The door opened and shut, and Mom was standing by the bed. She was pale. Her mass of hair was a mess, with a lot of gray showing in the glossy black. There were hard lines down beside her nostrils. She looked as though she hadn’t slept for a year. Her smile wasn’t real.
“Hello, my darling,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I’m late. How are you today?”
She bent and kissed Eva on her numb forehead. A strand of her hair trailed across Eva’s face. It didn’t tickle, because the face was numb too, but Eva automatically closed that eye to let it pass. Mom turned away to get the tall stool so that she could sit by the bed where Eva could see her directly. Eva’s eyelids still moved rather sluggishly, so she didn’t open the shut one at once.
Hey!
She opened it and closed the other one. Then the first again. Mom had come back now and slid her hand under the bedclothes to grasp Eva’s own hand.
“What are you doing, you funny girl?”
Eva answered the cool grip with a squeeze, but she could feel Mom’s jumpiness, and hear the false note in the lightness she tried to put into her voice. Her hand was wrong too. Too small. Deep in the nightmare now, Eva stared up into Mom’s questioning eyes. They were wrong too, something different about the color. She forced herself to close one eye again and then the other, squinting inwardly as she did so.
Her nose was gone.
Most of the time you don’t see your nose at all; but if you shut one eye and look sideways, there it is, that fuzzy hummock, too close to focus. It was gone. At the lower rim of vision she could see the vague blur of a cheek and at the top the darker fringe of an eyebrow, much more noticeable—much more there—than it used to be . . .
Mom wasn’t even pretending to smile now.
Eva closed both eyes and willed the nightmare into day. The accident. Her whole face must have been so badly smashed that they couldn’t rebuild it, or not yet anyway. They were keeping it numb so that it didn’t hurt. Her jaw and mouth must be so bad that she wouldn’t be able to speak right for ages—never perhaps—so they’d made her her voice box instead. They didn’t want her to see herself in the mirror . . .
She wriggled her fingers out of Mom’s grip and slowly found the right keys. No point in fussing with tones. She pressed the “Speak” bar.
“Let me see,” said her voice, dead flat.
“Darling ...” croaked Mom.
A whisper rustled in the speaker by her ear. She stopped to listen. Eva pressed out another message.
“Let me see. Or I’ll go mad. Wondering.”
“She’s right,” said Mom to the air. “No, it’s too late . . . No.”
The murmur started again. Eva gripped Mom’s hand again and closed her eyes. Why was the hand so small? Had her own hand . . . The thumb was all wrong! Why hadn’t she noticed? It was . . .
Without her touching the keys, the mirror motor whined. She kept her eyes closed until it stopped.
“I love you, darling,” said Mom. “I love you.”
Eva willed her eyes to open.
For an instant all she seemed to see was nightmare. Mess. A giant spiderweb, broken and tangled on the pillows, with the furry black body of the spider dead in the middle of it. And then the mess made sense.
She closed her right eye and watched the brown left eye in the mirror close as she did so. The web—it wasn’t broken—was tubes and sensor wires connecting the machines around the bed to the pink-and-black thing in the center. She stared. Her mind wouldn’t work. She couldn’t think, only feel—feel Mom’s tension, Mom’s grief, as much as her own amazement. Poor Mom—her lovely blue-eyed daughter . . . Must do something for Mom. She found the right keys.
“Okay,” said her voice. “It’s okay, Mom.”
“Oh, my darling,” said Mom and started to cry. That was okay too. Mom cried easy, usually when the worst was over. Eva stared at the face in the mirror. She’d recognized it at once, but couldn’t give it a name. Then it came. Carefully she pressed the keys. She used the tone control to sound cheerful.
“Hi, Kelly,” said her voice.
Kelly was—had been—a young female chimpanzee.
Eva had grown up with chimps.
