Eva

MONTH TWO,

DAY NINETEEN

Awake . . .

Not fust your eyelids rising, facing the day . . .

Your whole body, all of it, moving and feeling . . .

Carefully Eva pushed herself off the pillow and sat. With her right arm she heaved the bedclothes aside, then twisted herself till her legs dangled over the edge. All wrong. She was thinking too much. This was how a human would try to get out of bed, unaided for the first time, after a long illness. The ghost was very strong. All the shapes and distances seemed strange. Mom was watching from the chair.

“Sure you don’t want me to help?” she said.

Eva rippled her fingers over the keyboard, which now lay strapped to her chest. After her weeks of practice she’d gotten the pauses down to only a couple of seconds.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Been doing my exercises.”

A chimp wouldn’t have gotten up like this. It would have sort of rolled, and then dropped. She dropped. The ghost had judged the distance wrong, but her real limbs got it right and she didn’t stagger. She climbed onto Mom’s lap, giving her time to adjust the half-dozen sensor wires she still had to trail around before she kissed her. Mom laughed.

“It’s like being eaten alive,” she said.

Eva made her No-it’s-not grunt. A proper chimp kiss is done with the mouth wide open, but she’d done hers human-style, though admittedly she’d produced more suck than she’d meant to. She settled against Mom’s shoulder and without thinking lifted her hand and started to pick with inquisitive fingers among the roots of the gray-streaked hair. She felt Mom stiffen and then try to relax.

“You won’t find anything, darling,” she said.

The chimps in the Research Section of the Pool were allowed a few harmless parasites so that they could have the satisfaction of catching them in their endless grooming sessions, but a flake of dried skin or a scrap of dirt would do almost as well. That wasn’t the point.

“Mm-hmmm,” Eva murmured on a rising note.

Mom twitched and relaxed again.

“Don’t tease,” she said. “I’m not in the mood.”

Eva shrugged her shoulder forward and said, “You do me. It’s kind of comforting.”

“All right. Provided you don’t go poking in my earhole.”

Eva peered at the dark cave in the neat whorled ear. Yes, she did feel a definite urge to probe in there with a finger, but it wouldn’t be fair. Mom had never felt easy with the chimps, the way Eva had. She couldn’t even groom a shoulder as though it was the natural thing to be doing; there was a sort of fumblingness about her fingertips as they worked their way across the fur. All the same, it was lovely to be able to feel the movement after the weeks of stillness and numbness. If she’d been a cat, Eva would have purred.

“I’m supposed to be talking to you,” said Mom.

“Uh?”

“Have you thought about the sort of life you’re going to live when you’re up and about?”

“Lots. Skiing’s going to be fun.”

The snow peaks and the beaches were almost the only human playgrounds left. There wasn’t a lot else you could do with them. Mom chuckled.

“My legs are going to be so strong,” said Eva. “And I can get my center of gravity right down. I could be a world-beater. How’d you like to have a famous daughter?”

“Not much. People are going to be a bit interested in you anyway, darling. You know how they are about chimps as it is.”

“They’ll get used to me. Anyway, I want to be ordinary—go back to school, be with Bren and Ginny . . . They came around last night, you know?”

“They said they might . . . I’m afraid there’s a little more to it than that, darling.”

“Uh?”

“Haven’t you wondered where the funds have come from for all this?”

Mom tilted her head to show she meant the room and the machines and the control room beyond and so on.

“Research, I guess.”

“Of course, but research still has to be funded. Dad and I couldn’t have afforded it, and the Pool’s got nothing to spare. Joan may be famous, but she’s still got to get her funds from somewhere. What she did, in fact, was set up a sort of arrangement with SMI—you know, the shaper people—and they raised the money from some of their advertisers who were interested. World Fruit’s the main one, I believe.”

“You mean I’m sponsored!”

Eva used the keyboard to make such a squeak of outrage that Mom laughed aloud.

“I’m afraid so, my darling. Public TV couldn’t afford you.”

“Grrgh!”

“And, of course, this means that SMI is going to want to do at least one program about you. There are other things, like World Fruit having an option for you to appear in some of the Honeybear commercials ...”

“Uh?”

