The MaddAddam Trilogy

by Margaret Atwood

  Adam One then asked all present not to talk about Burt and the Buenavista, and especially the CorpSeCorps. “Our enemies may be listening,” he’d said. He’d been saying that more and more frequently: Toby sometimes wondered whether he was paranoid.

  “Nuala, Toby,” he’d said as the others were leaving. “A moment. Can you go by there and check?” he said to Zeb. “Though I don’t suppose there’s anything to be done.”

  “Nope,” said Zeb cheerfully. “Not a fuckworth. But I’ll take a look.”

  “Wear your pleebland clothes,” said Adam One.

  Zeb nodded. “The solarbiker outfit.” He strolled away towards the fire-escape stairs.

  “Nuala, my dear,” said Adam One. “Can you cast any light? On what Veena said, about you and Burt?”

  Nuala began sniffling. “I have no idea,” she said. “It’s such a lie! It’s so disrespectful! It’s so hurtful! How could she think such a thing, about me and … and Adam Thirteen?”

  Not too hard, thought Toby, considering the way you rub up against pant legs. Nuala flirted with anything male. But Veena had been in a Fallow state while the flirting had been going on, so what had aroused her suspicion?

  “None of us believes it, my dear,” said Adam One. “Veena must have listened to some rumour-monger – perhaps an agent provocateur sent by our enemies to sow dissention among us. I will ask the Buenavista gatekeepers if Veena had any unusual visitors in recent days. Now, dear Nuala, you should dry your tears and go to the Sewing Room. Our displaced congregation members will need many cloth items, such as quilts, and I know you’re happy to be of use.”

  “Thank you,” said Nuala gratefully. She gave him her only-you-understand-me look and hurried away towards the fire escape.

  “Toby, my dear. Do you think you could see it in your heart to take over Burt’s duties?” Adam One asked, once Nuala had gone. “The Garden Botanics, the Edible Weeds. We’d make you an Eve, of course. I’ve meant to do that for some time, but Pilar has so appreciated your help as her assistant, and I believe you’ve been happy in that role. I didn’t want to steal you away from her.”

  Toby thought. “I’d be honoured,” she said at last. “But I can’t accept. To be a full-fledged Eve … it would be hypocritical.” She’d never managed to repeat the moment of illumination she’d felt on her first day with the Gardeners, though she’d tried often enough. She’d gone on the Retreats, she’d done an Isolation Week, she’d performed the Vigils, she’d taken the required mushrooms and elixirs, but no special revelations had come to her. Visions, yes, but none with meaning. Or none with any meaning she could decipher.

  “Hypocritical?” said Adam One, wrinkling his forehead. “In what way?”

  Toby chose her words carefully: she didn’t wish to hurt his feelings. “I’m not sure I believe in all of it.” An understatement: she believed in very little.

  “In some religions, faith precedes action,” said Adam One. “In ours, action precedes faith. You’ve been acting as if you believe, dear Toby. As if – those two words are very important to us. Continue to live according to them, and belief will follow in time.”

  “That’s not much to go on,” said Toby. “Surely an Eve ought to be …”

  Adam One sighed. “We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be a poor example,” said Toby. “Children can spot faking – they’ll see I’m just going through the motions. That might be harmful to what you’re trying to accomplish.”

  “Your doubts reassure me,” said Adam One. “They show how trustworthy you are. For every No there is also a Yes! Will you do one thing for me?”

  “What thing?” said Toby cautiously. She didn’t want the responsibilities of Evehood – she didn’t want to close down her choices. She wanted to feel free to quit if she needed to. I’ve just been timeserving, she thought. Taking advantage of their goodwill. Such a fraud.

  “Just ask for guidance,” said Adam One. “Do an overnight Vigil. Pray for the strength to face your doubts and fears. I feel confident that a positive answer will be provided to you. You have gifts that should not be wasted. We would all welcome you as an Eve among us, I can assure you.”

  “All right,” said Toby. “I can do that.” For every Yes, she thought, there is also a No.

