Peter Dickinson - Eva

Eva put the pictures between her lips and flung herself up to where Sniff was perched among the screening leaves. If she’d been able to open her mouth, she would have whooped as she went. He peered, frowning, at the pictures, turned them over, and studied their blank backs. She knew he could feel her excitement and happiness, but he couldn’t understand the cause. She wasn’t even sure that he could read the pictures enough to understand that the small black blobs were chimps, let alone realize that one of them was him. The human meanings, the stories of defiance and comradeship, would mean nothing to him at all. All he wanted was to move away with Eva through the tree paths, back into the depths of the wood, together. Eva gave him a chimp kiss, then detached herself and swung back down.

“That Sniff?” said Grog. “Won’t he come and shake hands?”

“Uh-uh.”

Dad was looking at her with an inquisitive gleam in his eye. He would have seen her rump as she’d climbed. Eva gazed blankly back. It had nothing to do with him, nothing to do with any human. Her feelings for Sniff and Sniff’s for her were not even like human ideas about sex and love. You mustn’t try and bring those ideas in. You must let it happen as it would have happened in the forest of the dream, with the human Eva no more than a guest at the wedding, accepting and approving. But now Dad was probably wondering if he could set up a research project. Eva reached for the keyboard.

“You can tell Mom I’m okay,” she said.

Dad looked disappointed but shrugged. Bound to happen one day, he thought. He’d want to set up a research project, of course, as soon as a baby was born. He wasn’t thinking of Eva as his daughter anymore, any more than he would think of that baby as his grandchild—which it wouldn’t be.

“Can you face a press conference?” said Grog. “Sooner we can get a commitment in public, the harder it’ll be for the bastards to cry off.”

“Uh.”

“Okay. I’ll set it up for this evening. Down by the harbor would be easiest—there’ll be a fair amount of equipment to fly in.”

“No. Here. Under the trees.”

PART THREE

DYING

YEAR. TWENTY-FOUR,

MONTH FORGOTTEN,

DAY FORGOTTEN

Dying . . .

Sun high, warm on the pelt, but chill inside . . .

Yellow-gray mist, vague shapes, buzzing . . .

Time to go. Tomorrow? Next day?

Soon.

Crouched in the center of the clearing down by the old harbor, Eva waited. Hruffa groomed obsessively at her left arm, not understanding that there had been no feeling there since Eva’s stroke last winter. Two years before, recovering from her first attack, Eva had gotten Dad’s Diseases of the Chimpanzee out of the storage box and read about strokes. It had been difficult even then, with her right eye misty with cataract and her left too short-sighted to make more than a blur of the letters. She had managed it with the magnifying glass, but she couldn’t have done that now. Anyway there was no point. She was dying.

The others knew. That was why Hruffa had stayed with her to meet the humans—she’d never done so before. Hruffa was shivering with nerves and was grooming for her own reassurance as much as Eva’s comfort. Eva raised her good hand and began to search along Hruffa’s shoulder, with her muzzle pressed close in an effort to see among the hair roots. She found a tick by touch, cracked it between her nails, and ate it.

The motor of an airboat drubbed from beyond the trees. Hruffa twitched with anxiety, and Eva pursed her lips and made the little sucking noises chimp mothers use to calm a frightened baby—noises she’d used when Hruffa herself had been a springy pink-and-black scrap clutching her side. The buzz became louder. She could sense all the others in among the shadows under the trees, watching. They too understood it was the last time.

Eva nodded to herself. She stopped grooming Hruffa and moved the hand to the keyboard where it hung in its loops on her chest. Extraordinary how her fingers still knew the letters that her mind seemed almost to have forgotten. Slowly she pressed a few keys.

“Hi, there. Just testing.”

Hruffa jerked at the human voice. Eva reacted more slowly but more deeply. Over the past twenty years she must have gotten the keyboard out and used it dozens of times, hardly thinking about it at all, concerned only with what was to be said, not the voice that said it. Now, this last time, she was ambushed. The pang of ancient loss, a child with long black hair ice-skating in a yellow tracksuit. Me, whispered the ghost, the real Eva.

It was part of dying, coming in two like that. Hruffa must have felt the ambush, because she put her long arm around Eva and hugged her, rocking both bodies gently to and fro.

The airboat motor cut. It must be in sight by now, huge in the blue winter sky, but Eva couldn’t see it. Higher-pitched, a flivver detached itself, hummed down, settled in a storm of gusted leaves on the other side of the clearing. Through her misted vision Eva saw the people take shape, two moving tree trunks tramping toward her over the dusty earth. By their movements and sizes a man and a woman.

“Hello, Eva,” said the man.

“Denny?” she said. She had recognized the voice and was surprised. Denny was director of the whole Chimpanzee Pool, but he’d taken on being director of the trust as well when Grog Kennedy had started his mental illness and had to resign. Denny was too busy, usually, to come himself, unless there was something extra important. Then she realized the humans probably thought her death was important. They’d have known it was coming soon. The cameras were still there, if any of them were working. The technicians hadn’t come to service them for years. After her first stroke the trust had wanted to take her away for treatment, but she’d refused, just as she’d always refused any help of any kind after the setting-up stage. If the chimps couldn’t do something for themselves, it didn’t belong on the island.

“Right first time,” he said. “I’d like you to meet Gudrun Alp, Eva.”

Eva gave a grunt of welcome and held up her hand. She could sense the tingle of excitement with which the woman took it—she’d never touched a chimp before, so she hadn’t anything to do with the Pool.

“Hruffa,” she said, and then because to human ears the name would sound like a meaningless bark she spelled it out on the keyboard.

“Hruffa, my daughter.”

Hruffa held out her hand, unprompted, and the people took it.

“Pleased to meet you,” they said.

Few of the humans who’d visited over the years had really come to terms with the idea of Eva’s having children. Chimp kids. In their minds there were images of white women being carried away into the jungle by giant apes. They were both uneasy and inquisitive. Once when someone had asked about her newest baby, who the father was, Eva had laughed and said she didn’t know. There’d been a silence, a change of subject. Eva could have told them chimp societies don’t work like that, with a woman and a man falling in love and setting up house. You could be fond of a particular male, excited even by him, but your affection was for your group, and your love, if you were a female, was for your own mother and daughter. Eva hadn’t bothered to explain because that was not what the meetings were for. In her eyes their only purpose had been to get the project set up and, after that, to see that the humans stayed happy with things as they were and didn’t come to the island except for the meetings. When people asked the sort of question people did ask, out of the endless human longing to know, she answered as briefly as possible.

“Your mother sent some grapes,” said Denny.