Peter Dickinson - Eva

Right at the end of Eva’s visit something much more extraordinary happened. She took her chance to slip away and knuckled over to the door she used. A short wall screened it from the rest of the area. The door itself was a heavy metal thing with an observation grill in it and a lock humans could operate and chimps couldn’t—a box with a tricky catch and inside it a four-digit code to punch. Eva had slipped through and was putting on her overalls when she heard a movement and glanced up. Four chimp fingers were gripped into the grill. Quickly Eva switched the light off. The square of daylight blanked out, and now Eva could see the gleam of eyes and the pale muzzle pressed against the bars of the grill. Though she couldn’t recognize him, she knew it could only be Sniff. He hung there for some time before he dropped away. She heard him trying the catch and then thumping the box itself, not in a violent frustrated way as Tatters might have done, but more experimentally, to see if a good thump opened it.

Eva finished dressing in the dark, picked up her voice box and stole away. A last glance back showed her Sniff peering in at the grill once more. The observers would have noted his behavior, she realized. She’d have to discuss it with Dad. Pity. It was something she felt an instinct to keep to herself for the moment. She didn’t know why.

MONTH NINE,

DAY FOURTEEN

Living in the real world . . .

No dreams, only people.

Rush and crush.

Winter again, soon.

Eva made a tape to take to Grog in the hospital. On one side she put the reasons why she wasn’t going to help him in his campaign to get the chimps moved to Cayamoro. Long arguments like that she usually put on tape, because it took so long to spell them out face-to-face. She had plenty of reasons—reasons to do with chimps. (How could you let chimps loose in wild jungle when they didn’t know a poisonous berry from a safe one, or what a leopard was? How could you cope with males like Tatters and Geronimo? How could you hope for any of them to follow Eva’s lead, so junior, such an outsider? And so on.) Reasons to do with humans. (How would you raise the funds? How would you persuade people like Dad to stop what they were doing? How would you get the people who looked after Cayamoro to let you put a lot of chimps in their jungle? And so on.) Eva’s own reasons . . .

She found these harder to get said, but she had to, to be fair to Grog. She was happy with things as they were. Perhaps happy was the wrong word, but she felt she’d reached a balance she could live with. She needed human company as well as chimp company. She needed Ginny and Bren in the same sort of way she needed Lana. She enjoyed human things—cooked food, surfboarding, travel. She’d be going skiing in a couple of months. It wasn’t fair to ask her to give all that up.

Or to have to tell Mom she was going to go away and live in Cayamoro and never see her again.

Eva played the tape through to check. It was all right, firm, and final . . . but poor Grog. She turned the tape over and filled the other side with chitchat about things that had happened while he’d been away and then ill—the fight with Tatters, Mom’s most tiresome client winning a lottery, Sniff, Mimi’s latest rage, Abel’s first real knot, and so on. Bright bedside prattle. It was so difficult to imagine Grog being ill. Almost dying, apparently.

Mimi had chartered an air ambulance and flown out and brought him back to the university hospital, but he’d been too ill for visitors. Eva had called again, because she was due in for her monthly check at Joan Pradesh’s lab, and again she’d been told no, but then the hospital had called back to say Grog was asking for her, but she mustn’t stay more than five minutes. It sounded as though he must still be pretty bad. Even so, she wasn’t ready for the shock.

All his hair had fallen out. His face was the color of the underside of a fish, with all the flesh wasted from beneath the skin. His eyes were dull, yellow, exhausted, but at least they moved. If he’d had them shut, she would have thought he was dead. She realized at once she couldn’t give him the tape.

“Hi,” he whispered. “Good to see you.”

“Uh?” she grunted.

“Had a bad time. My fault. They thought I was done for, but they’ve got it licked at last. I’eve had half a million little wrigglers playing lurkie-lurkie around my bloodstream, but they’ve all gone now. Taught me a lesson. Can’t send chimps to Cayamoro. Don’t have the immunities any more than I had.”

He closed his eyes. Eva grunted agreement and relief. He didn’t notice the relief.

“Going to have to make our own jungle,” he said. “Nice, clean jungle. On an island, uh?”

With the closed eyes and the whisper it was as if he were talking in his sleep, muttering his dreams. Eva mumbled sounds of doubt. His eyes opened.

“You’re against?” he said.

“Uh.”

“Why? Only thing makes sense.”

“Tell you when you’re stronger.”

“No. Now.”

For the first time there was a sort of energy in his eyes, a glimmer of the Grog she knew before.

“Isn’t time now. I did you a tape. Give it to you later.”

“Let’s have it now. Come on. Listen, this is the only thing I think about. You got reasons, I want to listen to them, think about them. You’ve as good as told me you’re anti—you can’t just leave it at that. Right?”

His voice was more than a whisper now, and there was a tinge of pink in his cheeks. It was as if the argument were actually good for him. Eva took the tape out.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry, Grog. Listen to side one when you’re feeling stronger. Side two is just talk.”

“Thanks.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. Eva thought he’d fallen asleep, but then his lips moved.

“Have some grapes. More than I can eat.”

It was, too, a huge mound, purple and green. She took a whole bunch and felt her mouth starting to water. Grog smiled.

“Can’t promise you they aren’t poisoned,” he said. “Mother keeps sending them.”

Eva had discovered quite a human-sounding chuckle she could do with her own mouth, but she couldn’t control it the way she could her voice-box remarks, so now it came out all false.

Her sense of shock and depression deepened as she knuckled along corridors and rode escalators and elevators to Joan’s lab. Checkups had, in any case, become rather boring by now. Nothing new was likely to happen, so foan left them to her assistants. They wired you up and made you run on a moving belt and do other kinds of exercises; then, still wired up, you did memory tests and perception tests and intelligence tests; then they showed you shapings of things that were supposed to stir you up in different ways—human and chimp babies, a car crash, a snake eating a mouse, a nude male model, a bowl of apples, and so on, while the machines you were wired to recorded your pulse and your palm moisture and your brain rhythms and dozens of other things happening inside you and fed the results into computers to be juggled around. Today, by the time she reached this stage the shapings seemed to mean nothing at all.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” said Minnie. She was a happy, round-faced girl with a sharp little nose and tiny eyes. She was far brighter than she looked, Eva had found.

“Uh?”

“Only you hardly seem to be registering.”

“Sorry. Thinking about something else.”

Just saying so brought back the image of Grog, bald and beardless on the pillow.

“Whup!” said Minnie. “Something registered there!”

“I visited a friend on the way. He’s been very ill. All his hair’s fallen out.”

“Too bad.”

“Chimps mind about hair.”