Eva (8 page)

“That raises a very interesting point,” said Dad. “Of course you’re right in the sense that such a baby would inherit no human genetic material; but like humans, chimps are not solely the product of their inheritance. They are also creatures of their own cultures, though to a lesser extent than humans. The literature about wild chimps shows that different groups had their different ways of doing things, using simple tools and so on, which the young learned from their elders. Our own chimps would be lost if they had to return to a real jungle, because no one has taught them how to survive under such conditions, but on the other hand they have learned new skills and social arrangements to cope with conditions in the Pool. The social conditions are especially important because the restricted space has imposed a greater need for control of antisocial behavior, and the successful males in particular are those with greater social skills and awareness. It is extremely hard to quantify, but I am beginning to believe that especially in the Reserve, where the natural-selective process has the most chance to operate, something very like an increase in intelligence is becoming perceptible ...”

“But what about
my
babies?” said Eva.

“I was coming to that. The young of all higher animals are learning-machines. Evolution has programmed them to learn. The bigger brains they have, the more knowledge they can file and store. In all experiments with chimp learning the teachers have been humans, apart from a few anecdotal instances where a human-taught chimp has passed on some detail to another chimp. Moreover, the material taught has been strongly human biased—language is the obvious example. But imagine a chimp mother with human intelligence living in the wild. What would she teach her babies? Survival skills that they do not already possess—how to make fire, perhaps . . .”

“Knots?”

“Knots is an excellent example. Knots require dexterity and intelligence, both at about the limit of natural chimp capacity. The brighter ones could tie knots, the less bright couldn’t. Now suppose the ability to tie knots conferred an advantage in evolutionary terms, and suppose the knowledge of how to do it was passed on through a number of generations, then you would find that you had been breeding for dexterity and intelligence. You would have bred something into the chimp gene. A gift from humankind.”

Dad was really excited now, not just acting. His eyes sparkled, and his beard wagged. If he’d had a mane of white hair, he’d have been tossing it around. You couldn’t help liking him in this mood, though Mom, Eva was aware, had switched right off and withdrawn into herself as though all she could bear to think about was the process of cutting her food up on her plate and then chewing and swallowing it, with no enjoyment at all. Now, still chewing, she got up and began to clear the main course away. Eva scurried to help her.

“Don’t bother,” said Mom. “Go on talking to Dad.”

She was much more upset than Eva had realized. It was going to be difficult to get Dad to switch tracks in this mood. Eva went back to the table, peeled a banana, and ate it slowly, enjoying every mouthful but waiting for a gap in the flow.

“Now, suppose you introduce into your group a mutation,” said Dad. “Not anything physical, just some quirk, some trait, something like a slightly greater ability to intuit the causes of things, the why as well as the how ...”

In the pause for breath Eva made her grunt and rattled out her question.

“Are they getting bananas at the Pool?”

“Bananas all around? Can’t afford it. Where was I?”

“Hey! What about all these extra funds I’m earning for the benefit of the Pool?”

“They’re for research and so on. I was saying . . .”

“Bananas are benefits if you’re a chimp.”

“Okay, when we’re really rolling. But to go back ...”

“You better take me up on Saturday. I’ll do an opinion poll, find out how they want you to spend their funds. Okay?”

You could use the box like that, pressing the keys while the other person was still talking. Somehow it forced even Dad to wait and see what you were going to say. He shrugged and gave up.

“I want to be with the others anyway,” said Eva.

“No,” said Mom.

She was standing in the doorway from the kitchen, looking as though someone had just died.

“No, darling,” she said again. “I won’t have it.”

Eva’s hand froze over the keys.

“Now, listen, darling,” said Dad. “What we think, Mom and I, is this . . .”

Eva didn’t listen—she just understood. Mom didn’t want her to go to the Pool. She couldn’t bear the idea of Eva living that kind of life. Not at all, not even for a few hours at a time. She’d argued with Dad about it. Dad disagreed—he’d known it was something that Eva was going to need, and besides, it might have been extremely useful with his work, because Eva would learn about chimp behavior almost like a spy. She’d find out things no one had known before. He probably still wanted that, but he wasn’t prepared to fight for it, so he’d let Mom have her way for the time being, hoping that in a year or two Mom wouldn’t mind so much; and in the meanwhile the whole business they’d just been talking about, giving her others like her, chimps with human minds . . . well, they were going to do it anyway, but it was a sort of compromise, Dad’s way of putting things, to keep everyone sort-of-happy . . .

