Peter Dickinson: Eva

When breakfast came she tried to feed herself, putting the food into her mouth. She managed it by shutting her eyes and feeling for the next morsel. From then on, the hand knew the way to the mouth. But when she tried to guide the hand by looking in the mirror, she kept going the wrong way and missing, sometimes by several centimeters. This didn’t bother her much. Being able to move the arm at all was thrilling. But later that morning she found it wasn’t just the confusion of trying to do things in a mirror that had been spoiling her aim.

They must have decided to give her a nap—they could still do that. Then they woke her up, and she opened her eyes to see a stranger smiling down at her, a gorgeous young man with gleaming even teeth and a thin mustache and brown skin like polished leather.

“Hi, Eva,” he said. “I’m Robbo. I’m from Space-tech.”

“Uh?”

(When she’d first gotten her voice back Eva had experimented, trying to say a few human words, but it had been such an effort and her voice had come out so slow and stupid that she’d settled for chimp grunts. You could say quite a bit with those.)

“Okay, okay,” said Robbo. “We’re not shipping you off to colonize Vega Three. That’s what I was trained for, teaching ordinary folks like you and me—”

He said it without a flicker. He was clever as well as pretty.

“—how to use their bodies when they’re upside. Trouble is, there’s not so much of that happening just now, so my firm has lent me across to try and give you a hand. Right?”

He bent out of sight; but watching in the mirror, Eva saw him joining some steel rods into a structure that turned out, when he rose and stood it by the bed, to be a framework suspending a cord above her chest. He clipped a blue ball to the end of the cord.

“Let’s see you touch that without moving it,” he said.

Eva lifted her arm and stretched it out. Her fingers bumped into the ball a good five centimeters before she expected. She clicked irritation.

“Oh, not that bad,” said Robbo. “Give it another try.”

He steadied the ball and she tried again. And again and again. By concentrating hard she learned to touch the ball without moving it, but this was only by learning exactly how far to stretch, not by judging the distance and getting it right. As soon as he told her to speed up, she started overreaching again. She stopped and felt for her keyboard.

“Got two arms,” she said.

“Sure, like everyone else. Only your other one’s supposed to be still asleep.”

“No. Two this side.”

“Right. They told me you might, only I didn’t want to put the idea into your mind. One’s a sort of ghost, uh?”

Eva grunted. That was exactly the word. Ghost. The ghost of a human arm still trying to work, to reach and touch at the mind’s command. You couldn’t see it but it was there, moving slightly out of synch as the chimp arm moved, with the elbow wrong and the invisible fingertips wavering among the chimp knuckles. When she closed her eyes she saw in her mind the pale slim fingers, helpless, trapped in this strange hairy place, lost. Mustn’t think like that. Mustn’t.

“Want to give it a rest?” said Robbo.

She grunted a No, and this time as soon as he’d steadied the ball she snaked her arm out, fast as she could move it, not giving her mind time to think about the task. She missed, but by less than a centimeter.

“Not bad,” said Robbo.

After a few more tries he gave her a moving target by swinging the ball around, at first in a clean pendulum curve, then in a circle, and finally making it jiggle as it swung.

“That’s enough,” said Robbo. “Tired, I guess.”

“Uh.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve got to take things easy. We’ll work some exercises out with the physios, but you’re doing pretty well. Provided you move fast, uh? Mustn’t give the ghost a chance.”

Mustn’t, thought Eva.

“You came along just the right time for me, you know. Few more weeks, and I’d have been out of a job.”

“Uh?”

“That’s right. Ten years ago, when I went into this, I reckoned I was set up for life. Don’t mean I thought we’d be actually colonizing planets before I died, but the push would be there, the pressure to get off earth, and at least that’d mean research for us in the business. But now look, they’re all giving up. The pressure’s still there, but the governments are pulling out and the sponsors are pulling out and whole departments are closing down. At Space-tech alone, we’ve lost forty percent of our jobs in the last three years.”

Eva clicked commiseration. Robbo went on talking, as much to give her a rest as anything.

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason to it. It’s like we’ve just given up. We’re tired of trying. I worry about my kid, what life’s going to be like for him ...”

He got out his wallet and showed Eva a photograph of a little boy, pretty as himself, with the same glossy brown skin and dark eyes. He went on talking. Eva half listened. People, she thought—they’re funny. Her fingers moved caressingly over the furriness of her chest, and somehow the thought in her mind changed from the oddness of people worrying about why they’d stopped trying to colonize planets to the oddness of people not having any real hair on their bodies, being so smooth and shiny. When she thought of him like that Robbo didn’t seem pretty at all.

“Try something else?” he said at last. She grunted okay and he swung her table across the bed and gave her some colored bricks to build a tower with. She made it straight and slim, and far higher than a chimp could ever have done. Not that chimps are clumsy—they pick and groom among one another’s fur with nimble, sensitive fingers—but they don’t think tidy. Give them a cylinder to fit into a hole, and they’ll fumble it in any old way because that’s good enough. It wouldn’t enter their heads to square up the edges of a pile of blocks, so they’d get it out of kilter and down it would crash. But Eva could use her human mind to tell the chimp fingers what she wanted, and check by touch that they’d got it right. When Robbo asked her to speed it up she became chimp-clumsy. By that time she was tired again, so Robbo chatted a little more and left.

She lay with her eyes shut, but as soon as she began to feel drowsy she forced them open and pressed the keys on her control box.

“Don’t want to sleep,” said her voice.

“Just as you like, dearie,” sighed Meg’s soft answer from behind the headboard.

Wakefulness came flooding back, and Eva reset the mirror to show her the window, with a rainy mild day beyond the glass. Dull gray clouds were touching the tops of the dull gray high rises, and the air in the distance hung like smoke where the rain fell dense. She felt the skin of her arm tingle as the pores closed, stirring the coarse hair as they did so, and she sensed rather than felt the rest of her numb body trying to do the same. Not long now, she thought. A few more weeks, and I’ll be walking. Walking’s going to be tricky—I’ll be the wrong distance from the ground. No I won’t—I’ll be the right distance, but . . . I’m going to have to get rid of that ghost.

It was important. It was more important than just for walking without falling flat on your face. The thing is, you aren’t a mind in a body, you’re a mind and a body, and they’re both you . As long as the ghost of that other body haunted her, she would never become a you, belonging all together, a whole person. She could probably learn how to pick things up cleanly and pour out of a bottle and run around without tripping by training herself not to notice the ghost, but it would be there still. No good.