Eva (12 page)

MONTH NINE,
DAY FOURTEEN

Eva made a tape to take to Grog in the hospital. On one side she put the reasons why she wasn’t going to help him in his campaign to get the chimps moved to Cayamoro. Long arguments like that she usually put on tape, because it took so long to spell them out face-to-face. She had plenty of reasons—reasons to do with chimps. (How could you let chimps loose in wild jungle when they didn’t know a poisonous berry from a safe one, or what a leopard was? How could you cope with males like Tatters and Geronimo? How could you hope for any of them to follow Eva’s lead, so junior, such an outsider? And so on.) Reasons to do with humans. (How would you raise the funds? How would you persuade people like Dad to stop what they were doing? How would you get the people who looked after Cayamoro to let you put a lot of chimps in their jungle? And so on.) Eva’s own reasons . . .

She found these harder to get said, but she had to, to be fair to Grog. She was happy with things as they were. Perhaps
happy
was the wrong word, but she felt she’d reached a balance she could live with. She needed human company as well as chimp company. She needed Ginny and Bren in the same sort of way she needed Lana. She enjoyed human things—cooked food, surfboarding, travel. She’d be going skiing in a couple of months. It wasn’t fair to ask her to give all that up.

Or to have to tell Mom she was going to go away and live in Cayamoro and never see her again.

Eva played the tape through to check. It was all right, firm, and final . . . but poor Grog. She turned the tape over and filled the other side with chitchat about things that had happened while he’d been away and then ill—the fight with Tatters, Mom’s most tiresome client winning a lottery, Sniff, Mimi’s latest rage, Abel’s first real knot, and so on. Bright bedside prattle. It was so difficult to imagine Grog being ill. Almost dying, apparently.

Mimi had chartered an air ambulance and flown out and brought him back to the university hospital, but he’d been too ill for visitors. Eva had called again, because she was due in for her monthly check at Joan Pradesh’s lab, and again she’d been told no, but then the hospital had called back to say Grog was asking for her, but she mustn’t stay more than five minutes. It sounded as though he must still be pretty bad. Even so, she wasn’t ready for the shock.

All his hair had fallen out. His face was the color of the underside of a fish, with all the flesh wasted from beneath the skin. His eyes were dull, yellow, exhausted, but at least they moved. If he’d had them shut, she would have thought he was dead. She realized at once she couldn’t give him the tape.

“Hi,” he whispered. “Good to see you.”

“Uh?” she grunted.

“Had a bad time. My fault. They thought I was done for, but they’ve got it licked at last. I’eve had half a million little wrigglers playing lurkie-lurkie around my bloodstream, but they’ve all gone now. Taught me a lesson. Can’t send chimps to Cayamoro. Don’t have the immunities any more than I had.”

He closed his eyes. Eva grunted agreement and relief. He didn’t notice the relief.

“Going to have to make our own jungle,” he said. “Nice, clean jungle. On an island, uh?”

With the closed eyes and the whisper it was as if he were talking in his sleep, muttering his dreams. Eva mumbled sounds of doubt. His eyes opened.

“You’re against?” he said.

“Uh.”

“Why? Only thing makes sense.”

“Tell you when you’re stronger.”

“No. Now.”

For the first time there was a sort of energy in his eyes, a glimmer of the Grog she knew before.

“Isn’t time now. I did you a tape. Give it to you later.”

“Let’s have it now. Come on. Listen, this is the only thing I think about. You got reasons, I want to listen to them, think about them. You’ve as good as told me you’re anti—you can’t just leave it at that. Right?”

His voice was more than a whisper now, and there was a tinge of pink in his cheeks. It was as if the argument were actually good for him. Eva took the tape out.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry, Grog. Listen to side one when you’re feeling stronger. Side two is just talk.”

“Thanks.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. Eva thought he’d fallen asleep, but then his lips moved.

“Have some grapes. More than I can eat.”

It was, too, a huge mound, purple and green. She took a whole bunch and felt her mouth starting to water. Grog smiled.

