Oryx and Crake

SoYummie

Jimmy and Crake graduated from HelthWyzer High on a warm humid day in early February. The ceremony used to take place in June; the weather then used to be sunny and moderate. But June was now the wet season all the way up the east coast, and you couldn’t have held an outdoor event then, what with the thunderstorms. Even early February was pushing it: they’d ducked a twister by only one day.

HelthWyzer High liked to do things in the old style, with marquees and awnings and the mothers in flowered hats and the fathers in panamas, and fruit-flavoured punch, with or without alcohol, and Happicuppa coffee, and little plastic tubs of SoYummie Ice Cream, a HelthWyzer Own Brand, in chocolate soy, mango soy, and roasted-dandelion green-tea soy. It was a festive scene.

Crake was top of the class. The bidding for him by the rival EduCompounds at the Student Auction was brisk, and he was snatched up at a high price by the Watson-Crick Institute. Once a student there and your future was assured. It was like going to Harvard had been, back before it got drowned.

Jimmy on the other hand was a mid-range student, high on his word scores but a poor average in the numbers columns. Even those underwhelming math marks had been achieved with the help of Crake, who’d coached Jimmy weekends, taking time away from his own preparations. Not that he himself needed any extra cramming, he was some sort of mutant, he could crank out the differential equations in his sleep.

“Why are you doing this?” Jimmy asked in the middle of one exasperating session. (You need to look at it differently. You have to get the beauty of it. It’s like chess. Here—try this. See? See the pattern? Now it all comes clear. But Jimmy did not see, and it did not all come clear.) “Why help me out?”

“Because I’m a sadist,” Crake said. “I like to watch you suffer.”

“Anyway, I appreciate it,” said Jimmy. He did appreciate it, for several reasons, the best being that because Crake was known to be tutoring him Jimmy’s dad had no grounds for nagging.

If Jimmy had been from a Module school, or—better—from one of those dump bins they still called “the public system,” he’d have shone like a diamond in a drain. But the Compound schools were awash in brilliant genes, none of which he’d inherited from his geeky, kak-hearted parents, so his talents shrank by comparison. Nor had he been given any extra points for being funny. He was less funny now, anyway: he’d lost interest in the general audience.

After a humiliating wait while the brainiacs were tussled over by the best EduCompounds and the transcripts of the mediocre were fingered and skimmed and had coffee spilled on them and got dropped on the floor by mistake, Jimmy was knocked down at last to the Martha Graham Academy; and even that only after a long spell of lacklustre bidding. Not to mention some arm-twisting—Jimmy suspected—on the part of his dad, who’d known the Martha Graham president from their long-defunct mutual summer camp and probably had the dirt on him. Shagging smaller boys, dabbling in black-market pharmaceuticals. Or this was Jimmy’s suspicion, in view of the ill grace and excessive force with which his hand was shaken.

“Welcome to Martha Graham, son,” said the president with a smile fake as a vitamin-supplement salesman’s.

When can I stop being a son? thought Jimmy.

Not yet. Oh, not yet. “Attaboy, Jimmy,” said his father at the garden party afterwards, giving him the arm punch. He had chocolate soy goo on his dweeby tie, which had a pattern of pigs with wings. Just don’t hug me, Jimmy prayed.

“Honey, we’re so proud of you,” said Ramona, who’d come decked out like a whore’s lampshade in an outfit with a low neckline and pink frills. Jimmy’d seen something like that on HottTotts once, only it was worn by an eight-year-old. Ramona’s push-up-bra breast tops were freckled from too much sun, not that Jimmy was much interested in those any more. He was familiar with the tectonics of cantilevered mammary-gland support devices by now, and anyway he found Ramona’s new matronly air repellent. She was getting little creases on either side of her mouth, despite the collagen injections; her biological clock was ticking, as she was fond of pointing out. Pretty soon it would be the NooSkins BeauToxique Treatment for her—Wrinkles Paralyzed Forever, Employees Half-Price—plus, in say five years, the Fountain of Yooth Total Plunge, which rasped off your entire epidermis. She kissed him beside the nose, leaving a smooch of cerise lipstick; he could feel it resting on his cheek like bicycle grease.

She was allowed to say we and to kiss him, because she was now officially his stepmother. His real mother had been divorced from his father in absentia, for “desertion,” and the bogus wedding of his father had been celebrated, if that was the word for it, soon after. Not that his real mother would have given a wombat’s anus, thought Jimmy. She wouldn’t have cared. She was off having cutting-edge adventures on her own, far from the dolorous festivities. He hadn’t had a postcard from her in months; the last one had shown a Komodo dragon and had borne a Malaysian stamp, and had prompted another visit from the CorpSeCorps.

At the wedding Jimmy got as drunk as it took. He propped himself against a wall, grinning stupidly as the happy couple cut the sugary cake, All Real Ingredients, as Ramona had made known. Lots of cackling over the fresh eggs. Any minute now Ramona would be planning a baby, a more satisfactory baby than Jimmy had ever been to anybody.

“Who cares, who cares,” he’d whispered to himself. He didn’t want to have a father anyway, or be a father, or have a son or be one. He wanted to be himself, alone, unique, self-created and self-sufficient. From now on he was going to be fancy-free, doing whatever he liked, picking globes of ripe life off the life trees, taking a bite or two, sucking out the juice, throwing away the rinds.

It was Crake who’d got him back to his room. By that time Jimmy had been morose, and barely ambulatory. “Sleep it off,” said Crake in his genial fashion. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

Now here was Crake at the graduation garden party, looming up out of the crowd, shining with achievement. No, he wasn’t, Snowman amends. Give him credit for that at least. He was never a triumphalist.

“Congratulations,” Jimmy made himself say. It was easier because he was the only one at this gathering who’d known Crake well for any length of time. Uncle Pete was in attendance, but he didn’t count. Also, he was staying as far away from Crake as possible. Maybe he’d finally figured out who’d been running up his Internet bill. As for Crake’s mother, she’d died the month before.

It was an accident, or so went the story. (Nobody liked to say the word sabotage, which was notoriously bad for business.) She must have cut herself at the hospital—although, said Crake, her job didn’t involve scalpels—or scratched herself, or maybe she’d been careless and had taken her latex gloves off and had been touched on a raw spot by some patient who was a carrier. It was possible: she was a nail-biter, she might have had what they called an integumental entry point. In any case she’d picked up a hot bioform that had chewed through her like a solar mower. It was a transgenetic staph, said some labcoat, mixed with a clever gene from the slime-mould family; but by the time they’d pinned it down and started what they hoped would be effective treatment, she was in Isolation and losing shape rapidly. Crake couldn’t go in to see her, of course—nobody could, everything in there was done with robotic arms, as in nuclear-materials procedures—but he could watch her through the observation window.

“It was impressive,” Crake told Jimmy. “Froth was coming out.”

“Froth?”

“Ever put salt on a slug?”

Jimmy said he hadn’t.

“Okay. So, like when you brush your teeth.”

His mother was supposed to be able to speak her last words to him via the mike system, said Crake, but there was a digital failure; so though he could see her lips moving, he couldn’t hear what she was saying. “Otherwise put, just like daily life,” said Crake. He said anyway he hadn’t missed much, because by that stage she’d been incoherent.

Jimmy didn’t understand how he could be so nil about it—it was horrible, the thought of Crake watching his own mother dissolve like that. He himself wouldn’t have been able to do it. But probably it was just an act. It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.

