The Year of the Flood

THE FESTIVAL OF ARKS

YEAR TEN.

OF THE TWO FLOODS AND THE TWO COVENANTS.

SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.

Dear Friends and Fellow Mortals:

Today the Children have built their little Arks and launched them on the Arboretum Creek to carry their messages of respect for God’s Creatures to other children who may happen to find them on the seashore. In an increasingly endangered world, what a caring act that is! Let us remember: It is better to hope than to mope!

This evening we will share a special Festival meal – Rebecca’s delicious lentil soup, representing the First Flood, with Noah’s Ark dumplings stuffed with vegetable Animal forms. One of those dumplings contains a turnip Noah, and whoever finds that Noah will get a special prize – thus teaching us not to gobble our food in a heedless manner.

That prize is a picture painted by Nuala, our talented Eve Nine: Saint Brendan the Voyager, shown with the essential items we must include in our Ararat storerooms in preparation for the Waterless Flood. In this artwork, Nuala has given the tinned soydines and the soybits their due prominence. But let us remind ourselves to refresh our Ararats regularly. You wouldn’t want to open that tin of soydines on the day of need and find that the contents have gone bad.

Burt’s worthy wife, Veena, is in a Fallow state and cannot be with us for this Festival, but we look forward to welcoming her among us very soon.

Now let us turn to our Devotion for the Festival of Arks.

On this day we mourn, but we also rejoice. We mourn the deaths of all those Creatures of the land that were destroyed in the First Flood of extinctions – whenever those occurred – but we rejoice that the Fishes and Whales, and the Corals, and the Sea Turtles and the Dolphins, and the Sea Urchins, yea, also the Sharks – we rejoice that they were spared, unless a change in ocean temperature and salinity caused by the great downpour of fresh waters did harm to some Species unknown to us.

We mourn the carnage that took place among the Animals. God was evidently willing to do away with numerous Species, as the fossil records attest, but many were saved until our times, and these are the ones He bequeathed anew to our care. If you had composed a splendid symphony, would you want it to be obliterated? The Earth and the music thereof, the Universe and the harmony therein – these are God’s works of Creativity, of which Man’s creativity is but a poor shadow.

According to the Human Words of God, the task of saving the chosen Species was given to Noah, symbolizing the aware ones among Mankind. He alone was forewarned; he alone took upon himself Adam’s original stewardship, keeping God’s beloved Species safe until the waters of the Flood had receded and his Ark was beached upon Ararat. Then the rescued Creatures were set loose upon the Earth, as if at a second Creation.

At the first Creation all was rejoicing, but the second event was qualified: God was no longer so well pleased. He knew something had gone very wrong with his last experiment, Man, but that it was too late for him to fix it. “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite every thing living, as I have done,” say the Human Words of God in Genesis 8:21.

Yes, my Friends – any further cursing of the ground would be done not by God but by Man himself. Consider the southern shores of the Mediterranean – once fruitful farmland, now a desert. Consider the ruinations wrought in the Amazon River basin; consider the wholesale slaughter of ecosystems, each one a living reflection of God’s infinite care for detail… but these are subjects for another day.

Then God says a noteworthy thing. He says, “And the fear of you” – that is, Man – “and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air… into your hand are they delivered.” Genesis 9:2. This is not God telling Man that he has a right to destroy all the Animals, as some claim. Instead it is a warning to God’s beloved Creatures: Beware of Man, and of his evil heart.

Then God establishes his Covenant with Noah, and with his sons, “and with every living creature.” Many recall the Covenant with Noah, but forget the Covenant with all other living Beings. However, God does not forget it. He repeats the terms “all flesh” and “every living creature” a number of times, to make sure we get the point.

No one can make a Covenant with a stone: for a Covenant to exist, there must be a minimum of two live and responsible parties to it. Therefore the Animals are not senseless matter, not mere chunks of meat. No; they have living Souls, or God could not have made a Covenant with them. The Human Words of God affirm this: “But ask now the beasts,” says Job 12, “and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee… and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.”

Let us today remember Noah, the chosen caregiver of the Species. We God’s Gardeners are a plural Noah: we too have been called, we too forewarned. We can feel the symptoms of coming disaster as a doctor feels a sick man’s pulse. We must be ready for the time when those who have broken trust with the Animals – yes, wiped them from the face of the Earth where God placed them – will be swept away by the Waterless Flood, which will be carried on the wings of God’s dark Angels that fly by night, and in airplanes and helicopters and bullet trains, and on transport trucks and other such conveyances.

But we Gardeners will cherish within us the knowledge of the Species, and of their preciousness to God. We must ferry this priceless knowledge over the face of the Waterless Waters, as if within an Ark.

Let us construct our Ararats carefully, my Friends. Let us provision them with foresight, and with canned and dried goods. Let us camouflage them well.

May God deliver us from the snare of the fowler, and cover us with his feathers, and under his wings may we trust, as it says in Psalm 91; and thou shalt not be afraid of the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

May I remind you all about the importance of hand-washing, seven times a day at least, and after every encounter with a stranger. It is never too early to practise this essential precaution.

Avoid anyone who is sneezing.

Let us sing.

MY BODY IS MY EARTHLY ARK

From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

18

In the northern meadow the dead boar is still lying. The vultures have been at it, though they can’t get through the tough hide: they’re limited to eyes and tongue. They’ll have to wait until it rots and bursts before they can really dig in.

Toby turns her binoculars skyward, at the crows racketing around. When she looks back, two liobams are crossing the meadow. A male, a female, strolling along as if they own the place. They stop at the boar, sniff briefly. Then they continue their walk.

Toby stares at them, fascinated: she’s never seen a liobam in the flesh, only pictures. Am I imagining things? she wonders. No, the liobams are actual. They must be zoo animals freed by one of the more fanatical sects in those last desperate days.

They don’t look dangerous, although they are. The lion-sheep splice was commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists in order to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They’d reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together. But the result hadn’t been strictly vegetarian.

Still, the liobams seem gentle enough, with their curly golden hair and twirling tails. They’re nibbling flower heads, they don’t look up; yet she has the sense that they’re perfectly aware of her. Then the male opens its mouth, displaying its long, sharp canines, and calls. It’s an odd combination of baa and roar: a bloar, thinks Toby.

