birthdays, especially when he was busy. And right now he was super busy, getting ready for his new project.

  I sighed. If I was lucky, the movers would come, and I’d get a bed for my birthday. I looked around my new room, trying to decide where I was going to put all my stuff when it finally arrived.

  Scattered beside me on the floor were a bunch of magazines and comics, and I started paging through the latest issue of Popular Mechanics. There was a really cool article about how you could live in your own helicopter, and the pictures showed this big double-decker chopper on pontoons, tied up at a lakeside dock. Inside the helicopter was this super-happy family. There was the mom and daughter being happy in the kitchen and the father being happy in the shower, and the two sons being happy playing with toys in their bedroom. The chopper was surprisingly spacious. The family could fly away whenever they wanted and live all over the world, but still be at home.

  I wished we could’ve moved like that.

  All we had was an ancient Volvo, and it had taken Dad and me six days to drive from Toronto to Victoria.

  We could’ve flown, but Dad had wanted me to see my own country. He’d told me a bit about the Canadian Shield and the Prairies and the Rockies. A road trip, he’d said, just the two boys, while Mom was away in New Mexico, picking up the baby. We’d see all the cool sites, eat burgers and drink milkshakes, stay in motels with swimming pools, and have a blast.

  I was suspicious right away. I knew the whole thing was cooked up to distract me—like giving someone a handful of Smarties on a crashing plane. But Dad was a really good talker. When he was enthusiastic, you got enthusiastic. He made you feel like you were the only person in the world, and he was sharing these things with you alone.

  So I got pretty excited, and the day after school was out, we packed up the car and headed off. At first we talked a lot—actually, Dad did most of the talking, but I didn’t mind, because he usually didn’t talk this much to me. Normally he spent his days at the university, lecturing, or working on his research, and when he came home, he was all talked out, and didn’t have much left to say—not to me anyway.

  I really liked being with him the first couple of days. He’d already been out to Victoria for the job interview, and he told me how beautiful it was. Mountains and sea practically everywhere you looked. The house we were going to live in was huge. The climate was the best in Canada. He told me how exciting it was going to be for me, starting at a new school. New teachers, new friends. It was going to be a big change, but Dad said change was wonderful and invigorating and the best thing that could happen to us as human beings. I’d love it, he said. He’d already decided, so there was no point asking me how I felt.

  But not even Dad could talk for the entire eight hours we spent each day in the car—and every day he got a little quieter. Turned out we didn’t stop at as many tourist sites as he’d promised, because he had everything scheduled very tightly, and he knew exactly where he wanted to be at the end of each day. So mostly what I saw of Canada was moving at fifty-five miles an hour.

  Sometimes, instead of sitting up front, I sprawled across the back seat, reading Spider-Man comics and Ray Bradbury, or just listening to the radio. Dad let me choose the stations at least, tuning into new ones when the old ones evaporated with the cities, and provinces, and time zones we left behind. The Rolling Stones belted out “Angie” over and over again, and Dad watched the road, lost in his own thoughts. I sucked on orange Freezies, and the car smelled like french fries and ketchup, and the Fresca I’d spilled outside Thunder Bay.

  On the fourth night, we were back in our motel room after dinner. Dad had hardly talked to me all day. Things had gone completely back to normal. I was just cargo.

  Dad picked up one of his big books—on linguistics or primates, they all looked equally huge and terrifying—then glanced up like he’d just noticed me. Maybe he was feeling sorry for me, because he gave me a handful of change and said I could buy us something from the vending machines.

  I went down to the end of the hall. I put in some nickels and dimes and got Dad a bag of his favourite potato chips. Then I decided on a Mars bar. I pressed the button, and watched the big corkscrew coil turn. But it stopped too soon and my Mars bar was just hanging there. I thumped the machine, but it wouldn’t fall.

  And suddenly I was angry. It happened to me like that sometimes, a big solar flare of fury inside my head.

&
nbsp; Dad got his chips. That was typical. Dad always got what he wanted. But me, no. I hadn’t wanted to move. I liked Toronto. I liked my friends, and I’d wanted to stay, and Dad hadn’t even asked. He just talked and talked and told me how great it was going to be.

