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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 1
DAY ONE
Waking . . . Strange . . . Dream about trees? Oh, come back! Come . . . Lost . . . But so strange .
Eva was lying on her back. That was strange enough. She always slept facedown. Now she only knew that she wasn't by the sensation of upness and downness--she couldn't actually feel the pressure of the mattress against her back. She couldn't feel anything. She couldn't be floating? Still dreaming?
When she tried to feel with a hand if the mattress was there, it wouldn't move. Nothing moved! Stuck!
In panic she forced her eyes open. It seemed a huge effort. Slowly the lids rose.
Dim white blur. A misty hovering shape, pale at the center, dark at the edges.
"Darling?"
With a flood of relief Eva dragged herself out of the nightmare. Mom's voice. The mist unblurred a little, and the shape was Mom's face. She could see the blue eyes and the mouth now.
She tried to smile, but her lips wouldn't move.
"It's all right, darling. You're going to be all right."
There was something terrible in the voice.
"Do you know me, darling? Can you understand what I'm saying? Close your eyes and open them again."
The lids moved slow as syrup. When she opened them she could see better, Mom's face almost clear, but still just blur beyond.
"Oh, darling!"
Relief and joy in the voice now but something else still, underneath.
"You're going to be all right, darling. Don't worry. You've been unconscious for . . . for a long time. Now you're going to start getting better. You aren't really paralyzed. You can't move anything except your eyes yet, but you will soon, little by little, until you're running about again, good as new."
Eva closed her eyes. A picnic? Yes, on the seashore--Dad standing at the wave edge, holding Grunt's hand on one side and Bobo's on the other, all three shapes almost black against the glitter off the ripples. And after that? Nothing.
"Is she asleep?" whispered Mom.
As Eva opened her eyes she heard a faint electronic mutter, and this time she could see clearly enough to notice a thing like a hearing aid tucked in under the black coil of hair by Mom's left ear.
"I don't know if you can remember the accident, darling. We're all right too, Dad and me, just a bit bruised. Grunt broke his wrist--the chimps got loose in the car, you see--on the way back from the seashore. Can you remember? One blink for yes and two for no, all right?"
Eva opened and closed the heavy lids, twice.
"Oh, darling, it's so wonderful to have you back! I've only got five minutes, because I mustn't wear you out, and then they'll put you back to sleep for a while. Look, this is a toy they've made for you, until you're really better."
She held up a small black keyboard.
"They're going to start letting you move your left hand in a day or two," she said. "If everything goes well, I mean. So you can use this to do things for yourself, like switching the shaper off and on. What's the code for that?"
She'd asked the question to the air. The mutter answered. She pressed a few keys, and a zone hummed out of sight at the foot of the bed. At the same time a mirror in the ceiling directly above Eva's head began to move, showing her first a patch of carpet and then the corner of some kind of machine that stood close by the foot of the bed and then the zone as it sprang to life. It must have been a news program or something, an immense crowd stretching away along a wide street, banners, the drifting trails of tear gas, cries of rage . . .
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 2
"We don't want that," said Mom and switched off, then listened as the little speaker muttered at her ear.
"All right," she said. "Darling, they say it's time for me to go. It's been so wonderful . . . I never believed . . . I'll just open the blind for you, okay?, so that you've got something to look at next time you wake up . . .
Eva had closed her eyes to answer yes, but the lids didn't seem to want to open. She heard the slats of the blind rattle up and a slight whine directly overhead as the mirror tilted to show her the window.
"Oh, darling," said Mom's voice, farther away now. There was something in it-had been all along, in spite of the happiness in the words. A difficulty, a sense of effort . . .
A door opened and closed. For a while Eva lay with her eyes shut, expecting to drift off to sleep, back into the dream, but stopped by the need to try and puzzle out what Mom had told her. There'd been an accident in the car on the way back from the picnic, caused by the chimps getting loose. Grunt probably-he was always up to something. She'd been unconscious since then, and now she was lying here, in some kind of hospital probably, unable to move. But it was going to be all right. They were going to let her start moving her left hand in a day or two, and then later on the rest of her, little by little . . .
Really? Mom wouldn't have lied-she never did. If it had been Dad, now . . .
Her forehead tried to frown but wouldn't move. She'd heard of people being paralyzed after accidents, and then parts of them getting better, but the doctors letting it happen . . . ?
And the keyboard and the mirror-that showed it was going to take a long time, or they wouldn't have bothered . . .
Something' was dragging her down toward darkness. She willed herself awake. She fought to open her eyes. They wouldn't. But almost . . .
A reason to open them . . . something to see . . . the . window, Mom had said. She must look out of the window, see . . .
Suckingly the lids heaved up. A blur of bright light, clear, clearing, and now a white ceiling with a large mirror tilted to show the window. The light dazzled. After the long darkness it was almost like pain, but Eva forced herself to stare through it, waiting for her eyes to adapt to the glare. Now there was mist still, but it was in the mirror. An enormous sky, pale, pale blue. Light streaming sideways beneath it, glittering into diamonds where it struck the windows of the nearer buildings. High rise beyond high rise, far into the distance, all rising out of mist, the familiar, slightly brownish floating dawn mist that you always seemed to get in the city at the start of a fine day. She must be a long way up in a high rise herself, she could see so far. Later on, as the city's half-billion inhabitants began to stir about the streets the mist would rise, thinning as it rose, becoming just a haze but stopping you from seeing more than the first few dozen buildings. But now under the clear dawn sky in the sideways light of a winter sunrise Eva could see over a hundred kilometers, halfway perhaps to the farther shore where the city ended. She felt a sudden surge of happiness, of contentment to have awakened on such a perfect morning. It was like being born again. A morning like the first morning in the world. In the room beyond, a door had opened and closed, and Eva's mother had come through. Her face was lined and her shoulders sagged with effort. There were four other people in the room. A man with a blond beard, graying slightly, sat watching a shaper zone that showed the scene Eva's mother had just left, the small figure on the white hospital bed ringed by its attendant machines and lit by the sunrise beyond the window. A younger man and woman in lab coats sat at computer consoles with a battery of VDUs in front of them, and an older woman in a thick, stained sweater and lopsided skirt stood at their shoulders, watching the displays.
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 3
Eva's mother settled herself onto the arm of the first man's chair and put her hand into his.
"Well done," he whispered.
There was silence for a minute.
"She doesn't want to go to sleep," said the man at the console. "Trying to get her eyes open."
"Let her," said the older woman.
The shape in the zone raised its eyelids. Clear brown eyes stared up. Slowly the wide pupils contracted.
"She knew me," said Eva's mother. "At least she knew me."
The older woman turned at her voice and came over to stand beside her, looking down at the zone.
"Yes, she certainly knew you, Mrs. Adamson," she said. "You were the first thing she saw and recognized. That was essential. Now she is seeing a familiar view. That can do nothing but good."
"If only she could smile or something. If only I could feel she was happy."
"I cannot let her use her face muscles for a long while yet. She must not attempt to speak until most of her main bodily functions are firmly reimplanted. But for happiness . . . Ginny! A microshot of endorphin. And then put her back to sleep."
Eva's mother started to sob. The older woman patted clumsily at her shoulder.
"Don't cry; Mrs. Adamson," she said. "It's going to be all right. We've brought it off, in spite of everything. Your daughter's all there."
She turned and went back to the control area. The man rose and followed her. They stood watching the displays and talking in low voices. But Eva's mother sat motionless, staring at the zone, searching for a signal, the hint of a message, while beyond the imaged window the image of sunrise brightened into the image of day.
DAY SIX
Waking again . . . Still strange . . . Stranger each time, more certainly strange . . . But surely the dream had been there, unchanged. The trees . . . Lost . . . Loster than ever . . .
Already Eva had gotten into a waking habit. She would keep her eyes shut and try to remember something about the dream and fail. Then she would feel with her left hand for the keyboard and check that she'd left the mirror angled toward the window and that nobody had come in and changed it while she'd been asleep. And then, still with her eyes shut, she'd guess what time of day or night it was--they let her stay awake for more than an hour now, and then put her back to sleep for a while and woke her up again, so it might be any time--and what the weather was. And last of all she'd open her eyes and see if she'd guessed right.
First, what time? Not where were the hands on the clock, but where was the sun? Up there. It didn't seem like guessing. She could sense the presence of the sun, almost like a pressure, a weight, despite the layers of high rise above her. The weather, though? She didn't feel so sure about that, but it had been sunny the last few wakings, so a fine day, late morning . . .
She opened her eyes.
Dead right. The sun up there. She could tell by the stretching shadows under the sills of the high rise of the university library. The city haze was more than halfway up the nearer high rises, and as it thickened with distance it seemed to become deeper, so that only the tops of the farther buildings showed here and there, like rocks in a sea, and beyond that they vanished altogether. Nice guess, Eva--only it wasn't a guess. Funny how sure she felt about the sun. She couldn't remember that happening before the accident.
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 4
Next, she practiced using the keyboard. Mom had called it a toy, but if so it was an extremely expensive one. A very clever gadget indeed. It lay strapped in place beneath her hand, and the keys were so arranged that she could reach all of them. It didn't just do the things Mom had said, like moving the mirror and switching the shaper off and on and changing channels--its chief trick was that she could use it to talk. Only very slowly, so far. First you pressed a couple of keys to set it to the "Talk" mode, and then you tapped out what you wanted to say in ordinary English spelling, and then you coded for "Tone," and last of all you pressed the "Speak" bar, and it spoke.
It spoke not with a dry electronic rasp but with a human voice, Eva's real voice, taken from old home-shaper discs and sorted into all its possible sounds and stored in a memory to be used any way she wanted. It was tricky, like learning to play the violin or something. Practice wasn't just getting her hand to know the keys and then work faster and faster; it was also putting in a sentence and then getting the voice to say it in different ways ("Mary had a little lamb!" "Mary had a little lamb?" "Mary had a leetle lamb.").
Dad said it had been especially built for her by scientists in the Communications Faculty. His blue eyes, paler and harder than Mom's, had sparkled with excitement while he showed her its tricks--it was just his sort of toy. Eva, to be honest, had been less excited--okay, the scientists were friends of Dad's--the Chimp Pool was technically part of the university, and this room was in the Medical Faculty--and they'd been amused to see what they could do. Even so it must mean, surely, that nobody expected her to start speaking properly for a long time--months. Years? Ever? But Mom had said . . .
No she hadn't. She'd talked about running around, not about speaking.
The thought came and went as Eva practiced, until suddenly she got irritated with her slowness and switched the shaper on instead. A thriller of some sort--a woman desperately pushing her way in the wrong direction along a crowded traveler--not that. A flivver-rally, the sky patterned with bright machines, the buzz of thousands of rotors--not that. A beach, kilometers of shoreline invisible under human bodies, the white surf bobbing with human heads--not that. People, people, people. Ah, trees . . .
Only a cartoon, actually, one she used to watch a lot when she was smaller, because of the heroine's name. It was called Adam and Eve and the plot was always the same. Adam and Eve were the first people, and they were king and queen of the jungle. Adam ruled the animals, and Eve ruled the plants. Their enemy was the Great Snake. Adam and Eve were trying to drive him out of their jungle, so that it would be safe for them to have children, but Adam was always getting into trouble--usually a trap set by the Great Snake--because of his arrogance and impulsiveness, and then Eve had to get him out of it by her plant magic. It was rather wishy-washy but pretty to look at. All around the world hundreds of millions of little girls waited in ecstasy for the moment when Eve would begin her plant magic. Dad said the company spent huge amounts on research to make sure they put in what little girls wanted.
Now Eva watched, pleased by the greenness and the shapes of leaf and branch. Eve was following a trail through the jungle. Adam was in a mess somewhere, no doubt. The plants moved twigs and tendrils to show Eve the way he'd gone. She came to a cave mouth. She put a seed in the earth and caused a flower to spring up, a single white cup like a shaper dish. A huge white moth came out of the cave to drink at the nectar from the flower, and then guided Eve down into the darkness, using the trail of pollen that had stuck to Adam's feet as he came swishing through the jungle . . .
