Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  "What is that?"

  "These are feathers. Little feathers. Oryx gave them to me, as a special favour. See? More feathers are growing out of my face." He lets the children touch the stubble. He'd been lax about shaving lately, there seemed little point to it, so his beard was sprouting.

  "Yes. We see. But what are feathers?"

  Oh, right. They'd never seen any. "Some of the Children of Oryx have feathers on them," he said. "That kind are called birds. We'll go to where they are. Then you'll know about feathers."

  Snowman marvelled at his own facility: he was dancing gracefully around the truth, light-footed, light-fingered. But it was almost too easy: they accepted, without question, everything he said. Much more of this - whole days, whole weeks of it - and he could see himself screaming with boredom. I could leave them behind, he thought. Just leave them. Let them fend for themselves. They aren't my business.

  But he couldn't do that, because although the Crakers weren't his business, they were now his responsibility. Who else did they have?

  Who else did he have, for that matter?

  Snowman planned the route in advance: Crake's storeroom was well supplied with maps. He'd take the Children of Crake to the seashore, where he himself had never been. It was something to look forward to: at last he would see the ocean. He'd walk on a beach, as in stories told by the grown-ups when he was young. He might even go swimming. It wouldn't be too bad.

  The Crakers could live in the park near the arboretum, coloured green on the map and marked with a tree symbol. They'd feel at home there, and certainly there would be lots of edible foliage. As for himself, there would surely be fish. He gathered together some supplies - not too much, not too heavy, he'd have to carry it all - and loaded up his spraygun with the full complement of virtual bullets.

  The evening before the departure, he gave a talk. On the way to their new, better place, he would walk ahead - he said - with two of the men. He picked the tallest. Behind them would come the women and children, with a file of men to either side. The rest of the men would walk behind. They needed to do this because Crake had said that this was the proper way. (It was best to avoid mentioning the possible dangers: those would require too much exposition.) If the Crakers noticed anything moving - anything at all, in whatever shape or form - they were to tell him at once. Some of the things they might see would be puzzling, but they were not to be alarmed. If they told him in time, these things would not be able to hurt them.

  "Why would they hurt us?" asked Sojourner Truth.

  "They might hurt you by mistake," said Snowman. "As the ground hurts you when you fall on it."

  "But it is not the ground's wish to hurt us."

  "Oryx has told us that the ground is our friend."

  "It grows our food for us."

  "Yes," said Snowman. "But Crake made the ground hard. Otherwise we would not be able to walk on it."

  It took them a minute to work this one through. Then there was much nodding of heads. Snowman's brain was spinning; the illogic of what he'd just said dazzled him. But it seemed to have done the trick.

  In the dawn light he punched in the door code for the last time and opened up the bubble, and led the Crakers out of Paradice. They noticed the remains of Crake lying on the ground, but as they had never seen Crake when alive, they believed Snowman when he told them this was a thing of no importance - only a sort of husk, only a sort of pod. It would have been a shock to them to have witnessed their creator in his present state.

  As for Oryx, she was face down and wrapped in silk. No one they'd recognize.

  The trees surrounding the dome were lush and green, everything seemed pristine, but when they reached the RejoovenEsense Compound proper, the evidence of destruction and death lay all around. Overturned golf carts, sodden, illegible printouts, computers with their guts ripped out. Rubble, fluttering cloth, gnawed carrion. Broken toys. The vultures were still at their business.

  "Please, oh Snowman, what is that?"

  It's a dead body, what do you think? "It's part of the chaos," said Snowman. "Crake and Oryx are clearing away the chaos, for you - because they love you - but they haven't quite finished yet." This answer seemed to content them.

  "The chaos smells very bad," said one of the older children.

  "Yes," said Snowman, with something he meant for a smile. "Chaos always smells bad."

  Five blocks from the main Compound gate, a man staggered out of a side street towards them. He was in the penultimate stages of the disease: the sweat of blood was on his forehead. "Take me with you!" he shouted. The words were hardly audible. The sound was animal, an animal enraged.

