MaddAddam

The Story of the Two Eggs and Thinking

Thank you. I am happy that you remembered to bring the red hat.

And the fish. It is not a fish exactly, it is more like a frog. But you caught it in the water, and we are far from the ocean, so I am sure that Crake will understand, and will know that it was too far for you to go all the way to the ocean in order to catch a fish there.

Thank you for cooking it. For asking Rebecca to cook it. Crake has told me that I do not have to eat all of it. A nibble will be enough.

There.

Yes, the frog … the fish has a bone in it. A smelly bone. That is why I spat it out. But we do not need to talk about the smelly bone right now.

Tomorrow is a very important day. Tomorrow, all of us with two skins must finish the work that Crake began — the work of clearing away the chaos. That work was the Great Rearrangement, and it made the Great Emptiness.

But that was only part of the work of Crake. The other part was when he made you. He made your bones out of the coral on the beach, which is white like bones but not smelly. And he made your flesh out of a mango, which is sweet and soft. He did all this inside the giant Egg, and he had some helpers there. And Snowman-the-Jimmy was his friend — he was inside the Egg as well.

And Oryx was there too. Sometimes she was in the form of a woman with green eyes like yours, and sometimes she was in the form of an owl. And she laid two smaller owl eggs, inside the giant Egg. One smaller owl egg was full of animals and birds and fish — all her Children. Yes, and bees. And butterflies too. And ants, yes. And beetles — very many beetles. And snakes. And frogs. And maggots. And rakunks, and bobkittens, and Mo’Hairs, and Pigoons.

Thank you, but I don’t think we need to list every one of them.

Because we would be here all night.

Let us just say that Oryx made very many Children. And each one was beautiful in its own special way.

Yes, it was kind of her to make each and every one of them, inside the smaller owl egg that she laid. Except maybe the mosquitoes.

The other egg she laid was full of words. But that egg hatched first, before the one with the animals in it, and you ate up many of the words, because you were hungry; which is why you have words inside you. And Crake thought that you had eaten all the words, so there were none left over for the animals, and that was why they could not speak. But he was wrong about that. Crake was not always right about everything.

Because when he was not looking, some of the words fell out of the egg onto the ground, and some fell into the water, and some blew away in the air. And none of the people saw them. But the animals and the birds and the fish did see them, and ate them up. They were a different kind of word, so it was sometimes hard for people to understand the animals. They had chewed the words up too small.

And the Pigoons — the Pig Ones — ate up more of the words than any of the other animals did. You know how they love to eat. So the Pig Ones can think very well.

Then Oryx made a new kind of thing, called singing. And she gave it to you because she loved birds and she wanted you to be able to sing that way as well. But Crake did not want you to do the singing. It worried him. He thought that if you could sing like birds you would forget to talk like people, and then you would not remember him or understand his work — all the work that he had done to make you.

And Oryx said, You will just have to suck it up. Because if these people cannot sing, they will be like … they will be like nothing. They will be like stones.

Suck it up means … we will talk about that some other time.

Now I will tell a different part of the story, which is about why Crake decided to make the Great Emptiness.

For a long time, Crake thought. He thought and thought. He told no one about all his thoughts, though he told some of them to Snowman-the-Jimmy and some of them to Zeb and some of them to Pilar and some of them to Oryx.

This is what he thought:

The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don’t hear you.

So there is only one thing left to do. Either most of them must be cleared away while there is still an earth, with trees and flowers and birds and fish and so on, or all must die when there are none of those things left. Because if there are none of those things left, then there will be nothing at all. Not even any people.

But shouldn’t you give those ones a second chance? he asked himself. No, he answered, because they have had a second chance. They have had many second chances. Now is the time.

So Crake made some little seeds that tasted very good; and they made people very happy at first, when they ate them. But then those who ate the seeds would become very sick, and would come to pieces, and would die. And he sprinkled the seeds over all the earth.

And Oryx helped to sprinkle the seeds, because she could fly like an owl. And the Bird Women and the Snake Women and the Flower Women helped too. Though they did not understand about the dying part, only the happy part, because Crake had not told them all of his thoughts.

And then the Great Rearrangement began to happen. And Oryx and Crake left the Egg and flew up into the sky. But Snowman-the-Jimmy stayed behind, to watch over you and to keep bad things away from you, and to help you, and to tell you the stories of Crake. And the stories of Oryx as well.

You can do the singing later.

That is the story of the two eggs.

Now we must all go to sleep, because we must get up very early tomorrow. Some of us will go looking for the three bad men. Zeb will go, and Rhino, and Manatee, and Crozier, and Shackleton. And Snowman-the-Jimmy. Yes, the Pig Ones will go too, many of them. Not the little ones, or their mothers.

But you will stay here, with Rebecca, and Amanda, and Ren. And Swift Fox. And Lotis Blue. And you must keep the door shut, and not let anyone in, no matter what they say. Unless it is ones you already know.

Don’t be frightened.

Yes, I will go out looking for the bad men too. And Blackbeard will go, to help us talk with the Pig Ones.

Yes, we will come back. I hope we will come back.

Hope is when you want something very much but you do not know if that thing you want will really happen.

Now I will say good night.

Good night.

Shades

“This is where I waited for you,” says Toby. “During the Waterless Flood. Up here on the rooftop. I kept expecting you’d stroll out of those woods at any moment.”

The Crakers are all around them, sleeping peacefully. How trusting they are, thinks Toby. They’ve never learned real fear. Maybe they can’t learn it.

“So you didn’t think I was dead?” says Zeb.

“I was counting on you,” says Toby. “I thought, if anyone knew how to stay alive through all of that, it would be you. Some days I did tell myself you were dead, though. I called that ‘realism.’ But the rest of the time I was waiting.”

“Worth it?” says Zeb. Invisible grin in the darkness.

“You’re having a failure of confidence? You need to ask?”

“Yeah, I kind of do,” says Zeb. “Used to think I was God’s gift, but that gets rubbed off a guy. From the first time I knew you, back at the Gardeners, I could see you were smarter than me, what with the mushrooms and the potions and all of that.”

“But you were craftier,” says Toby.

“Granted. Though I outcraftied myself sometimes. Now where was I?”

“You were living with the Snake Women,” says Toby. “At Scales and Tails. Keeping yourself to yourself, your eyes open, your hands in your pockets, and your lip zipped.”

“Right.”

They made Zeb a bouncer. It was a fine disguise. He got the shaved head, the black suit, the shades, and the gold tooth that broadcast right into his mouth. Also the tasteful enamelled lapel pin in the shape of a snake eating its own tail: an ancient motif that meant regeneration, said Adam, though you could have fooled Zeb.

He rearranged his face parsley in the deep-pleeb bouncer fuzzdo of the day, which involved a very narrow shaver used to carve a crisscross design into a light layer of stubble, with an effect like a hairy waffle. It was at that time, too, that he got his ears recontoured, at the suggestion of Adam. They were using ears more in identities, said Adam, and it would be as well if Zeb were to rearrange his own so they couldn’t be matched with some ear photo of yore, supposing anyone was looking. The actual plasti-cosmi job was courtesy of Katrina WooWoo, who had access to some Grade A flesh-and-fat sculptors. Zeb opted for a more pointy look at the top of the ear and a droopier blob of lobe.

“Don’t look now,” he says. “I got them done a couple of times after that. But for a while there I was sort of a pixie Buddha.”

“It’s how I think of you,” says Toby.

Zeb’s job was to stand around the bar area, not smiling broadly but not actively threatening: just more or less looming. His partner was a large black guy called — at that moment — Jebediah, though when he joined MaddAddam he became Black Rhino. Zeb and Jeb was how Zeb linked the two of them in his head.

Though he was not Zeb to those at Scales, nor was he Hector the Vector. He had yet another name, which was Smokey. Smokey the Bear, like the old mascot for the so-called Forest Service. It was a fitting name. “Only YOU can prevent wildfires,” had been the slogan, and that was what he was supposed to do: prevent wildfires.

When there were signs of petulance among the clientele — glowering and scowling, verbal unpleasantness, unseemly grabbing and ripping of the feathery or scaly or petal-shaped fabrics decorating the floorshow, or the chimp-display shaking of beer cans that signalled an exchange of foam-streams followed by can-tossing, bottle-smashing, and punches — Zeb and Jeb would step in. They’d switch their passive looming to active surgical intervention, the goal being to take the aggressors out smoothly and cleanly without triggering an all-in brawl. So prompt action was a must, though of course you didn’t want to piss off the clients unnecessarily: a clobbered client was not often a repeat client.

