Eva (15 page)

“You never read your old mother’s contracts? Works of art! Works of art!”

“Right, you can go on massacring them till they buy you off by giving you some kind of control over the next series of chimp commercials.”

“Uh!” said Eva.

“Don’t worry,” said Grog. “I’ve got it all worked out, I hope. We’ve got to be lucky, but if we all push in the right direction we might swing it. I’m going to offer World Fruit a deal. I can’t call off the boycott—too much of a let-down—but I can tell them we’ll play it down, provided they announce that when they’ve finished this series of commercials they will shoot a new series in a natural location, using chimps behaving the way chimps used to in the wild.”

“Out of your mind, child?” said Mimi. “Me, a wildlife director? What should I
wear
?”

“Black jodhpurs, crimson trimmings? Parakeet on your shoulder?”

“Be serious.”

“I
am
serious. You won’t have to direct anything. What you’ve got to do is use any say McAulliffe can work into your contract to see that the location they actually settle for is a place called St. Hilaire.”

“Uh?” said Eva.

“Island off Madagascar. Extinct volcano. Used to be solid forest till it was felled a couple of hundred years ago. Now it’s bare rocks, apart from a few pockets of real old trees the loggers couldn’t reach. It’s no good for tourists, no beaches and hot as hell, with the odd cyclone thrown in in a bad year. And it belongs to World Fruit. There’s one bit of flat land where they’ve got a cocoa plantation, but it’s never been economically viable and now they’ve got a virus. The point is it’s just about the only location they
can
use. There’s patches of trees that are small enough to enclose. My movement can insist on a genuinely natural location and the chimps having time to get used to being there. Even World Fruit isn’t going to get permission to move into somewhere like Cayamoro. What d’you think, Eva?”

Eva shrugged. It seemed so trivial, this stuff about commercials and sponsors, after what she’d just seen on the shaper. Was this all that marvelous surge of human energy, that great wave of love and hope and anger, was going to produce? What difference would it make when the filming was over? A few eased human consciences. Nothing that mattered. Eva didn’t understand Grog’s excitement at all. Anyway, there were all sorts of problems he didn’t seem to have thought of. She started with an obvious one.

“Chimps behaving as chimps. They don’t know how.”

“Who don’t?”

“Jenny and the others. Trained to wear clothes. Only know what it’s like in the Public Section.”

“So we can’t take
them
—that’s why we’ll be taking chimps from the Reserve. Lana, Dinks, Sniff ...”

“Whuh!”

“You’ll have to pick the others. Two males besides Sniff, and that’ll mean a dozen females, won’t it? Youngsters and babies.”

“Whuh?”

“You’re not going to St. Hilaire just to shoot a few commercials. You don’t imagine that’s all I’ve been sweating my guts for or why I got you along here now? Listen ...”

Eva listened. Her pelt stirred. Her human mind kept telling her it could never work, never even begin, but while Grog talked her body became restless with excitement and she prowled the rich room, imagining shadows, imagining odors, imagining trees.

YEAH TWO,
MONTH TWELVE,
DAYS TWO AND THREE

Dopey still with drugs, the chimps stared at the daylight. They felt the steamy heat, breathed the strange air. Their yesterday—nearly three days ago, in fact—had been spent huddled into the caves of the Reserve, with wind-whipped snow scurrying around the concrete outside. They had slept through the flights and stopovers. Only Eva—awake for the journey—had seen the various changes until the final airboat had slanted out of tropic blaze into a ridged mass of cloud, felt its way down through the murk and emerged over a huge dark sea. She had not seen the island until they circled to land, but then there it was. She had pressed her muzzle to the window, misting the glass with her breath. At first what she saw didn’t make sense, but then she had realized that what she was looking at was mainly a mountain rising almost directly from the sea, with its top all fuzzed out by the cloud base. Below that, desolation, vast jumbled slopes of bare brownish storm-eroded rock. Only here and there, darker streaks and patches, the fragmentary remains of what had once been forest before the trees had been stripped away for timber or firewood, or simply for a patch of fresh earth somebody hoped to raise a couple of crops from before the summer rains washed it away; but in these few places, in ravines and on slopes too steep to reach, the last trees still stood.

The flight path curved on. A flatter, greener area appeared. The sea came nearer, slow ocean rollers freckled with foam. Surf along rocky shores, buildings around a small harbor, trees in patterned rows, touchdown.

That had been Eva’s yesterday. She could have slept in a bed but chose to spend the night with the still-doped chimps so that she would wake among them, be already one of them as they first moved out into this other world. She had awakened before any of the others, and seen Colin bending over Lana, taking her pulse, lifting an eyelid.

“Uh?”

“Morning, Eva. Stopped raining, you’ll be glad to know. Does that every day, apparently, this time of year, unless there’s a storm. Comes on drenching at four, thirty millimeters of rain in three hours, and that’s it.”

“Uh?” said Eva again, pointing at Lana.

“Not long now. That little guy’s stirring, look, and there’s a big fellow pretty well awake next door. They’ll all be whooping about outside by lunchtime. I’m looking forward to this—it’s really something.”

