“Uh!”
(The idea of Grog in an office was a contradiction in terms.)
“Sure. You’ve opened the gates. It’s a tide. It’s a wave. Now we’ve got to ride it. See you.”
He hung up.
“Grog?” Mom had asked.
“Uh.”
“It’s all his fault.”
Three days later a letter had come from Ms. Callaway saying that any attempt on Eva’s part to see or talk to Giorgio Kennedy or any persons connected with any organization set up by him for the return of chimpanzees to a natural habitat would be treated as a breach of contract.
So from then on, no Grog, no face-to-face. Eva saw him quite often on the shaper, though, leading marches, lobbying politicians, addressing meetings. The cameras wouldn’t be interested in him, but he always seemed to have one of their darlings along with him, some singer, some sports star, some billionaire’s boyfriend. Before long the demos were big enough to attract the shaper cameras in their own right. There were banners with slogans, and a symbol—not a chimp but a broken butterfly, one bright wing ripped apart. More and more you saw the same symbol sprayed on to walls as you were driven around the city. Kids at school started coming for autographs again, bringing cards with the broken butterfly printed in one corner.
“Uh-uh,” Eva said, and explained that she wasn’t allowed to, but she signed a separate piece of paper for them to stick on to the card later. Grog had been right, she realized. The movement was a wave. She could feel it all the time now, in the way people reacted to her. The singers and sports stars were only the glitter at the crest, but underneath came the growing surge of ordinary people, millions now, thinking the same thoughts, asking the same questions, moving in the same direction to the same end.
Early one evening, before Mom was home, Mimi Venturi telephoned.
“Eva, my pretty, is something I wish to discuss. I have this idea.”
“Uh?”
“You come here, to my apartment? Tuesday morning.”
“I thought we were doing a commercial.”
“Is cancelled. That stupid Grog.”
“Uh?”
“All his fault. You come?”
“You know I’m not allowed to talk to him?”
“Is in Berlin. No time for his poor mama. That boy!”
“How is he?”
“Is well. Is happy. Is boring—I send a car.”
“Okay.”
Mimi’s apartment was a good kilometer in the air. A real butler answered the door.
“Ms. Venturi is not yet home,” he said. “If you do not mind waiting.”
He showed Eva into the living room. It was almost dark, because the blinds were down, shutting out what must have been a stupendous view. Grog was sitting in an armchair reading a file.
Eva hesitated a moment, then scuttled across the carpet and leaped onto his lap. He laughed and ran his fingers across her pelt. Eagerly she began an inspection of his new beard.
“Great to see you,” he said. “You don’t have to worry—Mother smuggled me in.”
“Sh. Cormac’s in the hall.”
“I’ve told Bill to settle him down in front of a good loud space epic. How’s things? Difficult at home?”
“Uh.”
“Poor Lil—wish I could talk to her.”
“No good.”
“Not yet—someday, maybe. I’ve been in touch with Danhe’ll swing around.”
“Huh!”
“We’re going to need him. He knows a lot of essential stuff. When he finds where the future’s going, he’ll join. 1 don’t mean just to stay working. He’s enough of a scientist to want to be where the real stuff is happening. Now sit still. There’s something I want to show you. I’m just back from a demo in Berlin—our biggest yet. I’ve got a tape. Look.”
He switched the shaper on. The zone filled with people walking toward the camera, ten abreast. It closed in on a tiny figure in the front rank, blue-eyed, golden-haired, wearing a pair of green overalls with a broken butterfly on the bib. Eva recognized her at once—Tanya Olaf had rocketed up the charts out of nowhere five months ago and stayed at the top ever since.
“Whoo!” said Eva.
“Looks good in our get-up,” said Grog.
Eva caught a glimpse of him marching in the rank behind, a little to the left. She felt a silly pang of jealousy—since she’d been stopped from going on talk shows she hadn’t been meeting people like Tanya.
“What’s she like?” she said.
