Peter Dickinson: Eva

“Okay. Only little as poss.”

“You will have to cooperate with Dr. Alonso, who will be your psychiatrist. Her main preoccupation in the next few weeks will be to watch out for the slightest signs that ...”

Eva switched off. She couldn’t help it. She’d been awake only about twenty minutes, but she felt exhausted already. What Dad was telling her was vital, and she should have been straining to understand every detail, but the way he did it made her mind go numb. It used to do that sometimes, even before. Dad was a natural explainer, lecturer, arranger of thoughts and facts into orderly patterns. His beard would wag, and his blue eyes—sharper and smaller than Mom’s—would flash with the thrill of knowledge. His students thought he was great, which made Eva feel guilty that somehow the beard-wag and the eye-flash were like a hypnotist’s signals, making her mind drift off elsewhere.

Now it drifted off to home. The three of them, Mom and Dad and Eva, having supper after some ordinary day, Dad talking, Mom listening, and Eva looking out the window and watching a million lights come on as dusk thickened across the city. Suppers must have been sad this last year, she thought. Not all families loved one another. Eva had friends one of whose parents had left, or perhaps both had stayed, but they’d bitched and quarreled. She’d been luckier than some. She’d felt pretty secure, always. But suppose something—she couldn’t think what—had happened that had forced her parents to choose between their jobs and their family, well, there wouldn’t have been any question with Mom; Mom was interested in her work and thought it was worth doing, but she wouldn’t have hesitated. With Dad, you couldn’t be sure. If he’d had to give up his work he’d have given up half himself. More than half, perhaps. So perhaps he wouldn’t . . .

She looked at him as he leaned over the bed, explaining. Just beyond his head the mirror showed a bald patch in the middle of his scalp. It fascinated her. She longed to be able to sit up and rootle among the browny-gray hairs. From beyond the reflected scalp her own face gazed down. Seeing the man’s head and the chimp’s so close together, she was struck by a thought.

“Hey!”

Dad stopped and waited, a bit impatient.

“Kelly’s brain?” said Eva. “Big enough?”

“Yes. You have, in fact, got less than you used to have, but luckily there is a bit of waste space in brains. I think you’ll find you’re all there, darling. Where was I? Oh, yes ...”

But Eva had stopped listening again. The thought of grapes had returned, not out of her conscious mind but up from below. A whole bunch of grapes, purple, the bloom untouched, the skins bulging with sweet juices. Saliva spurted inside her mouth, and a machine sucked it away. She could actually feel it happening, which meant they were letting her have more of her mouth back. How long since she’d really eaten, how long since she’d had a taste on her tongue? Not since that picnic at the sea.

Dad had cocked his head to listen to the metallic whisper in his ear.

“Right,” he said. “Apparently you’re due for a nap, darling. Take it easy. Don’t try to hurry things up, and you’ll do fine. See you tomorrow, eh?”

Already Eva could feel the drift to darkness. She pressed a few keys.

“Love to Mom.”

“Yes, of course.”

Her eyes had closed before he was out the door. The first thing I’ll ask for is grapes, she thought. Kelly would have loved grapes. All chimps do.

DAY SEVENTEEN

Waking . . .

Leaving the trees, the green shadows, the leaf light . . .

Leaving the dream . . .

But the dream itself was changing. It was Eva’s fault. Sometimes even in the middle of the dream she was aware of herself as a human mind, an alien in the forest. She had thought about the dream, knowing everything the human Eva knew, so now as she reached and clambered and rested she carried the human knowledge with her.

The simplest change was that sometimes the dreams had stories. These might be a plus. She had adventures. She might look down between the branches and see men wearing clothes and carrying guns, walking on the forest floor, and she’d know the way you do in dreams that they had time-traveled from the future and were coming to cut down the forest so that a city could be built that would house the overflow of people from the bursting future world, and only Eva could stop them. Sometimes the stories were a minus. In the worst of these she was digging into a termite nest and found just below the surface a human face, Eva’s own old face, gazing with blank blue eyes at the sky, still alive, but with ants going in and out of the nostrils. Mostly the dreams were neither plus nor minus but muddled, the way human dreams are. The one she called Kelly’s dream hadn’t been like that. It had been simple, until Eva had brought her knowledge into it. She would never have it like that again.

She dreamed ordinary human dreams too, doing and seeing things in her old body, but nearly always the one she awoke with was the one about trees. Then she would lie with her eyes shut and decide where she wanted the mirror, what would be the first thing she saw. Though she always chose the same it was still a conscious decision, an effort of will not to go back to the old game of guessing the weather. She opened her eyes and gazed up and made her voice say “Hi.” As soon as they gave her her jaw and throat back, she added the proper little pant and grimace of greeting and tried to mean it. That helped.

Dad had been right. Suppose she’d awakened and seen what they’d done to her and her bloodstream hadn’t been stuffed with dope to help her stand the shock, then all of her, everything that used to be Eva, would have shrieked its No! It would have been like that however much she’d agreed, with her conscious mind, that she wanted to live in a chimp body, that it was far better than dying. Now, as they slowly cut the dope down, she could feel that the shriek was faintly there. The morning after she’d had the ant dream—she told Dr. Alonso about that because it had scared her so much—they put the dope right back up and started again, but Eva knew she couldn’t live like that forever. Kelly’s body wasn’t just something she had to get used to; it was something she had to learn to be happy about. Okay, it was better than dying, but that wasn’t enough. You had to awaken and open your eyes and see your new face and like what you saw. You had to make the human greeting and the chimp greeting and mean them.

The old Eva could never have done it, the one who used to skate and ski and play volleyball at school. They’d been right to make her come to life slowly, little by little, rejoicing in having a mouth to chew with, a throat that would swallow, a real moving arm she could lift and look at. Every day, as a sort of exercise, she forced herself to think of the third Eva, the one who’d come in between, after the accident but before the waking, a sort of nothing person, a sleeping mind in a smashed body. It was that that she had to compare this new Eva with, not the girl who used to skate and ski. This must be better than that.

Sometimes when they removed a tube or a wire, the place where it had joined felt sore, and even that was a plus. To be hurt, you have to be alive.

Alive but clumsy. The first movements, lip-ripples and hoots and chewings, had been misleading. The morning they let her have her arm back, she awoke and realized that in her last minutes of sleep she had been caressing her hand along her hairy thigh, troubled in her dream because the fingers could feel and the thigh couldn’t, so it was like stroking a rug. Then she was awake and found her whole arm moving. She had made her greetings to the face in the mirror before she realized what had happened. Gingerly she pulled the arm out and held it up with the palm half open, and saw the arm and hand in the mirror stretch down toward her in the gesture chimps make when they are asking for help or comfort. She stared at the glossy blue-black hairs, then drew the arm down and lip-nibbled comfortingly along it, thinking, So this is me now. Me. Not Kelly up in the mirror. Me down here. Okay.