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 5
Eva lost patience and switched off. It was funny, she thought, these sudden surges of annoyance--twice now this morning. She never used to be like that. She didn't feel like practicing with her voice again, so for something to do she told the mirror to go back and show her the view. She watched the reflections as it swung to its new position, mostly carpet and the corners of things, a piece of the cart, one of the machines that monitored and fed her and took her waste away, the air-conditioner, the window. The forest of high rises, the millions of people, people, people . . .
The crammed streets, the crammed beaches, the crammed skies-they were only a fraction of them. Most people stayed in their rooms all day, just to get away from one another. A lot of them never went out at all. Their world was four walls and their shaper zone. Dad said that the shaper companies were the real rulers of the world. The people told them what they wanted and the companies gave it to them and nothing else mattered. The view from the window was beautiful, until you thought about the people.
Eva lost patience again and told the mirror to go somewhere else. The only place it knew was the visitor's chair. She watched as it swung--the air-conditioner, the machine, the cart, the blank zone, another machine, the chair . . .
The long way around--it could have gone straight across the bed . . .
Why . . . ?
They didn't want her to see the bed!
That note in Mom's voice, the effort, the sorrow. The keyboard, the trouble they'd taken. The way they'd set the mirror. The accident. You can get very badly smashed in an accident.
"What a pretty baby!" strangers used to say. "What a lovely little girl!" Later, just looks and smiles that said the same--glances and stares from boys when she came into a new class. She'd had Mom's oval face but Dad's high cheekbones, eyes a darker blue than either of them, long black gleaming hair, straight nose, full mouth . . . She'd moved like a dancer, easily, fallen without thought into graceful poses . . .
No!
But she had to know, to see. Urgently she moved the mirror again, back to the window. It swung the whole way around, of course. She tried confusing it, stopping it, giving it fresh instructions before it had finished a movement. No good . . .
The door opened and shut, and Mom was standing by the bed. She was pale. Her mass of hair was a mess, with a lot of gray showing in the glossy black. There were hard lines down beside her nostrils. She looked as though she hadn't slept for a year. Her smile wasn't real.
"Hello, my darling," she whispered. "I'm sorry I'm late. How are you today?"
She bent and kissed Eva on her numb forehead. A strand of her hair trailed across Eva's face. It didn't tickle, because the face was numb too, but Eva automatically closed that eye to let it pass. Mom turned away to get the tall stool so that she could sit by the bed where Eva could see her directly. Eva's eyelids still moved rather sluggishly, so she didn't open the shut one at once.
Hey!
She opened it and closed the other one. Then the first again. Mom had come back now and slid her hand under the bedclothes to grasp Eva's own hand.
"What are you doing, you funny girl?"
Eva answered the cool grip with a squeeze, but she could feel Mom's jumpiness, and hear the false note in the lightness she tried to put into her voice. Her hand was wrong too. Too small. Deep in the nightmare now, Eva stared up into Mom's questioning eyes. They were wrong too, something different about the color. She forced herself to close one eye again and then the other, squinting inwardly as she did so.
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 6
Her nose was gone.
Most of the time you don't see your nose at all; but if you shut one eye and look sideways, there it is, that fuzzy hummock, too close to focus. It was gone. At the lower rim of vision she could see the vague blur of a cheek and at the top the darker fringe of an eyebrow, much more noticeable- much more there-than it used to be . . .
Mom wasn't even pretending to smile now.
Eva closed both eyes and willed the nightmare into day. The accident. Her whole face must have been so badly smashed that they couldn't rebuild it, or not yet anyway. They were keeping it numb so that it didn't hurt. Her jaw and mouth must be so bad that she wouldn't be able to speak right for ages--never perhaps--so they'd made her her voice box instead. They didn't want her to see herself in the mirror . . .
She wriggled her fingers out of Mom's grip and slowly found the right keys. No point in fussing with tones. She pressed the "Speak" bar.
"Let me see," said her voice, dead flat.
"Darling . . ." croaked Mom.
A whisper rustled in the speaker by her ear. She stopped to listen. Eva pressed out another message.
"Let me see. Or I'll go mad. Wondering."
"She's right," said Mom to the air. "No, it's too late . . . No."
The murmur started again. Eva gripped Mom's hand again and closed her eyes. Why was the hand so small? Had her own hand . . . The thumb was all wrong! Why hadn't she noticed? It was . . .
Without her touching the keys, the mirror motor whined. She kept her eyes closed until it stopped.
"I love you, darling," said Mom. "I love you."
Eva willed her eyes to open.
For an instant all she seemed to see was nightmare. Mess. A giant spiderweb, broken and tangled on the pillows, with the furry black body of the spider dead in the middle of it. And then the mess made sense.
She closed her right eye and watched the brown left eye in the mirror close as she did so. The web--it wasn't broken--was tubes and sensor wires connecting the machines around the bed to the pink-and-black thing in the center. She stared. Her mind wouldn't work. She couldn't think, only feel--feel Mom's tension, Mom's grief, as much as her own amazement. Poor Mom--her lovely blue-eyed daughter . . . Must do something for Mom. She found the right keys.
"Okay," said her voice. "It's okay, Mom."
"Oh, my darling," said Mom and started to cry. That was okay too. Mom cried easy, usually when the worst was over. Eva stared at the face in the mirror. She'd recognized it at once, but couldn't give it a name. Then it came. Carefully she pressed the keys. She used the tone control to sound cheerful.
"Hi, Kelly," said her voice.
Kelly was--had been--a young female chimpanzee.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 7
Eva had grown up with chimps.
As more and more people crammed into the world, needing more and more land for cities and crops, so the animals had died out. Most of the great wild jungles were gone, and the savannahs that used to cover half a continent. Here and there a few patches of jungle remained, among mountains too steep to use, or stretches of bleak and barren upland unsuitable for the energy fields that filled most of the old hot deserts, or offshore waters where fish farms for some reason wouldn't flourish, but even these were always being nibbled away as somebody found a new method of exploiting them. And anyway, the wild animals that had been crowded into those pockets had destroyed them by their numbers or become diseased or just seemed to lose interest in living in a world like that.
The big animals vanished first, elephants and giraffes, gorillas and orangs, whales and dolphins. Others hung on in the patches and crannies people left for them by mistake or on purpose. A few actually throve because living in a world full of people suited them in ways they could adapt to--there were no eagles anymore, but you could see kestrels any day in the city, nesting among the high rises or hovering in the updrafts between them, living off mice and sparrows and other small creatures, which in turn lived off the scraps that people littered around. There were rats, of course, and wasps and city pigeons and starlings and so on, but that was all.
There'd been zoos for a while, but what was the point of going to see a few sad old elephants in an enclosure when you could go to a shaper park and walk among the shapes of an elephant herd, life-sized, wallowing in the shape of a mud pool while the shape of a lion stalked the shape of an eland beyond (all stored on old tapes, made before the last savannahs had gone)? And at home there were wild-life programs on the shaper, either old tapes or live from the little patches of jungle and desert that still were left. You could have them in your living room, hear their screams and songs, watch their hunting and mating. They weren't life-sized, of course, and you couldn't smell them, and when they killed and ate one another, the blood disappeared from your carpet as soon as you switched channels. Besides, a real rhinoceros, living the life it was made for, needs a dozen square kilometers. A taped rhinoceros only needs a few cubic centimeters. So it was all very tidy and sensible, just right for a world crammed full of people. That's what people had thought, until it was too late. And that is why there were only the chimps left.
Chimps were different. Chimps were a special case because they were so close to humans, our cousins but not us. It was worth keeping real chimps alive for research you couldn't do on humans, a pool of chimps big enough to breed from, so that there were animals to spare for scientists to use. Of course, now that they'd lost all the other big animals, now that they'd found that shapings, however solid-seeming, weren't really a substitute, people had become interested in real chimps. More than interested-obsessed, almost. Easily the most popular commercials on the shaper were for a soft drink called Honeybear that used live chimps dressed up as people. All the cities had branches of the International Chimp Pool where you could go and see a few chimps in big cages. But the main sections of the Pool were right here, part of the university, and Eva's dad was Director of Primate Zoology, in charge of research. So Eva had grown up among chimps.
In fact, she'd been one of Dad's research projects. Of course, she'd met humans her own age because Mom and Dad, like other parents, put their child into playgroups so that she would learn to socialize, but Eva had always felt just as at home among chimps. In some ways more, in fact--she'd been making chimp chatter before she said her first human word, and before she was three Dad had been using her to help him understand how the chimps' minds were working. He knew almost everything there was to know about them, from the outside, but Eva could joke with their jokes, feel with their feelings, see why some simple-to-humans problem baffled them when they could solve trickier-looking problems almost at once.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 8
Of course, Mom and Dad had needed to be careful. A small chimp is enormously stronger than a human baby; it's even smarter for the first few months; but Eva had soon learned how to behave, how to use the grunts and gestures that meant "You're the boss" and "Please" and "Sorry, didn't mean it," and so on. She'd gotten along with chimps pretty well, always.
And now she was one herself. Okay.
She felt a sort of mild amazement. All her feelings were calm, a bit dreamy. They must be pumping something into her bloodstream, she reckoned, to control her shock and rejection. This must be real panic time for them out there, whoever they were who whispered into the little speaker in Mom's ear. Anyway, there were questions to ask. She pressed keys.
"How . . . Z"
No need to say any more with Mom. With Dad you'd have had to spell the question right out, but Mom was used to hints and garblings because she worked in the Housing Bureau, helping ordinary people straighten out ordinary problems like back rent or rowdy neighbors or trying to get away with an unlicensed pregnancy.
"It's something called neuron memory, darling," said Mom. "Dad says you'll have learned about it at school, so you probably know more than me. You were in an irreversible coma after the accident, and Joan Pradesh heard about it and said she'd try and . . . and do this, if we wanted. She's never done a human before, you see. It was a risk, she said, but we thought, in the end . . . well . . . your poor body, it was so broken, and just lying there . . . anyway, we said yes. And it's worked. That's marvelous, isn't it? But now you've got to be very patient and just lie and wait for all the connections to strengthen, one after another. You're there. You're joined up. But the connections aren't strong enough to use yet. Have I got that right?"
She'd asked the question to the air. The speaker began its whisper.
Neuron memory, thought Eva. Joan Pradesh. Of course. And yes, she had studied it at school last year: The thing is, you aren't just a lot of complicated molecules bundled together inside a skin-you're that too, but that's not what makes you you. What you are is a pattern, an arrangement, different from any other pattern that ever was or will be. Your pattern began to grow from the moment you were conceived, but the things that make you so sure you are you came later: your discoveries of the world, from your first blurred peerings with your baby eyes, and all your thoughts and imaginings and dreams and memories make up that pattern, and are kept there by the neurons in your brain that have sent their wriggling axons and dendrites branching and joining and passing messages to one another through the incredible complex networks they have grown into. What old Professor Pradesh, Joan's father, had found was that the pattern actually "remembers" how it got there; and given the right treatment and an "empty" brain, it can be persuaded to go through the whole process over again. Professor Pradesh had made his discovery with very simple creatures, flatworms mainly, but Joan had carried on the research until she was working with mammals, all the way up to chimps. And now, humans.
Eva pressed a few keys.
"How long?" said her voice.
"Two hundred and thirty-eight days."
It was the wrong answer, for once. Even so, Eva's mind juddered with the thought. Eight whole months gone from your life, blank! Of course, it would take that long for the pattern to grow-in the first Eva it had taken almost fourteen years.
"No," she said. "How long till?"
"Sorry," said Mom. "It was just . . .
Of course. Mom knew the exact count of days. She'd felt each of them grind through her, never knowing if the risk would be worth it or if she'd get no more than part of her daughter back or perhaps just a mumbling kind of nobody trapped in Kelly's body. No wonder she looked so much older. The speaker whisper stopped. Mom nodded.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 9
"Joan's been saying you mustn't try and start waking muscles up before they're ready. You must try not even to think about it. Just let it happen. She wasn't really ready for you to find out what . . . what's happened, but now you have found out she's probably going to change her plans and start letting you move your face muscles: She didn't want to before because you'd have tried to talk . . .
