Peter Dickinson - Eva

“Uh?”

“Trouble with us humans is we keep forgetting we’re animals. You know what happens when an animal population expands beyond what the setup will bear? Nature finds ways of cutting them back. Usually it’s plain starvation, but even when there’s food to go around something gets triggered inside them. They stop breeding or they eat their own babies or peck one another to death—there’s all sorts of ways. Us too. It’s in us. We can’t escape it. A lot of it’s been going on already for years without anyone noticing, a sort of retreat, a backing out, nine-tenths of the world’s population holed up in their apartments twenty-four hours a day watching the shaper. But it’s starting to move. I can feel it. There’s a real crash coming, and us being humans, whatever it is, we’re going to overdo it. You know what that means for you chimps? Lana’s children, or her children’s children, are going to have to fend for themselves. You think they’ll make it out there?”

He flicked his head toward the endless vista of high rises, veiled in their human haze.

“Not a hope,” he said. “They’ve got to be somewhere where there’s trees to shelter them, leaves that come and come, fruit all year round, small game—the life they were made for.”

“They’ve forgotten.”

“They’ll have to learn all over . . . No, listen . . .”

He had gripped her hand as she stretched it over the keyboard.

“. . . there’s chances now. There’s something new, something Brewer and the others didn’t have. When they tried to teach chimps how to live wild, they had one big problem—they were human. They couldn’t lead, they could only push—push the chimps out into a world where humans didn’t fit. It makes your heart bleed, how they tried, the things they gave up. But you could lead, Eva.”

“Uh!”

“You and the others. Stefan’s due to wake up, any day now.”

“Uh?”

“Chimp used to be called Caesar. Yasha’s a month behind. Then there’ll be three of you.”

Eva had not asked about Caesar since the night of her tantrum, and Mom and Dad hadn’t mentioned him either, though Mom was probably hoping that when Joan’s other patients began to awaken, to become available for company, then Eva would stop wanting to spend so much time at the Reserve. Eva wasn’t sure what she felt about this. Some ways it would be good to know chimps who could also talk—bitch about friends, discuss music, tease, plan lives—but she had now discovered other kinds of talk, in glance and gesture and especially touch, that gave her everything she needed.

“What do you think you’re for ?” said Grog.

“Uh?”

“Yeah. What are you for , Eva? What’s your purpose? Are you just a freak? Are you just here so Professor Pradesh can prove things about neuron memory? ’Course, that’s why the old girl chimped you, but do you reckon it’s enough? Are you happy with just that? Being a scientific curiosity and selling drinks on the shaper? Listen. Your dad and the people who helped chimp you did it for their own reasons, and your mom said yes to save your life. They didn’t know the real reason. The real reason was that you and Stefan and the others are the ones who are going to show the chimps how to survive. Nature doesn’t like letting species go. She’s going to save the chimps if she can, and that’s why she let you happen.”

Eva stared. She would hardly have known him. He stood in the brilliant morning light with the shaper jungle behind him, hunched, pop-eyed, quivering with the energies of his argument. She fluttered her fingers across the keys to tell him he was crazy. His whole idea was doubly impossible. You couldn’t teach chimps to live on their own, not any longer. You couldn’t persuade people to let you try. But try to tell Grog that. He simply wouldn’t understand. He was like his mother in one of her rages, an unstoppable force, blind with his passion. She canceled the words and just grunted doubt.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’ll take a bit of thinking about. Don’t expect you to give me a yes right off. It’s a long-term project—five years minimum. We’ve got to make a whole world see reason. They will in the end—they’ve got no other choice. But for you, Eva, do you want this ...”

He waved a hand at the green compelling jungle.

“. . . or this?”

He pressed keys. The jungle whipped away and the restaurant was filled with ruins, part of a dead city under gray moonlight with gray and grassless hills rimming the horizon—not real, part of a set for some shaper epic probably, but eerie, not just because of the sense of ghostliness and loss but because of the way the tables and chairs stood among the broken walls and rubble-littered floors, waiting and waiting for guests who would never come.

“Time to go,” said Grog. “Got to keep on my mother’s good side—we’re going to need her.”

MONTH EIGHT,

DAY TWENTY-NINE

Living with the dream . . .

Imaginary trees filling the iron grove . . .

Shadows, leaf litter, looping creepers, the flash of a bird . . .

Calls, whispers, odors . . .

A card had come from Grog that morning, saying he was staying a week longer because he’d picked up some kind of jungle bug, but the picture of Cayamoro was more beautiful than anything she’d ever seen. So now as she played with Abel she did so absentmindedly, making imaginary scenarios of escape not just for herself but for Lana and Beth and the rest of them—putting something in their food that would send them all to sleep, and flying them south and then letting them wake, amazed, among the odors and shadows they were made for . . .

A shriek! Lana! Another! Eva scuttled around the corner of the concrete slab against which she’d been leaning. Lana was lying flat on her face on the ground with a male chimp jumping on her. Beth and Dinks were watching, shrieking too, with all their teeth showing, outraged but too scared to help. Wang was actually under Lana, squealing each time the weight of the male came down. The male had his back to Eva. She flung herself at him, leaping at the last instant to crash into his spine while he was actually in the middle of a jump. He probably weighed twice what she did, but he wasn’t ready and she knocked him flat on his face, then raced on around the corner of the concrete slab, and the next corner too. There was just a chance he hadn’t even seen her and wouldn’t know what had happened. The shrieks on the other side of the slab became deafening. The male appeared, actually above her head, half crouching on the slab, screaming back at the females on the other side. Eva bit him on the ankle as hard as she could. He raced away, swung himself up the nearest iron tree, and clung there, shrieking. It had all happened in about fifteen seconds.

Eva peered out to see if Lana was all right and found Lana, Beth, Dinks, and another female grouped at the bottom of the iron tree and screaming up at the male. Eva went over and joined the racket. It was extremely satisfying, having a big male cornered like that and telling him to come down if he dared. With another part of her mind she worked out what had happened, though to the real chimps it was all so ordinary they had no need to think about it.

Dad had told Eva the setup before she’d first joined, and part of her “work” for him—her excuse for being at the Reserve—was keeping him up-to-date with the latest moves. Beth’s little “family”—Dad called it a subgroup—was part of a larger group that contained two adult males. Tatters, the one up the tree now, was the stronger, but Geronimo was older and had been boss of the group for several years while Tatters was still growing up. Now Tatters was challenging him. Tatters would have won a straight fight easily enough, but Geronimo had the females on his side. Beth, in particular, supported him, partly because she was used to him but partly because having the boss on her side helped her to dominate the younger females. Geronimo made a point of going around the female subgroups and sitting grooming with each of them. Tatters’s latest move in the contest was trying to break this alliance up by attacking any females who paid attention to Geronimo. Presumably he’d seen Lana and Geronimo grooming before Eva had arrived that morning, so he’d tried to punish her. He hadn’t seriously hurt her. There were rules. Males never used their terrifying teeth to bite females, though they did sometimes with other males. He might possibly have killed Wang, but that would have been an accident. Certainly he wouldn’t have expected a surprise ambush by a single female—that wasn’t in the rules. If he worked out what had happened, Eva guessed, she’d be in for a rough time.