  "Stay where you are," Snowman yelled. The Crakers stood amazed, staring, but - it appeared - not frightened. The man came on, stumbled, fell. Snowman shot him. He was worried about contagion - could the Crakers get this thing, or was their genetic material too different? Surely Crake would have given them immunity. Wouldn't he?

  When they reached the peripheral wall, there was another one, a woman. She lurched abruptly out of the gatehouse, weeping, and grabbed at a child.

  "Help me!" she implored. "Don't leave me here!" Snowman shot her too.

  During both incidents the Crakers looked on in wonder: they didn't connect the noise made by Snowman's little stick with the crumpling of these people.

  "What is the thing that fell down, oh Snowman? Is it a man or a woman? It has extra skins, like you."

  "It's nothing. It's a piece of a bad dream that Crake is dreaming."

  They understood about dreaming, he knew that: they dreamed themselves. Crake hadn't been able to eliminate dreams. We're hard-wired for dreams, he'd said. He couldn't get rid of the singing either. We're hard-wired for singing. Singing and dreams were entwined.

  "Why does Crake dream a bad dream like that?"

  "He dreams it," said Snowman, "so you won't have to."

  "It is sad that he suffers on our behalf."

  "We are very sorry. We thank him."

  "Will the bad dream be over soon?"

  "Yes," said Snowman. "Very soon." The last one had been a close call, the woman was like a rabid dog. His hands were shaking now. He needed a drink.

  "It will be over when Crake wakes up?"

  "Yes. When he wakes up."

  "We hope he will wake up very soon."

  And so they walked together through No Man's Land, stopping here and there to graze or picking leaves and flowers as they went, the women and children hand in hand, several of them singing, in their crystal voices, their voices like fronds unrolling. Then they wound through the streets of the pleeblands, like a skewed parade or a fringe religious procession. During the afternoon storms they took shelter; easy to do, as doors and windows had ceased to have meaning. Then, in the freshened air, they continued their stroll.

  Some of the buildings along the way were still smouldering. There were many questions, and much explaining to do. What is that smoke? It is a thing of Crake's. Why is that child lying down, with no eyes? It was the will of Crake. And so forth.

  Snowman made it up as he went along. He knew what an improbable shepherd he was. To reassure them, he tried his best to appear dignified and reliable, wise and kindly. A lifetime of deviousness came to his aid.

  Finally they reached the edge of the park. Snowman had to shoot only two more disintegrating people. He was doing them a favour, so he didn't feel too bad about it. He felt worse about other things.

  Late in the evening, they came at last to the shore. The leaves of the trees were rustling, the water was gently waving, the setting sun was reflected on it, pink and red. The sands were white, the offshore towers overflowing with birds.

  "It is so beautiful here."

  "Oh look! Are those feathers?"

  "What is this place called?"

  "It is called home," said Snowman.

  14

  ~

  Idol

  ~

  Snowman rifles the storeroom, packs what he can carry - the rest
of the food, dried and in tins, flashlight and batteries, maps and matches and candles, ammunition packs, duct tape, two bottles of water, painkiller pills, antibiotic gel, a couple of sun-proof shirts, and one of those little knives with the scissors. And the spraygun, of course. He picks up his stick and heads out through the airlock doorway, avoiding Crake's gaze, Crake's grin; and Oryx, in her silk butterfly shroud.

  Oh Jimmy. That's not me!

  Birdsong's beginning. The predawn light is a feathery grey, the air misty; dew pearls the spiderwebs. If he were a child it would seem fresh and new, this ancient, magical effect. As it is, he knows it's an illusion: once the sun's up, all will vanish. Halfway across the grounds he stops, takes one last backward look at Paradice, swelling up out of the foliage like a lost balloon.

