Lucerne was bad luck in some ways, said Zeb. Though she was good luck in others, because you couldn't deny that she -
"You can skip that part," says Toby.
"Okay, short version: she had me by the nuts, more ways than one. But I hadn't ratted on her that time in the washroom, and she was inclined to return the favour as long as I was attentive enough to her. Then she got hooked on me, and you know the rest: nothing would do but an elopement with a mystery man first spotted when wearing a nose of a pig.
"I moved us around inside the deeper pleeblands, which she found romantic at first. Luckily no one - no one in the CorpSeCorps - was much interested in her disappearance, because she hadn't stolen any IP. Wives did skedaddle from the Compounds out of sheer boredom, it wasn't unheard of. The CorpSeCorps regarded such defections as private, insofar as they regarded anything as private. They didn't bother with them much, especially if the husband wasn't agitating. Which it appears that Lucerne's husband did not.
"Trouble is, Lucerne took Ren with her. Cute little girl, I liked her. But it was way too dangerous for her in the deeper pleeblands. Kids like that could get snatched for the chicken-sex trade just walking along the street, even if they were with adults. There'd be a pleebrat mob scuffle, some SecretBurgers red sauce tossing, an overturned stand or solarcar - in other words, a honking big misdirection - and when you looked again, your child would be gone. I couldn't risk that."
Zeb got a few more alterations done to his ears and fingerprints and irises - they'd know by now he'd been up to no good on the HelthWyzer computers, they'd be looking for him - and then ...
"And then the three of you turned up at the God's Gardeners," says Toby. "I remember that; I wondered from the first what you were doing there. You didn't fit in with the rest of them."
"You mean I hadn't taken the vow of whatnot and drunk the Elixir of Life? God loves you, and he also loves aphids?"
"More or less."
"No. I hadn't. But Adam had to put up with me anyway, didn't he? I was his brother."
Edencliff
"Adam already had his ecofreakshow up and running by that time," says Zeb. "At the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. You were there. So were Katuro and Rebecca. Nuala - wonder what happened to her? Marushka Midwife, and the others. And Philo. Too bad about him."
"Freakshow?" says Toby. "That's not very kind. Surely the God's Gardeners was more than that."
"Yeah, it was," says Zeb. "Granted. But the pleebland slumfolk tagged it as a freakshow. Just as well: best to be thought of as harmless and addled and poor, in those parts. Adam did nothing to discourage that view; in fact, he encouraged it. Roaming around in the pleebs wearing the simple but eye-catching garb of a lunatic recycler with his choir in tow singing nutbar hymns, then preaching the love of hoofed animals in front of SecretBurger stands - you'd have to be lobotomized to do that, was the street verdict."
"If he hadn't done those things I wouldn't be here," says Toby. "Him and the Gardener kids grabbed me during a street brawl. I was working - I was trapped at SecretBurgers at the time, and the manager had a thing for me."
"Your pal Blanco," says Zeb. "Third-time Painball vet, as I recall."
"Yes. Girls he had a thing for ended up dead, and I was next on the list. He was already at the violent stage, he was working up to the kill; you could feel it. So I owe a lot to Adam - to Adam One, as I always knew him. Freakshow or not," she says defensively.
"Don't get it wrong," says Zeb. "He's my brother. We had our disagreements, and he had his way of doing things and I had mine, but that's different."
"You didn't mention Pilar," says Toby to deflect the conversation from Adam One. It's uncomfortable for her to listen to criticism of him. "She was there too. At Edencliff."
"Yeah, HelthWyzer finally got too much for her. She'd been feeding inside stuff to Adam, which was useful to him - he liked to know who might jump ship from a Corp, come over to the side of virtue, which was his side, naturally. But she said she couldn't stay there any longer. With the CorpSeCorps takeover of so-called law-and-order functions, the Corps had the power to bulldoze and squash and erase anything they liked. Their addiction to making a buck was becoming toxic for her: it was poisoning, I quote, her soul.
"The cryptics helped her put together a cover story that allowed her to vanish without inspiring any trackers: she'd had an unfortunate stroke, with instant shipment to CryoJeenyus in a Frasket, and presto, there she was on top of a pleebland tenement building, dressed in a cloth bag and mixing potions."
