Peter Dickinson - Eva

The cheering rose, the roar of the human wave. There was a new note in it now, more than the challenge to the fat-cat companies that had been trying to suppress the tape, a sense of excitement, of something special and extraordinary having happened. Eva could feel it too, with her human mind. A message had been passed, an immense gap bridged. The movements of the chimp on the table had expressed what Eva had felt at the conference—she’d known that at the time—but she now saw that they said much more. They spoke for Kelly and the other chimps and all the children of earth, the orangs and giraffes and whales and moths and eagles, which over the past few centuries had turned their backs on humankind and crawled or glided or sunk away into the dark.

“Terrific moment,” said Grog. “Time you saw it.”

“Not art,” said Mimi’s voice from the door. “Therefore not great moment.”

“Just don’t talk crap, Mother,” said Grog.

She sprang forward, her red cape swirling behind her, a handful of bangles swinging like brass knuckles. Eva jumped clear in time for Grog to catch the flailing arm by the wrist and pull his mother down onto his lap, where he pinioned her close. It was clearly a movement they’d had plenty of practice at.

“You say crap to your mother—you who are snatching the bread from my mouth!”

“Hey! So it’s right about the bread!”

“Already I told you! The banana merchants are trying to cancel my contract! They will pay me in blood! Eva, call McAulliffe!”

“Uh?” said Eva.

“Her lawyer,” said Grog. “She calls him nine times a day. Now wait a moment, Mother. I’m going to let you go, and if you bite me, Eva’s going to bite you right back. Show her your teeth, Eva—give them a good gnash. Ouch! You . . . ! Get her, Eva!”

Mimi was on her feet, calmly undoing the clasp of her cloak. With a queenly gesture she flung it over Grog and turned smiling to Eva. Eva snickered back at her. She liked Mimi—Mimi would have gotten on well in the Reserve, she thought. Grog tossed the cloak aside and sat licking his forearm.

“Let’s get this straight,” he said. “Honeybear is definitely trying to stop the chimp commercials because our boycott is beginning to pressure them!”

“I will not pressure them only, I will massacre them! Get me McAulliffe!”

“Hold it, hold it. What are they going to do instead? Why can’t they go back to the series they had you lined up for before Eva came along?”

“Because the little poof who dreamed it up has gone off to a new agency, using same idea for different yucky drink.”

“So they’re stuck. Great. It’s a bit early, but we’ve got to ride the wave. We’ve got to have some kind of success to show our people, or the movement’s going to fold. Nobody’s got any staying power any longer. Okay. Mother, you really reckon you can make yourself enough of a nuisance to World Fruit for them to think it’s worth buying you off?”

“You never read your old mother’s contracts? Works of art! Works of art!”

“Right, you can go on massacring them till they buy you off by giving you some kind of control over the next series of chimp commercials.”

“Uh!” said Eva.

“Don’t worry,” said Grog. “I’ve got it all worked out, I hope. We’ve got to be lucky, but if we all push in the right direction we might swing it. I’m going to offer World Fruit a deal. I can’t call off the boycott—too much of a let-down—but I can tell them we’ll play it down, provided they announce that when they’ve finished this series of commercials they will shoot a new series in a natural location, using chimps behaving the way chimps used to in the wild.”

“Out of your mind, child?” said Mimi. “Me, a wildlife director? What should I wear ?”

“Black jodhpurs, crimson trimmings? Parakeet on your shoulder?”

“Be serious.”

“I am serious. You won’t have to direct anything. What you’ve got to do is use any say McAulliffe can work into your contract to see that the location they actually settle for is a place called St. Hilaire.”

“Uh?” said Eva.

“Island off Madagascar. Extinct volcano. Used to be solid forest till it was felled a couple of hundred years ago. Now it’s bare rocks, apart from a few pockets of real old trees the loggers couldn’t reach. It’s no good for tourists, no beaches and hot as hell, with the odd cyclone thrown in in a bad year. And it belongs to World Fruit. There’s one bit of flat land where they’ve got a cocoa plantation, but it’s never been economically viable and now they’ve got a virus. The point is it’s just about the only location they can use. There’s patches of trees that are small enough to enclose. My movement can insist on a genuinely natural location and the chimps having time to get used to being there. Even World Fruit isn’t going to get permission to move into somewhere like Cayamoro. What d’you think, Eva?”

Eva shrugged. It seemed so trivial, this stuff about commercials and sponsors, after what she’d just seen on the shaper. Was this all that marvelous surge of human energy, that great wave of love and hope and anger, was going to produce? What difference would it make when the filming was over? A few eased human consciences. Nothing that mattered. Eva didn’t understand Grog’s excitement at all. Anyway, there were all sorts of problems he didn’t seem to have thought of. She started with an obvious one.

“Chimps behaving as chimps. They don’t know how.”

“Who don’t?”

“Jenny and the others. Trained to wear clothes. Only know what it’s like in the Public Section.”

“So we can’t take them —that’s why we’ll be taking chimps from the Reserve. Lana, Dinks, Sniff ...”

“Whuh!”

“You’ll have to pick the others. Two males besides Sniff, and that’ll mean a dozen females, won’t it? Youngsters and babies.”

“Whuh?”

“You’re not going to St. Hilaire just to shoot a few commercials. You don’t imagine that’s all I’ve been sweating my guts for or why I got you along here now? Listen ...”

Eva listened. Her pelt stirred. Her human mind kept telling her it could never work, never even begin, but while Grog talked her body became restless with excitement and she prowled the rich room, imagining shadows, imagining odors, imagining trees.

YEAH TWO,

MONTH TWELVE,

DAYS TWO AND THREE

Living in a new world . . .

Heavy, vegetable odors . . .

Racket of insects, clatter of birds . . .

Heat . . .

Dopey still with drugs, the chimps stared at the daylight. They felt the steamy heat, breathed the strange air. Their yesterday—nearly three days ago, in fact—had been spent huddled into the caves of the Reserve, with wind-whipped snow scurrying around the concrete outside. They had slept through the flights and stopovers. Only Eva—awake for the journey—had seen the various changes until the final airboat had slanted out of tropic blaze into a ridged mass of cloud, felt its way down through the murk and emerged over a huge dark sea. She had not seen the island until they circled to land, but then there it was. She had pressed her muzzle to the window, misting the glass with her breath. At first what she saw didn’t make sense, but then she had realized that what she was looking at was mainly a mountain rising almost directly from the sea, with its top all fuzzed out by the cloud base. Below that, desolation, vast jumbled slopes of bare brownish storm-eroded rock. Only here and there, darker streaks and patches, the fragmentary remains of what had once been forest before the trees had been stripped away for timber or firewood, or simply for a patch of fresh earth somebody hoped to raise a couple of crops from before the summer rains washed it away; but in these few places, in ravines and on slopes too steep to reach, the last trees still stood.