“Yeah. I remember all of that. But she wasn’t bullshitting,” said Zeb. “She believed the whole sackful, in a way. That’s why she was willing to run the risks she did at HelthWyzer. Remember what happened to Glenn’s dad? She could have gone off an overpass, like him. If they’d caught her; especially if they’d caught her with that white bishop and the three pills.”
“She held on to those?” says Toby. “I thought she was going to have them analyzed. After Adam gave them to her.”
“She decided it was too dangerous,” says Zeb. “For anyone to open them up and maybe let out whatever was inside them. They didn’t know how to get rid of them. So that bishop stayed right inside HelthWyzer Central as long as she was there. She brought it out with her when she left, and slipped those pills into her own white bishop, in the set she hand-carved. We played with that set of hers, you and me, that time I was recovering. From getting sliced up on one of those pleeb missions I was running for Adam.”
Toby has an image of it: Zeb in the shade, on a hazy afternoon. His arm. Her own hand, moving the white bishop, the death-carrier. Unknown to her then, like so much.
“You always played Black,” she says. “What happened to that bishop when Pilar died?”
“She willed her set to Glenn, along with a sealed letter. She’d taught him to play chess, back at HelthWyzer West, when he was little. But by the time she died, his mother had married the guy she’d been fooling around with – so-called Uncle Pete – and they’d been upgraded to HelthWyzer Central. Pilar kept in touch with Glenn through the cryptics, and Glenn was the one who arranged the cancer tests for her, found out she was terminal.”
“What was in the letter?”
“It was sealed. How to open the bishop, is my guess. I would have filched it, but Adam had firm control of it.”
“So Adam just handed that stuff over, the chess set with the pills inside? To Glenn – to Crake? He was only a teenager.”
“Pilar said he was mature for his age, and Adam felt Pilar’s deathbed wishes should be respected.”
“What about you? It was before I became an Eve, but you were on the council then. They discussed important decisions like that. You must have had an opinion. You were an Adam – Adam Seven.”
“The others agreed with Adam One. I thought it was a bad idea. What if the kid tried those things out on someone without knowing exactly what they’d do, the way I had?”
“He must have, later,” says Toby. “With some additions of his own. That must’ve been the core of the BlyssPluss pills: what you got after you’d experienced the bliss.”
“Yeah,” says Zeb. “I think you’re right.”
“Do you think Pilar knew what use he’d make of those microbes or viruses or whatever they were?” she asks. “Eventually?” She remembers Pilar’s wrinkled little face, her kindness, her serenity, her strength. But underneath, there had always been a hard resolve. You wouldn’t call it meanness or evil. Fatalism, perhaps.
“Let’s put it this way,” says Zeb. “All the real Gardeners believed the human race was overdue for a population crash. It would happen anyway, and maybe sooner was better.”
“But you weren’t a real Gardener.”
“Pilar thought I was, because of my Vigil. Part of the deal with Adam One was that I had to take on a title, that Adam Seven thing: he said it would confer the needed authority, as he put it. Status enhancer. To become one of those, you had to undergo a Vigil. See what was going on with your spirit animal.”
“I did that,” said Toby. “Talking tomato plants, in-depth stars.”
“Yeah, all of that. I don’t know what old Pilar mixed into the enhancer, but it was potent.”
“What did you see?”
A pause. “The bear. The one I killed and ate, when I was walking out of the Barrens.”
“Did it have a message for you?” says Toby. Her own spirit animal had been enigmatic.
“Not exactly. But it gave me to understand that it was living on in me. It wasn’t even pissed with me. It seemed quite friendly. Amazing what happens when you fuck with your own neurons.”
Once he was Adam Seven, Zeb could install himself and Lucerne and little Ren as bona fide members of the God’s Gardeners. They didn’t meld very well. Ren was homesick for the Compound and her father, and Lucerne had too great an interest in nail polish to make it as a female Gardener. Her investment in vegetable preparation was nil, and she hated the required outfits – the dark, baggy dresses, the bib aprons. Zeb ought to have known she wasn’t going to stick with this arrangement, over time.