Happicuppa

For the vacation following graduation, Jimmy was invited to the Moosonee HelthWyzer Gated Vacation Community on the western shore of Hudson’s Bay, where the top brass of HelthWyzer went to beat the heat. Uncle Pete had a nice place there, “nice place” being his term. Actually it was like a combination mausoleum and dirty-weekend hideaway—a lot of stonework, king-sized magic-finger beds, bidets in every bathroom—though it was hard to imagine Uncle Pete getting up to anything of much interest in there. Jimmy had been invited, he was pretty sure, so that Uncle Pete wouldn’t have to be alone with Crake. Uncle Pete spent most of his time on the golf course and the rest of it in the hot tub, and Jimmy and Crake were free to do whatever they liked.

They probably would have gone back to interactives and state-sponsored snuff, and porn, as relaxation after their final exams, but that was the summer the gen-mod coffee wars got underway, so they watched those instead. The wars were over the new Happicuppa bean, developed by a HelthWyzer subsidiary. Until then the individual coffee beans on each bush had ripened at different times and had needed to be handpicked and pro-cessed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa coffee bush was designed so that all of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines. This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and their labourers to starvation-level poverty.

The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafés were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army. Or by the armies, various armies; a number of countries were involved. But the soldiers and dead peasants all looked much the same wherever they were. They looked dusty. It was amazing how much dust got stirred up in the course of such events.

“Those guys should be whacked,” said Crake.

“Which ones? The peasants? Or the guys killing them?”

“The latter. Not because of the dead peasants, there’s always been dead peasants. But they’re nuking the cloud forests to plant this stuff.”

“The peasants would do that too if they had half a chance,” said Jimmy.

“Sure, but they don’t have half a chance.”

“You’re taking sides?”

“There aren’t any sides, as such.”

Nothing much to be said to that. Jimmy thought about shouting bogus, decided it might not apply. Anyway they’d used up that word. “Let’s change channels,” he said.

But there was Happicuppa coverage, it seemed, wherever you turned. There were protests and demonstrations, with tear gas and shooting and bludgeoning; then more protests, more demonstrations, more tear gas, more shooting, more bludgeoning. This went on day after day. There hadn’t been anything like it since the first decade of the century. Crake said it was history in the making.

Don’t Drink Death! said the posters. Union dockworkers in Australia, where they still had unions, refused to unload Happicuppa cargoes; in the United States, a Boston Coffee Party sprang up. There was a staged media event, boring because there was no violence—only balding guys with retro tattoos or white patches where they’d been taken off, and severe-looking baggy-boobed women, and quite a few overweight or spindly members of marginal, earnest religious groups, in T-shirts with smiley-faced angels flying with birds or Jesus holding hands with a peasant or God Is Green on the front. They were filmed dumping Happicuppa products into the harbour, but none of the boxes sank. So there was the Happicuppa logo, lots of copies of it, bobbing around on the screen. It could have been a commercial.

“Makes me thirsty,” said Jimmy.

“Shit for brains,” said Crake. “They forgot to add rocks.”

As a rule they watched the unfolding of events on the Noodie News, via the Net, but for a change they sometimes watched fully clothed newscasters on the wall-sized plasma screen in Uncle Pete’s leatherette-upholstered TV room. The suits and shirts and ties seemed bizarre to Jimmy, especially if he was mildly stoned. It was weird to imagine what all those serious-faced talking heads would look like minus their fashion items, full frontal on the Noodie News.

Uncle Pete sometimes watched too, in the evenings, when he was back from the golf course. He’d pour himself a drink, then provide a running commentary. “The usual uproar,” he said. “They’ll get tired of it, they’ll settle down. Everybody wants a cheaper cup of coffee—you can’t fight that.”

“No, you can’t,” Crake would say agreeably. Uncle Pete had a chunk of Happicuppa stock in his portfolio, and not just a little chunk. “What a mort,” Crake would say as he scanned Uncle Pete’s holdings on his computer.

“You could trade his stuff,” said Jimmy. “Sell the Happicuppa, buy something he really hates. Buy windpower. No, better—buy a croaker. Get him some South American cattle futures.”

“Nah,” said Crake. “I can’t risk that with a labyrinth. He’d notice. He’d find out I’ve been getting in.”

Things escalated after a cell of crazed anti-Happicuppa fanatics bombed the Lincoln Memorial, killing five visiting Japanese schoolkids that were part of a Tour of Democracy. Stop the Hipocrissy, read the note left at a safe distance.

“That’s pathetic,” said Jimmy. “They can’t even spell.”

“They made their point though,” said Crake.

“I hope they fry,” said Uncle Pete.

Jimmy didn’t answer, because now they were looking at the blockade of the Happicuppa head-office compound in Maryland. There in the shouting crowd, clutching a sign that read A Happicup Is a Crappi Cup, with a green bandanna over her nose and mouth, was—wasn’t it?—his vanished mother. For a moment the bandanna slipped down and Jimmy saw her clearly—her frowning eyebrows, her candid blue eyes, her determined mouth. Love jolted through him, abrupt and painful, followed by anger. It was like being kicked: he must have let out a gasp. Then there was a CorpSeCorps charge and a cloud of tear gas and a smattering of what sounded like gunfire, and when Jimmy looked again his mother had disappeared.

“Freeze the frame!” he said. “Turn back!” He wanted to be sure. How could she be taking such a risk? If they got hold of her she’d really disappear, this time forever. But after a brief glance at him Crake had already switched to another channel.

I shouldn’t have said anything, thought Jimmy. I shouldn’t have called attention. He was cold with fear now. What if Uncle Pete made the connection and phoned the Corpsmen? They’d be right on her trail, she’d be roadkill.

But Uncle Pete didn’t seem to have noticed. He was pouring himself another Scotch. “They should spraygun the whole bunch of them,” he said. “Once they’ve smashed those cameras. Who took that footage anyway? Sometimes you wonder who’s running this show.”

“So what was that about?” said Crake when they were alone.

“Nothing,” said Jimmy.

“I did freeze it,” said Crake. “I got the whole sequence.”

“I think you better erase it,” said Jimmy. He was past being frightened, he’d entered full-blown dejection. Surely at this very moment Uncle Pete was turning on his cellphone and punching in the numbers; hours from now it would be the CorpSeCorps interrogation all over again. His mother this, his mother that. He would just have to go through it.

“It’s okay,” said Crake, which Jimmy took to mean: You can trust me. Then he said, “Let me guess. Phylum Chordata, Class Vertebrata, Order Mammalia, Family Primates, Genus Homo, Species sapiens sapiens, subspecies your mother.”

“Big points,” said Jimmy listlessly.

“Not a stretch,” said Crake. “I spotted her right away, those blue eyes. It was either her or a clone.”

If Crake had recognized her, who else might have done so? Everyone in the HelthWyzer Compound had doubtless been shown pictures: You seen this woman? The story of his deviant mother had followed Jimmy around like an unwanted dog, and was probably half responsible for his poor showing at the Student Auction. He wasn’t dependable, he was a security risk, he had a taint.

“My dad was the same,” said Crake. “He buggered off too.”

“I thought he died,” said Jimmy. That’s all he’d ever got out of Crake before: dad died, full stop, change the subject. It wasn’t anything Crake would talk about.

“That’s what I mean. He went off a pleebland overpass. It was rush hour, so by the time they got to him he was cat food.”

“Did he jump, or what?” said Jimmy. Crake didn’t seem too worked up about it, so he felt it was okay to ask that.

“It was the general opinion,” said Crake. “He was a top researcher over at HelthWyzer West, so he got a really nice funeral. The tact was amazing. Nobody used the word suicide. They said ‘your father’s accident.’”

“Sorry about that,” said Jimmy.