  Pilar was the keeper of the Vigil materials and the other Gardener out-of-body voyaging substances. Toby hadn’t spoken with her for several days because of her illness – a stomach virus, it was said. But in their conversation Adam One hadn’t mentioned anything about this illness, so maybe Pilar was well again. Those bugs never lasted more than a week.

  Toby sought out Pilar’s tiny cubicle at the back of the building. Pilar was lying propped up on her futon; a beeswax candle flickered in a tin can on the floor beside her. The air was close, and smelled of vomit. But the bowl beside Pilar was empty, and clean.

  “Dear Toby,” said Pilar. “Come and sit beside me.” Her little face was more like a walnut than ever, though her skin was pale, or as pale as brown skin could get. Greyish. Muddy.

  “Are you feeling better?” said Toby, taking Pilar’s sinewy claw in both of her own hands.

  “Oh yes. Much better,” said Pilar, smiling sweetly. Her voice was not strong.

  “What was it?”

  “I ate something that disagreed with me,” said Pilar. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” said Toby, who’d just discovered that this was true. Pilar looked so wan, so depleted. She recognized fear in herself: what if Pilar – who’d seemed eternal, who’d surely always been there, or if not always, at least for a very long time, like a boulder or an ancient stump – what if she were suddenly to vanish?

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Pilar. She squeezed Toby’s hand.

  “And Adam One asked me to become an Eve.”

  “I suppose you said no?” said Pilar, smiling.

  “That’s right,” said Toby. Pilar could usually guess what she was thinking. “But he wants me to do an overnight Vigil. To pray for guidance.”

  “That would be best,” said Pilar. “You know where I keep the Vigil things. It’s the brown bottle,” she said as Toby lifted the rubber-band-and-string curtain in front of the storage shelves. “The brown one, to the right. Five drops only, and two from the purple one.”

  “Have I done this mix before?” asked Toby.

  “Not this exact one. You’ll get an answer of some kind, on this. It never fails. Nature never does betray us. You do know that?”

  Toby knew no such thing. She measured the drops into one of Pilar’s chipped teacups, then replaced the bottles. “Are you sure you’re better?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” said Pilar, “for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in. Now, you go along, Toby dear, and have a lovely Vigil. It’s a gibbous moon tonight. Enjoy it!” Sometimes, when doling out the head trips, Pilar sounded like the supervisor of a kiddie carnival ride.

  For the site of her Vigil, Toby chose the tomato section of the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. She posted the site on the Vigil sign-in slate, as required: those on Vigils sometimes went wandering away, and in tracing them it was helpful to know where they were supposed to have been.

  Adam One had recently taken to placing gatekeepers on every floor, beside the landings. So I can’t get down the Garden stairs without someone seeing me, thought Toby. Unless I fall off the roof.

  She waited till dusk, then took the drops with a mix of Elderflower and Raspberry to disguise the taste: Pilar’s Vigil potions always tasted like mulch. Then she sat down in meditation position, near a large tomato plant, which in the moonlight looked like a contorted leafy dancer or a grotesque insect.

  Soon the plant began to glow and twirl its vines, and the tomatoes on it started to beat like hearts. There w
ere crickets nearby, speaking in tongues: quarkit quarkit, ibbit ibbit, arkit arkit …

  Neural gymnastics, thought Toby. She closed her eyes.

  Why can’t I believe? she asked the darkness.

  Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was a golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.

  It gazed at her. She gazed at it. “You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins,” she told it. Then she fell asleep.

  33

  The next morning Adam One came to see how Toby’s Vigil had gone. “Did you get an answer?” he asked her.

  “I saw an animal,” said Toby.

  Adam One was delighted. “What a successful outcome! Which animal? What did it say to you?” But before Toby could answer, he looked over her shoulder. “We have a messenger,” he said.

  In her hazy post-Vigil state, Toby thought he meant some kind of mushroom angel or plant spirit, but it was only Zeb, breathing hard from his climb up the fire escape. He was still wearing his pleeblander disguise: black fleather vest, grimy jeans, battered solarbike boots. He looked hungover.

  “Were you up all night?” said Toby.