Zeb himself had no affinity for slug and snail relocation or soap-making or kitchen cleanup, so he and Adam came to an understanding about what his duties would be. He taught the kids survival skills, and Urban Bloodshed Limitation, which was street fighting viewed from a loftier perspective. As the Gardeners gathered members and expanded, and set up branch locations in different cities, he ran courier among the different groups. The Gardeners refused to use cellphones or technology of any kind; apart, that is, from the one secret souped-up computer that Zeb kept at his own disposal, and fitted out with spyware so he could snoop on the CorpSeCorps, and firewalled up the yin-yang.
Running courier for Adam had its advantages – he was away from home, so he didn’t have to listen to Lucerne’s complaints. But it also had its disadvantages – he was away from home, which gave Lucerne more to complain about. She liked to nag on about his commitment issues: why, for instance, had he never asked her to go through the God’s Gardeners Partnership ceremony with him?
“Where you jumped over a bonfire together and then traded green branches while everyone stood in a circle, and then they had some kind of pious banquet,” says Zeb. “She really wanted me to do that with her. I said as far as I was concerned it was a meaningless empty symbol. Then she’d accuse me of humiliating her.”
“If it was meaningless, why didn’t you do it?” says Toby. “It might have satisfied her. Made her happier.”
“Fat chance,” says Zeb. “I just didn’t want to. I hated being pushed.”
“She was right, you had commitment issues,” says Toby.
“Guess so. Anyway, she dumped me. Went back to the Compounds, took Ren with her. And then I wanted the Gardeners to get more activist, and everything unravelled.”
“I wasn’t there any more, by that time,” says Toby. “Blanco got out of Painball and went after me. I was a liability to the Gardeners. You helped me change my identity.”
“Years of practice.” He sighs. “After you left, things got severe. The God’s Gardeners was getting too big and successful for the CorpSeCorps. To them, it looked like a resistance movement in the making.
“Adam was using the Garden as a safe house for escapees from the BioCorps, and they were beginning to figure that out; so the CorpSemen were paying the pleebmobs to attack us. Being a pacifist, Adam One couldn’t bring himself to weaponize the Garden. I could’ve helped him turn a toy potato gun into an effective short-range shrapnel thrower, but he wouldn’t hear of it. It was too unsaintly for him.”
“You’re making fun,” says Toby.
“Just describing. No matter what was at stake, he couldn’t go on the offensive, not directly. Remember, he was the firstborn; the Rev got hold of him early, before either of us figured out what a fraud the murderous old bugger actually was. What stuck with Adam was that he had to be good. Gooder than good, so God would love him. Guess he was going to do the Rev thing himself, but do it right – everything the Rev had pretended to be, he would be in reality. It was a tall order.”
“But none of that stuck with you.”
“Not so I noticed. I was the devil-kid, remember? That let me off the goodness hook. Adam depended on that: he never would have turned the Rev into a raspberry soda with his own two hands. He just put me in the way of it. Even so, he had some guilt issues: the Rev was his father, like it or not, and honour your parents, etcetera, even if one of them had buried the other one in the roc
k garden. He felt he should be forgiving. He beat himself up a lot, Adam did. It was worse after he lost Katrina WooWoo.”
“She went off with someone else?”
“Nothing so pleasant. The Corps decided to take over the sex trade: it was so lucrative. They bought a few politicians, got it legalized, set up SeksMart, forced everyone in the trade to roll in. Katrina played at first, but then they wanted to institute policies she found unacceptable. ‘Institute policies,’ that’s how they put it. She had scruples, so she became inconvenient. They got rid of the python too.”
“Oh,” says Toby. “I’m sorry.”
“So was I,” says Zeb. “Adam was more than sorry. He pined, he dwindled. Something went missing in him. I think he’d had a dream of installing Katrina in the Garden. Not that it would have worked out. Wrong wardrobe preferences.”
“That’s very sad,” says Toby.
“Yeah. It was. I should’ve been more understanding. Instead, I picked a fight.”
“Oh,” says Toby. “Only you?”
