“Excuse me?”
“Your students; they’re bickering over who broke a chair, or told a lie. Is—is this Stella retarded?”
“Huh?” Jan said. Then her eyes lit up and she laughed. “Oh, no!” She covered her face. “Stella is a gorilla.”
He looked embarrassed. “A gorilla. Of course.”
She brushed the hair from her eyes. “A five-year-old lowland gorilla, to be precise. We’ve been expecting her to lie about something for quite a while. Our first gorilla, Jonathan, started lying at roughly the same age. It’s a good sign—it means the animal can displace events. Stella is using language to distort reality. She’s abstracting.”
“Yes,” McKibben said, searching his memory. “Nimson mentioned that. You communicate with the apes through Ameslan—American Sign Language, correct?”
She nodded.
“Extraordinary.” H
