The MaddAddam Trilogy (102 page)

No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die.

Because you are not a fish.

No, the bear was not a fish either. And it died in a bear way. Not in a fish way. So it was not cooked on a fire.

Yes, maybe Zeb said Thank You to Oryx too. As well as to the bear.

Because Oryx let Zeb eat one of her Children. Oryx knows that some of her Children eat other ones; that is the way they are made. The ones with sharp teeth. So she knew that Zeb could eat one of her Children too, because he was very hungry.

I don’t know whether Zeb said Thank You to Crake. Maybe you could ask Zeb that, the next time you see him. Anyway, Crake is not in charge of bears. Oryx is in charge of bears.

Zeb put on the bear’s fur to keep warm.

Because he was very cold. Because it was colder there. Because of the mountains all around, with snow on the top.

Snow
is water that is frozen into little pieces called snowflakes.
Frozen
is when water becomes hard like rock.

No, snowflakes have nothing to do with Snowman-the-Jimmy. I don’t know why part of his name is almost the same as a snowflake.

I am doing this thing with my hands on my forehead because I have a headache. A headache is when there is a pain in your head.

Thank you. I am sure purring would help. But it would also help if you would stop asking so many questions.

Yes, I think Amanda must have a headache too. Or some sort of ache. Perhaps you could do some purring for her.

I think that’s enough of the story of Zeb for tonight. Look, the moon is rising. It’s your bedtime.

I know you don’t have beds. But I have a bed. So it is my bedtime now. Good night.

Good night
means that I hope you will sleep well, and wake up safely in the morning, and that nothing bad will happen to you.

Well, such as … I can’t think what sort of bad things might happen to you.

Good night.

Scars

She’s tried to be discreet, sneaking off alone every night after she’s told the Crakers their story, then joining Zeb once out of eyesight. But she’s not fooling anyone, or anyone among the humans.

Naturally, they see it as funny. Or the younger ones do – Swift Fox, Lotis Blue, Croze and Shackie, Zunzuncito. Even Ren, probably. Even Amanda. Romance among the chronologically challenged is giggle fodder. For the youthful, lovelorn and wrinkly don’t blend, or not without farce. There’s a moment past which the luscious and melting becomes the crusty and wizened, the fertile sea becomes the barren sand, and they must feel she’s passed that moment. Brewing herbs, gathering mushrooms, applying maggots, tending bees, removing warts – beldam’s roles. Those are her proper vocations.

As for Zeb, he’s probably less comic to them than puzzling. From their socio-bio vantage point, he should be doing what alpha males do best: jumping the swooning nubiles that are his by right, knocking them up, passing his genes along via females who can actually parturiate, unlike her. So why is he wasting his precious sperm packet? they must wonder. Instead of, for instance, investing it wisely in the ovarian offerings of Swift Fox. Which is almost certainly that girl’s take on things, judging from the body language: the eyelash play, the tit thrusts, the hair-tuft flinging, the armpit display. She might as well be flashing a blue bottom, like the Crakers. Baboons in spate.

Stop that, Toby, she tells herself. This is how it starts, among the closed circles of the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged: jealousy, dissention, a breach in the groupthink walls. Then the entry of the foe, the murderer, the shadow slipping in through the door we
forgot to lock because we were distracted by our darker selves: nursing our minor hatreds, indulging our petty resentments, yelling at one another, tossing the crockery.

Beleaguered groups are prone to such festering: such backbiting, such infighting. At the Gardeners, they’d held Deep Mindfulness sessions about this very subject.

Ever since they’ve been lovers, Toby has been dreaming that Zeb is gone. In real life he is in fact gone while she dreams, as there isn’t enough room for both of them on Toby’s single-bed-sized slab in her broom closet of a room. So in the middle of each night Zeb sneaks off like someone in an ancient English country-house farce, groping in the darkness back to his own cramped cubicle.

