“Had a bad time. My fault. They thought I was done for, but they’ve got it licked at last. I’eve had half a million little wrigglers playing lurkie-lurkie around my bloodstream, but they’ve all gone now. Taught me a lesson. Can’t send chimps to Cayamoro. Don’t have the immunities any more than I had.”
He closed his eyes. Eva grunted agreement and relief. He didn’t notice the relief.
“Going to have to make our own jungle,” he said. “Nice, clean jungle. On an island, uh?”
With the closed eyes and the whisper it was as if he were talking in his sleep, muttering his dreams. Eva mumbled sounds of doubt. His eyes opened.
“You’re against?” he said.
“Uh.”
“Why? Only thing makes sense.”
“Tell you when you’re stronger.”
“No. Now.”
For the first time there was a sort of energy in his eyes, a glimmer of the Grog she knew before.
“Isn’t time now. I did you a tape. Give it to you later.”
“Let’s have it now. Come on. Listen, this is the only thing I think about. You got reasons, I want to listen to them, think about them. You’ve as good as told me you’re anti—you can’t just leave it at that. Right?”
His voice was more than a whisper now, and there was a tinge of pink in his cheeks. It was as if the argument were actually good for him. Eva took the tape out.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry, Grog. Listen to side one when you’re feeling stronger. Side two is just talk.”
“Thanks.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. Eva thought he’d fallen asleep, but then his lips moved.
“Have some grapes. More than I can eat.”
It was, too, a huge mound, purple and green. She took a whole bunch and felt her mouth starting to water. Grog smiled.
“Can’t promise you they aren’t poisoned,” he said. “Mother keeps sending them.”
Eva had discovered quite a human-sounding chuckle she could do with her own mouth, but she couldn’t control it the way she could her voice-box remarks, so now it came out all false.
Her sense of shock and depression deepened as she knuckled along corridors and rode escalators and elevators to Joan’s lab. Checkups had, in any case, become rather boring by now. Nothing new was likely to happen, so foan left them to her assistants. They wired you up and made you run on a moving belt and do other kinds of exercises; then, still wired up, you did memory tests and perception tests and intelligence tests; then they showed you shapings of things that were supposed to stir you up in different ways—human and chimp babies, a car crash, a snake eating a mouse, a nude male model, a bowl of apples, and so on, while the machines you were wired to recorded your pulse and your palm moisture and your brain rhythms and dozens of other things happening inside you and fed the results into computers to be juggled around. Today, by the time she reached this stage the shapings seemed to mean nothing at all.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” said Minnie. She was a happy, round-faced girl with a sharp little nose and tiny eyes. She was far brighter than she looked, Eva had found.
“Uh?”
“Only you hardly seem to be registering.”
“Sorry. Thinking about something else.”
Just saying so brought back the image of Grog, bald and beardless on the pillow.
“Whup!” said Minnie. “Something registered there!”
“I visited a friend on the way. He’s been very ill. All his hair’s fallen out.”
“Too bad.”
“Chimps mind about hair.”
“So you do too?”
“Uh.”
“Okay. Let’s see if we can find you something nice and shaggy.”
Minnie pressed keys. The computer thought for an instant, then came up with a ridiculous dog, a girl in a woolly suit, a bottle brush, a caterpillar, a diatom, a college professor. They began to laugh and were still laughing when Joan Pradesh came in. She glanced scornfully at the professor.
“An utter charlatan,” she said. “How’s it going, Minnie?”
“She’s not been concentrating. She’s a bit upset. She’s been visiting a sick friend.”
Joan nodded, not interested. She took over the console from Minnie and whizzed through the earlier results, faster than you’d have thought anyone could have taken them in.
“Absolutely normal,” she said. “I think we can stop doing this—we are not going to get anything new. Of course, I am not a psychologist—I can judge only the physiological data. Do you feel yourself to be a fully integrated creature, Eva?”
“Most of the time. Only I get chimp urges I’ve got to go along with. I’m more chimp than you expected, aren’t I?”
Joan said nothing, but stared at the VDU, not really seeing it. She rose.
“We’ll disconnect her now, Minnie,” she said.
“We haven’t quite finished.”
“Never mind.”
Joan helped remove the sensors with quick and expert fingers. She might be arrogant, but she wasn’t proud.
“Now, come with me,” she said and led the way out into the corridor and along to a windowless room, one wall of which was lined with VDUs. Meg was sitting at one of the consoles. She turned and said, “Hi, Eva,” but her smile was strained and sad.
“I want you to look at something,” said Joan. “I’m not going to tell you about it because I don’t want to put ideas into your head. If you find it too distressing, you must tell me.”
She pressed a switch. A zone hummed, and at the other end of the room shapes became solid—a hospital bed ringed by machines, the broken web, the thing like a hairy spider at the center—a chimp’s head on the pillow, split by a huge, straining grin. The gleaming canines showed it was a male. The eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling.
Eva knuckled across to the zone and circled it. So this was what was left of the boy called Stefan and the chimp called Caesar. It could only be them. She felt her lips beginning to strain in sympathy, copying the grin of horror.