“Pure bitch, doesn’t give a damn about chimps but knows the right place to be seen. Done us a song—not bad—you’ll hear it. Now that fellow there, the one with the blue chin, he’s going to be useful. He’s General Secretary of DKFD—that’s the main European ...”
“Whoo!”
Eva had snorted because the zone had changed. The camera had swung up and at the same time withdrawn until Tanya and Grog and the other leaders had dwindled to tiny figures at the bottom of the zone and behind them she now could see, stretching away down the tree-lined boulevard, out of sight in the distance but still coming on, thousands beyond thousands, the rest of the march.
“Good moment,” said Grog.
“You got all those people out?”
“You got them out. Didn’t you realize that? I’ve just been working on the results.”
The scene jumped. It was dusk now, a different street, the march going by, singing, faces under the lamp glare, the broken butterfly everywhere. And now it was a sports arena, every seat full and a solid mass of people crammed on to the central space around a floodlit stage. The music stopped and the lights went out. Silence, and then a bay of cheering as a public zone sprang up on the stage—a table draped with blue cloth, a woman speaking into a microphone, on one side of her a gray-haired man with a fretful look and on the other, sitting up on the table in a withdrawn huddle, a chimp in yellow overalls.
There was a curious note in the cheering, not just excitement but challenge.
“First time we’ve risked it in public,” said Grog.
“I’ve never seen it.”
“You haven’t! They all have.”
The woman sat down. The man grabbed the microphone. The heads of journalists bobbed in the foreground. In the sudden silence you could hear their calls and the man bleating, “One at a time, please.” You could feel the huge crowd holding its breath, waiting. The chimp jumped to her feet and barked. The sound was like an explosion, ringing out and then echoing off the cliffs of the arena. The cameras closed in till she filled the zone, staring at the crowd. Her rage, her misery, were solid things, as tangible and visible as the table beneath her. She paused and then, with a single firm movement, gripped the bib of her overalls in both hands, lifted the hem to her mouth, bit, and tore. The rasp of the rending cloth filled the night. The bright butterfly fell in two. With her black pelt shining under the lights as if electric with animal energies, the chimp knuckled along the table, blotting out the two humans as she passed them, and was gone.
The cheering rose, the roar of the human wave. There was a new note in it now, more than the challenge to the fat-cat companies that had been trying to suppress the tape, a sense of excitement, of something special and extraordinary having happened. Eva could feel it too, with her human mind. A message had been passed, an immense gap bridged. The movements of the chimp on the table had expressed what Eva had felt at the conference—she’d known that at the time—but she now saw that they said much more. They spoke for Kelly and the other chimps and all the children of earth, the orangs and giraffes and whales and moths and eagles, which over the past few centuries had turned their backs on humankind and crawled or glided or sunk away into the dark.
“Terrific moment,” said Grog. “Time you saw it.”
“Not art,” said Mimi’s voice from the door. “Therefore not great moment.”
“Just don’t talk crap, Mother,” said Grog.
She sprang forward, her red cape swirling behind her, a
handful of bangles swinging like brass knuckles. Eva jumped clear in time for Grog to catch the flailing arm by the wrist and pull his mother down onto his lap, where he pinioned her close. It was clearly a movement they’d had plenty of practice at.
“You say crap to your mother—you who are snatching the bread from my mouth!”
“Hey! So it’s right about the bread!”
“Already I told you! The banana merchants are trying to cancel my contract! They will pay me in blood! Eva, call McAulliffe!”
“Uh?” said Eva.
“Her lawyer,” said Grog. “She calls him nine times a day. Now wait a moment, Mother. I’m going to let you go, and if you bite me, Eva’s going to bite you right back. Show her your teeth, Eva—give them a good gnash. Ouch! You . . . ! Get her, Eva!”
Mimi was on her feet, calmly undoing the clasp of her cloak. With a queenly gesture she flung it over Grog and turned smiling to Eva. Eva snickered back at her. She liked Mimi—Mimi would have gotten on well in the Reserve, she thought. Grog tossed the cloak aside and sat licking his forearm.
