Eva

YEAR. TWENTY-FOUR,

MONTH FORGOTTEN,

DAY FORGOTTEN

Dying . . .

Sun high, warm on the pelt, but chill inside . . .

Yellow-gray mist, vague shapes, buzzing . . .

Time to go. Tomorrow? Next day?

Soon.

Crouched in the center of the clearing down by the old harbor, Eva waited. Hruffa groomed obsessively at her left arm, not understanding that there had been no feeling there since Eva’s stroke last winter. Two years before, recovering from her first attack, Eva had gotten Dad’s Diseases of the Chimpanzee out of the storage box and read about strokes. It had been difficult even then, with her right eye misty with cataract and her left too short-sighted to make more than a blur of the letters. She had managed it with the magnifying glass, but she couldn’t have done that now. Anyway there was no point. She was dying.

The others knew. That was why Hruffa had stayed with her to meet the humans—she’d never done so before. Hruffa was shivering with nerves and was grooming for her own reassurance as much as Eva’s comfort. Eva raised her good hand and began to search along Hruffa’s shoulder, with her muzzle pressed close in an effort to see among the hair roots. She found a tick by touch, cracked it between her nails, and ate it.

The motor of an airboat drubbed from beyond the trees. Hruffa twitched with anxiety, and Eva pursed her lips and made the little sucking noises chimp mothers use to calm a frightened baby—noises she’d used when Hruffa herself had been a springy pink-and-black scrap clutching her side. The buzz became louder. She could sense all the others in among the shadows under the trees, watching. They too understood it was the last time.

Eva nodded to herself. She stopped grooming Hruffa and moved the hand to the keyboard where it hung in its loops on her chest. Extraordinary how her fingers still knew the letters that her mind seemed almost to have forgotten. Slowly she pressed a few keys.

“Hi, there. Just testing.”

Hruffa jerked at the human voice. Eva reacted more slowly but more deeply. Over the past twenty years she must have gotten the keyboard out and used it dozens of times, hardly thinking about it at all, concerned only with what was to be said, not the voice that said it. Now, this last time, she was ambushed. The pang of ancient loss, a child with long black hair ice-skating in a yellow tracksuit. Me, whispered the ghost, the real Eva.

It was part of dying, coming in two like that. Hruffa must have felt the ambush, because she put her long arm around Eva and hugged her, rocking both bodies gently to and fro.

The airboat motor cut. It must be in sight by now, huge in the blue winter sky, but Eva couldn’t see it. Higher-pitched, a flivver detached itself, hummed down, settled in a storm of gusted leaves on the other side of the clearing. Through her misted vision Eva saw the people take shape, two moving tree trunks tramping toward her over the dusty earth. By their movements and sizes a man and a woman.

“Hello, Eva,” said the man.

“Denny?” she said. She had recognized the voice and was surprised. Denny was director of the whole Chimpanzee Pool, but he’d taken on being director of the trust as well when Grog Kennedy had started his mental illness and had to resign. Denny was too busy, usually, to come himself, unless there was something extra important. Then she realized the humans probably thought her death was important. They’d have known it was coming soon. The cameras were still there, if any of them were working. The technicians hadn’t come to service them for years. After her first stroke the trust had wanted to take her away for treatment, but she’d refused, just as she’d always refused any help of any kind after the setting-up stage. If the chimps couldn’t do something for themselves, it didn’t belong on the island.

“Right first time,” he said. “I’d like you to meet Gudrun Alp, Eva.”

Eva gave a grunt of welcome and held up her hand. She could sense the tingle of excitement with which the woman took it—she’d never touched a chimp before, so she hadn’t anything to do with the Pool.

“Hruffa,” she said, and then because to human ears the name would sound like a meaningless bark she spelled it out on the keyboard.

“Hruffa, my daughter.”

Hruffa held out her hand, unprompted, and the people took it.

“Pleased to meet you,” they said.

