Eva (2 page)

Chimps were different. Chimps were a special case because they were so close to humans, our cousins but not us. It was worth keeping real chimps alive for research you couldn’t do on humans, a pool of chimps big enough to breed from, so that there were animals to spare for scientists to use. Of course, now that they’d lost all the other big animals, now that they’d found that shapings, however solid-seeming, weren’t really a substitute, people had become interested in real chimps. More than interested—obsessed, almost. Easily the most popular commercials on the shaper were for a soft drink called Honeybear that used live chimps dressed up as people. All the cities had branches of the International Chimp Pool where you could go and see a few chimps in big cages. But the main sections of the Pool were right here, part of the university, and Eva’s dad was Director of Primate Zoology, in charge of research. So Eva had grown up among chimps.

In fact, she’d been one of Dad’s research projects. Of course, she’d met humans her own age because Mom and Dad, like other parents, put their child into playgroups so that she would learn to socialize, but Eva had always felt just as at home among chimps. In some ways more, in fact—she’d been making chimp chatter before she said her first human word, and before she was three Dad had been using her to help him understand how the chimps’ minds were working. He knew almost everything there was to know about them, from the outside, but Eva could joke with their jokes, feel with their feelings, see why some simple-to-humans problem baffled them when they could solve trickier-looking problems almost at once.

Of course, Mom and Dad had needed to be careful. A small chimp is enormously stronger than a human baby; it’s even smarter for the first few months; but Eva had soon learned how to behave, how to use the grunts and gestures that meant “You’re the boss” and “Please” and “Sorry, didn’t mean it,” and so on. She’d gotten along with chimps pretty well, always.

And now she was one herself. Okay.

She felt a sort of mild amazement. All her feelings were calm, a bit dreamy. They must be pumping something into her bloodstream, she reckoned, to control her shock and rejection. This must be real panic time for them out there, whoever they were who whispered into the little speaker in Mom’s ear. Anyway, there were questions to ask. She pressed keys.

“How . . . ?”

No need to say any more with Mom. With Dad you’d have had to spell the question right out, but Mom was used to hints and garblings because she worked in the Housing Bureau, helping ordinary people straighten out ordinary problems like back rent or rowdy neighbors or trying to get away with an unlicensed pregnancy.

“It’s something called neuron memory, darling,” said Mom. “Dad says you’ll have learned about it at school, so you probably know more than me. You were in an irreversible coma after the accident, and Joan Pradesh heard about it and said she’d try and . . . and do
this
, if we wanted. She’s never done a human before, you see. It was a risk, she said, but we thought, in the end . . . well . . . your poor body, it was so broken, and just lying there . . . anyway, we said yes. And it’s worked. That’s marvelous, isn’t it? But now you’ve got to be very patient and just lie and wait for all the connections to strengthen, one after another. You’re there. You’re joined up. But the connections aren’t strong enough to use yet. Have I got that right?”

She’d asked the question to the air. The speaker began its whisper.

Neuron memory, thought Eva. Joan Pradesh. Of course. And yes, she had studied it at school last year. The thing is, you aren’t just a lot of complicated molecules bundled together inside a skin—you’re that too, but that’s not what makes you
you
. What
you
are is a pattern, an arrangement, different from any other pattern that ever was or will be. Your pattern began to grow from the moment you were conceived, but the things that make you so sure you are
you
came later: your discoveries of the world, from your first blurred peerings with your baby eyes, and all your thoughts and imaginings and dreams and memories make up that pattern, and are kept there by the neurons in your brain that have sent their wriggling axons and dendrites branching and joining and passing messages to one another through the incredible complex networks they have grown into. What old Professor Pradesh, Joan’s father, had found was that the pattern actually “remembers” how it got there; and given the right treatment and an “empty” brain, it can be persuaded to go through the whole process over again. Professor Pradesh had made his discovery with very simple creatures, flatworms mainly, but Joan had carried on the research until she was working with mammals, all the way up to chimps. And now, humans.

Eva pressed a few keys.

“How long?” said her voice.

“Two hundred and thirty-eight days.”

It was the wrong answer, for once. Even so, Eva’s mind juddered with the thought. Eight whole months gone from your life, blank! Of course, it would take that long for the pattern to grow—in the first Eva it had taken almost fourteen years.

“No,” she said. “How long till?”

“Sorry,” said Mom. “It was just . . .”

Of course. Mom knew the exact count of days. She’d felt each of them grind through her, never knowing if the risk would be worth it or if she’d get no more than part of her daughter back or perhaps just a mumbling kind of nobody trapped in Kelly’s body. No wonder she looked so much older. The speaker whisper stopped. Mom nodded.

“Joan’s been saying you mustn’t try and start waking muscles up before they’re ready. You must try not even to think about it. Just let it happen. She wasn’t really ready for you to find out what . . . what’s happened, but now you
have
found out she’s probably going to change her plans and start letting you move your face muscles. She didn’t want to before because you’d have tried to talk ...”

