She knuckled across the floor and swung herself up into the frame.
“Hey! Take it easy!” said Robbo. “Don’t want you breaking a rib. We should’ve had a week at least, trying out what you can do before they did the program. Watch it!”
Impossible to obey. It was so glorious to be moving like this, reaching, grasping, swinging across. She knew she was still only about half strong, despite the exercises—when she was fully fit a grown man would have trouble holding her—but now what mattered was the sheer pleasure of movement, the feeling of naturalness. This was what these arms, these fingers, were for. It mattered because it allowed her to understand the Tightness of this new body, to feel its beauty and energy . . .
“Watch it, I said!” snapped Robbo.
Eva squatted into a crook of the frame and hooted derisively, but in fact he’d been right. For a moment, quite unpredictably, the ghost of a human arm had flickered into her mind, making her miss her grip, forcing her to grab with the other hand, clutch. The ghost came back even more strongly when she tried to swing. Long ago, as a small girl, that body had learned the to-and-fro rhythm, the exact timing needed to fling her weight on the chains and drive the swing forward through its arc. This body was differently weighted. Its arms were the wrong length. The rhythm wouldn’t come. Thinking didn’t help, because the old human timing was imprinted below the level of thought, putting a jiggle into the arc and spoiling the acceleration. Swinging was something she’d have to learn fresh.
What about riding a bike? There was a kid’s bike with fat tires and the Honeybear logo freshly painted on its side, but there wasn’t room to use it in the gym, with the mess of cables cluttering the floor, so she took it out into the corridor to try. Balancing turned out to be easy, and she could grip the pedals with her feet, but her legs didn’t understand about moving in circles. She was wobbling along, concentrating on the pedal movement, when some people came out of a door just ahead of her, not looking where they were going, because the man in front was talking over his shoulder. Trying to miss him, Eva steered into the wall and crashed. That stopped their talk.
She picked herself up and saw that the man she’d missed was a stranger, though there was something familiar about him all the same. If he hadn’t been wearing heavy dark glasses she might have recognized him. The people he’d been talking to over his shoulder were Dad and Joan Pradesh and a nervous-looking young woman. Eva rippled her fingers over the keys.
“Hi, Dad. Got to learn all over fresh.”
“Better learn to look where you’re going.”
“This is her?” said the stranger.
“This is Eva,” said Joan. “This is Dirk Elian, Eva. I’m sure you’ve seen him on the shaper.”
Eva grunted a greeting. The man just nodded, not to her but to Joan, telling her Yes, he’d seen this chimp. Something about the nod made the name click. Dirk Elian! Of course, though Eva hadn’t watched his programs often. Dad had taught her to be scornful of the sort of predigested science you got on the shaper.
“We were coming to see how you were getting along,” said Dad.
“She’s been doing fine, Dr. Adamson,” said Robbo. “Times you wouldn’t know she wasn’t a chimp. Few things she can’t handle yet.”
“Like riding a bike,” said Dad.
He was smiling inside his beard. Too much. Eva wasn’t surprised at the way Robbo had hurried to get his word in, but Dad! All anxious and eager. And Mr. Elian’s nods and silences showed that he was used to this sort of reaction—expected it, in fact. It was just like the chimps in the Pool, with their boss males, and the other males constantly making special signals to placate or challenge the bosses. Eva didn’t remember noticing humans behaving like this in the old days, but now everything the three men did seemed obvious, a language she’d always known.
Back in the gym she climbed and swung a bit to show them what she could do. Then there was a long wait while the shaper people set the cameras up and discussed angles and changed their minds and argued. Then she went through her paces; first, things chimps could do naturally, like climbing and swinging; then things they might be taught to do, like riding a bike; and then things they couldn’t, like building a self-supporting arch of toy bricks. There were long waits between each take.