“Uncle Pete was over at our place all the time. My mother said he was really supportive.” Crake said supportive like a quote. “She said, besides being my dad’s boss and best friend, he was turning out to be a really good friend of the family, not that I’d ever seen him around much before. He wanted things to be resolved for us, he said he was anxious about that. He kept trying to have these heart-to-heart talks with me—tell me all about how my father had problems.”

“Meaning your dad was a nutbar,” said Jimmy.

Crake looked at Jimmy out of his slanty green eyes. “Yeah. But he wasn’t. He was acting worried lately, but he didn’t have problems. He had nothing like that on his mind. Nothing like jumping. I’d have known.”

“You think he maybe fell off?”

“Fell off?”

“Off the overpass.” Jimmy wanted to ask what he’d been doing on a pleebland overpass in the first place, but it didn’t seem like the right time. “Was there a railing?”

“He was kind of uncoordinated,” said Crake, smiling in an odd way. “He didn’t always watch where he was going. He was head in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot.”

“You get along with him?”

Crake paused. “He taught me to play chess. Before it happened.”

“Well, I guess not after,” said Jimmy, trying to lighten things up, because by this time he was feeling sorry for Crake, and he didn’t like that at all.

How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid?

No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked—events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate.

There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.

Applied Rhetoric

At the end of that vacation, Crake went off to Watson-Crick and Jimmy to Martha Graham. They shook hands at the bullet-train station.

“See you around,” said Jimmy.

“We’ll e-mail,” said Crake. Then, noticing Jimmy’s dejection, he said, “Come on, you did okay, the place is famous.”

“Was famous,” said Jimmy.

“It won’t be that bad.”

Crake was wrong, for once. Martha Graham was falling apart. It was surrounded—Jimmy observed as the train pulled in—by the tackiest kind of pleeblands: vacant warehouses, burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and huts put together from scavenged materials—sheets of tin, slabs of plywood—and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people exist? Jimmy had no idea. Yet there they were, on the other side of the razor wire. A couple of them raised their middle fingers at the train, shouted something that the bulletproof glass shut out.

The security at the Martha Graham gateway was a joke. The guards were half asleep, the walls—scrawled all over with faded graffiti—could have been scaled by a one-legged dwarf. Inside them, the Bilbao-ripoff cast-concrete buildings leaked, the lawns were mud, either baked or liquid depending on the season, and there were no recreational facilities apart from a swimming pool that looked and smelled like a giant sardine can. Half the time the air conditioning in the dorms didn’t work; there was a brownout problem with the electrical supply; the food in the cafeteria was mostly beige and looked like rakunk shit. There were arthropods in the bedrooms, families and genera various, but half of them were cockroaches. Jimmy found the place depressing, as did—it seemed—everyone there with any more neural capacity than a tulip. But this was the hand life had dealt him, as his dad had said during their awkward goodbye, and now Jimmy would just have to play it as well as he could.

Right, Dad, Jimmy had thought. I’ve always known I could count on you for really, really sage advice.

The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century who’d apparently mowed quite a swath in her day. There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration building, in her role—said the bronze plaque—as Judith, cutting off the head of a guy in a historical robe outfit called Holofernes. Retro feminist shit, was the general student opinion. Every once in a while the statue got its tits decorated or steel wool glued onto its pubic region—Jimmy himself had done some of this glueing—and so comatose was the management that the ornaments often stayed up there for months before they were noticed. Parents were always objecting to this statue—poor role model, they’d say, too aggressive, too bloodthirsty, blah blah—whereupon the students would rally to its defence. Old Martha was their mascot, they’d say, the scowl, the dripping head and all. She represented life, or art, or something. Hands off Martha. Leave her alone.

The Academy had been set up by a clutch of now-dead rich liberal bleeding hearts from Old New York as an Arts-and-Humanities college at some time in the last third of the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the Performing Arts—acting, singing, dancing, and so forth. To that had been added Film-making in the 1980s, and Video Arts after that. These things were still taught at Martha Graham—they still put on plays, and it was there Jimmy saw Macbeth in the flesh and reflected that Anna K. and her Web site for peeping Toms had done a more convincing job of Lady Macbeth while sitting on her toilet.

The students of song and dance continued to sing and dance, though the energy had gone out of these activities and the classes were small. Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century—no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status. Theatrical events had dwindled into versions of the singalong or the tomato bombardment or the wet T-shirt contest. And though various older forms had dragged on—the TV sitcom, the rock video—their audience was ancient and their appeal mostly nostalgic.

So a lot of what went on at Martha Graham was like studying Latin, or book-binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything, though every once in a while the college president would subject them to some yawner about the vital arts and their irresistible reserved seat in the big red-velvet amphitheatre of the beating human heart.

As for Film-making and Video Arts, who needed them? Anyone with a computer could splice together whatever they wanted, or digitally alter old material, or create new animation. You could download one of the standard core plots and add whatever faces you chose, and whatever bodies too. Jimmy himself had put together a naked Pride and Prejudice and a naked To the Lighthouse, just for laughs, and in sophomore VizArts at HelthWyzer he’d done The Maltese Falcon, with costumes by Kate Greenaway and depth-and-shadow styling by Rembrandt. That one had been good. A dark tonality, great chiaroscuro.

With this kind of attrition going on—this erosion of its former intellectual territory—Martha Graham had found itself without a very convincing package to offer. As the initial funders had died off and the enthusiasm of the dedicated artsy money had waned and endowment had been sought in more down-to-earth quarters, the curricular emphasis had switched to other arenas. Contemporary arenas, they were called. Webgame Dynamics, for instance; money could still be made from that. Or Image Presentation, listed in the calendar as a sub-branch of Pictorial and Plastic Arts. With a degree in PicPlarts, as the students called it, you could go into advertising, no sweat.

Or Problematics. Problematics was for word people, so that was what Jimmy took. Spin and Grin was its nickname among the students. Like everything at Martha Graham it had utilitarian aims. Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills, ran the motto underneath the original Latin motto, which was Ars Longa Vita Brevis.

Jimmy had few illusions. He knew what sort of thing would be open to him when he came out the other end of Problematics with his risible degree. Window-dressing was what he’d be doing, at best—decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2- D verbiage. Depending on how well he did in his Problematics courses—Applied Logic, Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology, and the rest—he’d have a choice between well-paid window-dressing for a big Corp or flimsy cut-rate stuff for a borderline one. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

Nevertheless, he dug himself in at Martha Graham as if into a trench, and hunkered down for the duration. He shared a dorm suite—one cramped room either side, silverfish-ridden bathroom in the middle—with a fundamentalist vegan called Bernice, who had stringy hair held back with a wooden clip in the shape of a toucan and wore a succession of God’s Gardeners T-shirts, which—due to her aversion to chemical compounds such as underarm deodorants—stank even when freshly laundered.

Bernice let him know how much she disapproved of his carnivorous ways by kidnapping his leather sandals and incinerating them on the lawn. When he protested that they hadn’t been real leather, she said they’d been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate. After he’d had a few girls up to his room—none of Bernice’s business, and they’d been quiet enough, apart from some pharmaceutically induced giggling and a lot of understandable moans—she’d manifested her views on consensual sex by making a bonfire of all Jimmy’s jockey shorts.

He’d complained about that to Student Services, and after a few tries—Student Services at Martha Graham was notoriously grumpy, staffed as it was by burnt-out TV-series actors who could not forgive the world for their plunge from marginal fame—he got himself moved to a single room. (First my sandals, then my underwear. Next it’ll be me. The woman is a pyromaniac, let me rephrase that, she is reality-challenged in a major way. You wish to see the concrete evidence of her crotchwear auto-da-fé? Look into this tiny envelope. If you see me next in an urn, gritty ashes, couple of teeth, you want the responsibility? Hey, I’m the Student here and you’re the Service. Here it is, right on the letterhead, see? I’ve e-mailed this to the president.)