Also — increasingly — a lot of the customers were from the top layers of the Corps layer cake, and those guys liked to go slumming in the pleebs, though not in any life-endangering ways. Just enough so you could feel a little rebellious, a little cool, a little sexually functional. Scales and Tails was gaining a reputation as a sanitary and discreet place in which to get shitfaced and indiscreet, and you could take a prospective business partner there as a complicated form of bribery without fear of exposure.

Thus the light touch was essential when it came to conflict resolution. The best way was to drape a companionable arm around the shoulders of the dickhead in question and to growl warmly into the ear: “House Special, just for you, sir. Compliments of the management.” Overjoyed to be getting something for free and doubtless already suffering from nano-brain-death due to what he’d already guzzled, the guy would be shepherded down a few hallways and around a few corners with his tongue hanging out a yard. He’d be ushered into a large room with feather decorations and a green satin bedspread, and invisible video surveillance. There he would be lovingly undressed by a couple of the Snake Women, those with the knack of making an actuarial report sound like hot porn, while Zeb or Jeb loomed in the middle distance just out of sight, to keep the guy civil.

Then in would come a lurid mixture in a cocktail glass that might be orange or purple or blue depending on what had been ordered, topped with a green cherry that had a green plastic snake stuck into it. This would be hand-delivered by an orchid or a gardenia or a flamingo or a fluorescent blue skink on stilts, shimmering all over with sequins and tiny LED lights and scales or petals or feathers, with huge tits and a lip-licking smile. Itchy-kitchy-coo, this hallucination would say, or words to that effect. Drinkie-poo! What red-blooded hominid could say no? Down the hatch would go the mystery liquid, followed quickly by sweet dreams for Mr. Self-Styled Alpha Male, with minimal wear and tear on the hired help.

The chosen one would awaken ten hours later, convinced that he’d just had the time of his life. Which he would have done, said Zeb, because all experience registered by the brain is real, no? Even if it didn’t happen in 3-D so-called real time.

This act usually worked fine with Corp exec types, a naive and trusting bunch when it came to the duplicitous mores of the pleeblands. Zeb knew their kind from the Floating World: out for thrills during their night on the town, eager for something they mistook for experience. They led sheltered lives inside their Corp Compounds and the other guarded spaces where they hung out, such as courthouses, statehouses, and religious institutions, and they were gullible about anything outside their walls. It was touching how easily they drank the Kool-Aid on offer, how rapidly they hit the hay or, in fact, the green satin bedspread, how softly they slept, and how cheerily they awoke.

But a different sort of client was establishing a presence at Scales: a less agreeable type, not easily deflected from his own angers. Hate-fuelled, hardened in the fire, bent on carnage and broken glassware. These were rockier cases, and called for an all-points alert.

“I speak of the Painballers, as you must’ve guessed,” says Zeb. “Painball had just begun back then.”

Painball Arenas were at that time highly illegal, like cockfighting and the slaughter and eating of endangered species. But, like them, Painball existed and was expanding, hidden from public view. Spectator positions were reserved for the upper echelons, who liked to watch duels to the death involving skill, cunning, ruthlessness, and cannibalism: it was Corp life in graphic terms. A lot of money was already changing hands at Painball in the form of highroller betting. So the Corps paid indirectly for the infrastructure and the upkeep of the Painball players, and those providing the locations and the services paid directly if caught, and sometimes with their lives when there were turf wars.

This arrangement suited the CorpSeCorps — in its adolescence then — as it provided ample blackmail material through which the CorpSeCorps men could tighten their hold on those considered to be the pillars of what still passed for society.

If you were already locked up in an ordinary prison, you could elect the Painball option: fight your fellow prisoners, eliminate them, and win big prizes, such as getting out of jail free and landing a stint as a pleebland grey-market enforcer. Perks all round. Of course, once you’d elected to enter Painball, the alternative to winning was death. That was why it was so much fun to watch. Those who survived it did so through guile, the ability to wrongfoot their opponents, and superior murderousness: the eating of gouged-out eyes was a favourite party trick. In a word, you had to be prepared to knife and fillet your best friend.

Once they’d graduated from a stint in Painball, the Painball vets had very high status in the deeper pleebs and also on the higher heights, as Roman gladiators must once have had. Corps wives would pay to have sex with them, Corps husbands would invite them to dinner for the thrill of astounding their friends and watching them smash up the champagne flutes, though security enforcers would always be present in case things looked like they were getting seriously out of hand. A little rampaging was acceptable on these occasions, but uncontrolled mayhem was not.

Fuelled by their greyworld celebrity position, the Painball vets were pumped full of I-won hormones and thought they could tackle anyone, and they welcomed the chance to take a poke at a large, solid-looking bouncer such as Zeb the Smokey Bear. He was warned by Jeb never to turn his back on a Painballer: they’d whack you in the kidneys, blam you on the skull with anything handy, squeeze your neck till your eyes popped out of your ears.

How to recognize them? The facial scars. The blank expressions: some of their human mirror neurons had gone missing, along with big chunks of the empathy module: show a normal person a child in pain and they’d wince, whereas these guys would smirk. According to Jeb you had to get quick at reading the signs because if you were dealing with a psycho you needed to know it. Otherwise they could mangle the female talent before you could say snapped neck, and this could be costly: trapeze dancers who could do an artistic strip while hanging from one foot high above the crowd didn’t come cheap. Or, for that matter, an orgasm-enhancing near-strangulation with a python. A Painball vet might well feel that biting off a python’s head would be an unbeatable slice of alpha-chimp display, and even if the bite were to be intercepted, a damaged python would be hard to replace.

Scales kept a regularly updated register of Painballer identities, complete with face pics and ear profiles, which Katrina WooWoo obtained through some obscure back door using God-knows-what as trading cards. She must’ve been acquainted with someone on the running end of Painball — someone who wanted something she could supply, or else could withhold. Favours and anti-favours were the most respected currency of the deeper pleeblands.

“Hit first and hit dirty, was our rule for those Painball assholes,” says Zeb. “As soon as they started to get twitchy. Sometimes we’d spike their drinks, but sometimes we took them out permanently, because if we didn’t they’d be back for revenge. We had to be careful what we did with the bodies, though. They might have affiliates.”

“What did you do with the bodies?” says Toby.

“Let’s just say there was always a demand in the deeper pleebs for condensed protein packages, to be utilized for fun, profit, or pet food. But back then, in the early days, before the CorpSeCorps decided to make Painball legal and run it on TV, there weren’t very many out-of-control Painballers, so body disposal wasn’t a regular thing. More like an improvisation.”

“You make it sound like a leisure-time amusement,” says Toby. “These were human lives, whatever they’d done.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, slap my wrist, we were bad. Though you didn’t get into Painball unless you were already a multiple killer.

“Point of this whole recital being that it wasn’t unknown for us bar guards — me and Jeb — to take a personal interest in what went into the mixed drinks. Sometimes we even mixed them.”

Kicktail

All this time the white chess bishop with the six mystery pills in it had been kept safely hidden pending further instructions. The only people who knew where it was were Zeb himself, Katrina WooWoo, and Adam.

The hiding place was cunning, and right in plain view, a ploy Zeb had learned from old Slaight of Hand: the obvious is invisible. On a glass shelf behind the bar there was an array of novelty corkscrews, nutcrackers, and salt-and-peppers in the shapes of naked women. The arrangement of their parts was ingenious: the legs would open, the corkscrew would be revealed; the legs would open, the nut would be inserted, the legs would close, the nut would be cracked; the legs would open, the head would be screwed around, the salt or pepper would descend. Laughter all round.

The white bishop had been inserted into the salt cavity of one of these iron maidens, a green lady with enamelled scales. Her head still turned, salt still came out from between her thighs, but the bartenders had been told that this one was fragile — no man was too keen to have his salty sex toy’s head come off in mid-screw — so they should use the others instead, on the occasions when salt was required. Which were not frequent, though some liked to sprinkle salt in their beer and on their bar snacks.

Zeb kept an eye on the scaly green girl with the inner bishop. He felt he owed it to Pilar. Still, he was jumpy about the chosen location. What if someone got hold of the thing when he wasn’t there, fooled around with it, and found the pills? What if they thought the colourful little oblongs were brain candy, and took one or two just to try them? Since Zeb had no idea what the pills might actually do to a person, that possibility made him nervous.