Eva needed the rests. She was still only half strong and tired quickly. So she sat hunkered into a fork of the climbing frame and watched the others, Dad trying to impress Mr. Elian, Joan ignoring the hustle and working at some problem on scraps of paper, Robbo chatting up one of the shaper women. Sometimes a sort of irritation swelled up inside her, making her pelt bristle, urging her to go swinging wildly around the frame, barking as she went. Mostly she suppressed it, but at one moment, noticing a camera trained on her as though she were some kind of thing you didn’t have to say Do-you-mind to, she stretched her lips forward without thinking and gave it a Go-away hoot. The whole group turned and stared. As startled as they were, Eva shrugged, grinned, and waved a hand. Forget it. They forgot it and went on with what they’d been doing.
When she’d done enough tricks to keep them happy, Mr. Elian came over and leaned against the frame beside Eva. His whole personality changed as the cameras closed around the pair of them. He’d taken his dark glasses off, letting the world see the smile lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes. He was relaxed, friendly, trustworthy, understanding—all that. Eva knew it was just his job, a performance, but all the same she felt her skin unprickle.
“So you’re Eva?” he said.
“And you’re Dirk Elian.”
“Right. I better explain to viewers there’s got to be that little blip while that gizmo you’ve got puts the words together for you. And just in case there’s some real meanies out there, thinking it’s all a trick, how about you spelling out something real slow, so we can show ’em it just ain’t so?”
Eva grunted, eased the keyboard from its loops, and held it so that a camera could watch while with one thin dark finger she pressed the individual keys.
“You’ve got it wrong, you meanies.”
She rewound the little tape and played the words several times, varying the tone of voice.
“That’s amazing,” said Mr. Elian. Eva thought she could just hear a flicker of real surprise under the easy public accent. Perhaps he’d been wondering too—why not? Anyway, he was a meanie himself, in spite of the signals. Deliberately she gave him a genuine chimp snicker. His eyebrows went up.
“But inside there you’re really a young woman?” he said.
“I’m Eva, okay.”
He didn’t seem to notice her answer wasn’t the same as Yes. He wouldn’t.
“And how exactly does it feel?”
Eva managed to suppress another snicker. This was one of Dad’s bugbears—“and how exactly does it feel, Mrs. Hrumph, to have your husband reveal he’s a practicing werewolf?"—but she’d promised herself she was going to be on her best behavior. The program was important for everyone, especially the Pool. The trouble was that Mr. Elian filled her with a spirit of mischief—and that wouldn’t have been there in the old days either.
“It feels great,” she said. “I’m looking forward to things.”
“No regrets?”
“No regrets.”
“I’ve seen pictures of you. You used to be a very pretty little miss. How about that?”
Eva glanced at him. He was horrible. Didn’t he realize Mom would be watching? She wanted to bite his ear off. No. But she’d get him somehow.
“I’m very pretty now,” she said.
“Sure, but . . .”
“Don’t you think so?”
“Like I say . . .”
Deliberately she reached out, gripped the immaculate collar and hauled him toward her. He yelled. She heard a shout of “Eva!” from Dad, but by then she was giving Mr. Elian a kiss, not a proper open-mouthed chimp kiss but using her big lips to produce a real smacker, maximum vacuum. He was still trying to push her clear when she let go. He backe
d off while she sat laughing in the nook of the frame. He managed a sort of laugh too, but she could see the fright and fury in his eyes, just as she could feel the various reactions from the dimness beyond the camera lights, pleasure and alarm and excitement all mixed together. The shaper people, they must know he was a meanie. By the sound of their laughter, they did.
“Gee, you’re strong,” he said.
“Chimps are.”
“But you’re supposed to be a young woman.”
“I’m a chimp too. And I like it.”
“Sure, sure.”
PART TWO
LIVING
MONTH FOUR,
DAY TWELVE
Living at home, at last . . .
But the ghost still there . . .
The ghost moving about these rooms . . .
Making herself snacks in this kitchen . . .
Gazing, now, out this window . . .
There was a particular moment sometimes when the sun went down. It needed the right weather, a cloudless sky and a mild west wind to clear the brownish haze of the city. Then for a few moments, below the earliest stars and above the still-faint pattern of city lights, you might just catch a different kind of glimmer, a wavering thread, the twinkle of snow on mountain peaks, ninety kilometers off, catching the sun’s last rays.