  He has a map of the Compound, he's already studied it, charted his route. He cuts across a main artery to the golf course and crosses it without incident. His pack and the gun are beginning to weigh on him, so he stops for a drink. The sun's up now, the vultures are rising on their updrafts; they've spotted him, they'll note his limp, they'll be watching.

  He makes his way through a residential section, then across a schoolground. He has to shoot one pigoon before he reaches the peripheral wall: it was just having a good stare, but he was certain it was a scout, it would have told the others. At the side gate he pauses. There's a watchtower here, and access to the rampart; he'd like to climb up, have a look around, check out that smoke he saw. But the door to the gatehouse is locked, so he goes on out.

  Nothing in the moat.

  He crosses No Man's Land, a nervous passage: he keeps seeing furry movement at the sides of his eyes, and worries that the clumps of weeds are changing shape. At last he's in the pleeblands; he wends his way through the narrow streets, alert for ambushes, but nothing hunts him. Only the vultures circle above, waiting for him to be meat.

  An hour before noon he climbs a tree, conceals himself in the shade of the leaves. There he eats a tin of SoyOBoy wieners and finishes the first bottle of water. Once he stops walking, his foot asserts itself: there's a regular throbbing, it feels hot and tight, as if it's crammed into a tiny shoe. He rubs some antibiotic gel into the cut, but without much faith: the microbes infecting him have doubtless already mounted their resistance and are simmering away in there, turning his flesh to porridge.

  He scans the horizon from his arboreal vantage point, but he can't see anything that looks like smoke. Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct.

  What if I die up here, in this tree? he thinks. Will it serve me right? Why? Who will ever find me? And so what if they do? Oh look, another dead man. Big fucking deal. Common as dirt. Yeah, but this one's in a tree. So, who cares?

  "I'm not just any dead man," he says out loud.

  Of course not! Each one of us is unique! And every single dead person is dead in his or her very own special way! Now, who wants to share about being dead, in our own special words? Jimmy, you seem eager to talk, so why don't you begin?

  Oh torture. Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?

  After a couple of hours of fitful rest he moves on, holing up from the afternoon storm in the remains of a pleebland condo. Nobody in it, dead or alive. Then he continues on, limpity-limp, picking up speed now, heading south and then east, towards the shore.

  It's a relief when he hits the Snowman Fish Path. Instead of turning left towards his tree, he hobbles along towards the village. He's tired, he wants to sleep, but he'll have to reassure the Crakers - demonstrate his safe return, explain why he's been away so long, deliver his message from Crake.

  He'll need to invent some lies about that. What did Crake look like? I couldn't see him, he was in a bush. A burning bush, why not? Best to be nonspecific about the facial features. But he gave some orders: I get two fish a week - no, make it three - and roots and berries. Maybe he should add seaweed to that. They'll know which kinds are good. And crabs too - not the land crabs, the other kinds. He'll order them up steamed, a dozen at a time. Surely that's not too much to ask.

  After he's seen the Crakers, he'll stow away his new food and eat some of it, and then have a doze in his familiar tree. After that he'll be refreshed, and his brain will be working better, and he'll be able to think about what to do next.

  What to do next about what? That's too difficult. But suppose there are other people around, people like himself - smoke-making people - he'll wish to be in some kind of shape to greet them. He'll wash up - this one time he can risk the bathing pool - then put on one of the clean sun-proof shirts he's brought, maybe hack off some of his beard with the little scissors on the knife.

  Damn, he forgot to bring a pocket mirror. Brainfart!

  As he approaches the village, he hears an unusual sound - an odd crooning, high voices and deep ones, men's and women's both - harmonious, two-noted. It isn't singing, it's more like chanting. Then a clang, a series of pings, a boom. What are they doing? Whatever it is, they've never done anything like it before.

  Here's the line of demarcation, the stinky but invisible chemical wall of piss renewed by the men each day. He steps across it, moves cautiously forward, peers from behind a shrub. There they are. He does a quick head count - most of the young, all of the adults minus five - must be a fivesome off in the woods, mating. They're sitting in a semi-circle around a grotesque-looking figure, a scarecrowlike effigy. All their attention is focused on it: they don't at first see him as he steps out from behind the shrub and limps forward.

