What would the topic be today? Toby wondered. Which fruit Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge? It couldn't have been an apple, considering the state of horticulture at that time. A date? A bergamot? The Council had long been deliberating over that one. Toby had thought of proposing a strawberry, but then, strawberries didn't grow on trees.
As she walked, Toby was conscious, as always, of the others on the street. She could see in front of her and to the sides, despite her sunhat. She made use of pauses in doorways, of reflections in windows to check behind. But she could never shake the feeling that someone was sneaking up on her -- that a hand would descend on her neck, a hand with red and blue veining and a bracelet of baby skulls. Blanco hadn't been seen in the Sewage Lagoon for some time -- still in Painball, said some; no, overseas fighting as a mercenary, said others -- but he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.
There was someone behind her -- she could feel it, like a tingling between her shoulders. She stepped into a doorway, turned to face the sidewalk, then sagged with relief: it was Zeb.
"Hi, babe," he said. "Hot enough?"
He strolled along beside her, singing to himself:
Nobody gives a snot,
Nobody gives a snot,
That is why we're on the fucking spot,
Cause nobody gives a snot!
"Maybe you shouldn't sing," said Toby neutrally. It wasn't good policy to call attention to yourself on a pleeb sidewalk, especially not for Gardeners.
"Can't help it," said Zeb cheerfully. "God's fault. Wove music into the fabric of our being. Hears you better when you sing, so He's listening to this right now. I hope He's enjoying it," he added in a pious, mocking Adam One voice -- a voice he was using a lot, though not when Adam One was around.
Lurking insubordination, thought Toby: he's tired of being the Beta Chimp.
Since becoming an Eve she'd gained much insight into Zeb's status among the Gardeners. Each Gardener Rooftop site and Truffle cell ran its own affairs, but every half-year they'd send delegates to a central convention, which for security reasons was never held in the same abandoned warehouse twice. Zeb was always a delegate: he was well equipped to make it through the more jagged pleebland neighbourhoods and around the CorpSeCorps checkpoints without being mugged, swarmed, spraygunned, or arrested. Maybe that was why he was allowed to stretch the Gardeners' rules the way he did.
Adam One seldom attended the conventions. The journey was hazardous, and the implication was that although Zeb was expendable, Adam One was not. In theory the Gardener fellowship had no overall head, but in practice its leader was Adam One, revered founder and guru. The soft hammer of his word carried a lot of weight at the Gardener conventions, and since he was rarely there to use that hammer himself, Zeb wielded it for him. Which must be a temptation: what if Zeb were to jettison Adam One's decrees and substitute his own? By such methods had regimes been changed and emperors toppled.
"You've had some bad news?" Toby asked Zeb now. The singing was the clue: Zeb was annoyingly upbeat whenever the news was bad.
"In point of fact," said Zeb. "We've lost contact with one of our insiders in Compoundland -- our boy courier. He's gone dark."
Toby had learned about the boy courier once she'd become an Eve. He'd run Pilar's biopsy samples and brought her the fatal diagnosis -- both of them concealed in a jar of honey. But that was all she knew: information was shared among the Adams and Eves, but only as much as was necessary. Pilar's death was years ago: the boy courier couldn't be much of a boy any longer.
"Gone dark?" she said. "How?" Had he had a pigmentation makeover? Surely not that.
"He used to be at HelthWyzer, but now he's graduated from high school and moved over to the Watson-Crick Institute, and he's fallen off our screen. Not that we have that much of a screen, as such," he added.
Toby waited. With Zeb, there was no point in pushing or fishing.
"Between us, right?" he said after a while.
"Of course," said Toby. I'm just an ear, she thought. A doggie-type faithful companion. A well of silence. Nothing more to it. After Lucerne had flown the coop four years ago she'd wondered briefly if there might be more, sometime, between her and Zeb. But nothing had come of that hankering. I'm the wrong body type, she thought. Too muscular. No doubt he likes the jiggle.
"Council doesn't know about this, okay?" said Zeb. "Him going dark will just make them nervous."
"I'll forget I heard it," said Toby.
