Regarding Bonobos

About the Book

As air-born aids and other plagues decimate the human population, genetic engineering with the insertion of simian genes into the human genome has created a Homo Sapiens more suited to survival. Before the complete collapse of society in the mid 21st Century, a secret organization left over from the age of profligacy

produces a true species from a mix of hominid and pongid genes, apparently highly intelligent bonobos, designed for jungle warfare, but there is more to them than that. They thrive, and over a period of about three hundred years, they number well over a million.

    ----------------------------

They knew next to nothing of their beginnings. The Katean monks who raised the first twenty-four fuzzy babies never passed on much of whatever they knew, but there were a few notes in the personal diary of the Abbot: “God has given us a unique task, that of caring for a new form of his children who seem, withal, bright and healthy and undoubtedly possessed of souls.”

The Abbot told of receiving fourteen furry young creatures and being left to raise them as well as the monks could. The youngsters were about eighteen months old and were already beginning to talk, so there was no question about their intelligence. One large helicopter had descended onto the clearing outside the walls of the monastery and a uniformed woman handed down the diapered toddlers to a uniformed man on the ground. They said not a word, except to murmur reassurances to the babies, but took off, never to be seen again. A package was left with the children. Diapers. On top of the package was a book. It explained that the orphans were limited in their vocal capabilities and, in order to fill out meanings in their speech, should learn and use ASL. The book was a primer on sign language.

The Abbot speculated about the conditions back in the United States and concluded that what they were seeing was a last gasp of a secret military branch of the government. Secret divisions always become accountable to none, with their own laws and morality. This one was remarkable in its tenacity, since all other civic order had broken down.

Perhaps these people were saving these hybrids in defiance of orders to destroy them. The Kateans would be the most likely of all groups to respond to the challenge and accept the responsibility of raising a new species (If, indeed, that’s what they were).      

They should be given a proper education, both religious and secular, and so they were schooled along with the native children. In time, of course, they grew up and had children of their own and moved out into the jungle world around them and they adapted and flourished. They traded products of the forest with the farmer-villagers, sent their kids to school at the monastery, and all was well for many years and a number of generations. Homo Sapiens was still being decimated by the plague, but in that tiny corner of the world more survived than would have been expected.

The population of Belize was composed not only of Africans from Jamaica, but of Spanish, of English, and also the descendants of the Mayans. The Mayans had the best survival rate, and had gradually gone back to many of the ancient ways and mixed the oldest gods with the older and insisted on calling the hairy people Zemis—ancient forest spirits. And so Zemis they became. Their numbers more than doubled with each generation, and soon groups began to migrate to other parts of the land, and they all prospered.

   ----------------------

 ------------------------------- It wasn’t Juan’s fault that he was a freak, a hairless ape, but not a grounder, either. He had a full range of speech capabilities, just like a human, and did not have to use sign language in conjunction with vocalizations in the way that normal Zemis did. He was certainly blessed with the superior strength and agility of a Zemi, with graspin

About the Author

Richard Loehle has a sound and solid respect for coincidence, having had the doors open to becoming an artist, but not to the sciences, in which he was equally interested. With scholarships and opportunities all along the way, he hurried through art school and into the commercial art field in Chicago. Soon he was doing illustrations for Ziff Davis, publisher of Amazing Stories, and his first full color work appeared on the cover of that magazine. Along the way he picked up numerous fine art honors, such as prizes in national competitions and inclusion in museum and private collections. He and his wife, also an artist, were featured on the national television show Prime Time.. Over time stories needing to be written clamored for expression. “Regarding Bonobos” insisted on being the first. He is now expressing images of the mind with words instead of pictures