The whisper started again. Eva lay looking at the face in the mirror. Me, she thought. Not Kelly, me. Good-bye, blue eyes, good-bye soft pale skin, good-bye, nose. Perhaps Kelly had been pretty-pretty to another chimp. Except that chimps didn't seem to think like that, judging by the way the males used to go mad about moth-eaten old Rosie when she was in season . . .
The brown eyes peered down in the way you might gaze at an animal. Was there a glimmer there? Eva, inside?
Mom sighed and squared her shoulders, ready to explain yet more, but Eva closed her eyes. She was tired, tired of newness and strangeness and the world of people. She made her voice say "No." Not enough. With an effort she chose more keys. All she wanted to do was hide, vanish, creep away into dark green shadows.
"Sleep now, please," said her voice.
They let her go gently. Her last thought was to wonder what had happened to Kelly, the real Kelly, the one who used to live in this furry skin. Where was she now?
DAY SEVEN
Waking again . . . The dream . . . Keep it. Hold on. Hold on . . . Waking.
Perhaps they'd let her wake gently, so that the dream had floated up with her almost at the surface, or perhaps it was just the idea of holding, because that was one of the things in the dream, but at any rate Eva awoke and found that this time she could really remember what she'd been dreaming. It was still very strange, not like any of the dreams she usually had. There was no Story, no adventures, only the idea, the images, the feelings--herself, moving among branches, reaching with long arms, swinging, holding . . . Holding with her feet if she chose.
She lay with her eyes shut, living the dream again. Then, instead of angling the mirror to show her the window, left it where it had been when they sent her to sleep. She opened her eyes and looked.
The blind was up and morning light streamed across the bed. The face in the mirror, surrounded by its tangle of tubes and cables, was still that of a stranger. Large pale ears stuck out on either side through strong black hair; in the middle was the pinky-brown hummock of the face parts, with the huge lips, the nothing nose and the forward-facing nostrils; the brown eyes were bright with thought. She pressed keys. Deliberately she filled her mind with ideas of welcome. "Hi, there," said her voice.
Was there a glimmer in the eyes? Kelly's answer? Or just the reflection of Eva's own signal? No knowing.
"You've never seen a tree," she said.
That might not be quite true. The chimps in the Research Section of the Pool had metal-and-plastic frames to climb on, but Dad always took a couple on family outings if he could, so Kelly might have seen trees in the city parks, but she'd certainly not have been allowed to climb one because of the difficulty of getting her down and the damage she might do while she was up there. In any case, those would have been city trees, tamed, guarded, numbered, precious. The trees in the dream had been wild, part of a forest no one looked after, tree tangled into tree, stretching on and on, a forest where people had never been, a forest before there were people.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 10
She swung the mirror to take her usual look at the city. It was a duller day, with the last lights just going out as the sun rose behind high thin cloud and the city's own haze, the dust and fumes made by half a billion people living and working together, beginning to form among the high rises. She could still see about five kilometers. Nothing. The city stretched on far beyond that, far beyond sight on the clearest morning, endless. Like the forest in the dream.
Of course, Eva thought, I might have put the dream there. Me. Eva. Knowing when I went to sleep that I was living in a chimp's body, I might have put chimp arms and feet into the dream. I might have invented the forest, from things I've seen on shaper programs. Only . . .
Only I was having the dream before I knew about Kelly. And it was the same dream. Perhaps knowing just helped me think about it, hold on to it, but it was there before any of that. Perhaps it isn't my dream at all--not Eva's, I mean. Perhaps it's Kelly's.
Hi, Kelly. You there?
The mirror was angled to show the window, so she sent the unspoken message inward. She wasn't really serious. It was more of a private joke, a whimsy. Her lips twitched. She actually felt them move.
Oh, great, she thought. They're letting me have my mouth back. She moved the mirror to show her the bed again and tried a smile. The image above her wrinkled its mouth at the corners.
There was a game you could play with small chimps before they became too strong for you to hold still. You put the chimp on your lap, gripping its arms to stop it from grabbing, and then you moved a grape across in front of its face and watched a sort of wave ripple along the lips from side to side, following the grape, trying to suck it in. Chimps use their long and mobile mouths almost like an extra hand for feeling and touching and trying things out, as well as for all the grimaces that make up a lot of chimp language.
Forgetting about the dream, Eva lay and experimented. There wasn't a lot she could try, because they didn't seem to have awakened her other face muscles yet, or her jaw, but it was exciting enough to be able to move anything at all. She hadn't really begun before Dad came in.
"Hi, kid," he said.
"Sorry," she tapped. "Fun."
A slight pause while he put in the missing words. You didn't get this sort of blip with Mom, but Dad thought in whole sentences, with verbs and so on.
"That's fine," he said. "Only don't push it--we'll have to see how it all goes. How are you feeling?"
"Funny. Things in my blood?"
He didn't get it.
"Stop shock?" she added.
The pause was different this time, while he decided how much to tell her.
"Well, yes," he said. "We felt it was safer. As Mom told you, your neuron linkages appear complete, but we have no way of knowing how secure they are. You have been through an extremely risky procedure, my darling. We calculated that there were about four chances in five that we would fail."
"Only hope. Or dead."
"That's right."
There was something in his tone. Dad had never been as close to Eva as Mom had, but he had loved her always and been extremely proud of her good looks. He'd kept snapshots of her in his wallet, and portrait photos in his office. Now it crossed her mind to wonder whether there'd been a funeral yet.
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 11
Dad shook his head as if he were trying to shake her picture out of his mind.
"You have to remember that with you we are in new territory," he said. "You are the first of Joan's subjects to be capable of influencing the procedure of neuron memory by conscious thought. You are the first to be properly aware of the passage of time and therefore to be able to wish to hurry the process along. You are also the first to whom we have felt the kind of moral responsibility one has toward a human being. All this means that we are going . . .
"Hey!'
Eva had found how to make her toy do a sort of squawk that she used as a "Hey!" code. Conversations were boring if you couldn't interrupt, but it still took a second or two to work. Dad stopped, blinked, thought back.
"Of course, we have a moral responsibility to all living things," he said. "As a zoologist, life is my trade, so I feel this more strongly than most. I feel it especially toward chimpanzees. Still, it is different from the responsibility we have toward any single human being. Okay?"
Eva would have liked to argue, but it would have taken too long and, anyway, Dad was difficult to argue with and her own thoughts were all in a mess, so she said nothing. Dad, typically, assumed she'd agreed.
"Now, the danger point does not lie in your conscious mind," he said. "You understand and can accept that what we've done was, as you said, the only hope. The danger lies at the unconscious level, over which you don't have the same control. That is why we have to control it for you, for the time being, until it too has learned to accept what has happened. It is the danger point for two reasons--first, as I say, because you can't persuade it by rational means not to reject your new body, and second, because it is itself the main interface with that body. When you think, you think with a human mind. When you blink, you blink with a chimpanzee's involuntary reaction. Your own unconscious mind lies along that border. It is not, of course, as simple as that, but that will have to do. The upshot is that we are going to have to be very cautious indeed about reducing any drugs that help suppress your unconscious tendency to rejection."
"Okay. Only little as poss."
"You will have to cooperate with Dr. Alonso, who will be your psychiatrist. Her main preoccupation in the next few weeks will be to watch out for the slightest signs that . . .
Eva switched off. She couldn't help it. She'd been awake only about twenty minutes, but she felt exhausted already. What Dad was telling her was vital, and she should have been straining to understand every detail, but the way he did it made her mind go numb. It used to do that sometimes, even before. Dad was a natural explainer, lecturer, arranger of thoughts and facts into orderly patterns. His beard would wag, and his blue eyes--sharper and smaller than Mom's--would flash with the thrill of knowledge. His students thought he was great, which made Eva feel guilty that somehow the beard-wag and the eye-flash were like a hypnotist's signals, making her mind drift off elsewhere.
Now it drifted off to home. The three of them, Mom and Dad and Eva, having supper after some ordinary day, Dad talking, Mom listening, and Eva looking out the window and watching a million lights come on as dusk thickened across the city. Suppers must have been sad this last year, she thought. Not all families loved one another. Eva had friends one of whose parents had left, or perhaps both had stayed, but they'd bitched and quarreled. She'd been luckier than some. She'd felt pretty secure, always. But suppose something--she couldn't think what--had happened that had forced her parents to choose between their jobs and their family, well, there wouldn't have been any question with Mom; Mom was interested in her work and thought it was worth doing, but she wouldn't have hesitated. With Dad, you couldn't be sure. If he'd had to give up his work he'd have given up half himself. More than half, perhaps. So perhaps he wouldn't . . .
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 12
She looked at him as he leaned over the bed, explaining. Just beyond his head the mirror showed a bald patch in the middle of his scalp. It fascinated her. She longed to be able to sit up and rootle among the browny-gray hairs. From beyond the reflected scalp her own face gazed down. Seeing the man's head and the chimp's so close together, she was struck by a thought.
"Hey!"
Dad stopped and waited, a bit impatient.
"Kelly's brain?" said Eva. "Big enough?"
"Yes. You have, in fact, got less than you used to have, but luckily there is a bit of waste space in brains. I think you'll find you're all there, darling. Where was I? Oh, yes . . .
But Eva had stopped listening again. The thought of grapes had returned, not out of her conscious mind but up from below. A whole bunch of grapes, purple, the bloom untouched, the skins bulging with sweet juices. Saliva spurted inside her mouth, and a machine sucked it away. She could actually feel it happening, which meant they were letting her have more of her mouth back. How long since she'd really eaten, how long since she'd had a taste on her tongue? Not since that picnic at the sea.
Dad had cocked his head to listen to the metallic whisper in his ear.
"Right," he said. "Apparently you're due for a nap, darling. Take it easy. Don't try to hurry things up, and you'll do fine. See you tomorrow, eh?"
Already Eva could feel the drift to darkness. She pressed a few keys.
"Love to Mom."
"Yes, of course."
Her eyes had closed before he was out the door. The first thing I'll ask for is grapes, she thought. Kelly would have loved grapes. All chimps do.
DAY SEVENTEEN
Waking . . . Leaving the trees, the green shadows, the leaf light . . . Leaving the dream . . .
But the dream itself was changing. It was Eva's fault. Sometimes even in the middle of the dream she was aware of herself as a human mind, an alien in the forest. She had thought about the dream, knowing everything the human Eva knew, so now as she reached and clambered and rested she carried the human knowledge with her.
The simplest change was that sometimes the dreams had stories. These might be a plus. She had adventures. She might look down between the branches and see men wearing clothes and carrying guns, walking on the forest floor, and she'd know the way you do in dreams that they had time--traveled from the future and were coming to cut down the forest so that a city could be built that would house the overflow of people from the bursting future world, and only Eva could stop them. Sometimes the stories were a minus. In the worst of these she was digging into a termite nest and found just below the surface a human face, Eva's own old face, gazing with blank blue eyes at the sky, still alive, but with ants going in and out of the nostrils. Mostly the dreams were neither plus nor minus but muddled, the way human dreams are. The one she called Kelly's dream hadn't been like that. It had been simple, until Eva had brought her knowledge into it. She would never have it like that again.
She dreamed ordinary human dreams too, doing and seeing things in her old body, but nearly always the one she awoke with was the one about trees. Then she would lie with her eyes shut and decide where she wanted the mirror, what would be the first thing she saw. Though she always chose the same it was still a conscious decision, an effort of will not to go back to the old game of guessing the weather. She opened her eyes and gazed up and made her voice say "Hi." As soon as they gave her her jaw and throat back, she added the proper little pant and grimace of greeting and tried to mean it. That helped.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 13
Dad had been right. Suppose she'd awakened and seen what they'd done to her and her bloodstream hadn't been stuffed with dope to help her stand the shock, then all of her, everything that used to be Eva, would have shrieked its No! It would have been like that however much she'd agreed, with her conscious mind, that she wanted to live in a chimp body, that it was far better than dying. Now, as they slowly cut the dope down, she could feel that the shriek was faintly there. The morning after she'd had the ant dream--she told Dr. Alonso about that because it had scared her so much--they put the dope right back up and started again, but Eva knew she couldn't live like that forever. Kelly's body wasn't just something she had to get used to; it was something she had to learn to be happy about. Okay, it was better than dying, but that wasn't enough.You had to awaken and open your eyes and see your new face and like what you saw. You had to make the human greeting and the chimp greeting and mean them.