Eva watched for it, and yes, it was there, but the old prickle of pleasure didn’t come. Her happiest times used to be skiing. She would look forward for months to her next chance. But now it was only the ghost that yearned.
The ghost had been particularly strong this morning, because of being home and waking in her own bed. Eva had awakened on the edge of horrors, desperate for the feel of her own long-limbed smooth-skinned body, her own hair to brush, her own teeth to clean, her own dark blue eyes to ring with eye shadow. Dad had had to give her an extra shot of dope she still took to suppress that kind of feeling, so perhaps that was why the ghost that yearned for the ski slopes was now only a vague shadow in her mind, and Eva, the new Eva, the one she must learn to think and feel of as the only real Eva, was merely amused and interested in the idea of going skiing. She might have been excited if Dad had announced they were going off to the mountains next weekend, but she didn’t yearn anymore. That kind of intense, shapeless longing was for something else.
What?
The answer came when she closed her eyes. Leaves mottling the dark behind the eyelids. Trees. Only where could you still find trees, real trees in forests, the way you could still find mountains?
Up north in the timber stands, grown as a thirty-year crop? No good. The branches were the wrong shape to swing through or nest among. You couldn’t live through those winters. You couldn’t eat pine needles. South, then? There were bits of jungle still—you saw them sometimes on the shaper. Nearly three thousand kilometers on beyond the mountains, there were five or six valleys that had never been cleared, where the rain-forest trees still grew and the lianas dangled. There were a few other places in the world like that, tiny preserved patches, most of them funded by the shaper companies, studied and guarded by scientists, kept free from other human intrusion. But perhaps Dad might be able to arrange something, a research project which needed a sort-of-chimp to be in a jungle for a while . . .
It was a fantasy, and Eva knew it. It was a way of dreaming the dream. She kept her eyes closed and let it happen. Unnoticed beside her the ghost thinned, dwindled, vanished.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Mom had no sense of time, so she set the kitchen timer for anything that mattered. Its shrill sound stopped and Mom came into the living room and switched on the shaper. A travel commercial filled the zone, bronze bodies on a pale beach, ridiculously less crowded than a real beach would be. Mom settled into her chair and Eva knuckled over and climbed into her lap. Mom laughed resignedly.
“I suppose we’ve got to watch,” she said.
“Dad’s big day.”
Eva was glad she’d made enough fuss to force them to let her come home in time to watch the program with Mom. It wouldn’t have been fair to Mom to make her watch it alone. Dad was down at the studios because part of the format of Mr. Elian’s programs was always a live discussion. Mom could have come to the hospital to watch, of course, but that would have been making too big a thing of it. Much better here at home, ordinary.
When the titles began Mom turned up the sound, and the drumbeat theme of the series thudded out. The zone cleared, and then filled with a section of ice rink, a girl with long black hair skating in a yellow tracksuit. Her slightly fuzzy edges showed that the sequence had been taken with an amateur camera. Mom stiffened and closed her eyes. Mr. Elian’s solemn half whisper began as a voice-over.
“This girl’s name is Eva. Just over a year ago she was involved in a car accident and suffered extensive physical damage. She would certainly never have walked, let alone skated, again. Furthermore, she was in an irreversible coma. Yet today Eva is alive, active, healthy. She looks, however, quite different. She looks like this.”
And there was Kelly, squatting among the yellow bars of the climbing frame. She pursed her lips forward and hooted. Go away—but to humans it would be just a hoot, and anyway she immediately shrugged, grinned, and waved a friendly hand. Eva stared. Me, she thought. Me. Though she was used by now to looking at her own image in a mirror and accepting it as herself, the chimp in the zone was like a stranger. The brown eyes were bright with cleverness and mischief. The big ears stuck out through the coarse black hair. Eva felt a rush of friendliness and liking, and without thinking started a silent pant of greeting. Faintly she was aware of the old Eva gazing through her eyes, dismayed, trying to make the lips and throat cry No!, but thanks to the dope it wasn’t difficult to blank her out and will a Yes with her conscious mind. She glanced up, wanting to share that Yes. Mom still had her eyes shut.