  “You too, looks like,” said Zeb. “I’ll get shit for it back at the nest – Lucerne hates it when I work at night.” He didn’t seem too concerned about that. “You want to call a general meeting,” he said to Adam One, “or hear the bad news first yourself?”

  “Bad news first,” said Adam One. “We may have to edit it for wider consumption.” He nodded towards Toby. “She doesn’t panic.”

  “Right,” said Zeb. “Here’s the story.”

  His sources of information were unofficial, he said: in pursuit of the truth, he’d been forced to sacrifice himself by spending an evening watching the girls gyrate at Scales and Tails, where the CorpSeCorps guys hung out when off-duty. He didn’t like to get too close to the CorpSeMen, he said – he had a history of sorts, he might be recognized despite the alterations he’d had done to himself. But he knew a few of the girls, so he’d mined them for rumours.

  “You paid them?” said Adam One.

  “Nothing’s free,” said Zeb. “But I didn’t pay too much.”

  Burt had indeed been running a gro-op in the Buenavista, he said. It was the usual method – unoccupied apartments, windows blacked out, electricity hijacked. Full-spectrum gro-lights, automatic sprinkler systems, all top of the line. But it wasn’t just ordinary skunkweed, not even West Coast superweed: it was a stratospheric splice, with some peyote genes and psilocybins, and even a little ayahuasca – the good part, though they hadn’t completely eliminated the part that made you puke your guts out. A lot of people who’d tried this would kill to do it again, and there wasn’t much being made yet, so it was going for a very high price on the market.

  It was a CorpSeCorps operation, naturally. The HelthWyzer labs had developed the splice, the CorpSeCorpsMen were the wholesalers. They ran it the way they ran everything illegal, through the pleebmobs. They’d thought it was a joke to get one of the Adams to front it, and to plant the gro-op in a building the Gardeners controlled. They’d been paying Burt well enough, but then he’d tried to cheat by selling on his own. He’d been getting away with it too, said Zeb, until the CorpSeCorps got an anonymous tip. Traced to a cellphone tossed into a dumpster. No DNA on it. Woman’s voice, though. Very pissed-off woman.

  That would be Veena, thought Toby. I wonder where she got the phone? Word had it that she’d taken Bernice to the West Coast, with the money the CorpSeCorps had paid her.

  “Where is he now?” said Adam One. “Adam Thirteen? Former Adam Thirteen. Is he still alive?”

  “Can’t tell you,” said Zeb. “No word on it.”

  “Let us pray,” said Adam One. “He’ll talk about us.”

  “If he was in that deep with them, he already has,” said Zeb.

  “Did he know about Pilar’s tissue samples?” said Adam One. “And our contact in HelthWyzer? Our young courier with the honey jar?”

  “No,” said Zeb. “That was just you and me and Pilar. We never discussed it in Council.”

  “Fortunate,” said Adam One.

  “Let’s hope he’ll have an accident with a gutting knife,” said Zeb. “You didn’t hear any of this,” he said to Toby.

  “Fear not!” said Adam One. “Toby’s truly one of us now. She’s going to be an Eve.”

  “I didn’t get an answer!” Toby protested. An animal yawn was not very definitive, as visions went.

  Adam One smiled benignly. “You’ll make the right decision,” he said.

  Toby spent the rest of the afternoon mixing up a scent combo that would be irresistible to rats, and could be laid down as a trail from the FenderBender Body Shop to the Buenavista Condos. The goal was to remove the rats from the former and rehouse them in the latter, without loss of life: the Gardeners didn’t want to displace a fellow Species without offering them accommodation of equal value.

  She used meat scraps from the stash Pilar kept for maggots, some honey, some peanut butter – she’d sent Amanda to buy that at a supermarkette. Some rancid cheese; beer dregs for the liquid element. When it was ready, she sent for Shackleton and Crozier and gave them their instructions.

  “That is really putrid,” said Shackleton, sniffing with admiration.

  “Think you can stand it?” said Toby. “Because if you can’t …”

  “We’ll do it,” said Crozier, straightening his shoulders.

  “Can I come too?” said little Oates, who’d followed them.

  “No thumbsuckers,” said Crozier.