Adam, on the other hand, was remarkably cool about it, taking the view that no one would think to look inside a salt shaker unless it ran out of salt. “Though I don’t know why I’m saying ‘remarkably,’ ” says Zeb. “He was always a cool little bugger.”

“He was living there too?” asks Toby. “At Scales and Tails?” She can’t picture it. What would Adam One have done there all day, among the exotic dancers and their unusual fashion items? When she’d known him — once he’d been Adam One — he’d been quietly disapproving of female vanity, and of colour and ostentation and cleavage and leg in a woman’s outfit. But there was no way he could have implemented the Gardener religion at Scales or convinced its workers to follow the simple life. Those women must have had expensive manicures. They wouldn’t have put up with being required to dig and delve and relocate slugs and snails, even if there had been any vegetable-plot space available at Scales: ladies of the night do not weed by day.

“Nope, he wasn’t living at Scales,” says Zeb. “Or not living as such. He came and went. It was like a safe house for him.”

“You have any idea what he was doing when he wasn’t there?” asks Toby.

“Learning things,” said Zeb. “Tracking ongoing stories. Watching for storm clouds. Gathering the disaffected under his wing. Making converts. He’d already had his big insight, or whatever you want to call it — the part where God lightning-bolted a message into the top of his skull. Save my beloved Species in whom I am well pleased, and all of that: you know the palaver. I never got one of those messages, personally, but it seems Adam did.

“By that time he was well on the way to assembling the God’s Gardeners. He’d even bought the flat-roofed pleeb-slum building for the Edencliff Garden using some of the ill-gotten gains we’d hacked out of the Rev’s account. Pilar was sending him secret recruits from inside HelthWyzer; she was already planning to join him at Edencliff. However, I didn’t know any of that yet.”

“Pilar?” asks Toby. “But she can’t have been Eve One! She was way too old!” Toby has always wondered about Eve One: Adam had been Adam One, but there had never been any mention of an Eve.

“Nope, it wasn’t her,” Zeb says.

One of the ongoing stories Adam was tracking was that of their mutual father, the Rev. After a pleasing flurry of activity surrounding his embezzlements from the Church of PetrOleum and the tragic discovery that the Rev’s first wife, Fenella, was buried in the rock garden, and then the scandalous publication of the tell-all memoir by his second wife, Trudy, the whole affair had fizzled out.

There was a trial, yes, but the evidence had been inconclusive, or so the jury had decided. Trudy had taken the proceeds from her memoir and gone on vacation to a Caribbean island with — some said — a Tex-Mex lawn-maintenance expert, and had been found washing about in the surf after an impetuous naked moonlight swim. Such dangerous things, undertows, said the local police. She must have been dragged down, and hit her head on a rock. Her companion, whoever he was, had vanished. Understandable, since he might have been blamed; though a whisper was going around that he might also have been paid.

So Trudy was not able to give evidence at the trial, and, without that, what could be proven about anything? The skeleton of Fenella had lain so long in the ground: anyone at all might have put it there. Anonymous men, immigrants as a rule, were always walking around with shovels in the more affluent areas of cities, ready to bang trusting, innocent, horticulturally minded ladies on the head, stuff gardening gloves into their mouths, ravish them in the potting shed despite their muffled screams, and plant hens and chicks on top of them, not to mention lamb’s ears and snow-in-summer and other drought-resistant succulents. It was a well-known hazard for female homeowners who took an interest in landscaping.

As for his sizable embezzlements, which were beyond a doubt, the Rev had gone the tried and true route: a public confession of temptation, followed by an account of his sinfulness in failing to resist it, then by a further account of the discovery of that sinfulness, which had been a bitter herb, but through his humiliation had saved him from himself. This was topped up with a grovelling, tearful request for forgiveness from both God and man, in particular from the members of the Church of PetrOleum. Bingo, he was absolved, washed clean of stains, and ready for a new start. For who could find it in his heart to withhold forgiveness from a fellow human being who was so obviously contrite?

“He’s on the loose,” said Adam. “Exonerated, reinstated. His OilCorps associates got him off.”

“Fucker,” said Zeb. “Make that plural.”

“He’ll be wanting to hunt us down, and now he’ll be able to access the cash to do it,” said Adam. “His OilCorps friends will supply it. So be alert.”

“Right,” said Zeb. “The world needs more lerts.” It was an old joke of his. It used to make Adam laugh, or rather smile, but he didn’t smile that time.

One evening, when Zeb was loitering around the Scales bar in his Smokey the Bear shades and black suit and snake lapel pin, wearing his non-smile, non-frown, and listening to the chatter from the fauxgold tooth in his mouth, he heard something from one of the guys at the front door that made him stand up a little straighter.

It wasn’t a Painballer warning this time. On the contrary.

“Top of the pyramid, four of them, coming in,” said the voice. “Three OilCorps, one Church of PetrOleum. That preacher who was on the news.”

Zeb felt the adrenalin shooting through his veins. It had to be the Rev. Would the twisted, kiddie-bashing, wife-murdering sadist recognize him or not? He checked the location of every potential missile within reach, in case there might be a need for one. If there was a cry of “Seize that man” or any similar melodrama, he’d hurl a few cut-glass decanters and run like shit. His muscles were so taut they were twanging.

Here they came now, in a festive mood, judging from the japes and laughter and the modified backslaps — more like tentative pats — that were the main phrases of the quasi-brotherly body language permitted at the top levels of the Corps. They were on their way to champagne and tidbits, and everything that went with them. Tips would be lavish, supposing they could all get it up. Why be rich if you can’t flaunt it by bestowing patronizing sums of dosh on those who aid you in your quest for self-aggrandizement?

The cool thing for high-status Corps dudes was to pass by the paid security drudges at Scales as if they didn’t exist — why make eye contact with a hedge? — which, says Zeb, has probably been the style ever since you could say Roman emperor. And that was lucky for Zeb, because the Rev didn’t even toss him a glance. Not that he would have spotted Zeb beneath his hairy face waffle and dark shades, with the shaved head, the pointy ears, and all, had he bothered to look. But he didn’t bother. Zeb looked at him, though, and the more he looked, the less he liked the view.

The mirror balls were going round and round, sprinkling the clientele and the talent with a dandruff of light. The music was playing, a canned retro tango. Five Scalies in sequins were contorting themselves on the trapezes, tits pointing floorward, bodies curved into a C-shape, one leg on either side of their heads. Their smiles glowed in the blacklight. Zeb backed up to the glass bar shelving, palmed the green lady with the bishop up her snatch, and slid her into his sleeve. “Taking a leak,” he said to his partner, Jeb. “Cover for me.”

Once in the can, he unscrewed the bishop and abstracted three of the magic beans: a white, a red, and a black. He licked the salt from his fingers and tucked the pills into a front jacket pocket, then returned to his post and eased the scaly lady back into position on the shelf with not even a clink. No one would notice she’d been gone.

The Rev’s foursome was having a high old time. It was a celebration, Zeb figured: most likely in aid of the Rev’s return to what they all considered to be his normal life. Slithery lovelies were plying them with drinks, while above them the trapeze dancers did boneless twists and spineless twines. They showed bits of this and that, but never the royal flush: Scales was tonier than that, you had to pay extra if you wanted the full peepshow. Manners demanded a display of appreciative lust: the acrobatic sin charade wasn’t really the Rev’s thing because nobody was suffering, but he was doing a convincing job of pretending. His smile had that Botox look, as if it was a product of nerve damage.

Katrina WooWoo came over to the bar. Tonight she was dressed as an orchid, in a luscious peach colour with lavender accents. March, her python, was draped around her neck, and also over one bare shoulder.

“They’ve ordered the House Special for their pal,” she said to the bartender. “With the Taste of Eden.”

“Heavy on the tequila?” said the barkeep.

“Everything in,” said Katrina. “I’ll tell the girls.”

The House Special involved a private feather room with a green satin bedspread and three reptilian Scalies billed as catering to your every whim, and the Taste of Eden was a headbender kicktail guaranteed to deliver maximum bliss. Once that thing had been swallowed the client would be off in a world of wonders all his own. Zeb had tried some of the stuff on offer at Scales, but he’d never drunk the Taste of Eden kicktail. He was afraid of the visions he might have.

There it was now, standing on the counter. It was dark orange and fizzing slightly, and had a swizzle stick with a plastic snake curled around it, skewering a maraschino cherry. The snake was green and sparkly, with big eyes and a smiling lipstick mouth.