The old Eva could never have done it, the one who used to skate and ski and play volleyball at school. They'd been right to make her come to life slowly, little by little, rejoicing in having a mouth to chew with, a throat that would swallow, a real moving arm she could lift and look at. Every day, as a sort of exercise, she forced herself to think of the third Eva, the one who'd come in between, after the accident but before the waking, a sort of nothing person, a sleeping mind in a smashed body. It was that that she had to compare this new Eva with, not the girl who used to skate and ski. This must be better than that.
Sometimes when they removed a tube or a wire, the place where it had joined felt sore, and even that was a plus. To be hurt, you have to be alive.
Alive but clumsy. The first movements, lip-ripples and hoots and chewings, had been misleading. The morning they let her have her arm back, she awoke and realized that in her last minutes of sleep she had been caressing her hand along her hairy thigh, troubled in her dream because the fingers could feel and the thigh couldn't, so it was like stroking a rug. Then she was awake and found her whole arm moving. She had made her greetings to the face in the mirror before she realized what had happened. Gingerly she pulled the arm out and held it up with the palm half open, and saw the arm and hand in the mirror stretch down toward her in the gesture chimps make when they are asking for help or comfort. She stared at the glossy blue-black hairs, then drew the arm down and lip-nibbled comfortingly along it, thinking, So this is me now. Me. Not Kelly up in the mirror. Me down here. Okay.
When breakfast came she tried to feed herself, putting the food into her mouth. She managed it by shutting her eyes and feeling for the next morsel. From then on, the hand knew the way to the mouth. But when she tried to guide the hand by looking in the mirror, she kept going the wrong way and missing, sometimes by several centimeters. This didn't bother her much. Being able to move the arm at all was thrilling. But later that morning she found it wasn't just the confusion of trying to do things in a mirror that had been spoiling her aim.
They must have decided to give her a nap--they could still do that.Then they woke her up, and she opened her eyes to see a stranger smiling down at her, a gorgeous young man with gleaming even teeth and a thin mustache and brown skin like polished leather. "Hi, Eva," he said. "I'm Robbo. I'm from Space-tech."
"Uh?"
(When she'd first gotten her voice back Eva had experimented, trying to say a few human words, but it had been such an effort and her voice had come out so slow and stupid that she'd settled for chimp grunts. You could say quite a bit with those.)
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 14
"Okay, okay," said Robbo. "We're not shipping you off to colonize Vega Three. That's what I was trained for, teaching ordinary folks like you and me--"
He said it without a flicker. He was clever as well as pretty.
"--how to use their bodies when they're upside. Trouble is, there's not so much of that happening just now, so my firm has lent me across to try and give you a hand. Right?"
He bent out of sight; but watching in the mirror, Eva saw him joining some steel rods into a structure that turned out, when he rose and stood it by the bed, to be a framework suspending a cord above her chest. He clipped a blue ball to the end of the cord.
"Let's see you touch that without moving it," he said.
Eva lifted her arm and stretched it out. Her fingers bumped into the ball a good five centimeters before she expected. She clicked irritation.
"Oh, not that bad," said Robbo. "Give it another try."
He steadied the ball and she tried again. And again and again. By concentrating hard she learned to touch the ball without moving it, but this was only by learning exactly how far to stretch, not by judging the distance and getting it right. As soon as he told her to speed up, she started overreaching again. She stopped and felt for her keyboard. "Got two arms," she said.
"Sure, like everyone else. Only your other one's supposed to be still asleep."
"No. Two this side."
"Right. They told me you might, only I didn't want to put the idea into your mind. One's a sort of ghost, uh?"
Eva grunted. That was exactly the word. Ghost. The ghost of a human arm still trying to work, to reach and touch at the mind's command. You couldn't see it but it was there, moving slightly out of synch as the chimp arm moved, with the elbow wrong and the invisible fingertips wavering among the chimp knuckles. When she closed her eyes she saw in her mind the pale slim fingers, helpless, trapped in this strange hairy place, lost. Mustn't think like that. Mustn't.
"Want to give it a rest?" said Robbo.
She grunted a No, and this time as soon as he'd steadied the ball she snaked her arm out, fast as she could move it, not giving her mind time to think about the task. She missed, but by less than a centimeter.
"Not bad," said Robbo.
After a few more tries he gave her a moving target by swinging the ball around, at first in a clean pendulum curve, then in a circle, and finally making it jiggle as it swung.
"That's enough," said Robbo. "Tired, I guess."
"Uh."
"Don't worry. You've got to take things easy. We'll work some exercises out with the physios, but you're doing pretty well. Provided you move fast, uh? Mustn't give the ghost a chance."
Mustn't, thought Eva.
"You came along just the right time for me, you know. Few more weeks, and I'd have been out of a job."
"Uh?"
"That's right. Ten years ago, when I went into this, I reckoned I was set up for life. Don't mean I thought we'd be actually colonizing planets before I died, but the push would be there, the pressure to get off earth, and at least that'd mean research for us in the business. But now look, they're all giving up. The pressure's still there, but the governments are pulling out and the sponsors are pulling out and whole departments are closing down. At Space-tech alone, we've lost forty percent of our jobs in the last three years."
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 15
Eva clicked commiseration. Robbo went on talking, as much to give her a rest as anything.
"I don't know. It just doesn't make sense. There's no reason to it. It's like we've just given up. We're tired of trying. I worry about my kid, what life's going to be like for him . . .
He got out his wallet and showed Eva a photograph of a little boy, pretty as himself, with the same glossy brown skin and dark eyes. He went on talking. Eva half listened. People, she thought--they're funny. Her fingers moved caressingly over the furriness of her chest, and somehow the thought in her mind changed from the oddness of people worrying about why they'd stopped trying to colonize planets to the oddness of people not having any real hair on their bodies, being so smooth and shiny. When she thought of him like that Robbo didn't seem pretty at all.
"Try something else?" he said at last. She grunted okay and he swung her table across the bed and gave her some colored bricks to build a tower with. She made it straight and slim, and far higher than a chimp could ever have done. Not that chimps are clumsy--they pick and groom among one another's fur with nimble, sensitive fingers--but they don't think tidy. Give them a cylinder to fit into a hole, and they'll fumble it in any old way because that's good enough. It wouldn't enter their heads to square up the edges of a pile of blocks, so they'd get it out of kilter and down it would crash. But Eva could use her human mind to tell the chimp fingers what she wanted, and, check by touch that they'd got it right. When Robbo asked her to speed it up she became chimp-clumsy. By that time she was tired again, so Robbo chatted a little more and left.
She lay with her eyes shut, but as soon as she began to feel drowsy she forced them open and pressed the keys on her control box.
"Don't want to sleep," said her voice.
"Just as you like, dearie," sighed Meg's soft answer from behind the headboard.
Wakefulness came flooding back, and Eva reset the mirror to show her the window, with a rainy mild day beyond the glass. Dull gray clouds were touching the tops of the dull gray high rises, and the air in the distance hung like smoke where the rain fell dense. She felt the skin of her arm tingle as the pores closed, stirring the coarse hair as they did so, and she sensed rather than felt the rest of her numb body trying to do the same. Not long now, she thought. A few more weeks, and I'll be walking. Walking's going to be tricky--I'll be the wrong distance from the ground. No I won't--I'll be the right distance, but . . . I'm going to have to get rid of that ghost.
It was important. It was more important than just for walking without falling flat on your face. The thing is, you aren't a mind in a body, you're a mind and a body, and they're both you. As long as the ghost of that other body haunted her, she would never become a you, belonging all together, a whole person. She could probably learn how to pick things up cleanly and pour out of a bottle and run around without tripping by training herself not to notice the ghost, but it would be there still. No good.
She wondered whether to talk to Dr. Alonso about this. Dr. Alonso was all right, but Eva had taken a dislike to her. She was too kind, too cooing--it wasn't real. While she sat smiling by the bed Eva kept seeing Dr. Alonso, tucked out of sight in the corner of the room, thin-lipped, scribbling notes for a scientific article. Anyway, she didn't actually know anything--nobody did, because Eva was the first of her kind, and it was all new to everyone--but at least the biochemists and neurologists and everythingelsists knew a few facts about brains and bloodstreams and nervous systems and so on, but the psychiatrists were guessing all the way. Eva thought she could guess just as well as Dr. Alonso.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 16
So now she closed her eyes again and summoned up the dream. She lay wide awake, concentrating with all her will but letting the images float into her mind, the shapes of a green tree world, branches with bark rough or smooth, blobs and patches of sunlight seeping through the leaf cover, fruits and berries yellow, green, purple, orange, and through all this a single person, a body completely itself with its own mind part of it and the body part of the mind, reaching, grasping, swinging below a branch, finding and holding with a foot, reaching on.
Kelly was dead, gone, would never come back, but something was still there. Not a particular chimp with particular memories of a large cage with a cement floor and a steel-and-plastic climbing frame and perhaps a human who took her out to greener places on a leash, but a chimp still, with older, deeper memories. You couldn't just invade a chimp body and take it over with your human mind, like a hero in a history book--you'd never get to be whole that way. Eva's human neurons might have copied themselves into Kelly's brain, but as Dad had said, that left a sort of connection, an interface, a borderland where human ended and chimp began. You couldn't live like that, with a frontier in you like a wall, keeping yourselves apart. The only way to become whole was to pull the wall down, to let the other side back in, to let it invade in its turn, up into the human side, the neurons remembering their old paths, twining themselves in among the human network until both sides made a single pattern. A new pattern, not Eva, not Kelly--both but one.
That must be why she'd started dreaming the dream, even before she had first awakened. The chimp side had been trying to find its way back. So now, wide awake, she dreamed it again. Beyond her closed eyelids, beyond the sealed window, lay the rainy world crammed with humans. Soon, in a few weeks, Eva was going to be out there herself among them, trying to fit in, to belong, to cope with the fret and bustle of the human-centered city. She could never do that unless she became whole.
Inside her hairy skull she let the forest form. It was real. It was peaceful, endless, happy. There were no humans in it.
MONTH TWO, DAY NINETEEN
Awake . . . Not just your eyelids rising, facing the day . . . Your whole body, all of it, moving and feeling . . .
Carefully Eva pushed herself off the pillow and sat. With her right arm she heaved the bedclothes aside, then twisted herself till her legs dangled over the edge. All wrong. She was thinking too much. This was how a human would try to get out of bed, unaided for the first time, after a long illness. The ghost was very strong. All the shapes and distances seemed strange. Mom was watching from the chair. "Sure you don't want me to help?" she said.
Eva rippled her fingers over the keyboard, which now lay strapped to her chest. After her weeks of practice she'd gotten the pauses down to only a couple of seconds.
"I'm fine," she said. "Been doing my exercises."
A chimp wouldn't have gotten up like this. It would have sort of rolled, and then dropped. She dropped. The ghost had judged the distance wrong, but her real limbs got it right and she didn't stagger. She climbed onto Mom's lap, giving her time to adjust the half-dozen sensor wires she still had to trail around before she kissed her. Mom laughed.
"It's like being eaten alive," she said.
Eva made her No-it's-not grunt. A proper chimp kiss is done with the mouth wide open, but she'd done hers human-style, though admittedly she'd produced more suck than she'd meant to. She settled against Mom's shoulder and without thinking lifted her hand and started to pick with inquisitive fingers among the roots of the gray-streaked hair. She felt Mom stiffen and then try to relax. "You won't find anything, darling," she said.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 17
The chimps in the Research Section of the Pool were allowed a few harmless
parasites so that they could have the satisfaction of catching them in their
endless grooming sessions, but a flake of dried skin or a scrap of dirt would
do almost as well. That wasn't the point.
"Mm-hmmm," Eva murmured on a rising note.
Mom twitched and relaxed again.
"Don't tease," she said. "I'm not in the mood."
Eva shrugged her shoulder forward and said, "You do me. It's kind of
comforting."
"All right. Provided you don't go poking in my earhole."