(This is not what he actually said, of course. He knew better than that. He smiled, he presented himself as a reasonable human being, he enlisted their sympathy.)

After that, after he got his new room, things were a little better. At least he was free to pursue his social life unhampered. He’d discovered that he projected a form of melancholy attractive to a certain kind of woman, the semi-artistic, wise-wound kind in large supply at Martha Graham. Generous, caring, idealistic women, Snowman thinks of them now. They had a few scars of their own, they were working on healing. At first Jimmy would rush to their aid: he was tender-hearted, he’d been told, and nothing if not chivalrous. He’d draw out of them their stories of hurt, he’d apply himself to them like a poultice. But soon the process would reverse, and Jimmy would switch from bandager to bandagee. These women would begin to see how fractured he was, they’d want to help him gain perspective on life and access the positive aspects of his own spirituality. They saw him as a creative project: the raw material, Jimmy in his present gloomy form; the end product, a happy Jimmy.

Jimmy let them labour away on him. It cheered them up, it made them feel useful. It was touching, the lengths to which they would go. Would this make him happy? Would this? Well then, how about this? But he took care never to get any less melancholy on a permanent basis. If he were to do that they’d expect a reward of some sort, or a result at least; they’d demand a next step, and then a pledge. But why would he be stupid enough to give up his grey rainy-day allure—the crepuscular essence, the foggy aureole, that had attracted them to him in the first place?

“I’m a lost cause,” he would tell them. “I’m emotionally dyslexic.” He would also tell them they were beautiful and they turned him on. True enough, no falsehood there, he always meant it. He would also say that any major investment on their part would be wasted on him, he was an emotional landfill site, and they should just enjoy the here and now.

Sooner or later they’d complain that he refused to take things seriously. This, after having begun by saying he needed to lighten up. When their energy flagged at last and the weeping began, he’d tell them he loved them. He took care to do this in a hopeless voice: being loved by him was a poison pill, it was spiritually toxic, it would drag them down to the murky depths where he himself was imprisoned, and it was because he loved them so much that he wanted them out of harm’s way, i.e., out of his ruinous life. Some of them saw through it—Grow up, Jimmy!—but on the whole, how potent that was.

He was always sad when they decamped. He disliked the part where they’d get mad at him, he was upset by any woman’s anger, but once they’d lost their tempers with him he’d know it was over. He hated being dumped, even though he himself had manoeuvred the event into place. But another woman with intriguing vulnerabilities would happen along shortly. It was a time of simple abundance.

He wasn’t lying though, not all the time. He really did love these women, sort of. He really did want to make them feel better. It was just that he had a short attention span.

“You scoundrel,” says Snowman out loud. It’s a fine word, scoundrel; one of the golden oldies.

They knew about his scandalous mother, of course, these women. Ill winds blow far and find a ready welcome. Snowman is ashamed to remember how he’d used that story—a hint here, a hesitation there. Soon the women would be consoling him, and he’d roll around in their sympathy, soak in it, massage himself with it. It was a whole spa experience in itself.

By then his mother had attained the status of a mythical being, something that transcended the human, with dark wings and eyes that burned like Justice, and a sword. When he got to the part where she’d stolen Killer the rakunk away from him he could usually wring out a tear or two, not from himself but from his auditors.

What did you do? (Eyes wide, single pat of hand on arm, sympathetic gaze.)

Oh, you know. (Shrug, look away, change subject.)

It wasn’t all acting.

Only Oryx had not been impressed by this dire, feathered mother of his. So Jimmy, your mother went somewhere else? Too bad. Maybe she had some good reasons. You thought of that? Oryx had neither pity for him nor self-pity. She was not unfeeling: on the contrary. But she refused to feel what he wanted her to feel. Was that the hook—that he could never get from her what the others had given him so freely? Was that her secret?

Asperger’s U.

Crake and Jimmy kept in touch by e-mail. Jimmy whined about Martha Graham in what he hoped was an entertaining way, applying unusual and disparaging adjectives to his professors and fellow students. He described the diet of recycled botulism and salmonella, sent lists of the different multi-legged creatures he’d found in his room, moaned about the inferior quality of the mood-altering substances for sale in the dismal student mall. Out of self-protection, he concealed the intricacies of his sex life except for what he considered the minimum of hints. (These babes may not be able to count to ten, but hey, who needs numeracy in the sack? Just so long as they think it’s ten, haha, joke, .)

He couldn’t help boasting a little, because this seemed to be—from any indications he’d had so far—the one field of endeavour in which he had the edge over Crake. At HelthWyzer, Crake hadn’t been what you’d call sexually active. Girls had found him intimidating. True, he’d attracted a couple of obsessives who’d thought he could walk on water, and who’d followed him around and sent him slushy, fervent e-mails and threatened to slit their wrists on his behalf. Perhaps he’d even slept with them on occasion; but he’d never gone out of his way. Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.

The girls Jimmy accumulated had found Crake more than a little creepy, and it had made Jimmy feel superior to come to his defence. “He’s okay, he’s just on another planet,” was what he used to say.

But how to know about Crake’s present circumstances? Crake divulged few factoids about himself. Did he have a roommate, a girlfriend? He never mentioned either, but that meant nothing. His e-mail descriptions were of the campus facilities, which were awesome—an Aladdin’s treasure-trove of bio-research gizmos—and of, well, what else? What did Crake have to say in his terse initial communications from the Watson-Crick Institute? Snowman can’t remember.

They’d played long drawn-out games of chess though, two moves a day. Jimmy was better at chess by now; it was easier without Crake’s distracting presence, and the way he had of drumming his fingers and humming to himself, as if he already saw thirty moves ahead and was patiently waiting for Jimmy’s tortoiselike mind to trundle up to the next rook sacrifice. Also, Jimmy could look up grandmasters and famous games of the past on various Net programs, in between moves. Not that Crake wasn’t doing the same thing.

After five or six months Crake loosened up a bit. He was having to work harder than at HelthWyzer High, he wrote, because there was a lot more competition. Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger’s U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude—these were not your sharp dressers—and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behaviour.

More than at HelthWyzer? asked Jimmy.

Compared to this place, HelthWyzer was a pleebland, Crake replied. It was wall-to-wallNTs.

NTs?

Neurotypicals.

Meaning?

Minus the genius gene.

So, are you a neurotypical? Jimmy asked the next week, having had some time to think this over. Also to worry about whether he himself was a neurotypical, and if so, was that now bad, in the gestalt of Crake? He suspected he was, and that it was.

But Crake never answered that one. This was his way: when there was a question he didn’t want to address, he acted as if it hadn’t been asked.

You should come and see this joint, he told Jimmy in late October of their sophomore year. Give yourself a lifetime experience. I’ll pretend you’re my dull-normal cousin. Come for Thanksgiving Week.

The alternative for Jimmy was turkey with the parental-unit turkeys, joke, haha, , said Jimmy, and he wasn’t up for that; so it would be his pleasure to accept. He told himself he was being a pal and doing Crake a favour, for who did lone Crake have to visit with on his holidays, aside from his boring old australopithecine not-really-an-uncle Uncle Pete? But also he found he was missing Crake. He hadn’t seen him now for more than a year. He wondered if Crake had changed.

Jimmy had a couple of term papers to finish before the holidays. He could have bought them off the Net, of course—Martha Graham was notoriously lax about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there—but he’d taken a position on that. He’d write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed; a line that played well with the Martha Graham type of woman. They liked a dash of originality and risk-taking and intellectual rigour.