The whisper started again. Eva lay looking at the face in the mirror. Me, she thought. Not Kelly, me. Good-bye, blue eyes, good-bye soft pale skin, good-bye, nose. Perhaps Kelly had been pretty—pretty to another chimp. Except that chimps didn’t seem to think like that, judging by the way the males used to go mad about moth-eaten old Rosie when she was in season . . .

The brown eyes peered down in the way you might gaze at an animal. Was there a glimmer there? Eva, inside?

Mom sighed and squared her shoulders, ready to explain yet more, but Eva closed her eyes. She was tired, tired of newness and strangeness and the world of people. She made her voice say “No.” Not enough. With an effort she chose more keys. All she wanted to do was hide, vanish, creep away into dark green shadows.

“Sleep now, please,” said her voice.

They let her go gently. Her last thought was to wonder what had happened to Kelly, the real Kelly, the one who used to live in this furry skin. Where was
she
now?

DAY SEVEN

Perhaps they’d let her wake gently, so that the dream had floated up with her almost at the surface, or perhaps it was just the idea of holding, because that was one of the things in the dream, but at any rate Eva awoke and found that this time she could really remember what she’d been dreaming. It was still very strange, not like any of the dreams she usually had. There was no story, no adventures, only the idea, the images, the feelings—herself, moving among branches, reaching with long arms, swinging, holding . . .

Holding with her feet if she chose.

She lay with her eyes shut, living the dream again. Then, instead of angling the mirror to show her the window, left it where it had been when they sent her to sleep. She opened her eyes and looked.

The blind was up and morning light streamed across the bed. The face in the mirror, surrounded by its tangle of tubes and cables, was still that of a stranger. Large pale ears stuck out on either side through strong black hair; in the middle was the pinky-brown hummock of the face parts, with the huge lips, the nothing nose and the forward-facing nostrils; the brown eyes were bright with thought. She pressed keys. Deliberately she filled her mind with ideas of welcome.

“Hi, there,” said her voice.

Was there a glimmer in the eyes? Kelly’s answer? Or just the reflection of Eva’s own signal? No knowing.

“You’ve never seen a tree,” she said.

That might not be quite true. The chimps in the Research Section of the Pool had metal-and-plastic frames to climb on, but Dad always took a couple on family outings if he could, so Kelly might have seen trees in the city parks, but she’d certainly not have been allowed to climb one because of the difficulty of getting her down and the damage she might do while she was up there. In any case, those would have been city trees, tamed, guarded, numbered, precious. The trees in the dream had been wild, part of a forest no one looked after, tree tangled into tree, stretching on and on, a forest where people had never been, a forest before there were people.

She swung the mirror to take her usual look at the city. It was a duller day, with the last lights just going out as the sun rose behind high thin cloud and the city’s own haze, the dust and fumes made by half a billion people living and working together, beginning to form among the high rises. She could still see about five kilometers. Nothing. The city stretched on far beyond that, far beyond sight on the clearest morning, endless. Like the forest in the dream.

Of course, Eva thought, I might have put the dream there. Me. Eva. Knowing when I went to sleep that I was living in a chimp’s body, I might have put chimp arms and feet into the dream. I might have invented the forest, from things I’ve seen on shaper programs. Only . . .

Only I was having the dream before I knew about Kelly. And it was the same dream. Perhaps knowing just helped me think about it, hold on to it, but it was there before any of that. Perhaps it isn’t my dream at all—not Eva’s, I mean. Perhaps it’s Kelly’s.

Hi, Kelly. You there?

The mirror was angled to show the window, so she sent the unspoken message inward. She wasn’t really serious. It was more of a private joke, a whimsy. Her lips twitched. She actually felt them move.

Oh, great, she thought. They’re letting me have my mouth back. She moved the mirror to show her the bed again and tried a smile. The image above her wrinkled its mouth at the corners.

There was a game you could play with small chimps before they became too strong for you to hold still. You put the chimp on your lap, gripping its arms to stop it from grabbing, and then you moved a grape across in front of its face and watched a sort of wave ripple along the lips from side to side, following the grape, trying to suck it in. Chimps use their long and mobile mouths almost like an extra hand for feeling and touching and trying things out, as well as for all the grimaces that make up a lot of chimp language.

Forgetting about the dream, Eva lay and experimented. There wasn’t a lot she could try, because they didn’t seem to have awakened her other face muscles yet, or her jaw, but it was exciting enough to be able to move anything at all. She hadn’t really begun before Dad came in.

“Hi, kid,” he said.

“Sorry,” she tapped. “Fun.”

A slight pause while he put in the missing words. You didn’t get this sort of blip with Mom, but Dad thought in whole sentences, with verbs and so on.

“That’s fine,” he said. “Only don’t push it—we’ll have to see how it all goes. How are you feeling?”

“Funny. Things in my blood?”

He didn’t get it.

“Stop shock?” she added.

The pause was different this time, while he decided how much to tell her.

“Well, yes,” he said. “We felt it was safer. As Mom told you, your neuron linkages appear complete, but we have no way of knowing how secure they are. You have been through an extremely risky procedure, my darling. We calculated that there were about four chances in five that we would fail.”

“Only hope. Or dead.”