But in the dreams he really is gone – gone far away, nobody knows where – and Toby is standing outside the cobb-house fence, looking down the road, now overgrown with kudzu vines and choked with parts of broken houses and smashed-up vehicles. There’s a soft bleating sound, or is it weeping? “He won’t be back,” says a watercolour voice. “He won’t ever be back.”

It’s a woman’s voice: is it Ren, is it Amanda, is it Toby herself? The scenario is sweetly sentimental, like a pastel greeting card – awake, she’d be annoyed by it, but in dreams there is no irony. She cries so much that her clothes are damp with tears, luminous tears that flicker like blue-green gasfire in what is now becoming the darkness, or is she in a cave? But then a large cat-like animal comes to console her. It rubs up against her, purring like the wind.

She wakes to find a small Craker boy in the room with her. He’s lifted the edge of the damp sheet that entwists her and is gently stroking her leg. He smells of oranges, and of something else. Citrus air freshener. They all smell like this, but the young ones more.

“What are you doing?” she asks as calmly as she can. My toenails are so dirty, she thinks. Dirty and jagged. Nail scissors: put them on the gleaning list. Her skin is coarse beside the pristine skin on the
hand of this child. Is he glowing from within, or is his skin so fine-grained it reflects the light?

“Oh Toby, you have legs underneath,” says the boy. “Like us.”

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

“Do you have breasts, Oh Toby?”

“Yes, I have those as well,” she says, smiling.

“Are there two? Two breasts?”

“Yes,” she says, resisting the urge to add, “so far.” Is he expecting one breast, or three, or maybe four or six, like a dog? Has he ever seen a dog up close?

“Will a baby come out from between your legs, Oh Toby? After you turn blue?”

What is he asking? Whether non-Craker people like her can have babies, or whether she herself might have one? “If I were younger, then a baby might come out,” she says. “But not now.” Though her age isn’t the deciding factor. If her whole life had been different. If she hadn’t needed the money. If she’d lived in another universe.

“Oh Toby,” says the Craker boy, “what sickness do you have? Are you hurt?” He puts up his beautiful arms to hug her. Are those tears in his strange green eyes?

“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m not hurt any more.” She’d sold some of her eggs to pay the rent, back in her pleebland days, before the God’s Gardeners had taken her in. There’d been infection: all her future children, precluded. Surely she’d buried that particular sadness many years ago. If not, she ought to bury it. In view of the total situation – the situation of what used to be thought of as the human race – such emotions ought to be dismissed as meaningless.

She’s about to add, “I have scars, inside me,” but she stops herself.
What is a scar, Oh Toby?
That would be the next question. Then she’d have to explain what a scar is.
A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What is writing, Oh Toby? Writing is when you make marks on a piece of paper – on a stone – on a flat surface, like the sand on the beach, and each of the marks means a sound, and the sounds joined together mean a word, and the words joined together mean … How do you make this writing, Oh Toby? You make it with a keyboard,
or no – once you made it with a pen or a pencil, a pencil is a … Or you make it with a stick. Oh Toby, I do not understand. You make a mark with a stick on your skin, you cut your skin open and then it is a scar, and that scar turns into a voice? It speaks, it tells us things? Oh Toby, can we hear what the scar says? Show us how to make these scars that talk!

No, she should stay away from the whole scar business. Otherwise she might inspire the Crakers to start carving themselves up to see if they can let out the voices.

“What’s your name?” she says to the little boy.

“My name is Blackbeard,” says the child gravely. Blackbeard, the notorious murdering pirate? This sweet child? A child who will never have a beard when he grows up because Crake did away with body hair in his new species. A lot of the Crakers have odd names. According to Zeb, Crake named them – Crake, with his warped sense of humour. Though why shouldn’t their names be odd, to go with their general oddity?

“I am very happy to meet you, Oh Blackbeard,” she says.

“Do you eat your droppings, Oh Toby?” says Blackbeard. “As we do? To digest our leaves better?”

What droppings? Edible poo? No one warned her about this! “It is time to go and see your mother, Oh Blackbeard,” says Toby. “She must be worried about you.”