Eva picked up her mug and slung it at the wall. It smashed. By then she was on the table, flailing the dishes onto the door with a sweep of her arm. Mom screamed. Dad yelled at Eva to stop it. She ignored him and sprang across the room to the window , grabbed at the slats of the blind and ripped it down. Mom was shouting “No! Eva! No!” Dad was at his desk with his back to the room. He turned. He had a stun gun in his hand, the sort they used at the Pool to knock out a chimp they couldn’t handle any other way. As he raised it Eva snatched up a cushion and flung it at the gun, spoiling his aim. Before he could steady his arm she was on him. He tried to hang on, but she was far too strong. She wrenched the gun from his fingers and backed off. Mom was crying. Eva faced Dad, panting.

Her whole body was still electric with the impulse to rush around the apartment, breaking and destroying. She had watched the eruption almost as if from the outside, powerless to stop it, only able to direct it a little, using her human intelligence to recognize the gun, throw the cushion, snatch the weapon away. Now, with a big effort, she forced herself to stand still and tap out a sentence. Deliberately she didn’t press any of the tone codes.

“If you won’t let me be a chimp there, then I’ll be a chimp here,” said the lifeless voice. Dad watched her, fright and fury in the set of his mouth, calculation in his eyes. He’d kept the gun ready and loaded, Eva thought. He’d known, really. She pointed it downward and pressed the trigger. Phut, thud. The fine-needled dart quivered in the carpet. Mom stared at it, gulping to control her sobs. Eva pressed the keys again, but this time she coded in the human warmth.

“I’m sorry. It’s there. It’s part of me now. Please understand.”

Silence still.

“It doesn’t mean I’ll stop loving you.”

Dad turned and fiddled with the ruined blind, pretending he was trying to see whether it could be mended. Eva put the gun on the desk and went and stood in front of Mom in the half-crouched position now natural to her, with one set of knuckles on the ground. She looked up into Mom’s face. The blue eyes were blank, not stony and rejecting but empty, numb, lightless. Eva’s whole instinct was to reach up and touch and caress, but she knew that would be a mistake. Mom managed an unhappy smile.

“I suppose I’ll have to say yes,” she said.

She turned and went back into the kitchen.

MONTH SIX,
DAY TEN

Shivering with nerves, Eva waited. The rusty surface of a branch pressed its hard nodules into her soles. The iron trunk at her side was rougher and rustier still. In front of her rose a whole grove of iron trees, gaunt, leafless, five regular lines of them stretching away into the distance, rising from a barren gray floor whose pits and boulders had the same square, unnatural angles as the trees. Around the grove was a low cliff, with openings like the mouths of caves, only here again the square angles and straight edges showed that, like everything else she could see, the caves had been made by people.

Eva hadn’t guessed she would find it so weird. She had seen it before, often, but with human eyes. Then the trees had been the iron pillars that had once supported the roof of a large factory; the boulders had been beds for heavy machinery; the surrounding caves had been offices and storerooms. Beyond the roofless walls she could see the tops of the rest of the human forest, building beyond building, rising into the morning sky. The only reason that there were no high rises here was that the ground below was riddled with the tunnels of an exhausted coal mine, so in the old days the area had been used for industry. But then, Dad said, the tides of money had washed elsewhere and the area had become derelict, just at the time when the last chimpanzees were being gathered out of the wild to form the Pool. Of course, most of the people who’d done the agitating and signed the petitions had thought the chimps could come and live in a nice green park somewhere, like squirrels, but being chimps they’d have stripped the precious trees leafless in a couple of months. Instead, they’d been put in this iron-and-concrete grove. It used to seem neat and convenient when Dad explained it, but it didn’t now, not through chimp eyes. It seemed weird.

These ruined factories were the Reserve Section of the Pool. From here came the chimps in Dad’s Research Section, and the ones who were sold to other scientists, and slightly luckier ones for people to go and look at it in the cities. But this was their jungle now, where as far as possible they were left alone. Ropes had been hung from some of the girders, like creepers in a real jungle, and extra branches had been bolted to the pillars to make them easier to climb. Eva was squatting on one now. She couldn’t see the whole area even of this particular factory, because low walls had been built here and there across the floor space to make a kind of open maze, carefully sited so that the chimps could have corners to explore and feel private while human observers could still study most of what was going on from observation points up in the outer walls.

Dad was in one of these now, with Joey, the head keeper at the Reserve. They had a long-range stun gun loaded and ready—Mom had insisted on that, and had made Eva promise she wouldn’t go anywhere out of Joey’s line of sight—but neither Eva nor Dad thought there’d be that sort of trouble. Chimp groups weren’t like beehives or ants’ nests, so close-knit that they’d kill a stranger who tried to join them. In the old jungle, Dad said, females had mostly stuck together in loose family networks—daughters, aunts, cousins—while the males had wandered around more. And nowadays the Pool was always swapping individuals from one section to another without any fuss, though sometimes it took them a day or two to fit in, and there were always a few who, like humans, were just plain unpopular. There was no reason why Eva shouldn’t be okay, but still she was extremely nervous. She felt as though the next hour might be the most important in her whole new life.