“That’s right.”

There was something in his tone. Dad had never been as close to Eva as Mom had, but he had loved her always and been extremely proud of her good looks. He’d kept snapshots of her in his wallet, and portrait photos in his office. Now it crossed her mind to wonder whether there’d been a funeral yet.

Dad shook his head as if he were trying to shake her picture out of his mind.

“You have to remember that with you we are in new territory,” he said. “You are the first of Joan’s subjects to be capable of influencing the procedure of neuron memory by conscious thought. You are the first to be properly aware of the passage of time and therefore to be able to wish to hurry the process along. You are also the first to whom we have felt the kind of moral responsibility one has toward a human being. All this means that we are going ...”

“Hey!”

Eva had found how to make her toy do a sort of squawk that she used as a “Hey!” code. Conversations were boring if you couldn’t interrupt, but it still took a second or two to work. Dad stopped, blinked, thought back.

“Of course, we have a moral responsibility to all living things,” he said. “As a zoologist, life is my trade, so I feel this more strongly than most. I feel it especially toward chimpanzees. Still, it is different from the responsibility we have toward any single human being. Okay?”

Eva would have liked to argue, but it would have taken too long and, anyway, Dad was difficult to argue with and her own thoughts were all in a mess, so she said nothing. Dad, typically, assumed she’d agreed.

“Now, the danger point does not lie in your conscious mind,” he said. “You understand and can accept that what we’ve done was, as you said, the only hope. The danger lies at the unconscious level, over which you don’t have the same control. That is why we have to control it for you, for the time being, until it too has learned to accept what has happened. It is the danger point for two reasons—first, as I say, because you can’t persuade it by rational means not to reject your new body, and second, because it is itself the main interface with that body. When you think, you think with a human mind. When you blink, you blink with a chimpanzee’s involuntary reaction. Your own unconscious mind lies along that border. It is not, of course, as simple as that, but that will have to do. The upshot is that we are going to have to be very cautious indeed about reducing any drugs that help suppress your unconscious tendency to rejection.”

“Okay. Only little as poss.”

“You will have to cooperate with Dr. Alonso, who will be your psychiatrist. Her main preoccupation in the next few weeks will be to watch out for the slightest signs that ...”

Eva switched off. She couldn’t help it. She’d been awake only about twenty minutes, but she felt exhausted already. What Dad was telling her was vital, and she should have been straining to understand every detail, but the way he did it made her mind go numb. It used to do that sometimes, even before. Dad was a natural explainer, lecturer, arranger of thoughts and facts into orderly patterns. His beard would wag, and his blue eyes—sharper and smaller than Mom’s—would flash with the thrill of knowledge. His students thought he was great, which made Eva feel guilty that somehow the beard-wag and the eye-flash were like a hypnotist’s signals, making her mind drift off elsewhere.

Now it drifted off to home. The three of them, Mom and Dad and Eva, having supper after some ordinary day, Dad talking, Mom listening, and Eva looking out the window and watching a million lights come on as dusk thickened across the city. Suppers must have been sad this last year, she thought. Not all families loved one another. Eva had friends one of whose parents had left, or perhaps both had stayed, but they’d bitched and quarreled. She’d been luckier than some. She’d felt pretty secure, always. But suppose something—she couldn’t think what—had happened that had forced her parents to choose between their jobs and their family, well, there wouldn’t have been any question with Mom; Mom was interested in her work and thought it was worth doing, but she wouldn’t have hesitated. With Dad, you couldn’t be sure. If he’d had to give up his work he’d have given up half himself. More than half, perhaps. So perhaps he wouldn’t . . .

She looked at him as he leaned over the bed, explaining. Just beyond his head the mirror showed a bald patch in the middle of his scalp. It fascinated her. She longed to be able to sit up and rootle among the browny-gray hairs. From beyond the reflected scalp her own face gazed down. Seeing the man’s head and the chimp’s so close together, she was struck by a thought.

“Hey!”

Dad stopped and waited, a bit impatient.

“Kelly’s brain?” said Eva. “Big enough?”

“Yes. You have, in fact, got less than you used to have, but luckily there is a bit of waste space in brains. I think you’ll find you’re all there, darling. Where was I? Oh, yes ...”

But Eva had stopped listening again. The thought of grapes had returned, not out of her conscious mind but up from below. A whole bunch of grapes, purple, the bloom untouched, the skins bulging with sweet juices. Saliva spurted inside her mouth, and a machine sucked it away. She could actually feel it happening, which meant they were letting her have more of her mouth back. How long since she’d really eaten, how long since she’d had a taste on her tongue? Not since that picnic at the sea.

Dad had cocked his head to listen to the metallic whisper in his ear.

“Right,” he said. “Apparently you’re due for a nap, darling. Take it easy. Don’t try to hurry things up, and you’ll do fine. See you tomorrow, eh?”

Already Eva could feel the drift to darkness. She pressed a few keys.

“Love to Mom.”

“Yes, of course.”

Her eyes had closed before he was out the door. The first thing I’ll ask for is grapes, she thought. Kelly would have loved grapes. All chimps do.