Peter Dickinson - Eva

“And her love,” said the woman. Eva nudged Hruffa to take the grapes. Hruffa started a grab but remembered that this was a moment of ritual. She took the bunch and tore off a twiglet that she put into Eva’s hand. Eva ate the grapes slowly, bursting them one by one against her palate. Last time, that shock of sweetness.

While she ate, the woman came and squatted on her other side. People sometimes did that, trying to conduct themselves chimp-fashion, but with them it had usually been a deliberate decision. This woman, Eva sensed, had done it naturally, without thinking.

“I’m afraid Lil’s not too well,” she said.

Eva grunted understanding. She held out her hand for another twiglet of grapes and when Hruffa gave it to her she passed it on to the woman, who took it and ate.

“Dying?” said Eva.

“She’s got a few weeks left. She’ll be glad to go. She’s had a lot of pain.”

Eva sat nodding in the sun, letting Hruffa put grapes directly into her mouth. The juice was as fresh and sweet as it had ever been in childhood.

“I don’t know if you know,” said the woman, “but a lot of kids have been taking their own lives. No reason anyone can give. I lost my own daughter five years back. Lil helped with our counseling group. I cracked up more than some, but Lil was pretty good to me and in the end we kind of elected each other mother and daughter. We had good times, considering. She never talked about you outside the counseling group, except these last couple of months when she’s been getting old tapes out and playing them through and through. Then she asked if I could make it out here, see you. The trust laid it on. They said you’ve not been too well yourself. I haven’t told Lil.”

Eva grunted.

“D’you think I should?” said the woman.

“You decide. Say I understand. Thank you for coming, Gudrun. And for loving Mom.”

Silence again. Eva rested. It had been an effort to press so many keys, to order her thoughts into a human mode.

“Trees are coming along nicely,” said Denny.

It was just conversation, but he sounded as if he were trying to cheer himself up by talking about something that had gone right. And it was true. Eva was proud of the trees. She’d planted most of them herself, in the gaps of the old cocoa grove, using seed the trust had gathered and sent, food trees and shade trees. Most of them had failed or been smashed by a passing chimp in a temper, but enough had come through. Trees grew fast in this climate. More important still, there were saplings growing that Hruffa had planted, and Whahhu, and some of the others. Not all of them, but a few, because they had watched Eva doing it when they were small. It was something you did. Eva treasured the day when Hawa had taken her to show her a stem that had burst from the ground overnight, splaying its cotyledon leaves apart. Hawa must have planted that seed herself and remembered doing so and had made the connection. Yes, the trees were worth it, and so was everything else.

Denny coughed.

“I’ve got some other news,” he said. “It’s pretty important. Do you feel up to it?”

“Uh.”

Eva felt very clear-headed, very aware. Though she couldn’t see as far as the trees, her perceptions seemed to reach out all around her. She could feel the invisible watchers in the shadows, waiting.

“Fact is, they’re closing down the Pool. Winding up the trust too.”

“Uh?”

Eva wasn’t surprised. The past half-dozen visits she’d sensed some kind of change in the air. And the technicians not coming to service the cameras—things like that.

“We’ve run out of funds,” said Denny. “It isn’t just us. There’s hardly a project that hasn’t got trouble. It’s the same all over. You can’t get a bridge built or a solar replaced. You can’t get a road repaired. People won’t pay their taxes. They won’t invest or save. Some districts there’s trouble getting the farms planted—just enough to feed the planters another year, that’s all. A few kilometers north of where I live there was a community meeting last year where they passed a resolution to stop eating. Kept it too. Starved themselves to death. Nobody stopped them.”

“My daughter joined the group that walked into the sea,” said Gudrun. “They put rocks in their pockets, joined hands, and walked in, singing. Just a couple of dozen kids. Now they’re doing it hundreds at a time. When Lil goes, I think I might try that.”

Denny didn’t protest. He took it as just one of the things people said and did these days.

“So it’s no more of these trips, Eva,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll mean for the chimps.”

Eva moved her hand carefully across the keyboard.

“Will they leave us alone?” said the young voice.

“No telling. No telling about anything. We haven’t been here before. Sometimes I think it’s just a phase, old Mother Nature, who we keep forgetting we’re children of, just cutting the population back to a sane kind of size, and then we’ll start again. Sometimes I think it’s not a long step from walking into the sea with rocks in your pockets to deciding to blow the whole planet apart, clean sweep. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’d take more organization than we’ll be capable of much longer. I suppose there might be a war or two. Won’t last. Nobody’s got the will. No, funny thing is that the people who bother me most are the ones who’d try and tell you they’re on your side. A lot of nutty little sects have sprung up, and we’ve had a bit of trouble in the trust from a group who call themselves Kennedyites, after old Grog. Their idea is that chimps are the human future. They call you the Inheritors. It’s all mixed up with eleven-dimensional superintelligences in hyperspace, but there’s always a chance some of them might trek out here and beg you to come back and save the world.”

“Ask them to keep away.”

“They don’t pay any attention to me. Apparently I’m an emanation of Antitruth. I suppose you could try sending them a message by Gudrun ...”

“I don’t imagine anyone would listen to me,” said Gudrun.

Eva bowed her head, collecting her ideas. She would like to send a message, she thought. It didn’t really matter who to. One by one she chose the keys, concentrating, using the last little driblets of human energy. At last she pressed the “Speak” key.

“Hello,” said the unchanged voice. “This is Eva. I am speaking for all the chimps in the Reserve. I want to say thank you to the humans for giving us back the life that is right for us. We are well and happy. We will be okay if we are left alone. I don’t know what is going to happen in the rest of the world, but if the chimps survive it will be because of what you have done for us. Thank you.”

She took the keyboard from its loops and pressed the key to eject the tape, but instead of taking it out she pushed the cover shut and handed the whole keyboard to Denny. She heard the click of the cover opening and made a rejecting movement with her good arm.

“Uh-uh,” she said.

“She wants you to keep it,” said Gudrun.

“I can’t do that,” said Denny. “It’s . . .”

He stopped. It was as though he thought of the keyboard being still somehow the real Eva, but needing a chimp body to carry it around.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose it might save us the hassle of trying to find a machine that’d play that size tape. You can’t get anything these days.”

Eva could hear the defeat in his voice, the defeat of humankind and all that cleverness, all those machines they’d used to control the universe, lost in the silence of a tape that had nothing to play it. She hunched her shoulders to the sun. She was going sooner than she’d thought. She hoped she wouldn’t die before she got back under the trees.