“Let’s get this straight,” he said. “Honeybear is definitely trying to stop the chimp commercials because our boycott is beginning to pressure them!”
“I will not pressure them only, I will massacre them! Get me McAulliffe!”
“Hold it, hold it. What are they going to do instead? Why can’t they go back to the series they had you lined up for before Eva came along?”
“Because the little poof who dreamed it up has gone off to a new agency, using same idea for different yucky drink.”
“So they’re stuck. Great. It’s a bit early, but we’ve got to ride the wave. We’ve got to have some kind of success to show our people, or the movement’s going to fold. Nobody’s got any staying power any longer. Okay. Mother, you really reckon you can make yourself enough of a nuisance to World Fruit for them to think it’s worth buying you off?”
“You never read your old mother’s contracts? Works of art! Works of art!”
“Right, you can go on massacring them till they buy you off by giving you some kind of control over the next series of chimp commercials.”
“Uh!” said Eva.
“Don’t worry,” said Grog. “I’ve got it all worked out, I hope. We’ve got to be lucky, but if we all push in the right direction we might swing it. I’m going to offer World Fruit a deal. I can’t call off the boycott—too much of a let-down—but I can tell them we’ll play it down, provided they announce that when they’ve finished this series of commercials they will shoot a new series in a natural location, using chimps behaving the way chimps used to in the wild.”
“Out of your mind, child?” said Mimi. “Me, a wildlife director? What should I wear?”
“Black jodhpurs, crimson trimmings? Parakeet on your shoulder?”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious. You won’t have to direct anything. What you’ve got to do is use any say McAulliffe can work into your contract to see that the location they actually settle for is a place called St. Hilaire.”
“Uh?” said Eva.
“Island off Madagascar. Extinct volcano. Used to be solid forest till it was felled a couple of hundred years ago. Now it’s bare rocks, apart from a few pockets of real old trees the loggers couldn’t reach. It’s no good for tourists, no beaches and hot as hell, with the odd cyclone thrown in in a bad year. And it belongs to World Fruit. There’s one bit of flat land where they’ve got a cocoa plantation, but it’s never been economically viable and now they’ve got a virus. The point is it’s just about the only location they can use. There’s patches of trees that are small enough to enclose. My movement can insist on a genuinely natural location and the chimps having time to get used to being there. Even World Fruit isn’t going to get permission to move into somewhere like Cayamoro. What d’you think, Eva?”
Eva shrugged. It seemed so trivial, this stuff about commercials and sponsors, after what she’d just seen on the shaper. Was this all that marvelous surge of human energy, that great wave of love and hope and anger, was going to produce? What difference would it make when the filming was over? A few eased human consciences. Nothing that mattered. Eva didn’t understand Grog’s excitement at all. Anyway, there were all sorts of problems he didn’t seem to have thought of. She started with an obvious one.
“Chimps behaving as chimps. They don’t know how.”
“Who don’t?”
“Jenny and the others. Trained to wear clothes. Only know what it’s like in the Public Section.”
“So we can’t take them—that’s why we’ll be taking chimps from the Reserve. Lana, Dinks, Sniff ...”
“Whuh!”
“You’ll have to pick the others. Two males besides Sniff, and that’ll mean a dozen females, won’t it? Youngsters and babies.”
“Whuh?”
“You’re not going to St. Hilaire just to shoot a few commercials. You don’t imagine that’s all I’ve been sweating my guts for or why I got you along here now? Listen ...”
Eva listened. Her pelt stirred. Her human mind kept telling her it could never work, never even begin, but while Grog talked her body became restless with excitement and she prowled the rich room, imagining shadows, imagining odors, imagining trees.
YEAH TWO,
MONTH TWELVE,
DAYS TWO AND THREE
Living in a new world . . .
Heavy, vegetable odors . . .
Racket of insects, clatter of birds . . .
Heat . . .
