Eva

by Peter Dickinson

  The sixth day, people came to the wood. They were lowered from a new flivver, larger and more complicated, which seemed to have no trouble hovering close in to the slope on the far side and letting them down on to a ledge. There were three of them, with ropes, helmets, rock axes. Two of them were clearly mountaineers, moving with confidence, balancing erect on the precipitous slope and helping the third one over the trickier spots. Just before they reached the trees this third man took off his helmet to mop his brow and Eva, watching from a branch three terraces farther down, recognized him. He was Joey, the head keeper at the Reserve. He wasn’t carrying a rock ax but a stun gun. He checked the mechanism before he went in under the trees.

  When they struggled in along the terrace Eva followed them while Sniff led the others down to the lower end of the wood. She didn’t dare get too close, so only caught odd glimpses of what they were up to. They didn’t seem to be doing real hunting, but spent most of their time studying the ground, presumably for chimp droppings and other traces, but they were out of luck. Because of the angle on which the trees grew, rising in tiers, somewhat more light reached the ground than it would have in a level patch of forest, and the going along the terraces was impeded by undergrowth, which also tended to hide the odd dropping that might have gotten scattered there. The hunters would have needed to chance on one of the places where the chimps nested or sheltered, and where the traces were much more obvious, but those were all farther down the mountain. After about a couple of hours they called up the flivver on a commo, made their way into the open, and were hauled back up.

  That same afternoon Eva noticed two small ships moored out to sea. They carried their own flivvers, which rose and started to scurry unsystematically around the mountain. Both flivvers were caught unaware by the evening downpour and must have had a tricky time getting back down. It didn’t look as though they were part of the main expedition. There was plenty of room in the harbor, but the ships stayed out at sea, riding the slow ocean swell. A new airboat came past next day, loitering under the heavy sky, with bright green bag and letters ABS painted in vermilion along it. ABS was a shaper company, one of SMI’s main rivals. Uh-huh, thought Eva. Grog. Give us a month, he’d said, if you can manage it. The way things were going she could have stayed out for years.

  “You’ll get world-wide interest,” he’d said. “Okay, you’ll have that already, but it’ll all be under SMI’s control. They can turn it off like a tap if they want to. But you make yourself news in the middle of it, and SMI can’t copyright that. The rest will be onto the island like vultures, watching every damn thing they’re doing. If they put a foot wrong, the world’s going to know. They’ll be everybody’s baddies.”

  “They can sue us. They can make the Pool bankrupt.”

  “They’ll never dare. I think you could bust that contract anyway—I’ve gotten advice—but it won’t get that far. You’ve got a very fair deal to offer them when they come around. Which they will. Just give me a month.”

  “Uh.”

  Now Eva began to wish she’d done what Grog had wanted and smuggled a receiver into the enclosure somehow and brought it with her, so that she could pick up the news, find out how things looked from out there. All she knew was what she saw between the screening leaves. But the next day a different airboat came past, small and unglamorous but making a lot of noise because it was playing Tanya Olaf’s song on its loudspeakers. On the flank of its bag was the broken butterfly and a message: THE WORLD’S ON YOUR SIDE, EVA.

  There were a dozen ships moored out at sea by now and something passing overhead almost all day long. It became impossible to keep the chimps still while the watchers went by. It didn’t have to be SMI who spotted them—any of the other companies would immediately send the pictures around the world, and then the rest would know. Eva realized that it had happened when she woke one morning and heard the noise, flivver-hum on twenty different notes and the deeper buzz of airboat engines. A big voice was calling from a speaker, and the Tanya Olaf music was blasting out full volume. She couldn’t hear any words above the other noises.

