Dexter Mount Sinai was born in New York, Earth in 228 AxY. His mother was a yellow carded Chim who belonged to a professional household group that owned a building in Greenwich Village. Mt. Sinai himself was a product of a highly innovative uplift research project run jointly by Cornell University and Mt. Sinai Medical Center. Despite genetic assays and fetal monitoring, Mt. Sinai was born with severe speech aphasia and dyslexia. Dexter Mt. Sinai is unable to decipher long strings of visual symbols, can pronounce a few dozen words with great difficulty, and seldom signs more than two or three words at a time. Due to his profound disability, Mt. Sinai has always received special educational services. Prior to his assignment with the Brothers of the Night diplomatic mission starting in 253, he was a resident at the Center for Extraordinary Uplift Disabilities in San Francisco, Earth.
Despite his severe speech aphasia and dyslexia, Dexter Mt. Sinai understands signed and spoken speech. He is also mechanically inclined, so long as the problem requires little mathematics or symbolic manipulation. In addition, he is a good cook, enjoys music, appreciates modern art, and has a well deserved reputation as a social observer and critic.
When he was twenty-six the Brothers of the Night requested Mt. Sinai's services as an Embassy servant. To this day no one but Brethren diplomatic officers know why the Brothers of the Night opted to honor the august diplomatic custom of employing the uplift failures of ones hosts. David Dos Pasos' and Mt. Sinai's writings clearly confirm that the Brothers of the Night find dealing with outsiders of any kind very stressful. Bringing in an alien servant --especially an exotic Terragen --must have required an heroic effort at self-control of the part of the Embassy staff. Mt. Sinai served in the Embassy commune of the Brothers of the Night for twenty-three years, until the Brethren withdrew their mission after the surprise attack on Earth in 277.
In cooperation with his uplift case worker, David Dos Pasos, Mt. Sinai has since written extensively on his experiences --both as a Neo-chimpanzee cruelly stigmatized for his disability and as an intimate friend (and intimate enemy) of the Brothers of the Night. Nor should Mt. Sinai be dismissed as an authoritorial voice in his own right. Though it is difficult in the extreme for Mt. Sinai to actually produce meaningful utterances, he is an accomplished listener. By interacting with computerized expert systems he is capable of great "conversational" and editorial finesse. There is no doubt that Dexter Mt. Sinai contributes his own distinctive voice to any Dos Pasos -Mt. Sinai text.
The question of espionage always comes up in connection with Dexter Mt. Sinai. Certainly his writings give us a rare glimpse into the 'private' lives of the Brethren. However, he never hints at contact with Terragen intelligence. Nevertheless, we infer that he must have been of some service to the Terragen government, since they took the unusual step of issuing the severely disabled Neo-chimp a green reproduction card authorizing two children.
This essay first appeared in the New Yorker Atlantic Monthly.
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