"Where's Amanda?" he says.
"She's not dead," I say too quickly. "I just know she isn't." He and Toby trade a look over my head, as if they don't want to tell me my pet bunny got run over. "What about Shackleton?" I say, and Croze says, "He's okay. Let's go back to the place."
"What place?" says Toby, and he says, "The cobb house. Where we used to have the Tree of Life Exchange. Remember?" he says to me. "It's not too far."
The sheep are heading that way anyway. They seem to know where they're going. We follow along behind them.
The sun's so hot by now that it's boiling inside our top-to-toes. Croze has part of his bedsheet draped over his head; he looks a lot cooler than me.
It's noon when we reach the old Tree of Life parkette. The plastic swings are gone, but the cobb house is the same -- even the spraypainted pleeb tags are there -- except they've been building onto it. There's a fence made of poles and planks and wire and a lot of duct tape. Croze opens the gate, and the sheep go in and file towards a pen in the yard.
"I got the sheep," Croze calls, and a man with a spraygun comes out through the house door, and then two more men. Then four women -- two young, one a bit older, and an older one, maybe as old as Toby. Their clothes aren't Gardener clothes, but they aren't new and they aren't pretty. Two of the men are wearing bedsheets, the third has cut-offs and a shirt. The women have long cover-ups, like top-to-toes.
They stare at us. Not friendly: anxious. Croze says our names. "You sure they're not infected?" says the first man, the one with the spraygun.
"No way," says Croze. "They were isolated the whole time." He looks at us for confirmation, and Toby nods. "Friends of Zeb," Croze adds. "Toby and Ren." Then he tells us, "This is MaddAddam."
"What's left of us," says the shortest man. He says their names: his is Beluga, and the other three are Ivory Bill, Manatee, and Zunzuncito. The women are Lotis Blue, Swift Fox, White Sedge, and Tamaraw. We don't shake hands: they're still nervous about us and our germs.
"MaddAddam," says Toby. "Good to meet you. I followed some of your work online."
"How'd you get in?" Ivory Bill says to Toby. "To the playroom?" He's eyeing her antique rifle as if it's made of gold.
"I was Inaccessible Rail," says Toby.
They look at one another. "You," says Lotis Blue. "You were Inaccessible! The secret lady!" She laughs. "Zeb would never tell us who you were. We thought you were some hot bimbo he had." Toby gives her a thin little smile.
"He said you were solid, though," says Tamaraw. "He insisted on that."
"Zeb?" says Toby, as if she's talking to herself. I know she wants to ask if he's still alive, but she's afraid to.
"MaddAddam was a great caper," says Beluga. "Until we got snatched."
"So-called drafted by fucking ReJoov," says White Sedge, the youngest woman. "Crake, that little bastard." She's brown-skinned but she has kind of an English accent, so it comes out bahstahd. They're a lot friendlier now that Toby's told them she was really somebody else.
I'm confused. I look up at Croze, and he says, "It was that thing we were doing, the bioresistance thing. Why they put us in Painball. These are the scientists they scooped. Remember I told you? At Scales?"
"Oh," I say. But I'm still not clear. Why did ReJoov scoop them? Was it a brain kidnapping, like what happened to my father?
"We had visitors," Ivory Bill says to Croze. "After you went for the sheep. Two guys, with a woman and a spraygun and a dead rakunk."
"Really," says Croze. "That's major."
"Said they were Painball, like we should respect that," says Beluga. "They wanted to trade the woman for spraygun cells and Mo'Hair meat -- the woman and the rakunk."
"I bet it was them got our purple Mo'Hair," says Croze. "Toby found the legs."
"Rakunk! Why would we trade for that?" says White Sedge indignantly. "We're not stahving!"
"We should've shot them," says Manatee. "But they were holding the woman in front."
"What was she wearing?" I say, but they ignore me.
"We said no trade," says Ivory Bill. "Tough for the girl. But they're desperate for cells, which means they're running out. So we'll deal with them later."
"It's Amanda," I say. They could have saved her. Though I don't blame them for not trading: you can't give spraycells to guys who'll use them to kill you. "What about Amanda?" I say. "Shouldn't we go and get her?"
"Yeah -- we need to get everyone together now that the Flood's over," says Croze. "Like we've said." He's backing me up.