  Climbing cautiously up through the tree where she’d nested, keeping close to the trunk so as not to sway the leaf cover with her weight, Eva reached a point from which she could see several patches of sky. There was hardly a moment when one of them didn’t have some kind of flying machine passing through it. Something came rattling and tearing along the treetops to her left, and a moment later she saw the bulk of an airboat blocking out one whole patch. Under its cabin trailed a rope ladder. It wasn’t the SMI boat. Perhaps they were hoping Eva would grab the ladder and scramble up and give them an exclusive interview. Crazy.

  Soon there were people being lowered on to the bare terraces beyond the wood. Climbers with light ladders and ropes explored up and down for the least impeded routes into the trees, and then the hunting groups made their way in, parties of three, one carrying a gadget like a camera with a giant lens as well as a stun gun slung across his back, and one with an ordinary portable shaper with the SMI logo on its side. The first man pointed his gadget up among the treetops and also at any mound of fallen branches that looked as though it might be hiding something. Eva guessed it must be some kind of sensor that would register the radiation from an animal body, hidden among leaves. They worked systematically along the terrace while the flying machines buzzed around overhead, invisible.

  This was bad. She didn’t know what to do. She had come to the edge of the wood to watch the landing, and Sniff had come too (he could smell that she was coming into estrus and wouldn’t leave her side). The others were farther down. There were at least two parties of hunters between them now. The chimps’ whole instinct would be to climb for safety. They couldn’t work out they were actually better off on the ground, provided they weren’t on the same level as the hunters, because then the jut of the terraces would screen them from the sensor. Eva had trouble enough to get Sniff to stay down and wait for this group of hunters to move past, two terraces below. Then she and Sniff could move down behind them, and join up.

  She never got the chance. When the nearest party was almost immediately below her she heard the bipping call sign of a commo. A man’s voice muttered into the handset, then spoke, calling to someone else a few meters off.

  “They’ve located ’em. B Gang.”

  A passing flivver drowned any answers. By the time it had gone the men were picking their way back along the terrace. Eva and Sniff followed toward the edge of the wood and saw that one of the other gangs was out on the rock face already, waiting to be picked up by the flivver, ferried down the slope, and landed again. The SMI airboat was hovering close in with cables dangling, ready to moor. In the sky overhead thirty or forty flying machines maneuvered for a view of the hunt.

  Sick in her heart, full of the sense of failure, Eva led the way down the terraces. Sniff came reluctantly, very nervous, constantly making small warning snorts and grunts. If he hadn’t been so interested in her for other reasons, he would probably have stayed behind. She took a route she knew well by now, mainly from tree to tree without touching the ground. She had no idea what she would do, could do. Hide by herself? Grog had said he could still have used her if she’d been the only one to get free. It wouldn’t be easy. She’d need to hunt for food, to spend several hours on that. She had to sleep. And anyway Sniff would be tagging along. Bright though he was, he wouldn’t understand about the sensors. Besides, alone wasn’t enough. For Grog it might be, but Eva knew that a lone chimp is almost a kind of ghost, not quite real. It was the group that counted. From the very first, she’d been determined to take Lana and the others with her. If they were caught, then it was all over.

  Their route took them almost to the edge of the wood. The airboat was moored now, unloading what looked like nets. Yes, of course. You couldn’t just stun a chimp ten meters up a tree—you’d have to catch it as it fell, or it could be killed when it hit the ground. So if the chimps kept moving, if she could reach them and lead
them away through the tree-tops . . .

  It wouldn’t work. They’d be terrified already, with the bustle in the wood and the racket of machines above. Their instinct would be to climb as high as they could and cling. Without thinking what she was doing, Eva continued on down until she was only a couple of terraces above the one on which the men were going to and fro. Here at last she paused and tried to think. Her mind buzzed. She felt as if she were being wrenched apart, back into her two selves, but it was her human mind that kept telling her that the best she could do was go and join the others and try and get them clear and if she couldn’t, then be caught with them, be shot, and fall and fail—nobody would really get hurt if the hunters did their job properly. Her chimp half simply knew it had to hide.

