He stared, snorted more loudly, took the first pace and halted, his eyes flickering from side to side.
Come.
This time he grunted and followed her up beside the stream, into the shadows. Behind them the hidden cameras watched them go. It was about twenty minutes before they returned to wait for the others to wake, to take them out, and show them what they had discovered.
The advance team had found the place, about three hectares of real forest they could actually reach. The rains that had stripped the mountain bald had washed most of the earth out into the sea, but here and there the shape of the underlying rock had trapped pockets of soil on which fresh growth could begin. The lower end of this patch was a steep-sided valley, thick with shrubs and saplings. Farther up it closed to a sheer-walled ravine, beyond human reach, where older trees still rooted deep into the rock. Out of sight over the bare ridges on either side ran a tall electric fence. The humans camped in the dying cocoa groves well over a kilometer below.
There were remote-controlled cameras hidden throughout the area. The idea was that everything the chimps did would be filmed, with Eva helping by seeing they were often in camera range and also by setting up events and interactions to stimulate them. SMI would edit the film for wildlife programs, and suitable sections would also be dubbed with sophisticated human voices and used for commercials for Honeybear. There ought to be enough in the can after three weeks’ filming for everyone to go home. It was silly, trivial, a total waste of time and money, but none of that mattered.
It had looked as if it were going to matter at first. When they’d found out what it was going to cost, the accountants had tried to object, but by then the news had gotten out (Grog’s friends had seen to that) that World Fruit was planning to take twenty chimps to a natural habitat for an experimental period, and see what happened. The bare rumor had done more for their sales than a whole season of commercials. From being world villains they found themselves world heroes. The expedition was news. By nightfall billions of eyes would have seen that first shot, the dark shapes of two chimpanzees knuckling in silence away into the trees.
Lana was awake, inspecting Wang. Abel was already at the door, peering out bright-eyed, too young to be frightened. Dinks was stirring. The stale reek of the crate was horrible after the live air. Eva beckoned from the door to Lana, who huddled back against the crate wall. She beckoned again. Then behind her a new noise started, a loud repeated hoot as Sniff stamped to and fro in front of the four crates, threshing the ground with a branch he had broken from a bush. The familiar sound seemed to encourage Lana, who came to the door and peered out. Eva put her arm around her and kissed her, encouraging her, telling her this was a good place. There were faces at the other doors now, and the sight of one another, and of Sniff displaying to and fro, seemed to give the chimps heart. Several came out into the open, sniffing and staring around. Eva could feel their wonder, their excitement and nerves. It was all so strange, so unprepared-for. And yet, and yet . . . How many of them, besides herself, had dreamed the dream? Surely she couldn’t be the only one.
Suddenly a half-grown male called Berry broke from the trance. He rushed up the slope, tore a branch from the nearest bush and rushed to and fro, beating the branch around and hooting, half in imitation of what Sniff had been doing and half in sheer excitement and joy. The others watched him for a moment and then began to move too. They gathered at the edge of the stream and stared amazed at the rushing water. Eva joined them and crouched down to drink. The water had a sweetish, mineral taste, quite different from the many-times-treated water in the troughs of the Reserve. Perhaps the drugs made you thirsty, because almost at once the rest of the group was doing the same. When Eva rose and turned she saw Sniff and Herman sitting side by side, chewing steadily at some leaves they had torn from a bush.
There had been a lot of discussion back home about whether and how to feed the chimps during the experiment. Botanists on the preliminary expedition to the island had reported that there was enough food in the ringed patch to support twenty chimps for three weeks, provided they knew what to look for. Probably only some of the leaves were edible, and one particular bush was fairly poisonous but tasted so bitter that you knew at once and spat it out. (Eva had tested some of the samples the botanists had brought home.) There were wild fig trees, and mangoes that must have seeded from crop trees planted by people before the mountains went bald. There were roots too, probably, if you knew what to look for, and ants’ nests and grubs under the bark of old trees up the ravine. Three hectares wasn’t a lot for twenty chimps—it would be looking fairly bashed around by the time they left. Eva had been especially interested in everything the botanists could tell her. It was going to be more important than people knew. But for the moment she was thankful that Dad and the others had decided they would have to come in at night while the chimps were sleeping and leave extra food around.
She knuckled over to Herman and put her muzzle close to the fist that clasped the leaves. He cuffed her casually away—he was a big young male, strong and not very intelligent, but placid and with less than the usual share of male chimp mischief. Sniff had seen the exchange. He snapped a few twigs from the bush and passed them to Eva, who took them and munched experimentally. The taste was faintly nutty, and all but the young leaves at the tips took a lot of chewing. Not many vitamins there, she guessed. Not much else either. Chimps in the wild, Dad said, used to spend two-thirds of their day looking for food and the rest eating it when they’d found it.
By now the rest of the group had gathered around and was snatching twigs from the tree and trying the bushes nearby. Billy found a bitter one and spat the leaves out with a grunt of disgust, then went and washed his mouth out in the stream. They were used to being fed in their caves soon after they awoke, so they kept making trips back to the crates to see whether breakfast had come yet. Eva was hungry too but waited. She felt it was important not to always be the one who did things first.