"Then we can, you know, rebuild the human race," I say. I know it sounds stupid, but it's the only thing I can think of. "Amanda could really help us -- she's so good at everything." But they just smile at me sadly as if they know it's hopeless.
Croze takes my hand and walks me away from them. "You mean that?" he says. "About the human race?" He smiles. "You'll have to have babies."
"Maybe not just yet," I say.
"Come on," he says. "I'll show you the garden."
They have a cookhouse, and some violet porta-biolets over in one corner, and some solar they're fixing up. There's no shortage of parts for just about everything back in the pleebs, though you have to look out for falling buildings.
Their vegetable garden is in behind: they don't have a lot of stuff planted yet. "We get pig attacks," he says. "They dig under the fence. We shot one of them, so maybe the others got the point. Zeb says they're superpigs, because they're spliced with human brain tissue."
"Zeb?" I say. "Is Zeb alive?" I feel dizzy all of a sudden. All of these dead people, coming alive again -- it's overwhelming.
"Sure," says Croze. "Are you all right?" He puts his arm around me, to keep me from falling down.
72
TOBY. SAINT RACHEL AND ALL BIRDS
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
Ren and Crozier have wandered off behind the cobb house. No harm, thinks Toby. Young love, no doubt. She's telling Ivory Bill about the third man -- the dead one. Blanco. He listens carefully. "Plague?" he asks. An infected bullet wound, she says. She doesn't add the Poppy and the Death Angels.
While they're talking, another woman comes around from behind the house. "Hey, Toby," she says. It's Rebecca. Older, less plump, but still Rebecca. Solid. She takes hold of Toby's shoulders. "You're too thin, sweetheart," she says. "Never mind. We've got bacon. Fatten you up for sure."
Bacon is not a concept that Toby can grasp right now. "Rebecca," she says. She wants to add, "Why are you alive?" but this is -- increasingly -- a meaningless question. Why are any of them alive? So she merely says, "Wonderful."
"Zeb said you'd make it. He always said that. Hey. Gimme a smile!"
Toby doesn't like the past tense. It has a deathbed smell. "When did he say it?" she asks.
"Heck, he says it most days. Now come on in the kitchen, eat something. Tell me where you've been."
Zeb's alive then, thinks Toby. Now that it's true she feels she's always known it. She also doubts it -- it won't really be true until she sees him. Touches him.
They have coffee -- dandelion roots, roasted, Rebecca says proudly -- and some baked burdock root with herbs, and a slice of -- could it be cold pork? "Those pigs are a nuisance," says Rebecca. "Too smart by half." She eyes Toby challengingly. "Needs must when the devil drives," she says. "Anyways, at least we know what's in it -- not like at SecretBurgers."
"It's delicious," Toby says truthfully.
After their snack, Toby hands over the three remaining Mo'Hair legs, not that fresh but Rebecca says they'll be fine for stock. Then they plunge right into history. Toby runs through her time in the AnooYoo Spa, and tells about the arrival of Ren; Rebecca describes her fake identity selling life insurance in gated communities out west while planting MaddAddam's inventive bioforms, and how she got the last bullet train east -- a risk, lot of folks coughing but she wore a nose cone and gloves -- and then holed up in the Wellness Clinic, along with Zeb and Katuro. "In our old meeting room, remember?" she says. "Our Ararat supplies were
still there."
"And Katuro?" says Toby.
"Doing fine. Had a germ of some kind, but not the bad one; he's over it now. He's off with Zeb and Shackleton, and Black Rhino. They're looking for Adam One and the rest of them. Zeb says if anyone could get through, they could."
"Really? There's a chance?" says Toby. Did he look for me? she wants to ask. Probably not. He'd have thought she'd do fine on her own. And she had, hadn't she?
"We've been listening on the windup shortwave, 24/7, and sending too. Couple of days ago we finally got an answer," says Rebecca.
"It was him?" Toby's prepared to believe anything now. "Adam One?"
"We just heard the one voice. All it said was, 'I'm here, I'm here.'"
"Let's hope," says Toby. And she does hope; or she tries to.
There's the barking of dogs outside, and a confusion of shouting. "Shit. Dog attack," says Rebecca. "Bring that gun."