“They can’t make you, if we don’t agree, but you aren’t allowed to advertise anyone else’s products—that’s what an option means.”

“Might be fun. And lots of grapes.”

“Is that all you can think of? I’m trying to explain to you that quite soon SMI is going to start wanting to film you again. They did some while you were asleep, but Joan wouldn’t let them since then because it might have . . . oh, it’s too long to explain. Anyway, they’re going to do this program and some more after, perhaps, and they’ve spent so much money on you that they’re bound to want to make a production of it, and ...”

“Do I have to?”

“Well, yes, at least one. That’s in the contract. After that . . . You see, if people are interested in you, enough of them, then that’s going to mean more programs, and that’s going to mean money coming in, not just for you and Dad and me—I mean it’d be nice, but we don’t really . . . You see, we actually owe Joan, morally I mean, for what she’s done. Then there’s the Pool ...”

Mom sighed. The Pool was always desperate for funds. It was a fact that Eva had grown up with, almost like the law of gravity.

“Okay,” she said. “If it’s for the Pool.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Provided they don’t try and make out I’m some kind of freak.”

A pause. Mom sort of squaring her shoulders, inside.

“There’s bound to be a bit of that, darling. I mean, we’ve got to get used to the idea that people are going to stare. Some people. I suppose in the long run it’s going to be up to you to show them you’re not.”

In her skiing fantasy Eva had imagined the gawps of the other skiers as she careered down the slopes. And school—of course heads would turn when she first came into class, but kids get used to things pretty quickly. She hadn’t really thought about living her life as the object of an endless stare. People!

No, you didn’t have to have people, not all the time.

“Okay,” she said. “And when it gets to be too much, I can always go and join the Pool and be a chimp for a while.”

She felt Mom’s body stiffen beneath her, as if she’d gotten a cramp. Eva thought she’d just been keeping the conversation going, but now . . . yes, better get it said. It was important.

“It’s all right, Mom. I’ll only go to the Reserve.”

“Are you serious?”

“Mind you, if I went to a Public Section, people wouldn’t know which one was me. I’d have to take my clothes off, of course.”

“Please, darling ...”

“It’s all right, Mom.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

That was family code, just like a chimp code, only in words—a way of not getting into an argument. You chose another subject and hoped the argument would simply go away, like a headache—only this one, Eva knew, wasn’t going to, but for now she obeyed the code.

“What about clothes, then?” she said.

“Yes, we’ve got to work that out. Have you got any ideas?”

“Bow in my hair?”

Mom managed a laugh. She’d always loved making clothes for her pretty daughter. The chimps in the Pool mostly wore nothing but were dressed in child’s overalls when Dad took them on expeditions, partly because they weren’t housebroken and had to use diapers, but mainly to hide the sexual swellings on the rumps of the females, which people who didn’t know about chimps always found embarrassing.

“I’m a different shape now,” said Eva.

“A challenge, darling. I’ll bring my tape measure tomorrow.”

“Nothing fancy, Mom. I hate it in the commercials when they put chimps into frills. Just overalls, mostly.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’m not going to try and look human.”

Silence, but Eva could feel the sigh.

“It’s important, Mom. I’ve got to be happy with this new me, and so do you. Not just think it’s better than me being dead. Happy to have me like this.”

“I’m trying, darling. I really am trying.”

Poor Mom. It was much harder for her. When you’re born you get imprinted with your mother’s face, and she with yours. It happens with a lot of animals, some more strongly than others. With humans it’s about middling, but the bond is still there, deep inside you, hard to alter. Eva still had the same Mom she’d always known, but Mom had this new thing, this stranger, this changeling. She couldn’t help yearning in her depths for her own daughter, the one with the long black hair and blue eyes and the scar on her left earlobe where a chimp had bitten her when she was three. However much she taught herself to think of this new Eva as that daughter, it wasn’t the same as feeling she was.

It was unfair to push her too hard. Eva stopped grooming Mom’s hair and took her hand and held it, human-style. Mom squeezed back but let go. Eva’s was not the hand she needed, not any longer. It was long and bony-fingered with hair on the back. How could anyone pretend it was her daughter’s?

And, Eva knew, Mom was trying harder than anyone else would, ever.