Peter Dickinson - Eva

Tatters was still full of aggression. He could easily have followed her up the tree and continued punishing her there, despite her advantage of being uppermost he would have been much too quick and strong for her, but that was against the rules. He swung around looking for another target. Lulu was crouched where she’d been, licking a bite wound on her arm and moaning between licks. Wang had gone, and so had Lana, but Geronimo had been sitting all this while (about twenty seconds) with his back to the squabble, pretending not to know it was happening, while Sniff had been perched a little farther off, as usual watching the whole scene.

Now Tatters knuckled over to Geronimo and began to circle him, hooting, with his hair bushed out. Geronimo, head bowed, watched him out of the corner of his eye. Geronimo had three options. He could challenge Tatters back or he could submit by bowing down and panting and letting Tatters step over him or he could run away up a tree. The tension mounted. Any moment now, he would make a dash for it. But then an odd thing happened. Sniff rose, came over, settled by Geronimo, and put his arm around him. Geronimo looked at him. Tatters, absorbed in his aggression display, seemed not to notice what had happened until he had circled completely around the pair and come face-to-face again. By this time they were standing. Their hair rose like Tatters’s. They hooted. Geronimo took a half pace forward. Tatters stopped dead in his tracks and looked away. Geronimo hooted again. Tatters hesitated, turned, and knuckled away. Geronimo and Sniff settled down to groom each other.

Waiting till Tatters was safely out of sight, Eva climbed down the tree, but Sniff must have been watching her, because he instantly left Geronimo and came across to meet her. Eva hadn’t seen much of Sniff during the winter. According to the human observers, he’d gone off and joined up with a different group in one of the other ruined factories while Tatters and Geronimo were fighting it out, so it didn’t seem like him to have behaved as he had just done, especially since he was intelligent enough to know that Tatters would make him pay for it as soon as he could get him alone. Now he looked at Eva gravely. She stayed where she was while he went around and gave her rump a quick sniff, then returned to peer into her eyes again. He grunted quietly to himself, then put out a hand and patted her twice gently, on the side of the cheek. It was not a signal she had ever seen one chimp give another, but she understood at once what it meant. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.” He grunted again and went back to Geronimo.

Later that morning Tatters came charging into Beth’s group, buffeting them aside and rushing away before they could join up to drive him off. Apart from that, nothing much happened until it was time for Eva to leave. She found Sniff sitting in the little nook that screened the door. She paused. The obvious thing would have been to greet him briefly and move on, as though she were passing by on her way to somewhere else, but she could see from his whole pose and the sudden alertness at her arrival that he had been waiting for her and wouldn’t be deceived.

He rose, looked at her, went to the door, and rattled the grill, then turned and went to the box that contained the lock. He rapped it with his knuckles, looked at her sharply, and held out a hand—“Show me.” All right, thought Eva, I’m going to need a male I can trust, so I’ll have to let him see I trust him. She undid the catch, lifted the lid, and punched the code. Sniff watched every detail but jumped with alarm when the door lock clicked. Eva opened the door.

Grinning with nerves, Sniff peered into the darkness beyond. She switched on the light and led the way through, but he stayed close by the door, excited, frightened, his eyes darting from side to side. Now that she’d made the decision to trust him, Eva felt it was important to let him understand as much as he could, so she fetched her overalls from the peg and put them on. Though the policy at the Reserve was to keep humans out of sight as much as possible, from time to time they had to intervene in one way or another, so all the chimps would have seen them. They might not understand about clothes but they’d know they had something to do with humans.

She turned and faced Sniff. He came a pace closer, put out a finger, and touched the butterfly on her chest. (This had become a sort of trademark that she always wore—in fact, a kid’s clothing firm had just signed a contract to market Mom’s designs worldwide, under the name of Evaralls. Apparently it was going to bring in a ton of money, both for Mom and the Pool.)

Eva always carried something to nibble, so she had a bar of raisin shortbread in the pocket; she took it out, unwrapped it, broke it in two, and gave him half. He sniffed it and peered at it before he bit and inspected the wrapping too. It was all typical, though just like any ordinary chimp he insisted on looking in the pocket to see if she had another bar. After that she sat with him by the door for a grooming session and then rose and beckoned him back out into the open. He seemed to understand exactly what was happening. Before she left him she patted his cheek, the way he’d done hers. He grunted and knuckled away without waiting for the door to close behind her.

Joan made a real hash of the press conference, worse than anybody could have guessed. She was aggressive and contemptuous, making it obvious that she despised journalists even more than she despised everyone else, and couldn’t accept that they had any business to question the Tightness of whatever she’d done. There was a man from the university, tall and handsome with silky white hair, who tried to smooth things out and calm everyone down and put Joan’s answers into blander phrases, but he only made things worse. At least you could see Joan was being honest; she stuck her chin out and her eyes flashed and she said exactly what she thought, but the man wriggled and squirmed and tried to slither away from the point and blur everything over. Eva could see Joan becoming increasingly irritated by his efforts to tell people that she didn’t really mean what she’d just been saying. Tempers were snapping, when a fat, shiny-bald young man with huge thick-lensed glasses stood up and waited for a pause in the shouting.

“Can we hear from Eva?” he said. “You have the subject of one of these experiments here. May we hear her views?”

“Well ...” began the silky man.

“Or is she just here to look pretty?” said Mike.

“That’s a very ...” began the silky man.

Eva was sitting on a stool on the other side of Joan, but she reached out a long arm and grabbed the microphone. The man tried to snatch it back, but she was far too strong for him. There was a crackle and rasp from the speakers, and she had it. She pressed the “Speak” bar on her keyboard.

“Joan saved some of my life,” said her voice. “So some of me’s glad. But all of me knows she was wrong.”

The silky man had left his chair and come around behind. His hand was reaching for the mike.

“I think, if you don’t mind ...”

Eva turned on him with a snarl. Her teeth snapped shut a millimeter from his wrist. He leapt away as if she’d actually bitten him. Several of the journalists cheered. Mike was still on his feet.

“ ’Some of me,’ ” he said.

Eva climbed on to the table. She tapped her chest.

“This belongs to a chimp called Kelly,” she said. “You people stole it from her. You thought you’d killed her so that you could steal it, but some of her’s still here. Some of her’s me. She knows what you did, so I know. I know it’s wrong.”

That was all she’d prepared, so she had to pause. The shouting began, everyone trying to get their questions in. The silky man reached for the microphone again, but Eva bared her teeth and he drew back. Joan looked at her and put her hand out, palm up.