"And growing mushrooms, and teaching me about maggots, and keeping bees. She was very good at it," says Toby a little ruefully. "Convincing. She had me talking to the bees. I was the one who told them when she died."
"Yeah. I remember all of that. But she wasn't bullshitting," said Zeb. "She believed the whole sackful, in a way. That's why she was willing to run the risks she did at HelthWyzer. Remember what happened to Glenn's dad? She could have gone off an overpass, like him. If they'd caught her; especially if they'd caught her with that white bishop and the three pills."
"She held on to those?" says Toby. "I thought she was going to have them analyzed. After Adam gave them to her."
"She decided it was too dangerous," says Zeb. "For anyone to open them up and maybe let out whatever was inside them. They didn't know how to get rid of them. So that bishop stayed right inside HelthWyzer Central as long as she was there. She brought it out with her when she left, and slipped those pills into her own white bishop, in the set she hand-carved. We played with that set of hers, you and me, that time I was recovering. From getting sliced up on one of those pleeb missions I was running for Adam."
Toby has an image of it: Zeb in the shade, on a hazy afternoon. His arm. Her own hand, moving the white bishop, the death-carrier. Unknown to her then, like so much.
"You always played Black," she says. "What happened to that bishop when Pilar died?"
"She willed her set to Glenn, along with a sealed letter. She'd taught him to play chess, back at HelthWyzer West, when he was little. But by the time she died, his mother had married the guy she'd been fooling around with - so-called Uncle Pete - and they'd been upgraded to HelthWyzer Central. Pilar kept in touch with Glenn through the cryptics, and Glenn was the one who arranged the cancer tests for her, found out she was terminal."
"What was in the letter?"
"It was sealed. How to open the bishop, is my guess. I would have filched it, but Adam had firm control of it."
"So Adam just handed that stuff over, the chess set with the pills inside? To Glenn - to Crake? He was only a teenager."
"Pilar said he was mature for his age, and Adam felt Pilar's deathbed wishes should be respected."
"What about you? It was before I became an Eve, but you were on the council then. They discussed important decisions like that. You must have had an opinion. You were an Adam - Adam Seven."
"The others agreed with Adam One. I thought it was a bad idea. What if the kid tried those things out on someone without knowing exactly what they'd do, the way I had?"
"He must have, later," says Toby. "With some additions of his own. That must've been the core of the BlyssPluss pills: what you got after you'd experienced the bliss."
"Yeah," says Zeb. "I think you're right."
"Do you think Pilar knew what use he'd make of those microbes or viruses or whatever they were?" she asks. "Eventually?" She remembers Pilar's wrinkled little face, her kindness, her serenity, her strength. But underneath, there had always been a hard resolve. You wouldn't call it meanness or evil. Fatalism, perhaps.
"Let's put it this way," says Zeb. "All the real Gardeners believed the human race was overdue for a population crash. It would happen anyway, and maybe sooner was better."
"But you weren't a real Gardener."
"Pilar thought I was, because of my Vigil. Part of the deal with Adam One was that I had to take on a title, that Adam Seven thing: he said it would confer the needed authority, as he put it. Status en
hancer. To become one of those, you had to undergo a Vigil. See what was going on with your spirit animal."
"I did that," said Toby. "Talking tomato plants, in-depth stars."
"Yeah, all of that. I don't know what old Pilar mixed into the enhancer, but it was potent."
"What did you see?"
A pause. "The bear. The one I killed and ate, when I was walking out of the Barrens."
"Did it have a message for you?" says Toby. Her own spirit animal had been enigmatic.
"Not exactly. But it gave me to understand that it was living on in me. It wasn't even pissed with me. It seemed quite friendly. Amazing what happens when you fuck with your own neurons."
Once he was Adam Seven, Zeb could install himself and Lucerne and little Ren as bona fide members of the God's Gardeners. They didn't meld very well. Ren was homesick for the Compound and her father, and Lucerne had too great an interest in nail polish to make it as a female Gardener. Her investment in vegetable preparation was nil, and she hated the required outfits - the dark, baggy dresses, the bib aprons. Zeb ought to have known she wasn't going to stick with this arrangement, over time.