  Something happened while she was still hesitating. Through the buzz of engines she heard a new noise, a cry from throats, a human cheer. Instantly she understood that someone had been caught. Too late. All she could do now was wait and watch. People came hurrying out along the terrace. There was a rope stretched out as a handrail to help them across the rock face to where the airboat was moored. Somebody passed out poles and canvas from the cabin—stretchers. The people hurried off with them into the wood.

  Eva waited. After some while the people came back, slowly, struggling to maneuver the stretcher over the difficult ground among the trees. They came and went, in glimpses. She craned. Somehow there always seemed to be an obstruction, a bush, a tree trunk, the people themselves, between her and the pale canvas. Near the edge of the wood they paused. An argument began. Somebody spoke into a handset. Others peered out at the buzzing watchers in the sky above. A woman came scrambling across the rock from the airboat, carrying what looked like a sheet. Yes, of course. They didn’t want the world to see them carrying a dead-looking chimp across the open surface between the wood and the airboat—bad image. The group parted to let the woman through, and now she could see the body on the stretcher. It was Lana.

  Rage exploded. Eva didn’t hear herself scream, wasn’t aware of her rush through the branches till she saw the people turn and point, and a gun go up. The movement stopped her, changed the course of her attack. Even in the middle of the madness she knew she couldn’t cope with people carrying stun guns. If the man fired, he missed. By then Eva was hurling herself out and down toward the edge of the wood, toward the open slope where the airboat was tethered. Perhaps some tiny part of her mind told her that if she could disable the airboat the people wouldn’t be able to take Lana away, but all she felt was the need to attack, to break and smash and destroy. Anything human would do, and there was the airboat, huge and smug, trapped by its moorings on the rock below her. She picked up a loose rock and slung it. It bounced off the bag. Next time she aimed better and heard a crash from the cabin. The terrace on which she’d been hiding continued as a bare ledge across the rock face, like the others above and below, before narrowing and becoming just part of the slope. Immediately above the airboat it was blocked by a large boulder. Eva knuckled toward it, slinging loose stuff as she went. When she reached the boulder she gave it a heave, but it stayed firm. She started to scramble over it, looking for more missiles, but at this point she heard a grunt behind her, looked back, and saw that Sniff had followed and was bending to see if he could move it. She dropped on the far side, bent too, and heaved. The boulder stirred. They grunted and heaved together, rolling it from its bed and over the edge. It struck the rim of the ledge below and bounced, turning as it fell, straight into the cabin of the airboat, smashing clean through it and on in great leaps down the mountain.

  Eva gave a great whoosh of satisfaction. As it ended, something slapped into her arm, just below the elbow, hurting like fury. She looked down and saw the dart of a stun gun protruding from her pelt. Before she could snatch it out she was in darkness.

  Waking. Strange, drowsy, cold, the dream of trees . . .

  Mutter and buzz and rumble—flivvers!

  The dart!

  Where . . . ?

  Forcing her eyes open, fighting the remnants of the drug in her bloodstream, Eva saw nothing but dark mist with vague shapes in it. She thought for a moment there must be something wrong with her eyes, but then she heard a grunt, and a face came close to hers, peering into her eyes. Sniff. Every hair of the gray whiskers below his mouth had a droplet of mist at the end. She grunted a welcome and eased herself on to her elbow to look around.

  Of course. They were up in the cloud layer. That was why it was so cold. They were on a ledge under a sort of fir with drooping branches from which dangled blobs of moss like seaweed, the shapes she’d seen in the mist. She knew the place. It was quite a long way up. The buzz of the flivvers and airboats came from below—fewer of them? Or just farther away?

  How long? What time was it? The drug from a dart usually lasted a couple of hours. She tried to sense where the weight of the sun fell, the way she used to when she lay in the hospital . . . there. Early afternoon—that’d be about right. Plenty of daylight still for the people to find them. Straining her ears, filtering out the noise of the motors, she heard no sound of a hunt.