“Maybe both of us. But it was no holds barred. I said he was just like the Rev, really, only inside out, like a sock: neither one of them gave a shit about anyone else. It was always their way or zero. He said I’d always had criminal tendencies, and that was why I couldn’t understand pacifism and inner peace. I said that by doing nothing he was colluding with the powers that were fucking the planet, especially the OilCorps and the Church of PetrOleum. He said I had no faith, and that the Creator would sort the earth out in good time, most likely very soon, and that those who were attuned and had a true love for the Creation would not perish. I said that was a selfish view. He said I listened to the whisperings of earthly power and I only wanted attention, the way I always had as a child when I pushed the boundaries.” He sighs again.
“Then what?” says Toby.
“Then I got mad. So I said something I wish I’d never said.” A pause. Toby waits. “I said he wasn’t really my brother, not genetically. He was no relation to me.” Another pause. “He didn’t believe me at first. I backed it up, I told him about the test Pilar had done. He just crumpled.”
“Oh,” says Toby. “I’m sorry.”
“I felt terrible right away, but I couldn’t unsay it. After that we tried to patch it up and paper it over. But things festered. We had to go our own ways.”
“Katuro went with you,” says Toby. She knows this for a fact. “Rebecca. Black Rhino. Shackleton, Crozier, and Oates.”
“Amanda, at first,” says Zeb. “She got out, though. Then new ones joined. Ivory Bill, Lotis Blue, White Sedge. All of them.”
“And Swift Fox,” says Toby.
“Yeah. And her. We thought Glenn – we thought Crake was our inside guy, feeding us stuff from the Corps through the MaddAddam chatroom. But all along, he was setting us up so he could drag us into the Paradice dome to do his people-splicing for him.”
“And his plague-virus-mixing?” says Toby.
“Not from what I hear,” says Zeb. “He did that on his own.”
“To make his perfect world,” says Toby.
“Not perfect,” says Zeb. “He wouldn’t claim that. More like a reboot. And he succeeded in his own way. Up to now.”
“He didn’t anticipate the Painballers,” says Toby.
“He should have. Or something like them,” says Zeb.
It’s very quiet, down there in the forest. A Craker child is singing a little in its sleep. Around the swimming pool the Pigoons are dreaming, emitting small grunts like puffs of smoke. Far away something cries: a bobkitten?
There’s a faint cool breeze; the leaves go about their business, which is rustling; the moon travels through the sky, moving towards its next phase, marking time.
“You should get some sleep,” says Zeb.
“Both of us should,” says Toby. “We’ll need our energy.”
“I’ll spell you – two on, two off. Wish I was twenty years younger,” says Zeb. “Not that those Painball guys are in great shape, you’d think. God knows what they’ve been eating.”
“The Pigoons are fit enough,” says Toby.
“They can’t pull triggers,” says Zeb. He pauses. “If we both come out of this tomorrow, maybe we should do the bonfire thing. With the green branches.”
Toby laughs. “I thought you said it was a meaningless empty symbol.”
“Even a meaningless empty symbol can mean something sometimes,” says Zeb. “You rejecting me?”
“No,” says Toby. “How could you even think it?”
“I fear the worst,” says Zeb.
“Would that be the worst? Me rejecting you?”
“Don’t push a guy when he’s feeling skinless.”
“I just have trouble believing you’re serious,” says Toby.
Zeb sighs. “Get some sleep, babe. We’ll work it out later. Tomorrow’s on the way.”
Eggshell
Muster
Peach-coloured haze in the east. Day is breaking, so cool and delicate at first, the sun not yet a hot spotlight. The crows are abroad, signalling to one another. Caw! Cawcaw! Caw! What are they saying? Look out! Look out! Or maybe: Party time soon! Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.
Dump the morbid soliloquies, Toby tells herself. What’s needed is a positive outlook. That was what trumpet fanfares were for, and drums, and march music. We are invincible, that music told the soldiers. They had to believe in them, those lying melodies, because who can walk intrepidly towards death without? The bear-shirted berserkers were said to have doped themselves up before battle with northern hallucinogenic fungus: Amanita muscaria, perhaps, or so said Pilar, at the Gardeners. Historical Mushroom Practices, for senior students only.
