Planet of the Apes

by Maurice, Greg Keyes

Genres: Media Tie-In

Synopsis

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Planet of the Apes franchise: an illustrated life story of Caesar, the brave and extraordinary leader of the apes, as told by Maurice, Caesar's best friend. After the events of War for the Planet of the Apes, Caesar's tribe has finally found a safe refuge from the last remnants of the humans who wish to see them wiped out. It comes at a cost, however, as Caesar dies before he can see the apes thrive and prosper in their new home. Maurice, as a gift to Caesar's son, Cornelius, for when he grows older, decides to recount and chronicle Caesar's story so his son can truly know what a unique and brave ape his father was and inspire Cornelius in turn. Caesar's Story is this chronicle and tells the story of Caesar from his earliest days under the care of scientist Will Rodman, as well his life with the ape colony in Muir Woods after the outbreak of the Simian Flu, his interactions with Malcolm and Ellie, the dangerous ape Koba, and his ultimate battle with and imprisonment by the vicious and unstable Colonel. The audiobook also chronicles what happens in between the events of Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, as well as the events between Dawn of and War for the Planet of the Apes. The audiobook includes Maurice's personal thoughts and reflections of his long time spent alongside Caesar and contributions from several other key apes that knew Caesar. The result is a truly one-of-a-kind celebration of the new Planet of the Apes trilogy and the franchise as a whole. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

Release date: October 23, 2018

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Print pages: 256

Sample

To begin with, your father was no fantastical being. He did not spring from the stone of our prison, adult and fully formed. He was not the result of lightning striking a tree. He was not born human.

But he was raised by humans. He was raised as one.

We know his mother was a chimpanzee, and that she was born—as many apes were—in the Forest of Fruit, where the trees bore food of all kinds. She could reach up and pluck a fig, a banana, a durian from the very plants that they grow on. We know much of this from your mother, Cornelia, who was also born in our faraway homeland. It was always warm there, she said, never bitter cold as our home in the north was each winter. Rivers and lakes did not harden; ice never fell from the sky. The birds, the trees, the four-footed creatures were all different than those we know. The air was sweet with the smell of a hundred kinds of flower. Some believe the Forest of Fruit isn’t real, that it was only a dream apes had before the Change. Before we came awake.

But it was real, and it was not a perfect place. Your mother also told of giant cats and snakes, of terrible beasts in rivers and streams, of many other dangers. And there were times when the rains did not come, and the fruit did not grow in abundance. When that happened, apes ate what they could find. Sometimes they hunted and killed for meat, a practice that helped us survive in these lands with very little fruit. The Forest of Fruit was not paradise, but it was the place where the apes of old were born to live, where they knew how to survive and were at home. And free. Not one of us knows where it is. Perhaps we will find it again one day. Perhaps it is lost to us forever.

The greatest danger in the forest was man. Humans killed apes for meat and for fun. They captured us and carried us far away. Some apes were put in cages to be gawked at and taunted. Others—like me—were taught tricks to amuse humans. Some were tortured to discover medicines to help humans to live longer.

We know Caesar’s mother was named Bright Eyes, but not much more. He never knew her. Will—the human who raised Caesar—told him that she had died shortly after he was born. He also did not speak much of this. But from what we know, Bright Eyes was given the same strange medicine as we, the breath that went into us, woke us up, made us Changed from what we were before. And Caesar was a child inside of her when this happened.

Caesar was the first of us to be born Changed. As you were, Cornelius. As all apes are now born. Caesar had green eyes as a result of the medicine, and they were one of his most striking features.

He did not know that he was Changed at the time, of course. Caesar did not know any other apes. He only knew humans. And as strange as it might sound to you, these humans loved him, and he loved them. Will was his father, and Caroline his mother. Will’s father, Charles, was his grandfather. This part of the story was hard for me to understand; the humans who kept me were not so kind and treated me only as an animal. For others—such as Koba—it was impossible to believe. Many apes hold only hatred in their hearts for humans, for good reason.

But I believed Caesar. I came to see that as not all apes are good, and not all humans are bad. We are, unfortunately, far too similar.

Your father was raised much as a human child. He wore human clothing, he played with the same toys as human children. He had a room in a human house full of wonderful things, and a window through which he observed the world outside. But over time, he began to understand that other humans did not see him as one of them. One day, through his window, he saw human children playing. He wanted to join them. But when he tried to play with them, they were afraid, and their father hurt Caesar. They didn’t see a human boy, but something else, something they didn’t like.

