Peter Dickinson - Eva

He strolled away.

“What was that about?” said Mom.

“Don’t know—only he’s taking me to the studio so he can explain why he’s been nosing around. How’s your tooth, Cormac?”

Grog’s car was characteristic—small and old and smelly. Even more characteristic was the fact that he had a license for it, when he didn’t even have a job and didn’t do anything for anyone. He kept overriding the City Guidance System to drive manually along side routes that avoided the jams. He didn’t seem to want to talk, so Eva decided to ask him directly.

“What were you doing up at the Reserve?”

“Watching. Learning.”

“Why?”

“Tell you when we get there. There’ll be time.”

As he spoke his head moved fractionally. To Cormac, crouching enormous on the backseat, it probably looked just like the result of a jolt, but Eva understood. They reached their destination with a good half hour to spare.

Honeybear rented a studio from one of the big shaper companies, and the car they sent for Eva used to drive around to that wing, but Grog pulled up in front of the soaring transmission tower.

“Slot one-two-oh-eight in the parking garage,” he said. “Take her around for me, will you, Cormac? See you in the studio. Thanks.”

At the main entrance he showed a pass to the security guard, who said, “Hi, Grog, nice morning . . . hey, is this Eva?” Eva shook the guard’s hand and followed Grog through the huge hallway to the elevators. At the hundred-and-somethingth floor the elevator voice said, “Terminus. Terminus. Upper floors not yet open.” Grog slid a plastic card into a slot, and the elevator went on up.

“Okay,” he said as it slowed. “I want to carry you this bit. Shut your eyes. Don’t open them till I say so, or you’ll spoil the fun. Huh! You’re heavier than I guessed!”

Mystified, Eva closed her eyes and clung. She heard the doors open and smelled food-smells. Grog’s footsteps made no noise on a thick carpet. He stopped and she heard the faint flip of switches, then the hum of a shaper-zone warming—more than one, and huge, making her fur creep with static. The hum died as the zones settled into their shapes.

“Okay, you can look now,” said Grog.

She opened her eyes and saw jungle—dark, rich greenness, swaying faintly. Now the noises began, rustles, birdcalls, a weird distant howling, the splash of water. But no smells, only yesterday’s food. An enormous orange spider scuttled across the brown dead leaves toward Grog’s feet, and vanished. It wasn’t real. It had just reached the edge of the zone. She turned her head and over Grog’s shoulder saw a table and chairs, and a little way off another one in another gap in the zones; then another and another; and then, farther off still, daylight, the brilliant sky over the city, seen through big windows high up in the building.

“Uh?” she grunted.

“Executive restaurant,” said Grog. “Center of the world, kind of. The fat bastards who decide what we’re all going to see and think sit in their offices and look at the instant-feedback figures and then they come up here and fight out over their steaks what we’re going to see and think next. They can’t do a vital job like that without something pretty to look at in the background, can they? Want something else?”

He pressed a key on the control box he was carrying and they were on a paved square in Venice, under striped umbrellas, with palaces and gondolas around; a moment later they were under palms on an island, with blue-green waves breaking into surf. He brought the jungle back.

“It’s not even tape,” he said. “It’s real. This very minute, out in Cayamoro, that snake’s looking for tree frogs.”

The snake was pale green, with a dark stripe along its spine. Eva felt herself shudder at the sight of it. She almost jumped back into Grog’s arms. She hadn’t minded snakes when she’d been human—not on the shaper anyway. Now it was Kelly’s impulse, barely controllable, to leap away and chatter her fright. Teeth bared, she watched the snake slide out of sight. It took her a minute or two more to gather the courage to explore.

Of course Eva had seen jungle on the shaper at home, but there the zone filled only a part of the living room, less than life-size. You could walk into it, but it was all so crowded that you couldn’t help walking through the shapes, and you felt huge, and you could see out all around to the same old walls and chairs and pictures. This was different. It was almost real, apart from the tables and chairs. Faint marks on the floor showed the narrow pathways between the zones where the guests and the waiters came and went, but on either side you seemed to peer deep into living jungle, succulent leaves, shaggy peeling bark with yellow berries. A hummingbird darted across a space, its wings a blur, emerald mist. Beneath the leaf litter something moved, emerged, jet-black, a millipede twenty centimeters long. Between two trunks stretched a strange white vague thing; small yellow spiders scuttled through it, hundreds of them; it was their communal web; when a moth blundered in they were on their victim in a flash. All around was a sense of danger. Could you eat the berries, the bugs, the leaves? Was the millipede deadly? Or the snake?

But along with the danger was excitement, yearning. This was where you belonged. This was Kelly’s dream.

Eventually she knuckled her way back and found Grog standing by one of the wide windows, staring south.

“Uh?” she said.

“Going to see the real thing,” he said. “I’m flying out to Cayamoro, day after tomorrow.”

“Uh?”

“Just have a look around. Size things up. People too.”

You couldn’t just go to Cayamoro like that. But Grog could. He held up a finger.

“Hear that?” he said.

The far faint wail had begun again.

“Howler monkey,” he said. “Jungle should be full of that noise, but they got their figures wrong when they set it all up. The howler population’s gone down and down. They’re not going to survive. So there’s room for a new big ape in Cayamoro.”

Eva understood at once what he was talking about. She was surprised. Surely he’d learned enough by now.

“We wouldn’t survive either,” she said. “It’s been tried.”

“No, it hasn’t. Not what I’ve in mind.”

“Have you told Dad? First time we met, I said ask him.”

“Said as much as I could, short of getting slung out of the door. Not a good listener, your dad. You’ve got to remember he’s got a whole lot of his life tied up in the Pool. One thing I’ve learned is we’re going to have a tougher time educating humans than we are educating chimps.”

“It’s been tried.”

“Sure—I’ve read the literature, Stella Brewer, for instance, great girl, trying to teach chimps how to live in the wild after they’d been used for learning experiments, lived in houses, worn clothes, eaten off plates.”

“I thought some of hers were wild.”

“Yeah. Brought in as babies by poachers, and some of them she won with, too—just a few. None of that matters. All I know is we’ve got to try again. We can’t go on as we are. You’ve been born with the Pool, Eva, grown up with it. It’s an always-there thing for you. But it isn’t. The way things are going, in twenty years’ time the Pool will be finished.”

“Uh!”

“I’ve seen the figures. To you, being short of funds is just another always-there thing, but it’s been getting worse. There’s a trend. It started long before you were born. I’m not just talking about the Pool and I’m not just talking about money. It’s happening all over. The whole human race is thinking in shorter and shorter terms. The bright kids aren’t going into research; the investors aren’t putting their money into anything that doesn’t give them a quick return; governments and institutions aren’t funding basic research; we’re pulling back from space exploration—you name it, we’re doing it. We’re giving up. Packing it in.”