“No, Oh Toby. She knows I am with you. She says you are good and kind.” He smiles, showing perfect little teeth: enchantment. They are all so attractive – like airbrushed cosmetic ads. “You are good like Crake. You are kind like Oryx. Do you have wings, Oh Toby?” He cranes his neck, trying to see behind her. Maybe the earlier hug was only a stealthy way of feeling her back for the feathered stubs that might be sprouting there.

“No,” says Toby. “No wings.”

“I will mate with you when I am bigger,” says Blackbeard. He offers this heroically. “Even if you are … even if you are only a little blue. Then you will have a baby! It will grow in your bone cave! You will be happy!”

Only a little blue. It must mean that he recognizes her comparative age, though
old
is not something the Crakers have a word for. “Thank you, Oh Blackbeard,” says Toby. “Now run along. I have to eat my
breakfast. And I must go and visit Jimmy – I must visit Snowman-the-Jimmy, to see if his sickness is better.” She sits up and plants her feet squarely on the floor, a sign for the boy to leave.

Though not a sign he understands. “What is
breakfast
, Oh Toby?” he says. She forgot: these people don’t have meals as such. They graze, like herbivores.

He eyes her binoculars, pokes her stack of bedsheets. Now he’s stroking her rifle, where it stands in the corner. It’s something a normal human child might do: idle fiddling, curious handling. “Is this your breakfast?”

“Don’t touch that,” she says a little sharply. “That is not breakfast, that is a special thing for … Breakfast is what we eat in the morning – the people like me, with extra skins.”

“Is it a fish?” says the boy. “This breakfast?”

“Sometimes,” says Toby. “But for breakfast today, I will eat part of an animal. An animal with fur. Perhaps I will eat its leg. There will be a smelly bone inside. You wouldn’t want to see such a smelly bone, would you?” she says. That will surely get rid of him.

“No,” says the child dubiously. He wrinkles his nose. He seems intrigued, however: who wouldn’t want to peek from behind the curtain at the trolls’ revolting feasts?

“Then you should go away,” says Toby.

Still he lingers. “Snowman-the-Jimmy says the bad people in the chaos ate the Children of Oryx,” he says. “They killed them and killed them, and ate them and ate them. They were always eating them.”

“Yes, they were,” says Toby, “but they were eating them in the wrong way.”

“Were the two bad men eating them in the wrong way too? The ones who ran away?”

“Yes,” says Toby. “They were.”

“How are you eating them, Oh Toby? The legs of the Children?” His huge eyes are fixed on her as if she’s about to sprout fangs and pounce on him.

“The right way,” she says, hoping he won’t ask what the right way is.

“I saw a smelly bone. It was behind the kitchen. Is it breakfast? Do the bad men eat such bones?” says Blackbeard.

“Yes,” says Toby. “But they do other bad things too. Many bad
things. Much worse things. We must all be very careful, and not go into the forest by ourselves. If you see those bad men or anyone like them, you must come and tell me right away. Or tell Crozier, or Rebecca, or Ren, or Ivory Bill. Any of us.” She’s gone over this point several times with all of the Crakers, the adults too, but she’s not sure they’ve taken it in. They gaze at her and nod, chewing slowly as if thinking, but they don’t seem frightened. It’s worrying, their lack of fear.

“Not Snowman-the-Jimmy or Amanda,” the boy says. “We can’t tell them. Because they are sick.” At least he’s grasped that much. He pauses as if considering. “But Zeb will make the bad men go away. Then everything will be safe.”

“Yes,” says Toby. “Then everything will be safe.” Already the Crakers have constructed a formidable set of beliefs about Zeb. Soon he’ll be all-potent and able to fix every ill; and that could be troublesome, because of course he can’t. Not even for me, thinks Toby.

But the name of Zeb is reassuring to Blackbeard. He smiles again, lifts his hand, gives a little wave, like a president of old, like a queen in a cavalcade, like a movie star. Where has he picked up that gesture? Now he’s sidling backwards through the doorway. He doesn’t take his eyes off Toby until he’s around the corner.