Her skin prickles. She doesn’t relish the thought of one of those creatures leaping on her from behind a shrub. If it’s her fate to be mangled and devoured, she’d prefer a more conventional beast of prey. Still, they are astounding. She watches them while they gambol together, then sniff the air and saunter away to the edge of the forest, vanishing into dappled shade.

How Pilar would have enjoyed seeing those, she thinks. Pilar, and Rebecca, and little Ren. And Adam One. And Zeb. All dead now.

Stop it, she tells herself. Just stop that right now.

She sidesteps carefully down the stairs, using her mop handle for balance. She keeps expecting – still – that the elevator doors will open, the lights blink on, the air conditioning begins to breathe, and someone – who? – will step out.

She goes down the long hall, walking softly on the increasingly spongy carpet, past the line of mirrors. There’s no shortage of mirrors in the Spa: the ladies needed to be reminded by harsh light of how bad they looked, and then by soft light of how good they might yet appear with a little costly help. But after her first few weeks alone she’d covered the mirrors with pink towels to avoid being startled by her own shape as it flitted from one frame to the next.

“Who lives here?” she says out loud. Not me, she thinks. This thing I’m doing can hardly be called living. Instead I’m lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That’s all.

She spends the rest of the morning sitting in a kind of stupor. Once, this would have been meditation, but she can hardly call it that now. Paralyzing rage can still take hold of her, it seems: impossible to know when it will strike. It begins as disbelief and ends in sorrow, but in between those two phases her whole body shakes with anger. Anger at whom, at what? Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she’s here for a reason – to bear witness, to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can’t.

It’s wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There’s nothing to be accomplished by it.

During the heat of the day, she naps. Trying to stay awake through the noontime steambath is a waste of energy.

She sleeps on a massage table in one of the cubicles where the Spa clients took their organic-botanic treatments. There are pink sheets and pink pillows, and pink blankets too – soft cuddly colours, pampering infant colours – though she doesn’t need the blankets, not in this weather.

She’s been having some difficulty waking up. She must fight against lethargy. It’s a strong desire – to sleep. To sleep and sleep. To sleep forever. She can’t live only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can’t see any future. Maybe she’ll go on from day to day and year to year until she simply withers, folds in on herself, shrivels up like an old spider.

Or she could take a shortcut. There’s always the Poppy in its red bottle, there are always the lethal amanita mushrooms, the little Death Angels. How soon before she sets them loose inside herself and lets them fly away with her on their white, white wings?

To cheer herself up, she opens her jar of honey. It’s the last one remaining from the honey she extracted so long ago – she and Pilar – up on the Edencliff Rooftop. She’s been saving it all these years as if it’s a protective charm. Honey doesn’t decay, said Pilar, as long as you keep water out of it: that’s why the ancients called it the food of immortality.

She swallows one fragrant spoonful, then another. It was hard work collecting that honey: the smoking of the hives, the painstaking removal of the combs, the extracting. It took delicacy and tact. The bees had to be spoken to and persuaded, not to mention temporarily gassed, and sometimes they’d sting, but in her memory the whole experience is one of unblemished happiness. She knows she’s deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.

19

Gradually, Toby stopped thinking she should leave the Gardeners. She didn’t really believe in their creed, but she no longer disbelieved. One season blended into the next – rainy, stormy, hot and dry, cooler and dry, rainy and warm – and then one year into another. She wasn’t quite a Gardener, yet she wasn’t a pleeblander any more. She was neither the one nor the other.

She’d venture out onto the street now, though she didn’t go far from the Garden, and she’d cover herself well and wear a nose cone and a wide sunhat. She still had nightmares about Blanco – the snakes on his arms, the headless women chained to his back, his skinless-looking blue-veined hands coming for her neck. Say you love me! Say it, bitch! During the worst times with him, during the most terror, the most pain, she’d focus on those hands coming off at the wrists. The hands, other parts of him. Grey blood gushing out. She’d picture him stuffed into a garboil boiler, alive. Those had been violent thoughts, and since joining the Gardeners she’d sincerely tried to erase them from her brain. But they kept coming back. She was told by those in nearby sleeping cubicles that she sometimes made what they called “signals of distress” in her sleep.

Adam One was aware of these signals. She had come, over time, to realize it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Though his beard had now turned an innocent feathery white and his blue eyes were round and guileless as a baby’s, though he seemed so trusting and vulnerable, Toby felt she would never encounter anyone as strong in purpose. He didn’t wield this purpose like a weapon, he simply floated along inside it and let it carry him. That would be hard to attack: like attacking the tide.

“He’s in Painball now, my dear,” he told her one fine Saint Mendel’s Day. “He may not ever be released. Perhaps he will return to the elements there.”

Toby’s heart fluttered. “What did he do?”

“Killed a woman,” said Adam One. “The wrong kind of woman. A woman from one of the Corps who was seeking excitement in the pleeblands. I wish they wouldn’t do that. The CorpSeCorps were forced to act, this time.”

Toby had heard about Painball. It was a facility for condemned criminals, both political ones and the other kind: they had a choice of being spraygunned to death or doing time in the Painball Arena, which wasn’t an arena at all, but more like an enclosed forest. You got enough food for two weeks, plus the Painball gun – it shot paint, like a regular paintball gun, but a hit in the eyes would blind you, and if you got the paint on your skin you’d start to corrode, and then you’d be an easy target for the throat-slitters on the other team. For everyone who went in was assigned to one of two teams: the Red, the Gold.

Woman criminals didn’t choose Painball much, they chose the sprayguns. So did most of the politicals. They knew they wouldn’t stand a chance in there, they preferred to just get it over with. Toby could understand that.

For a long time they’d kept the Painball Arena secret, like cock-fighting and Internal Rendition, but now, it was said, you could watch it onscreen. There were cameras in the Painball forest, hidden in trees and built into rocks, but often there wasn’t much to see except a leg or an arm or a blurry shadow, because the Painballers were understandably stealthy. But once in a while there’d be a hit, right on screen. If you survived for a month, you were good; longer than that, very good. Some got hooked on the adrenalin and didn’t want to come out when their time was up. Even the CorpSeCorps professionals were scared of the long-term Painballers.