Zeb should have resisted his evil impulses. What he did was reckless, he admits that freely. But you only live once, he told himself, and maybe the Rev had used up his once. Zeb wondered which of the three pills to slip into the drink — the white, the red, or the black. But why be stingy? he admonished himself. Why not all?

“Down the hatch, good buddy.” “Have a wild trip!” “Up and at ’em!” “Knock ’em dead!” Were such archaic chunks of joshery still uttered on occasions like this? It appeared so. The Rev was patted and treated to a bouquet of softly knowing haw-haws, then led away for his treat by three lithe snakelets. All four of them were giggling: eerie to remember that, in retrospect.

Zeb longed to excuse himself from bar duty and slide into the video viewing cubicle where a couple of Scales security personnel monitored the private feather rooms for trouble. He didn’t know how those pills would act. Did they make you very sick, and if so, how? Maybe the effect was long-term: maybe those babies didn’t kick in for a day, a week, a month. But if it was anything more rapid, he sure as hell wanted to watch.

Doing so, however, would finger him as the perpetrator. So he waited stoically though tensely, ears pricked, humming silently to himself to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:

My dad loved walloping little kids,

He loved it more than nooky,

I hope he bleeds from every pore,

And chucks up all his cookies.

After a few too many repetitions of that, there was some tooth static: someone else was talking to the gatekeeper guys at the front. After what seemed like a long time but wasn’t, Katrina WooWoo came through the doorway that led to the private rooms. She was trying to appear casual, but the clicking of her high heels was urgent.

“I need you to come backstage,” she whispered to him.

“I’m on bar duty,” he said, feigning reluctance.

“I’ll call in Mordis from the front. He’ll take over. Come right now!”

“Girls okay?” He was stalling: if something bad was happening to the Rev, he wanted it to keep on happening.

“Yes. But they’re frightened. It’s an emergency!”

“Guy go berserk?” he said. They sometimes did: the effects of the Taste of Eden weren’t always predictable.

“Worse than that,” she said. “Bring Jeb too.”

Raspberry Mousse

The feather room was a cyclone site: a sock here, a shoe there, smears of unidentified substances, bedraggled feathers everywhere. That lump in the corner must’ve been the Rev, covered by the green satin bedspread. Oozing out from under it was a hand-span of red foam that looked like a badly diseased tongue.

“What happened?” Zeb asked innocently. It was hard to look really innocent with shades on — he’d tried in the mirror — so he took them off.

“I’ve sent the girls to take showers,” said Katrina WooWoo. “They were so upset! One minute they were …”

“Peeling the shrimp,” said Zeb. It was the staff slang for getting a dink out of his clothes, the underpants in particular. There was an art to it, as to everything, said the Scalies. Or a craft. A slow unbuttoning, a long, sensuous unzipping. Hold the moment. Pretend he’s a box of candies, lick-a-licious. “Lick-a-licious,” Zeb said out loud. He’s shaken: the effect on the Rev had been far worse than he’d imagined. He hadn’t intended actual death.

“Yes, well, good thing they didn’t get that far, because he, well, he simply dissolved, according to the monitors in the video room. They’ve never seen anything like it. Raspberry mousse, is what they said.”

“Crap,” said Jeb, who’d lifted a corner of the bedspread. “We need a water-vac, it’s like a very sick swimming pool under there. What hit him?”

“The girls say he just started to froth,” said Katrina. “And scream, of course. At first. And tear out feathers — those are ruined, they’ll have to be destroyed, what a waste. Then it was no longer screaming, it was gurgling. I’m so worried!” She was understating: scared was more like it.

“He had a meltdown. Must be something he ate,” said Zeb. He meant it for a joke; or he meant it to be mistaken for a joke.

Katrina didn’t laugh. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “Though you’re right, it might have been in food. Nothing he ate here though, no way! It has to be a new microbe. Looks like a flesh-eater, only so speeded up! What if it’s really contagious?”

“Where could he have caught it?” said Jeb. “Our girls are clean.”

“Off a doorknob?” said Zeb. Another lame joke. Shut up, pinhead, he told himself.

“Lucky our girls had their Biofilm Bodygloves on,” said Katrina. “Those will have to be burned. But none of the — none of what came out of — none of whatever it is touched them.”

Zeb was getting an incoming call on his tooth: it was Adam. Since when does he have tooth broadcasting privileges? thought Zeb.

“I understand there’s been an incident,” said Adam. He was tinny and far away.

“It’s fucking creepy having your voice in my head,” said Zeb. “You sound like a Martian.”

“No doubt,” said Adam. “But that is not your number-one problem right now. The man who died was our mutual parent, I’m told.”

“You were told right,” said Zeb, “but who told you?”

He’d gone into a corner of the room so the conversation would be semi-private, out of consideration for others: it was annoying to have to listen to a person talking to their own tooth. Katrina was in another corner with her intramural cell, calling in the Scales cleanup squad, who were bound to be taken aback. Similar things had been known to occur with older guys during the course of House Specials — the kick-tails could be overly powerful for those of diminished bodily abilities and functions — but nothing very similar. Usually it was a stroke or a heart attack. This kind of frothing was unprecedented.

“Katrina called me. Naturally,” said Adam. “She keeps me informed.”

“She knows he’s our …?”

“Not exactly. She knows I have an interest in anything concerning the Corps bookings — especially the OilCorps — so she notified me of the four-party reservation, and of the special surprise arrangements made by three of the clients as a gift to the fourth. Then she sent me the headshots generated automatically by the doorware at the front, and of course I recognized him at once. I was already on the premises, so I came to the front of the house in case I might be needed. I’m out in the bar area now; I’m right beside the glass shelves, where the novelty corkscrews and the salt shakers are displayed.”

“Oh,” said Zeb. “Good,” he added lamely.

“Which one did you use?”

“Which one of what?” said Zeb.

“Don’t play innocent,” said Adam. “I can count. Six minus three is three. The white, the red, or the black?”

“All of them,” said Zeb. There was a pause.

“Too bad,” said Adam. “That will make it more difficult for us to determine what exactly was in each one. A more controlled approach would have been preferable.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me I’m a fucking stupid fuckwit,” said Zeb, “for doing such a stupid fucking dickwit thing? Though not in so many words, I guess.”

“It was a little spontaneous of you,” said Adam, “but worse things could have happened. In the event, it was fortuitous that he didn’t recognize you.”

“Wait a minute,” said Zeb. “You knew he was walking in the door? You didn’t warn me?”

“I counted on you to act as the situation would dictate,” said Adam. “Nor was my confidence misplaced.”

Zeb was outraged: his cunning bastard of a big brother had set him up, the shit! But he’d also trusted Zeb to be competent enough to deal with whatever mayhem might result, so in addition to the outrage he felt all warm and vindicated. Thank you didn’t really fit the case, so instead he said, “You fucking smartass!”

“Regrettable,” said Adam. “And I do regret it. But may I point out that, as a result, that man is permanently off our case. Now, and this is important: get them to collect as much of him — of it — as they can. Put it in a CryoJeenyus Frasket — Katrina always keeps a few on hand for clients with CryoJeenyus contracts. The full-body model would be preferable to the head-only. Many Scales customers who are no longer young have made such arrangements. The protocol is that if they have a — what CryoJeenyus calls ‘a life-suspending event’ — and when speaking of those who have had their lives suspended, please do avoid the word death, as CryoJeenyus employees do, since you will shortly be impersonating one of them. If such a life-suspending event occurs, the client is flash-frozen immediately in the Frasket and shipped to CryoJeenyus for re-animation later, once CryoJeenyus has developed the biotech to do that.”

“Which is when pigs can fly,” says Zeb. “I hope Katrina’s got a giant ice-cube tray.”

“Use buckets if necessary,” said Adam. “We need to get him — we need to get the effluent to Pilar’s cryptic team, out on the east coast.”

“Pilar’s what?”

“Cryptic team. Our friends,” says Adam. “They have day jobs in the biotech Corps: OrganInc, HelthWyzer Central, RejoovenEsense, even CryoJeenyus. But they’re helping us at night, cryptic being a bio-term for camouflage in, say, caterpillars.”

“Since when are you so palsy with caterpillars?” said Zeb. “Are you warping your brain lurking in that dumb MaddAddam Extinctathon name-the-dead-beetle game site?” Adam overrode him.