"His dad was a friend of Pilar's -- she used to be Botanic Splices, at HelthWyzer. I knew them both, at that time. But he got unhappy when he found out they were seeding folks with illnesses via those souped-up supplement pills of theirs -- using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses. Nifty scam, charging top dollar for stuff they caused themselves. Troubled his conscience. So the dad fed us some interesting data. Then he had an accident."
"Accident?" said Toby.
"Went off an overpass at rush hour. Blood gumbo."
"That's a bit graphic," said Toby. "For a vegetarian."
"Sorry about that," said Zeb. "Suicide, was the rumour."
"It wasn't, I take it," said Toby.
"We call it Corpicide. If you're Corp and you do something they don't like, you're dead. It's like you shot yourself."
"I see," said Toby.
"Anyway, back to our young guy. The mother was Diagnostics at HelthWyzer, he'd hacked her lab sign-in code, he could run stuff through the system for us. Genius hacker. The mom's married a top corp guy at HelthWyzer Central and the kid went with her."
"Where Lucerne is," said Toby.
Zeb ignored this. "Burned through their firewalls, cooked up a few onscreen identities, got back in touch. We heard from him for a while, but then nothing."
"Maybe he's lost interest," said Toby. "Or else they caught him."
"Maybe," said Zeb. "But he's a three-dimensional chess player, he likes a challenge. He's nimble. Also he's got no fear."
"How many like that do we have?" Toby asked. "In the Compounds?"
"Nobody that good at hacking," said Zeb. "This guy's one of a kind."
45
They reached the Wellness Clinic and entered the Vinegar Room. Toby moved around behind the three huge barrels, unlocked the bottle shelf, and swung it out so she could open the inner door. She could hear Zeb sucking in his stomach to squeeze past the barrels: he wasn't softly fat, but he was large.
The inner room was almost filled by a table patched together from old floorboards, with a motley collection of chairs. On one wall there was a recent watercolour -- Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera -- done by Nuala in one of her too frequent moments of artistic inspiration. The Saint was shown with the sun behind him, giving him a halo effect. On his face was an ecstatic smile, in his hand was a collecting jar containing several black spots. These were the bees, Toby supposed, or possibly the ants. As was often the case with Nuala's paintings of Saints, one of the arms was longer than the other.
There was a gentle knock, and Adam One slipped through the door. The rest followed in their turn.
Adam One was a different person behind the scenes. Not entirely different -- no less sincere -- but more practical. Also more tactical. "Let us say a silent prayer for the success of our deliberations," he began. The meetings always opened this way. Toby had some difficulty praying in the close confines of the hidden room: she was too aware of stomach rumblings, of the waftings of clandestine odours, of the creaks and shiftings of bodies. But then, she had some difficulty praying anyway.
The silent prayer seemed to be on a timer. As heads lifted and eyes opened, Adam One glanced around the room. "Is that a new picture?" he said. "On the wall?"
Nuala beamed. "It's Saint E.O.," she said. "Wilson. Of Hymenoptera."
"So like him, my dear," said Adam One. "Especially the ... You are blessed with such talent." He coughed slightly. "Now to a pressing practical matter. We have just received a very s
pecial guest, originally from HelthWyzer Central, though she has been, shall we say, travelling. Despite all obstacles, she's brought us a gift of genome codes, for which we owe her, not only temporary asylum, but secure Exfernal placement."
"They're looking for her," said Zeb. "She shouldn't have come back to this country. We'll have to move her out as fast as possible. Through the FenderBender and over to the Street of Dreams, as usual?"
"If it's a clear path," said Adam One. "We can't take unnecessary risks. We can always keep her hidden in this meeting room, if we have to."
The ratio of women to men fleeing the Corporations was roughly three to one. Nuala said it was because women were more ethical, Zeb said it was because they were more squeamish, and Philo said it amounted to the same thing. Such fugitives often brought contraband information with them. Formulae. Long lines of code. Test secrets, proprietary lies. What did the Gardeners do with it all? Toby wondered. Surely they didn't sell it as industrial corp espionage material, though it would fetch a bundle from foreign rivals. As far as she could tell, they just held on to it; though it was possible that Adam One harboured a dream of restoring all the lost Species via their preserved DNA codes, once a more ethical and technically proficient future had replaced the depressing present. They'd cloned the mammoth, so why not all? Was that his vision of the ultimate Ark?
