Eva (4 page)

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

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.

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 ...”

“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 Joan 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.

“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

“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.”

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.

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 Tightness 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 Elian, Eva. I’m sure you’ve seen him on the shaper.”

Eva grunted a greeting. The man just nodded, not to her but to Joan, telling her Yes, he’d seen this chimp. Something about the nod made the name click. Dirk Elian! 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.

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. Elian’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. Elian, 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. Elian 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 Elian.”

“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. Elian. 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. Elian 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.”

“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. Elian 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.”