Eva had grunted agreement. The same excitement ran through the whole team. They all felt themselves to be doing something extraordinary, even though it was only three weeks (they thought) and then back to the city, to winter, and the chimps huddling again in the caves of the grim Reserve. But for the moment it was as though they felt they were in at the birth of a new world, with the old tired world waiting and watching. Even the cameramen, who had seen so much they never admitted they were impressed by anything, couldn’t quite hide their excitement.

But in Eva’s case there was more than excitement—there was fear too, dry mouth, crawling pelt, drumming heart, cold weight in the stomach. She wasn’t planning to make her move for at least ten days, but the thought and the fear were there. She watched Wang finger sleepily at Lana’s side. Dinks’s two-month-old, Tod, was stirring too—the vets had had to give the babies smaller and more frequent shots, so they woke more readily. Colin left. Eva followed him out and was watching him lower the door of the next crate when she heard a quiet snort close behind her. She spun round and saw Sniff’s face peering through the door of the crate Colin had already visited. She knuckled over, crouched, and greeted him. There was no Tatters here, no Geronimo. Sniff would have to settle with Billy and Herman who was boss. They were older and stronger. It was important to build up his confidence.

He acknowledged her greeting with a grunt but continued to stare out at the scene beyond. She settled beside him in the doorway, looking at it too, seeing it now as far as she could with his eyes, this totally strange place, nothing like anything he’d known.

What did he see? A patch of reddish jumbled scree sloping down toward him—nothing square, nothing flat, nothing he was used to. Beyond that, dusty green hummocks—bushes—on one side. Denser green—thick growth around a scurry of water. Red scree sloping sharply up on the left. Beyond all that, much taller green, dark shadows—trees. Buzz of insects, reek of tropic growth, steamy air under low sky. A bird, bright yellow, dipping across, calling wheep-wheep-wheep. Sniff was shivering with excitement and alarm. Eva groomed for several minutes along the twitching surface of his upper arm, then rose, knuckled a few paces forward, turned, and held out her hand, palm up. Come.

He stared, snorted more loudly, took the first pace and halted, his eyes flickering from side to side.

Come.

This time he grunted and followed her up beside the stream, into the shadows. Behind them the hidden cameras watched them go. It was about twenty minutes before they returned to wait for the others to wake, to take them out, and show them what they had discovered.

The advance team had found the place, about three hectares of real forest they could actually reach. The rains that had stripped the mountain bald had washed most of the earth out into the sea, but here and there the shape of the underlying rock had trapped pockets of soil on which fresh growth could begin. The lower end of this patch was a steep-sided valley, thick with shrubs and saplings. Farther up it closed to a sheer-walled ravine, beyond human reach, where older trees still rooted deep into the rock. Out of sight over the bare ridges on either side ran a tall electric fence. The humans camped in the dying cocoa groves well over a kilometer below.

There were remote-controlled cameras hidden throughout the area. The idea was that everything the chimps did would be filmed, with Eva helping by seeing they were often in camera range and also by setting up events and interactions to stimulate them. SMI would edit the film for wildlife programs, and suitable sections would also be dubbed with sophisticated human voices and used for commercials for Honeybear. There ought to be enough in the can after three weeks’ filming for everyone to go home. It was silly, trivial, a total waste of time and money, but none of that mattered.

It had looked as if it were going to matter at first. When they’d found out what it was going to cost, the accountants had tried to object, but by then the news had gotten out (Grog’s friends had seen to that) that World Fruit was planning to take twenty chimps to a natural habitat for an experimental period, and see what happened. The bare rumor had done more for their sales than a whole season of commercials. From being world villains they found themselves world heroes. The expedition was news. By nightfall billions of eyes would have seen that first shot, the dark shapes of two chimpanzees knuckling in silence away into the trees.

Lana was awake, inspecting Wang. Abel was already at the door, peering out bright-eyed, too young to be frightened. Dinks was stirring. The stale reek of the crate was horrible after the live air. Eva beckoned from the door to Lana, who huddled back against the crate wall. She beckoned again. Then behind her a new noise started, a loud repeated hoot as Sniff stamped to and fro in front of the four crates, threshing the ground with a branch he had broken from a bush. The familiar sound seemed to encourage Lana, who came to the door and peered out. Eva put her arm around her and kissed her, encouraging her, telling her this was a good place. There were faces at the other doors now, and the sight of one another, and of Sniff displaying to and fro, seemed to give the chimps heart. Several came out into the open, sniffing and staring around. Eva could feel their wonder, their excitement and nerves. It was all so strange, so unprepared-for. And yet, and yet . . . How many of them, besides herself, had dreamed the dream? Surely she couldn’t be the only one.