Eva peered at the dark cave in the neat whorled ear. Yes, she did feel a
definite urge to probe in there with a finger, but it wouldn't be fair. Mom
had never felt easy with the chimps, the way Eva had. She couldn't even groom
a shoulder as though it was the natural thing to be doing; there was a sort
of fumblingness about her fingertips as they worked their way across the fur.
All the same, it was lovely to be able to feel the movement after the weeks
of stillness and numbness. If she'd been a cat, Eva would have purred.
"I'm supposed to be talking to you," said Mom.
"Uh?"
"Have you thought about the sort of life you're going to live when you're up
and about?"
"Lots. Skiing's going to be fun."
The snow peaks and the beaches were almost the only human playgrounds left.
There wasn't a lot else you could do with them. Mom chuckled.
"My legs are going to be so strong," said Eva. "And I can get my center of
gravity right down. I could be a world-beater. How'd you like to have a
famous daughter?"
"Not much. People are going to be a bit interested in you anyway, darling.
You know how they are about chimps as it is."
"They'll get used to me. Anyway, I want to be ordinary--go back to school,
be with Bren and Ginny . . . They came around last night, you know?"
"They said they might . . . I'm afraid there's a little more to it than
that, darling."
"Uh?"
"Haven't you wondered where the funds have come from for all this?"
Mom tilted her head to show she meant the room and the machines and the
control room beyond and so on.
"Research, I guess."
"Of course, but research still has to be funded. Dad and I couldn't have
afforded it, and the Pool's got nothing to spare. Joan may be famous, but
she's still got to get her funds from somewhere. What she did, in fact, was
set up a sort of arrangement with SMI--you know, the shaper people--and they
raised the money from some of their advertisers who were interested. World
Fruit's the main one, I believe."
"You mean I'm sponsored!"
Eva used the keyboard to make such a squeak of outrage that Mom laughed
aloud.
"I'm afraid so, my darling. Public TV couldn't afford you."
"Grrgh! "
"And, of course, this means that SMI is going to want to do at least one
program about you. There are other things, like World Fruit having an option
for you to appear in some of the Honeybear commercials . . .
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 18
"Uh?"
"They can't make you, if we don't agree, but you aren't allowed to advertise anyone else's products--that's what an option means."
"Might be fun. And lots of grapes."
"Is that all you can think of? I'm trying to explain to you that quite soon SMI is going to start wanting to film you again. They did some while you were asleep, but loan wouldn't let them since then because it might have . . . oh, it's too long to explain. Anyway, they're going to do this program and some more after, perhaps, and they've spent so much money on you that they're bound to want to make a production of it, and . . .
"Do I have to?"
"Well, yes, at least one. That's in the contract. After that . . . You see, if people are interested in you, enough of them, then that's going to mean more programs, and that's going to mean money coming in, not just for you and Dad and me--I mean it'd be nice, but we don't really . . . You see, we actually owe Joan, morally I mean, for what she's done. Then there's the Pool . . .
Mom sighed. The Pool was always desperate for funds. It was a fact that Eva had grown up with, almost like the law of gravity.
"Okay," she said. "If it's for the Pool."
"I knew you'd say that."
"Provided they don't try and make out I'm some kind of freak. "
A pause. Mom sort of squaring her shoulders, inside.
"There's bound to be a bit of that, darling. I mean, we've got to get used to the idea that people are going to stare. Some people. I suppose in the long run it's going to be up to you to show them you're not."
In her skiing fantasy Eva had imagined the gawps of the other skiers as she careered down the slopes. And school--of course heads would turn when she first came into class, but kids get used to things pretty quickly. She hadn't really thought about living her life as the object of an endless stare. People! No, you didn't have to have people, not all the time.
"Okay," she said. "And when it gets to be too much, I can always go and join the Pool and be a chimp for a while."
She felt Mom's body stiffen beneath her, as if she'd gotten a cramp. Eva thought she'd just been keeping the conversation going, but now . . . yes, better get it said. It was important.
"It's all right, Mom. I'll only go to the Reserve."
"Are you serious?"
"Mind you, if I went to a Public Section, people wouldn't know which one was me. I'd have to take my clothes off, of course."
'Please, darling . . .
"It's all right, Mom."
"Let's talk about something else."
That was family code, just like a chimp code, only in words--a way of not getting into an argument. You chose another subject and hoped the argument would simply go away, like a headache--only this one, Eva knew, wasn't going to, but for now she obeyed the code.
"What about clothes, then?" she said.
"Yes, we've got to work that out. Have you got any ideas?"
"Bow in my hair?"
Mom managed a laugh. She'd always loved making clothes for her pretty daughter. The chimps in the Pool mostly wore nothing but were dressed in child's overalls when Dad took them on expeditions, partly because they weren't housebroken and had to use diapers, but mainly to hide the sexual swellings on the rumps of the females, which people who didn't know about chimps always found embarrassing.
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 19
"I'm a different shape now," said Eva.
"A challenge, darling. I'll bring my tape measure tomorrow. "
"Nothing fancy, Mom. I hate it in the commercials when they put chimps into frills. Just overalls, mostly."
"I suppose so."
"I'm not going to try and look human."
Silence, but Eva could feel the sigh.
"It's important, Mom. I've got to be happy with this new me, and so do you. Not just think it's better than me being dead. Happy to have me like this."
"I'm trying, darling. I really am trying."
Poor Mom. It was much harder for her. When you're born you get imprinted with your mother's face, and she with yours. It happens with a lot of animals, some more strongly than others. With humans it's about middling, but the bond is still there, deep inside you, hard to alter. Eva still had the same Mom she'd always known, but Mom had this new thing, this stranger, this changeling. She couldn't help yearning in her depths for her own daughter, the one with the long black hair and blue eyes and the scar on her left earlobe where a chimp had bitten her when she was three. However much she taught herself to think of this new Eva as that daughter, it wasn't the same as feeling she was.
It was unfair to push her too hard. Eva stopped grooming Mom's hair and took her hand and held it, human-style. Mom squeezed back but let go. Eva's was not the hand she needed, not any longer. It was long and bony-fingered with hair on the back. How could anyone pretend it was her daughter's?
And, Eva knew, Mom was trying harder than anyone else would, ever.
MONTH TWO, DAY TWENTY-FIVE
Awake. Standing by the window, looking down, nerve ends electric . . . Like standing on a cliff top, imagining falling . . . Falling into the world, people, people, people . . . Having to move among them, to begin to live . . . "Big day," said Robbo. .
Eva turned at the sound of his voice. He stood smiling at the door, handsome as a shaper cop. His skin glistened like a fresh nut. He was wearing a brand-new outfit, straight from the store, with fawn trousers molded to his legs and a loose fawn jacket above. He'd had his hair styled and his mustache trimmed. It was a big day for everyone.
"I like the butterfly," he said.
"Mom couldn't resist it."
It was gold-and-purple, stitched on to the left pocket of Eva's new green overalls. She liked it too.
"Let's see you walk, then . . . You call that walking?"
"You want me to do tricks?"
She didn't get the sneer quite right. Practicing when you were alone wasn't the same as talking, and she still made mistakes. Robbo was used to it and hardly noticed, but from today on it mattered. People judge other people by their voices. If you sound stupid, you are stupid. If you don't sound real, you aren't-you're not a person.
"I've seen chimps walking," said Robbo. "Of their own accord."
"When they've got something to carry. Like I've seen humans crawling."
"Okay, okay, walk how you want. Let's go and look at this gym, huh? They've just about gotten it finished in time."
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 20
He turned and held the door for Eva as if going through it was the most ordinary thing you could think of. Last evening, while Dad and Joan and Ali and Meg and the rest of the team had stood around, Dr. Richter had ceremonially removed the last pair of sensor cables that tied her to the machines. Champagne corks had popped. Everyone had wished her good luck. And today she was free. Going through the door was like being hatched, coming out of her safe egg into the huge world.
The world was a shambles. First there was a little empty vestibule and beyond that the control room, where new machines were being uncrated; technicians were arguing over a wiring diagram; a supervisor was frowning at a printout. Eva knuckled through the mess beside Robbo and out into a wide hospital corridor. She was glad now of the boring exercises he and the physios had made her do all the last seven weeks. She felt none of the tiredness and heaviness you'd have expected after all that time in bed-in fact, an exhilarating lightness filled her, becoming stronger and stronger until she lost control and went scampering on ahead, hooting with pleasure as she ran.
Then she stopped dead, with all the hairs along her back prickling erect. Her call had been answered, not with the same call but with a series of short breathy barks on a slightly rising note snapped off into silence. A chimp call. Eva had never heard it before, but she knew, or rather she felt, what it meant. Alone, it said. Lost. Frightened. Where are you? She felt the answer rising in her throat but suppressed it as Robbo caught up with her. "Who's that?" she said. "Who's what?"
The call began again while Eva was still pressing keys. Alone. Lost . . .
"That, you mean?" said Robbo. "Next patient, I guess. Now that Prof. Pradesh has proved she can do it with you . . .
"They're going to do lots?" Kelly after Kelly after Kelly?
Eva stayed where she was, her pelt crawling at the thought. Robbo was already moving on and glanced back at her, puzzled.
"Sure. Got to try again, don't they? Check it all out? That's how science works. You want to be the only one?"
Eva grunted and knuckled on beside him down the corridor. She didn't know what she wanted. Anyway, they couldn't do lots--there weren't enough chimps. But Robbo was right they'd do some, as many as they could probably. Not to save lives either, though that would come into it, but the real reason was in the human mind. It couldn't stop asking, the human mind. Once it found one thing out, it had to move on. And then what? it kept saying. You do one experiment and it works, so you try it again, with a difference, to see if that works too. And again and again . . . So there wasn't just one chimp shut up, lonely, frightened, bewildered, having its blood sampled, its brain rhythms measured, all that. Eva's control room was having new gadgets moved in so it could take care of more than one experiment . . .
"Now, what do you think of that!"
"Hoo! "
"Who, what?"
"Okay, who paid for it?"
"You can't read?"
Eva looked again. The gym wasn't large, but it shone like a glossy new toy and smelled of fresh plastic and varnish. In one corner a shaper crew was rigging lights and a camera. There was a climbing. frame, a trapeze, a vaulting horse, and a lot of moveable stuff; and every item, she now saw, had the Honeybear logo on it. Eva knew it so well that she hadn't noticed it. Because Honeybear used chimps in its commercials there'd always been free Honeybear drinks at home, ever since she could remember. Now there was a free gym. Okay.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 21
She knuckled across the floor and swung herself up into the frame.
"Hey! Take it easy!" said Robbo. "Don't want you breaking a rib. We should've had a week at least, trying out what you can do before they did the program. Watch it!"
Impossible to obey. It was so glorious to be moving like this, reaching, grasping, swinging across. She knew she was still only about half strong, despite the exercises--when she was fully fit a grown man would have trouble holding her--but now what mattered was the sheer pleasure of movement, the feeling of naturalness. This was what these arms, these fingers, were for. It mattered because it allowed her to understand the rightness of this new body, to feel its beauty and energy . . .
"Watch it, I said!" snapped Robbo.
Eva squatted into a crook of the frame and hooted derisively, but in fact he'd been right. for a moment, quite unpredictably, the ghost of a human arm had flickered into her mind, making her miss her grip, forcing her to grab with the other hand, clutch. The ghost came back even more strongly when she tried to swing. Long ago, as a small girl, that body had learned the to-and-fro rhythm, the exact timing needed to fling her weight on the chains and drive the swing forward through its arc. This body was Differently weighted. Its arms were the wrong length. The rhythm wouldn't come. Thinking didn't help, because the old human timing was imprinted below the level of thought, putting a jiggle into the arc and spoiling the acceleration. Swinging was something she'd have to learn fresh.
What about riding a bike? There was a kid's bike with fat tires and the Honeybear logo freshly painted on its side, but there wasn't room to use it in the gym, with the mess of cables cluttering the floor, so she took it out into the corridor to try. Balancing turned out to be easy, and she could grip the pedals with her feet, but her legs didn't understand about moving in circles. She was wobbling along, concentrating on the pedal movement, when some people came out of a door just ahead of her, not looking where they were going, because the man in front was talking over his shoulder. Trying to miss him, Eva steered into the wall and crashed. That stopped their talk.