For the same reason he’d taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks, ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.

Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment, even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered—at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power—an archaic waste of time. Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete a book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.

He compiled lists of old words too—words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a meaningful application in today’s world, or toady’s world, as Jimmy sometimes deliberately misspelled it on his term papers. (Typo, the profs would note, which showed how alert they were.) He memorized these hoary locutions, tossed them left-handed into conversation: wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine, adamant. He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

One of his term papers—for his Applied Rhetoric course—was titled “Self-Help Books of the Twentieth Century: Exploiting Hope and Fear,” and it supplied him with a great stand-up routine for use in the student pubs. He’d quote snatches of this and that—Improve Your Self-Image; The Twelve-Step Plan for Assisted Suicide; How to Make Friends and Influence People; Flat Abs in Five Weeks; You Can Have It All; Entertaining Without a Maid; Grief Management for Dummies—and the circle around him would crack up.

He now had a circle around him again: he’d rediscovered that pleasure. Oh Jimmy, do Cosmetic Surgery for Everyone! Do Access Your Inner Child! Do Total Womanhood! Do Raising Nutria for Fun and Profit! Do The Survival Handbook of Dating and Sex! And Jimmy, the ever-ready song-and-dance man, would oblige. Sometimes he’d make up books that didn’t exist—Healing Diverticulitis Through Chanting and Prayer was one of his best creations—and nobody would spot the imposture.

He’d turned that paper topic into his senior dissertation, later. He’d got an A.

There was a bullet-train connection between Martha Graham and Watson-Crick, with only one change. Jimmy spent a lot of the three-hour trip looking out the window at the pleeblands they were passing through. Rows of dingy houses; apartment buildings with tiny balconies, laundry strung on the railings; factories with smoke coming out of the chimneys; gravel pits. A huge pile of garbage, next to what he supposed was a high-heat incinerator. A shopping mall like the ones at HelthWyzer, only there were cars in the parking lots instead of electric golf carts. A neon strip, with bars and girlie joints and what looked like an archeological-grade movie theatre. He glimpsed a couple of trailer parks, and wondered what it was like to live in one of them: just thinking about it made him slightly dizzy, as he imagined a desert might, or the sea. Everything in the pleeblands seemed so boundless, so porous, so penetrable, so wide-open. So subject to chance.

Accepted wisdom in the Compounds said that nothing of interest went on in the pleeblands, apart from buying and selling: there was no life of the mind. Buying and selling, plus a lot of criminal activity; but to Jimmy it looked mysterious and exciting, over there on the other side of the safety barriers. Also dangerous. He wouldn’t know the ways to do things there, he wouldn’t know how to behave. He wouldn’t even know how to pick up girls. They’d turn him upside down in no time, they’d shake his head loose. They’d laugh at him. He’d be fodder.

The security going into Watson-Crick was very thorough, unlike the sloppy charade that took place at Martha Graham: the fear must have been that some fanatic would sneak in and blow up the best minds of the generation, thus dealing a crippling blow to something or other. There were dozens of CorpSeCorps men, complete with sprayguns and rubber clubs; they had Watson-Crick insignia, but you could tell who they really were. They took Jimmy’s iris imprint and ran it through the system, and then two surly weightlifters pulled him aside for questioning. As soon as it happened he guessed why.

“You seen your runaway mother lately?”

“No,” he said truthfully.

“Heard from her? Had a phone call, another postcard?” So they were still tracking his snail mail. All of the postcards must be stored on their computers; plus his present whereabouts, which was why they hadn’t asked where he’d come from.

No again, he said. They had him hooked up to the neural-impulse monitor so they knew he wasn’t lying; they must also have known that the question distressed him. He was on the verge of saying And if I had I wouldn’t tell you, apeface, but he was old enough by then to realize that nothing would be served by that, and it was likely to land him on the next bullet train back to Martha Graham, or worse.

“Know what she’s been doing? Who she’s hanging out with?”

Jimmy didn’t, but he had a feeling they themselves might have some idea. They didn’t mention the Happicuppa demonstration in Maryland though, so maybe they were less informed than he feared.

“Why are you here, son?” Now they were bored. The important part was over.

“I’m visiting an old friend for Thanksgiving Week,” said Jimmy. “A friend from HelthWyzer High. He’s a student here. I’ve been invited.” He gave the name, and the visitor authorization number supplied to him by Crake.

“What sort of a student? What’s he taking?”

Transgenics, Jimmy told them.

They pulled up the file to check, frowned at it, looked moderately impressed. Then they made a cellcall, as if they hadn’t quite believed him. What was a serf like him doing visiting the nobility? their manner implied. But finally they let him through, and there was Crake in his no-name dark clothing, looking older and thinner and also smarter than ever, leaning on the exit barrier and grinning.

“Hi there, cork-nut,” said Crake, and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like sudden hunger. He was so pleased to see Crake he almost wept.

Wolvogs

Compared with Martha Graham, Watson-Crick was a palace. At the entranceway was a bronzed statue of the Institute’s mascot, the spoat/gider—one of the first successful splices, done in Montreal at the turn of the century, goat crossed with spider to produce high-tensile spider silk filaments in the milk. The main application nowadays was bulletproof vests. The CorpSeCorps swore by the stuff.

The extensive grounds inside the security wall were beautifully laid out: the work, said Crake, of the JigScape Faculty. The students in Botanical Transgenics (Ornamental Division) had created a whole array of drought-and-flood-resistant tropical blends, with flowers or leaves in lurid shades of chrome yellow and brilliant flame red and phosphorescent blue and neon purple. The pathways, unlike the crumbling cement walks at Martha Graham, were smooth and wide. Students and faculty were beetling along them in their electric golf carts.

Huge fake rocks, made from a combo-matrix of recycled plastic bottles and plant material from giant tree cacti and various lithops—the living-stone members of the Mesembryanthemaceae—were dotted here and there. It was a patented process, said Crake, originally developed at Watson-Crick and now a nice little money-spinner. The fake rocks looked like real rocks but weighed less; not only that, they absorbed water during periods of humidity and released it in times of drought, so they acted like natural lawn regulators. Rockulators, was the brand name. You had to avoid them during heavy rainfalls, though, as they’d been known to explode.

But most of the bugs had now been ironed out, said Crake, and new varieties were appearing every month. The student team was thinking of developing something called the Moses Model, for dependable supplies of fresh drinking water in times of crisis. Just Hit It With a Rod, was the proposed slogan.

“How do those things work?’ asked Jimmy, trying not to sound impressed.

“Search me,” said Crake. “I’m not in NeoGeologicals.”

“So, are the butterflies—are they recent?” Jimmy asked after a while. The ones he was looking at had wings the size of pancakes and were shocking pink, and were clustering all over one of the purple shrubs.

“You mean, did they occur in nature or were they created by the hand of man? In other words, are they real or fake?”

“Mm,” said Jimmy. He didn’t want to get into the what is real thing with Crake.

“You know when people get their hair dyed or their teeth done? Or women get their tits enlarged?”

“Yeah?”

“After it happens, that’s what they look like in real time. The process is no longer important.”

“No way fake tits feel like real tits,” said Jimmy, who thought he knew a thing or two about that.

“If you could tell they were fake,” said Crake, “it was a bad job. These butterflies fly, they mate, they lay eggs, caterpillars come out.”

“Mm,” said Jimmy again.

