Eva (7 page)

They watched the program through to the end. It finished with a kiss. When Eva had grabbed Mr. Elian 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. Elian 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.

MONTH SIX,
DAY TWO

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. Elian. 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 Elian 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, stares, 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 . . .

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 was 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.

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 the crowds on the pavement waiting for a gap to board it. People, people . . . They were strange, listless, empty. As if they didn’t have anything to live for. Even Ginny and Bren, who seemed so lively, were only lively for today. They never thought about the future or what was going to happen to them when they grew up. Their future was tomorrow or next week or next vacation . . .

Eva gazed at the people, full of a sense of not belonging. She was as different from all of them as if she’d come from another planet, especially so today. Her outburst in the morning had left her both alarmed and exhilarated, which was strange but she thought she knew why. Mom and Dad had taught her to loathe quarrels. You stayed calm, you bottled your anger up, if someone else was in a rage you kept clear of them, and if you did get into a fight you felt sick about it for days—but that was the old Eva. Now there was Kelly too—not the old Kelly either. She was gone, with all her memories, all her sense of belonging and being herself in a particular time and place. She would never come back. But still she had left part of herself behind, her nature, her instincts, still rooted deep into the body into which the human Eva had been grafted. That was the Kelly Eva herself had invited back across the shadowy border between mind and brain. She couldn’t do that and then say okay, but I don’t want all of her. I’ll have the lightning reactions but not the tantrums, the warmth and fun but not the sullen hours, the sympathy but not the mischief. They were Eva too now. She couldn’t bottle them away . . . She remembered the relief that had washed through her after that outburst and how she’d settled down at once to grooming Bren’s hair. Just like a chimp in the Pool after a fight. Of course.

Cormac met her at the bus stop, and she was glad to see him. He was huge and strong, very neat in his movements, but simpleminded as a child. He thought of her as an animal, somebody’s pet, and rumpled her pelt with absentminded fingers and blinked with surprise when she spoke. Sometimes this was irritating, but today it was fine. Cormac knew the difference. She sat in the crook of his arm while they rode the traveler and then knuckled along in his wake for the last stretch. Cormac was big enough for people to stand out of his way, and the crowds, used to the little procession by now, would leave a space for Eva and say “Hi!” to her as she passed, and she’d grin and wave a hand. Most days this was rather good, with its sense of acceptance, of friendliness from strangers, but today the feeling of not belonging was too strong and she kept her eyes on the ground and tried to pretend they weren’t there.

Dad had been away two weeks on a lecture tour—a slice of Eva’s fame. He was one of those people who can’t eat and talk at the same time, so supper took longer than usual while he told Mom how well it had gone. Eva didn’t listen much. There was something about Dad in his triumphant moods, though he was a pretty good lecturer—everyone said so . . .

“. . . interested to see how the next two experiments turn out,” he said and took another mouthful.

In the pause Eva suddenly realized what he’d been talking about.

“Just two, Dad?”

“At the moment. Do you know, Joan’s outfit has had more than sixty volunteers, last count?”

“How many chimps?”

“Nothing like enough. If we were to refuse any fresh research projects in other fields, we might have seven candidates by the end of the year.”

“Seven volunteers?”

Dad had tried to stop the conversation by taking another mouthful.

“I heard a chimp calling in the hospital,” said Eva. “First day I was really up. He didn’t sound like a volunteer.”

“Caesar,” said Dad.

“How’s he doing?”

“Too soon to say. Are you going to insist on discussing this, darling?”

“Please.”

“All right. As you know, I’ve never really liked the business of selling chimps for research and have always been very selective about projects. If it had not been for their research value, there would be no chimps in the world today. If we didn’t continue to sell the surplus, there would be no Pool.”

“Yes, I know, but ...”

“But what?”

Now Eva wished she hadn’t started. Her horror of talking about it like this made it difficult to think.

“This is different. You’ve saved my life, but you’ve lost Kelly’s. One chimp, one human. It isn’t enough.”

“You mean that to justify the sacrifice of a chimp, one ought to be able to see the possibility of saving tens of thousands of human lives by the consequent research? I’d have to ask a philosopher if that made the difference. Let me put it another way. Suppose I went out sailing with my daughter and a young chimp, and the boat capsized and I had the chance to save one of you but not both—you wouldn’t expect me to save the chimp, would you?”

“I sometimes think so,” said Mom, meaning to make a joke of it but getting it wrong.

“Nonsense. It would be no choice at all. That was effectively the same decision we had to make about you. And then if I can make it in your case, what right have I to withhold a similar chance from someone else? Suppose I were in my boat with a chimp and a stranger’s child ...”

“There’s millions times more people than there’s chimps,” said Eva.

It was an argument Eva’d heard him use himself, making the case for more funds for his precious Pool. He remembered and laughed but changed tack.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s come down to a more selfish level. Do you want to be the only person on whom this procedure has been carried out?”

Dad was deliberately not looking at Mom, but Eva felt her stiffen.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You must have thought about it.”

She could hear the wariness in his voice and tried to lighten her answer.

“A little. I keep changing my mind. Your idea is we’ll go along to the Pool and I’ll choose a sexy male and you’ll find some boy with an IQ of a hundred and eighty who’s just walked under a bus, and then Joan will put them together and we’ll have a lovely wedding and live happily ever after?”

Dad laughed. Mom didn’t.

“I hadn’t gotten that far,” said Dad, but Eva had heard in the laugh and the silence that this was something they’d talked about, often.

“Our babies would be just chimps, wouldn’t they?” said Eva. “They’d be Kelly’s, really.”

The tension screw tightened another half turn. They’d talked about this too. Dad chose to answer in his new voice, the shaper scholar, the patient but charming zoologist, explaining to dimwits. Eva felt a prickle of irritation down her spine. He shouldn’t use that voice inside the family. It was his way, she guessed, of ducking the dangerous parts of her question (was she going to be allowed to have babies? If so, whose? How? With a real mate or by artificial insemination? And what a frenzy there’d be in the fame market when it happened! The riot outside the apartment the night of that first program would be nothing!).