MaddAddam 03 - MaddAddam

by Margaret Atwood

  By this time Zeb had magic fingers: he could play code the way Mozart played the piano, he could warble in cuneiform, he could waltz through firewalls like a tiger of old leaping through a flaming circus hoop without singeing a whisker. He could slip into the PetrOleum Church accounting – both sets of books, the official set and the actual one – in a few swift moves, and he did, on a regular basis. This went on for a couple of years, as the .09 per cents piled up, and Zeb grew taller and sprouted more body hair, and worked out in the gym at CapRock Prep, where he took care to keep in the middle of the bell curve gradeswise, especially in IT, so that his extraterrestrial hacking talents would not be suspected.

  In six months he would graduate, and what then? He had some notions, but so did his parental overseers. The Rev had made it known that through his connections he could get Zeb a coveted job in the northern oil desert, driving one of the humungous machines that wrangled oil-rich bituminous gravel. It would make a man of Zeb, he said, leaving the possible definition of man floating in the air between them. (Child torturer? Religious fraudster? Online girl decapitator?) Also, the money was good. Then, when he’d done that for a while, Zeb could decide on what calling he wished to pursue.

  There were three subtexts to this: 1) The Rev wanted Zeb to go very far away because he was beginning to be afraid of him, and rightly so. 2) With any luck, Zeb would get lung cancer, or a third eye, or scales like an armadillo: the air up there was so toxic you mutated in about a week.

  And 3) Zeb was not brilliant. Not like Adam, who – in the hopes that he would carry on in the old man’s fraudchurch biz – had been sent to Spindletop U. and had majored in PetrTheology, Homiletics, and PetrBiology; this last, as far as Zeb could see, required you to learn biology in order to disprove it. That took a certain kind of intellectual adroitness, a kind – it was implied – that Zeb lacked. Galley slave would be more his level.

  “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” said Trudy. “You should be so grateful to your father for taking all that trouble. Not every boy has a father like yours.”

  Smile, Zeb ordered himself. “I know,” he said. The word smile meant “carving knife” in Greek. He’d found that on the web, when he wasn’t decapitating historical figures.

  Zeb missed Adam when he wasn’t there, and he suspected it was mutual. Who else could they talk to about the improbable sublayers of their lives? Who else could do a hilarious word-for-word imitation of the Rev’s Prayer to Saint Lucic-Lucas, to whom God had revealed the Holy Oil?

  When they were apart they avoided text messages, phone calls, or anything else with an electronic signal: the internet, as was well known, leaked like a prostate cancer patient, and the Rev was most likely snooping, if not on Adam, at least on Zeb. But when Adam would come back for vacations it was old-home week. Zeb would welcome him with an amphibian in the shoe or an arthropod in the cufflink box or a burr or two artfully stuck onto the inside of his Y-fronts, though they were getting too old for this kind of japery, so it was more of a nostalgia thing.

  Then they’d go out onto the tennis court and pretend to play a game, and murmur together in brief snatches across the net, comparing notes. Zeb would want to know if Adam had got laid yet, a question that was skilfully evaded. Adam would want to know how much money Zeb had skimmed off from the Church and sequestered in his secret stowaway accounts, since it was their firm plan to disappear from the Rev’s charmed circle once they had sufficient funds.

  It was Adam’s last vacation before graduating. Zeb was sitting at the Rev’s home office desk monitor with a pair of medical latex gloves on, humming under his breath, while Adam stood watch at the window in case the Rev’s gas-guzzling tycoon car or Trudy’s Hummerette drove up.

  “You’ve got Schillizzi’s hands,” Adam said to him in that neutral way he had. Was it admiration or merely observation?

  “Schillizzi?” said Zeb. “Hot crap, the botulistic old bugger’s embezzling again, only this is a lot more! Look at this!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t swear,” said Adam in his mildest voice.

  “Stuff yourself,” said Zeb cheerfully. “And he’s stashing it in a bank account in Grand Cayman!”

  “Schillizzi was a well-known white-hat twentieth-century safecracker,” said Adam, who was interested in history, unlike Zeb. “He never used explosives, only his hands. He was legendary.”

