Eva by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

can do it with you ...”
    “They’re going to do
lots
?” Kelly after Kelly after Kelly?
    Eva stayed where she was, her pelt crawling at the thought. Robbo was already moving on and glanced back at her, puzzled.
    “Sure. Got to try again, don’t they? Check it all out? That’s how science works. You want to be the only one?”
    Eva grunted and knuckled on beside him down the corridor. She didn’t know what she wanted. Anyway, they couldn’t do lots—there weren’t enough chimps. But Robbo was right—they’d do some, as many as they could probably. Not to save lives either, though that would come into it, but the real reason was in the human mind. It couldn’t stop asking, the human mind. Once it found one thing out, it had to move on. And
then
what? it kept saying. You do one experiment and it works, so you try it again, with a difference, to see if that works too. And again and again . . . So there wasn’t just one chimp shut up, lonely, frightened, bewildered, having its blood sampled, its brain rhythms measured, all that. Eva’s control room was having new gadgets moved in so it could take care of more than one experiment . . .
    “Now, what do you think of that!”
    “Hoo!”
    “Who,
what
?”
    “Okay, who paid for it?”
    “You can’t read?”
    Eva looked again. The gym wasn’t large, but it shone like a glossy new toy and smelled of fresh plastic and varnish. In one corner a shaper crew was rigging lights and a camera. There was a climbing frame, a trapeze, a vaulting horse, and a lot of moveable stuff; and every item, she now saw, had the Honeybear logo on it. Eva knew it so well that she hadn’t noticed it. Because Honeybear used chimps in its commercials there’d always been free Honeybear drinks at home, ever since she could remember. Now there was a free gym. Okay.
    She knuckled across the floor and swung herself up into the frame.
    “Hey! Take it easy!” said Robbo. “Don’t want you breaking a rib. We should’ve had a week at least, trying out what you can do before they did the program. Watch it!”
    Impossible to obey. It was so glorious to be moving like this, reaching, grasping, swinging across. She knew she was still only about half strong, despite the exercises—when she was fully fit a grown man would have trouble holding her—but now what mattered was the sheer pleasure of movement, the feeling of naturalness. This was what these arms, these fingers, were for. It mattered because it allowed her to understand the Tightness of this new body, to feel its beauty and energy . . .
    “Watch it, I said!” snapped Robbo.
    Eva squatted into a crook of the frame and hooted derisively, but in fact he’d been right. For a moment, quite unpredictably, the ghost of a human arm had flickered into her mind, making her miss her grip, forcing her to grab with the other hand, clutch. The ghost came back even more strongly when she tried to swing. Long ago, as a small girl, that body had learned the to-and-fro rhythm, the exact timing needed to fling her weight on the chains and drive the swing forward through its arc. This body was differently weighted. Its arms were the wrong length. The rhythm wouldn’t come. Thinking didn’t help, because the old human timing was imprinted below the level of thought, putting a jiggle into the arc and spoiling the acceleration. Swinging was something she’d have to learn fresh.
    What about riding a bike? There was a kid’s bike with fat tires and the Honeybear logo freshly painted on its side, but there wasn’t room to use it in the gym, with the mess of cables cluttering the floor, so she took it out into the corridor to try. Balancing turned out to be easy, and she could grip the pedals with her feet, but her legs didn’t understand about moving in circles. She was wobbling along, concentrating on the pedal movement, when some people came out of a door just ahead of her, not looking where they were going, because the man in front was talking over