Peter Dickinson - Eva

She wondered whether to talk to Dr. Alonso about this. Dr. Alonso was all right, but Eva had taken a dislike to her. She was too kind, too cooing—it wasn’t real. While she sat smiling by the bed Eva kept seeing Dr. Alonso II, tucked out of sight in the corner of the room, thin-lipped, scribbling notes for a scientific article. Anyway, she didn’t actually know anything—nobody did, because Eva was the first of her kind, and it was all new to everyone—but at least the biochemists and neurologists and everythingelsists knew a few facts about brains and bloodstreams and nervous systems and so on, but the psychiatrists were guessing all the way. Eva thought she could guess just as well as Dr. Alonso.

So now she closed her eyes again and summoned up the dream. She lay wide awake, concentrating with all her will but letting the images float into her mind, the shapes of a green tree world, branches with bark rough or smooth, blobs and patches of sunlight seeping through the leaf cover, fruits and berries yellow, green, purple, orange, and through all this a single person, a body completely itself with its own mind part of it and the body part of the mind, reaching, grasping, swinging below a branch, finding and holding with a foot, reaching on.

Kelly was dead, gone, would never come back, but something was still there. Not a particular chimp with particular memories of a large cage with a cement floor and a steel-and-plastic climbing frame and perhaps a human who took her out to greener places on a leash, but a chimp still, with older, deeper memories. You couldn’t just invade a chimp body and take it over with your human mind, like a hero in a history book—you’d never get to be whole that way. Eva’s human neurons might have copied themselves into Kelly’s brain, but as Dad had said, that left a sort of connection, an interface, a borderland where human ended and chimp began. You couldn’t live like that, with a frontier in you like a wall, keeping your selves apart. The only way to become whole was to pull the wall down, to let the other side back in, to let it invade in its turn, up into the human side, the neurons remembering their old paths, twining themselves in among the human network until both sides made a single pattern. A new pattern, not Eva, not Kelly—both but one.

That must be why she’d started dreaming the dream, even before she had first awakened. The chimp side had been trying to find its way back. So now, wide awake, she dreamed it again. Beyond her closed eyelids, beyond the sealed window, lay the rainy world crammed with humans. Soon, in a few weeks, Eva was going to be out there herself among them, trying to fit in, to belong, to cope with the fret and bustle of the human-centered city. She could never do that unless she became whole.

Inside her hairy skull she let the forest form. It was real. It was peaceful, endless, happy. There were no humans in it.

MONTH TWO,

DAY NINETEEN

Awake . . .

Not fust your eyelids rising, facing the day . . .

Your whole body, all of it, moving and feeling . . .

Carefully Eva pushed herself off the pillow and sat. With her right arm she heaved the bedclothes aside, then twisted herself till her legs dangled over the edge. All wrong. She was thinking too much. This was how a human would try to get out of bed, unaided for the first time, after a long illness. The ghost was very strong. All the shapes and distances seemed strange. Mom was watching from the chair.

“Sure you don’t want me to help?” she said.

Eva rippled her fingers over the keyboard, which now lay strapped to her chest. After her weeks of practice she’d gotten the pauses down to only a couple of seconds.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Been doing my exercises.”

A chimp wouldn’t have gotten up like this. It would have sort of rolled, and then dropped. She dropped. The ghost had judged the distance wrong, but her real limbs got it right and she didn’t stagger. She climbed onto Mom’s lap, giving her time to adjust the half-dozen sensor wires she still had to trail around before she kissed her. Mom laughed.

“It’s like being eaten alive,” she said.

Eva made her No-it’s-not grunt. A proper chimp kiss is done with the mouth wide open, but she’d done hers human-style, though admittedly she’d produced more suck than she’d meant to. She settled against Mom’s shoulder and without thinking lifted her hand and started to pick with inquisitive fingers among the roots of the gray-streaked hair. She felt Mom stiffen and then try to relax.

“You won’t find anything, darling,” she said.

The chimps in the Research Section of the Pool were allowed a few harmless parasites so that they could have the satisfaction of catching them in their endless grooming sessions, but a flake of dried skin or a scrap of dirt would do almost as well. That wasn’t the point.

“Mm-hmmm,” Eva murmured on a rising note.

Mom twitched and relaxed again.

“Don’t tease,” she said. “I’m not in the mood.”

Eva shrugged her shoulder forward and said, “You do me. It’s kind of comforting.”

“All right. Provided you don’t go poking in my earhole.”

Eva peered at the dark cave in the neat whorled ear. Yes, she did feel a definite urge to probe in there with a finger, but it wouldn’t be fair. Mom had never felt easy with the chimps, the way Eva had. She couldn’t even groom a shoulder as though it was the natural thing to be doing; there was a sort of fumblingness about her fingertips as they worked their way across the fur. All the same, it was lovely to be able to feel the movement after the weeks of stillness and numbness. If she’d been a cat, Eva would have purred.

“I’m supposed to be talking to you,” said Mom.

“Uh?”

“Have you thought about the sort of life you’re going to live when you’re up and about?”

“Lots. Skiing’s going to be fun.”

The snow peaks and the beaches were almost the only human playgrounds left. There wasn’t a lot else you could do with them. Mom chuckled.

“My legs are going to be so strong,” said Eva. “And I can get my center of gravity right down. I could be a world-beater. How’d you like to have a famous daughter?”

“Not much. People are going to be a bit interested in you anyway, darling. You know how they are about chimps as it is.”

“They’ll get used to me. Anyway, I want to be ordinary—go back to school, be with Bren and Ginny . . . They came around last night, you know?”

“They said they might . . . I’m afraid there’s a little more to it than that, darling.”

“Uh?”

“Haven’t you wondered where the funds have come from for all this?”

Mom tilted her head to show she meant the room and the machines and the control room beyond and so on.

“Research, I guess.”

“Of course, but research still has to be funded. Dad and I couldn’t have afforded it, and the Pool’s got nothing to spare. Joan may be famous, but she’s still got to get her funds from somewhere. What she did, in fact, was set up a sort of arrangement with SMI—you know, the shaper people—and they raised the money from some of their advertisers who were interested. World Fruit’s the main one, I believe.”

“You mean I’m sponsored !”

Eva used the keyboard to make such a squeak of outrage that Mom laughed aloud.

“I’m afraid so, my darling. Public TV couldn’t afford you.”

“Grrgh!”

“And, of course, this means that SMI is going to want to do at least one program about you. There are other things, like World Fruit having an option for you to appear in some of the Honeybear commercials ...”

“Uh?”

“They can’t make you, if we don’t agree, but you aren’t allowed to advertise anyone else’s products—that’s what an option means.”