The MaddAddams with sprayguns are already at the fence. Big dogs and small ones, maybe fifteen, bounding towards them wagging their tails. The spraygunners begin shooting. Before Toby can fire, seven of the dogs are dead and the rest have run away.
"Watson-Crick splices," says Ivory Bill. "They're not really dogs, they only look like it. They'll tear out your throat. Used them in prison moats and such -- you couldn't hack them, not like an alarm system code -- but they got loose during the Flood."
"Are they breeding?" says Toby. Will they have to fight off wave after wave of these non-dogs, or are they few in number?
"Lord knows," says Ivory Bill.
Lotis Blue and White Sedge go out to make sure the dogs are dead. Then Tamaraw and Swift Fox and Rebecca and Toby join them, and they skin and butcher, with the spraygunners standing guard in case the other dogs come back. Toby's hands remember how to do this from long ago. The smell is the same too. A childhood smell.
The dog skins are laid aside, the meat's cut up and put into a pot. Toby feels a little sick. But she also feels hungry.
73
REN. SAINT RACHEL AND ALL BIRDS
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
I ask Croze if I should be helping to skin the dogs, but Croze says there's enough people doing it and I look tired, so why don't I lie down on his bed, inside the cobb house? The room is cool and smells the cobb-house way I remember, so I feel safe. Croze's bed is just a platform, but it has a silver Mo'Hair fleece on it with a sheet, and Croze says, Sleep tight and then goes away, and I take off my AnooYoo top and pants because it's getting too hot, and the Mo'Hair is soft and silky, and I go to sleep.
When the afternoon thunderstorm wakes me up, Croze is curled around behind me, and I can tell he's worried and sad; so I turn around and then we're hugging each other, and he wants to have sex. But all of a sudden I don't want to have sex without loving the person, and I haven't really loved anybody in that way since Jimmy; certainly not at Scales, where it was just acting, with other people's kinky scripts.
Also there's a dark place in me, like ink spilled into my brain -- I can't think about sex, in that place. It has brambles in it, and something about Amanda, and I don't want to be there. So I say, "Not yet." And even though Croze used to be kind of crude he seems to understand, so we just hold on to each other and talk.
He's full of plans. They'll build this, they'll build that; they'll get rid of the pigs, or else tame them. After the two Painballers are dead -- he personally will take care of that -- he'll take me, and Amanda and Shackie too, and we'll all go down to the beach and do some fishing. As for the MaddAddam group -- Bill and Sedge and Tamaraw and Rhino, all them -- they're really smart, so they'll have the communications going in no time.
"Who are we going to communicate with?" I ask, and Croze says there must be others out there. Then he tells me about the MaddAddams -- how they were working with Zeb, but then the CorpSeCorps tracked them down through a MaddAddam codenamed Crake, and they ended up as brain slaves in a place called the Paradice Project dome. It was a choice between that and being spraygunned, so they took the jobs. Then when the Flood came and the guards vanished, they deactivated the security and walked out, but that wasn't too hard for them because they're all brainiacs.
He's told me some of this before, but he hasn't said Paradice Project or Crake. "Just a minute," I say. "That's what they were working on inside the dome? Immortality?"
Yes, Croze says: they were all helping Crake with his big experiment: some kind of perfectly beautiful human gene splice that could live forever. They were the ones who'd done the heavy lifting on the BlyssPluss pill too, but they weren't allowed to take it themselves. Not that they were tempted: it gave you the best sex ever, but it had serious side effects, such as death.
"That's how the pandemic plague got started," Croze says. "They said Crake ordered them to put it in the supersex pill." I felt lucky all over again that I'd been in the Sticky Zone because I might've gulped down the BlyssPluss pill secretly even though Mordis said no drugs for Scalies. It sounded so great, like a whole other reality.
"Who'd do a thing like that?" I say. "A poison sex pill?" It was Glenn, it must have been. That's the sort of stuff he was telling the ReJoov Mr. Bigs, at Scales. He didn't tell about the poison part, of course. I remembered those nicknames, Oryx and Crake. I'd thought it was just sex talk, with Glenn and his main plank: a lot of people used animal names at such times. Panther and Tiger and Wolverine, Pussycat and Doggie-wog. So, not sex talk: codenames. Or maybe both.