As more and more people crammed into the world, needing more and more land for cities and crops, so the animals had died out. Most of the great wild jungles were gone, and the savannahs that used to cover half a continent. Here and there a few patches of jungle remained, among mountains too steep to use, or stretches of bleak and barren upland unsuitable for the energy fields that filled most of the old hot deserts, or offshore waters where fish farms for some reason wouldn’t flourish, but even these were always being nibbled away as somebody found a new method of exploiting them. And anyway, the wild animals that had been crowded into those pockets had destroyed them by their numbers or become diseased or just seemed to lose interest in living in a world like that.
The big animals vanished first, elephants and giraffes, gorillas and orangs, whales and dolphins. Others hung on in the patches and crannies people left for them by mistake or on purpose. A few actually throve because living in a world full of people suited them in ways they could adapt to—there were no eagles anymore, but you could see kestrels any day in the city, nesting among the high rises or hovering in the updrafts between them, living off mice and sparrows and other small creatures, which in turn lived off the scraps that people littered around. There were rats, of course, and wasps and city pigeons and starlings and so on, but that was all.
There’d been zoos for a while, but what was the point of going to see a few sad old elephants in an enclosure when you could go to a shaper park and walk among the shapes of an elephant herd, life-sized, wallowing in the shape of a mud pool while the shape of a lion stalked the shape of an eland beyond (all stored on old tapes, made before the last savannahs had gone)? And at home there were wild-life programs on the shaper, either old tapes or live from the little patches of jungle and desert that still were left. You could have them in your living room, hear their screams and songs, watch their hunting and mating. They weren’t life-sized, of course, and you couldn’t smell them, and when they killed and ate one another, the blood disappeared from your carpet as soon as you switched channels. Besides, a real rhinoceros, living the life it was made for, needs a dozen square kilometers. A taped rhinoceros only needs a few cubic centimeters. So it was all very tidy and sensible, just right for a world crammed full of people. That’s what people had thought, until it was too late. And that is why there were only the chimps left.
Chimps were different. Chimps were a special case because they were so close to humans, our cousins but not us. It was worth keeping real chimps alive for research you couldn’t do on humans, a pool of chimps big enough to breed from, so that there were animals to spare for scientists to use. Of course, now that they’d lost all the other big animals, now that they’d found that shapings, however solid-seeming, weren’t really a substitute, people had become interested in real chimps. More than interested—obsessed, almost. Easily the most popular commercials on the shaper were for a soft drink called Honeybear that used live chimps dressed up as people. All the cities had branches of the International Chimp Pool where you could go and see a few chimps in big cages. But the main sections of the Pool were right here, part of the university, and Eva’s dad was Director of Primate Zoology, in charge of research. So Eva had grown up among chimps.
In fact, she’d been one of Dad’s research projects. Of course, she’d met humans her own age because Mom and Dad, like other parents, put their child into playgroups so that she would learn to socialize, but Eva had always felt just as at home among chimps. In some ways more, in fact—she’d been making chimp chatter before she said her first human word, and before she was three Dad had been using her to help him understand how the chimps’ minds were working. He knew almost everything there was to know about them, from the outside, but Eva could joke with their jokes, feel with their feelings, see why some simple-to-humans probl
em baffled them when they could solve trickier-looking problems almost at once.
Of course, Mom and Dad had needed to be careful. A small chimp is enormously stronger than a human baby; it’s even smarter for the first few months; but Eva had soon learned how to behave, how to use the grunts and gestures that meant “You’re the boss” and “Please” and “Sorry, didn’t mean it,” and so on. She’d gotten along with chimps pretty well, always.
And now she was one herself. Okay.
She felt a sort of mild amazement. All her feelings were calm, a bit dreamy. They must be pumping something into her bloodstream, she reckoned, to control her shock and rejection. This must be real panic time for them out there, whoever they were who whispered into the little speaker in Mom’s ear. Anyway, there were questions to ask. She pressed keys.
“How . . . ?”
