Eva by Peter Dickinson

now. Please understand.”
    Silence still.
    “It doesn’t mean I’ll stop loving you.”
    Dad turned and fiddled with the ruined blind, pretending he was trying to see whether it could be mended. Eva put the gun on the desk and went and stood in front of Mom in the half-crouched position now natural to her, with one set of knuckles on the ground. She looked up into Mom’s face. The blue eyes were blank, not stony and rejecting but empty, numb, lightless. Eva’s whole instinct was to reach up and touch and caress, but she knew that would be a mistake. Mom managed an unhappy smile.
    “I suppose I’ll have to say yes,” she said.
    She turned and went back into the kitchen.

MONTH SIX,
DAY TEN

                                                          
A new life, a beginning . . .
                                                          
Sun on a naked pelt . . .
                                                          
Chimp odors, chimp voices . . .

    Shivering with nerves, Eva waited. The rusty surface of a branch pressed its hard nodules into her soles. The iron trunk at her side was rougher and rustier still. In front of her rose a whole grove of iron trees, gaunt, leafless, five regular lines of them stretching away into the distance, rising from a barren gray floor whose pits and boulders had the same square, unnatural angles as the trees. Around the grove was a low cliff, with openings like the mouths of caves, only here again the square angles and straight edges showed that, like everything else she could see, the caves had been made by people.
    Eva hadn’t guessed she would find it so weird. She had seen it before, often, but with human eyes. Then the trees had been the iron pillars that had once supported the roof of a large factory; the boulders had been beds for heavy machinery; the surrounding caves had been offices and storerooms. Beyond the roofless walls she could see the tops of the rest of the human forest, building beyond building, rising into the morning sky. The only reason that there were no high rises here was that the ground below was riddled with the tunnels of an exhausted coal mine, so in the old days the area had been used for industry. But then, Dad said, the tides of money had washed elsewhere and the area had become derelict, just at the time when the last chimpanzees were being gathered out of the wild to form the Pool. Of course, most of the people who’d done the agitating and signed the petitions had thought the chimps could come and live in a nice green park somewhere, like squirrels, but being chimps they’d have stripped the precious trees leafless in a couple of months. Instead, they’d been put in this iron-and-concrete grove. It used to seem neat and convenient when Dad explained it, but it didn’t now, not through chimp eyes. It seemed weird.
    These ruined factories were the Reserve Section of the Pool. From here came the chimps in Dad’s Research Section, and the ones who were sold to other scientists, and slightly luckier ones for people to go and look at it in the cities. But this was their jungle now, where as far as possible they were left alone. Ropes had been hung from some of the girders, like creepers in a real jungle, and extra branches had been bolted to the pillars to make them easier to climb. Eva was squatting on one now. She couldn’t see the whole area even of this particular factory, because low walls had been built here and there across the floor space to make a kind of open maze, carefully sited so that the chimps could have corners to explore and feel private while human observers could still study most of what was going on from observation points up in the outer walls.
    Dad was in one of these now, with Joey, the head keeper at the Reserve. They had a long-range stun gun loaded and ready—Mom had