In the end it was Sniff. He took Herman by the wrist and led him to the gap in the bushes he and Eva had found earlier. At the opening he turned and beckoned to Eva. Come. She rose and signaled to Lana and Dinks, but it was Abel, who nowadays associated Eva in his mind with amusements and games, who came scampering across. Beth followed, tut-tut-ting, so Lana picked up Wang and came too. Eva turned and led them into the shadows, aware by the sounds behind her that the rest of the group would trail along.
By midmorning they were up in the ravine. They had found figs and a trailing plant with sweet yellow berries and some slow white grubs in a mound of dead leaves—they tasted like shrimp without the sea flavor—and a bog plant with long pale leaves whose midrib you could crunch like celery. They had also begun to learn that trees were not as easy to climb as they looked, especially if you were used to the rigid steel branches welded to the pillars of the Reserve. Herman had one crashing fall into the bushes below and rose bewildered, still clutching the branch that had snapped on him. By now they’d eaten enough for the moment, and it was getting too hot to move, so they rested.
There were two trees of the same kind, with smooth gray many-forked branches, growing low down from opposite cliffs of the ravine and meeting over the rush of water. Two hidden cameras up in the cliffs were trained on the place, but Eva hadn’t needed to coax the others there. They had found it of their own accord and swung themselves up, draping their bodies into crooks and crotches, making a pattern of dark strong shapes against the snaking gray branches. They twitched or scratched or groomed for a while at a neighbor, or moved lethargically to a fresh perch or to join another chimp, but for the most part they stayed still.
Eva sat at the edge of the group and watched them. Deliberately she lived in the moment, refusing to think about what lay ahead. She could not imagine that she would ever be so happy again, so filled with tingling, sparkling peace. Of course it was too hot for scampering around, though the spray from the stream helped, but she could feel that there was more to the stillnes
s of the chimps than that. It was something shared, like a song, the wonder, the amazement, the deep content, the sense of having come home. She did not have to guess but knew, because she could feel the awareness going to and fro among them, shared and real, that they understood what had happened. The part that mattered, anyway. All of them, wide awake, were remembering and recognizing the dream. If nothing else happened, or if everything she and Grog had planned went wrong, this hour, this noon, would have been worthwhile.
In the early afternoon Eva experimented with making herself a nest. She was going to have to teach the others, so it was important to get it right herself first. It was easy, once you’d learned to recognize the sort of branches needed, close and whippy enough to bend and then lace together, holding them in place with your weight. Later still, she seemingly accidentally coaxed the chimps up the southern slope outside the ravine to where the humans had left the day’s rations—mostly plain chimp chow, with enough bananas to go around. Sniff and Billy had their first set-to, not a proper fight, but bluffing and challenging, and then, before anything serious happened, settling down to intense close mutual grooming. They were still at it when the rain started.
It came almost in an instant, a few large drops rattling among the leaves and then a drenching downpour. Everything streamed wet. Twenty dark faces—twenty-one including Tod’s—stared disgusted at the sky, and then the whole group went knuckling rapidly from the hill for the cover of their crates. The crates were gone. Eva had known they would be and had heard earlier that afternoon the thud of rotor blades as a flivver lifted them away. The chimps halted and stared at the blank space in dismay. The stream was roaring now with a dangerous sound, which added to their alarm. Across the valley, below where the crates had been, stretched the electric fence.
The fence had become the biggest problem in the whole expedition. The sponsors nearly called it off because of the cost and difficulty, but everyone had agreed that without one the chimps would probably go roving across the barren mountain to other patches of forest, almost impossible for humans to reach, and be lost completely. Even as it was, the whole program was months late, because the fence had taken so long to build. There should have been sun and sparkling waters, instead of this daylong sauna.
Now the chimps gazed at the fence and the barren slope beyond. To their minds there was no other place the crates could have gone but down there. Several of them knuckled over to the fence to look, naturally enough reaching hands to grip the mesh as they did so. They leaped back with barks of dismay, then gingerly reached forward and tried again, snatching their hands back at the first tingle. Some of them perhaps knew about electric fences, because there were places around the Reserve where possible escape routes had been blocked with charged wire, but they wouldn’t all have explored that far.
The rain, if anything, was heavier now. For a few minutes they scuttered to and fro along the fence, as if hoping for a gap. Sniff, more purposefully, traced the line up the right-hand ridge and over to where it turned and climbed toward the cloud base. He paused at the angle, staring out over the barren, horrible rockscape, all streaming with thousands of individual tiny waterfalls, then snorted and turned away. Eva had followed, interested both in the fence and in Sniff’s reactions, and when he saw her he snorted on a slightly different, negative, note, and led the way back down into the valley. The others were already heading up into the comparative shelter of the trees.
In the ravine the stream was a foaming fawn torrent, but near its lower end rose a stand of broad-leaved palms, with dryish patches beneath them. Here they huddled together, their drenched pelts steaming. Night fell, and suddenly they were in total dark. By the time the rain stopped an hour later, they were all asleep, but Eva, restless, awoke and saw lights moving around. Her first thought was that Dad or some of his helpers had come up to check that they were all right, but then she realized that the lights were too faint and there were far too many of them, hundreds, thousands, blinking their different codes. Fireflies. Of course. She lay for a while, listening to the roar of the stream, and at last fell truly asleep.