“The cryptic team will find out what it was, inside the pills. Or is. Let’s hope it can’t go airborne; we don’t think it can yet, or anyone who was in that room will have been contaminated. It appears to be very rapid-acting, so they’d be showing symptoms. As things stand, we believe it’s contact-only. Don’t let any of the — of the residue touch you.”

And don’t stick my finger in the goo and then shove it up my ass, Zeb thought. “I’m not a fucking idiot,” he said out loud.

“Live up to that pledge. I know you can,” said Adam. “I’ll see you on the sealed bullet train, with the Frasket.”

“We’re going where?” said Zeb. “You’re coming too?” But Adam had rung off, or hung up, or logged out; whatever you did on the other end of a tooth.

While the plastic-film-dressed and face-masked cleanup team was water-vaccing the Rev into enamelled pails and then funnelling him into sealable freezer-friendly metal flasks, Zeb headed off to become a tidier and sweeter version of Smokey the Bear. He disposed of his black outfit, doomed to incineration, and took a quick antimicrobial-enhanced shower — same product the Scalies used — lathering his face, sanctifying his pits, and Q-tipping his pointy ears.

I’m gonna wash that Rev right offa my head,

’Cause he’s not only dead, he’s red,

He’s a red red goo, and a good thing too,

’Cause Daddy I’m through and so are you,

A boobity-doop-de-doop-de-doop-de-doo!

He did a little two-step, a little hip-wiggle. He liked to sing in the shower, especially when danger threatened.

One more river, he sang while putting on a fresh black suit. And that’s the river of boredom! One more molar, There’s one more molar to floss.

Then he resumed his duties, standing sentinel behind Katrina WooWoo — now dressed as a fruit cluster with a fetching set of tooth marks embroidered on one apple-shaped boob — while she and March the python broke the lamentable news to the three OilCorps execs, having first ordered frozen daiquiris on the house, all around, and a platter of mini-fish-fingers, PeaPod Good-as-Real Scallops — No Bottoms Dragged for These, said the label, as Zeb knew from mooching them in the kitchen — some Gourmet’s Holiday Poutine, and a plate of deep-fried NeverNetted Shrimps, a new lab-grown splice.

“Your friend has unfortunately had a life-suspending event,” she told the OilCorps execs. “Total bliss can be taxing on the system. But as you know, he had — excuse me, he has a contract with CryoJeenyus — full-body, not head-only — so all is well. I’m so sorry for your temporary loss.”

“I didn’t know that,” said one of the execs. “About the contract. I thought you wore a CryoJeenyus bracelet or something; I never saw his.”

“Some gentlemen prefer not to advertise the possibility of life suspension,” said Katrina smoothly. “They choose the tattoo option, which is applied in a concealed and very private location. Of course, at this enterprise we become aware of all such tattoos, as a casual business acquaintance might not.” One more thing to admire about her, thought Zeb, trying not to peer down the front of her apples: she was a tip-top liar. He couldn’t have done better himself.

“Makes sense,” said the dominant exec.

“In any case, we did discover this fact in time,” said Katrina, “and, as you know, the procedure has to be carried out immediately in order to be effective. Luckily we have a fast-track Premium Platinum-level agreement with CryoJeenyus, and their trained operatives are always on call. Your friend is already in a Frasket, and will be on his way to the central CryoJeenyus facility on the east coast almost at once.”

“We can’t see him?” said the second exec.

“Once the Frasket is sealed and vacuumized — as it now is — it would defeat the purpose to open it,” Katrina said, smiling. “I can provide a certificate of authentication from CryoJeenyus. Would you like another frozen daiquiri?”

“Shit,” said the third exec. “What do we tell that nutbar church of his? Fell over getting fracked in a moppet shop won’t go down too well.”

“I agree,” said Katrina, a little more coldly. She felt Scales was much more than a moppet shop: it was a total aesthetic experience, ran the blurb on the website. “But Scales and Tails is well known for its discretion in such matters. That is why it is the number-one choice among discerning gentlemen such as yourselves. With us, you do get what you pay for, and more; and that includes a good cover story.”

“Any bright ideas?” said the second exec. He had eaten all the NeverNetted Shrimps and was starting on the scallops. Death made some people hungry.

“Contracted viral pneumonia while working with disadvantaged children in the deeper pleeblands, would be my first suggestion,” said Katrina. “That would be a popular choice. But we have our own trained PR personnel to assist you.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said the third exec, watching her through narrowed and slightly reddened eyes. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“My pleasure,” said Katrina, smiling graciously and leaning forward to let her hand be shaken and then her fingertips kissed while disclosing enough but not too much of her upper torso real-estate. “Anytime. We’re here for you.”

“What a gal,” says Zeb. “She could have run any of the top Corps with one thumb, no problem.”

Toby feels the familiar snarly tendrils of jealousy knotting round her heart. “So did you ever?” she asks.

“Ever what, babe?”

“Ever get into her scaly underthings.”

“It’s one of my life-span regrets,” says Zeb, “but no. I didn’t even give it a try. Hands stayed in the pockets, firmly clenched. Jaw clenched likewise. It was an effort to restrain myself, but that’s the bare-naked truth: I didn’t give it a single grope. Not even a wink.”

“Because?”

“One, she was my boss when I was working at Scales. It’s not a smart move to roll around on the floor with a woman boss. It confuses them.”

“Oh please,” says Toby. “That’s so twentieth century!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a sexist-wexist pig and so forth, but that happens to be accurate. Hormone overdrive craps up efficiency. I’ve watched it in action — women bosses getting all coy and weird about issuing orders to some bullet-headed stud who’s just erased their rational faculties and blown off the top of their heads and made them growl like a rakunk in heat and scream like a dying rabbit. It alters the power hierarchy. ‘Take me, take me, write my speech, get me a coffee, you’re fired.’ So there’s that.” He pauses. “Plus.”

“Plus what?” She’s hoping for some revolting feature on the part of Katrina WooWoo, whom, granted, she has never seen, and who is 99.999 per cent likely to be dead; but envy crosses all borders. Maybe she was knock-kneed, or had halitosis or hopeless taste in music. Even a pimple would have been some comfort.

“Plus,” says Zeb, “Adam loved her. No doubt of it. I’d never poach in his goldfish pond. He was — he’s my brother. He’s my family. There’s limits.”

“You’re kidding!” says Toby. “Adam One? In love? With Katrina WooWoo?”

“She was Eve One,” says Zeb.

The Train to CryoJeenyus

“That’s hard to believe,” says Toby. “How do you know?”

Zeb is silent. Will this be a painful story? It’s likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably.

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators hunting their dispersed flesh, transformed now into grasshoppers and mice.

There’s a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones. There’s a couple of them down there now, jumping about in the meadow, glowing with a faint greenish light. Some used to think there was a giant rabbit up there on the moon: they could clearly make out its ears. Others thought there was a smiling face, yet others an old woman with a basket. What will the Crakers decide about that when they get around to astrology, in a hundred years, or ten, or one? As they will, or will not.

But is the moon waxing or waning? Her moontime sense isn’t as sharp as it used to be in the days of the Gardeners. How many times had she watched over Vigils when the moon was full? Wondering, from time to time, why there was an Adam One but no Eve One, nor ever any mention of such. Now she’ll find out.

“Picture it,” says Zeb. “Adam and me were on the sealed bullet train together for three days. I’d only seen him twice since we cleared out the Rev’s bank account and went our separate ways: in the Happicuppa joint, in the back room at Scales. No time to dig down. So naturally I asked him stuff.”

Zeb had to sacrifice his face waffle, of which he’d become moderately fond despite the meticulous upkeep, what with those stubbly mini-squares to sculpt. He clear-cut the thing with a shaver: all that remained of it was a goatee. He had some new head growth — an unconvincing Mo’Hair glue-on from the early days of that Corp — in a shade of glossy pimp-oil brown.

Luckily he could cover up some of the more fraudulent effects with the dorky hat that was part of the CryoJeenyus outfit for the position that would have once been called “undertaker’s assistant,” though CryoJeenyus used the label Temporary Inertness Caretaker instead. The hat was a modified turban, referencing both magicians and genies. It was reddish in colour and had a flame design on the front.