To Dad’s surprise and Mom’s relief Eva had not wanted to talk much about what would happen when Joan’s new patients woke. People expected her to be excited at the idea of having companions like herself, but her own feelings were more mixed. There had even been a strand of jealousy in them, at the knowledge that soon she would be losing her own uniqueness. Fame was funny. You didn’t want to share it. But much more important than that had been the fear, half thought and half felt, that having others like her would upset the balance she had achieved. Because there was no one like her, people had to accept her as human when she was with them, just as the chimps accepted her as chimp when she was in the Reserve. When the others came, wouldn’t people, even Ginny and Bren, find it harder not to think of her as other, different and unwanted? And Eva herself, would she still want to be with Lana as much as she did? That was something too precious to lose, but you couldn’t keep it alive just by wanting to. So on the whole, Eva had not spent much time thinking about the moment when she would first meet Stefan/Caesar. Perhaps that was why, when the moment came, the shock was not the simple selfish shock of disappointment. It was pure shock, shock at the thing itself.
The bedclothes beside the body moved.
“Erch,” said a voice. “Gningg.”
Eva knuckled back to Joan.
“Something wrong?” she said.
“We began the resuscitation procedure nineteen days ago. We had earlier felt able to take a few shortcuts on the basis of what we learned from you, and it is just possible that we made a mistake there, but if so, it hasn’t shown up in any of our tests. Personally I am confident that the transfer has taken place, that Stefan’s axon network has replicated in the animal’s brain, that he is, in lay terms, there. But for some reason he is unable to communicate, either with the animal’s body or through it with the outside world.”
Eva turned and circled the zone again, staring at the image on the image bed. No use.
“Can I go in?” she said.
“If you don’t mind going through the sterilizer.”
“You won’t have to do my clothes.”
Eva stripped and stood in the little cubicle. Her hair bushed out around her under the tingling bombardment. She opened the inner door and went through. The room was just the same as when she used to lie here, with the bed and the mirror and the silent machines, and beyond the window the huge sky with the city stretching away beneath it. She pulled a stool over to the bed and climbed on to it, so that she could lean over and peer down into the dark eyes. There was nothing she could read there, no presence, no signal. Her hand moved without her telling it to and began to groom through the long black hairs on the scalp.
“He hasn’t got any feeling there,” said Meg’s voice. “Just his left arm and his mouth.”
Eva shifted the bedclothes back. The hand lay across a keyboard just like hers. Sometimes the fingers twitched, and when they touched the “Speak” bar a voice came out, meaningless. She settled herself and started to groom her way painstakingly up the arm. Was there a faint response, felt through her fingertips, as though the flesh itself recognized the signal? But when she peered into the eyes again she saw no change, and the agonized grin stayed tense.
She lifted the twitching fingers aside and pressed the keys.
“Hi,” said a boy’s voice from the keyboard speaker. “I’m Stefan. I’m here. I’m okay.”
The arm threshed at the sound, straining against the straps that held it.
“That is his regular reaction,” said Joan out of the air. “Violent agitation.”
Eva let the threshings subside and returned to grooming the arm. The response she imagined she had felt before was there no longer. There was no change in the dreadful grimace, no glimmer of any kind in the eye. After about ten minutes Joan’s voice spoke again.
“He’s had as much as he can stand for the moment. Meg’s going to put him to sleep.”
Eva grunted but continued her work. She wanted him to go back into darkness with the feel of her fingers on his flesh. It seemed important, but she didn’t know why. She felt the change in her fingertips and looked up in time to see the eyes close, the lips lose their tension, soften, and close, too, until the face was that of a young male chimp, asleep, deep in a dream—a dream, perhaps, of trees.
Totally exhausted, Eva knuckled out into the control room and put on her overalls. She was very shivery. While she had been in the bedroom she had been too busy, too absorbed in trying to make contact, to understand quite what she had seen and felt. Now the horror of it gathered inside her and exploded into a howling hoot. She rocked herself to and fro in her misery. Joan stood watching, bright-eyed, but Meg jumped off her chair, knelt down, and cuddled beside her, sobbing with human grief.
Eva recovered first and reached for her keyboard.
“Sorry,” she said. “Couldn’t help it.”
“We are all somewhat shaken,” said Joan. “Do you have any ideas?”
“They’re both there. They don’t want each other.”
“Both?”
“Stefan. Caesar. Like Kelly’s here.”
She tapped herself on the chest.
“I made myself want Kelly,” she said. “I knew I had to. Suppose it’s easier for me. Always been used to chimps.”
“I’m afraid that may well be the answer,” said Joan. “At a very early age, thanks to your father’s decision to bring you up in such close contact with the Pool, you may well have learned to think of yourself as actually being a chimpanzee as well as a human, and that deep in your unconscious mind you still do so. The attraction of this theory is that the level at which rejection of the transfer is most likely to occur is very close to the unconscious, the boundary where the human mind has to mesh with the autonomous systems of the animal host.”
