Eva (3 page)

DAY SEVENTEEN

But the dream itself was changing. It was Eva’s fault. Sometimes even in the middle of the dream she was aware of herself as a human mind, an alien in the forest. She had thought about the dream, knowing everything the human Eva knew, so now as she reached and clambered and rested she carried the human knowledge with her.

The simplest change was that sometimes the dreams had stories. These might be a plus. She had adventures. She might look down between the branches and see men wearing clothes and carrying guns, walking on the forest floor, and she’d know the way you do in dreams that they had time-traveled from the future and were coming to cut down the forest so that a city could be built that would house the overflow of people from the bursting future world, and only Eva could stop them. Sometimes the stories were a minus. In the worst of these she was digging into a termite nest and found just below the surface a human face, Eva’s own old face, gazing with blank blue eyes at the sky, still alive, but with ants going in and out of the nostrils. Mostly the dreams were neither plus nor minus but muddled, the way human dreams are. The one she called Kelly’s dream hadn’t been like that. It had been simple, until Eva had brought her knowledge into it. She would never have it like that again.

She dreamed ordinary human dreams too, doing and seeing things in her old body, but nearly always the one she awoke with was the one about trees. Then she would lie with her eyes shut and decide where she wanted the mirror, what would be the first thing she saw. Though she always chose the same it was still a conscious decision, an effort of will not to go back to the old game of guessing the weather. She opened her eyes and gazed up and made her voice say “Hi.” As soon as they gave her her jaw and throat back, she added the proper little pant and grimace of greeting and tried to mean it. That helped.

Dad had been right. Suppose she’d awakened and seen what they’d done to her and her bloodstream hadn’t been stuffed with dope to help her stand the shock, then all of her, everything that used to be Eva, would have shrieked its
No!
It would have been like that however much she’d agreed, with her conscious mind, that she wanted to live in a chimp body, that it was far better than dying. Now, as they slowly cut the dope down, she could feel that the shriek was faintly there. The morning after she’d had the ant dream—she told Dr. Alonso about that because it had scared her so much—they put the dope right back up and started again, but Eva knew she couldn’t live like that forever. Kelly’s body wasn’t just something she had to get used to; it was something she had to learn to be happy about. Okay, it
was
better than dying, but that wasn’t enough. You had to awaken and open your eyes and see your new face and like what you saw. You had to make the human greeting and the chimp greeting and mean them.

The old Eva could never have done it, the one who used to skate and ski and play volleyball at school. They’d been right to make her come to life slowly, little by little, rejoicing in having a mouth to chew with, a throat that would swallow, a real moving arm she could lift and look at. Every day, as a sort of exercise, she forced herself to think of the third Eva, the one who’d come in between, after the accident but before the waking, a sort of nothing person, a sleeping mind in a smashed body. It was
that
that she had to compare this new Eva with, not the girl who used to skate and ski. This must be better than that.

Sometimes when they removed a tube or a wire, the place where it had joined felt sore, and even that was a plus. To be hurt, you have to be alive.

Alive but clumsy. The first movements, lip-ripples and hoots and chewings, had been misleading. The morning they let her have her arm back, she awoke and realized that in her last minutes of sleep she had been caressing her hand along her hairy thigh, troubled in her dream because the fingers could feel and the thigh couldn’t, so it was like stroking a rug. Then she was awake and found her whole arm moving. She had made her greetings to the face in the mirror before she realized what had happened. Gingerly she pulled the arm out and held it up with the palm half open, and saw the arm and hand in the mirror stretch down toward her in the gesture chimps make when they are asking for help or comfort. She stared at the glossy blue-black hairs, then drew the arm down and lip-nibbled comfortingly along it, thinking, So this is me now. Me. Not Kelly up in the mirror. Me down here. Okay.

When breakfast came she tried to feed herself, putting the food into her mouth. She managed it by shutting her eyes and feeling for the next morsel. From then on, the hand knew the way to the mouth. But when she tried to guide the hand by looking in the mirror, she kept going the wrong way and missing, sometimes by several centimeters. This didn’t bother her much. Being able to move the arm at all was thrilling. But later that morning she found it wasn’t just the confusion of trying to do things in a mirror that had been spoiling her aim.