Crake didn’t have a roommate. Instead he had a suite, accented in wood tones, with push-button venetians and air conditioning that really worked. It consisted of a large bedroom, an enclosed bath and shower unit with steam function, a main living-dining room with a pullout couch—that was where Jimmy would camp out, said Crake—and a study with a built-in sound system and a full array of compu-gizmos. It had maid service too, and they picked up and delivered your laundry. (Jimmy was depressed by this news, as he had to do his own laundry at Martha Graham, using the clanking, wheezy washers and the dryers that fried your clothes. You had to slot plastic tokens into them because the machines had been jimmied regularly when they’d taken coins.)

Crake also had a cheery kitchenette. “Not that I microwave much,” said Crake. “Except for snack food. Most of us eat at our dining halls. There’s one for each faculty.”

“How’s the food?” Jimmy asked. He was feeling more and more like a troglodyte. Living in a cave, fighting off the body parasites, gnawing the odd bone.

“It’s food,” said Crake indifferently.

On day one they toured some of the wonders of Watson-Crick. Crake was interested in everything—all the projects that were going on. He kept saying “Wave of the future,” which got irritating after the third time.

First they went to Décor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors was developing Smart Wallpaper that would change colour on the walls of your room to complement your mood. This wallpaper—they told Jimmy—had a modified form of Kirilian-energy-sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short-lived in humid weather because it ate up all the nutrients and then went grey; also it could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red.

That team was also working on a line of bathroom towels that would behave in much the same way, but they hadn’t yet solved the marine-life fundamentals: when algae got wet it swelled up and began to grow, and the test subjects so far had not liked the sight of their towels from the night before puffing up like rectangular marshmallows and inching across the bathroom floor.

“Wave of the future,” said Crake.

Next they went to NeoAgriculturals. AgriCouture was its nickname among the students. They had to put on biosuits before they entered the facility, and scrub their hands and wear nose-cone filters, because what they were about to see hadn’t been bioform-proofed, or not completely. A woman with a laugh like Woody Woodpecker led them through the corridors.

“This is the latest,” said Crake.

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.

“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.”

“But there aren’t any heads,” said Jimmy. He grasped the concept—he’d grown up with sus multiorganifer, after all—but this thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his childhood hadn’t lacked heads.

“That’s the head in the middle,” said the woman. “There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump the nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”

“This is horrible,” said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.

“Picture the sea-anemone body plan,” said Crake. “That helps.”

“But what’s it thinking?” said Jimmy.

The woman gave her jocular woodpecker yodel, and explained that they’d removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth.

“It’s sort of like a chicken hookworm,” said Crake.

“No need for added growth hormones,” said the woman, “the high growth rate’s built in. You get chicken breasts in two weeks—that’s a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the animal-welfare freaks won’t be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain.”

“Those kids are going to clean up,” said Crake after they’d left. The students at Watson-Crick got half the royalties from anything they invented there. Crake said it was a fierce incentive. “ChickieNobs, they’re thinking of calling the stuff.”

“Are they on the market yet?” asked Jimmy weakly. He couldn’t see eating a ChickieNob. It would be like eating a large wart. But as with the tit implants—the good ones—maybe he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

“They’ve already got the takeout franchise operation in place,” said Crake. “Investors are lining up around the block. They can undercut the price of everyone else.”

Jimmy was becoming annoyed by Crake’s way of introducing him—“This is Jimmy, the neurotypical”—but he knew better than to show it. Still, it seemed to be like calling him a Cro-Magnon or something. Next step they’d be putting him in a cage, feeding him bananas, and poking him with electroprods.

Nor did he think much of the Watson-Crick women on offer. Maybe they weren’t even on offer: they seemed to have other things on their minds. Jimmy’s few attempts at flirtation got him some surprised stares—surprised and not at all pleased, as if he’d widdled on these women’s carpets.

Considering their slovenliness, their casual approach to personal hygiene and adornment, they ought to have fainted at the attention. Plaid shirts were their formal wear, hairstyles not their strong suit: a lot of them looked as if they’d had a close encounter with the kitchen shears. As a group, they reminded him of Bernice, the God’s Gardeners pyromaniac vegan. The Bernice model was an exception at Martha Graham, where the girls tried to give the impression they were, or had been once, or could well be, dancers or actresses or singers or performance artists or conceptual photographers or something else artistic. Willowy was their aim, style was their game, whether they played it well or not. But here the Bernice look was the rule, except that there were few religious T-shirts. More usual were ones with complex mathematical equations on them that caused snickers among those who could decode them.

“What’s the T-shirt say?” asked Jimmy, when he’d had one too many of these experiences—high-fives among the others, himself standing with the foolish look of someone who’s just had his pocket picked.

“That girl’s a physicist,” said Crake, as if this explained everything.

“So?”

“So, her T-shirt’s about the eleventh dimension.”

“What’s the joke?”

“It’s complicated,” said Crake.

“Try me.”

“You have to know about the dimensions and how they’re supposed to be all curled up inside the dimensions we know about.”

“And?”

“It’s sort of like, I can take you out of this world, but the route to it is just a few nanoseconds long, and the way of measuring those nanoseconds doesn’t exist in our space-frame.”

“All that in symbols and numbers?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t say it was funny,” said Crake. “These are physicists. It’s only funny to them. But you asked.”

“So it’s sort of like she’s saying they could make it together if he only had the right kind of dick, which he doesn’t?” said Jimmy, who’d been thinking hard.

“Jimmy, you’re a genius,” said Crake.

“This is BioDefences,” said Crake. “Last stop, I promise.” He could tell Jimmy was flagging. The truth was that all this was too reminiscent. The labs, the peculiar bioforms, the socially spastic scientists—they were too much like his former life, his life as a child. Which was the last place he wanted to go back to. Even Martha Graham was preferable.

They were standing in front of a series of cages. Each contained a dog. There were many different breeds and sizes, but all were gazing at Jimmy with eyes of love, all were wagging their tails.

“It’s a dog pound,” said Jimmy.

“Not quite,” said Crake. “Don’t go beyond the guardrail, don’t stick your hand in.”

“They look friendly enough,” said Jimmy. His old longing for a pet came over him. “Are they for sale?”

“They aren’t dogs, they just look like dogs. They’re wolvogs—they’re bred to deceive. Reach out to pat them, they’ll take your hand off. There’s a large pit-bull component.”

“Why make a dog like that?” said Jimmy, taking a step back. “Who’d want one?”

“It’s a CorpSeCorps thing,” said Crake. “Commission work. A lot of funding. They want to put them in moats, or something.”

“Moats?”

“Yeah. Better than an alarm system—no way of disarming these guys. And no way of making pals with them, not like real dogs.”

“What if they get out? Go on the rampage? Start breeding, then the population spirals out of control—like those big green rabbits?”

“That would be a problem,” said Crake. “But they won’t get out. Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“Meaning what?” said Jimmy. He wasn’t paying close attention, he was worrying about the ChickieNobs and the wolvogs. Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

“Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.”

“Them?”

“Nature and God.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy.

“I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.”

Hypothetical

“So, you got a girlfriend?” said Jimmy on the fourth day. He’d been saving this question for the right time. “I mean, there’s quite an array of babes to choose from.” He meant this to be ironic. He couldn’t picture himself with the Woody Woodpecker—laugh girl or the ones with numbers all over their chests, but he couldn’t picture Crake with one of them either. Crake was too suave for that.

“Not as such,” said Crake shortly.

“What do you mean, not as such? You’ve got a girl, but she’s not a human being?”

“Pair-bonding at this stage is not encouraged,” said Crake, sounding like a guidebook. “We’re supposed to be focusing on our work.”

“Bad for your health,” said Jimmy. “You should get yourself fixed up.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Crake. “You’re the grasshopper, I’m the ant. I can’t waste time in unproductive random scanning.”