She picked herself up and saw that the man she'd missed was a stranger, though there was something familiar about him all the same. If he hadn't been wearing heavy dark glasses she might have recognized him. The people he'd been talking to over his shoulder were Dad and Joan Pradesh and a nervous-looking young woman. Eva rippled her fingers over the keys.
"Hi, Dad. Got to learn all over fresh."
"Better learn to look where you're going."
"This is her?" said the stranger.
"This is Eva," said Joan. "This is Dirk Ellan, Eva. I'm sure you've seen him on the shaper."
Eva grunted a greeting. The man just nodded, not to her but to loan, telling her Yes, he'd seen this chimp. Something about the nod made the name click. Dirk Ellan! Of course; though Eva hadn't watched his programs often. Dad had. taught her to be scornful of the sort of predigested science you got on the shaper.
"We were coming to see how you were getting along," said Dad.
"She's been doing fine, Dr. Adamson," said Robbo. "Times you wouldn't know she wasn't a chimp. Few things she can't handle yet."
"Like riding a bike," said Dad.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 22
He was smiling inside his beard. Too much. Eva wasn't surprised at the way Robbo had hurried to get his word in, but Dad! All anxious and eager. And Mr. Ellan's nods and silences showed that he was used to this sort of reaction--expected it, in fact. It was just like the chimps in the Pool, with their boss males, and the other males constantly making special signals to placate or challenge the bosses. Eva didn't remember noticing humans behaving like this in the old days, but now everything the three men did seemed obvious, a language she'd always known.
Back in the gym she climbed and swung a bit to show them what she could do. Then there was a long wait while the shaper people set the cameras up and discussed angles and changed their minds and argued. Then she went through her paces; first, things chimps could do naturally, like climbing and swinging; then things they might be taught to do, like riding a bike; and then things they couldn't, like building a self-supporting arch of toy bricks. There were long waits between each take.
Eva needed the rests. She was still only half strong and tired quickly. So she sat hunkered into a fork of the climbing frame and watched the others, Dad trying to impress Mr. Ellan, Joan ignoring the hustle and working at some problem on scraps of paper, Robbo chatting up one of the shaper women. Sometimes a sort of irritation swelled up inside her, making her pelt bristle, urging her to go swinging wildly around the frame, barking as she went. Mostly she suppressed it, but at one moment, noticing a camera trained on her as though she were some kind of thing you didn't have to say Do-you-mind to, she stretched her lips forward without thinking and gave it a Go-away hoot. The whole group turned and stared. As startled as they were, Eva shrugged, grinned, and waved a hand. Forget it. They forgot it and went on with what they'd been doing.
When she'd done enough tricks to keep them happy, Mr. Ellan came over and leaned against the frame beside Eva. His whole personality changed as the cameras closed around the pair of them. He'd taken his dark glasses off, letting the world see the smile lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes. He was relaxed, friendly, trustworthy, understanding-all that. Eva knew it was just his job, a performance, but all the same she felt her skin unprickle.
"So you're Eva?" he said.
"And you're Dirk Ellan."
"Right. I better explain to viewers there's got to be that little blip while that gizmo you've got puts the words together for you. And just in case there's some real meanies out there, thinking it's all a trick, how about you spelling out something real slow, so we can show 'em it just ain't so?"
Eva grunted, eased the keyboard from its loops, and held it so that a camera could watch while with one thin dark finger she pressed the individual keys.
"You've got it wrong, you meanies."
She rewound the little tape and played the words several times, varying the tone of voice.
"That's amazing," said Mr. Ellan. Eva thought she could just hear a flicker of real surprise under the easy public accent. Perhaps he'd been wondering too-why not? Anyway, he was a meanie himself, in spite of the signals. Deliberately she gave him a genuine chimp snicker. His eyebrows went up.
"But inside there you're really a young woman?" he said.
"I'm Eva, okay."
He didn't seem to notice her answer wasn't the same as Yes. He wouldn't.
"And how exactly does it feel?"
Eva managed to suppress another snicker. This was one of Dad's bugbears-- "and how exactly does it feel, Mrs. Hrumph, to have your husband reveal he's a practicing werewolf?"--but she'd promised herself she was going to be on her best behavior. The program was important for everyone, especially the Pool. The trouble was that Mr. Ellan filled her with a spirit of mischief--and that wouldn't have been there in the old days either.
"It feels great," she said. "I'm looking forward to things."
"No regrets?"
"No regrets."
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 23
"I've seen pictures of you. You used to be a very pretty little miss. How about that?"
Eva glanced at him. He was horrible. Didn't he realize Mom would be watching? She wanted to bite his ear off. No. But she'd get him somehow.
"I'm very pretty now," she said.
"Sure, but . . .
"Don't you think so?"
"Like I say . . .
Deliberately she reached out, gripped the immaculate collar and hauled him toward her. He yelled. She heard a shout of "Eva!" from Dad, but by then she was giving Mr. Ellan a kiss, not a proper open-mouthed chimp kiss but using her big lips to produce a real smacker, maximum vacuum. He was still trying to push her clear when she let go. He backed off while she sat laughing in the nook of the frame. He managed a sort of laugh too, but she could see the fright and fury in his eyes, just as she could feel the various reactions from the dimness beyond the camera lights, pleasure and alarm and excitement all mixed together. The shaper people, they must know he was a meanie. By the sound of their laughter, they did.
"Gee, you're strong," he said.
"Chimps are."
"But you're supposed to be a young woman."
"I'm a chimp too. And I like it."
"Sure, sure."
PART TWO LIVING
MONTH FOUR,
DAY TWELVE
Living at home, at last . . . But the ghost still there . . . The ghost moving about these rooms . . . Making herself snacks in this kitchen . . . Gazing, now, out this window . . .
There was a particular moment sometimes when the sun went down. It needed the right weather, a cloudless sky and a mild west wind to clear the brownish haze of the city. Then for a few moments, below the earliest stars and above the still-faint pattern of city lights, you might just catch a different kind of glimmer, a wavering thread, the twinkle of snow on mountain peaks, ninety kilometers off, catching the sun's last rays.
Eva watched for it, and yes, it was there, but the old prickle of pleasure didn't come. Her happiest times used to be skiing. She would look forward for months to her next chance. But now it was only the ghost that yearned.
The ghost had been particularly strong this morning, because of being home and waking in her own bed. Eva had awakened on the edge of horrors, desperate for the feel of her own long-limbed smooth-skinned body, her own hair to brush, her own teeth to clean, her own dark blue eyes to ring with eye shadow. Dad had had to give her an extra shot of dope she still took to suppress that kind of feeling, so perhaps that was why the ghost that yearned for the ski slopes was now only a vague shadow in her mind, and Eva, the new Eva, the one she must learn to think and feel of as the only real Eva, was merely amused and interested in the idea of going skiing. She might have been excited if Dad had announced they were going off to the mountains next weekend, but she didn't yearn anymore. That kind of intense, shapeless longing was for something else. What?
The answer came when she closed her eyes. Leaves mottling the dark behind the eyelids. Trees. Only where could you still find trees, real trees in forests, the way you could still find mountains?
Up north in the timber stands, grown as a thirty-year crop? No good. The branches were the wrong shape to swing through or .nest among. You couldn't live through those winters. You couldn't eat pine needles. South, then? There were bits of jungle still--you saw them sometimes on the shaper. Nearly three thousand kilometers on beyond the mountains, there were five or six valleys that had never been cleared, where the rain-forest trees still grew and the lianas dangled. There were a few other places in the world like that, tiny preserved patches, most of them funded by the shaper companies, studied and guarded by scientists, kept free from other human intrusion. But perhaps Dad might be able to arrange something, a research project which needed a sort-of-chimp to be in a jungle for a while . . .
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 24
It was a fantasy, and Eva knew it. It was a way of dreaming the dream. She kept her eyes closed and let it happen. Unnoticed beside her the ghost thinned, dwindled, vanished.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Mom had no sense of time, so she set the kitchen timer for anything that mattered. Its shrill sound stopped and Mom came into the living room and switched on the shaper. A travel commercial filled the zone, bronze bodies on a pale beach, ridiculously less crowded than a real beach would be. Mom settled into her chair and Eva knuckled over and climbed into her lap. Mom laughed resignedly. "I suppose we've got to watch," she said. "Dad's big day."
Eva was glad she'd made enough fuss to force them to let her come home in time to watch the program with Mom. It wouldn't have been fair to Mom to make her watch it alone. Dad was down at the studios because part of the format of Mr. Ellan's programs was always a live discussion. Mom could have come to the hospital to watch, of course, but that would have been making too big a thing of it. Much better here at home, ordinary.
When the titles began Mom turned up the sound, and the drumbeat theme of the series thudded out. The zone cleared, and then filled with a section of ice rink, a girl with long black hair skating in a yellow tracksuit. Her slightly fuzzy edges showed that the sequence had been taken with an amateur camera. Mom stiffened and closed her eyes. Mr. Ellan's solemn half whisper began as a voice-over.
"This girl's name is Eva. just over a year ago she was involved in a car accident and suffered extensive physical damage. She would certainly never have walked, let alone skated, again. Furthermore, she was in an irreversible coma. Yet today Eva is alive, active, healthy. She looks, however, quite different. She looks like this. "
And there was Kelly, squatting among the yellow bars of the climbing frame. She pursed her lips forward and hooted. Go away--but to humans it would be just a hoot, and anyway she immediately shrugged, grinned, and waved a friendly hand. Eva stared. Me, she thought. Me. Though she was used by now to looking at her own image in a mirror and accepting it as herself,, the chimp in the zone was like a stranger. The brown eyes were bright with cleverness and mischief. The big ears stuck out through the coarse black hair. Eva felt a rush of friendliness and liking, and without thinking started a silent pant of greeting. Faintly she was aware of the old Eva gazing through her eyes, dismayed, trying to make the lips and throat cry No!, but thanks to the dope it wasn't difficult to blank her out and will a Yes with her conscious mind. She glanced up, wanting to share that Yes. Mom still had her eyes shut.
"Try and watch, Mom," she made the keyboard murmur. "It's me now. We've got to like this me. I do already. Really. I'm not pretending."
"I'm so glad, darling."
"I know it's harder for you."
"I'll learn."
The climbing frame vanished, leaving Kelly hanging in midair as a still. The girl in the yellow tracksuit appeared on the opposite side of the zone, and Mr. Ellan strolled up between them as though he'd just happened along.
"In the next hour," he said, "we are going to show you the full story of this astonishing event. Before we begin I should point out that but for the generosity of Honeybear Soft Drinks it would not have been possible. Eva's transformation was a very expensive procedure, demanding the attention of many highly skilled scientists working at the very frontier of technology. Such work does not come cheap, and Eva and her parents have cause to be very grateful indeed to Honeybear for its help. We have with us in the studio this evening one of those parents, Dr. Daniel Adamson of the International Chimpanzee Pool . . .
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 25
The zone widened and there was Dad, smiling at the cameras, his blue eyes bright in the studio lights, his whole face and attitude saying Like me, oh, please like me .
. . . and we are also honored to have with us Professor Joan Pradesh, whose work in the field of neuron memory, first discovered by her father, Professor E. K. Pradesh, made the miracle of Eva possible . . .
And there was Joan. Somebody had bullied her into wearing a mauve dress. She didn't even bother to smile.
. . . Now, first, Dr. Adamson, perhaps you can tell us how exactly you and your wife felt . . .
"I can't listen to this," said Mom and switched the sound off. "You've got it taping for Dad, haven't you?"
Eva grunted a yes. She didn't mind--she could listen later too. And meanwhile it was interesting to watch Dad trying to tell Mr. Ellan how exactly . . . And then there was a picture of Dad's car lying upside down with its roof caved in; and then a shape on a hospital bed, a mound of bandages with tubes running in and out--Mom had her eyes shut againand then the same shape, with a sort of box like a coffin beside it. The cameras closed in to a little window in the lid of the box. Dimly, behind the glass, you could see something that might have been a dark, furry head with its eyes closed . . .