“Ever-burning flame of life, right?” says Zeb. “When they showed that third-rate magic-show headrag to me, I said, ‘You can’t be fucking serious! I’m not wearing a boiled tomato on my head!’ But then I saw the beauty of it. With it, and with the rest of the ensemble — a purple thing like pyjamas, or maybe a karate concept, with the CryoJeenyus logo plastered across the front — no one could mistake me for anything but an overgrown dim bulb who couldn’t get any other job. Frasketsitting on a train — how pathetic was that? ‘If you’re where no one expects you to be,’ old Slaight of Hand used to say, ‘you’re invisible.’ ”

Adam had the same uniform, and he looked even stupider in it than Zeb did. So that was some comfort. Anyway, who was going to see them? They were locked into the special CryoJeenyus car with the Frasket plugged into its own separate generator to keep it subzero inside. CryoJeenyus prided itself on being extra secure: DNA theft, not to mention the pilfering of other, larger body parts, was a worry among those who were in love with their own carbon structures: in those circles, the theft of Einstein’s brain had not been forgotten.

Thus an armed guard travelled with all Frasket-sitters, riding shotgun near the door. On bona fide CryoJeenyus missions, this individual would have been a member of the consolidated and ever-expanding CorpSeCorps and would have been armed with a spraygun. But since everything about this particular caper was bogus, the role was played by a Scales manager named Mordis. He looked the part: tough, bright eyes like a shiny black beetle, smile impartial as a falling rock.

His weaponry wasn’t real, however: the cryptic team could imitate clothing, but they couldn’t reproduce that kind of triple-security moving-part tech. So the spraygun was a cunning plastic and painted-foam imitation, which wouldn’t matter at all unless someone got close enough to be hit with a fist.

But why would they? As far as anyone else was concerned, this was just a routine dead-run. Or rather, a ferrying of the subject of a life-suspending event from the shore of life on a round trip back to the shore of life. It was a mouthful, but CryoJeenyus went in for that kind of evasive crapspeak. They had to, considering the business they were in: their two best sales aids being gullibility and unfounded hope.

“It was the most bizarre trip I ever took,” says Zeb. “Dressed up like Aladdin, sitting in a locked train compartment with my brother, who was wearing half a squashed pumpkin on his head, and between us a Frasket containing our dad in the form of soup stock. Though we did put the bones and teeth in there, as well. Those didn’t dissolve. There was some discussion at Scales about the osseous materials — you could get a good price for human bones in the deeper pleeblands, where carved artisanal human-products jewellery was a fashion: Bone Bling, it was called. But the cooler heads of Adam and Katrina and, I have to say, your humble self overruled the enthusiasts, because even if you boiled those things there was no telling what microbes might remain. As yet, we knew nothing about them.”

A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow Frasket, Zeb sang.

Adam took out a little notebook and a pencil and wrote: Watch what you say. We’re most likely bugged.

After showing it to Zeb under cover of his hand, he erased it, and wrote: And please do not sing. It is very irritating.

Zeb motioned for the little notebook. After a slight hesitation, Adam handed it over. Zeb wrote: FU+PO. Then he wrote, underneath them: Fuck You and Piss Off. Then: You manage to get yourself laid yet?

Adam read this and blushed. Watching him blush was a novelty: Zeb had never witnessed such a thing before. Adam was so pale you could almost see his capillaries. He wrote: None of your business.

Zeb wrote: Haha, was it K and did you pay? Since he had long suspected which way the wind of Adam was blowing.

Adam wrote: I refuse to have that lady spoken about in such a manner. She has been a devoted furtherer of our efforts.

Zeb should have written: What efforts? Then he would have known more. Instead he wrote, Haha, hole in one for my score, so to speak: D!! At least you’re not gay!:D: D

Adam wrote: You are beneath vulgar.

Zeb wrote: That would be me! Never mind, I respect true love. He drew a heart, then a flower. He almost added, Even if she is running a fancypants blowjob emporium, but he thought better of it: Adam was getting very huffy, and he might forget himself and take a swipe at Zeb for just about the first time in his life. Then there would be an unseemly scuffle over the remains of their liquefied parent that would not end well for Zeb because he could never bear to deck Adam, not really; so he’d just have to let the pallid little weenie beat him up.

Adam looked mollified — maybe it was the heart and the flower — but still ruffled. He crumpled up all the notebook pages they’d been writing on, then tore them into pieces and went to the can, where — Zeb assumed — he flushed them onto the tracks. Even if some nosy spyster managed to gather them up and stick them together they’d hardly learn anything of interest. Just a bunch of low-calorie dirty talk, of the kind a Frasket-sitter might be expected to employ while killing time out of the hearing of the paying customers.

The rest of the trip passed in silence, Adam with arms folded and a frowny but sanctimonious expression on his face, Zeb humming under his breath while the continent zipped past outside the window.

At the east coast end, the CryoJeenyus dedicated carriage was met by Pilar, posing as a concerned relative of the stiff — or, rather, of the temporarily life-suspended client — and three members from, Zeb assumed, the cryptic team.

“You know two of them,” says Zeb. “Katuro and Manatee. The third was a gal we lost during Crake’s scoop of the MaddAddamites, when he was designing the Crakers and gathering up the brainslaves for his Paradice Project. She tried to run, and I can only assume she went over an overpass and got turned into car tire mush. But none of that had happened yet.”

Pilar shed a few croc tears into a hanky just in case there were any mini-drones or spyware installations around. Then she supervised discreetly as the Frasket was loaded into a long vehicle. CryoJeenyus did not call those vehicles “hearses”: they were “Life2Life Shuttles.” They were boiled tomato colour and had the perky ever-burning flame of life on the doors: nothing dark to spoil the festive mood.

So into the L2Ls went the Rev in his Frasket, headed for an extreme security biosampling unit — not at CryoJeenyus, they weren’t equipped for that, but at HelthWyzer Central. Pilar got in as well, and also Zeb. Mordis would change his outfit and head to the local Scales and Tails, where they needed a tougher manager.

Adam would change into his increasingly bizarre streetwear and shuffle off to do whatever it was that Adam did, out there in the deep pleebs. He gave the white bishop to Pilar, having extracted it from the salty cavity of the girl salt shaker: the cryptic team wanted to take a close look at the contents of those pills, and they thought they finally had the equipment to do so without exposing themselves to contagion.

Zeb was slated for yet another identity, which Pilar had already prepared for him: he was to be embedded right inside HelthWyzer Central.

“Do me a favour,” said Zeb to Pilar, once she had assured them that the L2Ls had been thoroughly swept for spyware. “Run a DNA comparison for me. On the Rev. The guy in the Frasket.” He’d never shaken his childhood notion that the Rev was not his real father, and this was surely his last chance to find out.

Pilar said it would be no problem. He handed over a cheek swab sample of himself, improvised on a piece of tissue, and she tucked it carefully inside a small plastic envelope that contained what looked like a dried-up elf ear, wrinkly in appearance, yellow in colour.

“What’s that?” he asked her. He wanted to say, “What the fuck’s that,” but proximity to Pilar did not encourage swearing. “Gremlin from outer space?”

“It’s a chanterelle,” she said. “A mushroom. An edible variety, not to be confused with the false chanterelle.”

“So, will I come out with the DNA of a fungus?”

Pilar laughed. “There’s not much chance of that,” she said.

“Good,” said Zeb. “Tell Adam.”

Only problem was, he thought later that night, when drifting off to sleep in his Spartan but acceptable HelthWyzer accommodations — only problem was that if Pilar ran the DNA comparison and the Rev wasn’t his dad, then Adam wouldn’t be his brother. Adam would be no relation to him at all. No blood relation.

Thus:

Fenella + the Rev = Adam.

Trudy + Unknown Semen Donor = Zeb.

= No shared DNA.

If that was the truth, did he really want to know it?

Lumiroses

Zeb’s new title at HelthWyzer Central was that of Disinfector, First Rank. He got a pair of lurid green overalls with the HelthWyzer logo and a big luminous orange D on the front; he got a hairnet to keep his own shed follicle-ware from littering the desk spaces of his betters; he got a nose filter cone that made him look like a cartoon pig; he got an endless supply of protective liquid-repelling nanobioform-impermeable gloves and shoes; and, most importantly, he got a passkey.

Only for the bureaucratic offices, however: not for the labs. Those were in another building. But you never could tell what sort of intel a nimble-fingered robinhooder with a few lines of entry code slipped to him by underground cryptics might be able to scoop off an untended computer, late at night, when all good citizens were sound asleep in other people’s beds. HelthWyzer was somewhat porous in the spouse department.