"Our new guest wants to send a message to her son," said Adam One. "She's worried about having left him at what may have been a crucial time in his life. Jimmy is this lad's name. I believe he's now at the Martha Graham Academy."
"A postcard," said Zeb. "We'll say it's from Aunt Monica. Get me the address, I'll relay it through England -- one of our Truffle cellfolk has a trip there next week. The CorpSeCorps will read it, of course. They read all the postcards."
"She wants us to say that his pet rakunk was released into the wilds of Heritage Park, where it is living a free and happy life. Its name is -- ah -- Killer."
"Oh, Christ in a Zeppelin!" said Zeb.
"That language is uncalled for," said Nuala.
"Sorry. But they make it so fucking complicated," said Zeb. "That's the third pet rakunk message this month. Next it'll be gerbils and mice."
"I think it's touching," said Nuala.
"Guess some people anyway practise what they preach," said Rebecca.
Toby was assigned as minder to the new refugee. Her code name was the Hammerhead, because upon leaving HelthWyzer she was said to have taken her husband's computer apart with a home handyman's toolkit to disguise the extent of her data thefts. She was thin and blue-eyed, and far from calm. Like all Corp defectors, she thought she was the only one ever to have taken the momentous and heretical step of defying a Corp; and like all of them, she desperately wanted to be told what a good person she was.
Toby obliged. She said how brave the Hammerhead had been, which was true, and how smart she'd been to take a winding and devious path, and how much they appreciated the information she'd brought them. In reality she hadn't told them anything they didn't already know -- it was that old human-to-pig neocortex transplant material -- but it would have been less than kind to say so. We must cast a wide net, said Adam One, although some of the fish may be small. Also we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.
Toby shrouded the Hammerhead in a dark blue Gardener dress, adding a nose cone to conceal her face. But the woman was nervous and fidgety, and kept asking if she could have a cigarette. Toby said no Gardener smoked -- not tobacco -- so to be caught doing so would blow her cover. Anyway there weren't any cigarettes up on the Rooftop.
The Hammerhead paced the floor and gnawed her fingernails until Toby felt like hitting her. We didn't ask you to come here and put all our necks in a noose over a teaspoonful of stale-dated crap, she wanted to say. In the end she gave the woman some chamomile tea with Poppy in it, just to take her off the airwaves.
46
The next day was Saint Aleksander Zawadzki of Galicia. A minor saint but one of Toby's favourites. He'd lived in turbulent times -- what times in Poland had ever not been turbulent? -- but had followed his own peaceful and slightly dotty pursuits nonetheless, cataloguing the flowers of Galicia, naming its beetles. Rebecca liked him too: she'd put on her apron with the butterfly appliques and made beetle biscuits for the small children's snack time, ornamenting each one with an A and a Z. The children had made up their own little song about him: Alexsander, Alexsander, beetle up your nose! Blow it on your handkerchief, stick it on a rose!
It was midmorning. The Hammerhead was still sleeping off the effects of yesterday's Poppy: Toby had overdone it, but she didn't feel too guilty, and now she had some time for her regular chores. She'd garbed up in her bee veil and gloves and lit the smudge in her bellows: as she'd explained to the bees, she intended to spend the morning extracting the full honeycombs. Before she'd begun the smoking, however, Zeb appeared.
"Crappy news," he said. "Your Painball buddy's out again." Like everyone at the Gardeners, Zeb knew the story of Toby's rescue from Blanco by Adam One and the Buds and Blooms -- it was part of oral history. But he also sensed her fear. Though they'd never discussed it.
Toby felt an ice needle shoot through her. She lifted up her veil. "Really?"
"Older and meaner," said Zeb. "Twisted fuck should have been vulture pellets long ago. He must have friends in high places, though, because he's back managing SecretBurgers, over in the Sewage Lagoon."
"As long as he stays there," said Toby. She tried to make her voice sound strong.
"The bees can wait," said Zeb. He took her arm. "You need to sit down. I'll do a snoop. Maybe he's forgotten all about you."
He took Toby to the kitchen. "Sweetheart, you look beat," said Rebecca. "What's wrong?" Toby told her.
