Eva

DAY ONE

Waking . . .

Strange . . .

Dream about trees? Oh, come back! Come . . .

Lost . . .

But so strange . . .

Eva was lying on her back. That was strange enough. She always slept facedown. Now she only knew that she wasn’t by the sensation of upness and downness—she couldn’t actually feel the pressure of the mattress against her back. She couldn’t feel anything. She couldn’t be floating? Still dreaming?

When she tried to feel with a hand if the mattress was there, it wouldn’t move. Nothing moved! Stuck!

In panic she forced her eyes open. It seemed a huge effort. Slowly the lids rose.

Dim white blur. A misty hovering shape, pale at the center, dark at the edges.

“Darling?”

With a flood of relief Eva dragged herself out of the nightmare. Mom’s voice. The mist unblurred a little, and the shape was Mom’s face. She could see the blue eyes and the mouth now.

She tried to smile, but her lips wouldn’t move.

“It’s all right, darling. You’re going to be all right.”

There was something terrible in the voice.

“Do you know me, darling? Can you understand what I’m saying? Close your eyes and open them again.”

The lids moved slow as syrup. When she opened them she could see better, Mom’s face almost clear, but still just blur beyond.

“Oh, darling!”

Relief and joy in the voice now but something else still, underneath.

“You’re going to be all right, darling. Don’t worry. You’ve been unconscious for . . . for a long time. Now you’re going to start getting better. You aren’t really paralyzed. You can’t move anything except your eyes yet, but you will soon, little by little, until you’re running about again, good as new.”

Eva closed her eyes. A picnic? Yes, on the seashore—Dad standing at the wave edge, holding Grunt’s hand on one side and Bobo’s on the other, all three shapes almost black against the glitter off the ripples. And after that? Nothing.

“Is she asleep?” whispered Mom.

As Eva opened her eyes she heard a faint electronic mutter, and this time she could see clearly enough to notice a thing like a hearing aid tucked in under the black coil of hair by Mom’s left ear.

“I don’t know if you can remember the accident, darling. We’re all right too, Dad and me, just a bit bruised. Grunt broke his wrist—the chimps got loose in the car, you see—on the way back from the seashore. Can you remember? One blink for yes and two for no, all right?”

Eva opened and closed the heavy lids, twice.

“Oh, darling, it’s so wonderful to have you back! I’ve only got five minutes, because I mustn’t wear you out, and then they’ll put you back to sleep for a while. Look, this is a toy they’ve made for you, until you’re really better.”

She held up a small black keyboard.

“They’re going to start letting you move your left hand in a day or two,” she said. “If everything goes well, I mean. So you can use this to do things for yourself, like switching the shaper off and on. What’s the code for that?”

She’d asked the question to the air. The mutter answered. She pressed a few keys, and a zone hummed out of sight at the foot of the bed. At the same time a mirror in the ceiling directly above Eva’s head began to move, showing her first a patch of carpet and then the corner of some kind of machine that stood close by the foot of the bed and then the zone as it sprang to life. It must have been a news program or something, an immense crowd stretching away along a wide street, banners, the drifting trails of tear gas, cries of rage . . .

“We don’t want that,” said Mom and switched off, then listened as the little speaker muttered at her ear.

“All right,” she said. “Darling, they say it’s time for me to go. It’s been so wonderful . . . I never believed . . . I’ll just open the blind for you, okay?, so that you’ve got something to look at next time you wake up . . .”

Eva had closed her eyes to answer yes, but the lids didn’t seem to want to open. She heard the slats of the blind rattle up and a slight whine directly overhead as the mirror tilted to show her the window.

“Oh, darling,” said Mom’s voice, farther away now. There was something in it—had been all along, in spite of the happiness in the words. A difficulty, a sense of effort . . .