Some teams would hang their kill on a tree, some would mutilate the body. Cut off the head, tear out the heart and kidneys. That was to intimidate the other team. Eat part of it, if food was running low or just to show how mean you were. After a while, thought Toby, you wouldn’t just cross the line, you’d forget there ever were any lines. You’d do whatever it takes.

She had a quick vision of Blanco, headless, hanging upside down. What did she feel about that? Pleasure? Pity? She couldn’t tell.

She asked to do a Vigil, and spent it on her knees, attempting to mind-meld with a plantful of green peas. The vines, the flowers, the leaves, the pods. So green and soothing. It almost worked.

One day, old walnut-faced Pilar – Eve Six – asked Toby if she wanted to learn about bees. Bees and mushrooms – these were Pilar’s specialties. Toby liked Pilar, who seemed kind, and who had a serenity she envied; so she said yes.

“Good,” said Pilar. “You can always tell the bees your troubles.” So Adam One wasn’t the only person to have registered Toby’s worry.

Pilar took her to visit the beehives, and introduced her to the bees by name. “They need to know you’re a friend,” she said. “They can smell you. Just move slowly,” she cautioned as the bees coated Toby’s bare arm like golden fur. “They’ll know you next time. Oh – if they do sting, don’t slap them. Just brush the sting off. But they won’t sting unless they’re frightened, because stinging kills them.”

Pilar had a fund of bee lore. A bee in the house means a visit from a stranger, and if you kill the bee, the visit will not be a good one. If the beekeeper dies, the bees must be told, or they will swarm and fly away. Honey helps an open wound. A swarm of bees in May, worth a cool day. A swarm of bees in June, worth a new moon. A swarm of bees in July, not worth a squashed fly. All the bees of a hive are one bee: that’s why they’ll die for the hive. “Like the Gardeners,” Pilar said. Toby couldn’t tell whether or not she was joking.

The bees were agitated by her at first, but after a while they accepted her. They allowed her to extract the honey by herself, and she got stung only twice. “The bees made a mistake,” Pilar told her. “You must ask permission of their Queen, and explain to them that you mean them no harm.” She said you had to speak out loud because the bees couldn’t read your mind precisely, any more than a person could. So Toby did speak, though she felt like a fool. What would anyone down there on the sidewalk think if they saw her talking to a swarm of bees?

According to Pilar, the bees all over the world had been in trouble for decades. It was the pesticides, or the hot weather, or a disease, or maybe all of these – nobody knew exactly. But the bees on the Rooftop Garden were all right. In fact, they were thriving. “They know they’re loved,” said Pilar.

Toby doubted this. She doubted a lot of things. But she kept her doubts to herself, because doubt wasn’t a word the Gardeners used much.

After a while, Pilar took Toby down to the dank cellars below the Buenavista Condos and showed her where the mushrooms were grown. Bees and mushrooms went together, said Pilar: the bees were on good terms with the unseen world, being the messengers to the dead. She tossed that crazed little factoid off as if it was something everyone knew, and Toby pretended to ignore it. Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The part you could see – what most people called a mushroom – was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.

There were mushrooms for eating, mushrooms for medicinal uses, and mushrooms for visions. These last were used only for the Retreats and the Isolation Weeks, though sometimes they might be good for certain medical conditions, and even to ease people through their Fallow states, when the Soul was refertilizing itself. Pilar said that everyone had a Fallow state sometime. But it was dangerous to stay Fallow too long, “It’s like going down the stairs,” she said, “and never coming back up. But the mushrooms can help with that.”

There were three kinds of mushrooms, said Pilar – Never Poisonous, Employ with Caution and Advice, and Beware. They all had to be memorized. Puffballs, any species: Never Poisonous. The psilocybins: Employ with Caution and Advice. All amanitas, and especially amanita phalloides, the Death Angel: Beware.

“Aren’t those very dangerous?” said Toby.

Pilar nodded. “Oh yes. Very dangerous.”

“Then why do you grow them?”

“God wouldn’t have made poisonous mushrooms unless He intended us to use them sometimes,” said Pilar.

Pilar was so mild-mannered and gentle that Toby couldn’t believe she’d just heard this. “You wouldn’t poison anyone!” she said.

Pilar gave her a straight look. “You never know, dear,” she said. “When you might have to.”

Now Toby spent all her spare hours with Pilar – tending the Edencliff beehives and the crops of buckwheat and lavender grown for the bees on adjacent rooftops, extracting the honey and storing it in jars. They stamped the labels with the little bee stamp that Pilar used instead of lettering, and set some jars aside to add to the preserved foods in the Ararat that Pilar had built behind a moveable cinder block in the Buenavista cellar wall. Or they cared for the Poppy plants and collected the thick juice from their seed pods, or pottered among the mushroom beds in the Buenavista cellar, or simmered elixirs and remedies and the honey-and-rose liquid skin emulsion they’d sell at the Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange.

Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth.

20

New people kept arriving among the Gardeners. Some were genuine converts, but others didn’t stay long. They’d be there for a while, wearing the same baggy, concealing clothes as everyone else, working at the most menial tasks, and, if they were women, weeping from time to time. Then they’d be gone. They were shadow people, and Adam One was moving them around in the shadows. As he’d moved Toby herself.

This was guesswork: it hadn’t taken Toby long to realize that the Gardeners did not welcome personal questions. Where you’d come from, what you’d done before – all of that was irrelevant, their manner implied. Only the Now counted. Say about others as you would have them say about you. In other words, nothing.

There were a lot of things Toby remained curious about. For instance, had Nuala ever got laid, and if not, was that why she flirted so much? Where had Marushka Midwife learned her skills? What exactly had Adam One done before the Gardeners? Had there ever been an Eve One, or even a Mrs. Adam One, or any child Adam Ones? If she came too close to such territory Toby would be granted a smile and a change of subject, and a hint that she might try avoiding the original sin of desiring too much knowledge, or possibly too much power. Because the two were connected – didn’t dear Toby agree?

