Peter Dickinson - Eva

Now, attracted by the uproar, Geronimo came rambling over, with a young male called Sniff who tended to follow Geronimo around. Geronimo settled onto a slab with his back toward the tree. As soon as Beth noticed him she came over and greeted him with quick submissive bows and pants. He looked around in a lordly way and pretended to notice Tatters in the tree for the first time. Beth settled beside him and began to groom him. Dinks came over and presented her rump to him and then joined in grooming the other side. The three females left at the foot of the tree didn’t feel confident enough to go on shrieking at Tatters without the support of Beth and Dinks, so they backed off and settled down together. Eva put her arm around Lana to comfort her for her bad treatment, while Lana began to inspect Wang for signs of damage. Wang was trembling with fright and stared at the world with shining, baffled eyes.

There would be cameras running up in the observation posts, and students taking notes, but they were all outside the story. Eva was inside it. She could feel little Wang’s fright and Lana’s quick recovery to her usual contented self. She could feel too that Lana hadn’t seen how she’d been rescued. When Geronimo slowly turned to look up at Tatters, still grinning in the iron tree, and raised a beckoning hand to him, inviting him down, Eva could sense both the mockery in the gesture and the genuine suggestion of peacemaking. Tatters stayed where he was. His teeth still gleamed inside his tight-drawn lips, showing he was worried and nervous, though the threat from the females had gone. Perhaps, Eva thought, he was baffled by what had happened; at one moment he’d been fully in control, winning, punishing Lana, with the others too scared to interfere, and the next moment he’d been flat on his face, harried by the females, bitten and chased up a tree.

Eva studied all this with quick, secret glances. It took her a little time to realize that she herself was being watched, by Sniff. He was sitting alone, a few yards off, with his head bowed as if lost in some private dream, but his eyes were darting from side to side. The moment Eva caught his glance he looked away. This happened two or three times, until she realized that Sniff was actually doing much the same that she was, watching deliberately in order to learn how things worked. The moment he realized that she’d been staring at him, he turned his back on her.

The wild thought struck her that Sniff was actually like her, another chimp with a human mind, whom Dad hadn’t told her about. No, impossible. Everything that had happened from her first waking, right through to the things people said during her checkups in Joan’s lab, made her certain she was the only one. So far.

At last Tatters came down from the tree and ambled off. Lana was feeling extra possessive about Wang, and Dinks and Beth were still busy with Geronimo, but Abel, who’d been frightened enough by the fight to go and nestle against Beth’s side, became restless again, so Eva took him off to continue their game. This consisted of a variation on the original trick with the bottle and cord, which allowed Eva sometimes to tie him a loose knot and when it came undone to see if he could be persuaded to try and retie it himself. At first he’d just held the ends together and hoped and then brought it to Eva to mend, but she had refused to retie the knot unless he sat and watched what she was doing. Now when it came apart he’d gotten as far as twisting the ends together before giving up—anything like a real knot was still an accident.

They were sitting together, Eva knotting the loose ends with clear, exaggerated movements, and Abel peering with his nose so close to her fingers that it looked as if he were trying to understand the process by smell, when she felt a faint movement against her shoulder. She looked around and saw Sniff crouching just behind her, watching what she was doing. He backed away at once, but she turned and gave him a quick pant of greeting, then finished tying the knot and gave the toy to Abel, who scampered away, trailing it behind him.

Sniff sat gazing at her. He was an odd-looking chimp with a shorter, squarer face than most and large pale ears. He wasn’t quite full grown, but Eva had the impression that even when he was he still wouldn’t be as big as Tatters or Geronimo. He faced her with a bright, steady stare, challenging and inquisitive. She was aware at once that he had realized she was different. He wanted to know why.

This was new to Eva. Most of the chimps she’d met probably vaguely realized there was something a little strange about her, but didn’t distinguish Eva’s kind of oddity from the oddities of some of the other chimps—Lulu’s deafness or Gran’s refusal to mate, ever. She panted again and moved up beside him, but when she started to groom him he took her hand in his and studied it carefully, back and front, before letting go. Then he picked up a short piece of the cord she’d been using and gave it to her. She knotted the two ends, showing him every move, and passed him the resultant loop, which he stared at for a while, then took in two fists and tore apart. The cord broke at a weakness, but the knot stayed tied. Sniff was still staring at it when a new hullabaloo broke out behind the slab. Together they rose and peered over the top.

Tatters had come back. Eva could see the back of his head and shoulders with his hair all bushed out as he swayed and stamped to and fro, hooting softly. Beth and Dinks, out of sight, were shrieking at him. Eva knuckled around to the corner of the slab to watch the whole scene. Geronimo had actually turned his back on Tatters, trying to pretend he wasn’t there, but Beth and Dinks had stopped grooming to watch Tatters and shriek. Tatters was an alarming sight. With his hair bushed out and his ponderous stamping movements, he managed to make himself look even larger and heavier than he really was. The rhythm of his stamping increased. Dinks noticed Eva and held out a beseeching hand—“Come and help.” Eva turned her head to look for Lana, who was out of sight, so she started forward to join the others, but before she reached them Tatters charged, not directly at Geronimo but between him and Beth, knocking them both over. He swung his charge into a circling movement, and finding Eva directly in his path, he slapped her aside, sending her head over heels. She screeched and rose with her head ringing. The slap had been a terrific buffet, but it hadn’t actually hurt all that much. Still, it was an outrage. Geronimo was on his feet now, screeching too, a little uncertainly, but with Beth and Dinks beside him he gathered the courage to rush at Tatters. Lana had appeared from somewhere and joined in, so Eva did too. Together they drove Tatters up the tree again. Sniff, Eva noticed, did nothing, but watched the whole episode from a few yards off.

Twenty minutes later, at Geronimo’s invitation, Tatters came down and this time the two males settled down to an intensive grooming session, totally absorbed, locked into each other’s arms. This was perfectly ordinary. It was the way most fights ended. It was even ordinary that a little later when Eva had started her game with Abel again, Beth came ambling past and seemed to notice her. She stared a moment, puzzled, and then without warning rushed at Eva and bit her hard on the shoulder. Eva shrieked—the bite hurt a good deal more than the buffet from Tatters. Abel raced off. Lana came over, beginning to shriek too, but instead of continuing the fight Beth knuckled rapidly away, leaving Lana to comfort Eva and lick the bite mark, which had actually drawn blood. Eva sat trembling with shock, but she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. Beth must have seen the attack on Tatters and known what had happened; and though she had joined in driving Tatters up the tree, she still couldn’t approve of a junior female acting with that kind of initiative. So as soon as she’d recovered from her shakes, Eva went and found Beth and gave her a very formal submissive bow and pant, just to keep things straight. Beth, of course, pretended not to notice but was clearly pleased. This was something Eva could see and feel, but the researchers in the observation posts couldn’t, though they’d have most of the other details of the fight recorded.