No need to say any more with Mom. With Dad you’d have had to spell the question right out, but Mom was used to hints and garblings because she worked in the Housing Bureau, helping ordinary people straighten out ordinary problems like back rent or rowdy neighbors or trying to get away with an unlicensed pregnancy.
“It’s something called neuron memory, darling,” said Mom. “Dad says you’ll have learned about it at school, so you probably know more than me. You were in an irreversible coma after the accident, and Joan Pradesh heard about it and said she’d try and . . . and do this, if we wanted. She’s never done a human before, you see. It was a risk, she said, but we thought, in the end . . . well . . . your poor body, it was so broken, and just lying there . . . anyway, we said yes. And it’s worked. That’s marvelous, isn’t it? But now you’ve got to be very patient and just lie and wait for all the connections to strengthen, one after another. You’re there. You’re joined up. But the connections aren’t strong enough to use yet. Have I got that right?”
She’d asked the question to the air. The speaker began its whisper.
Neuron memory, thought Eva. Joan Pradesh. Of course. And yes, she had studied it at school last year. The thing is, you aren’t just a lot of complicated molecules bundled together inside a skin—you’re that too, but that’s not what makes you you. What you are is a pattern, an arrangement, different from any other pattern that ever was or will be. Your pattern began to grow from the moment you were conceived, but the things that make you so sure you are you came later: your discoveries of the world, from your first blurred peerings with your baby eyes, and all your thoughts and imaginings and dreams and memories make up that pattern, and are kept there by the neurons in your brain that have sent their wriggling axons and dendrites branching and joining and passing messages to one another through the incredible complex networks they have grown into. What old Professor Pradesh, Joan’s father, had found was that the pattern actually “remembers” how it got there; and given the right treatment and an “empty” brain, it can be persuaded to go through the whole process over again. Professor Pradesh had made his discovery with very simple creatures, flatworms mainly, but Joan had carried on the research until she was working with mammals, all the way up to chimps. And now, humans.
Eva pressed a few keys.
“How long?” said her voice.
“Two hundred and thirty-eight days.”
It was the wrong answer, for once. Even so, Eva’s mind juddered with the thought. Eight whole months gone from your life, blank! Of course, it would take that long for the pattern to grow—in the first Eva it had taken almost fourteen years.
“No,” she said. “How long till?”
“Sorry,” said Mom. “It was just . . .”
Of course. Mom knew the exact count of days. She’d felt each of them grind through her, never knowing if the risk would be worth it or if she’d get no more than part of her daughter back or perhaps just a mumbling kind of nobody trapped in Kelly’s body. No wonder she looked so much older. The speaker whisper stopped. Mom nodded.
“Joan’s been saying you mustn’t try and start waking muscles up before they’re ready. You must try not even to think about it. Just let it happen. She wasn’t really ready for you to find out what . . . what’s happened, but now you have found out she’s probably going to change her plans and start letting you move your face muscles. She didn’t want to before because you’d have tried to talk ...”
The whisper started again. Eva lay looking at the face in the mirror. Me, she thought. Not Kelly, me. Good-bye, blue eyes, good-bye soft pale skin, good-bye, nose. Perhaps Kelly had been pretty—pretty to another chimp. Except that chimps didn’t seem to think like that, judging by the way the males used to go mad about moth-eaten old Rosie when she was in season . . .
The brown eyes peered down in the way you might gaze at an animal. Was there a glimmer there? Eva, inside?
Mom sighed and squared her shoulders, ready to explain yet more, but Eva closed her eyes. She was tired, tired of newness and strangeness and the world of people. She made her voice say “No.” Not enough. With an effort she chose more keys. All she wanted to do was hide, vanish, creep away into dark green shadows.
“Sleep now, please,” said her voice.
They let her go gently. Her last thought was to wonder what had happened to Kelly, the real Kelly, the one who used to live in this furry skin. Where was she now?
DAY SEVEN
Waking again . . .
The dream . . .