The zone had not been switched off. Eva knuckled over and circled it, staring at the thing on the bed. She had her horror under control now, but if anything it was stronger than before. Before, she had simply felt it, in her shivers, in her howling, but now she thought it too. These humans, they couldn’t know. They cared, they were sad, but they couldn’t understand. This was what humans did to animals, one way or another. This was what they’d always done. The ghastly little wrigglers that had invaded Grog’s bloodstream had more right to be there than Stefan had to be in Caesar, or Eva herself in Kelly.
She grunted and turned to Joan.
“So I’m going to be the only one?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody else has been brought up with chimps.”
“That is only one theory. In any case, we shall have to see.”
“You’re going to do more?”
“Sasha is due to wake in eleven days, and I shall certainly explore the possibilities of further experiments. We cannot let it rest there. But first I think we must have a session with Dr. Alonso and the animal psychology team—your father too, of course ...”
Eva didn’t go straight to the parking lot—Cormac had a new comic book so he wouldn’t mind waiting. She rode elevators and scuttled along corridors until she had found her way back to Grog’s room. He was lying as she’d left him, with his eyes closed. The tape was running.
“. . . then what about all the people down at Cayamoro?” her voice was saying. “The scientists, for instance. They’re ...”
She crossed the room silently and switched it off. Grog opened his eyes.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “We’ve got to try. I’ll help you.”
YEAR TWO,
MONTH THREE,
DAY SEVENTEEN
Living with a purpose.
Waking with it already at work in your mind.
Allies, enemies, schemes, failures.
Secrets.
Even in the minute-by-minute life of the Reserve, thinking all the time.
One day . . . somehow . . .
By the time Grog’s beard was long enough to groom again he could sit up, write letters, talk for an hour at a time. At the request of Stefan’s parents, Joan Pradesh had put Stefan back into coma and let him stay there. There had been the girl called Sasha and a chimp called Angel. Joan’s team had let them wake with their whole mouth working, and they had screamed all the time they were awake. They had done this for nine days, and then they had died.
It was supposed to be a secret, but Eva had told Grog and Grog had told a reporter he knew (of course). There was going to be a press conference this evening. The university was very jumpy about it because it was pretty well certain Joan would put everyone’s back up and then sponsors would get scared and funds would be cut. So they’d arranged for Eva to be there too, clever, famous, popular Eva, the whole world’s favorite cuddly toy—if Eva told people it was all right, then the fuss would die down and the funds would go on rolling in and that was all that mattered in the world . . .
“You don’t need to worry,” Grog had said. “There’ll be quite a few people on our side down in the audience—I’ve been rounding them up. If it doesn’t come up some other way Mike will ask you a direct question ...”
“Uh?”
“You’ll know him—a blind white blob. Get a few lines ready on your tape. Be nice about Joan. After that, just play it by ear. This is our first big chance, but don’t let that scare you. They all love you out here, remember.”
Eva was trying not to think about it because it was a waste of her morning in the Reserve. Though she spent every spare minute she had here now, it still wasn’t enough—not just because she was happier here, more herself, either. In fact, that wasn’t true. Visits to the Reserve were sometimes very unsatisfactory, difficult or boring or frightening, harder to control than human life. And human life was a lot of fun, often exciting and interesting, and easier every day as people got used to her . . .
But that was all beside the point. She needed to be at the Reserve more, for the purpose. Suppose the impossible came true and Grog found a place
where they could go and together they persuaded Dad and the others to let them, to help them when they got there, and all the other parts of the dream slotted in, what would be the use if the chimps themselves weren’t ready? You couldn’t tell them what was going to happen, teach them how to cope, any of that, so “ready” just meant trusting Eva, being prepared to follow her lead—an outsider, a female, a juvenile, coming and going at random. Not easy.
Winter had been tough. Some days the chimps hardly went out into the open at all but stayed in their “caves” squabbling for places nearest the heated patches of wall and floor. In those close unnatural quarters tempers were bad, and the signals for keeping them in control didn’t always work. Tatters and Geronimo had several real fights, with serious bite wounds. By the end of the winter Tatters was boss, which was a bad thing all around, because Geronimo used to use his authority to keep the fights among the females from getting serious, by siding with the one who looked as if she was losing, which was why on the whole the females had supported him, but Tatters wasn’t clever enough for that. By the time the spring sun was strong enough to lounge and scratch in, the whole group was in a sour mood.
Lulu stole Wang deliberately. She must have been waiting her chance for some time, not only for Wang to get far enough away from Lana to be grabbed and run off with but also for Tatters to be somewhere near. In fact, thinking about it afterward, Eva realized that she had been half aware of Lulu sitting about a dozen paces off, watching Beth’s group most of the time but also glancing over her shoulder as if looking for something out of sight of the rest of them. They should have been aware of the danger. Lulu had never managed to rear a baby of her own because her deafness kept her from hearing the cries and whimpers that would have told her its needs, so she couldn’t really be trusted near someone else’s. Unfortunately Beth was in a cantankerous mood, and the other three were preoccupied with watching for a sudden attack from her. The first they knew of the kidnapping was Wang’s cluttering scream as Lulu dashed away, dragging him by one arm and bashing him casually against the hard ground as she went.
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