  “Be careful,” said Toby. “We don’t want to find you spraygunned in a vacant lot. Minus your kidneys.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” said Shackleton proudly. “Zeb’s gonna help us. We’re wearing pleeb stuff – see?” He opened his Gardener shirt: underneath it was a black T-shirt that read, DEATH: A GREAT WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT! Underneath the slogan was a skull and crossbones, in silver.

  “Those Corps guys are so dumb,” said Crozier, grinning. He had a T-shirt too: STRIPPERS LOVE MY POLE.“We’ll walk right past them!”

  “Not a thumbsucker,” said Oates, kicking Crozier in the shin. Crozier batted him on the side of the head.

  “We’re under their radar,” said Shackleton. “They won’t even see us.”

  “Pig-eater!” said Oates.

  “Oates, that is enough language out of you,” said Toby. “You can come and help me feed the worms. Off you go,” she said to the other two. “Here’s the bottle. Don’t spill it inside FenderBender, and especially not on wood, or some unlucky people will have to live with it for a long time.” She added, to Shackleton, “We’re depending on you.” It was good to let boys that age believe they were doing the jobs of men, so long as they didn’t get carried away.

  “Ciao, bedwetter,” said Crozier.

  “You totally stink,” said Oates.

  34

  The next morning Toby was giving a class at the Wellness Clinic: Affective Herbs, for the twelve-to fifteen-year-olds. Manic Botanics, the kids called it, which was better than what they called some of the other subjects: Poop and Goop for violet biolet instruction, Guck and Muck for Compost-Pile Building.

  “Willow,” she said. “Analgesic. A-N-A-L-G-E-S-I-C, spell it on your slates.” There was the squeaking of chalk – too much squeaking. “Stop that, Crozier,” said Toby, without looking. Crozier was a chronic squeaker. Had she heard a whisper of Dry Witch? “I heard that, Shackleton,” she said. The class was more restless than usual: aftershocks from the uproar caused by Veena. “Analgesic. What do we mean by that?”

  “Painkiller,” said Amanda.

  “Correct, Amanda,” said Toby. Amanda, always suspiciously well behaved in class, was even more so today. She was sly, Amanda. Too well versed in the ways of the Exfernal World. But Adam One believed the Gardeners had been of great benefit to her, and who was to s
ay that Amanda was not undergoing a life change?

  Still, it was unfortunate that Ren had been swept into Amanda’s all-too-attractive orbit. Ren was overly pliable – she risked being always under somebody’s thumb.

  “What part of the Willow do we use to make the analgesic?” she went on. “The leaves?” said Ren. Too eager to please, the wrong answer anyway, and even more anxious than usual. Ren must be feeling the loss of Bernice, or maybe the guilt: how ruthlessly Bernice had been shouldered aside, once Amanda had appeared on the scene. They think we don’t see them, thought Toby. They think we don’t know what they’re up to. Their snobberies, their cruelties, their schemes.

  Nuala stuck her head in the door. “Toby, dear,” she said, “could I have a word with you?” Her tone was lugubrious. Toby stepped out into the corridor.

  “What’s happened?” she said.

  “You need to go and see Pilar,” said Nuala. “Right now. She’s chosen her time.” Toby felt her heart contract. So Pilar had lied to her. No, not lied; just not told the whole truth. It had been something she’d eaten, but not by accident. Nuala squeezed Toby’s arm to show deep sympathy. Get your moist palms off me, Toby thought, I’m not a man.

  “Could you take my class?” she said. “Please. I’m teaching Willow.”

  “Of course, Toby dear,” said Nuala. “I’ll do ‘The Weeping Willow’ with them.” This sugary song was a favourite of Nuala’s; she’d composed it for small children. Toby could imagine the rolling eyes among these older kids. But since Nuala didn’t really know much about botanicals, having them sing it would at least fill the time.

  Toby hurried away to the sound of Nuala’s voice: “Toby has been called away on an errand of mercy, so let us help her by singing the Weeping Willow song!” Her intense, slightly flat contralto rose above the lacklustre voices of the children:

  Weeping willow, weeping willow, branches waving like the sea,