Eva always carried something to nibble, so she had a bar of raisin shortbread in the pocket; she took it out, unwrapped it, broke it in two, and gave him half. He sniffed it and peered at it before he bit and inspected the wrapping too. It was all typical, though just like any ordinary chimp he insisted on looking in the pocket to see if she had another bar. After that she sat with him by the door for a grooming session and then rose and beckoned him back out into the open. He seemed to understand exactly what was happening. Before she left him she patted his cheek, the way he’d done hers. He grunted and knuckled away without waiting for the door to close behind her.
Joan made a real hash of the press conference, worse than anybody could have guessed. She was aggressive and contemptuous, making it obvious that she despised journalists even more than she despised everyone else, and couldn’t accept that they had any business to question the Tightness of whatever she’d done. There was a man from the university, tall and handsome with silky white hair, who tried to smooth things out and calm everyone down and put Joan’s answers into blander phrases, but he only made things worse. At least you could see Joan was being honest; she stuck her chin out and her eyes flashed and she said exactly what she thought, but the man wriggled and squirmed and tried to slither away from the point and blur everything over. Eva could see Joan becoming increasingly irritated by his efforts to tell people that she didn’t really mean what she’d just been saying. Tempers were snapping, when a fat, shiny-bald young man with huge thick-lensed glasses stood up and waited for a pause in the shouting.
“Can we hear from Eva?” he said. “You have the subject of one of these experiments here. May we hear her views?”
“Well ...” began the silky man.
“Or is she just here to look pretty?” said Mike.
“That’s a very ...” began the silky man.
Eva was sitting on a stool on the other side of Joan, but she reached out a long arm and grabbed the microphone. The man tried to snatch it back, but she was far too strong for him. There was a crackle and rasp from the speakers, and she had it. She pressed the “Speak” bar on her keyboard.
“Joan saved some of my life,” said her voice. “So some of me’s glad. But all of me knows she was wrong.”
The silky man had left his chair and come around behind. His hand was reaching for the mike.
“I think, if you don’t mind ...”
Eva turned on him with a snarl. Her teeth snapped shut a millimeter from his wrist. He leapt away as if she’d actually bitten him. Several of the journalists cheered. Mike was still on his feet.
“ ’Some of me,’ ” he said.
Eva climbed on to the table. She tapped her chest.
“This belongs to a chimp called Kelly,” she said. “You people stole it from her. You thought you’d killed her so that you could steal it, but some of her’s still here. Some of her’s me. She knows what you did, so I know. I know it’s wrong.”
That was all she’d prepared, so she had to pause. The shouting began, everyone trying to get their questions in. The silky man reached for the microphone again, but Eva bared her teeth and he drew back. Joan looked at her and put her hand out, palm up.
“May I?” she murmured.
“You’re just another monkey, remember,” said Eva.
It was the gesture, like one of Lana’s or Dinks’s, that had put the thought into her mind, and she was really saying it only to Joan, but the mike picked the words up loud enough for everyone to hear. There was laughter and a drop in tension. Joan smiled her thin smile as she took the mike.
“Eva is almost right,” she said. “I am, in fact, an ape, not a monkey, and so are chimpanzees. Eva’s argument is that one species is not entitled to exploit another, one individual member of a species is not entitled even to save its own life, or the life of its child, at the expense of the life of a member of another species. I’m afraid this is nonsense. I would point out that when there were still wild chimpanzees, they hunted and ate any small monkeys they could catch, whereas for humans to eat monkeys was comparatively uncommon. Most civilized people would have regarded eating anything so human-seeming with revulsion, and among primitive peoples it was often taboo, even in areas where monkeys were common and meat a luxury. What I might call unconscious moral standards in these matters are already quite high. It is unlikely that a chimpanzee would have any such qualms. And when it comes to my own work, I, of course, recognize that I must also exercise conscious moral standards. I certainly have no right to expend the life of a member of another species on frivolities. But I have no doubt at all that I had, and have, the right to do so in order to save a human life, as I did for Eva.”
She saw Eva’s fingers move on the keys and paused.
“Not to save my life. Just to know.”
Joan nodded.
“All right,” she said, “though that is not entirely fair. I was delighted for Eva and her parents when our first transfer succeeded. Eva herself could tell you how unhappy I was about what had happened in the case of Stefan and of Sasha ...”
“Caesar?” interrupted Eva. “Angel?”
“Who? Oh, the two chimpanzees. No, my feelings about them are different, and I would maintain quite properly so. Their lives have not been wasted. We have learned less than we hoped from them, but we might have learned a great deal and that is my justification. In this case, the knowledge might have led almost immediately to the saving or prolonging of human life, but when my father began his work with flatworms such an outcome could not have been foreseen. Flatworms are fairly primitive life-forms, and no doubt some of you would want to draw a line somewhere on the scale between them and the chimpanzees, above which it would be improper to use the animal. This makes no sense to me. I do not know how many flatworms died in the course of our experiments—the figure must have run into thousands—but I do know that not one of them died unnecessarily. By their deaths each of them minutely advanced human knowledge. Without their deaths Eva would not be here today.”
As she let go of the microphone the silky man grabbed it and edged away. Still up on the table, Eva sat down and huddled into herself. She felt empty, despairing, her big chance wasted. The journalists had looked at her, but they hadn’t listened. They weren’t interested. All most of them wanted to do was to get the conference back to the humans, to Stefan and Sasha and what had happened to them, and how ghastly it must have been for their families, and so on. “One at a time, one at a time,” the silky man kept saying.
As the shouting rose Eva bowed her head. She was wearing a pair of yellow overalls, Mom’s latest, lightweight because of the shaper lights, with a huge green-and-purple butterfly on the bib. The shouts and arguments—Mike and Grog’s other friends were still trying to ask questions about chimp rights—had their usual effect of making her pelt prickle and bush out, so that she could feel the pressure of the overalls enclosing her. She felt like a bubble, a bubble of frustration and anger, and now the bubble seemed to be inside her, rising up, so that she had to leap to her feet and face the human pack and let the bubble burst out in one loud bark, which echoed around the room in the sudden silence.
It wasn’t enough. She had to do or say something more. They were waiting. Not words, nothing human. Deliberately she let her inward urges loose. Her hands gripped the hem of her bib and dragged it up until she could nick the point of a corner tooth into the cloth. She pulled down. The hem gave. Using all her strength, she ripped the overalls apart right down to the crotch and let go. The yellow cloth crumpled around her ankles. She stepped out of the mess and knuckled away naked along the table, past Joan, past the silky man where he sat clutching the microphone, down off the table, and out of the room. Behind her she heard the trance of silence break. She did not glance back. The bay of the human pack dwindled along the corridor.