Peter Dickinson - Eva

It was still in the shaper. Eva hadn’t seen it—she’d been waiting for a moment when Mom wasn’t around. Now Dad took it out without a word and gave it to Ms. Callaway, who put it in her briefcase and left. She hadn’t said anything about Grog that time. That came later.

Eva had only begun to understand what she’d done as the day went on.

“That was something!” Cormac had exclaimed. “That was really something !”

“You were great!” Bren had told her.

“Terrific!” Ginny had agreed.

Mr. Sellig had wanted to scrap the prepared subject for that afternoon’s ethics lesson and have a discussion on animal rights, but Eva had told him she wasn’t allowed to.

On the news programs that evening rival companies had shown pictures of chimps, and extinct animals, and were snide about the fact that SMI was refusing permission to let anyone show the sequence.

Grog had called. It was difficult with Mom in the room, so Eva had answered mainly with grunts.

“How’s things?”

“Mmmm.”

“Lil and Dan not too happy?”

“Uh.”

“Tell them I’m sorry—no, better not. From my point of view it was . . . hell, Eva, I’d never guessed—I was just keeping my fingers crossed and you came up with that !”

“Uh?”

“Not seen it yet?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You’d better be quick. SMI is going flat out to suppress every damn tape. Anyway, it’s just what I wanted. We’re off. I’m setting up office tomorrow.”

“Uh!”

(The idea of Grog in an office was a contradiction in terms.)

“Sure. You’ve opened the gates. It’s a tide. It’s a wave. Now we’ve got to ride it. See you.”

He hung up.

“Grog?” Mom had asked.

“Uh.”

“It’s all his fault.”

Three days later a letter had come from Ms. Callaway saying that any attempt on Eva’s part to see or talk to Giorgio Kennedy or any persons connected with any organization set up by him for the return of chimpanzees to a natural habitat would be treated as a breach of contract.

So from then on, no Grog, no face-to-face. Eva saw him quite often on the shaper, though, leading marches, lobbying politicians, addressing meetings. The cameras wouldn’t be interested in him, but he always seemed to have one of their darlings along with him, some singer, some sports star, some billionaire’s boyfriend. Before long the demos were big enough to attract the shaper cameras in their own right. There were banners with slogans, and a symbol—not a chimp but a broken butterfly, one bright wing ripped apart. More and more you saw the same symbol sprayed on to walls as you were driven around the city. Kids at school started coming for autographs again, bringing cards with the broken butterfly printed in one corner.

“Uh-uh,” Eva said, and explained that she wasn’t allowed to, but she signed a separate piece of paper for them to stick on to the card later. Grog had been right, she realized. The movement was a wave. She could feel it all the time now, in the way people reacted to her. The singers and sports stars were only the glitter at the crest, but underneath came the growing surge of ordinary people, millions now, thinking the same thoughts, asking the same questions, moving in the same direction to the same end.

Early one evening, before Mom was home, Mimi Venturi telephoned.

“Eva, my pretty, is something I wish to discuss. I have this idea.”

“Uh?”

“You come here, to my apartment? Tuesday morning.”

“I thought we were doing a commercial.”

“Is cancelled. That stupid Grog.”

“Uh?”

“All his fault. You come?”

“You know I’m not allowed to talk to him?”

“Is in Berlin. No time for his poor mama. That boy!”

“How is he?”

“Is well. Is happy. Is boring—I send a car.”

“Okay.”

Mimi’s apartment was a good kilometer in the air. A real butler answered the door.

“Ms. Venturi is not yet home,” he said. “If you do not mind waiting.”

He showed Eva into the living room. It was almost dark, because the blinds were down, shutting out what must have been a stupendous view. Grog was sitting in an armchair reading a file.

Eva hesitated a moment, then scuttled across the carpet and leaped onto his lap. He laughed and ran his fingers across her pelt. Eagerly she began an inspection of his new beard.

“Great to see you,” he said. “You don’t have to worry—Mother smuggled me in.”

“Sh. Cormac’s in the hall.”

“I’ve told Bill to settle him down in front of a good loud space epic. How’s things? Difficult at home?”

“Uh.”

“Poor Lil—wish I could talk to her.”

“No good.”

“Not yet—someday, maybe. I’ve been in touch with Danhe’ll swing around.”

“Huh!”

“We’re going to need him. He knows a lot of essential stuff. When he finds where the future’s going, he’ll join. 1 don’t mean just to stay working. He’s enough of a scientist to want to be where the real stuff is happening. Now sit still. There’s something I want to show you. I’m just back from a demo in Berlin—our biggest yet. I’ve got a tape. Look.”

He switched the shaper on. The zone filled with people walking toward the camera, ten abreast. It closed in on a tiny figure in the front rank, blue-eyed, golden-haired, wearing a pair of green overalls with a broken butterfly on the bib. Eva recognized her at once—Tanya Olaf had rocketed up the charts out of nowhere five months ago and stayed at the top ever since.

“Whoo!” said Eva.

“Looks good in our get-up,” said Grog.

Eva caught a glimpse of him marching in the rank behind, a little to the left. She felt a silly pang of jealousy—since she’d been stopped from going on talk shows she hadn’t been meeting people like Tanya.

“What’s she like?” she said.

“Pure bitch, doesn’t give a damn about chimps but knows the right place to be seen. Done us a song—not bad—you’ll hear it. Now that fellow there, the one with the blue chin, he’s going to be useful. He’s General Secretary of DKFD—that’s the main European ...”

“Whoo!”

Eva had snorted because the zone had changed. The camera had swung up and at the same time withdrawn until Tanya and Grog and the other leaders had dwindled to tiny figures at the bottom of the zone and behind them she now could see, stretching away down the tree-lined boulevard, out of sight in the distance but still coming on, thousands beyond thousands, the rest of the march.

“Good moment,” said Grog.

“You got all those people out?”

“ You got them out. Didn’t you realize that? I’ve just been working on the results.”

The scene jumped. It was dusk now, a different street, the march going by, singing, faces under the lamp glare, the broken butterfly everywhere. And now it was a sports arena, every seat full and a solid mass of people crammed on to the central space around a floodlit stage. The music stopped and the lights went out. Silence, and then a bay of cheering as a public zone sprang up on the stage—a table draped with blue cloth, a woman speaking into a microphone, on one side of her a gray-haired man with a fretful look and on the other, sitting up on the table in a withdrawn huddle, a chimp in yellow overalls.

There was a curious note in the cheering, not just excitement but challenge.

“First time we’ve risked it in public,” said Grog.

“I’ve never seen it.”

“You haven’t! They all have.”

The woman sat down. The man grabbed the microphone. The heads of journalists bobbed in the foreground. In the sudden silence you could hear their calls and the man bleating, “One at a time, please.” You could feel the huge crowd holding its breath, waiting. The chimp jumped to her feet and barked. The sound was like an explosion, ringing out and then echoing off the cliffs of the arena. The cameras closed in till she filled the zone, staring at the crowd. Her rage, her misery, were solid things, as tangible and visible as the table beneath her. She paused and then, with a single firm movement, gripped the bib of her overalls in both hands, lifted the hem to her mouth, bit, and tore. The rasp of the rending cloth filled the night. The bright butterfly fell in two. With her black pelt shining under the lights as if electric with animal energies, the chimp knuckled along the table, blotting out the two humans as she passed them, and was gone.