For the first time in their lives, Jimmy wondered—could it be?—whether Crake might be jealous of him. Though maybe Crake was just being a pompous tightass; maybe Watson-Crick was having a bad effect on him. So what’s the super-cerebellum-triathlon ultralife mission? Jimmy felt like saying. Deign to divulge? “I wouldn’t call it a waste,” he said instead, trying to lighten Crake up, “unless you fail to score.”

“If you really need to, you can arrange that kind of thing through Student Services,” Crake said, rather stiffly. “They deduct the price from your scholarship, same as room and board. The workers come in from the pleeblands, they’re trained professionals. Naturally they’re inspected for disease.”

“Student Services? In your dreams! They do what?”

“It makes sense,” said Crake. “As a system, it avoids the diversion of energies into unproductive channels, and short-circuits malaise. The female students have equal access, of course. You can get any colour, any age—well, almost. Any body type. They provide everything. If you’re gay or some kind of a fetishist, they’ll fix that too.”

At first Jimmy thought Crake might be joking, but he wasn’t. Jimmy longed to ask him what he’d tried—had he done a double amputee, for instance? But all of a sudden such a question seemed intrusive. Also it might be mistaken for mockery.

The food in Crake’s faculty dining hall was fantastic—real shrimps instead of the CrustaeSoy they got at Martha Graham, and real chicken, Jimmy suspected, though he avoided that because he couldn’t forget the ChickieNobs he’d seen; and something a lot like real cheese, though Crake said it came from a vegetable, a new species of zucchini they were trying out.

The desserts were heavy on the chocolate, real chocolate. The coffee was heavy on the coffee. No burnt grain products, no molasses mixed in. It was Happicuppa, but who cared? And real beer. For sure the beer was real.

So all of that was a welcome change from Martha Graham, though Crake’s fellow students tended to forget about cutlery and eat with their hands, and wipe their mouths on their sleeves. Jimmy wasn’t picky, but this verged on gross. Also they talked all the time, whether anyone was listening or not, always about the ideas they were developing. Once they found Jimmy wasn’t working on a space—was attending, in fact, an institution they clearly regarded as a mud puddle—they lost any interest in him. They referred to other students in their own faculties as their conspecifics, and to all other human beings as nonspecifics. It was a running joke.

So Jimmy had no yen to mingle after hours. He was happy enough to hang out at Crake’s, letting Crake beat him at chess or Three-Dimensional Waco, or trying to decode Crake’s fridge magnets, the ones that didn’t have numbers and symbols. Watson-Crick was a fridge-magnet culture: people bought them, traded them, made their own.

Sometimes they’d watch TV or Web stuff, as in the old days. The Noodie News, brainfrizz, alibooboo, comfort eyefood like that. They’d microwave popcorn, smoke some of the enhanced weed the Botanical Transgenic students were raising in one of the greenhouses; then Jimmy could pass out on the couch. After he got used to his status in this brainpound, which was equivalent to that of a house plant, it wasn’t too bad. You just had to relax and breathe into the stretch, as in workouts. He’d be out of here in a few days. Meanwhile it was always interesting to listen to Crake, when Crake was alone, and when he was in the mood to say anything.

On the second to last evening, Crake said, “Let me walk you through a hypothetical scenario.”

“I’m game,” said Jimmy. Actually he was sleepy—he’d had too much popcorn and beer—but he sat up and put on his paying-attention look, the one he’d perfected in high school. Hypothetical scenarios were a favourite thing of Crake’s.

“Axiom: that illness isn’t productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it’s an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it.”

“Granted,” said Jimmy.

“Now, suppose you’re an outfit called HelthWyzer. Suppose you make your money out of drugs and procedures that cure sick people, or else—better—that make it impossible for them to get sick in the first place.”

“Yeah?” said Jimmy. Nothing hypothetical here: that was what HelthWyzer actually did.

“So, what are you going to need, sooner or later?”

“More cures?”

“After that.”

“What do you mean, after that?”

“After you’ve cured everything going.”

Jimmy made a pretence of thinking. No point doing any actual thought: it was a foregone conclusion that Crake would have some lateral-jump solution to his own question.

“Remember the plight of the dentists, after that new mouthwash came in? The one that replaced plaque bacteria with friendly ones that filled the same ecological niche, namely your mouth? No one ever needed a filling again, and a lot of dentists went bust.”

“So?”

“So, you’d need more sick people. Or else—and it might be the same thing—more diseases. New and different ones. Right?”

“Stands to reason,” said Jimmy after a moment. It did, too. “But don’t they keep discovering new diseases?”

“Not discovering,” said Crake. “They’re creating them.”

“Who is?” said Jimmy. Saboteurs, terrorists, is that what Crake meant? It was well known they went in for that kind of thing, or tried to. So far they hadn’t had a lot of successes: their puny little diseases had been simple-minded, in Compound terms, and fairly easy to contain.

“HelthWyzer,” said Crake. “They’ve been doing it for years. There’s a whole secret unit working on nothing else. Then there’s the distribution end. Listen, this is brilliant. They put the hostile bioforms into their vitamin pills—their HelthWyzer over-the-counter premium brand, you know? They have a really elegant delivery system—they embed a virus inside a carrier bacterium, E. coli splice, doesn’t get digested, bursts in the pylorus, and bingo! Random insertion, of course, and they don’t have to keep on doing it—if they did they’d get caught, because even in the pleeblands they’ve got guys who could figure it out. But once you’ve got a hostile bioform started in the pleeb population, the way people slosh around out there it more or less runs itself. Naturally they develop the antidotes at the same time as they’re customizing the bugs, but they hold those in reserve, they practise the economics of scarcity, so they’re guaranteed high profits.”

“Are you making this up?” said Jimmy.

“The best diseases, from a business point of view,” said Crake, “would be those that cause lingering illnesses. Ideally—that is, for maximum profit—the patient should either get well or die just before all of his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation.”

“This would be really evil,” said Jimmy.

“That’s what my father thought,” said Crake.

“He knew?” Jimmy really was paying attention now.

“He found out. That’s how come they pushed him off a bridge.”

“Who did?” said Jimmy.

“Into oncoming traffic.”

“Are you going paranoid, or what?”

“Not in the least,” said Crake. “This is the bare-naked truth. I hacked into my dad’s e-mails before they deep-cleansed his computer. The evidence he’d been collecting was all there. The tests he’d been running on the vitamin pills. Everything.”

Jimmy felt a chill up his spine. “Who knows that you know?”

“Guess who else he told?” said Crake. “My mother and Uncle Pete. He was going to do some whistle-blowing through a rogue Web site—those things have a wide viewership, it would have wrecked the pleebland sales of every single HelthWyzer vitamin supplement, plus it would have torched the entire scheme. It would have caused financial havoc. Think of the job losses. He wanted to warn them first.” Crake paused. “He thought Uncle Pete didn’t know.”

“Wow,” said Jimmy. “So one or the other of them…”

“Could have been both,” said Crake. “Uncle Pete wouldn’t have wanted the bottom line threatened. My mother may just have been scared, felt that if my dad went down, she could go too. Or it could have been the CorpSeCorps. Maybe he’d been acting funny at work. Maybe they were checking up. He encrypted everything, but if I could hack in, so could they.”

“That is so weird,” said Jimmy. “So they murdered your father?”

“Executed,” said Crake. “That’s what they’d have called it. They’d have said he was about to destroy an elegant concept. They’d have said they were acting for the general good.”

The two of them sat there. Crake was looking up at the ceiling, almost as if he admired it. Jimmy didn’t know what else to say. Words of comfort would be superfluous.

