Eva peered out to see if Lana was all right and found Lana, Beth, Dinks, and another female grouped at the bottom of the iron tree and screaming up at the male. Eva went over and joined the racket. It was extremely satisfying, having a big male cornered like that and telling him to come down if he dared. With another part of her mind she worked out what had happened, though to the real chimps it was all so ordinary they had no need to think about it.
Dad had told Eva the setup before she’d first joined, and part of her “work” for him—her excuse for being at the Reserve—was keeping him up-to-date with the latest moves. Beth’s little “family”—Dad called it a subgroup—was part of a larger group that contained two adult males. Tatters, the one up the tree now, was the stronger, but Geronimo was older and had been boss of the group for several years while Tatters was still growing up. Now Tatters was challenging him. Tatters would have won a straight fight easily enough, but Geronimo had the females on his side. Beth, in particular, supported him, partly because she was used to him but partly because having the boss on her side helped her to dominate the younger females. Geronimo made a point of going around the female subgroups and sitting grooming with each of them. Tatters’s latest move in the contest was trying to break this alliance up by attacking any females who paid attention to Geronimo. Presumably he’d seen Lana and Geronimo grooming before Eva had arrived that morning, so he’d tried to punish her. He hadn’t seriously hurt her. There were rules. Males never used their terrifying teeth to bite females, though they did sometimes with other males. He might possibly have killed Wang, but that would have been an accident. Certainly he wouldn’t have expected a surprise ambush by a single female—that wasn’t in the rules. If he worked out what had happened, Eva guessed, she’d be in for a rough time.
Now, attracted by the uproar, Geronimo came rambling over, with a young male called Sniff who tended to follow Geronimo around. Geronimo settled onto a slab with his back toward the tree. As soon as Beth noticed him she came over and greeted him with quick submissive bows and pants. He looked around in a lordly way and pretended to notice Tatters in the tree for the first time. Beth settled beside him and began to groom him. Dinks came over and presented her rump to him and then joined in grooming the other side. The three females left at the foot of the tree didn’t feel confident enough to go on shrieking at Tatters without the support of Beth and Dinks, so they backed off and settled down together. Eva put her arm around Lana to comfort her for her bad treatment, while Lana began to inspect Wang for signs of damage. Wang was trembling with fright and stared at the world with shining, baffled eyes.
There would be cameras running up in the observation posts, and students taking notes, but they were all outside the story. Eva was inside it. She could feel little Wang’s fright and Lana’s quick recovery to her usual contented self. She could feel too that Lana hadn’t seen how she’d been rescued. When Geronimo slowly turned to look up at Tatters, still grinning in the iron tree, and raised a beckoning hand to him, inviting him down, Eva could sense both the mockery in the gesture and the genuine suggestion of peacemaking. Tatters stayed where he was. His teeth still gleamed inside his tight-drawn lips, showing he was worried and nervous, though the threat from the females had gone. Perhaps, Eva thought, he was baffled by what had happened; at one moment he’d been fully in control, winning, punishing Lana, with the others too scared to interfere, and the next moment he’d been flat on his face, harried by the females, bitten and chased up a tree.
Eva studied all this with quick, secret glances. It took her a little time to realize that she herself was being watched, by Sniff. He was sitting alone, a few yards off, with his head bowed as if lost in some private dream, but his eyes were darting from side to side. The moment Eva caught his glance he looked away. This happened two or three times, until she realized that Sniff was actually doing much the same that she was, watching deliberately in order to learn how things worked. The moment he realized that she’d been staring at him, he turned his back on her.
The wild thought struck her that Sniff was actually like her, another chimp with a human mind, whom Dad hadn’t told her about. No, impossible. Everything that had happened from her first waking, right through to the things people said during her checkups in Joan’s lab, made her certain she was the only one. So far.
At last Tatters came down from the tree and ambled off. Lana was feeling extra possessive about Wang, and Dinks and Beth were still busy with Geronimo, but Abel, who’d been frightened enough by the fight to go and nestle against Beth’s side, became restless again, so Eva took him off to continue their game. This consisted of a variation on the original trick with the bottle and cord, which allowed Eva sometimes to tie him a loose knot and when it came undone to see if he could be persuaded to try and retie it himself. At first he’d just held the ends together and hoped and then brought it to Eva to mend, but she had refused to retie the knot unless he sat and watched what she was doing. Now when it came apart he’d gotten as far as twisting the ends together before giving up—anything like a real knot was still an accident.
They were sitting together, Eva knotting the loose ends with clear, exaggerated movements, and Abel peering with his nose so close to her fingers that it looked as if he were trying to understand the process by smell, when she felt a faint movement against her shoulder. She looked around and saw Sniff crouching just behind her, watching what she was doing. He backed away at once, but she turned and gave him a quick pant of greeting, then finished tying the knot and gave the toy to Abel, who scampered away, trailing it behind him.
Sniff sat gazing at her. He was an odd-looking chimp with a shorter, squarer face than most and large pale ears. He wasn’t quite full grown, but Eva had the impression that even when he was he still wouldn’t be as big as Tatters or Geronimo. He faced her with a bright, steady stare, challenging and inquisitive. She was aware at once that he had realized she was different. He wanted to know why.
This was new to Eva. Most of the chimps she’d met probably vaguely realized there was something a little strange about her, but didn’t distinguish Eva’s kind of oddity from the oddities of some of the other chimps—Lulu’s deafness or Gran’s refusal to mate, ever. She panted again and moved up beside him, but when she started to groom him he took her hand in his and studied it carefully, back and front, before letting go. Then he picked up a short piece of the cord she’d been using and gave it to her. She knotted the two ends, showing him every move, and passed him the resultant loop, which he stared at for a while, then took in two fists and tore apart. The cord broke at a weakness, but the knot stayed tied. Sniff was still staring at it when a new hullabaloo broke out behind the slab. Together they rose and peered over the top.