  She felt decidedly sore. There was a cut on her thigh and bruises everywhere. Sniff must have carried or dragged her all this way, scrambling up from terrace to terrace, taking her with him any old way. Would he know about darts? Yes, probably. The keepers in the Reserve had to use them occasionally, and if Sniff had seen it happen he’d have taken an interest, tried to work it out. Good old Sniff.

  They stayed together all afternoon. No one came near them. When they looked for food they moved with caution. The trees were different up in the cloud layer, with the fruit unripe and little sweetness in the leaves. In the dusk, almost by accident, Sniff caught his first marmot. Just before it got dark they moved down to the warmer terraces below.

  Eva awoke hungry but alert. No noises in the air at all—too early for humans. Cautiously she climbed a tree and peered around. The sky seemed empty, but there were a lot more ships offshore, three with airboats tethered above them. The sky was its usual sullen layer, and the sea dark and slow-moving. Sniff joined her and looked around. They moved to a better tree and began to feed.

  They were still there when they heard the motor, an airboat, not a flivver. They froze and waited. Over the wood the motor cut out and was replaced by a burst of music—the Tanya Olaf song. That stopped too. A voice boomed from a loudspeaker.

  “Eva, this is Grog. Your dad and I will be landing on the rock face to the south of the trees. No one else will be there. Can you come and talk?”

  Starting and stopping its motor, the airboat worked systematically up the hillside, repeating its message half a dozen times. When it came into view Eva saw it was the one with the broken butterfly and the message for her on its side. It could still be a trick, she thought. You couldn’t be sure of recognizing Grog’s voice, distorted like that, but she didn’t care. She wanted to know what had happened to Lana.

  Sniff tried to stop her, barring her path and displaying at her, and she had to calm him and groom him before he’d let her go on. By the time they reached the edge of the trees the airboat was already moored and Dad and Grog were waiting on a ledge beside it. The sky overhead was even more crowded than yesterday.

  Eva hooted, but they didn’t hear her above the noise of motors, so she lowered herself into the open and beckoned, then went back under the screening leaves and climbed on to a branch. Sniff watched from higher up, making little snorts of anxiety as Dad led the way to the foot of the tree. He looked absolutely exhausted. Eva reached down and took her keyboard from him when he handed it to her. Immediately she tapped out a message.

  “Sorry. I had to.”

  “I’m aware that that is what you felt,” said Dad.

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, it’s done now. I’m here in my legal capacity as your parent to tell you that I assent on my and your mother’s behalf to the arrangement that Mr. Kennedy tells me you wish to make with your sponsoring companies, and w
hich they in their turn have now agreed to.”

  “Is Lana all right?” said Eva.

  Dad blinked.

  “She’s fine, as far as I know,” he said. “Haven’t you seen her?”

  “Uh?”

  “They never took her off the hillside,” said Grog. “They got a change of orders. I better explain. Your dad’s been having a bad time, and not just worrying about you. There’ve been some pretty severe personality clashes, with your dad being accused of everything under the sun. On one side he can’t help feeling you’ve let him down pretty badly, and on the other he’s threatened with the big legal stick for helping you set this up. Right, sir?”

  “Forget it,” said Dad. “Tell her about the agreement.”

  The bitterness in his voice wasn’t quite real, Eva could tell. It was partly a kind of play-acting, putting himself in the center of the zone and extracting as much drama as he could from the moment. What he really minded, probably, was Eva’s seeming to trust Grog more than she trusted him.

  “It’s really a sort of three-way, maybe four-way agreement if you count the chimps,” said Grog. “World Fruit will set up a trust with the Chimp Pool as joint trustees. They lease St. Hilaire to the trust. They and SMI sponsor it. The Pool moves the major part of the Reserve out here. SMI to have exclusive filming rights, where possible by remote control cameras, and World Fruit exclusive commercial use of any such film. Human access to be kept to a minimum—we haven’t gotten all the details worked out.”