Finally Crake said, “How come your mother took off the way she did?”

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy. “A lot of reasons. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I bet your dad was in on something like that. Some scam like the HelthWyzer one. I bet she found out.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Jimmy. “I think she got involved with some God’s Gardeners—type outfit. Some bunch of wackos. Anyway, my dad wouldn’t have…”

“I bet she knew they were starting to know she knew.”

“I’m really tired,” said Jimmy. He yawned, and suddenly it was true. “I think I’ll turn in.”

Extinctathon

On the last evening, Crake said, “Want to play Extinctathon?”

“Extinctathon?” said Jimmy. It took him a moment, but then he remembered it: the boring Web interactive with all those defunct animals and plants. “When was it we used to play that? It can’t still be going.”

“It’s never stopped,” said Crake. Jimmy took in the implications: Crake had never stopped. He must’ve been playing it by himself, all these years. Well, he was a compulsive, no news there.

“So, how’s your cumulative score?” he asked, to be polite.

“Once you rack up three thousand,” said Crake, “you get to be a Grandmaster.” Which meant Crake was one, because he wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise.

“Oh good,” said Jimmy. “So do you get a prize? The tail and both ears?”

“Let me show you something,” said Crake. He went onto the Web, found the site, pulled it up. There was the familiar gateway: EXTINCTATHON,Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?

Crake clicked Yes, and entered his codename: Rednecked Crake. The little coelacanth symbol appeared over his name, meaning Grandmaster. Then something new came up, a message Jimmy had never seen before: Welcome Grandmaster Rednecked Crake. Do you want to play a general game or do you want to play another Grandmaster?

Crake clicked the second. Good. Find your playroom. MaddAddam will meet you there.

“MaddAddam is a person?” asked Jimmy.

“It’s a group,” said Crake. “Or groups.”

“So what do they do, this MaddAddam?” Jimmy was feeling silly. It was like watching some corny old spy DVD, James Bond or something. “Besides counting the skulls and pelts, I mean.”

“Watch this.” Crake left Extinctathon, then hacked into a local pleeb bank, and from there skipped to what looked to be a manufacturer of solarcar parts. He went into the image of a hubcap, which opened into a folder—HottTotts Pinups, it was titled. The files were dated, not named; he chose one of them, transferred it into one of his lily pads, used that to skip to another, erased his footprints, opened the file there, loaded an image.

It was the picture of Oryx, seven or eight years old, naked except for her ribbons, her flowers. It was the picture of the look she’d given him, the direct, contemptuous, knowing look that had dealt him such a blow when he was—what? Fourteen? He still had the paper printout, folded up, hidden deep. It was a private thing, this picture. His own private thing: his own guilt, his own shame, his own desire. Why had Crake kept it? Stolen it.

Jimmy felt ambushed. What’s she doing here? he wanted to yell. That’s mine! Give it back! He was in a lineup; fingers pointed at him, faces scowled, while some rabid Bernice clone set fire to his undershorts. Retribution was at hand, but for what? What had he done? Nothing. He’d only looked.

Crake moved to the girl’s left eye, clicked on the iris. It was a gateway: the playroom opened up.

Hello, Grandmaster Crake. Enter passnumber now.

Crake did so. A new sentence popped up: Adam named the animals. MaddAddam customizes them.

Then there was a string of e-bulletins, with places and dates—CorpSeCorps issue, by the look of them, marked For Secure Addresses Only.

A tiny parasitic wasp had invaded several ChickieNobs installations, carrying a modified form of chicken pox, specific to the ChickieNob and fatal to it. The installations had had to be incinerated before the epidemic could be brought under control.

A new form of the common house mouse addicted to the insulation on electric wiring had overrun Cleveland, causing an unprecedented number of house fires. Control measures were still being tested.

Happicuppa coffee bean crops were menaced by a new bean weevil found to be resistant to all known pesticides.

A miniature rodent containing elements of both porcupine and beaver had appeared in the northwest, creeping under the hoods of parked vehicles and devastating their fan belts and transmission systems.

A microbe that ate the tar in asphalt had turned several interstate highways to sand. All interstates were on alert, and a quarantine belt was now in place.

“What’s going on?” said Jimmy. “Who’s putting this stuff out there?”

The bulletins vanished, and a fresh entry appeared. MaddAddam needs fresh initiatives. Got a bright idea? Share with us.

Crake typed, Sorry, interruption. Must go.

Right, Grandmaster Rednecked Crake. We’ll talk later. Crake closed down.

Jimmy had a cold feeling, a feeling that reminded him of the time his mother had left home: the same sense of the forbidden, of a door swinging open that ought to be kept locked, of a stream of secret lives, running underground, in the darkness just beneath his feet. “What was all that about?” he said. It might not be about anything, he told himself. It might be about Crake showing off. It might be an elaborate setup, an invention of Crake’s, a practical joke to frighten him.

“I’m not sure,” said Crake. “I thought at first they were just another crazy Animal Liberation org. But there’s more to it than that. I think they’re after the machinery. They’re after the whole system, they want to shut it down. So far they haven’t done any people numbers, but it’s obvious they could.”

“You shouldn’t be messing around!” said Jimmy. “You don’t want to be connected! Someone could think you’re part of it. What if you get caught? You’ll end up on brainfrizz!” He was frightened now.

“I won’t get caught,” said Crake. “I’m just cruising. But do me a favour and don’t mention this when you e-mail.”

“Sure,” said Jimmy. “But why even take the chance?”

“I’m curious, that’s all,” said Crake. “They’ve let me into the waiting room, but not any further. They’ve got to be Compound, or Compound-trained. These are sophisticated bioforms they’re putting together; I don’t think a pleeblander would be able to make anything like that.” He gave Jimmy his green-eyed sideways look—a look (Snowman thinks now) that meant trust. Crake trusted him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have shown him the hidden playroom.

“It could be a CorpSeCorps flytrap,” said Jimmy. The Corpsmen were in the habit of setting up schemes of that sort, to capture subversives in the making. Weeding the pea patch, he’d heard it called. The Compounds were said to be mined with such potentially lethal tunnels. “You need to watch your step.”

“Sure,” said Crake.

What Jimmy really wanted to know was: Out of all the possibilities you had, out of all the gateways, why did you choose her?

He couldn’t ask, though. He couldn’t give himself away.

Something else happened during that visit; something important, though Jimmy hadn’t realized it at the time.

The first night, as he was sleeping on Crake’s pullout sofa bed, he’d heard shouting. He’d thought it was coming from outside—at Martha Graham it would have been student pranksters—but in fact it was coming from Crake’s room. It was coming from Crake.

More than shouting: screaming. There were no words. It happened every night he was there.

“That was some dream you were having,” said Jimmy the next morning, after the first time it happened.

“I never dream,” said Crake. His mouth was full and he was looking out the window. For such a thin man he ate a lot. It was the speed, the high metabolic rate: Crake burned things up.

“Everyone dreams,” Jimmy said. “Remember the REM-sleep study at HelthWyzer High?”

“The one where we tortured cats?”

“Virtual cats, yeah. And the cats that couldn’t dream went crazy.”

“I never remember my dreams,” said Crake. “Have some more toast.”

“But you must have them anyway.”

“Okay, point taken, wrong words. I didn’t mean I never dream. I’m not crazy, therefore I must dream. Hypothesis, demonstration, conclusion, if A then not B. Good enough?” Crake smiled, poured himself some coffee.

So Crake never remembered his dreams. It’s Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he’s immersed in them, he’d wading through them, he’s stuck in them. Every moment he’s lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.