Peter Dickinson - Eva

“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.”

PART TWO

LIVING

MONTH FOUR,

DAY TWELVE

Living at home, at last . . .

But the ghost still there . . .

The ghost moving about these rooms . . .

Making herself snacks in this kitchen . . .

Gazing, now, out this window . . .

There was a particular moment sometimes when the sun went down. It needed the right weather, a cloudless sky and a mild west wind to clear the brownish haze of the city. Then for a few moments, below the earliest stars and above the still-faint pattern of city lights, you might just catch a different kind of glimmer, a wavering thread, the twinkle of snow on mountain peaks, ninety kilometers off, catching the sun’s last rays.

Eva watched for it, and yes, it was there, but the old prickle of pleasure didn’t come. Her happiest times used to be skiing. She would look forward for months to her next chance. But now it was only the ghost that yearned.

The ghost had been particularly strong this morning, because of being home and waking in her own bed. Eva had awakened on the edge of horrors, desperate for the feel of her own long-limbed smooth-skinned body, her own hair to brush, her own teeth to clean, her own dark blue eyes to ring with eye shadow. Dad had had to give her an extra shot of dope she still took to suppress that kind of feeling, so perhaps that was why the ghost that yearned for the ski slopes was now only a vague shadow in her mind, and Eva, the new Eva, the one she must learn to think and feel of as the only real Eva, was merely amused and interested in the idea of going skiing. She might have been excited if Dad had announced they were going off to the mountains next weekend, but she didn’t yearn anymore. That kind of intense, shapeless longing was for something else.

What?

The answer came when she closed her eyes. Leaves mottling the dark behind the eyelids. Trees. Only where could you still find trees, real trees in forests, the way you could still find mountains?

Up north in the timber stands, grown as a thirty-year crop? No good. The branches were the wrong shape to swing through or nest among. You couldn’t live through those winters. You couldn’t eat pine needles. South, then? There were bits of jungle still—you saw them sometimes on the shaper. Nearly three thousand kilometers on beyond the mountains, there were five or six valleys that had never been cleared, where the rain-forest trees still grew and the lianas dangled. There were a few other places in the world like that, tiny preserved patches, most of them funded by the shaper companies, studied and guarded by scientists, kept free from other human intrusion. But perhaps Dad might be able to arrange something, a research project which needed a sort-of-chimp to be in a jungle for a while . . .

It was a fantasy, and Eva knew it. It was a way of dreaming the dream. She kept her eyes closed and let it happen. Unnoticed beside her the ghost thinned, dwindled, vanished.

Beep. Beep. Beep . Mom had no sense of time, so she set the kitchen timer for anything that mattered. Its shrill sound stopped and Mom came into the living room and switched on the shaper. A travel commercial filled the zone, bronze bodies on a pale beach, ridiculously less crowded than a real beach would be. Mom settled into her chair and Eva knuckled over and climbed into her lap. Mom laughed resignedly.

“I suppose we’ve got to watch,” she said.

“Dad’s big day.”

Eva was glad she’d made enough fuss to force them to let her come home in time to watch the program with Mom. It wouldn’t have been fair to Mom to make her watch it alone. Dad was down at the studios because part of the format of Mr. Elian’s programs was always a live discussion. Mom could have come to the hospital to watch, of course, but that would have been making too big a thing of it. Much better here at home, ordinary.

When the titles began Mom turned up the sound, and the drumbeat theme of the series thudded out. The zone cleared, and then filled with a section of ice rink, a girl with long black hair skating in a yellow tracksuit. Her slightly fuzzy edges showed that the sequence had been taken with an amateur camera. Mom stiffened and closed her eyes. Mr. Elian’s solemn half whisper began as a voice-over.

“This girl’s name is Eva. Just over a year ago she was involved in a car accident and suffered extensive physical damage. She would certainly never have walked, let alone skated, again. Furthermore, she was in an irreversible coma. Yet today Eva is alive, active, healthy. She looks, however, quite different. She looks like this .”

And there was Kelly, squatting among the yellow bars of the climbing frame. She pursed her lips forward and hooted. Go away —but to humans it would be just a hoot, and anyway she immediately shrugged, grinned, and waved a friendly hand. Eva stared. Me, she thought. Me. Though she was used by now to looking at her own image in a mirror and accepting it as herself, the chimp in the zone was like a stranger. The brown eyes were bright with cleverness and mischief. The big ears stuck out through the coarse black hair. Eva felt a rush of friendliness and liking, and without thinking started a silent pant of greeting. Faintly she was aware of the old Eva gazing through her eyes, dismayed, trying to make the lips and throat cry No! , but thanks to the dope it wasn’t difficult to blank her out and will a Yes with her conscious mind. She glanced up, wanting to share that Yes . Mom still had her eyes shut.