  “I bet the old fart’s planning a jump,” said Zeb. “Here today, then zap, and the next morning he’s sucking up martinis on a tropical beach and renting lick-your-cleft bimbettes, leaving the fuckin’ faithful out in the cold with their pants down.”

  “Not in Grand Cayman, he won’t,” said Adam. “They’re mostly underwater. But those banks have relocated to the Canaries; there are more mountains there. Only they’ve kept the Grand Cayman corporate names. Preserving a tradition, I suppose.”

  “Wonder if he’ll take Trusty Fusty Trudy with him?” said Zeb. Adam’s knowledge of banking surprised him, but then Adam’s knowledge of a lot of things surprised him. It was hard to know what Adam knew.

  “He won’t take Trudy,” said Adam. “She’s becoming too financially demanding. She suspects what he’s up to.”

  “You know this how?”

  “An educated guess,” said Adam. “The body language. She’s giving him the narrow eyes at breakfast, when he’s not looking. She’s nagging him about vacations, and when are they going to take one. Also she’s feeling held back in her interior decoration ambitions: note her on-show collection of wallpaper samples and paint chips. She’s tired of playing the angel wife for the benefit of the congregation. She feels she’s helped to create the domestic surplus, and she wants more scope.”

  “Like Fenella,” said Zeb. “She wanted more scope too. At least she got out early.”

  “Fenella didn’t get out,” said Adam in his neutral voice. “She’s under the rock garden.”

  Zeb turned in the Rev’s ergonomic swivel chair. “She’s what?”

  “Here they come,” said Adam. “Both at once, it’s a convoy. Power down.”

  Mute and Theft

  “Say that again,” said Zeb once they were on the tennis court and safely out of hearing. Neither of them was much good at tennis, but they pretended to practise. They stood side by side, serving balls over the net or, more often, into it. Their rooms were bugged – Zeb had discovered that years ago, and enjoyed feeding misinformation into his desk lamp and then looping it back to himself via the Rev’s computer – but it was best to play dumb by leaving the bugs where they were.

  “Under the rock garden,” said Adam. “That’s where Fenella is.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I watched them burying her,” said Adam. “From the window. They didn’t see me.”

  “This wasn’t a … you didn’t dream it?” said Zeb. “You must’ve been fucking fetal!” Adam gave him the fisheye: not only did he not approve of obscenity, he never seemed to get used to it. “I mean, really young,” Zeb amended. “Kids make stuff up.” For once he was shaken: he could barely think straight.

  If Adam’s story was true – and why would he invent this? – it changed Zeb’s whole view of himself. Fenella had shaped his story about his past, and also the one about his future, but suddenly Fenella was a skeleton: she’d been dead all along. So, no secret helper waiting out there: he’d never had one. There was no understanding family member he would someday locate, once he’d found the Exit sign and unlocked the invisible locks and cut his way out of the Rev’s chicken-hawk-wired coop. He was flying a wing-damaged solo, all alone except for his joined-at-the-head-wound brother, who could well turn pious on him for real, he had the talent. Then Zeb himself would be drifting in Voidsville, out in the cold and dark, like a torn-loose astronaut in one of those old five-tomato space flics. He slammed a ball into the net.

  “I was almost four,” Adam said in his I-have-spoken-and-therefore-it-is-so voice that was too much like the Rev’s for comfort. “I have clear memories of that tim
e.”

  “You never told me,” Zeb said. He was offended: Adam had not deemed him trustworthy. That hurt. They were supposed to be a team.

  “You would have let it slip,” said Adam. “Then who knows what they would’ve done?” He tossed his ball up, tapped it lightly over the net. “You could’ve ended up under the rock garden as well. Not to mention me.”

  “Wait,” said Zeb. “They? You mean fucking Trudy was in on this too?”

  “I already told you,” said Adam. “There is no need to swear.”

  “Sorry, it just fucking slipped out,” said Zeb. No way he was going to let Adam tell him how to talk. “Trudy the Good?”