Sniff explored the fence in the morning. Eva had expected him to, just as he seemed to have expected her to come around with him. It was another steamy hot day, but the cloud base was higher so that you could see most of the way up the mountain. Even for chimps the climb was stiff going—for the humans who had built the fence it must have been quite a task. Every so often Sniff would stop and gingerly touch the mesh, to check that the current was active all along. At other times he paused and simply stared at the mountainside, all brownish dull rock and scree, glaring with the heavy diffused light, plunging toward the sea. From up here you could see the grove spreading across the cramped plain at the foot of the mountain, the regular green rows mottled brown with disease.
During one of his pauses Sniff gazed at the area with deep interest, then grunted, nudged Eva and pointed, not at the grove but out beyond to the tip of the island, the little harbor with a ship loading, and in an open patch beside the buildings the SMI airboat tethered firm and the two flivvers, tiny as toys with distance. His snort expressed wariness and distrust.
The fence turned again, running sideways across the slope now, and climbed steeply to cross the ridge that lower down became the left-hand flank of their valley. At the crest Sniff halted. This was the highest point of the enclosure. From here you could see a whole new expanse of mountain, almost the same as the other side but steeper, with sheer cliff in places and in others loose rock at such a slope that it seemed poised for a fresh fall. There was another difference. About two kilometers away, nearer to the peak, was a large patch of dull green—trees.
They were too far off for Eva to tell whether they were real trees, or just bushes that had somehow retained their roothold on the incredible slope, but she could understand why they’d never been cleared—there was almost no way any human could reach them. She stared and stared. It was no use trying to work out a possible route—too much of the slope between was hidden—but she couldn’t help trying. “Take as many of the others as you can with you,” Grog had said. “If the worst comes to the worst you’ll have to go alone. Give me a month.” Grog had never been on the island—he’d only seen photographs. From them it looked as if there’d be places to hide and enough to eat. He couldn’t have known.
She heard Sniff grunt and turned. He was already climbing back down the ridge toward the ravine. Eva waited. She heard him crashing about below, and then he came back carrying a small branch he had torn from a bush. When he reached the fence he put the branch against it, at first just brushing the leaf tips quickly along and then withdrawing it. Feeling no shock, he pushed harder. The mesh bowed out under his weight, but the fence had been engineered to stand such attacks—Dad would know that the chimps were smart enough to try something like that if they chose—and the branch broke first.
Sniff wasn’t ready. He fell solidly against the wire and got the full force of the current. All his hair shot erect. He jumped back and might have gone tumbling helplessly down toward the stream if Eva hadn’t grabbed at his arm and caught him. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. She eased him into a crouch, where he stayed gasping while she tried to calm him by grooming the trembling pelt along his spine. At last he gave a long sigh and straightened, then turned his head to gaze at the trees on the far slope. He got up, went back to the fence, and studied it minutely, his muzzle only a few inches away from the mesh. After a while, with a grunt of disappointment, he continued their exploration down the slope, but now didn’t pause either to test the current or to look at the mountain.
Just as they were gathering for their midday rest in the ravine, a whooping noise began from down the slope. It was, in fact, the recorded call of a howler monkey, chosen because it was natural enough not to alarm the chimps but couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. If it had come in short bursts, it would have been a signal that Dad or someone wanted to see her urgently, but the steady unbroken versi
on just meant Come if you can. Sniff had come back from his reconnoiter in an aggressive mood and had had several confrontations with Billy. Now they were making it up, clasped together, absorbedly peering and combing each other’s fur. Nobody but Sniff would have been likely to keep an eye on Eva. Slowly she edged herself clear and slipped away.
Dad was waiting by the gate, fanning the flies away with a branch. Sweat streamed down his beard.
“Having fun?” he said.
Eva grunted enthusiasm.
“And your pals?”
“Uh.”
“The shaper chaps are pleased with the pictures they’re getting. There’s one long sequence, yesterday, when you were settling into those trees in the gorge. That was lovely to see. Like a Japanese print.”
He had brought the keyboard. Eva picked it up and pressed the keys.
“Lovely to do,” she said.
Eva had heard the enthusiasm in his voice and was glad but at the same time bothered. In a few days’ time she was going to let him down very badly. He was doing his best for her and for the chimps, he thought. He really wanted them to be happy. He loved them, in his way. Probably he understood them better than any human alive, but still she didn’t dare tell him.
“What happened up at the top of the enclosure this morning?” he said.
“Uh?”
“We saw you and Sniff going off on your fence survey. Characteristic—he’s a very bright lad. We don’t have any cameras right up there in the open, so the next thing we knew was the alarm bell ringing in the camp. The circuit didn’t break, so we left it until we saw you coming back down the far side.”
Inwardly Eva frowned. They hadn’t told her about the alarm bell.
“He fell against the fence,” she said. “He’d been testing it with a branch. He’s learned now.”
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