  Ohhhh, croon the women.

  Mun, the men intone.

  Is that Amen? Surely not! Not after Crake's precautions, his insistence on keeping these people pure, free of all contamination of that kind. And they certainly didn't get that word from Snowman. It can't have happened.

  Clank. Ping-ping-ping-ping. Boom. Ohhh-mun.

  Now he can see the percussion group. The instruments are a hubcap and a metal rod - those create the clanks - and a series of empty bottles dangling from a tree branch and played with a serving spoon. The boom is from an oil drum, hit with what looks like a kitchen mallet. Where did they get these things? Off the beach, no doubt. He feels as if he's watching his day-care rhythm band of long ago, but with huge green-eyed children.

  What's the thing - the statue, or scarecrow, or whatever it is? It has a head, and a ragged cloth body. It has a face of sorts - one pebble eye, one black one, a jar lid it looks like. It has an old string mop stuck onto the chin.

  Now they've seen him. They scramble to their feet, hurry to greet him, surround him. All are smiling happily; the children jump up and down, laughing; some of the women clap their hands with excitement. This is more energy than they usually display about anything.

  "Snowman! Snowman!" They touch him gently with their fingertips. "You are back with us!"

  "We knew we could call you, and you would hear us and come back."

  Not Amen, then. Snowman.

  "We made a picture of you, to help us send out our voices to you."

  Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them - who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait.

  "Look! Snowman has flowers on him!" (This from the children, who've noticed his new floral sarong.)

  "Can we have flowers on us too?"

  "Was it difficult, your journey into the sky?"

  "Flowers too, flowers too!"

  "What message does Crake send us?"

  "Why do you think I've been into the sky?" Snowman asks, as neutrally as possible. He
's clicking through the legend files in his head. When did he ever mention the sky? Did he relate some fable about where Crake had come from? Yes, now he remembers. He'd given Crake the attributes of thunder and lightning. Naturally they assume Crake must have gone back up to cloudland.

  "We know Crake lives in the sky. And we saw the whirling wind - it went the way you went."

  "Crake sent it for you - to help you rise from the ground."

  "Now you have been to the sky, you are almost like Crake."

  Best not to contradict them, but he can't let them continue in a belief that he can fly: sooner or later they might expect him to demonstrate. "The whirling wind was so Crake could come down out of the sky," he says. "He made the wind to blow him down from above. He decided not to stay up there, because the sun was too hot. So that isn't where I saw him."

  "Where is he?"

  "He's in the bubble," Snowman says, truthfully enough. "The place we came from. He's in Paradice."

  "Let us go there and see him," says one of the older children. "We know how to get there. We remember."

  "You can't see him," Snowman says, a little too sharply. "You wouldn't recognize him. He's turned himself into a plant." Now where did that come from? He's very tired, he's losing it.

  "Why would Crake become food?" asks Abraham Lincoln.

  "It's not a plant you can eat," says Snowman. "It's more like a tree."

  Some puzzled looks. "He talks to you. How does he talk, if he is a tree?"

  This is going to be hard to explain. He's made a narrative mistake. He has the sensation that he's lost his balance at the top of a flight of stairs.

  He flails for a grip. "It's a tree with a mouth," he says.

  "Trees don't have mouths," says one of the children.

  "But look," says a woman - Madame Curie, Sacajawea? "Snowman has hurt his foot." The women can always sense his discomfort, they try to ease it by changing the subject. "We must help him."

  "Let us get him a fish. Would you like a fish now, Snowman? We will ask Oryx to give us a fish, to die for you."

  "That would be good," he says with relief.

  "Oryx wants you to be well."

  Soon he's lying on the ground and they're purring over him.

  The pain lessens, but although they try very hard, the swelling will not go all the way down.