Few of the humans who’d visited over the years had really come to terms with the idea of Eva’s having children. Chimp kids. In their minds there were images of white women being carried away into the jungle by giant apes. They were both uneasy and inquisitive. Once when someone had asked about her newest baby, who the father was, Eva had laughed and said she didn’t know. There’d been a silence, a change of subject. Eva could have told them chimp societies don’t work like that, with a woman and a man falling in love and setting up house. You could be fond of a particular male, excited even by him, but your affection was for your group, and your love, if you were a female, was for your own mother and daughter. Eva hadn’t bothered to explain because that was not what the meetings were for. In her eyes their only purpose had been to get the project set up and, after that, to see that the humans stayed happy with things as they were and didn’t come to the island except for the meetings. When people asked the sort of question people did ask, out of the endless human longing to know, she answered as briefly as possible.

“Your mother sent some grapes,” said Denny.

“And her love,” said the woman. Eva nudged Hruffa to take the grapes. Hruffa started a grab but remembered that this was a moment of ritual. She took the bunch and tore off a twiglet that she put into Eva’s hand. Eva ate the grapes slowly, bursting them one by one against her palate. Last time, that shock of sweetness.

While she ate, the woman came and squatted on her other side. People sometimes did that, trying to conduct themselves chimp-fashion, but with them it had usually been a deliberate decision. This woman, Eva sensed, had done it naturally, without thinking.

“I’m afraid Lil’s not too well,” she said.

Eva grunted understanding. She held out her hand for another twiglet of grapes and when Hruffa gave it to her she passed it on to the woman, who took it and ate.

“Dying?” said Eva.

“She’s got a few weeks left. She’ll be glad to go. She’s had a lot of pain.”

Eva sat nodding in the sun, letting Hruffa put grapes directly into her mouth. The juice was as fresh and sweet as it had ever been in childhood.

“I don’t know if you know,” said the woman, “but a lot of kids have been taking their own lives. No reason anyone can give. I lost my own daughter five years back. Lil helped with our counseling group. I cracked up more than some, but Lil was pretty good to me and in the end we kind of elected each other mother and daughter. We had good times, considering. She never talked about you outside the counseling group, except these last couple of months when she’s been getting old tapes out and playing them through and through. Then she asked if I could make it out here, see you. The trust laid it on. They said you’ve not been too well yourself. I haven’t told Lil.”

Eva grunted.

“D’you think I should?” said the woman.

“You decide. Say I understand. Thank you for coming, Gudrun. And for loving Mom.”

Silence again. Eva rested. It had been an effort to press so many keys, to order her thoughts into a human mode.

“Trees are coming along nicely,” said Denny.

It was just conversation, but he sounded as if he were trying to cheer himself up by talking about something that had gone right. And it was true. Eva was proud of the trees. She’d planted most of them herself, in the gaps of the old cocoa grove, using seed the trust had gathered and sent, food trees and shade trees. Most of them had failed or been smashed by a passing chimp in a temper, but enough had come through. Trees grew fast in this climate. More important still, there were saplings growing that Hruffa had planted, and Whahhu, and some of the others. Not all of them, but a few, because they had watched Eva doing it when they were small. It was something you did. Eva treasured the day when Hawa had taken her to show her a stem that had burst from the ground overnight, splaying its cotyledon leaves apart. Hawa must have planted that seed herself and remembered doing so and had made the connection. Yes, the trees were worth it, and so was everything else.

Denny coughed.

“I’ve got some other news,” he said. “It’s pretty important. Do you feel up to it?”

“Uh.”

Eva felt very clear-headed, very aware. Though she couldn’t see as far as the trees, her perceptions seemed to reach out all around her. She could feel the invisible watchers in the shadows, waiting.

“Fact is, they’re closing down the Pool. Winding up the trust too.”

“Uh?”

Eva wasn’t surprised. The past half-dozen visits she’d sensed some kind of change in the air. And the technicians not coming to service the cameras—things like that.

“We’ve run out of funds,” said Denny. “It isn’t just us. There’s hardly a project that hasn’t got trouble. It’s the same all over. You can’t get a bridge built or a solar replaced. You can’t get a road repaired. People won’t pay their taxes. They won’t invest or save. Some districts there’s trouble getting the farms planted—just enough to feed the planters another year, that’s all. A few kilometers north of where I live there was a community meeting last year where they passed a resolution to stop eating. Kept it too. Starved themselves to death. Nobody stopped them.”