Eva was glad they had the sound off. There was something holy about the silent pair, something you didn't want Mr. Ellan, or even Dad, telling you what to think about . . . But it was interesting that they'd started making the program even then, so that Honeybear could have something to pay for. It must all have cost a fortune, Eva realized. They'd be wanting to see returns on their money from now on.
"It's all right, you can look now. It's Joan," she said, switching up the sound.
Joan was pure Joan, despite the mauve dress, looking and sounding as if she thought the program was a complete waste of her time. She didn't even try to make things easier for the dimwits out there watching, but Mr. Ellan was pretty good at his job, really, asking his questions in a way that forced her to give the dimwits a chance. They'd only been going a few minutes when the commo beeped. Mom picked it up with her free hand.
"Hello. Who? Oh, no. No, I don't want to talk about it. No thank you."
She hung up.
"A woman from some other program," she said. "How did they get our new number? It isn't on the . . .
The commo beeped again. She picked it up, said hello, listened for a moment, and hung up. Eva reached over and switched it to autocall .
. . . that Eva was used to chimps?" Mr. Ellan was saying. "From what Dr. Adamson was telling us, she'd practically grown up with them."
The zone showed another amateur sequence, a naked human child with blue eyes and dark hair absorbed in play in a sandbox. A half-grown female chimp knuckled into view and started to search intently across her scalp. The child seemed hardly to notice.
"I can only say it may have been of importance," Joan said. "The brain is an extremely complex mechanism, and we do not yet understand many things about it. In this case, the problems of rejection in the immediately posttransferral stage may well have been eased by experiences analogous to maternal imprinting in Eva's early childhood. However . . .
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 26
The doorbell rang. One of the neighbors, thought Eva, checking to see if we know the program's on-people can be thick--they couldn't use the commo because we're on auto. She was moving to tell them Thanks, we're watching, when. Mom said "Wait," turned the volume down, and switched the shaper to closed circuit. The zone filled with the landing outside the apartment door. Four people stood there, two of them with shaper cameras and the other two jostling to hold up their ID cards to the closed-circuit camera above the lintel. They were calling out something, inaudibly because the volume was off. Behind them the elevator doors opened and more people jostled out, some with cameras.
"I knew this was going to happen," said Mom. "Jerry swore he wouldn't let anyone through the main doors, but I just gnaw "
"How'd they get here so soon?" said Eva. "I thought . . .
"SMI did a lot of publicity. They guaranteed no one would be told our name in advance, but somebody at the studios must have sold it to the other companies. Shaper people will do anything. "
The doorbell was ringing now without stopping. People were banging at the door itself. It was supposed to be breakin-proof, but you couldn't be sure. Mom pressed a couple of keys and spoke into the mouthpiece of her control.
"This is Mrs. Adamson. We are not giving any interviews. Will you please go away? You are trespassing on private property."
Nothing happened. Perhaps they hadn't heard through the racket they were making, hammering and calling and swearing at one another and pressing the bell. Even from right inside the apartment the noise was loud enough to feel dangerous. More people came out of the elevator. Mom repeated her message. And again and again. The doorbell stopped. Now they were shouting at one another not to shout at one another, and making shushing gestures. Then silence. You could see they could hear the message because half a dozen microphones poked up toward the speaker to record Mom's voice. It didn't do any good. The bell started again at once, and the shouting and knocking.
Now the door on the other side of the landing opened, and little Mr. Koo came out to complain about the racket. The Koos never watched the shaper, so he couldn't have understood what was happening, but the moment they saw him the reporters closed around him like wasps attacking a caterpillar, yelling questions and thrusting microphones and cameras at him. He retreated, but before he could close the door they surged in around him, leaving room on the landing for the elevator to disgorge another load, and these newcomers, seeing their rivals streaming through an open door, must have thought the Adamsons lived on that side and pressed in after them while the poor old elevator went down for yet another load.
White and shuddering, Mom plugged the commo in. It immediately started to bleep, but after several tries she hit a clear space and got a channel out. She called the police, but whoever she spoke to said they couldn't help. Then she tried the home number of a man she knew in the police department, because of her job, and he said the same, explaining privately that the police never interfered with shaper people if they could help it, because the shaper people always got their own back by putting on programs that made that department look like crooks or idiots.
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 27
The moment she put it down the commo began to beep again, till she switched to auto. The doorbell was getting on Eva's nerves, so she went out into the hallway to see if she could turn it off. The sound came from a box up by the ceiling. She opened the door of the coat closet, jumped, grasped, and swung herself up. Crouching on top of the door, clutching it with her feet, she inspected the box. There wasn't a switch, but there was a grill in front through which the sound came, so she swung down and got a box of rice from the kitchen. Using the lid of the box as a sort of chute, she eased a stream of rice into the grill until the noise stopped.
She didn't come down at once. She felt safer crouched up there away from the floor. The voices from beyond the door made her pelt prickle, and her throat and lips worked involuntarily, wanting to shout back. Though she couldn't hear any words, the voices still had a meaning--they were hunting cries, the calls of a pack baying outside the lair of its prey. Of course, if they'd been let in the people out there wouldn't have hurt her, only asked stupid questions. That was what her mind told her. But her body told her they were enemy. It was an effort to climb down and go back into the living room. Mom was still white and shivering.
"Hadn't we better call Dad?" said Eva, using the tone control on her keyboard to sound calm. "The program's still on. He'll be at the studio."
"You better warn him. He'll never get in."
Again it took several tries to get a channel out, but in the end Mom managed to find someone who said they'd tell Dad as soon as they could.
"I never dreamed it would be as bad as this," said Mom. "I realized they'd be interested, but honestly! They're mad!"
No, they're just people, thought Eva. Time went by. The riot on the landing calmed. The onslaught became a siege. Some of the attackers settled onto the floor and waited; others leaned against walls; a few spoke into pocket commos.
"Let's watch something else," said Eva, taking the control and beginning to flick through the channels. The second one she came to was showing an old tape of chimps. She watched for a while until she realized from the voice--over that it was a news program about her, only they didn't have anything to show the viewers except that tape. Three channels farther on she found another news program, live, with a reporter talking into a camera in the street outside this very apartment house. Almost at once the shot switched to another angle from far higher, this building still, against the evening sky, with the city spreading on beyond it until it was lost in its own man- made dusky mist. The focus zoomed in to a particular window. The lights were on in the room, so you could just make out a woman sitting in a chair, with a large dark something on her lap.
Mom sighed and pressed keys to lower the blind. In the imaged window in the zone the blind came down.
"Someone in one of the other buildings must have let them use their apartment," said Mom. "Honestly, people will do anything. "
People, people, people--even Mom talked as if they were enemy, and she was people too. She switched the shaper off, just leaving the VCR running so that Dad could watch his big moment tomorrow.
More than an hour later they were halfheartedly playing chess when Eva felt her pelt prickle with wariness. Something had changed. Though she hadn't been aware of hearing the crowd on the landing, now that she listened for them she knew that they had stopped muttering among themselves and become very quiet. She switched the closed circuit on and saw that they were all standing up, lacing the elevator. She could hear the whine of its ascent.
"Dad," said Mom. "But he'll . . . how did they know?"
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 28
They had friends with commos below, of course, thought Eva, but she didn't have time to say so before the elevator stopped and the door opened. Two huge men in gray uniforms faced the crowd, which had begun to surge forward. They lowered their shoulders and charged out. Now Eva could see that there were four other people in the elevator, Dad, a woman, and two more huge men in uniform. The crowd gave way before the charge but then surged in from the side as the second two guards tried to hustle Dad and the woman on through the gap. Dad looked terrified, though often you could hardly see him for outthrust microphones. The woman held herself very erect and spoke in a loud voice, clearly saying the same few words over and over. The guards elbow-jabbed the crowd aside. Eva saw at least one bleeding nose, and several people fell right over. When they reached the door the guards regrouped and kept the crowd at bay while Dad bent down to operate the voice lock, but either because of the racket or because he was so scared his voice came out funny and the lock didn't work at once, so Eva got there first and opened the door. The crowd could barely have glimpsed her, but they let out a baying roar and surged forward as Dad and the woman slipped through. The guards just managed to hold them while
Eva got the door shut.
Dad stood in the hall, shaking his head while the baying dwindled into shouts of pleading and frustration. He scuffed his toe at some of the rice Eva had spilled while she was silencing the bell.
"I didn't believe it," he said. "I just didn't believe it."
"It is certainly far worse than anyone had expected," said the woman, as calm as if she were discussing the weather. She was a bit over thirty, blond, with fluffy hair and neat features. At first glance she looked rather fragile, despite her dark business suit, but she spoke and carried herself as though she weren't afraid of anyone. She turned to Mom, who had come out into the hallway.
"Good evening, Mrs. Adamson. I am Jane Callaway, from the legal and contract department of SMI. Before anything else, I must apologize on behalf of the company for the intolerable disturbance you have suffered tonight."
"It's awful," said Mom.
"Let's have a drink," said Dad.
"Just fruit juice for me," said Ms. Callaway. "I'm working."
Eva knuckled into the kitchen and got the drinks, making Dad's a bit stronger than usual. Ms. Callaway said Thank you in a perfectly normal way but then sat looking at Eva with cool, considering pale eyes.
"I wish I'd seen her sooner," she said. "I think I might have realized. It may all die down in a few days, but in my opinion you are going to have to prepare for quite a long period of very intense media interest. That is why I'm here. My job is to work out the problems that arise in cases like this."
"There can't be many cases like this!" said Mom.
"There are always unique features," said Ms. Callaway. "That's why the public is interested. But the legal basis remains remarkably constant. In my experience, your most straightforward course would be to assign exclusive rights to Eva's story to a company such as SMI. Part of the contract would be that we protect you from unwanted intrusion. As a private citizen you can't sue a reporter who tries to question you, but we can, because the reporter is asking you to break your contract with us. Now obviously you don't want to embark on a long-term contract without thinking it over, but in view of what has happened it would be a sensible course for you to assign the rights to the story in the next few days . . . '
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 29
She had opened her briefcase while she was speaking and pulled out a few sheets of paper. She continued to explain, cool, friendly, helpful. Eva stopped listening. There was something about the three of them--Mom and Dad and Ms. Callaway--that puzzled her. Mom was frowning, Dad leaning forward in his chair, bright-eyed, nodding at each fresh point Ms. Callaway made . . . This wasn't his sort of thing at all, but Mom though she wasn't a lawyer knew a lot about things like contracts, because her job often involved trying to help people who'd gotten into some kind of legal mess . . . Why was Dad so anxious? Why wasn't he trying to get his word in, as usual? Was it just that he was tired after the program and still shocked by what had happened on the landing? Or . . .
Out of nowhere the thought floated into Eva's mind that Dad was acting. He already knew what Ms. Callaway was going to say. He'd already talked to her about all this. And that meant . . .
No, he couldn't have known it was going to be like this. He hadn't been acting when he got home. He'd been really frightened, really shocked . . . But suppose Ms. Callaway's company had realized what was going to happen. Suppose they just allowed it to happen in cases like this and then sent someone like Ms. Callaway along, cool, friendly, helpful, while you had the reporter--pack actually baying on your doormat and all you could think of was getting rid of them. What they'd do was calm Dad down and get him to sort-of-agree not to worry till the time came, and tell him about the long-term contract and the kind of money that would be coming to the Pool, and he'd have sort-of-agreed to that too, and then sort-of-told them about Mom and how she might react to the idea of assigning exclusive rights to her daughter's story to a shaper company . . .
Slowly Eva tapped a few words into her keyboard and waited for a pause before she pressed the "Speak" bar.
"Do you know who I belong to?"
The three heads jerked around.
"You don't belong to anyone, darling," said Mom.
Dad said nothing but looked at Ms. Callaway. She stared at Eva and nodded, like a teacher when someone's asked the right question.
"As a matter of fact, that is a very interesting point," she said. "I have, of course been looking into it."
"Why?" said Mom, sharply.
