Peter Dickinson: Eva

In the room beyond, a door had opened and closed, and Eva’s mother had come through. Her face was lined and her shoulders sagged with effort. There were four other people in the room. A man with a blond beard, graying slightly, sat watching a shaper zone that showed the scene Eva’s mother had just left, the small figure on the white hospital bed ringed by its attendant machines and lit by the sunrise beyond the window. A younger man and woman in lab coats sat at computer consoles with a battery of VDUs in front of them, and an older woman in a thick, stained sweater and lopsided skirt stood at their shoulders, watching the displays.

Eva’s mother settled herself onto the arm of the first man’s chair and put her hand into his.

“Well done,” he whispered.

There was silence for a minute.

“She doesn’t want to go to sleep,” said the man at the console. “Trying to get her eyes open.”

“Let her,” said the older woman.

The shape in the zone raised its eyelids. Clear brown eyes stared up. Slowly the wide pupils contracted.

“She knew me,” said Eva’s mother. “At least she knew me.”

The older woman turned at her voice and came over to stand beside her, looking down at the zone.

“Yes, she certainly knew you, Mrs. Adamson,” she said. “You were the first thing she saw and recognized. That was essential. Now she is seeing a familiar view. That can do nothing but good.”

“If only she could smile or something. If only I could feel she was happy.”

“I cannot let her use her face muscles for a long while yet. She must not attempt to speak until most of her main bodily functions are firmly reimplanted. But for happiness . . . Ginny! A microshot of endorphin. And then put her back to sleep.”

Eva’s mother started to sob. The older woman patted clumsily at her shoulder.

“Don’t cry, Mrs. Adamson,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. We’ve brought it off, in spite of everything. Your daughter’s all there.”

She turned and went back to the control area. The man rose and followed her. They stood watching the displays and talking in low voices. But Eva’s mother sat motionless, staring at the zone, searching for a signal, the hint of a message, while beyond the imaged window the image of sunrise brightened into the image of day.

DAY SIX

Waking again . . .

Still strange . . .

Stranger each time, more certainly strange . . .

But surely the dream had been there, unchanged.

The trees . . .

Lost . . .

Loster than ever . . .

Already Eva had gotten into a waking habit. She would keep her eyes shut and try to remember something about the dream and fail. Then she would feel with her left hand for the keyboard and check that she’d left the mirror angled toward the window and that nobody had come in and changed it while she’d been asleep. And then, still with her eyes shut, she’d guess what time of day or night it was—they let her stay awake for more than an hour now, and then put her back to sleep for a while and woke her up again, so it might be any time—and what the weather was. And last of all she’d open her eyes and see if she’d guessed right.

First, what time? Not where were the hands on the clock, but where was the sun? Up there . It didn’t seem like guessing. She could sense the presence of the sun, almost like a pressure, a weight, despite the layers of high rise above her. The weather, though? She didn’t feel so sure about that, but it had been sunny the last few wakings, so a fine day, late morning .. .

She opened her eyes.

Dead right. The sun up there . She could tell by the stretching shadows under the sills of the high rise of the university library. The city haze was more than halfway up the nearer high rises, and as it thickened with distance it seemed to become deeper, so that only the tops of the farther buildings showed here and there, like rocks in a sea, and beyond that they vanished altogether. Nice guess, Eva—only it wasn’t a guess. Funny how sure she felt about the sun. She couldn’t remember that happening before the accident.

Next, she practiced using the keyboard. Mom had called it a toy, but if so it was an extremely expensive one. A very clever gadget indeed. It lay strapped in place beneath her hand, and the keys were so arranged that she could reach all of them. It didn’t just do the things Mom had said, like moving the mirror and switching the shaper off and on and changing channels—its chief trick was that she could use it to talk. Only very slowly, so far. First you pressed a couple of keys to set it to the “Talk” mode, and then you tapped out what you wanted to say in ordinary English spelling, and then you coded for “Tone,” and last of all you pressed the “Speak” bar, and it spoke.

It spoke not with a dry electronic rasp but with a human voice, Eva’s real voice, taken from old home-shaper discs and sorted into all its possible sounds and stored in a memory to be used any way she wanted. It was tricky, like learning to play the violin or something. Practice wasn’t just getting her hand to know the keys and then work faster and faster; it was also putting in a sentence and then getting the voice to say it in different ways (“Mary had a little lamb!” “ Mary had a little lamb?” “Mary had a leetle lamb.”).

Dad said it had been especially built for her by scientists in the Communications Faculty. His blue eyes, paler and harder than Mom’s, had sparkled with excitement while he showed her its tricks—it was just his sort of toy. Eva, to be honest, had been less excited—okay, the scientists were friends of Dad’s—the Chimp Pool was technically part of the university, and this room was in the Medical Faculty—and they’d been amused to see what they could do. Even so it must mean, surely, that nobody expected her to start speaking properly for a long time—months. Years? Ever? But Mom had said . . .

No she hadn’t. She’d talked about running around, not about speaking.

The thought came and went as Eva practiced, until suddenly she got irritated with her slowness and switched the shaper on instead. A thriller of some sort—a woman desperately pushing her way in the wrong direction along a crowded traveler—not that. A flivver-rally, the sky patterned with bright machines, the buzz of thousands of rotors—not that. A beach, kilometers of shoreline invisible under human bodies, the white surf bobbing with human heads—not that. People, people, people. Ah, trees . . .

Only a cartoon, actually, one she used to watch a lot when she was smaller, because of the heroine’s name. It was called Adam and Eve and the plot was always the same. Adam and Eve were the first people, and they were king and queen of the jungle. Adam ruled the animals, and Eve ruled the plants. Their enemy was the Great Snake. Adam and Eve were trying to drive him out of their jungle, so that it would be safe for them to have children, but Adam was always getting into trouble—usually a trap set by the Great Snake—because of his arrogance and impulsiveness, and then Eve had to get him out of it by her plant magic. It was rather wishy-washy but pretty to look at. All around the world hundreds of millions of little girls waited in ecstasy for the moment when Eve would begin her plant magic. Dad said the company spent huge amounts on research to make sure they put in what little girls wanted.

Now Eva watched, pleased by the greenness and the shapes of leaf and branch. Eve was following a trail through the jungle. Adam was in a mess somewhere, no doubt. The plants moved twigs and tendrils to show Eve the way he’d gone. She came to a cave mouth. She put a seed in the earth and caused a flower to spring up, a single white cup like a shaper dish. A huge white moth came out of the cave to drink at the nectar from the flower, and then guided Eve down into the darkness, using the trail of pollen that had stuck to Adam’s feet as he came swishing through the jungle . . .