“Can’t promise you they aren’t poisoned,” he said. “Mother keeps sending them.”

Eva had discovered quite a human-sounding chuckle she could do with her own mouth, but she couldn’t control it the way she could her voice-box remarks, so now it came out all false.

Her sense of shock and depression deepened as she knuckled along corridors and rode escalators and elevators to Joan’s lab. Checkups had, in any case, become rather boring by now. Nothing new was likely to happen, so foan left them to her assistants. They wired you up and made you run on a moving belt and do other kinds of exercises; then, still wired up, you did memory tests and perception tests and intelligence tests; then they showed you shapings of things that were supposed to stir you up in different ways—human and chimp babies, a car crash, a snake eating a mouse, a nude male model, a bowl of apples, and so on, while the machines you were wired to recorded your pulse and your palm moisture and your brain rhythms and dozens of other things happening inside you and fed the results into computers to be juggled around. Today, by the time she reached this stage the shapings seemed to mean nothing at all.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” said Minnie. She was a happy, round-faced girl with a sharp little nose and tiny eyes. She was far brighter than she looked, Eva had found.

“Uh?”

“Only you hardly seem to be registering.”

“Sorry. Thinking about something else.”

Just saying so brought back the image of Grog, bald and beardless on the pillow.

“Whup!” said Minnie. “Something registered there!”

“I visited a friend on the way. He’s been very ill. All his hair’s fallen out.”

“Too bad.”

“Chimps mind about hair.”

“So you do too?”

“Uh.”

“Okay. Let’s see if we can find you something nice and shaggy.”

Minnie pressed keys. The computer thought for an instant, then came up with a ridiculous dog, a girl in a woolly suit, a bottle brush, a caterpillar, a diatom, a college professor. They began to laugh and were still laughing when Joan Pradesh came in. She glanced scornfully at the professor.

“An utter charlatan,” she said. “How’s it going, Minnie?”

“She’s not been concentrating. She’s a bit upset. She’s been visiting a sick friend.”

Joan nodded, not interested. She took over the console from Minnie and whizzed through the earlier results, faster than you’d have thought anyone could have taken them in.

“Absolutely normal,” she said. “I think we can stop doing this—we are not going to get anything new. Of course, I am not a psychologist—I can judge only the physiological data. Do you feel yourself to be a fully integrated creature, Eva?”

“Most of the time. Only I get chimp urges I’ve got to go along with. I’m more chimp than you expected, aren’t I?”

Joan said nothing, but stared at the VDU, not really seeing it. She rose.

“We’ll disconnect her now, Minnie,” she said.

“We haven’t quite finished.”

“Never mind.”

Joan helped remove the sensors with quick and expert fingers. She might be arrogant, but she wasn’t proud.

“Now, come with me,” she said and led the way out into the corridor and along to a windowless room, one wall of which was lined with VDUs. Meg was sitting at one of the consoles. She turned and said, “Hi, Eva,” but her smile was strained and sad.

“I want you to look at something,” said Joan. “I’m not going to tell you about it because I don’t want to put ideas into your head. If you find it too distressing, you must tell me.”

She pressed a switch. A zone hummed, and at the other end of the room shapes became solid—a hospital bed ringed by machines, the broken web, the thing like a hairy spider at the center—a chimp’s head on the pillow, split by a huge, straining grin. The gleaming canines showed it was a male. The eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling.

Eva knuckled across to the zone and circled it. So this was what was left of the boy called Stefan and the chimp called Caesar. It could only be them. She felt her lips beginning to strain in sympathy, copying the grin of horror.

To Dad’s surprise and Mom’s relief Eva had not wanted to talk much about what would happen when Joan’s new patients woke. People expected her to be excited at the idea of having companions like herself, but her own feelings were more mixed. There had even been a strand of jealousy in them, at the knowledge that soon she would be losing her own uniqueness. Fame was funny. You didn’t want to share it. But much more important than that had been the fear, half thought and half felt, that having others like her would upset the balance she had achieved. Because there was no one like her, people had to accept her as human when she was with them, just as the chimps accepted her as chimp when she was in the Reserve. When the others came, wouldn’t people, even Ginny and Bren, find it harder not to think of her as
other
, different and unwanted? And Eva herself, would she still want to be with Lana as much as she did? That was something too precious to lose, but you couldn’t keep it alive just by wanting to. So on the whole, Eva had not spent much time thinking about the moment when she would first meet Stefan/Caesar. Perhaps that was why, when the moment came, the shock was not the simple selfish shock of disappointment. It was pure shock, shock at the thing itself.

