The MaddAddam Trilogy (19 page)

He finds the caecotrophs revolting, consisting as they do of semi-digested herbage, discharged through the anus and re-swallowed two or three times a week. This had been another
boy-genius concept on the part of Crake. He’d used the vermiform appendix as the base on which to construct the necessary organ, reasoning that at an earlier evolutionary stage, when the ancestral diet had been higher in roughage, the appendix must have fulfilled some such function. But he’d stolen the specific idea from the
Leporidae
, the hares and rabbits, which depend on caecotrophs rather than on several stomachs like the ruminants. Maybe this is why bobkittens have started hunting the young Crakers, Snowman thinks: beneath the citrus overlay, they can smell the rabbity aroma of the caecotrophs.

Jimmy had argued with Crake over this feature. However you look at it, he’d said, what it boiled down to was eating your own shit. But Crake had merely smiled. For animals with a diet consisting largely of unrefined plant materials, he’d pointed out, such a mechanism was necessary to break down the cellulose, and without it the people would die. Also, as in the
Leporidae
, the caecotrophs were enriched with Vitamin B1, and with other vitamins and minerals as well, at four or five times the level of ordinary waste material. Caecotrophs were simply a part of alimentation and digestion, a way of making maximum use of the nutrients at hand. Any objections to the process were purely aesthetic.

That was the point, Jimmy had said.

Crake had said that if so it was a bad one.

Snowman is now surrounded by an attentive circle. “Greetings, Children of Crake,” he says. “I have come to tell you that I’m going on a journey.” The adults must have deduced this already, from his long stick and the way he’s tied his sheet: he’s gone on journeys before, or that’s what he’s called his looting forays into the trailer parks and adjacent pleeblands.

“Are you going to see Crake?” asks one of the children.

“Yes,” says Snowman. “I’ll try to see him. I’ll see him if he’s there.”

“Why?” says one of the older children.

“There are some things I need to ask him,” says Snowman cautiously.

“You must tell him about the bobkitten,” says Empress Josephine. “The one that bit.”

“That is a matter for Oryx,” says Madame Curie. “Not for Crake.” The other women nod.

“We want to see Crake too,” the children begin. “We too, we too! We want to see Crake too!” It’s one of their favourite ideas, going to see Crake. Snowman blames himself: he shouldn’t have told them such exciting lies at the beginning. He’d made Crake sound like Santa Claus.

“Don’t bother Snowman,” says Eleanor Roosevelt gently. “Surely he is making this journey to help us. We must thank him.”

“Crake is not for children,” says Snowman, looking as stern as he can manage.

“Let us come too! We want to see Crake!”

“Only Snowman can ever see Crake,” Abraham Lincoln says mildly. That seems to settle it.

“This will be a longer journey,” Snowman says. “Longer than the other journeys. Maybe I won’t come back for two days.” He holds up two fingers. “Or three,” he adds. “So you shouldn’t worry. But while I’m away, be sure to stay here in your home, and do everything the way Crake and Oryx have taught you.”

A chorus of yesses, much nodding of heads. Snowman doesn’t mention the possibility of danger to himself. Perhaps it isn’t a thing they ever consider, nor is it a subject he brings up – the more invulnerable they think he is, the better.

“We will come with you,” says Abraham Lincoln. Several of the other men look at him, then nod.

“No!” says Snowman, taken aback. “I mean, you can’t see Crake, it isn’t allowed.” He doesn’t want them tagging along, absolutely not! He doesn’t want them witnessing any weaknesses or failures on his part. Also, some of the sights along the way might be bad for their state of mind. Inevitably they would shower him with questions. In addition to all of which, a day in their company would bore the pants off him.

But you don’t have any pants
, says a voice in his head – a small voice this time, a sad little child’s voice.
Joke! Joke! Don’t kill me!

Please, not now, thinks Snowman. Not in company. In company, he can’t answer back.

“We would come with you to protect you,” says Benjamin Franklin, looking at Snowman’s long stick. “From the bobkittens that bite, from the wolvogs.”

“Your smell is not very strong,” adds Napoleon.

Snowman finds this offensively smug. Also it’s too euphemistic by half: as they all know, his smell is strong enough, it just isn’t the right kind. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “You stay here.”

The men look dubious, but he thinks they’ll do as he says. To reinforce his authority he holds his watch up to his ear. “Crake says he’ll be watching over you,” he says. “To keep you safe.”
Watch, watching over
, says the small child’s voice.
It’s a pun, you cork-nut
.

“Crake watches over us in the daytime, and Oryx watches over us at night,” Abraham Lincoln says dutifully. He doesn’t sound too convinced.

“Crake always watches over us,” says Simone de Beauvoir serenely. She’s a yellow-brown woman who reminds Snowman of Dolores, his long-lost Philippina nanny; he sometimes has to resist the urge to drop to his knees and throw his arms around her waist.

“He takes good care of us,” says Madame Curie. “You must tell him that we are grateful.”