  And now I couldn’t even get a stupid Mars bar. I grabbed the machine by the sides and tried to shake it. It moved a little. I put my weight into it. I was furious. I was like one of those mothers who sees her kid trapped under a car and suddenly has the strength to lift the whole thing. I figured if I could just tilt the machine forwards an inch or so, my chocolate bar would fall loose.

  I got the machine rocking, and then it was rocking too much, and I felt the huge refrigerator weight of the thing pushing back, and I knew it was going to fall on me.

  Two huge hands slammed against the machine and I looked over and saw this enormous guy putting his shoulder to it and pushing it back into place.

  “You coulda been killed, buddy!” he puffed.

  “Geez,” I said, staring stupidly at the machine.

  “These things crush you, you know,” said the guy. “Happened to a cousin of mine in Red Deer.”

  “Really?” I said numbly.

  “Oh yeah, big time. That your Mars bar?”

  I nodded. He reached through the flap, grabbed it, and handed it to me.

  “Have a good night now,” he said, and started plugging his own coins into the machine.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I went back to our room. It took Dad a few seconds to glance up from his book. He probably had a paragraph to finish. “That took a long time,” he said.

  “The vending machine almost fell on me.”

  Dad put down his book. “Were you pushing it?”

  “A bit.” I felt sick. Not just about the close call, but about how furious I’d been.

  “Ben, you should never, never do that!” he said. “Those things can kill you!”

  “You don’t have to get so mad!” I said. Maybe it was delayed shock, but my knees went wobbly and tears came into my eyes. Dad came over and hugged me.

  I was glad he was hugging me, but at the same time I didn’t want his hug because I still felt angry with him.

  Later, after he was asleep, I lay awake for a bit, watching the headlights of the passing cars through the curtains and wondering what life was going to be like in Victoria.

  The next day, instead of leaving at the crack of dawn, Dad let us have a long swim in the pool and then we took a detour off the Trans-Canada to a place called Drumheller where they’d discovered dinosaur bones. After that, it was up into the Rockies. The views were fantastic, and Dad made plenty of stops so I could take pictures.

  On day six, we got to Vancouver and took the ferry across to Victoria. Our house, it turned out, wasn’t actually in the city itself. It was on the outskirts, in the country, because we didn’t want neighbours. Or, as Dad said with a wink, the neighbours didn’t want us.

  The university had found us a place off West Saanich Road. It was mostly farmland, with some pastures where you’d see cows and horses. You could drive a few minutes without seeing a single house.

  “And here we are,” said Dad, pulling into a gravel driveway.

  The place looked kind of sullen and dingy to me. On our old street in Toronto, the houses were red brick, skinny, and three stories tall. This one was wide, but just two stories. The bottom was wood, painted dark green, and the top floor had some kind of pebbly stuff that Dad called stucco.

  “It’s perfect for us,” he said enthusiastically, as we walked to the front door. “Come on, wait till you see your new room.”

  My bedroom really was much bigger than my old one, and there were two bathrooms upstairs, so I wouldn’t have to share with Mom and Dad any more. It was strange, and a bit lonely, walking through all the empty rooms. They had nothing to do with me.

  The only part that wasn’t empty was the downstairs extension, which the university had just finished before we arrived. It still smelled of wood and fresh paint. It was like a little guest house, connected to the kitchen by a door. You walked in and there was a playroom with cushions and a wooden box of blocks and toys and picture books. There was a little red table with matching chairs. There was a kitchenette with its own sink, fridge, hot-plate, and high chair. Beyond that was the bedroom. The chest of drawers was already filled with colourful little T-shirts and shorts, and there were packs of diapers and a pail for the dirty ones. There was a comfy chair, and even a shelf with stuffed animals.

  A colourful mobile hung above the empty crib.

  I was still in my sleeping bag flipping through Popular Mechanics when I heard the sound of a big truck pulling up outside the house, then honking as it backed down our driveway. I ran to my window just to make sure it was really the movers, then out into the hallway in my pyjamas. “Our stuff!” I hollered.

  Dad staggered out in his boxers. “The truck’s here?” “Yeah!” I was thinking: My camera equipment, my records, my bed.

  Dad lurched back into his bedroom and pulled on some pants and a T-shirt. I did the same, and then we were both running down the stairs, throwing open the front door, and rushing out to greet the movers. They already had the back of the truck open and the ramp down.

