Peter Dickinson - Eva

They stayed together all afternoon. No one came near them. When they looked for food they moved with caution. The trees were different up in the cloud layer, with the fruit unripe and little sweetness in the leaves. In the dusk, almost by accident, Sniff caught his first marmot. Just before it got dark they moved down to the warmer terraces below.

Eva awoke hungry but alert. No noises in the air at all—too early for humans. Cautiously she climbed a tree and peered around. The sky seemed empty, but there were a lot more ships offshore, three with airboats tethered above them. The sky was its usual sullen layer, and the sea dark and slow-moving. Sniff joined her and looked around. They moved to a better tree and began to feed.

They were still there when they heard the motor, an airboat, not a flivver. They froze and waited. Over the wood the motor cut out and was replaced by a burst of music—the Tanya Olaf song. That stopped too. A voice boomed from a loudspeaker.

“Eva, this is Grog. Your dad and I will be landing on the rock face to the south of the trees. No one else will be there. Can you come and talk?”

Starting and stopping its motor, the airboat worked systematically up the hillside, repeating its message half a dozen times. When it came into view Eva saw it was the one with the broken butterfly and the message for her on its side. It could still be a trick, she thought. You couldn’t be sure of recognizing Grog’s voice, distorted like that, but she didn’t care. She wanted to know what had happened to Lana.

Sniff tried to stop her, barring her path and displaying at her, and she had to calm him and groom him before he’d let her go on. By the time they reached the edge of the trees the airboat was already moored and Dad and Grog were waiting on a ledge beside it. The sky overhead was even more crowded than yesterday.

Eva hooted, but they didn’t hear her above the noise of motors, so she lowered herself into the open and beckoned, then went back under the screening leaves and climbed on to a branch. Sniff watched from higher up, making little snorts of anxiety as Dad led the way to the foot of the tree. He looked absolutely exhausted. Eva reached down and took her keyboard from him when he handed it to her. Immediately she tapped out a message.

“Sorry. I had to.”

“I’m aware that that is what you felt,” said Dad.

“Sorry.”

“Well, it’s done now. I’m here in my legal capacity as your parent to tell you that I assent on my and your mother’s behalf to the arrangement that Mr. Kennedy tells me you wish to make with your sponsoring companies, and which they in their turn have now agreed to.”

“Is Lana all right?” said Eva.

Dad blinked.

“She’s fine, as far as I know,” he said. “Haven’t you seen her?”

“Uh?”

“They never took her off the hillside,” said Grog. “They got a change of orders. I better explain. Your dad’s been having a bad time, and not just worrying about you. There’ve been some pretty severe personality clashes, with your dad being accused of everything under the sun. On one side he can’t help feeling you’ve let him down pretty badly, and on the other he’s threatened with the big legal stick for helping you set this up. Right, sir?”

“Forget it,” said Dad. “Tell her about the agreement.”

The bitterness in his voice wasn’t quite real, Eva could tell. It was partly a kind of play-acting, putting himself in the center of the zone and extracting as much drama as he could from the moment. What he really minded, probably, was Eva’s seeming to trust Grog more than she trusted him.

“It’s really a sort of three-way, maybe four-way agreement if you count the chimps,” said Grog. “World Fruit will set up a trust with the Chimp Pool as joint trustees. They lease St. Hilaire to the trust. They and SMI sponsor it. The Pool moves the major part of the Reserve out here. SMI to have exclusive filming rights, where possible by remote control cameras, and World Fruit exclusive commercial use of any such film. Human access to be kept to a minimum—we haven’t gotten all the details worked out.”

Eva grunted. It was pretty much what Grog had outlined to her in Mimi’s apartment several months ago, not what she really wanted, she’d felt back then, when the whole thing had seemed so nearly impossible that you might as well daydream it perfect, with no cameras, no sponsors, nothing to do with the human world. Now that it was going to come true, she realized it was better than she could have hoped for. It was amazing.

“What happened?” she said. “Why? I thought we’d lost.”

“Must have looked like that,” said Grog. “All blew up bigger than I’d guessed. Your project director got a bit excited ...”

“Maria went berserk,” said Dad.

“There’s been some kind of a power struggle in the World Fruit boardroom,” said Grog. “Been going on a while—I’d heard rumors, of course—I’ve got a couple of contacts. None of them’s interested in chimps as such, but what they do care like hell about is their image. This Maria woman is a protegee of a fellow who’s part of a faction . . . hell, it’s too complicated to explain, but what you’ve got to think of is the board members sitting around watching the pictures coming in from St. Hilaire, and on another couple of screens getting the figures for world reaction to what they were seeing. Not too bad at first. Nothing to look at but trees and rock and flivvers whizzing around. Lot of interest, though—they’d loved the stuff from down in the other wood. They’d gotten pretty much the whole world watching, waiting, wanting to see what was going to happen. And what did they see? Look, I’ve brought some stills ...”

Grog took the pictures out of a case and passed them up. Eva leafed through . . . They’d been taken from above, at an angle, and all showed the same scene, the bare rock ledges, the bulge of the airboat’s bag, its shadow heavy on the rock, the edge of the wood at the side. At the top of the first picture, black and tiny like spiders, two chimpanzees were knuckling out along a ledge. In the next the leading chimp was throwing something. Then they were both heaving at a boulder. Then they were looking down the slope, side by side. The boulder was gone and the bag hid what had happened to the cabin of the airboat, but the attitudes of the chimps spoke like a language—you could see their sense of achievement, their aggression and resistance, their sense of their own wildness and freedom. In the next picture one of the chimps was sprawled on the ledge and the other was bending over her, while in the bottom corner—the viewpoint had shifted slightly—one man was trying to raise the barrel of a stun gun while another was trying to force it down. The next picture showed Sniff carrying Eva back along the ledge. He had somehow gotten her across his shoulder and was knuckling along three-footed, gripping her left arm with his right hand. The last picture was a close-up of the same thing. It too spoke. Looked at with human eyes, thought about with a human mind, felt with human emotions, it almost cried aloud. All the old stories were there, the sort of thing people saw in cartoons and adventures on the shaper practically every day of their lives, the lone fighters against impossible odds, the rescue from the battlefield under fire, the comradeship in the face of death. Uh uh, thought Eva. People. They’ll never understand. Not why he did it at all.

“Fellow who shot you had lost his head,” said Dad. “If you’d fallen off that ledge you might have been killed.”

“That’s only part of it,” said Grog. “One of my contacts told me that when those pictures came through, and the world reaction on the screens, the people at World Fruit as good as panicked. Some of them had been waiting for a chance like this, remember. They suspended the whole operation, replaced the project director on the spot, and went into a brainstorming session on how to repair the damage. My contact called me up and I got on to them and offered them this deal and they took it. So here we are.”