Then there was Zeb. Adam Seven. Toby didn’t believe Zeb was a true Gardener, any more than she was. She’d seen a lot of men of that general shape and hairiness during her SecretBurger days, and she’d bet that he had some game going; he had that kind of alertness. Now what was a man like that doing at the Edencliff Rooftop?

Zeb came and went; sometimes he’d vanish for days, and when he turned up again he might be wearing pleeblander clothes: solarbiker fleather gear, groundsman’s coveralls, bouncer black. At first she’d worried that he was a Blanco affiliate, come to spy her out, but no, it wasn’t that. Mad Adam, the kids nicknamed him, but he appeared sane enough. A little too sane to be hanging out with this clutch of sweet but delusional eccentrics. And what was the bond between him and Lucerne? Lucerne had pampered Compound wife written all over her: every time she broke a nail she went into a pout. She was an unlikely choice of partner for a man like Zeb – a bullet-spitter, he’d have been called in Toby’s childhood, back when bullets were common.

Though maybe it was the sex, Toby thought. A mirage of the flesh, a hormone-fuelled obsession. It happened to a lot of people. She could remember a time when she herself might have been part of such a story, given the right man, but the longer she stayed with the Gardeners, the more that time receded.

She’d had no sex recently, nor did she miss it: during her immersion in the Sewage Lagoon she’d had far too much sex, though not the kind anyone would want. Freedom from Blanco was worth a lot: she was lucky she hadn’t ended up fucked into a purée and battered to a pulp and poured out onto a vacant lot.

There had been one sex-linked incident at the Gardeners: old Mugi the Muscle had leapt on her when she was putting in an hour on one of the Run-For-Your-Light Treadmills in the former party room at the top of the Boulevard Condos. He’d pulled her off the treadmill and tussled her to the floor, then fallen heavily on top of her and groped under her denim skirt, wheezing like a faulty pump. But she was strong from all the soil-hauling and stair-climbing, and Mugi wasn’t as fit as he must have been once, and she’d dug her elbow into him and levered him off, and left him sprawled and gasping on the floor.

She’d told Pilar about it, as she now told her everything that puzzled her. “What should I do?” she said.

“We never make a fuss about such things,” said Pilar. “There’s no harm in Mugi really. He’s tried that on more than one of us – even me, some years ago.” She gave a dry little chuckle. “The ancient Australopithecus can come out in all of us. You must forgive him in your heart. He won’t do it again, you’ll see.”

So that was that, as far as sex went. Maybe it’s temporary, thought Toby. Maybe it’s like having your arm go to sleep. My neural connections for sex are blocked. But why don’t I care?

It was the afternoon of Saint Maria Sibylla Merian of Insect Metamorphosis Day, said to be a propitious time for working with bees. Toby and Pilar were extracting the honey. They had on their wide veiled hats; for the smoke they used a bellows, and a smudge of decaying wood.

“Your parents – are they living?” said Pilar, from behind her white veil.

Toby was surprised by such a question, uncharacteristically direct for a Gardener. But Pilar wouldn’t have asked such a thing without good reason. Toby couldn’t bring herself to discuss her father, so instead she told Pilar about her mother’s mysterious illness. What was so odd, she said, was that her mother had always been so keen on health: by weight she would have been half vitamin supplement.

“Tell me,” said Pilar. “What supplements was she taking?”

“She ran a HelthWyzer franchise, so she took those.”

“HelthWyzer,” said Pilar. “Yes. We’ve heard of this before.”

“Heard of what?” said Toby.

“This kind of illness, coupled with those supplements. No wonder the HelthWyzer people wanted to treat your mother themselves.”

“What do you mean?” said Toby. She felt chilly, even though the morning sun was hot.

“Did it ever occur to you, my dear,” said Pilar, “that your mother may have been a guinea pig?”

It hadn’t occurred to Toby, but it occurred to her now. “I kind of wondered,” she said. “Not about the pills, but… I thought it was the developer who wanted Dad’s land. I figured maybe they’d put something in the well.”

“In that case you’d all have been ill,” said Pilar. “Now, promise me that you will never take any pill made by a Corporation. Never buy such a pill, and never accept any such pill if offered, no matter what they say. They’ll produce data and scientists; they’ll produce doctors – worthless, they’ve all been bought.”

“Surely not all of them!” said Toby, shocked by Pilar’s vehemence: she was usually so calm.

“No,” said Pilar. “Not all. But all who are still working with any of the Corporations. The others – some have died unexpectedly. But those still alive – those with any shred of the old medical ethic left in them…” She paused. “There are doctors like that, still. But not at the Corps.”

“Where are they?” Toby asked.

“Some of them are here, with us,” said Pilar. She smiled. “Katuro the Wrench used to be an internist. He does our plumbing now. Surya was an eye surgeon. Stuart was an oncologist. Marushka was a gynecologist.”

“And the other doctors? If they aren’t here?”

“Let’s just say they’re safe, elsewhere,” said Pilar. “For the moment. But now you must promise me: those Corporation pills are the food of the dead, my dear. Not our kind of dead, the bad kind. The dead who are still alive. We must teach the children to avoid these pills – they’re evil. It’s not only a rule of faith among us, it’s a matter of certainty.”

“But how can you be so sure?” Toby asked. “The Corps – nobody knows what they’re doing. They’re locked into those Compounds of theirs, nothing gets out…”

“You’d be surprised,” said Pilar. “No boat was ever built that didn’t spring a leak eventually. Now, promise me.”

Toby promised.

“One day,” said Pilar, “when you’re an Eve, you’ll understand more.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever be an Eve,” said Toby lightly. Pilar smiled.

Later that same afternoon, when Pilar and Toby had finished the honey extraction and Pilar was thanking the hive and the queen for their cooperation, Zeb came up the fire-escape stairs. He was wearing a black fleather jacket of the kind favoured by solarbikers. They slashed those jackets to let the hot air circulate while they were riding, but there were extra slashes in this one.

“What happened?” said Toby. “What can I do?” Zeb’s tree-stump hands were clutched to his stomach; blood was coming out from between his fingers. She felt a little sick. At the same time she felt an urge to say, “Don’t drip on the bees.”