Once upon a time Zeb’s Disinfector position would have been called “cleaner,” and before that “janitor,” and before that “charwoman”; but this was the twenty-first century and they’d added some nanobioform consciousness to the title. To deserve that title Zeb was supposed to have passed a rigid security check, for what hostile Corp — possibly from a foreign clime — wouldn’t think of disguising one of their keyboard pirates as a minor functionary and ordering him to grab whatever he could find?

To qualify as a Disinfector, Zeb was also supposed to have taken a training course replete with updated modern babble about where germs might lurk and how to render them unconscious. Needless to say, he hadn’t taken it; but Pilar had given him the condensed version before he started.

Germs were said to hang out on the usual toilet seats, floors, sinks, and doorknobs, of course. But also on elevator buttons, on telephone receivers, and on computer keyboards. So he had to wipe down all of these with antimicrobial cloths and zap them with death rays, in addition to the floor-washing in hallways and such, and the dust-sucking on the carpets in the plushier offices to pick up anything the daily robots might have missed. Those things were always rolling to and fro, backing up to wall outlets to plug themselves in and replenish their battery power, then scuttling away again, emitting beeping sounds so you wouldn’t trip over them. It was like navigating a beach littered with giant crabs. When he was alone on a floor he used to kick them into corners or turn them over on their backs, just to see how fast they could recover.

In addition to the outfit he got a new name, which was Horatio.

“Horatio?” says Toby.

“Laughter is uncalled for,” says Zeb. “It was someone’s idea of what a semi-legal Tex-Mex family who snuck under the Wall might have called a son they hoped would make good in the world. They thought I looked kind of Tex-Mex, or maybe like a hybrid that contained some of that DNA. Which I do, as was discovered not long after that.”

“Oh,” says Toby. “Pilar ran the DNA comparison.”

“You got it,” says Zeb. “Though it took a while for me to access the news. She couldn’t really be seen with me, because why would she know me? Anyway we’d have to go out of our way to meet, we were on different shifts. So we’d fixed up a fallback code when I gave her my cell sample.

“Before then, when I was on my way in the CryoJeenyus train car and she was putting my Disinfector identity together and getting it slotted into the system, she’d already learned I’d be cleaning the women’s washroom down the hall from the lab where she was working. I was night shift — it was all male Disinfectors for that shift, they didn’t want any groping or screaming, which might have taken place with a gender mix. So I had the run of the floor after dark. Second cubicle from the left: that was the one I needed to watch.”

“She left a note inside the toilet tank?”

“Nothing so obvious. Those toilet tanks were routinely checked; only an amateur would stash anything important in there. The dropbox was that square container thing they have in those washrooms, for what-have-you. Those items you aren’t supposed to flush. But it wouldn’t be a note, way too telltale.”

“So, a signal?” Toby wonders what kind. One for joy, two for sorrow? But one and two of what?

“Yeah. Something that wouldn’t be out of place, but wouldn’t be the usual. Pits, was what she decided.”

“Pits? What do you mean, pits?” Toby tries to visualize pits. Armpits, holes in the ground? “Like peach pits?” she guesses.

“Correct. Might be from a lunch that got eaten in the washroom. Some of the secretary-type women did that — they sat in the can for some peace and quiet. I did find sandwich remains in those boxes: the odd bacon rind, the odd cheesefood fragment. There was a lot of time pressure in HelthWyzer, and more of it the farther down the status ladder you were, so they liked to sneak breathers.”

“What was the pit selection?” Toby asks. “For the yes and the no?” The way Pilar thought has always intrigued her: she wouldn’t have made the fruit selections haphazardly.

“Peach pit for no: no relationship to the Rev. Date pit for yes: worse luck, the Rev is your dad, hear it and weep because you’re at least half psychopath.”

The peach choice makes sense to Toby: peaches were valued among the Gardeners as having been one of the possible candidates for the Fruit of Life in Eden. Not that the Gardeners disparaged dates, or any other fruit that had not been chemically sprayed.

“HelthWyzer must have had access to some pretty expensive fruit. I thought the peach and apple yields plummeted around then, when the big bee die-off was going on. And the plums,” she adds. “And the citrus varieties.”

“HelthWyzer was making a lot of money,” says Zeb. “Raking it in, from their vitamin pill business and the medical drugs end. So they could afford the cyber-pollinated imports. It was one of the perks of working at HelthWyzer, the fresh fruit. Only for the higher-ups, naturally.”

“Which did you find?” says Toby. “Pit-wise.”

“Peach. Two pits. She’d underlined it.”

“How did you feel about that?” Toby asks.

“About the overkill on the expensive fruit?” says Zeb. He’s dodging emotion.

“About finding out that your father wasn’t your father,” says Toby patiently. “You must have felt something.”

“Okay. I felt, I knew it,” says Zeb. “I always like to be right, who doesn’t? Also less guilty about, you know. Frothing him to death.”

“You felt guilty about that?” says Toby. “Even if he had been your father, he was such a …”

“Yeah, I know. But still. Blood is thicker than blood. It would’ve bothered me some. The downside was the Adam end of it. I didn’t feel so good about that: all of a sudden he was no relation to me. No genetic relation, that is.”

“Did you tell him?” Toby asks.

“Nope. As far as I was concerned, I figured he was my brother. Joined at the head. We shared a lot of stuff.”

“Now I’m coming to a part you won’t like much, babe,” says Zeb.

“Because it’s about Lucerne?” says Toby. Zeb’s not stupid. He must have suspected for a long time how she’d felt about Lucerne, his live-in at the Gardeners. Lucerne the Irritating, dodger of communal weeding duties, shirker of women’s sewing groups, sufferer from frequent excuse-making headaches, whiny possessor of Zeb, neglectful mother of Ren. Lucerne the Luscious, one-time denizen of the HelthWyzer Corp, married to a top geek. Lucerne, the romantic fantasist who’d run away with the raggle-taggle Zeb because she’d seen too many movies in which beautiful women did that.

Zeb, in Lucerne’s version, had been crazed with irresistible and relentless desire for her. He’d been cross-eyed with lust when he’d spotted her in her pink negligee at the AnooYoo Spa while he was planting lumiroses in his capacity as gardener, and he’d made mad passionate love to her right there and then, on the dew-damp morning grass. Toby had heard that story many times from Lucerne herself, back at the Gardeners, and she’d liked it less every time. If she leaned over the railing and spat, she might be able to hit the very spot where Zeb and Lucerne had first rolled around on the lawn. Or near enough.

“Right,” says Zeb. “Lucerne. That’s what came next in my life. I can skip over it if you like.”

“No,” says Toby. “I’ve never heard your side of it. But Lucerne told me about the lumirose petals. How you strewed them over her pulsating body and so forth.” She tries not to sound envious, but it’s difficult. Has anyone ever strewn lumirose petals over her own pulsating body, or even thought about it? No. She lacks the temperament for petal-strewing. She would spoil the moment — “What are you doing with those silly petals?” Or she would laugh, which would be fatal. Right now she needs to shut up and hold back on the commentary or she won’t get the story.

“Yeah, well, petal-strewing comes naturally to me, I used to be in the magic biz,” says Zeb. “It distracts the attention. But some of what she told you was most likely true.”

The first time Zeb and Lucerne set eyes on each other was not at the AnooYoo Spa, however. It was in the women’s washroom that Zeb was supposed to be cleaning — was cleaning, in fact — while pawing through the detritus in the metal box for pits, whether peach or date. He hadn’t found any yet — it was before Pilar had the results of the Rev mix ’n’ match DNA test, or possibly before she could amass the necessary pits — so he was emerging from the second cubicle from the left empty-handed, pit-wise. When who should come into the Women’s Room but Lucerne.

“This was the middle of the night?” says Toby.

“Affirmative. What was she doing there? I asked myself. Either she was a robinhooder like me, in which case she was really inept because she’d got caught out of place. Or else she was having it off with some HelthWyzer exec who’d given her an access key to the building so they could flail on his fancy carpet while he was supposed to be working late at the office and she was supposed to be at the gym. Though it was late even for that.”

“Or both,” says Toby. “The having it off and the robinhooding, both.”

“Yeah. They combine well: each can provide an excuse for the other. Oh no, I wasn’t pilfering, I was only cheating on my husband. Oh no, I wasn’t cheating, I was only pilfering. But it was the first one of those, for sure. No mistaking the symptoms.”