  We didn’t bother with breakfast. We were too busy telling the guys where our stuff should go. I was watching for my boxes. It seemed like forever since I’d helped pack up my room in Toronto. The guys worked pretty fast, and I was amazed how quickly our entire life was moving from the truck into the new house.

  After a few hours they were done with most of the big stuff and were working on the rest of the boxes. I was unpacking in my room. I’d been worried about my photo enlarger and records, but nothing was broken. And I’d have a bed for my birthday after all! Better still, the movers would be gone in an hour or so, and Dad and I would definitely have time for a swim, and dinner at the pizza place.

  Outside, a car horn gave a couple of honks. I went to the window and saw a taxi pulled up behind the moving van. The driver was taking a suitcase out of the trunk, and then he came around and opened the back door. Inside was Mom.

  “Dad!” I yelled. “Mom’s home!”

  “What?” I heard him call out in surprise.

  I ran downstairs and outside. Mom was walking towards me, beaming. In her arms was a little bundle of blankets. I’d been missing her, but I hadn’t realized just how much until I saw her. With her free hand she pulled me close.

  “Ben,” she said, kissing the top of my head. “Happy birthday, sweetie.”

  “Thanks.” Dad hadn’t even mentioned it yet.

  “You’re early!” Dad said, striding out of the house and kissing her.

  “They thought he was ready, so I got an earlier flight,” Mom said. “I left a message at the department, but I guess you didn’t get it.”

  “I didn’t. Our phone’s not hooked up yet either. So how’s our little gentleman?” Dad asked.

  Mom pulled back the blankets and there in her arms was a sleeping baby chimpanzee.

  He was ugly. His tiny body fit in the crook of Mom’s arm, his head resting on three of her fingers. His skin was all wrinkly. His nose was squashed flat and his jaw stuck way out. Frizzy black hair covered his whole body, except for his face and fingers, chest and toes. He had long skinny arms. His short legs were pulled up, and his toes were so long they looked more like fingers. He wore a little white T-shirt and a diaper and smelled like shampoo and Mom’s perfume. As we watched, he stirred and opened his eyes. They were brown and seemed huge in his small face. He stared at me and Dad, and then up at Mom, as if for reassurance. Mom held him closer.

  “He was a little angel on the plane,” she said. “Not a peep, even when he was awake.”

  “He’ll do just fine,” said Dad, smiling. “If he’s this agreeable all the time, we’ll have no problem with this little guy.”

  I looked from Dad to Mom. They seemed really happy. And I suddenly wondered: Was this how
they brought me home when I was born? When Dad first set eyes on me, had he smiled, just like he was smiling now?

  I looked at the chimp. He was the reason we’d come.

  I’d moved all the way across the country so my parents could be with him.

  So they could teach him how to talk.

  Dad was a behavioural psychologist. That meant he studied the way people acted. Animals too. Dr. Richard Tomlin. In Toronto he taught at the university. A few years back, he did something clever with rats and published lots of articles, which led to invitations to other universities to show people what his rats could do. Everyone got very excited about it.

  Then he got bored with rats and got interested in whether humans were the only animals who could learn language. Dad said there were some scientists in the 1930s who actually tried to teach chimps to speak, but it turned out chimps didn’t have the right kind of tongue or larynx or something, so they couldn’t form human words.

  But Dad knew how smart chimps were, and wanted to see if they could learn American Sign Language, just like deaf people.

  So for the past couple of years he’d been asking the university to get him a chimp and fund the experiment. But even though Dad was a bit of a hotshot, and very good with rats, the university wasn’t so sure it was interested. I knew Dad had been getting frustrated because he talked a lot about how short-sighted the psychology department was, dragging its feet like this.

  But then he got a job offer from the university out here in Victoria. Not only would they give him a big promotion and make him a full professor, but they’d get him a chimp. Dad said yes. I didn’t think he even asked Mom. He certainly didn’t ask me. He would’ve moved us to Tibet if they’d given him a chimp.

  It turned out finding one wasn’t all that easy. You couldn’t just buy one at a pet store. I’ll take the cute little one over there. And it couldn’t be some scraggly old chimp from a zoo. Dad wanted a brand new chimpanzee. A fresh slate; that’s what he’d called it.

  It took about six months. When he finally got the call, I could tell just from his voice that it was good news. After he hung up, I’d never seen him so excited.