“Fell down and cut myself,” said Zeb. “Broken glass.” He was breathing heavily.

“I don’t believe that,” said Toby.

“Didn’t think you would,” said Zeb, grinning at her. “Here,” he said to Pilar. “Brought you a present. SecretBurger special.” He reached a hand into the pocket of his fleather jacket and brought out a fistful of ground meat. For a moment, Toby had the horrible impression that this was part of Zeb himself, but Pilar smiled.

“Thank you, dear Zeb,” she said. “I can always rely on you! Come with me, now, we’ll fix it up. Toby, could you find Rebecca and ask her to bring some clean kitchen towels? And Katuro. Him too.” She didn’t seem at all flustered by the sight of blood.

How old will I be, thought Toby, before I can be that calm? She felt cut open.

21

Pilar and Toby carried Zeb over to the Fallows Recovery Hut on the northwest corner of the Rooftop, which was used by Gardeners on Vigils, or those emerging from a Fallow state, or those who were moderately ill. As they were helping him to lie down, Rebecca came out from the enclosed shed at the back of the Rooftop, carrying a stack of dishtowels. “Now who did that?” she said. “That’s a glass job! Bottle fight?”

Katuro arrived, peeled the jacket off Zeb’s stomach, took a professional look. “Stopped by ribs,” he said. “Slash, not stab. No deep punctures – lucky.”

Pilar handed the ground meat to Toby. “It’s for the maggots,” she said. “Could you take care of it this time, dear?” The meat was already going off, from the smell of it.

Toby wrapped it in gauze from the Wellness Clinic as she’d seen Pilar do, and lowered the bundle over the edge of the rooftop on a string. In a couple of days, after the flies had laid their eggs and the eggs had had time to hatch, they’d haul it up again and harvest the maggots, because where there was rotting flesh, maggots were sure to follow. Pilar kept a supply of maggots always on hand for therapeutic use in case of need, but Toby had never seen them in action.

According to Pilar, maggot therapy was very ancient. It had been discarded as out of date along with leeches and bleeding, but during the First World War the doctors had noticed that soldiers’ wounds healed much faster if maggots were present. Not only did the helpful creatures eat the decaying flesh, they killed necrotic bacteria, and were thus a great help in preventing gangrene.

The maggots created a pleasant sensation, said Pilar – a gentle nibbling, as of minnows – but they needed to be watched carefully, because if they ran out of decay and began to invade the living flesh there would be pain and bleeding. Otherwise, the wound would heal cleanly.

Pilar and Katuro sponged Zeb’s cuts with vinegar, then rubbed on honey. Zeb was no longer bleeding, though he was pale. Toby got him a drink of Sumac.

Katuro said that pleebland street-fight glass was notoriously septic, so they should apply the maggots right away to avoid blood poisoning. Pilar used tweezers to place her stored maggots inside a fold of gauze, taping the gauze to Zeb. By the time the maggots had chewed through the gauze, Zeb would surely be festering enough to be attractive to them.

“Someone has to stay on maggot watch,” said Pilar. “Twenty-four hours a day. In case the maggots start to eat our dear Zeb.”

“Or in case I start to eat them,” said Zeb. “Land shrimp. Same body plan. Very nice fried. Great source of lipids.” He was keeping up a good front, but his voice was weak.

Toby took the first five hours. Adam One had heard about Zeb’s accident and came to visit. “Discretion is the better part of valour,” he said mildly.

“Yeah, well, there were too many of them,” said Zeb. “Anyway I put three of them in the hospital.”

“Not a thing to be proud of,” said Adam One. Zeb frowned.

“Foot soldiers use their feet,” he said. “That’s why I wear boots.”

“We’ll discuss this later, when you’re feeling better,” said Adam One.

“I’m feeling fine,” Zeb growled.

Nuala bustled in to take over from Toby. “Have you made him some Willow?” she said. “Oh dear, I hate those maggots! Here, let me prop you up! Can’t we raise the screening? We need a breeze through! Zeb, is this what you mean by Urban Bloodshed Limitation? You are so naughty!” She was twittering, and Toby felt like kicking her.

Lucerne arrived next, blotting tears. “This is terrible! What’s happened, who did…”

“Oh, he’s been so bad!” said Nuala conspiratorially. “Haven’t you, Zeb? Fighting with the pleeblanders,” she whispered delightedly.

“Toby,” said Lucerne, ignoring Nuala, “how serious is it? Will he… is he…” She sounded like some old-time TV actress playing a deathbed scene.

“I’m fine,” said Zeb. “Now buzz off and leave me alone!”

He didn’t want anyone fiddling with him, he said. Except Pilar. And Katuro, if absolutely necessary. And Toby, because at least she was silent. Lucerne went away, weeping angrily, but there was nothing Toby could do about that.

Rumour was the daily news among the Gardeners. The older boys heard quickly about Zeb’s battle – it had now become a battle – and the next afternoon Shackleton and Crozier came to see him. He was asleep – Toby had slipped some Poppy into his Willow tea – so they tiptoed around him, speaking in low voices and trying for a peek at his wound.

“He ate a bear once,” said Shackleton. “When he was flying for Bearlift, that time they were trying to save the polar bears. His plane crashed and he walked out – it took months!” The older boys had many such heroic tales about Zeb. “He said bears look just like a man when they’re skinned.”

“He ate the co-pilot. After he was dead, though,” Crozier said.

“Can we see the maggots?”

“Has he got gangrene?”

“Gang! Grene!” shouted little Oates, who’d tagged along after his brothers.

“Shut up, Oatie!”

“Ow! You meat-breath!”

“Off you go now,” said Toby. “Zeb – Adam Seven needs his rest.”

Adam One persisted in thinking that Shackleton and Crozier and young Oates would turn out just fine, but Toby had her doubts. Philo the Fog was supposed to be their stand-in father, but he wasn’t always mentally available.

Pilar took the night watches: she didn’t sleep much at night anyway, she said. Nuala volunteered for the mornings. Toby took over during the afternoons. She checked the maggots every hour. Zeb had no temperature, and there was no fresh blood.