Zeb himself had no affinity for slug and snail relocation or soap-making or kitchen cleanup, so he and Adam came to an understanding about what his duties would be. He taught the kids survival skills, and Urban Bloodshed Limitation, which was street fighting viewed from a loftier perspective. As the Gardeners gathered members and expanded, and set up branch locations in different cities, he ran courier among the different groups. The Gardeners refused to use cellphones or technology of any kind; apart, that is, from the one secret souped-up computer that Zeb kept at his own disposal, and fitted out with spyware so he could snoop on the CorpSeCorps, and firewalled up the yin-yang.
Running courier for Adam had its advantages - he was away from home, so he didn't have to listen to Lucerne's complaints. But it also had its disadvantages - he was away from home, which gave Lucerne more to complain about. She liked to nag on about his commitment issues: why, for instance, had he never asked her to go through the God's Gardeners Partnership ceremony with him?
"Where you jumped over a bonfire together and then traded green branches while everyone stood in a circle, and then they had some kind of pious banquet," says Zeb. "She really wanted me to do that with her. I said as far as I was concerned it was a meaningless empty symbol. Then she'd accuse me of humiliating her."
"If it was meaningless, why didn't you do it?" says Toby. "It might have satisfied her. Made her happier."
"Fat chance," says Zeb. "I just didn't want to. I hated being pushed."
"She was right, you had commitment issues," says Toby.
"Guess so. Anyway, she dumped me. Went back to the Compounds, took Ren with her. And then I wanted the Gardeners to get more activist, and everything unravelled."
"I wasn't there any more, by that time," says Toby. "Blanco got out of Painball and went after me. I was a liability to the Gardeners. You helped me change my identity."
"Years of practice." He sighs. "After you left, things got severe. The God's Gardeners was getting too big and successful for the CorpSeCorps. To them, it looked like a resistance movement in the making.
"Adam was using the Garden as a safe house for escapees from the BioCorps, and they were beginning to figure that out; so the CorpSemen were paying the pleebmobs to attack us. Being a pacifist, Adam One couldn't bring himself to weaponize the Garden. I could've helped him turn a toy potato gun into an effective short-range shrapnel thrower, but he wouldn't hear of it. It was too unsaintly for him."
"You're making fun," says Toby.
"Just describing. No matter what was at stake, he couldn't go on the offensive, not directly. Remember, he was the firstborn; the Rev got hold of him early, before either of us figured out what a fraud the murderous old bugger actually was. What stuck with Adam was that he had to be good. Gooder than good, so God would love him. Guess he was going to do the Rev thing himself, but do it right - everything the Rev had pretended to be, he would be in reality. It was a tall order."
"But none of that stuck with you."
"Not so I noticed. I was the devil-kid, remember? That let me off the goodness hook. Adam depended on that: he never would have turned the Rev into a raspberry soda with his own two hands. He just put me in the way of it. Even so, he had some guilt issues: the Rev was his father, like it or not, and honour your parents, etcetera, even if one of them had buried the other one in the rock garden. He felt he should be forgiving. He beat himself up a lot, Adam did. It was worse after he lost Katrina WooWoo."
"She went off with someone else?"
"Nothing so pleasant. The Corps decided to take over the sex trade: it was so lucrative. They bought a few politicians, got it legalized, set up SeksMart, forced everyone in the trade to roll in. Katrina played at first, but then they wanted to institute policies she found unacceptable. 'Institute policies,' that's how they put it. She had scruples, so she became inconvenient. They got rid of the python too."
"Oh," says Toby. "I'm sorry."
"So was I," says Zeb. "Adam was more than sorry. He pined, he dwindled. Something went missing in him. I think he'd had a dream of installing Katrina in the Garden. Not that it would have worked out. Wrong wardrobe preferences."
"That's very sad," says Toby.
"Yeah. It was. I should've been more understanding. Instead, I picked a fight."
"Oh," says Toby. "Only you?"