Dopey still with drugs, the chimps stared at the daylight. They felt the steamy heat, breathed the strange air. Their yesterday—nearly three days ago, in fact—had been spent huddled into the caves of the Reserve, with wind-whipped snow scurrying around the concrete outside. They had slept through the flights and stopovers. Only Eva—awake for the journey—had seen the various changes until the final airboat had slanted out of tropic blaze into a ridged mass of cloud, felt its way down through the murk and emerged over a huge dark sea. She had not seen the island until they circled to land, but then there it was. She had pressed her muzzle to the window, misting the glass with her breath. At first what she saw didn’t make sense, but then she had realized that what she was looking at was mainly a mountain rising almost directly from the sea, with its top all fuzzed out by the cloud base. Below that, desolation, vast jumbled slopes of bare brownish storm-eroded rock. Only here and there, darker streaks and patches, the fragmentary remains of what had once been forest before the trees had been stripped away for timber or firewood, or simply for a patch of fresh earth somebody hoped to raise a couple of crops from before the summer rains washed it away; but in these few places, in ravines and on slopes too steep to reach, the last trees still stood.
The flight path curved on. A flatter, greener area appeared. The sea came nearer, slow ocean rollers freckled with foam. Surf along rocky shores, buildings around a small harbor, trees in patterned rows, touchdown.
That had been Eva’s yesterday. She could have slept in a bed but chose to spend the night with the still-doped chimps so that she would wake among them, be already one of them as they first moved out into this other world. She had awakened before any of the others, and seen Colin bending over Lana, taking her pulse, lifting an eyelid.
“Uh?”
“Morning, Eva. Stopped raining, you’ll be glad to know. Does that every day, apparently, this time of year, unless there’s a storm. Comes on drenching at four, thirty millimeters of rain in three hours, and that’s it.”
“Uh?” said Eva again, pointing at Lana.
“Not long now. That little guy’s stirring, look, and there’s a big fellow pretty well awake next door. They’ll all be whooping about outside by lunchtime. I’m looking forward to this—it’s really something.”
Eva had grunted agreement. The same excitement ran through the whole team. They all felt themselves to be doing something extraordinary, even though it was only three weeks (they thought) and the
n back to the city, to winter, and the chimps huddling again in the caves of the grim Reserve. But for the moment it was as though they felt they were in at the birth of a new world, with the old tired world waiting and watching. Even the cameramen, who had seen so much they never admitted they were impressed by anything, couldn’t quite hide their excitement.
But in Eva’s case there was more than excitement—there was fear too, dry mouth, crawling pelt, drumming heart, cold weight in the stomach. She wasn’t planning to make her move for at least ten days, but the thought and the fear were there. She watched Wang finger sleepily at Lana’s side. Dinks’s two-month-old, Tod, was stirring too—the vets had had to give the babies smaller and more frequent shots, so they woke more readily. Colin left. Eva followed him out and was watching him lower the door of the next crate when she heard a quiet snort close behind her. She spun round and saw Sniff’s face peering through the door of the crate Colin had already visited. She knuckled over, crouched, and greeted him. There was no Tatters here, no Geronimo. Sniff would have to settle with Billy and Herman who was boss. They were older and stronger. It was important to build up his confidence.
He acknowledged her greeting with a grunt but continued to stare out at the scene beyond. She settled beside him in the doorway, looking at it too, seeing it now as far as she could with his eyes, this totally strange place, nothing like anything he’d known.
What did he see? A patch of reddish jumbled scree sloping down toward him—nothing square, nothing flat, nothing he was used to. Beyond that, dusty green hummocks—bushes—on one side. Denser green—thick growth around a scurry of water. Red scree sloping sharply up on the left. Beyond all that, much taller green, dark shadows—trees. Buzz of insects, reek of tropic growth, steamy air under low sky. A bird, bright yellow, dipping across, calling wheep-wheep-wheep. Sniff was shivering with excitement and alarm. Eva groomed for several minutes along the twitching surface of his upper arm, then rose, knuckled a few paces forward, turned, and held out her hand, palm up. Come.
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