Eva (19 page)

“Fellow who shot you had lost his head,” said Dad. “If you’d fallen off that ledge you might have been killed.”

“That’s only part of it,” said Grog. “One of my contacts told me that when those pictures came through, and the world reaction on the screens, the people at World Fruit as good as panicked. Some of them had been waiting for a chance like this, remember. They suspended the whole operation, replaced the project director on the spot, and went into a brainstorming session on how to repair the damage. My contact called me up and I got on to them and offered them this deal and they took it. So here we are.”

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

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.

“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.

The people rose.

“I’ll give your message to Lil,” said Gudrun. “And your love.”

“Well, good-bye, Eva,” said Denny. “It’s been a privilege to have known you. Good-bye, Hruffa.”

They shook hands and moved away, became tramping pillars, columns of mist, nothing. The flivver hummed and the downdraft buffeted across the dry earth. The noises dwindled into the sky.

Now Eva’s own group came out of the trees, carrying the litter Whahhu and Graa had made. Eva’s third daughter, Hawa, brought a half gourd of water. Eva drank a little and let Hawa bathe her face while Hruffa handed around the rest of the grapes. There was a spat between Graa and Arrwa about the divvying-up but almost before Hruffa and Whahhu had barked at them they remembered where they were, and why. Eva let herself be lifted on to the litter and carried back toward the trees.

The others came out to meet them. She could feel their solemnity. They knew. Of course, they had not asked themselves if the humans would stop coming once Eva was no longer there to talk for them. There was no way Eva could explain something like that, not even to Hruffa. All she could do was let them understand that a change was coming—not by telling them but by feeling the approaching change inside herself, by sharing the feeling and her own acceptance of it. They joined the process, sharing and understanding. They knew.