  “Must’ve been something in it for her,” said Adam in his I-am-loftily-overlooking-your-provocation voice. “If only blackmail material. Or maybe she wanted Fenella out of the way, to clear her path. My guess is she was already pregnant with you. The Church of PetrOleum doesn’t sanction divorce, what with the Holy Oil at the marriage ceremony. As we know.”

  So now it was Zeb’s fault, the death of Fenella. For having the bad taste to get himself conceived. Shit. “How did they do it?” he said. “The two of them? Did they slip arsenic into her tea, or …” Not a decapitation, he thought, ashamed of himself. They wouldn’t have gone that far.

  “I don’t know. I was only four. I just saw the burial.”

  “So all that about her being whore-pill trash, deserting her baby and so forth, that was just …”

  “It’s what the congregation wanted to believe,” said Adam. “And they did believe it. Bad mothers are always a good story, for them.”

  “Maybe we should call the CorpSeCorps,” said Zeb. “Tell them to bring shovels.”

  “I wouldn’t risk it,” said Adam. “There’s quite a few Petrobaptists on the force, and there are a number of OilCorps heavies on the Church board. There’s a lot of overlap because of the benefits to both parties. They’re agreed on the need to crush dissent. So the OilCorps would cover up for the Rev over a pure and simple wife murder that didn’t per se threaten its holdings, since they’d know there’d be much credibility lost through a scandal. They’d accuse the two of us of mental instability. Shut us away, use the heavy drugs. Or, as I said – dig a couple of new holes in the rock garden.”

  “But we’re his kids!” said Zeb, sounding about two years old even to himself.

  “You think that would stop him?” said Adam. “Blood is thinner than money. He’d hear a convenient voice from God, suggesting a son sacrifice for the greater good. Remember Isaac. He’d slit our throats and set fire to us, because this time God wouldn’t send a sheep.”

  Which was about as dark as Zeb could remember Adam ever being. “So,” he said. He was out of breath, although they’d barely been moving. “Why are you telling me about this now?”

  “Because if what you’ve said about your successful cash-diverting activities is true, we have accumulated enough money,” said Adam. “Also the Church might catch you doing the diverting. Time to go, while we still can. Before they send you off to die in the tar pits,” he added. “It would be called an accident. Of course.”

  Zeb was touched. Adam was looking out for him. He always thought further ahead than Zeb did.

  They waited until the next day, when the Rev had a board meeting and Trudy was heading up the Ladies’ Prayer Circle. Then they took a solarcab to the bullet train station, exchanging fake info for the benefit of the driver’s flapping ears. Most of those guys were snoops, formal or informal. The script was that Adam was on his way back to Spindletop and Zeb was seeing him off. Nothing unusual in that.

  From a net café at the station, Zeb cleaned out the Rev’s Grand Cayman hidey-hole account while Adam acted nonchalant and scanned for anyone who looked too interested. Once the Rev’s funds were secured and transferred, Zeb sent the infected gonad a couple of messages, using a lilypad pathway to delay potential cyberhounds as long as possible. He hacked into a men’s underarm deodorant video ad, clicked on the gleaming, depilatoried stud’s belly button – he’d gone through that pixel wormhole before – then skipped to a home and garden site, appropriate under the circumstances, and chose a trowel. From it he launched his messages.

  The first message said, “We know who’s under the rocks. Don’t follow us.” The second contained the details of the Rev’s thefts from the Church of PetrOleum’s charity initiative funds, and another warning: “Don’t leave town or this goes public. Stay put and await instructions.” That would give the mildewed old bugger the idea that they’d be back in touch soon for blackmail purposes, which must be their motive, and he could lie in wait for them.

  “That should do it,” said Adam, but Zeb couldn’t resist adding a third message: a copy of the details of the Rev’s Feel-iT haptic site transactions. Lady Jane Grey had been his favourite: he must have decapitated her at least fifteen times.

  “Wish I could watch,” said Zeb, once they were on the train. “When he opens his mail. And even better, when he finds out his Cayman bank stash is gone.”

  “Gloating is a character flaw,” said Adam.

  “Up yours,” said Zeb.