Once he began healing he was restless, so Toby played dominoes with him, then cribbage, and finally chess. The chess set was Pilar’s: black was ants, white was bees; she’d carved it herself. “They used to think the queen of the bees was a king,” Pilar said. “Since if you killed that bee, the rest lost their purpose. That’s why the chess king doesn’t move around much on the board – it’s because the queen bee always stays inside the hive.” Toby wasn’t sure this was true: did the queen bee always stay inside the hive? Except for swarming, of course, and for nuptial flights… She stared at the board, trying to see the pattern. From outside the Fallows Recovery Hut came the sound of Nuala’s voice mingling with the chirping of the smaller children. “The five senses, through which the world comes to us… seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting… what do we use for tasting? That’s right… Oates, there is no need for you to lick Melissa. Now pop your tongues back into your tongue containers and close the lids.” Toby had an image – no, a taste. She could taste the skin of Zeb’s arm, the salt on it…

“Checkmate,” said Zeb. “Ants win again.” Zeb always played Ants, to give Toby an opening advantage.

“Oh,” said Toby. “I didn’t see that.” Now she was wondering – unworthy thought – whether there was something going on between Nuala and Zeb. Though overblown, Nuala was lush, and oddly babyish. Some men found that quality alluring.

Zeb swept the pieces from the board and began to set them up again. “Do me a favour?” he said. He didn’t wait for a yes.

Lucerne was having a lot of headaches, he said. His voice was neutral, but there was an edge to it, by which Toby understood that the headaches might not be real; or else that they were real enough, but Zeb found them boring anyway.

Could Toby stop by with some of her bottles the next time Lucerne had a migraine, he said, and see what she could manage? Because he himself sure as hell couldn’t do anything for Lucerne ’s hormones, if that’s what it was. “She’s been giving me a lot of grief,” he said. “For being away too much. Makes her jealous.” He grinned like a shark. “Maybe she’ll hear sense, from you.”

So. The bloom is off the rose, thought Toby. And the rose doesn’t like it.

22

Saint Allan Sparrow of Clean Air: not a Day that had so far lived up to its name. Toby picked her way through the crowded pleebland streets, carrying her bag of dried herbals and bottled medicinals hidden under her loose coverall. The afternoon thunderstorm had cleared the fumes and particulate somewhat, but she was wearing a black nose cone anyway, in honour of Saint Sparrow. As was the custom.

She felt safer on the street since Blanco had been put into Painball; still, she never strolled or loitered, but – remembering Zeb’s instructions – also she didn’t run. It was best to look purposeful, as if you were on a mission. She ignored the passing stares, the anti-Gardener slurs, but she was alert to sudden movement or to anyone coming too close. A pleebrat gang had once grabbed her mushrooms; luckily for them, she hadn’t been carrying anything lethal that time.

She was heading towards the Cheese Factory building to fulfil Zeb’s request. This was the third time she’d gone. If Lucerne ’s headaches were real and not just a bid for attention, an over-the-counter double-strength painkiller/soporific from HelthWyzer could have handled the problem, either by curing her or killing her. But Corps pills were taboo among the Gardeners, so she’d been using extract of Willow, followed by Valerian, with some Poppy mixed in; though not too much Poppy, as it could be addictive.

“What’s in this?” Lucerne would say each time Toby had treated her. “It tastes better when Pilar makes it.”

Toby would refrain from saying that Pilar had in fact made it, and would urge Lucerne to swallow the dose. Then she’d put a cold compress on her forehead and sit by her bedside, trying to tune out Lucerne ’s whining.

The Gardeners were expected to avoid any broadcasting of their personal problems: foisting your mental junk on others was frowned on. For drinking Life there are two cups, Nuala taught the small children. What’s in each of them might be exactly the same, but my, oh my, the taste is so different!

The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy -

Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

This was a basic Gardener credo. But though Lucerne could mouth the slogans, she hadn’t internalized the teachings: Toby could tell a sham when she saw one, being a sham herself. As soon as Toby was locked into the ministering position, everything that was festering inside Lucerne would come roiling out. Toby would nod and say nothing, hoping to convey the impression of sympathy, though in reality she’d be considering how many drops of Poppy it would take to knock Lucerne unconscious before she, Toby, gave in to her worst impulses and throttled her.

As she quick-stepped through the streets, Toby anticipated Lucerne ’s complaints. If true to pattern, they’d be about Zeb: why was he never there when Lucerne needed him? How had she ended up in this unsanitary septic tank with this clutch of dreamers – I don’t mean you, Toby, you’ve got some sense – who didn’t understand the first thing about how the world really worked? She was buried alive here with a monster of egotism, with a man who cared only about his own needs. Talking to him was like talking to a potato – no, to a stone. He didn’t hear you, he never told you what he was thinking, he was hard as flint.

Not that Lucerne hadn’t tried. She wanted to be a responsible person, she really did believe that Adam One was right about so many things, and nobody loved animals more than she did, but really there was a limit and she did not believe for one instant that slugs had any central nervous system, and to say they had souls was to make a mockery of the whole idea of souls, and she resented that, because nobody had more respect for souls than she did, she’d always been a very spiritual person. As for saving the world, nobody wanted to save the world as much as she did, but no matter how much the Gardeners deprived themselves of proper food and clothing and even proper showers, for heaven’s sake, and felt more high and mighty and virtuous than everyone else, it wouldn’t really change anything. They were just like those people who used to whip themselves during the Middle Ages – those flagrants.

“Flagellants,” Toby had said, the first time this came up.

Then Lucerne had said she didn’t mean it about the Gardeners, she was just feeling gloomy because of the headache. Also because they looked down on her for coming from a Corps, and for ditching her husband and running away with Zeb. They didn’t trust her. They thought she was a slut. They made dirty jokes about her behind her back. Or the children did – didn’t they?

“The children make dirty jokes about everyone,” Toby had said. “Including me.”

“You?” Lucerne had said, opening her large eyes with their dark lashes. “Why would they make dirty jokes about you?” Nothing sexual about you, was what she meant. Flat as a board, back and front. Worker bee.