Keep it. Hold on. Hold on . . .
Waking.
Perhaps they’d let her wake gently, so that the dream had floated up with her almost at the surface, or perhaps it was just the idea of holding, because that was one of the things in the dream, but at any rate Eva awoke and found that this time she could really remember what she’d been dreaming. It was still very strange, not like any of the dreams she usually had. There was no story, no adventures, only the idea, the images, the feelings—herself, moving among branches, reaching with long arms, swinging, holding . . .
Holding with her feet if she chose.
She lay with her eyes shut, living the dream again. Then, instead of angling the mirror to show her the window, left it where it had been when they sent her to sleep. She opened her eyes and looked.
The blind was up and morning light streamed across the bed. The face in the mirror, surrounded by its tangle of tubes and cables, was still that of a stranger. Large pale ears stuck out on either side through strong black hair; in the middle was the pinky-brown hummock of the face parts, with the huge lips, the nothing nose and the forward-facing nostrils; the brown eyes were bright with thought. She pressed keys. Deliberately she filled her mind with ideas of welcome.
“Hi, there,” said her voice.
Was there a glimmer in the eyes? Kelly’s answer? Or just the reflection of Eva’s own signal? No knowing.
“You’ve never seen a tree,” she said.
That might not be quite true. The chimps in the Research Section of the Pool had metal-and-plastic frames to climb on, but Dad always took a couple on family outings if he could, so Kelly might have seen trees in the city parks, but she’d certainly not have been allowed to climb one because of the difficulty of getting her down and the damage she might do while she was up there. In any case, those would have been city trees, tamed, guarded, numbered, precious. The trees in the dream had been wild, part of a forest no one looked after, tree tangled into tree, stretching on and on, a forest where people had never been, a forest before there were people.
She swung the mirror to take her usual look at the city. It was a duller day, with the last lights just going out as the sun rose behind high thin cloud and the city’s own haze, the dust and fumes made by half a billion people living and working together, beginning to form among the high rises. She could still see about five kilometers. Nothing. The city stretched on far beyond that, far beyond sight on the clearest morning, endless. Like the forest in the dream.
Of course, Eva thought, I might have put the dream there. Me. Eva. Knowing when I went to sleep that I was living in a chimp’s body, I might
have put chimp arms and feet into the dream. I might have invented the forest, from things I’ve seen on shaper programs. Only . . .
Only I was having the dream before I knew about Kelly. And it was the same dream. Perhaps knowing just helped me think about it, hold on to it, but it was there before any of that. Perhaps it isn’t my dream at all—not Eva’s, I mean. Perhaps it’s Kelly’s.
Hi, Kelly. You there?
The mirror was angled to show the window, so she sent the unspoken message inward. She wasn’t really serious. It was more of a private joke, a whimsy. Her lips twitched. She actually felt them move.
Oh, great, she thought. They’re letting me have my mouth back. She moved the mirror to show her the bed again and tried a smile. The image above her wrinkled its mouth at the corners.
There was a game you could play with small chimps before they became too strong for you to hold still. You put the chimp on your lap, gripping its arms to stop it from grabbing, and then you moved a grape across in front of its face and watched a sort of wave ripple along the lips from side to side, following the grape, trying to suck it in. Chimps use their long and mobile mouths almost like an extra hand for feeling and touching and trying things out, as well as for all the grimaces that make up a lot of chimp language.
Forgetting about the dream, Eva lay and experimented. There wasn’t a lot she could try, because they didn’t seem to have awakened her other face muscles yet, or her jaw, but it was exciting enough to be able to move anything at all. She hadn’t really begun before Dad came in.
“Hi, kid,” he said.
“Sorry,” she tapped. “Fun.”
A slight pause while he put in the missing words. You didn’t get this sort of blip with Mom, but Dad thought in whole sentences, with verbs and so on.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Only don’t push it—we’ll have to see how it all goes. How are you feeling?”
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