Because he was hurt, his human father took Caesar to a doctor, and where the doctor was he saw other apes for the first time. He wasn’t sure what they were. They looked something like him, but nothing else about them seemed right. The doctor was Caroline, and she would eventually become his human mother.

I cannot tell you everything your father felt when his parents first took him to the forest across the Orange Bridge. When I asked him, he simply said, “Free.” But I know he loved that place, and I know how I felt when I first entered it. I felt small and large at the same time, and content, like being able to finally scratch an itch I had never been able to reach before. His human parents took him there many times, over the years of his childhood. But always they returned to the house in the City, which to Caesar felt smaller each day.

And each day he was less sure of what he was, where he fit in. When he finally asked Will this question, his father took him to Gen-Sys Laboratories, the place where Will worked. Where Caesar was born and his mother died.

Something happened after that, another thing Caesar didn’t like to discuss. Looking from his window, he saw his grandfather, Charles, threatened by the human who had hurt him as a child. Charles was old and sick. He forgot things and sometimes didn’t know what he was doing. But he was kind and loving. A good human.

Seeing Charles threatened, Caesar acted as any loyal grandchild might. He attacked the man. He bit off his finger. He defended his human family, just as he later defended us.

For the humans, that was not excusable. An ape who hurt a human, whatever the reason, was either a dead ape or an ape in a cage.

So they took him to where I lived, and Rocket lived, and many others, where we were forced to stay in cages. And it was soon after that he understood something that changed everything.

For a long time, he’d thought of himself as human. But he also knew that other humans didn’t think of him that way.

Now he understood that Will and Caroline didn’t think of him that way, either.

That was a hard lesson. But he would soon learn an even harder one.

The humans called it a shelter. I knew the hand sign for that word when I arrived, and even then I knew it was the wrong word for the place. Prison would have been a better one. It was dark, and it stank. Everything about it was wrong and unpleasant. Our cages were small, but there was one large room for us to move about in. In it was a tree that was not a tree; it wasn’t alive. No wind came through its branches. No birds nested in the crooks of its boughs. The walls were painted to resemble the world outside, but they were walls. Only the sunlight was real, and it came in from high above.

The humans in the shelter were not good, but one in particular was crueler than the others. His name was Dodge. He loved to hurt us, to see our pain, fear, and confusion. He had a sparking stick that he struck us with. It was painful beyond belief. It was like a small death to be hit by it. Sometimes he touched it to our cages, which were all connected, and hurt us all at once. What a noise the chimps made when he did that! Chimps are excitable still, but they were even more so then.

I was used to punishment, and rewards. That’s how they trained me in the circus. I did most of what I did out of fear of punishment. But in the shelter, punishment often seemed to come for no reason, or at least no reason I could understand. It was just a part of life in that place.

None of us was born in the shelter. We all came from elsewhere. Some of us were rescued from even worse places. Some—like me—were discarded by humans who no longer wanted us. I mostly kept to myself. That is the nature of orangutans—we prefer solitude. In the Forest of Fruit, adult male orangutans avoid even their own kind, sometimes for many days.

Most of the apes in the shelter were chimpanzees. Chimpanzees do not like solitude. They crave company; they need it. As terrible as that place was, the chimps had an order, a society, that gave them some measure of solace.

Their ruler when Caesar arrived was Rocket. He had been the leader for a while. When a new chimp appeared, Rocket quickly let them know who was boss. It usually didn’t come to much—some shouted threats, a little shoving. The newcomers understood what was happening and gave in quickly.

I wasn’t a chimp, so Rocket didn’t care about me one way or the other. I would climb to the least crowded corner of the place and was mostly left alone to watch, to think my slow, patient thoughts. I was an observer, not a participant.

The only ape Rocket truly feared was Buck. Buck was a gorilla, and he was alone. While the rest of us were free of our cages, Buck remained in his. Gorillas are more like chimps than orangs. They like company, they like grooming and doing things together. Buck had no one to groom him, no family. And so he became angry. He was angry all the time. Rocket worried about what Buck might do if he ever got out. So did I.

And there we were, when Caesar came. Three kinds of apes, different from one another, not understanding that we were of a kind. Chimps were chimps; orangs were orangs; gorillas were gorillas. And we had as little to do with one another as possible.

When Caesar first arrived in the shelter, he was wearing clothes, like a human. I wasn’t surprised. When I was in the circus I often wore clothes. Humans thought it was funny, although at the time I never understood why. Later, after the a. . .