Peter Dickinson - Eva

“So you do too?”

“Uh.”

“Okay. Let’s see if we can find you something nice and shaggy.”

Minnie pressed keys. The computer thought for an instant, then came up with a ridiculous dog, a girl in a woolly suit, a bottle brush, a caterpillar, a diatom, a college professor. They began to laugh and were still laughing when Joan Pradesh came in. She glanced scornfully at the professor.

“An utter charlatan,” she said. “How’s it going, Minnie?”

“She’s not been concentrating. She’s a bit upset. She’s been visiting a sick friend.”

Joan nodded, not interested. She took over the console from Minnie and whizzed through the earlier results, faster than you’d have thought anyone could have taken them in.

“Absolutely normal,” she said. “I think we can stop doing this—we are not going to get anything new. Of course, I am not a psychologist—I can judge only the physiological data. Do you feel yourself to be a fully integrated creature, Eva?”

“Most of the time. Only I get chimp urges I’ve got to go along with. I’m more chimp than you expected, aren’t I?”

Joan said nothing, but stared at the VDU, not really seeing it. She rose.

“We’ll disconnect her now, Minnie,” she said.

“We haven’t quite finished.”

“Never mind.”

Joan helped remove the sensors with quick and expert fingers. She might be arrogant, but she wasn’t proud.

“Now, come with me,” she said and led the way out into the corridor and along to a windowless room, one wall of which was lined with VDUs. Meg was sitting at one of the consoles. She turned and said, “Hi, Eva,” but her smile was strained and sad.

“I want you to look at something,” said Joan. “I’m not going to tell you about it because I don’t want to put ideas into your head. If you find it too distressing, you must tell me.”

She pressed a switch. A zone hummed, and at the other end of the room shapes became solid—a hospital bed ringed by machines, the broken web, the thing like a hairy spider at the center—a chimp’s head on the pillow, split by a huge, straining grin. The gleaming canines showed it was a male. The eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling.

Eva knuckled across to the zone and circled it. So this was what was left of the boy called Stefan and the chimp called Caesar. It could only be them. She felt her lips beginning to strain in sympathy, copying the grin of horror.

To Dad’s surprise and Mom’s relief Eva had not wanted to talk much about what would happen when Joan’s new patients woke. People expected her to be excited at the idea of having companions like herself, but her own feelings were more mixed. There had even been a strand of jealousy in them, at the knowledge that soon she would be losing her own uniqueness. Fame was funny. You didn’t want to share it. But much more important than that had been the fear, half thought and half felt, that having others like her would upset the balance she had achieved. Because there was no one like her, people had to accept her as human when she was with them, just as the chimps accepted her as chimp when she was in the Reserve. When the others came, wouldn’t people, even Ginny and Bren, find it harder not to think of her as other , different and unwanted? And Eva herself, would she still want to be with Lana as much as she did? That was something too precious to lose, but you couldn’t keep it alive just by wanting to. So on the whole, Eva had not spent much time thinking about the moment when she would first meet Stefan/Caesar. Perhaps that was why, when the moment came, the shock was not the simple selfish shock of disappointment. It was pure shock, shock at the thing itself.

The bedclothes beside the body moved.

“Erch,” said a voice. “Gningg.”

Eva knuckled back to Joan.

“Something wrong?” she said.

“We began the resuscitation procedure nineteen days ago. We had earlier felt able to take a few shortcuts on the basis of what we learned from you, and it is just possible that we made a mistake there, but if so, it hasn’t shown up in any of our tests. Personally I am confident that the transfer has taken place, that Stefan’s axon network has replicated in the animal’s brain, that he is, in lay terms, there . But for some reason he is unable to communicate, either with the animal’s body or through it with the outside world.”

Eva turned and circled the zone again, staring at the image on the image bed. No use.

“Can I go in?” she said.

“If you don’t mind going through the sterilizer.”

“You won’t have to do my clothes.”

Eva stripped and stood in the little cubicle. Her hair bushed out around her under the tingling bombardment. She opened the inner door and went through. The room was just the same as when she used to lie here, with the bed and the mirror and the silent machines, and beyond the window the huge sky with the city stretching away beneath it. She pulled a stool over to the bed and climbed on to it, so that she could lean over and peer down into the dark eyes. There was nothing she could read there, no presence, no signal. Her hand moved without her telling it to and began to groom through the long black hairs on the scalp.

“He hasn’t got any feeling there,” said Meg’s voice. “Just his left arm and his mouth.”

Eva shifted the bedclothes back. The hand lay across a keyboard just like hers. Sometimes the fingers twitched, and when they touched the “Speak” bar a voice came out, meaningless. She settled herself and started to groom her way painstakingly up the arm. Was there a faint response, felt through her fingertips, as though the flesh itself recognized the signal? But when she peered into the eyes again she saw no change, and the agonized grin stayed tense.

She lifted the twitching fingers aside and pressed the keys.

“Hi,” said a boy’s voice from the keyboard speaker. “I’m Stefan. I’m here. I’m okay.”

The arm threshed at the sound, straining against the straps that held it.

“That is his regular reaction,” said Joan out of the air. “Violent agitation.”

Eva let the threshings subside and returned to grooming the arm. The response she imagined she had felt before was there no longer. There was no change in the dreadful grimace, no glimmer of any kind in the eye. After about ten minutes Joan’s voice spoke again.

“He’s had as much as he can stand for the moment. Meg’s going to put him to sleep.”

Eva grunted but continued her work. She wanted him to go back into darkness with the feel of her fingers on his flesh. It seemed important, but she didn’t know why. She felt the change in her fingertips and looked up in time to see the eyes close, the lips lose their tension, soften, and close, too, until the face was that of a young male chimp, asleep, deep in a dream—a dream, perhaps, of trees.

Totally exhausted, Eva knuckled out into the control room and put on her overalls. She was very shivery. While she had been in the bedroom she had been too busy, too absorbed in trying to make contact, to understand quite what she had seen and felt. Now the horror of it gathered inside her and exploded into a howling hoot. She rocked herself to and fro in her misery. Joan stood watching, bright-eyed, but Meg jumped off her chair, knelt down, and cuddled beside her, sobbing with human grief.

Eva recovered first and reached for her keyboard.

“Sorry,” she said. “Couldn’t help it.”

“We are all somewhat shaken,” said Joan. “Do you have any ideas?”

“They’re both there. They don’t want each other.”

“Both?”

“Stefan. Caesar. Like Kelly’s here.”

She tapped herself on the chest.

“I made myself want Kelly,” she said. “I knew I had to. Suppose it’s easier for me. Always been used to chimps.”