“Try and watch, Mom,” she made the keyboard murmur. “It’s me now. We’ve got to like this me. I do already. Really. I’m not pretending.”
“I’m so glad, darling.”
“I know it’s harder for you.”
“I’ll learn.”
The climbing frame vanished, leaving Kelly hanging in midair as a still. The girl in the yellow tracksuit appeared on the opposite side of the zone, and Mr. Elian strolled up between them as though he’d just happened along.
“In the next hour,” he said, “we are going to show you the full story of this astonishing event. Before we begin I should point out that but for the generosity of Honeybear Soft Drinks it would not have been possible. Eva’s transformation was a very expensive procedure, demanding the attention of many highly skilled scientists working at the very frontier of technology. Such work does not come cheap, and Eva and her parents have cause to be very grateful indeed to Honeybear for its help. We have with us in the studio this evening one of those parents, Dr. Daniel Adamson of the International Chimpanzee Pool . . .”
The zone widened and there was Dad, smiling at the cameras, his blue eyes bright in the studio lights, his whole face and attitude saying Like me, oh, please like me.
“. . . and we are also honored to have with us Professor Joan Pradesh, whose work in the field of neuron memory, first discovered by her father, Professor E. K. Pradesh, made the miracle of Eva possible ...”
And there was Joan. Somebody had bullied her into wearing a mauve dress. She didn’t even bother to smile.
“. . . Now, first, Dr. Adamson, perhaps you can tell us how exactly you and your wife felt ...”
“I can’t listen to this,” said Mom and switched the sound off. “You’ve got it taping for Dad, haven’t you?”
Eva grunted a yes. She didn’t mind—she could listen later too. And meanwhile it was interesting to watch Dad trying to tell Mr. Elian how exactly . . . And then there was a picture of Dad’s car lying upside down with its roof caved in; and then a shape on a hospital bed, a mound of bandages with tubes running in and out—Mom had her eyes shut again—and then the same shape, with a sort of box like a coffin besi
de it. The cameras closed in to a little window in the lid of the box. Dimly, behind the glass, you could see something that might have been a dark, furry head with its eyes closed . . .
Eva was glad they had the sound off. There was something holy about the silent pair, something you didn’t want Mr. Elian, or even Dad, telling you what to think about . . . But it was interesting that they’d started making the program even then, so that Honeybear could have something to pay for. It must all have cost a fortune, Eva realized. They’d be wanting to see returns on their money from now on.
“It’s all right, you can look now. It’s Joan,” she said, switching up the sound.
Joan was pure Joan, despite the mauve dress, looking and sounding as if she thought the program was a complete waste of her time. She didn’t even try to make things easier for the dimwits out there watching, but Mr. Elian was pretty good at his job, really, asking his questions in a way that forced her to give the dimwits a chance. They’d only been going a few minutes when the commo beeped. Mom picked it up with her free hand.
“Hello. Who? Oh, no. No, I don’t want to talk about it. No thank you.”
She hung up.
“A woman from some other program,” she said. “How did they get our new number? It isn’t on the ...”
The commo beeped again. She picked it up, said hello, listened for a moment, and hung up. Eva reached over and switched it to autocall.
“. . . that Eva was used to chimps?” Mr. Elian was saying. “From what Dr. Adamson was telling us, she’d practically grown up with them.”
The zone showed another amateur sequence, a naked human child with blue eyes and dark hair absorbed in play in a sandbox. A half-grown female chimp knuckled into view and started to search intently across her scalp. The child seemed hardly to notice.
“I can only say it may have been of importance,” Joan said. “The brain is an extremely complex mechanism, and we do not yet understand many things about it. In this case, the problems of rejection in the immediately posttransferral stage may well have been eased by experiences analogous to maternal imprinting in Eva’s early childhood. However ...”
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