There was a plus to that: at least Lucerne wasn’t jealous of her. In that respect, Toby stood alone among the Gardener women.

“They don’t look down on you,” Toby had said. “They don’t think you’re a slut. Now just relax and close your eyes and picture the Willow moving through your body, up to your head, where the pain is.”

It was true that the Gardeners didn’t look down on Lucerne, or not for the reasons she thought they did. They might resent the way she slacked off on chores and could never learn how to chop a carrot, they might be scornful of the messiness of her living space and her pathetic attempt at windowsill tomato-growing and the amount of time she spent in bed, but they didn’t care about her infidelity, or her adultery, or whatever it had once been called.

That was because the Gardeners didn’t bother with marriage certificates. They endorsed fidelity as long as a pair-bonding was current but there was no record of the first Adam and the first Eve going through a wedding, so in their eyes neither the clergymen of other religions nor any secular official had the power to marry people. As for the CorpSeCorps, they favoured official marriages only as a means for capturing your iris image, your fingerscans, and your DNA, all the better to track you with. Or so the Gardeners claimed, and this was one claim of theirs that Toby could believe without reservation.

Among the Gardeners, weddings were simple affairs. Both parties had to proclaim in front of witnesses that they loved each other. They exchanged green leaves to symbolize growth and fertility and jumped over a bonfire to symbolize the energy of the universe, then declared themselves married and went to bed. For divorces they did the whole thing in reverse: a public statement of non-love and separation, the exchange of dead twigs, and a swift hop over a heap of cold ashes.

A standing complaint of Lucerne’s – which was sure to come up if Toby wasn’t quick enough with the Poppy – was that Zeb had never invited her to do the green-leaf and bonfire-leaping ceremony with him. “Not that I think it means anything,” she’d say. “But he must think it does, because he’s one of them, right? So by not doing it, he’s refusing commitment. Don’t you agree?”

“I never know what anyone thinks,” Toby would say.

“But if it was you, wouldn’t you feel he was shirking his responsibility?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Toby would say. “Ask why he hasn’t…” Was proposed the right word?

“He’d just get angry.” Lucerne would sigh. “He was so different when I first knew him!”

Then Toby would be treated to the story of Lucerne and Zeb – a story Lucerne never tired of telling.

23

The story went like this. Lucerne met Zeb at the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park – did Toby know the AnooYoo? Oh. Well, it was a fantastic place to unwind and get yourself resurfaced. This was right after it was built and they were still putting in the landscaping. The fountains, the lawns, the gardens, the bushes. The lumiroses. Didn’t Toby just love lumiroses? She’d never seen them? Oh. Well, maybe sometime…

Lucerne loved to get up at dawn, she was an early riser then, she liked to watch the sunrise; it was because she’d always been so sensitive to colour and light, she’d paid so much attention to the aesthetic values in her homes – the homes she’d decorated. She loved to include at least one room in sunrise colours – the sunrise room, she would think of that room.

Also she was restless in those days. She was really very restless, because her husband was cold as a crypt, and they never made love any more because he was too busy with his career. And she was a sensual person, she always had been, and her sensual nature was being starved to death. Which was bad for the health, and especially for the immune system. She’d read the studies on that!

So there she was, prowling around at dawn in her pink kimono and crying a little, and contemplating a divorce from her HelthWyzer Corp husband, or a separation at least, though she realized it would not be the best thing for Ren, so young then and fond of her father, not that he paid enough attention to Ren either. And suddenly there was Zeb, in the rising light, like a – well, like a vision, all by himself, planting a lumirose bush. One of those roses that glow in the dark, the scent was so divine – had Toby ever smelled them? – she didn’t suppose so because the Gardeners were death on anything new, but those roses were really pretty.

So there was a man, in the dawn, kneeling on the ground and looking as if he was holding a bouquet of live coals.

What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love? thought Toby. On Zeb’s part there must have been something to be said for an attractive woman in a pink kimono, a loosely tied pink kimono, on a lawn in a pearly sunrise, especially when tearful. Because Lucerne was attractive. Simply from a visual point of view, she was very attractive. Even if whining, which was the way Toby saw her mostly.

Lucerne had wafted across the lawn, aware of her bare feet on the damp cool grass, aware of the brush of fabric across her thighs, aware of the tightness around her waist and the looseness below her collarbone. Billowing, like waves. She’d stopped in front of Zeb, who’d been watching her come towards him as if he’d been a sailor dumped into the ocean by mistake and she’d been either a mermaid or a shark. (Toby supplied these images: Lucerne said Fate.) They were both just so aware, she told Toby; she’d always been aware of other peoples’ awareness, she was like a cat, or, or… she had that talent, or was it a curse – that was how she knew. So she could feel from the inside what Zeb was feeling as he watched her. That was overwhelming!

It was impossible to explain this in words, she’d say, as if nothing of the sort could ever have happened to Toby herself.

Anyway, there they stood, though they’d already foreseen what was about to happen – what had to happen. Fear and lust pushed them together and held them apart, equally.

Lucerne did not call it lust. She called it longing.

At this point, Toby would have an image of the set of salt and pepper shakers that used to be on the kitchen table in her long-ago childhood home: a little china hen, a little china rooster. The hen had been the salt, the rooster had been the pepper. Salty Lucerne had stood there in front of peppery Zeb, smiling and looking up, and she’d asked him a simple question – how many rose bushes would there be or something, she couldn’t remember, so mesmerized was she by Zeb’s… (Here Toby would turn off her attention because she didn’t want to hear about the biceps, triceps, and other muscular attractions of Zeb. Was she herself immune to them? No. Was she therefore jealous of this part of the story? Yes. We must be mindful of our own animal-nature tendencies and biases at all times, said Adam One.)

And then, Lucerne would say, hooking Toby back into her story – and then a strange thing had happened: she’d recognized Zeb.

