Eva

by Peter Dickinson

  “Funny. Things in my blood?”

  He didn’t get it.

  “Stop shock?” she added.

  The pause was different this time, while he decided how much to tell her.

  “Well, yes,” he said. “We felt it was safer. As Mom told you, your neuron linkages appear complete, but we have no way of knowing how secure they are. You have been through an extremely risky procedure, my darling. We calculated that there were about four chances in five that we would fail.”

  “Only hope. Or dead.”

  “That’s right.”

  There was something in his tone. Dad had never been as close to Eva as Mom had, but he had loved her always and been extremely proud of her good looks. He’d kept snapshots of her in his wallet, and portrait photos in his office. Now it crossed her mind to wonder whether there’d been a funeral yet.

  Dad shook his head as if he were trying to shake her picture out of his mind.

  “You have to remember that with you we are in new territory,” he said. “You are the first of Joan’s subjects to be capable of influencing the procedure of neuron memory by conscious thought. You are the first to be properly aware of the passage of time and therefore to be able to wish to hurry the process along. You are also the first to whom we have felt the kind of moral responsibility one has toward a human being. All this means that we are going ...”

  “Hey!”

  Eva had found how to make her toy do a sort of squawk that she used as a “Hey!” code. Conversations were boring if you couldn’t interrupt, but it still took a second or two to work. Dad stopped, blinked, thought back.

  “Of course, we have a moral responsibility to all living things,” he said. “As a zoologist, life is my trade, so I feel this more strongly than most. I feel it especially toward chimpanzees. Still, it is different from the responsibility we have toward any single human being. Okay?”

  Eva would have liked to argue, but it would have taken too long and, anyway, Dad was difficult to argue with and her own thoughts were all in a mess, so she said nothing. Dad, typically, assumed she’d agreed.

  “Now, the danger point does not lie in your conscious mind,” he said. “You understand and can accept that what we’ve done was, as you said, the only hope. The danger lies at the unconscious level, over which you don’t have the same control. That is why we have to control it for you, for the time being, until it too has learned to accept what has happened. It is the danger point for two reasons—first, as I say, because you can’t persuade it by rational means not to reject your new body, and second, because it is itself the main interface with that body. When you think, you think with a human mind. When you blink, you blink with a chimpanzee’s involuntary reaction. Your own unconscious mind lies along that border. It is not, of course, as simple as that, but that will have to do. The upshot is that we are going to have to be very cautious indeed about reducing any drugs that help suppress your unconscious tendency to rejection.”

  “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.

  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.