Peter Dickinson: Eva

Eva lost patience and switched off. It was funny, she thought, these sudden surges of annoyance—twice now this morning. She never used to be like that. She didn’t feel like practicing with her voice again, so for something to do she told the mirror to go back and show her the view. She watched the reflections as it swung to its new position, mostly carpet and the corners of things, a piece of the cart, one of the machines that monitored and fed her and took her waste away, the air-conditioner, the window. The forest of high rises, the millions of people, people, people . . .

The crammed streets, the crammed beaches, the crammed skies—they were only a fraction of them. Most people stayed in their rooms all day, just to get away from one another. A lot of them never went out at all. Their world was four walls and their shaper zone. Dad said that the shaper companies were the real rulers of the world. The people told them what they wanted and the companies gave it to them and nothing else mattered. The view from the window was beautiful, until you thought about the people.

Eva lost patience again and told the mirror to go somewhere else. The only place it knew was the visitor’s chair. She watched as it swung—the air-conditioner, the machine, the cart, the blank zone, another machine, the chair . . .

The long way around—it could have gone straight across the bed . . .

Why . . . ?

They didn’t want her to see the bed!

That note in Mom’s voice, the effort, the sorrow. The keyboard, the trouble they’d taken. The way they’d set the mirror. The accident. You can get very badly smashed in an accident.

“What a pretty baby!” strangers used to say. “What a lovely little girl!” Later, just looks and smiles that said the same—glances and stares from boys when she came into a new class. She’d had Mom’s oval face but Dad’s high cheekbones, eyes a darker blue than either of them, long black gleaming hair, straight nose, full mouth . . . She’d moved like a dancer, easily, fallen without thought into graceful poses . . .

No!

But she had to know, to see. Urgently she moved the mirror again, back to the window. It swung the whole way around, of course. She tried confusing it, stopping it, giving it fresh instructions before it had finished a movement. No good . . .

The door opened and shut, and Mom was standing by the bed. She was pale. Her mass of hair was a mess, with a lot of gray showing in the glossy black. There were hard lines down beside her nostrils. She looked as though she hadn’t slept for a year. Her smile wasn’t real.

“Hello, my darling,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I’m late. How are you today?”

She bent and kissed Eva on her numb forehead. A strand of her hair trailed across Eva’s face. It didn’t tickle, because the face was numb too, but Eva automatically closed that eye to let it pass. Mom turned away to get the tall stool so that she could sit by the bed where Eva could see her directly. Eva’s eyelids still moved rather sluggishly, so she didn’t open the shut one at once.

Hey!

She opened it and closed the other one. Then the first again. Mom had come back now and slid her hand under the bedclothes to grasp Eva’s own hand.

“What are you doing, you funny girl?”

Eva answered the cool grip with a squeeze, but she could feel Mom’s jumpiness, and hear the false note in the lightness she tried to put into her voice. Her hand was wrong too. Too small. Deep in the nightmare now, Eva stared up into Mom’s questioning eyes. They were wrong too, something different about the color. She forced herself to close one eye again and then the other, squinting inwardly as she did so.

Her nose was gone.

Most of the time you don’t see your nose at all; but if you shut one eye and look sideways, there it is, that fuzzy hummock, too close to focus. It was gone. At the lower rim of vision she could see the vague blur of a cheek and at the top the darker fringe of an eyebrow, much more noticeable—much more there —than it used to be . . .

Mom wasn’t even pretending to smile now.

Eva closed both eyes and willed the nightmare into day. The accident. Her whole face must have been so badly smashed that they couldn’t rebuild it, or not yet anyway. They were keeping it numb so that it didn’t hurt. Her jaw and mouth must be so bad that she wouldn’t be able to speak right for ages—never perhaps—so they’d made her her voice box instead. They didn’t want her to see herself in the mirror . . .

She wriggled her fingers out of Mom’s grip and slowly found the right keys. No point in fussing with tones. She pressed the “Speak” bar.

“Let me see,” said her voice, dead flat.

“Darling ...” croaked Mom.

A whisper rustled in the speaker by her ear. She stopped to listen. Eva pressed out another message.

“Let me see. Or I’ll go mad. Wondering.”

“She’s right,” said Mom to the air. “No, it’s too late . . . No.”

The murmur started again. Eva gripped Mom’s hand again and closed her eyes. Why was the hand so small? Had her own hand . . . The thumb was all wrong! Why hadn’t she noticed? It was . . .

Without her touching the keys, the mirror motor whined. She kept her eyes closed until it stopped.

“I love you, darling,” said Mom. “I love you.”

Eva willed her eyes to open.

For an instant all she seemed to see was nightmare. Mess. A giant spiderweb, broken and tangled on the pillows, with the furry black body of the spider dead in the middle of it. And then the mess made sense.

She closed her right eye and watched the brown left eye in the mirror close as she did so. The web—it wasn’t broken—was tubes and sensor wires connecting the machines around the bed to the pink-and-black thing in the center. She stared. Her mind wouldn’t work. She couldn’t think, only feel—feel Mom’s tension, Mom’s grief, as much as her own amazement. Poor Mom—her lovely blue-eyed daughter . . . Must do something for Mom. She found the right keys.

“Okay,” said her voice. “It’s okay, Mom.”

“Oh, my darling,” said Mom and started to cry. That was okay too. Mom cried easy, usually when the worst was over. Eva stared at the face in the mirror. She’d recognized it at once, but couldn’t give it a name. Then it came. Carefully she pressed the keys. She used the tone control to sound cheerful.

“Hi, Kelly,” said her voice.

Kelly was—had been—a young female chimpanzee.

Eva had grown up with chimps.

As more and more people crammed into the world, needing more and more land for cities and crops, so the animals had died out. Most of the great wild jungles were gone, and the savannahs that used to cover half a continent. Here and there a few patches of jungle remained, among mountains too steep to use, or stretches of bleak and barren upland unsuitable for the energy fields that filled most of the old hot deserts, or offshore waters where fish farms for some reason wouldn’t flourish, but even these were always being nibbled away as somebody found a new method of exploiting them. And anyway, the wild animals that had been crowded into those pockets had destroyed them by their numbers or become diseased or just seemed to lose interest in living in a world like that.

The big animals vanished first, elephants and giraffes, gorillas and orangs, whales and dolphins. Others hung on in the patches and crannies people left for them by mistake or on purpose. A few actually throve because living in a world full of people suited them in ways they could adapt to—there were no eagles anymore, but you could see kestrels any day in the city, nesting among the high rises or hovering in the updrafts between them, living off mice and sparrows and other small creatures, which in turn lived off the scraps that people littered around. There were rats, of course, and wasps and city pigeons and starlings and so on, but that was all.