They must have decided to give her a nap—they could still do that. Then they woke her up, and she opened her eyes to see a stranger smiling down at her, a gorgeous young man with gleaming even teeth and a thin mustache and brown skin like polished leather.

“Hi, Eva,” he said. “I’m Robbo. I’m from Space-tech.”

“Uh?”

(When she’d first gotten her voice back Eva had experimented, trying to say a few human words, but it had been such an effort and her voice had come out so slow and stupid that she’d settled for chimp grunts. You could say quite a bit with those.)

“Okay, okay,” said Robbo. “We’re not shipping you off to colonize Vega Three. That’s what I was trained for, teaching ordinary folks like you and me—”

He said it without a flicker. He was clever as well as pretty.

“—how to use their bodies when they’re upside. Trouble is, there’s not so much of that happening just now, so my firm has lent me across to try and give you a hand. Right?”

He bent out of sight; but watching in the mirror, Eva saw him joining some steel rods into a structure that turned out, when he rose and stood it by the bed, to be a framework suspending a cord above her chest. He clipped a blue ball to the end of the cord.

“Let’s see you touch that without moving it,” he said.

Eva lifted her arm and stretched it out. Her fingers bumped into the ball a good five centimeters before she expected. She clicked irritation.

“Oh, not that bad,” said Robbo. “Give it another try.”

He steadied the ball and she tried again. And again and again. By concentrating hard she learned to touch the ball without moving it, but this was only by learning exactly how far to stretch, not by judging the distance and getting it right. As soon as he told her to speed up, she started overreaching again. She stopped and felt for her keyboard.

“Got two arms,” she said.

“Sure, like everyone else. Only your other one’s supposed to be still asleep.”

“No. Two this side.”

“Right. They told me you might, only I didn’t want to put the idea into your mind. One’s a sort of ghost, uh?”

Eva grunted. That was exactly the word. Ghost. The ghost of a human arm still trying to work, to reach and touch at the mind’s command. You couldn’t see it but it was there, moving slightly out of synch as the chimp arm moved, with the elbow wrong and the invisible fingertips wavering among the chimp knuckles. When she closed her eyes she saw in her mind the pale slim fingers, helpless, trapped in this strange hairy place, lost. Mustn’t think like that. Mustn’t.

“Want to give it a rest?” said Robbo.

She grunted a No, and this time as soon as he’d steadied the ball she snaked her arm out, fast as she could move it, not giving her mind time to think about the task. She missed, but by less than a centimeter.

“Not bad,” said Robbo.

After a few more tries he gave her a moving target by swinging the ball around, at first in a clean pendulum curve, then in a circle, and finally making it jiggle as it swung.

“That’s enough,” said Robbo. “Tired, I guess.”

“Uh.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve got to take things easy. We’ll work some exercises out with the physios, but you’re doing pretty well. Provided you move fast, uh? Mustn’t give the ghost a chance.”

Mustn’t, thought Eva.

“You came along just the right time for me, you know. Few more weeks, and I’d have been out of a job.”

“Uh?”

“That’s right. Ten years ago, when I went into this, I reckoned I was set up for life. Don’t mean I thought we’d be actually colonizing planets before I died, but the push would be there, the pressure to get off earth, and at least that’d mean research for us in the business. But now look, they’re all giving up. The pressure’s still there, but the governments are pulling out and the sponsors are pulling out and whole departments are closing down. At Space-tech alone, we’ve lost forty percent of our jobs in the last three years.”

Eva clicked commiseration. Robbo went on talking, as much to give her a rest as anything.

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason to it. It’s like we’ve just given up. We’re tired of trying. I worry about my kid, what life’s going to be like for him ...”

He got out his wallet and showed Eva a photograph of a little boy, pretty as himself, with the same glossy brown skin and dark eyes. He went on talking. Eva half listened. People, she thought—they’re funny. Her fingers moved caressingly over the furriness of her chest, and somehow the thought in her mind changed from the oddness of people worrying about why they’d stopped trying to colonize planets to the oddness of people not having any real hair on their bodies, being so smooth and shiny. When she thought of him like that Robbo didn’t seem pretty at all.