Lucerne gave a little scream when she saw Zeb emerging from the cubicle in his impermeable gloves and his alien-from-outer-space nose cone. It wasn’t the first time that night she’d given a little scream, in his opinion: she was flushed and breathless, and what you might call dishevelled. Or maybe unbuttoned. Or, if you were being fancy, in disarray. Needless to say, she was very attractive at that moment.

Oh, needless to say, thinks Toby.

“What are you doing in the Ladies?” Lucerne said accusingly. The first rule: when caught wet-handed, accuse first. She did say Ladies, not Women’s. That was a clue in itself.

“To what?” says Toby.

“Her character. She had a pedestal complex. She wanted to be on one. Ladies was a step higher than Women.”

Zeb shoved his nose cone up onto his forehead: now he looked like a blunted rhinoceros. “I’m a Disinfector, First Rank,” he added impressively but pompously. There’s something about a gorgeous woman who’s obviously been shagging another man that brings out the pompous in a guy: it’s a wound to his ego. “What are you doing in this building?” he counter-accused. He noted the wedding ring. Aha, he thought. Caged lioness. Needs a holiday from the tedium.

“I had some work to finish up,” Lucerne lied, as convincingly as she could. “My presence here is entirely legitimate. I have a pass.” Zeb could have called her on it, but he admired a woman who could use the word legitimate in such a fraudulent context. So he did not march her off to Security, which would have triggered a check via the spouse, and set off unpleasant repercussions for the lover, and would almost certainly have resulted — come to think of it — in Zeb himself being fired. So he let her get away with it.

“Right, okay, sorry,” he said with acceptable hangdog servility.

“Now, if you don’t mind, this is the Ladies, and I’d like some privacy, Horatio,” she said, caressing the name on his tag. She gazed deep into his eyes. It was a plea — Don’t rat me out — and also a promise: One day I’ll be yours. Not that she intended to honour that promise.

Well played, thought Zeb as he made his exit.

Thus, when he and Lucerne encountered each other for the second time, in the first flush of dawn, she barefoot and inadequately concealed in a diaphanous pink negligee, he with a phallic spade and an ardent lumirose bush in hand, right down there on the freshly sodded lawn of the just-completed AnooYoo Spa in the middle of Heritage Park, she recognized him. And she remembered that he’d once been Horatio, but was now, mysteriously — as his AnooYoo Spa grounds-keeper’s name tag had it — Atash.

“You were at HelthWyzer,” she’d said. “But you weren’t …” So, naturally, he’d kissed her, fervently and with unrestrainable passion. Because she couldn’t talk and kiss at the same time.

“Naturally,” says Toby. “You were supposed to be who? What’s Atash?”

“Iranian,” says Zeb. “Immigrant grandparents. Why not? There were a lot of them came over in the late twentieth. It was safe enough as long as I never bumped into any other Iranians and they started asking genealogy stuff, and where was your family from. Though I’d memorized the whole identity, just in case. I had a good backstory — just enough disappearances and atrocities in it to account for any time/place discrepancies.”

“So Lucerne meets Atash, and suspects he’s really Horatio,” says Toby. “Or vice versa.” She wants to get over the hurtful parts as quickly as possible: with luck, the hot, irresistible sex and the petal-strewing that Lucerne had never tired of describing to Toby won’t be mentioned again.

“Right. And that wasn’t good, because I’d had to go missing from HelthWyzer very fast. One of the computers had an alarm on it I didn’t spot until too late, and it showed that somebody’d been in there. I could tell I’d triggered it right after I did it, and they were going to start tracking who’d been in the building at the time, and that would pinpoint me. I used the MaddAddam chatroom and called for emergency help, and the cryptics got hold of Adam. He had a contact who could stick me into the AnooYoo Spa gardening job, though we both realized it was a stopgap and I’d have to move on soon.”

“So, she knows, and you know she knows, and she knows you know she knows,” says Toby. “At the lawn encounter.”

“Correct. I had two choices: murder or seduction. I chose the most attractive.”

“Understood,” says Toby. “I’d have done the same.” He’s made it sound like a seduction of convenience, but they both know there was more to it than that. Diaphanous pink negligees are their own excuse for being.

Lucerne was bad luck in some ways, said Zeb. Though she was good luck in others, because you couldn’t deny that she –

“You can skip that part,” says Toby.

“Okay, short version: she had me by the nuts, more ways than one. But I hadn’t ratted on her that time in the washroom, and she was inclined to return the favour as long as I was attentive enough to her. Then she got hooked on me, and you know the rest: nothing would do but an elopement with a mystery man first spotted when wearing a nose of a pig.

“I moved us around inside the deeper pleeblands, which she found romantic at first. Luckily no one — no one in the CorpSeCorps — was much interested in her disappearance, because she hadn’t stolen any IP. Wives did skedaddle from the Compounds out of sheer boredom, it wasn’t unheard of. The CorpSeCorps regarded such defections as private, insofar as they regarded anything as private. They didn’t bother with them much, especially if the husband wasn’t agitating. Which it appears that Lucerne’s husband did not.

“Trouble is, Lucerne took Ren with her. Cute little girl, I liked her. But it was way too dangerous for her in the deeper pleeblands. Kids like that could get snatched for the chicken-sex trade just walking along the street, even if they were with adults. There’d be a pleebrat mob scuffle, some SecretBurgers red sauce tossing, an overturned stand or solarcar — in other words, a honking big misdirection — and when you looked again, your child would be gone. I couldn’t risk that.”

Zeb got a few more alterations done to his ears and fingerprints and irises — they’d know by now he’d been up to no good on the HelthWyzer computers, they’d be looking for him — and then …

“And then the three of you turned up at the God’s Gardeners,” says Toby. “I remember that; I wondered from the first what you were doing there. You didn’t fit in with the rest of them.”

“You mean I hadn’t taken the vow of whatnot and drunk the Elixir of Life? God loves you, and he also loves aphids?”

“More or less.”

“No. I hadn’t. But Adam had to put up with me anyway, didn’t he? I was his brother.”

Edencliff

“Adam already had his ecofreakshow up and running by that time,” says Zeb. “At the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. You were there. So were Katuro and Rebecca. Nuala — wonder what happened to her? Marushka Midwife, and the others. And Philo. Too bad about him.”

“Freakshow?” says Toby. “That’s not very kind. Surely the God’s Gardeners was more than that.”

“Yeah, it was,” says Zeb. “Granted. But the pleebland slumfolk tagged it as a freakshow. Just as well: best to be thought of as harmless and addled and poor, in those parts. Adam did nothing to discourage that view; in fact, he encouraged it. Roaming around in the pleebs wearing the simple but eye-catching garb of a lunatic recycler with his choir in tow singing nutbar hymns, then preaching the love of hoofed animals in front of SecretBurger stands — you’d have to be lobotomized to do that, was the street verdict.”

“If he hadn’t done those things I wouldn’t be here,” says Toby. “Him and the Gardener kids grabbed me during a street brawl. I was working — I was trapped at SecretBurgers at the time, and the manager had a thing for me.”

“Your pal Blanco,” says Zeb. “Third-time Painball vet, as I recall.”

“Yes. Girls he had a thing for ended up dead, and I was next on the list. He was already at the violent stage, he was working up to the kill; you could feel it. So I owe a lot to Adam — to Adam One, as I always knew him. Freakshow or not,” she says defensively.

“Don’t get it wrong,” says Zeb. “He’s my brother. We had our disagreements, and he had his way of doing things and I had mine, but that’s different.”

“You didn’t mention Pilar,” says Toby to deflect the conversation from Adam One. It’s uncomfortable for her to listen to criticism of him. “She was there too. At Edencliff.”

“Yeah, HelthWyzer finally got too much for her. She’d been feeding inside stuff to Adam, which was useful to him — he liked to know who might jump ship from a Corp, come over to the side of virtue, which was his side, naturally. But she said she couldn’t stay there any longer. With the CorpSeCorps takeover of so-called law-and-order functions, the Corps had the power to bulldoze and squash and erase anything they liked. Their addiction to making a buck was becoming toxic for her: it was poisoning, I quote, her soul.

“The cryptics helped her put together a cover story that allowed her to vanish without inspiring any trackers: she’d had an unfortunate stroke, with instant shipment to CryoJeenyus in a Frasket, and presto, there she was on top of a pleebland tenement building, dressed in a cloth bag and mixing potions.”

“And growing mushrooms, and teaching me about maggots, and keeping bees. She was very good at it,” says Toby a little ruefully. “Convincing. She had me talking to the bees. I was the one who told them when she died.”

“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 rock 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.”