For one split second I think about saying all this to Croze -- how I know quite a lot about this Crake from a former life. But then I'd have to tell about what I used to do at Scales -- not just the trapeze dancing or even Glenn making us purr and sing like birds, but the other things, the feather-ceiling room things. Croze wouldn't want to hear about that: guys hate to picture other guys doing sex things with you that they want to do themselves.
So instead I ask, "What about the splice people? The perfect ones? Did they actually make them?" Glenn always wanted everything to be more perfect.
"Yeah, they made them," says Croze, as if it's an everyday thing, making people.
"I guess those people died along with everyone else," I say.
"Nope," says Croze. "They're living down by the shore. They don't need clothes, they eat leaves, they purr like cats. Not my idea of perfect." He laughs. "Perfect is more like you!"
I let that go by. "You're making this up," I say.
"No, I swear," says Croze. "They get these huge -- their dicks turn blue. Then they have group sex with these blue-assed women. It's wicked!"
"It's a joke, right?" I say.
"Seen them myself," says Croze. "We aren't supposed to go near them in case we mess them up. But Zeb says we can look at them from a distance, like the zoo. He says they're not dangerous -- it's us that's dangerous to them."
"When can I see them?"
"Once we take care of those Painballers," says Croze. "I'd have to go with you, though. There's another guy down there -- sleeps in a tree, talks to himself, crazy as a bag of snakes, no offence to snakes. We leave him alone -- figure he might be infected. I wouldn't want him bothering you."
"Thanks," I say. "This Crake, in the Paradice Project dome. What did he look like?"
"Never saw him," says Croze. "Nobody said."
"Did he have a friend?" I asked. "Inside the dome thing?" When Glenn brought Jimmy to Scales that time, they were definitely into something together.
"Rhino says he wasn't much on friends. But he did have some pal of his in there, plus his girlfriend -- the two of them were supposed to be planning the marketing. Rhino says the guy was a waste of time. Told a lot of stupid jokes, drank too much."
That would be Jimmy all right, I thought. "Did he make it out?" I say. "Out of the dome? With the blue people?"
"How would I know? Anyway, who gives a shit?" says Croze.
I do. I don't want Jimmy to be dead. "That's kind of harsh," I say.
"Hey, be cool," says Croze. He puts his arm around me, lets his h
and fall onto my breast, as if by accident. I take it off. "Okay," he says in a disappointed voice. He kisses my ear.
The next thing I know Croze is waking me up. "They're back," he says. He hurries out and I put my clothes on, and when I go outside Zeb is there in the yard, and Toby's got her arms around him. Katuro's there; and the man they call Black Rhino, who's even kind of black. Shackie's there too, grinning over at me. He hasn't heard yet about the two Painballers and Amanda. Croze will have to tell him. If I do he'll ask me questions, and I only have bad answers.
I go slowly over to Zeb -- I'm feeling shy -- and Toby lets go of him. She's smiling -- not a thin smile, a real one -- and I think, She can still be pretty sometimes. "Little Ren. You grew up," Zeb says to me. He's greyer than the last time I saw him. He smiles, and squeezes my shoulder briefly. I remember him singing in our shower, back at the Gardeners; I remember the times he was nice to me. I'd like him to be proud of me for making it through, even though that part was mostly luck. I'd like him to be more surprised and happy that I'm alive. But he must have a lot on his mind.
Zeb and Shackie and Black Rhino have sprayguns and packsacks, and now they start opening up the packsacks and taking things out. Tins of soydines, a couple of bottles -- looks like booze -- a handful of Joltbars. Three cellpacks, for the sprayguns.
"From Compounds," Katuro says. "Gates open on a lot of them. Looters have been through."
"CryoJeenyus was locked up tight," says Zeb. "Guess they thought they could tough it out inside."
"Them and all the frozen heads they had in there," says Shackie.
"I doubt anyone got out," says Black Rhino. I'm sorry to hear that, because Lucerne must have been inside that Compound, and despite how she acted later, she was my mother once, and I used to love her. I look over at Zeb, because maybe he did too.
"You find Adam One?" says Ivory Bill.
Zeb shakes his head. "We looked in the Buenavista," Zeb says. "They must've been there for some time -- them, or someone. There were all the signs. Then we tried a few more Ararats, but nothing. They must have moved on."