"Oh shit," said Rebecca. "I'll make you some Rescue Tea, you look like you need it. Don't you worry -- that man's karma will kill him one day." But, thought Toby, one day was far too distant.
It was afternoon. Many of the general-membership Gardeners were gathered on the roof. Some were retying the tomatoes and climbing zucchinis that had blown over in the storm, a more violent one than usual. Others sat in the shade, working at their knitting, their knotting, their mending. The Adams and Eves were restless, as they always were when they were harbouring a runaway -- what if the Hammerhead had been followed? Adam One had posted sentinels; he himself was standing over by the roof's edge in one-legged meditation pose, keeping an eye on the street below.
The Hammerhead had woken up, and Toby had set her to work picking snails off the lettuces; she'd told the rank-and-file Gardeners this was a new convert, and shy. They'd seen so many new converts come and go.
"If we have a visit," Toby said to the Hammerhead, "anything like an inspection, pull your sunhat down and go on with the snails. Act like background." She herself was smoking the bees, on the theory that it was best to carry on as usual.
Then Shackleton and Crozier and young Oates came pounding up the fire-escape stairs, followed by Amanda, then Zeb. They headed straight over to Adam One. He motioned to Toby with his chin: join us.
"There's been a scuffle in the Sewage Lagoon," said Zeb after they'd grouped around Adam One.
"Scuffle?" said Adam One.
"We were just looking," said Shackleton. "But he saw us."
"He called us fucking meat-stealers," said Crozier. "He was drunk."
"Not drunk: wasted," said Amanda with authority. "He tried to hit me, but I did a satsuma." Toby smiled a little: it was a mistake to underestimate Amanda. She was a tall sinewy Amazon by now, and she'd been studying Urban Bloodshed Limitation with Zeb. As had her two devoted henchmen. There were three if you counted Oates, though he was merely at the hopeless crush level.
"Who is 'he'?" said Adam One. "Where was this?"
"SecretBurgers," said Zeb. "We were checking it out -- we heard Blanco was back."
"Zeb pulled an unagi on him," said Shackleton. "It was
neat!"
"Did you have to actually go there?" said Adam One, a little peevishly. "We have other ways of ..."
"Then the Asian Fusions swarmed him," said Oates excitedly. "They had bottles!"
"He pulled a killer knife," said Croze. "He notched a couple."
"I hope there was no lasting damage," said Adam One. "Much as we deplore the very existence of SecretBurgers, and the depredations of this -- this unlucky individual, we want no violence."
"Booth overturned, meat thrown around. All he suffered was cuts and bruises," said Zeb.
"That is unfortunate," said Adam One. "It's true that we sometimes have to defend ourselves, and we've had trouble with this -- with him before. But on this occasion, do I have the impression that we attacked first?" He frowned at Zeb. "Or provoked an attack? Is this correct?"
"Asshole had it coming," said Zeb. "We should be getting medals."
"Our way is the way of peace," said Adam One, frowning even more.
"Peace goes only so far," said Zeb. "There's at least a hundred new extinct species since this time last month. They got fucking eaten! We can't just sit here and watch the lights blink out. Have to begin somewhere. Today SecretBurgers, tomorrow that fucking gourmet restaurant chain. Rarity. That needs to go."
"Our role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness," said Adam One. "And to guard the memories and the genomes of the departed. You can't fight blood with blood. I thought we'd agreed on that."
There was a silence. Shackleton and Crozier and Oates and Amanda were staring at Zeb. Zeb and Adam One were staring at each other.
"Anyway, it's too late now," said Zeb. "Blanco's raging."
"Will he cross pleebmob boundaries?" said Toby. "Raid us here, in the Sinkhole?"
"Mood he's in, no question," said Zeb. "Ordinary mob guys don't scare him any more. He's multiple-session Painball."
Zeb warned the assembled Gardeners, posted a line of watchers around the roof, and stationed the strongest gatekeepers at the bottom of the fire-escape stairs. Adam One protested, saying that to act like one's enemies was to descend to their level. Zeb said that if Adam One wanted to handle defence matters in some other way he was free to do so, but if not he should keep his nose out of it.