Eva (18 page)

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.

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 which 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.”

Eva grunted. It was pretty much what Grog had outlined to her in Mimi’s apartment several months ago, not what she really wanted, she’d felt back then, when the whole thing had seemed so nearly impossible that you might as well daydream it perfect, with no cameras, no sponsors, nothing to do with the human world. Now that it was going to come true, she realized it was better than she could have hoped for. It was amazing.

“What happened?” she said. “Why? I thought we’d lost.”

“Must have looked like that,” said Grog. “All blew up bigger than I’d guessed. Your project director got a bit excited ...”

“Maria went berserk,” said Dad.

“There’s been some kind of a power struggle in the World Fruit boardroom,” said Grog. “Been going on a while—I’d heard rumors, of course—I’ve got a couple of contacts. None of them’s interested in chimps as such, but what they do care like hell about is their image. This Maria woman is a protegee of a fellow who’s part of a faction . . . hell, it’s too complicated to explain, but what you’ve got to think of is the board members sitting around watching the pictures coming in from St. Hilaire, and on another couple of screens getting the figures for world reaction to what they were seeing. Not too bad at first. Nothing to look at but trees and rock and flivvers whizzing around. Lot of interest, though—they’d
loved
the stuff from down in the other wood. They’d gotten pretty much the whole world watching, waiting, wanting to see what was going to happen. And what did they see? Look, I’ve brought some stills ...”

Grog took the pictures out of a case and passed them up. Eva leafed through . . . They’d been taken from above, at an angle, and all showed the same scene, the bare rock ledges, the bulge of the airboat’s bag, its shadow heavy on the rock, the edge of the wood at the side. At the top of the first picture, black and tiny like spiders, two chimpanzees were knuckling out along a ledge. In the next the leading chimp was throwing something. Then they were both heaving at a boulder. Then they were looking down the slope, side by side. The boulder was gone and the bag hid what had happened to the cabin of the airboat, but the attitudes of the chimps spoke like a language—you could see their sense of achievement, their aggression and resistance, their sense of their own wildness and freedom. In the next picture one of the chimps was sprawled on the ledge and the other was bending over her, while in the bottom corner—the viewpoint had shifted slightly—one man was trying to raise the barrel of a stun gun while another was trying to force it down. The next picture showed Sniff carrying Eva back along the ledge. He had somehow gotten her across his shoulder and was knuckling along three-footed, gripping her left arm with his right hand. The last picture was a close-up of the same thing. It too spoke. Looked at with human eyes, thought about with a human mind, felt with human emotions, it almost cried aloud. All the old stories were there, the sort of thing people saw in cartoons and adventures on the shaper practically every day of their lives, the lone fighters against impossible odds, the rescue from the battlefield under fire, the comradeship in the face of death. Uh uh, thought Eva. People. They’ll never understand. Not why he did it at all.