"Maybe both of us. But it was no holds barred. I said he was just like the Rev, really, only inside out, like a sock: neither one of them gave a shit about anyone else. It was always their way or zero. He said I'd always had criminal tendencies, and that was why I couldn't understand pacifism and inner peace. I said that by doing nothing he was colluding with the powers that were fucking the planet, especially the OilCorps and the Church of PetrOleum. He said I had no faith, and that the Creator would sort the earth out in good time, most likely very soon, and that those who were attuned and had a true love for the Creation would not perish. I said that was a selfish view. He said I listened to the whisperings of earthly power and I only wanted attention, the way I always had as a child when I pushed the boundaries." He sighs again.
"Then what?" says Toby.
"Then I got mad. So I said something I wish I'd never said." A pause. Toby waits. "I said he wasn't really my brother, not genetically. He was no relation to me." Another pause. "He didn't believe me at first. I backed it up, I told him about the test Pilar had done. He just crumpled."
"Oh," says Toby. "I'm sorry."
"I felt terrible right away, but I couldn't unsay it. After that we tried to patch it up and paper it over. But things festered. We had to go our own ways."
"Katuro went with you," says Toby. She knows this for a fact. "Rebecca. Black Rhino. Shackleton, Crozier, and Oates."
"Amanda, at first," says Zeb. "She got out, though. Then new ones joined. Ivory Bill, Lotis Blue, White Sedge. All of them."
"And Swift Fox," says Toby.
"Yeah. And her. We thought Glenn - we thought Crake was our inside guy, feeding us stuff from the Corps through the MaddAddam chatroom. But all along, he was setting us up so he could drag us into the Paradice dome to do his people-splicing for him."
"And his plague-virus-mixing?" says Toby.
"Not from what I hear," says Zeb. "He did that on his own."
"To make his perfect world," says Toby.
"Not perfect," says Zeb. "He wouldn't claim that. More like a reboot. And he succeeded in his own way. Up to now."
"He didn't anticipate the Painballers," says Toby.
"He should have. Or something like them," says Zeb.
It's very quiet, down there in the forest. A Craker child is singing a little in its sleep. Around the swimming pool the Pigoons are dreaming, emitting small grunts like puffs of smoke. Far away something cries: a bobkitten?
There's a faint cool breeze; the leaves go about their business, which is rustling; the m
oon travels through the sky, moving towards its next phase, marking time.
"You should get some sleep," says Zeb.
"Both of us should," says Toby. "We'll need our energy."
"I'll spell you - two on, two off. Wish I was twenty years younger," says Zeb. "Not that those Painball guys are in great shape, you'd think. God knows what they've been eating."
"The Pigoons are fit enough," says Toby.
"They can't pull triggers," says Zeb. He pauses. "If we both come out of this tomorrow, maybe we should do the bonfire thing. With the green branches."
Toby laughs. "I thought you said it was a meaningless empty symbol."
"Even a meaningless empty symbol can mean something sometimes," says Zeb. "You rejecting me?"
"No," says Toby. "How could you even think it?"
"I fear the worst," says Zeb.
"Would that be the worst? Me rejecting you?"
"Don't push a guy when he's feeling skinless."
"I just have trouble believing you're serious," says Toby.
Zeb sighs. "Get some sleep, babe. We'll work it out later. Tomorrow's on the way."
Eggshell
Muster
Peach-coloured haze in the east. Day is breaking, so cool and delicate at first, the sun not yet a hot spotlight. The crows are abroad, signalling to one another. Caw! Cawcaw! Caw! What are they saying? Look out! Look out! Or maybe: Party time soon! Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.
Dump the morbid soliloquies, Toby tells herself. What's needed is a positive outlook. That was what trumpet fanfares were for, and drums, and march music. We are invincible, that music told the soldiers. They had to believe in them, those lying melodies, because who can walk intrepidly towards death without? The bear-shirted berserkers were said to have doped themselves up before battle with northern hallucinogenic fungus: Amanita muscaria, perhaps, or so said Pilar, at the Gardeners. Historical Mushroom Practices, for senior students only.