“My daughter joined the group that walked into the sea,” said Gudrun. “They put rocks in their pockets, joined hands, and walked in, singing. Just a couple of dozen kids. Now they’re doing it hundreds at a time. When Lil goes, I think I might try that.”

Denny didn’t protest. He took it as just one of the things people said and did these days.

“So it’s no more of these trips, Eva,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll mean for the chimps.”

Eva moved her hand carefully across the keyboard.

“Will they leave us alone?” said the young voice.

“No telling. No telling about anything. We haven’t been here before. Sometimes I think it’s just a phase, old Mother Nature, who we keep forgetting we’re children of, just cutting the population back to a sane kind of size, and then we’ll start again. Sometimes I think it’s not a long step from walking into the sea with rocks in your pockets to deciding to blow the whole planet apart, clean sweep. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’d take more organization than we’ll be capable of much longer. I suppose there might be a war or two. Won’t last. Nobody’s got the will. No, funny thing is that the people who bother me most are the ones who’d try and tell you they’re on your side. A lot of nutty little sects have sprung up, and we’ve had a bit of trouble in the trust from a group who call themselves Kennedyites, after old Grog. Their idea is that chimps are the human future. They call you the Inheritors. It’s all mixed up with eleven-dimensional superintelligences in hyperspace, but there’s always a chance some of them might trek out here and beg you to come back and save the world.”

“Ask them to keep away.”

“They don’t pay any attention to me. Apparently I’m an emanation of Antitruth. I suppose you could try sending them a message by Gudrun ...”

“I don’t imagine anyone would listen to me,” said Gudrun.

Eva bowed her head, collecting her ideas. She would like to send a message, she thought. It didn’t really matter who to. One by one she chose the keys, concentrating, using the last little driblets of human energy. At last she pressed the “Speak” key.

“Hello,” said the unchanged voice. “This is Eva. I am speaking for all the chimps in the Reserve. I want to say thank you to the humans for giving us back the life that is right for us. We are well and happy. We will be okay if we are left alone. I don’t know what is going to happen in the rest of the world, but if the chimps survive it will be because of what you have done for us. Thank you.”

She took the keyboard from its loops and pressed the key to eject the tape, but instead of taking it out she pushed the cover shut and handed the whole keyboard to Denny. She heard the click of the cover opening and made a rejecting movement with her good arm.

“Uh-uh,” she said.

“She wants you to keep it,” said Gudrun.

“I can’t do that,” said Denny. “It’s . . .”

He stopped. It was as though he thought of the keyboard being still somehow the real Eva, but needing a chimp body to carry it around.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose it might save us the hassle of trying to find a machine that’d play that size tape. You can’t get anything these days.”

Eva could hear the defeat in his voice, the defeat of humankind and all that cleverness, all those machines they’d used to control the universe, lost in the silence of a tape that had nothing to play it. She hunched her shoulders to the sun. She was going sooner than she’d thought. She hoped she wouldn’t die before she got back under the trees.

The people rose.

“I’ll give your message to Lil,” said Gudrun. “And your love.”

“Well, good-bye, Eva,” said Denny. “It’s been a privilege to have known you. Good-bye, Hruffa.”

They shook hands and moved away, became tramping pillars, columns of mist, nothing. The flivver hummed and the downdraft buffeted across the dry earth. The noises dwindled into the sky.

Now Eva’s own group came out of the trees, carrying the litter Whahhu and Graa had made. Eva’s third daughter, Hawa, brought a half gourd of water. Eva drank a little and let Hawa bathe her face while Hruffa handed around the rest of the grapes. There was a spat between Graa and Arrwa about the divvying-up but almost before Hruffa and Whahhu had barked at them they remembered where they were, and why. Eva let herself be lifted on to the litter and carried back toward the trees.