“Try something else?” he said at last. She grunted okay and he swung her table across the bed and gave her some colored bricks to build a tower with. She made it straight and slim, and far higher than a chimp could ever have done. Not that chimps are clumsy—they pick and groom among one another’s fur with nimble, sensitive fingers—but they don’t think tidy. Give them a cylinder to fit into a hole, and they’ll fumble it in any old way because that’s good enough. It wouldn’t enter their heads to square up the edges of a pile of blocks, so they’d get it out of kilter and down it would crash. But Eva could use her human mind to tell the chimp fingers what she wanted, and check by touch that they’d got it right. When Robbo asked her to speed it up she became chimp-clumsy. By that time she was tired again, so Robbo chatted a little more and left.

She lay with her eyes shut, but as soon as she began to feel drowsy she forced them open and pressed the keys on her control box.

“Don’t want to sleep,” said her voice.

“Just as you like, dearie,” sighed Meg’s soft answer from behind the headboard.

Wakefulness came flooding back, and Eva reset the mirror to show her the window, with a rainy mild day beyond the glass. Dull gray clouds were touching the tops of the dull gray high rises, and the air in the distance hung like smoke where the rain fell dense. She felt the skin of her arm tingle as the pores closed, stirring the coarse hair as they did so, and she sensed rather than felt the rest of her numb body trying to do the same. Not long now, she thought. A few more weeks, and I’ll be walking. Walking’s going to be tricky—I’ll be the wrong distance from the ground. No I won’t—I’ll be the right distance, but . . . I’m going to have to get rid of that ghost.

It was important. It was more important than just for walking without falling flat on your face. The thing is, you aren’t a mind
in
a body, you’re a mind
and
a body, and they’re both
you
. As long as the ghost of that other body haunted her, she would never become a you, belonging all together, a whole person. She could probably learn how to pick things up cleanly and pour out of a bottle and run around without tripping by training herself not to notice the ghost, but it would be there still. No good.

She wondered whether to talk to Dr. Alonso about this. Dr. Alonso was all right, but Eva had taken a dislike to her. She was too kind, too cooing—it wasn’t real. While she sat smiling by the bed Eva kept seeing Dr. Alonso II, tucked out of sight in the corner of the room, thin-lipped, scribbling notes for a scientific article. Anyway, she didn’t actually
know
anything—nobody did, because Eva was the first of her kind, and it was all new to everyone—but at least the biochemists and neurologists and everythingelsists knew a few facts about brains and bloodstreams and nervous systems and so on, but the psychiatrists were guessing all the way. Eva thought she could guess just as well as Dr. Alonso.

So now she closed her eyes again and summoned up the dream. She lay wide awake, concentrating with all her will but letting the images float into her mind, the shapes of a green tree world, branches with bark rough or smooth, blobs and patches of sunlight seeping through the leaf cover, fruits and berries yellow, green, purple, orange, and through all this a single person, a body completely itself with its own mind part of it and the body part of the mind, reaching, grasping, swinging below a branch, finding and holding with a foot, reaching on.

Kelly was dead, gone, would never come back, but something was still there. Not a particular chimp with particular memories of a large cage with a cement floor and a steel-and-plastic climbing frame and perhaps a human who took her out to greener places on a leash, but a chimp still, with older, deeper memories. You couldn’t just invade a chimp body and take it over with your human mind, like a hero in a history book—you’d never get to be whole that way. Eva’s human neurons might have copied themselves into Kelly’s brain, but as Dad had said, that left a sort of connection, an interface, a borderland where human ended and chimp began. You couldn’t live like that, with a frontier in you like a wall, keeping your selves apart. The only way to become whole was to pull the wall down, to let the other side back in, to let it invade in its turn, up into the human side, the neurons remembering their old paths, twining themselves in among the human network until both sides made a single pattern. A new pattern, not Eva, not Kelly—both but one.