A door opened and closed. For a while Eva lay with her eyes shut, expecting to drift off to sleep, back into the dream, but stopped by the need to try and puzzle out what Mom had told her. There’d been an accident in the car on the way back from the picnic, caused by the chimps getting loose. Grunt probably—he was always up to something. She’d been unconscious since then, and now she was lying here, in some kind of hospital probably, unable to move. But it was going to be all right. They were going to let her start moving her left hand in a day or two, and then later on the rest of her, little by little . . .

Really? Mom wouldn’t have lied—she never did. If it had been Dad, now . . .

Her forehead tried to frown but wouldn’t move. She’d heard of people being paralyzed after accidents, and then parts of them getting better, but the doctors letting it happen . . . ?

And the keyboard and the mirror—that showed it was going to take a long time, or they wouldn’t have bothered . . .

Something was dragging her down toward darkness. She willed herself awake. She fought to open her eyes. They wouldn’t. But almost . . .

A reason to open them . . . something to see . . . the window, Mom had said. She must look out of the window, see . . .

Suckingly the lids heaved up. A blur of bright light, clearing, clearing, and now a white ceiling with a large mirror tilted to show the window. The light dazzled. After the long darkness it was almost like pain, but Eva forced herself to stare through it, waiting for her eyes to adapt to the glare. Now there was mist still, but it was in the mirror. An enormous sky, pale, pale blue. Light streaming sideways beneath it, glittering into diamonds where it struck the windows of the nearer buildings. High rise beyond high rise, far into the distance, all rising out of mist, the familiar, slightly brownish floating dawn mist that you always seemed to get in the city at the start of a fine day. She must be a long way up in a high rise herself, she could see so far. Later on, as the city’s half-billion inhabitants began to stir about the streets the mist would rise, thinning as it rose, becoming just a haze but stopping you from seeing more than the first few dozen buildings. But now under the clear dawn sky in the sideways light of a winter sunrise Eva could see over a hundred kilometers, halfway perhaps to the farther shore where the city ended. She felt a sudden surge of happiness, of contentment to have awakened on such a perfect morning. It was like being born again. A morning like the first morning in the world.

In the room beyond, a door had opened and closed, and Eva’s mother had come through. Her face was lined and her shoulders sagged with effort. There were four other people in the room. A man with a blond beard, graying slightly, sat watching a shaper zone that showed the scene Eva’s mother had just left, the small figure on the white hospital bed ringed by its attendant machines and lit by the sunrise beyond the window. A younger man and woman in lab coats sat at computer consoles with a battery of VDUs in front of them, and an older woman in a thick, stained sweater and lopsided skirt stood at their shoulders, watching the displays.

Eva’s mother settled herself onto the arm of the first man’s chair and put her hand into his.

“Well done,” he whispered.

There was silence for a minute.

“She doesn’t want to go to sleep,” said the man at the console. “Trying to get her eyes open.”

“Let her,” said the older woman.

The shape in the zone raised its eyelids. Clear brown eyes stared up. Slowly the wide pupils contracted.

“She knew me,” said Eva’s mother. “At least she knew me.”

The older woman turned at her voice and came over to stand beside her, looking down at the zone.

“Yes, she certainly knew you, Mrs. Adamson,” she said. “You were the first thing she saw and recognized. That was essential. Now she is seeing a familiar view. That can do nothing but good.”

“If only she could smile or something. If only I could feel she was happy.”

“I cannot let her use her face muscles for a long while yet. She must not attempt to speak until most of her main bodily functions are firmly reimplanted. But for happiness . . . Ginny! A microshot of endorphin. And then put her back to sleep.”

Eva’s mother started to sob. The older woman patted clumsily at her shoulder.

“Don’t cry, Mrs. Adamson,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. We’ve brought it off, in spite of everything. Your daughter’s all there.”

She turned and went back to the control area. The man rose and followed her. They stood watching the displays and talking in low voices. But Eva’s mother sat motionless, staring at the zone, searching for a signal, the hint of a message, while beyond the imaged window the image of sunrise brightened into the image of day.