Maybe I should spike the water bottles, she thinks. Poison your brain, then stride forth and kill people. Or be killed.
She stands, unwinds herself from the pink bedspread, shivers. There’s been a dew: dampness beads her hair, her eyebrows. Her foot’s asleep. Her rifle is where she left it, within reach; and the binoculars as well.
Zeb’s already up, leaning on the railing. “I dozed off last night,” she says to him. “Not much of a watchperson. Sorry.”
“So did I,” he says. “It’s okay, the Pigoons would’ve sounded the alarm.”
“Sounded?” she says, laughing a little.
“You’re such a stickler. Okay, grunted the alarm. Our porky pals have been busy.”
Toby looks where he’s looking: over and down. The Pigoons have levelled the meadow, all the way around the spa building, wherever there were tall weeds or shrubs. Five of the larger ones are still at work, trampling and rolling on anything higher than an ankle.
“Nobody’s going to be sneaking up on them, that’s for sure,” says Zeb. “Clever buggers, they know about cover.” They’ve left one tuft of foliage in the middle distance, Toby notes. She peers at it with the binoculars. It must mark the remains of that boar she’d killed, back when there was a turf war between her and the Pigoons over the subject of the AnooYoo garden. Oddly enough they hadn’t devoured the carcass, though they’d seemed willing enough to eat their dead piglet. Was there a hierarchy in such matters, among them? Sows eat their farrow, but nobody eats the boars? What next, commemorative statues?
“Too bad about the lumiroses,” she says.
“Yeah, planted them myself. But they’ll grow back. Darn things are as hard to kill as kudzu, once they get going.”
“What will the Crakers have for breakfast, though?” says Toby. “Now that the foliage is gone. We can’t have them wandering over there, close to the forest.”
“The Pigoons thought of that too,” says Zeb. “Look beside the swimming pool.”
Sure enough, there’s a heap of fresh fodder. The Pigoons must have gathered it, since there’s no one else around.
“That’s considerate,” says Toby.
&n
bsp; “Crap, they’re smart,” says Zeb. “Speaking of which.” He points.
Toby lifts the binoculars. Three medium-sized Pigoons, two spotted ones and a third that’s mostly black, are approaching from the north at a brisk trot. The squad of huge bulldozing Pigoons assiduously levelling the meadow roll themselves upright and lollop out to meet them. There’s some grunting, some nuzzling. All ears are forward, all tails are curled and twirling: they’re not frightened or angry, anyway.
“I wonder what they’re saying?” Toby asks.
“We’ll find out,” says Zeb, “when they’re damn ready to tell us. We’re just the infantry as far as they’re concerned. Dumb as a stump, they must think, though we can work the sprayguns. But they’re the generals. I’d bet they’ve got their strategy all worked out.”
Rebecca must have been ferreting around, discovering odds and ends. For breakfast they have soybits that have been soaked in Mo’Hair milk and sweetened with sugar. On the side, for a treat, a teaspoonful of Avocado Body Butter. The AnooYoo Spa had gone in for cosmetic products that sounded a lot like food: Chocolate Mousse Facial, Lemon Meringue Exfoliating Masque. And the various body butters, so rich in essential lipids.
“There was some of that stuff left?” says Toby. “I was sure I ate it all.”
“It was in the kitchen, hidden in one of the big soup tureens,” says Rebecca. “Maybe you put it there yourself, and forgot. You must’ve been building up an Ararat cache somewhere in this building, all the time you worked here.”
“Yes, but it was in the supply room,” says Toby. “Here and there. I disguised it inside the colon cleanser bulk packaging. I wouldn’t have left any of my own supplies in the kitchen; someone might have found them. It was most likely one of the staff who hid it. They used to try that – make off with a little of the high-end AnooYoo line, sell it on the pleebland grey market. But I did an inventory every two weeks, so usually I caught them.”
Not that she always reported them: the help was not overpaid. Why wreck a life?
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 101