The bedclothes beside the body moved.

“Erch,” said a voice. “Gningg.”

Eva knuckled back to Joan.

“Something wrong?” she said.

“We began the resuscitation procedure nineteen days ago. We had earlier felt able to take a few shortcuts on the basis of what we learned from you, and it is just possible that we made a mistake there, but if so, it hasn’t shown up in any of our tests. Personally I am confident that the transfer has taken place, that Stefan’s axon network has replicated in the animal’s brain, that he is, in lay terms,
there
. But for some reason he is unable to communicate, either with the animal’s body or through it with the outside world.”

Eva turned and circled the zone again, staring at the image on the image bed. No use.

“Can I go in?” she said.

“If you don’t mind going through the sterilizer.”

“You won’t have to do my clothes.”

Eva stripped and stood in the little cubicle. Her hair bushed out around her under the tingling bombardment. She opened the inner door and went through. The room was just the same as when she used to lie here, with the bed and the mirror and the silent machines, and beyond the window the huge sky with the city stretching away beneath it. She pulled a stool over to the bed and climbed on to it, so that she could lean over and peer down into the dark eyes. There was nothing she could read there, no presence, no signal. Her hand moved without her telling it to and began to groom through the long black hairs on the scalp.

“He hasn’t got any feeling there,” said Meg’s voice. “Just his left arm and his mouth.”

Eva shifted the bedclothes back. The hand lay across a keyboard just like hers. Sometimes the fingers twitched, and when they touched the “Speak” bar a voice came out, meaningless. She settled herself and started to groom her way painstakingly up the arm. Was there a faint response, felt through her fingertips, as though the flesh itself recognized the signal? But when she peered into the eyes again she saw no change, and the agonized grin stayed tense.

She lifted the twitching fingers aside and pressed the keys.

“Hi,” said a boy’s voice from the keyboard speaker. “I’m Stefan. I’m here. I’m okay.”

The arm threshed at the sound, straining against the straps that held it.

“That is his regular reaction,” said Joan out of the air. “Violent agitation.”

Eva let the threshings subside and returned to grooming the arm. The response she imagined she had felt before was there no longer. There was no change in the dreadful grimace, no glimmer of any kind in the eye. After about ten minutes Joan’s voice spoke again.

“He’s had as much as he can stand for the moment. Meg’s going to put him to sleep.”

Eva grunted but continued her work. She wanted him to go back into darkness with the feel of her fingers on his flesh. It seemed important, but she didn’t know why. She felt the change in her fingertips and looked up in time to see the eyes close, the lips lose their tension, soften, and close, too, until the face was that of a young male chimp, asleep, deep in a dream—a dream, perhaps, of trees.

Totally exhausted, Eva knuckled out into the control room and put on her overalls. She was very shivery. While she had been in the bedroom she had been too busy, too absorbed in trying to make contact, to understand quite what she had seen and felt. Now the horror of it gathered inside her and exploded into a howling hoot. She rocked herself to and fro in her misery. Joan stood watching, bright-eyed, but Meg jumped off her chair, knelt down, and cuddled beside her, sobbing with human grief.

Eva recovered first and reached for her keyboard.

“Sorry,” she said. “Couldn’t help it.”

“We are all somewhat shaken,” said Joan. “Do you have any ideas?”

“They’re both there. They don’t want each other.”

“Both?”

“Stefan. Caesar. Like Kelly’s here.”

She tapped herself on the chest.

“I made myself want Kelly,” she said. “I knew I had to. Suppose it’s easier for me. Always been used to chimps.”