Suddenly a half-grown male called Berry broke from the trance. He rushed up the slope, tore a branch from the nearest bush and rushed to and fro, beating the branch around and hooting, half in imitation of what Sniff had been doing and half in sheer excitement and joy. The others watched him for a moment and then began to move too. They gathered at the edge of the stream and stared amazed at the rushing water. Eva joined them and crouched down to drink. The water had a sweetish, mineral taste, quite different from the many-times-treated water in the troughs of the Reserve. Perhaps the drugs made you thirsty, because almost at once the rest of the group was doing the same. When Eva rose and turned she saw Sniff and Herman sitting side by side, chewing steadily at some leaves they had torn from a bush.

There had been a lot of discussion back home about whether and how to feed the chimps during the experiment. Botanists on the preliminary expedition to the island had reported that there was enough food in the ringed patch to support twenty chimps for three weeks, provided they knew what to look for. Probably only some of the leaves were edible, and one particular bush was fairly poisonous but tasted so bitter that you knew at once and spat it out. (Eva had tested some of the samples the botanists had brought home.) There were wild fig trees, and mangoes that must have seeded from crop trees planted by people before the mountains went bald. There were roots too, probably, if you knew what to look for, and ants’ nests and grubs under the bark of old trees up the ravine. Three hectares wasn’t a lot for twenty chimps—it would be looking fairly bashed around by the time they left. Eva had been especially interested in everything the botanists could tell her. It was going to be more important than people knew. But for the moment she was thankful that Dad and the others had decided they would have to come in at night while the chimps were sleeping and leave extra food around.

She knuckled over to Herman and put her muzzle close to the fist that clasped the leaves. He cuffed her casually away—he was a big young male, strong and not very intelligent, but placid and with less than the usual share of male chimp mischief. Sniff had seen the exchange. He snapped a few twigs from the bush and passed them to Eva, who took them and munched experimentally. The taste was faintly nutty, and all but the young leaves at the tips took a lot of chewing. Not many vitamins there, she guessed. Not much else either. Chimps in the wild, Dad said, used to spend two-thirds of their day looking for food and the rest eating it when they’d found it.

By now the rest of the group had gathered around and was snatching twigs from the tree and trying the bushes nearby. Billy found a bitter one and spat the leaves out with a grunt of disgust, then went and washed his mouth out in the stream. They were used to being fed in their caves soon after they awoke, so they kept making trips back to the crates to see whether breakfast had come yet. Eva was hungry too but waited. She felt it was important not to always be the one who did things first.

In the end it was Sniff. He took Herman by the wrist and led him to the gap in the bushes he and Eva had found earlier. At the opening he turned and beckoned to Eva. Come. She rose and signaled to Lana and Dinks, but it was Abel, who nowadays associated Eva in his mind with amusements and games, who came scampering across. Beth followed, tut-tut-ting, so Lana picked up Wang and came too. Eva turned and led them into the shadows, aware by the sounds behind her that the rest of the group would trail along.

By midmorning they were up in the ravine. They had found figs and a trailing plant with sweet yellow berries and some slow white grubs in a mound of dead leaves—they tasted like shrimp without the sea flavor—and a bog plant with long pale leaves whose midrib you could crunch like celery. They had also begun to learn that trees were not as easy to climb as they looked, especially if you were used to the rigid steel branches welded to the pillars of the Reserve. Herman had one crashing fall into the bushes below and rose bewildered, still clutching the branch that had snapped on him. By now they’d eaten enough for the moment, and it was getting too hot to move, so they rested.

There were two trees of the same kind, with smooth gray many-forked branches, growing low down from opposite cliffs of the ravine and meeting over the rush of water. Two hidden cameras up in the cliffs were trained on the place, but Eva hadn’t needed to coax the others there. They had found it of their own accord and swung themselves up, draping their bodies into crooks and crotches, making a pattern of dark strong shapes against the snaking gray branches. They twitched or scratched or groomed for a while at a neighbor, or moved lethargically to a fresh perch or to join another chimp, but for the most part they stayed still.

Eva sat at the edge of the group and watched them. Deliberately she lived in the moment, refusing to think about what lay ahead. She could not imagine that she would ever be so happy again, so filled with tingling, sparkling peace. Of course it was too hot for scampering around, though the spray from the stream helped, but she could feel that there was more to the stillness of the chimps than that. It was something shared, like a song, the wonder, the amazement, the deep content, the sense of having come home. She did not have to guess but knew, because she could feel the awareness going to and fro among them, shared and real, that they understood what had happened. The part that mattered, anyway. All of them, wide awake, were remembering and recognizing the dream. If nothing else happened, or if everything she and Grog had planned went wrong, this hour, this noon, would have been worthwhile.

In the early afternoon Eva experimented with making herself a nest. She was going to have to teach the others, so it was important to get it right herself first. It was easy, once you’d learned to recognize the sort of branches needed, close and whippy enough to bend and then lace together, holding them in place with your weight. Later still, she seemingly accidentally coaxed the chimps up the southern slope outside the ravine to where the humans had left the day’s rations—mostly plain chimp chow, with enough bananas to go around. Sniff and Billy had their first set-to, not a proper fight, but bluffing and challenging, and then, before anything serious happened, settling down to intense close mutual grooming. They were still at it when the rain started.