The others came out to meet them. She could feel their solemnity. They knew. Of course, they had not asked themselves if the humans would stop coming once Eva was no longer there to talk for them. There was no way Eva could explain something like that, not even to Hruffa. All she could do was let them understand that a change was coming—not by telling them but by feeling the approaching change inside herself, by sharing the feeling and her own acceptance of it. They joined the process, sharing and understanding. They knew.

There would be other changes that Eva herself had long foreseen but which there was no way of sharing. The structure of the groups would alter—they would become more separate without Eva’s prestige to bind them. The dominance of the males would become more marked, and would shift slightly in other ways. Eva had always understood that she had to work within the grain of nature, her own and the others’. It had been no use, for instance, supporting Sniff indefinitely once Abel had grown into a big strong male and almost as intelligent. Poor Sniff had become morose and withdrawn, but it couldn’t be helped. On the other hand she herself had always refused to mate with males she thought stupid or unsociable, and sometimes by guile and distraction had interfered in the same kind of way when the other females were in season. That wouldn’t happen anymore.

The names, she thought, would probably go too, though not long ago Hawa had brought her new baby to her and told her his name, unprompted. Names were only slightly useful. If you were in someone’s presence you didn’t need them; the other chimp was already an individual in your mind, a shape and smell and touch, a bunch of memories. Occasionally you might want to ask where someone was by saying the name as a question, and there were a few other uses like that—possibly just enough for names to persist, and the easy use of them to become enough of an advantage for chimps with vocal tracts slightly more adapted to naming to be the ones who had more children . . . hard to see how.

Fire-making, though. Knots. Making and using a bone needle so that leathery palm leaves could be sewed into a shelter and your baby stay dry from summer downpours . . . The litter on which Eva lay was of special importance to her. It wasn’t the first—Eva had made that, years ago, to carry Beth from place to place when her legs became paralyzed. Later she’d shown the others how and supervised. Their main use was for carrying food and things like bedding materials up into the caves. This one had been made by Whahhu and Graa. Eva herself had taught Whahhu, and Whahhu had taught Graa. Graa, moreover, was a male. Eva had found him when he was still only half grown, high up in the mountains on a clear winter day, staring at the distant blue loom of Madagascar. Graa was Sniff’s grandson. If you could make a litter, perhaps one day you would experiment with a raft.

No. It was far too soon. Generations beyond generations would have to pass before that, or before you could say that the skills had become enough of an advantage to be passed down in the genes, slightly nimbler fingers to make the knots, slightly subtler minds to think of uses for them, let alone for the new race of chimps to begin to move outward. Quite likely it would never happen at all—quite likely people would change their minds and come back and wipe out the chimps—but if it did those far-distant adventurers would not be Eva’s descendants. They would be Hruffa’s, and Graa’s, and Arrwa’s, and Urff’s—and Kelly’s. Not one human gene would be there. Only, faintly, but in all of them, changed by them and changing them, the threads of human knowledge.

Our gift to the future, thought Eva. It crossed her mind to wonder what had happened to Dad. Denny hadn’t said anything about Dad.

At the edge of the trees but still in the sunlight her bearers put the litter on the ground and stood back. Eva lay on her side in the useless warmth. If they’d propped her up she would have fallen. All she could see was a dark band between the glare of the sky and the glare of the bleached earth, but she could feel the presence of the others, hear their breathing and their mutters of doubt and concern. One by one, in no order, they came forward and crouched in front of her, panting lightly, putting their faces close enough for her to smell their breath and see the glint in the dark brown eyes. They reached out and touched her thigh or forearm or the back of her hand. The mothers helped their children to perform the impromptu ritual. The ones with small babies held them for a moment against her side.

When they had all taken their turns they drew back. Their voices changed to grunts of uncertainty. Eva was by no means the first to die—Beth had gone long ago, and since then there had been illnesses and accidents Eva could do nothing about. She had taught them to scoop a hollow, lay the body in it, and pile rocks over the place. But from now on, their voices said, everything was new. They would have to continue without her and survive.

In the end they left her alone to die. All of them, even Hruffa. She could not see them but felt them go, splitting into groups and families and then, like something happening in a dream, moving slowly away into the trees.