She sniffed at the chimpy air and listened to the voices echoing among the iron trees—squabbles, happy noises, the chitter-chatter of a baby pretending to be in trouble. The urge rose in her throat to answer, to cry her lonely call, to make them come and find her. She controlled it. That wasn’t how she wanted to start.

She’d been sitting in her tree for something like twenty minutes when a young adult male came rambling down past one of the machine beds and saw her. She didn’t know his name—she’d only known the chimps in the Research Section that well. She gave him the breathy hoot of greeting, but he had something else on his mind and knuckled on out of sight. Still, the encounter calmed her nerves slightly—at least he’d seemed to think it was perfectly normal for this stranger to be sitting up there.

Another time passed by—she didn’t know how long, she’d stopped thinking in minutes. Then a group of chimps emerged from one of the roofless rooms on the far side and came wandering toward where Eva sat. Three adult females and a four-year-old—Beth, Dinks, Lana, Buttons; Beth’s son, Abel, one-and-a-half; Lana’s baby, Wang. (The Pool staff took turns to name the chimps.) This was the group Eva had been waiting for. They usually made their way over here this time of the morning. She knew their names because Dad had shown her shapings of them last night.

Beth was elderly, gray around the ears, with a long, thin face; Dinks was an orphan who’d been sort of adopted by Beth a few years back when her own daughter had been sold for research; Buttons had been miserable in one of the public areas, so had been brought here and had just joined herself on to Beth’s group; Lana was Beth’s niece. She was also Kelly’s sister. Their mother, Arlene, had died last winter, while Kelly had lain inert in the long dream, having her mind emptied away and then slowly being turned into Eva. This was the group Kelly would naturally have belonged to if she’d never been taken off for research. It seemed the obvious one to try. Only, without actually saying anything to each other, Dad and Eva had agreed they wouldn’t tell Mom.

Either they didn’t notice Eva sitting halfway up a tree in “their” patch, or they just ignored her. They came closer and closer. Her heart pounded. Her lips began to ripple with exploratory impulses of greeting and beseeching. And then, frustratingly, they settled out of sight on the far side of a piece of wall that ran slantwise across the floor a few paces from Eva’s perch. Perhaps, she realized, they
had
noticed her and didn’t want to be watched by this stranger. She sat for a while, listening to the faint sounds they made. On the whole, unless they were having a squabble or one of them was frustrated in some way, chimps didn’t “talk” with their voices. Most of that sort of noise was used for calls—“Danger!” “Hurry!” “Food!” Their language when they were resting peaceably was grimace and gesture and touch. Touch especially. All Eva could tell without seeing them was that one of them—probably Abel—was restless and being a nuisance, pestering the others to play. Nothing else happened, not here, though over on the far side of the space a real hullabaloo blew up between two males and then died away.

After a while Eva climbed down from her tree, knuckled back toward the outer wall, and picked up a plastic soda bottle she’d noticed lying there. The staff deliberately dropped bits of harmless junk into the space to give the chimps objects to play with and use. On her way back she found a strip of coarse woven stuff. She hunkered down in the open just beyond the wall, about a dozen paces from Beth’s group, and began to unpick the cloth. The strands came out about half a meter long. Slowly she tied them together. The knots were surprisingly difficult, not just because the chimp thumb is so short and awkward but because her fingers didn’t seem to understand what was expected of them. It was like tying knots in a dream. She managed to tie four strands into a length and then looped one end around the neck of the bottle and pulled it tight.

All this while she pretended to be absorbed in what she was doing, but she was aware that by now most of Beth’s group had stopped reacting with one another and were watching her. Her spine prickled with their attention. Close in front of her there was a gap in the floor level, some kind of sump or inspection pit; it was dry, so it must drain away somewhere, but it had a jumble of rubbish in the bottom, old cabbage stalks and peelings, pieces of plastic, cans, cardboard. She dropped the bottle over the edge and backed away, holding the cord.

Her move took her beyond the edge of the wall, out of sight of the others. Hunkering down again she pulled on the cord, teasing the bottle up over the edge of the pit and then, slowly, across the floor toward her.

