Peter Dickinson: Eva

“Try and watch, Mom,” she made the keyboard murmur. “It’s me now. We’ve got to like this me. I do already. Really. I’m not pretending.”

“I’m so glad, darling.”

“I know it’s harder for you.”

“I’ll learn.”

The climbing frame vanished, leaving Kelly hanging in midair as a still. The girl in the yellow tracksuit appeared on the opposite side of the zone, and Mr. Elian strolled up between them as though he’d just happened along.

“In the next hour,” he said, “we are going to show you the full story of this astonishing event. Before we begin I should point out that but for the generosity of Honeybear Soft Drinks it would not have been possible. Eva’s transformation was a very expensive procedure, demanding the attention of many highly skilled scientists working at the very frontier of technology. Such work does not come cheap, and Eva and her parents have cause to be very grateful indeed to Honeybear for its help. We have with us in the studio this evening one of those parents, Dr. Daniel Adamson of the International Chimpanzee Pool . . .”

The zone widened and there was Dad, smiling at the cameras, his blue eyes bright in the studio lights, his whole face and attitude saying Like me, oh, please like me .

“. . . and we are also honored to have with us Professor Joan Pradesh, whose work in the field of neuron memory, first discovered by her father, Professor E. K. Pradesh, made the miracle of Eva possible ...”

And there was Joan. Somebody had bullied her into wearing a mauve dress. She didn’t even bother to smile.

“. . . Now, first, Dr. Adamson, perhaps you can tell us how exactly you and your wife felt ...”

“I can’t listen to this,” said Mom and switched the sound off. “You’ve got it taping for Dad, haven’t you?”

Eva grunted a yes. She didn’t mind—she could listen later too. And meanwhile it was interesting to watch Dad trying to tell Mr. Elian how exactly . . . And then there was a picture of Dad’s car lying upside down with its roof caved in; and then a shape on a hospital bed, a mound of bandages with tubes running in and out—Mom had her eyes shut again—and then the same shape, with a sort of box like a coffin beside it. The cameras closed in to a little window in the lid of the box. Dimly, behind the glass, you could see something that might have been a dark, furry head with its eyes closed . . .

Eva was glad they had the sound off. There was something holy about the silent pair, something you didn’t want Mr. Elian, or even Dad, telling you what to think about . . . But it was interesting that they’d started making the program even then, so that Honeybear could have something to pay for. It must all have cost a fortune, Eva realized. They’d be wanting to see returns on their money from now on.

“It’s all right, you can look now. It’s Joan,” she said, switching up the sound.

Joan was pure Joan, despite the mauve dress, looking and sounding as if she thought the program was a complete waste of her time. She didn’t even try to make things easier for the dimwits out there watching, but Mr. Elian was pretty good at his job, really, asking his questions in a way that forced her to give the dimwits a chance. They’d only been going a few minutes when the commo beeped. Mom picked it up with her free hand.

“Hello. Who? Oh, no. No, I don’t want to talk about it. No thank you.”

She hung up.

“A woman from some other program,” she said. “How did they get our new number? It isn’t on the ...”

The commo beeped again. She picked it up, said hello, listened for a moment, and hung up. Eva reached over and switched it to autocall.

“. . . that Eva was used to chimps?” Mr. Elian was saying. “From what Dr. Adamson was telling us, she’d practically grown up with them.”

The zone showed another amateur sequence, a naked human child with blue eyes and dark hair absorbed in play in a sandbox. A half-grown female chimp knuckled into view and started to search intently across her scalp. The child seemed hardly to notice.

“I can only say it may have been of importance,” Joan said. “The brain is an extremely complex mechanism, and we do not yet understand many things about it. In this case, the problems of rejection in the immediately posttransferral stage may well have been eased by experiences analogous to maternal imprinting in Eva’s early childhood. However ...”

The doorbell rang. One of the neighbors, thought Eva, checking to see if we know the program’s on—people can be thick—they couldn’t use the commo because we’re on auto. She was moving to tell them Thanks, we’re watching, when Mom said “Wait,” turned the volume down, and switched the shaper to closed circuit. The zone filled with the landing outside the apartment door. Four people stood there, two of them with shaper cameras and the other two jostling to hold up their ID cards to the closed-circuit camera above the lintel. They were calling out something, inaudibly because the volume was off. Behind them the elevator doors opened and more people jostled out, some with cameras.

“I knew this was going to happen,” said Mom. “Jerry swore he wouldn’t let anyone through the main doors, but I just knew.”

“How’d they get here so soon?” said Eva. “I thought . . .”

“SMI did a lot of publicity. They guaranteed no one would be told our name in advance, but somebody at the studios must have sold it to the other companies. Shaper people will do anything. ”

The doorbell was ringing now without stopping. People were banging at the door itself. It was supposed to be break-in-proof, but you couldn’t be sure. Mom pressed a couple of keys and spoke into the mouthpiece of her control.

“This is Mrs. Adamson. We are not giving any interviews. Will you please go away? You are trespassing on private property.”

Nothing happened. Perhaps they hadn’t heard through the racket they were making, hammering and calling and swearing at one another and pressing the bell. Even from right inside the apartment the noise was loud enough to feel dangerous. More people came out of the elevator. Mom repeated her message. And again and again. The doorbell stopped. Now they were shouting at one another not to shout at one another, and making shushing gestures. Then silence. You could see they could hear the message because half a dozen microphones poked up toward the speaker to record Mom’s voice. It didn’t do any good. The bell started again at once, and the shouting and knocking.

Now the door on the other side of the landing opened, and little Mr. Koo came out to complain about the racket. The Koos never watched the shaper, so he couldn’t have understood what was happening, but the moment they saw him the reporters closed around him like wasps attacking a caterpillar, yelling questions and thrusting microphones and cameras at him. He retreated, but before he could close the door they surged in around him, leaving room on the landing for the elevator to disgorge another load, and these newcomers, seeing their rivals streaming through an open door, must have thought the Adamsons lived on that side and pressed in after them while the poor old elevator went down for yet another load.

White and shuddering, Mom plugged the commo in. It immediately started to bleep, but after several tries she hit a clear space and got a channel out. She called the police, but whoever she spoke to said they couldn’t help. Then she tried the home number of a man she knew in the police department, because of her job, and he said the same, explaining privately that the police never interfered with shaper people if they could help it, because the shaper people always got their own back by putting on programs that made that department look like crooks’ or idiots.