"Because I am paid to be-sure of our legal ground before we undertake long-term commitments. I believe that when animals from the Chimpanzee Pool are sold for research they are sold outright, and the organization doing the research then buys them. But in Eva's case, because the experiment was carried out by the Pool itself, in cooperation with the Pradesh Institute, no such arrangement was made-in fact, no arrangement was made at all."
"I suppose I ought . . ." said Dad.
"There might therefore be an argument that Eva's body, at least, still belongs to the Pool."
"This is ridiculous," said Mom. "Anyway, we could pay for her now-we'd have to find the money somehow."
"The difficulty, Mrs. Adamson, is that Eva is now an extremely valuable piece of property. The trustees of the Pool might well argue . . .
"She isn't property!"
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 30
"Well, I would agree that if the case were to go to court, Eva could eventually be confirmed as a human being--that is to 'say not belonging to anyone, but with her parents having the usual rights and responsibilities while she remains a minor. Even a point like that raises problems. How old is she? The human Eva is thirteen, but the body she is using is less than six. All I can tell you is that however the courts decide these points, the legal costs in coming to a decision might well prove very considerable indeed. That is why I have drafted a special clause into this contract under which my company accepts that Eva is fully human, with all that that implies, and furthermore, the company undertakes, in the event of your signing a long-term contract with us, to bear all legal costs in arguing the case."
"You got this all ready beforehand?" said Mom.
Ms. Callaway smiled, unruffled.
"It's my job to think of difficulties before they happen. The short-term preliminary contract I suggest is only one option. If you would like to discuss . . .
"No. Let's have a look at it."
Ms. Callaway passed the papers across. Mom put on her glasses and started to read. Dad beckoned to Eva. She knuckled across, climbed onto his lap, and started to finger through his beard.
"How did it go?" he muttered.
"Didn't have time to watch much. Joan had just started. Then they turned up."
She shrugged a shoulder toward the doorway.
"But you've got it on tape?"
"Uh."
They waited. Dad finished his drink. Ms. Callaway sat still, patient as a hunter. At last Mom looked up.
"I suppose that's the best course," she said. "You really think you can get rid of them?"
"It has usually worked in the past," said Ms. Callaway, calm as ever-but then for the first time she gave a small jerk of surprise as Mom turned to Eva.
"Listen, darling. If Dad and I sign this, it means that for the next week we agree not to talk about you to anyone except Ms. Callaway's company. We don't have to talk to them either if we don't want to during that week. But it means that they will have the legal right to shoo everyone else away, and that will give us all time to think. Are you happy about that?"
They had to wait while Eva thought and then, more slowly than usual, set her message up. She made the words come slowly too.
"All right. Only provided you don't sign anything saying ordinary chimps belong to people either."
She felt Dad's body jerk. Then he laughed his infuriating little laugh that meant that what you'd just said was too silly to argue about.
"I don't think there's anything . . ." murmured Mom.
"No," said Ms. Callaway, "and I will make a note to avoid phrases to that effect in future contracts. Now, if you will just sign here . . . and here, Dr. Adamson . . . excellent. And now I will see what I can do about driving the wolves from your door."
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 31
She stood up, patted her hair smooth, and left. The racket from the landing rose as the door opened, then faded. Mom switched on the closed circuit to watch but kept the volume off. Ms. Callaway, flanked by security men, was reading a statement--she must have had that ready too. The camera showed only the back of her head. Microphones jutted toward her. The crowd was listening. Their faces signaled weariness, frustration, defeat. Some at the back were talking into commos. The elevator doors were opening, and several of the crowd were already waiting to board it. When Ms. Callaway stopped reading, some questions were shouted, but she answered with a shake of her head. The elevator went down, crammed. Ms. Callaway came back into the apartment and talked to Mom and Dad about an appointment to which they could bring their own lawyer. By the time she left, the landing was almost empty, and the guards were shoving the last few reporters into the elevator by force. Two of the guards stayed on in case anyone tried to come back. Eva awoke several times in the night. She was oddly restless in her own bed. In the old days she used to sleep on her stomach, stretched right out, but now she felt more comfortable curled up. I'd really like a basket, she thought, a big dog-basket, like a nest. I wonder if Mom would mind. Perhaps if I told her I wanted a round patchwork, to cover it with . . .
Later she woke again and heard voices, Mom and Dad, Mom angry and hurt, Dad trying to talk his way out. They both hated fights, didn't even like arguments, Dad especially. It was typical he hadn't ever figured out who owned Kelly, because that would have meant hassle. I'm going to have to watch Dad, Eva thought. Whatever he says, I'm going to see that I own me . . .
Another voice in the early dawn, only a murmur again but unmistakable. Mr. Ellan. Creeping out into the living room, she found Dad settling down to watch his big moment. Since she'd missed so much with Mom turning the sound off and then the siege starting, she climbed onto his lap to watch too. He welcomed her by ruffling the fur at the back of her head with easy fingers.
Dad came over well on the shaper. In fact, Eva thought, he seemed more real than he sometimes did at home--sincere, solemn, and honest when he was talking about what had happened to his daughter, and then when he was talking about his chimps still sincere, but clever, excited, eager to make people understand. Now she could actually feel him purring with satisfaction at his own performance.
They watched the program through to the end. It finished with a kiss. When Eva had grabbed Mr. Ellan by the collar and given him that mighty, sucking smacker, some cameraman had had the wits to zoom right in and get it in close-up. No professional comic could have reacted quite as beautifully as Mr. Ellan did, his horrible self-satisfied calm suddenly ripped away, leaving him with bulging eyes, head uselessly twisted aside, mouth gaping in a yell of fright. Eva hugged herself. Dad laughed his big cheerful bay, which only came when he was genuinely amused.
The zone froze on the kiss, and the credits spun through. That meant they'd cut what Eva had said about being a chimp. Too bad, she thought. People had better start understanding that, or they wouldn't understand anything.
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 32
MONTH SIX, DAY TWO
Living with fame . . .
Studios, waiting for programs to begin. Glare of shaper lights. How-exactly-does-it-feel . . .
Autographs (no good chimp-grip for a pen). Stares. Giggles.
Money and treats and meeting shaper stars.
A bodyguard, Cormac, in case you got kidnapped. A secretary, Joe, to answer the commo and the mailjournalists calling for a quick quote on Miss World or some diet fad, scientists wanting a slice of you (yes, a real slice sometimes, cells to culture, but usually only a slice of time and publicity) . . .
Dad getting offered visiting professorships . . .
People, people, people . . .
As many grapes as you could eat . . .
Not enough time with Mom . . .
Partly it was Eva's own fault. She would have been stuck with a little fame whatever she'd done. The people at SMI said that long before the program was over, the Public Response Indicators were already registering high interest and excitement. That was why the reporters had been ringing at the door so soon. But if only she'd never kissed Mr. Ellan. The PRI Index had really hit the roof then, they said. That's what the billions of watchers had really gone for. Things that happened in their shaper zones were more solid to them, more important, more exciting than anything that happened in their own lives, and somehow that image--the chimp squatting among the yellow bars of the climbing frame, with the bright butterfly embroidered on her chest, and her glossy pelt and clear gaze, and then the great Dirk Ellan panicking in her grip, and the comic, huge-lipped kiss-people could never get enough of it. They had laughed and fallen in love. The sequence was played again and again and copied and parodied and referred to like a proverb everybody knew. On talk shows Eva had to cope with people trying to work themselves into a kiss-me position so that they could share the effect. All the crammed world, even oddballs like the Koos who never watched the shaper, knew about Eva.
Fame could be useful. Mom and the school social worker, who'd been around several times to talk things over before Eva started school again, had been worried about how the other kids would react--whispers, giggles, states, outright rejection perhaps. Eva herself had been pretty nervous the first day, but in fact there was hardly any of that at all. She found she wasn't a stranger. The kids felt they already knew her, seeing her so often on the shaper in their own homes. Some of the smaller ones were into a craze for imitating her voice, fluttering their fingers across imaginary keyboards on their chests and then speaking; some of them were so good Eva couldn't tell the difference. In most ways too, kids were more sensible about fame than adults. The stares and the autographs lasted about two weeks, only. A few of the little ones hung around longer, not because she was famous--not even thinking about that--but because they felt a need to touch and fondle and be happy with a furry creature. Left to herself, Eva would probably have let it happen, but Ginny didn't like it and shooed the kids off.
Of course, there'd been hours of talk about all this at home. Mom had had the main teachers around and they'd discussed everything they could think of, from security against kidnappers to having a special small desk, but still there'd been things they'd missed . . .
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 33
Eva was sitting hunkered on the low wall in the shade of the Language Building with Bren beside her and Ginny just beyond. Ginny was going on about why she was going to give Juan the brush-off, and Bren, half jealous and half enjoying the idea of boys getting punished, was egging her on. A gang of juniors came shrieking around the corner of the building, and Eva's pelt stirred uncomfortably at the sound, the massed voices of humans, the pack-cry. The whole air was full of the same noise, nearer and farther, and every sitting place was filled, like a roost of starlings, as the out-shift gathered to wait for the in-shift to finish with the classrooms so that they could take their turn. It could have been worse. There were schools in the city that operated on a three-shift system, but they were mostly in the poorer areas. On the wall beyond Ginny a couple of older kids were creating their own little bubble of privacy in a long, motionless kiss. Ginny had gotten around to describing Juan's eating habits, and Bren was giggling at each fresh exaggeration. They didn't seem to notice the pressure either. It was as if you were born used to it, the clamor and the jostling, people, people, people. They were the air you breathed, the sea you swam in. But if you weren't people, you stifled, you drowned . . .
This feeling of pressure, of loneliness and strangeness in the crowd, was different from the sort of depression and sadness Eva still sometimes woke with, when she lay remembering how her old body used to enjoy lying in its bed, the caress of nightgown and warm sheets on smooth soft skin. She could take a shot of her dope when those ghost feelings got too strong, though she didn't often need to these days. But this ryas something else, a mirror image almost, not what the human part of her felt about being chimp but what the chimp felt about being human.
The pressure rose as Ginny and Bren talked across her. Mostly they were very good, they tried hard, but when they got excited they forgot to include her in their glances. Anyway, she wasn't interested in Juan. She shrank into herself and as she did so became aware of a different ghost. It had no body, only a voice, the ghost of a cry, but so strong and near in her mind that every hair on her body stood out. She had heard it just once, weeks ago, when she'd been scampering along the hospital corridor to inspect her new gym, the call of a chimp, scared, lost and bewildered, and waiting--though it couldn't know it--to have its own mind emptied away so that a human mind could invade and explore human pathways through the now blank cells. Where was that chimp now, that mind, those memories? Where was Kelly? Lost . . . lost . . . lost . . .
She was moving before she understood what was happening. The violence of the reaction whirled her off through the gaps between the little knots of kids and then with a leap, clutch, and swing up on to the shoulder of the old robed female statue--Mathematics or History or something--that stood by the library steps. She crouched there in her blue overalls while the cry shuddered up through her.
Lost . . . lost . . . lost . . .
It echoed off the walls of the Language Building, the lonely cry of a ghost.
For a moment the clamor stopped. A couple of hundred heads turned to stare. Some of the kids laughed and waved arms in greeting as though she were doing something clever. The mood died. She swung down and knuckled back to Bren and Ginny.
"What was that about?" said Bren.
"Did I say something stupid?" said Ginny, the same instant.
Eva made a forget-it grunt. A few minutes later the hooter sounded, calling the out-shift in to fill their heads with another ration of knowledge. Eva went home on the school bus. There'd been a fuss about that. The company had wanted to send a car so that Cormac could ride with her-- he wasn't allowed on the bus. Eva thought this was ridiculous; though Mom's job was pretty useful and Dad's was quite high up, they only just mustered enough points between them to qualify for a car license, but Eva could have had one from the SMI quota, just for being famous. Only it wouldn't have gotten her through the jams in the car lanes any faster, while the school bus could whisk her home in the bus lanes. How could you kidnap someone out of a bus in the bus lanes--you'd need to hijack another bus to start with . . .
Anyway, the company had given in in the end.
Brad and Trouble
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EVA by PETER DICKINSON part 34
After Bren had gotten off the bus Eva sat by herself, staring out over the endless lines of car. roofs, and at a jam-packed traveler, and t