“I’ve seen you before,” she’d said. “Didn’t you used to be at HelthWyzer? But you weren’t working on the grounds then! You were – ”

“Mistaken identity,” said Zeb. And then he’d kissed her. That kiss had gone right into her like a knife, and she’d crumpled into his arms like – like a dead fish – no – like a petticoat – no – like damp tissue paper! And then he’d picked her up and laid her down on the lawn, right where anyone could have seen, which was an unbelievable turn-on, and then he’d undone her kimono and pulled the petals off the roses he was holding and scattered them all over her body, and then the two of them… It was like a high-speed collision, said Lucerne, and she’d thought, How can I survive this, I’m going to die right here and now! And she could tell he felt the same.

Later – quite a lot later, after they were living together – he’d told her she’d been right. Yes, he’d been at HelthWyzer, but for reasons he wouldn’t go into he’d had to leave in a hurry, and he trusted her not to mention that earlier time and place he’d once inhabited, not to anybody. Which she hadn’t mentioned. Or not very much. Except right now, to Toby.

Back then, though, during her Spa sojourn – thank god she hadn’t been having any skin procedure that would have made her scabby, she’d just been there for a tuneup – back then, they’d had several more appetizer-sized helpings of each other, locked into one of the showers in the Spa pool’s changeroom, and after that she was stuck to Zeb like a wet leaf. As he was to her, she added. They couldn’t get enough of each other.

And then, after her Spa sessions were over and she was back at her so-called home, she’d slip out of the Compound on one pretext or another – shopping errands, mostly, the things you could buy in the Compound were so predictable – and they’d met secretly in the pleeb-lands – it was so exciting at first! – such funny places, junky little love hotels and rent-a-rooms, you took them by the hour, so far away from the buttoned-down ambiance of the HelthWyzer Compound; and then, when he’d had to travel in a hurry – there was some trouble, she’d never understood why, but he needed to get away very fast – and, well, she couldn’t bear to be apart from him.

So she’d left her so-called husband, not that it didn’t serve him right for being so inert. And they’d moved around from one city to another, from one trailer park to another, and Zeb had bought a few black-market procedures, for his fingers and his DNA and so on; and then, when it was safe, they’d come back, right here, to the Gardeners. Because Zeb had told her he’d been a Gardener all along. Or so he’d said. Anyway, he seemed to know Adam One quite well. They’d been to school together. Or something like that.

So Zeb was forced into it, Toby thought. He was ex-Corps, on the run; maybe he’d been black-marketing some proprietary item, such as a nanotechnology or a gene splice. That could be fatal if you were caught. And Lucerne had put face and ex-name together, and he’d had to distract her with sex, then take her with him to ensure her loyalty. It was either that or kill her. He couldn’t leave her behind: she would have felt scorned, she’d have set the CorpSeCorps dogs on him. Still, what a risk he’d taken. The woman was like an amateur car bomb: you never knew when she’d blow up or who she’d take down with her when she did. Toby wondered whether Zeb had ever thought of stuffing a cork down her epiglottis and slotting her into a carbon garboil dumpster.

But maybe he loved her. In his way. Hard though that was for Toby to picture. However, perhaps the love had run out, because he wasn’t doing enough maintenance work on her at the moment.

“Hasn’t your husband looked for you?” Toby had asked the first time she’d heard this tale. “The one at HelthWyzer?”

“I don’t consider that man to be my husband any more,” Lucerne said in an offended tone.

“Excuse me. Your former husband. Haven’t the CorpSeCorps… did you leave him a message?” The trail of Lucerne, if followed, would lead right to the Gardeners – not only to Zeb, but to Toby herself, and to her own former identity. Which could be uncomfortable for her: the CorpSeCorps never wrote off skipped debts, and what if anyone had dug up her father?

“Why would they spend the money?” said Lucerne. “I’m not important to them. As for my former husband” – she gave a little grimace – ”he ought to have married an equation. Maybe he doesn’t even notice I’ve gone.”

“What about Ren?” said Toby. “She’s a lovely little girl. Surely he misses her.”

“Oh,” said Lucerne. “Yes. He probably does notice that.”

Toby wanted to ask why Lucerne hadn’t simply left Ren behind with her father. Stealing her away, leaving no information – it seemed like a petty act of spite. But asking such a question would simply make Lucerne angry – it would sound too much like criticism.

Two blocks away from the Cheese Factory, Toby ran into a pleebrat street fight – Asian Fusions versus Blackened Redfish, with a few Lintheads shouting around the edges. These kids were only seven or eight, but there were a lot of them, and when they spotted her they stopped yelling at one another and started yelling at her. Goddie goddie, whitey bitch! Get her shoes!

She swivelled so her back was against a wall and prepared to fend them off. It was difficult to kick them really hard when they were that young – as Zeb had pointed out in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation class, there was a species inhibition against hurting children – but she knew she’d have to, because they could be deadly. They’d aim for her stomach, ram her with their hard little heads, try to pull her down. The smaller ones had a nasty habit of hoisting the Gardener women’s baggy skirts and diving in under them, then biting whatever they could find once they were in there. But she was ready for them: when they got close enough, she’d twist their ears or chop their necks with the side of her hand, or bang two of their little skulls together.

Suddenly, however, they swerved like a school of fish, rushed past her, and disappeared into an alleyway.

She turned her head, saw why. It was Blanco. He wasn’t in Painball at all. He must have been let out. Or got out, somehow.

Panic gripped her heart. She saw his red-and-blue flayed hands, she felt her bones crumbling. This was her worst fear.

Take hold, she told herself. He was across the street, and she was inside her baggy coverall and had her nose cone on, so maybe he couldn’t recognize her. And he’d given no sign yet that he’d noticed her. But she was alone, and he wasn’t above a random stomp-and-rape. He’d drag her up that very same alleyway, the one where the pleebrats had gone. Then he’d rip off the cone and see who she was. And that would be the end, but it wouldn’t be a quick end. It would be as slow as he could make it. He’d turn her into a flesh billboard – a not-quite-living demonstration of his rank finesse.

She turned quickly and marched away as fast as she could, before he’d had a chance to focus his malevolence on her. Breathless, she turned the corner, went half a block, glanced back. He wasn’t there.

For once she was more than happy to reach the door of Lucerne ’s apartment. She raised her nose cone, twitched the muscles of her professional smile, and knocked.

“Zeb?” Lucerne called. “Is that you?”