  He spent the trip looking out the window at the passing scenery: gated communities like the one they’d just fled, fields of soybeans, frackware installations, windfarms, piles of gigantic truck tires, heaps of gravel, pyramids of discarded ceramic toilets. Mountains of garbage with dozens of people picking through it; pleebland shanty towns, the shacks made of discarded everything. Kids standing on the shack roofs, on the piles of garbage, on the piles of tires, waving flags made of colourful plastic bags or flying rudimentary kites, or giving Zeb the finger. The odd camera drone drifted overhead, purporting to be scanning traffic, logging the comings and goings of who-knew-who. Those things were bad news if they were hunting for you specifically: he’d gathered that much from web gossip.

  But the Rev wouldn’t be searching for them yet. He’d still be at the board lunch, gobbling down the labmeat hors d’oeuvres and the farmed tilapia.

  Hackety-hack, railroad track,

  Momma’s in the garden, so don’t look back,

  Zeb hummed. He hoped Fenella’s death had been sudden, with none of the Rev’s more puke-making obsessions involved.

  Beside him Adam was asleep, looking even whiter and thinner than he did when awake, and more like an idealistic statue of some annoying allegorical figure: Prudence. Sincerity. Faith.

  Zeb was too high for sleep. Also jittery, despite himself: they’d crossed a big thick barbed-wire line, they’d robbed the ogre, they’d made off with his treasure. There would be fury. So he kept watch.

  Who killed Fenella?

  A really evil fella.

  Hit her on the head,

  Gave her quite a whack,

  Everything went black,

  Now she’s fuckin’ dead.

  Something was running down his face. He used his sleeve to wipe. No snivelling, he told himself. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

  Once in San Francisco, Adam and Zeb decided to separate. “He won’t sit still for this,” Adam said. “He’s got a lot of contacts. He’ll put out a red alert, use his OilCorps networks. We’re overly noticeable together.”

  True enough: they were too disparate. Dark and light, hefty and frail; anomalies like that were memorable. And the Rev’s description would be of the two of them, not one at a time.

  Mutt and Jeff, Zeb hummed to himself. Mute and Theft. Cute and Deft.

  “Don’t make that pseudo-musical noise,” said Adam. “It draws attention to us. Anyway you’re flat.” He did have a point. Two points.

  In a pleebland grey-market hourly-rental morph-your-backstory kitshop, Zeb crafted identities for them – cardboard, wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, time-sensitive, but good for the next stage of the trip. Adam went north, Zeb went south, each heading for camouflage.

  He and Adam had agreed on a dropbox in space. It was the topmost rose being strewn by the zephyrs in a print of Botticelli’s The Birth
of Venus, posted on a much-visited Italian tourism site. Zeb opted for the left tit nipple of Venus, but Adam overruled him: too obvious, he said. It would also be too obvious for them to attempt to contact each other for at least six months, he added: the Rev was vindictive, and by now he’d also be frightened.

  Zeb pondered the likely consequences of this vindictiveness and fright. What would he himself do if two young wiseass descendants of his that he’d never liked anyway had made off with his foul secrets? The rage. The betrayal. After all he’d done for Adam. And for Zeb, because weren’t his physical chastisements in the best interests of the lad’s spiritual development? He was probably still deceiving himself with righteous barf like that.

  Among other things, he’d hire some DORCS: digital online rapid capture specialists. They charged a lot but were said to produce results. They’d set up a search algorithm geared to detect likely profile matches online. So it was necessary to stay away from digital as much as possible. No surfing. No purchasing. No socializing. No wisecracking. No porn.

  “Just don’t act like yourself,” was Adam’s parting advice.

  Deeper into the Pleeblands

  Zeb cut his hair in San Fran. He was growing a moustache, and he’d bought some coolish contact lenses on the dark-grey market that not only changed your eye colour but also gave you astigmatism and spurious iris features. But though these might get him through a casual scan, he didn’t want to risk closer scrutiny, and the Fickle Fingers of Fake fingerprint distorters he’d also bought were laughable in any professional sense, so it was better not to chance the bullet train again. Also, most of those riding it still believed in the legality of law and the orderliness of order, and might report anything suspicious, as they were constantly being nagged to do.