There was a scamper of feet—Abel, probably—and a bark—Beth calling him back. Eva whisked the bottle out of sight and hid it behind her back. Abel came rushing to the corner and stared, bewildered. Eva laughed at him. She went back to the pit, still holding the bottle so that he couldn’t see it, and dropped it over the edge again, then backed off, but this time not so far, so that the others could see what she was doing. When she pulled the cord Abel followed the bottle across the floor, crouching so close that his face almost touched it, but as soon as he made a move to grab it Eva whisked it out of reach. She hid it and laughed again, then turned. Lana, she saw, was laughing too. A chimp’s laugh is almost silent, a sucking of breath and a round toothless grin. Abel, suddenly alarmed, went scuttering back to Beth. Beth rose slowly from where Dinks had been grooming her and came over. Her solid, deliberate movement showed she was boss of the group and knew it and expected this stranger to know it too. Eva crouched low and gave a series of brief, quiet pants—what Dad called “submission greeting,” a way of saying You’re the boss. Beth snorted, then lowered her head to within a few inches of Eva’s and stared.

Eva couldn’t stare back because that would have been a challenge; but flickering glances showed her there was something else in Beth’s eyes than the assertion of dominance-puzzlement? Surprise? Eva was very aware now of her differences, of the people smells she must carry, shampoo and cooking and trafficky streets, and inside her the human mind trying to control the encounter. She made more submission pants and put out her left hand in a tentative pleading gesture. Beth backed away, still staring, but now with a frown of definite bewilderment. Almost as clear as speaking her look said Where have I seen you before?

Chimps had good memories, Eva knew. When she was five a young female called Snoo had been very fond of her and wanted to play with her all the time whenever Eva came. But then Snoo had gone off for a language experiment and Eva hadn’t seen her for three whole years, so that Eva had changed a lot before they met again. Even so, Snoo had known her at once and gone wild with excitement, jumping up and down and shrieking in her glee. So was it possible Beth actually remembered Kelly? Dad had said no. Chimps for the Research Section were taken away when they were still small, in order not to disrupt the community too much, so Kelly would have been less than a year old—tiny, when Beth had last seen her. It didn’t seem possible. Still . . .

She tried the greeting again, but this time more confidently—not Good morning, Lady Elizabeth but Hi, Mrs. Beth. Beth gave up the puzzle, whooshed her breath out, and lumbered back to Dinks. Eva stayed where she was and made a loose loop in the end of her cord.

After a short while Abel came sliding across to look for the bottle. Eva rolled it toward him, then drew it back, coaxing him along till he was in reach. She picked the bottle up and teased him closer, then slipped the loop over his neck as she gave him the bottle. He grabbed and scampered away to play with his toy, not yet realizing it was fastened to him. After a while he took it to the pit and dropped it over the edge. Nothing happened, so he lost interest and moved off. As soon as the cord tightened he jerked away. The bottle shot into the open. Abel stared at it, nosed forward, and then backed off again. The bottle followed him. Now for the first time he seemed to notice the cord. He grabbed it and pulled, jerking the bottle nearer. Suddenly he seemed to lose his alarm and started running to and fro, trailing the bottle behind him, delighted by its rattle across the concrete, dropping it into the pit and yanking it out again, until the weak cord snapped. For a minute or two he simply ran about, trailing the cord, but there was no fun in that, so he lost his temper and wrenched the cord off his neck.

The adults had watched his game intently, their heads moving to and fro as he scampered about. When it was over Beth and Dinks went back to grooming but Lana turned toward Eva with a look of amusement crinkling around her eyes. They laughed together. Eva rose and lolloped across, then stopped. There was still, she sensed, an invisible barrier that it wasn’t polite to go bursting through. Slowly she reached out with the same pleading gesture she had used toward Beth, but stretching farther, farther. Lana replied by pushing an arm toward her. Eva touched with her fingertips, walking them delicately up the flesh beneath the dark hairs, and then, when Lana didn’t withdraw, hunkered down closer and began to groom her never-known sister in earnest.

It was some while before she realized that she had broken her promise by moving out of Joey’s line of fire. By then she was sitting huddled close to Lana while Lana searched steadily down her shoulder blade and Wang scrambled his way over the pair of them, not seeming to notice which was which. Eva hadn’t had a bath for four days, but she knew she must still smell strongly of the human world. Lana sniffed at her sometimes, inquisitively but not suspiciously. Sitting in the sun, being properly groomed by a real chimp who did it because she wanted to and not just because she was supposed to, was the most glorious sensation. Eva had never felt closer to anyone. The only trouble was that Lana wasn’t going to find any reward for her search. She didn’t seem to mind, but Eva had picked off and nibbled half a dozen little bugs that had moved in under Lana’s fur.

I must get me some bugs of my own, she thought. Mom’s not going to like that.

“How was it, darling?”

“Okay. A little like the first day of school. I think some of them sort of guessed I was funny, but then they forgot.”

Mom had tried to make her question casual but you could hear the edge in it. Eva, on the other hand, could control her tone exactly, using the box. It wasn’t fair, but it couldn’t be helped.