Snowman goes back along the Snowman Fish Path. He feels mushy: nothing breaks him up like the generosity of these people, their willingness to be of help. Also their gratitude towards Crake. It’s so touching, and so misplaced.

“Crake, you dickhead,” he says. He feels like weeping. Then he hears a voice – his own! – saying
boohoo;
he sees it, as if it’s a printed word in a comic-strip balloon. Water leaks down his face.

“Not this again,” he says. What’s the sensation? It isn’t anger exactly; it’s vexation. An old word but serviceable.
Vexation
takes in more than Crake, and indeed why blame Crake alone?

Maybe he’s merely envious. Envious yet again. He too would like to be invisible and adored. He too would like to be elsewhere. No hope for that: he’s up to his neck in the here and now.

He slows to a shamble, then to a halt.
Oh, boohoo!
Why can’t he control himself? On the other hand, why bother, since nobody’s watching? Still, the noise he’s making seems to him like the exaggerated howling of a clown – like misery performed for applause.

Stop snivelling, son
, says his father’s voice.
Pull yourself together. You’re the man around here
.

“Right!” Snowman yells. “What exactly would you suggest? You were such a great example!”

But irony is lost on the trees. He wipes his nose with his stick-free hand and keeps walking.

It’s nine in the morning, sun clock, by the time Snowman leaves the Fish Path to turn inland. As soon as he’s out of the sea breeze the humidity shoots up, and he attracts a coterie of small green biting flies. He’s barefoot – his shoes disintegrated some time ago, and in any case they were too hot and damp – but he doesn’t need them now because the soles of his feet are hard as old rubber. Nevertheless he walks cautiously: there might be broken glass, torn metal. Or there might be snakes, or other things that could give him a nasty bite, and he has no weapon apart from the stick.

At first he’s walking under trees, formerly parkland. Some distance away he hears the barking cough of a bobkitten. That’s the sound they make as a warning: perhaps it’s a male, and it’s met another male bobkitten. There’ll be a fight, with the winner taking all – all the females in the territory – and dispatching their kittens, if he can get away with it, to make room for his own genetic package.

Those things were introduced as a control, once the big green rabbits had become such a prolific and resistant pest. Smaller than bobcats, less aggressive – that was the official story about
the bobkittens. They were supposed to eliminate feral cats, thus improving the almost non-existent songbird population. The bobkittens wouldn’t bother much about birds, as they would lack the lightness and agility necessary to catch them. Thus went the theory.

All of which came true, except that the bobkittens soon got out of control in their turn. Small dogs went missing from backyards, babies from prams; short joggers were mauled. Not in the Compounds, of course, and rarely in the Modules, but there’d been a lot of grousing from the pleeblanders. He should keep a lookout for tracks, and be careful of overhanging branches: he doesn’t like the thought of one of those things landing on his head.

There are always the wolvogs to worry about. But wolvogs are nocturnal hunters: in the heat of the day they tend to sleep, like most things with fur.

Every so often there’s a more open space – the remains of a drive-in campsite, with a picnic table and one of those outdoor-barbecue fireplaces, though nobody used them very much once it got so warm and began to rain every afternoon. He comes upon one now, fungi sprouting from the decaying table, the barbecue covered in bindweed.

Off to the side, from what is probably a glade where the tents and trailers used to be set up, he can hear laughter and singing, and shouts of admiration and encouragement. There must be a mating going on, a rare-enough occasion among the people: Crake had worked out the numbers, and had decreed that once every three years per female was more than enough.

There’ll be the standard quintuplet, four men and the woman in heat. Her condition will be obvious to all from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen – a trick of variable pigmentation filched from the baboons, with a contribution from the expandable chromosphores of the octopus. As Crake used to say,
Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first
.

Since it’s only the blue tissue and the pheromones released by it that stimulate the males, there’s no more unrequited love these days, no more thwarted lust; no more shadow between the desire and the act. Courtship begins at the first whiff, the first faint blush of azure, with the males presenting flowers to the females – just as male penguins present round stones, said Crake, or as the male silverfish presents a sperm packet. At the same time they indulge in musical outbursts, like songbirds. Their penises turn bright blue to match the blue abdomens of the females, and they do a sort of blue-dick dance number, erect members waving to and fro in unison, in time to the foot movements and the singing: a feature suggested to Crake by the sexual semaphoring of crabs. From amongst the floral tributes the female chooses four flowers, and the sexual ardour of the unsuccessful candidates dissipates immediately, with no hard feelings left. Then, when the blue of her abdomen has reached its deepest shade, the female and her quartet find a secluded spot and go at it until the woman becomes pregnant and her blue colouring fades. And that is that.

No more
No means yes
, anyway, thinks Snowman. No more prostitution, no sexual abuse of children, no haggling over the price, no pimps, no sex slaves. No more rape. The five of them will roister for hours, three of the men standing guard and doing the singing and shouting while the fourth one copulates, turn and turn about. Crake has equipped these women with ultra-strong vulvas – extra skin layers, extra muscles – so they can sustain these marathons. It no longer matters who the father of the inevitable child may be, since there’s no more property to inherit, no father-son loyalty required for war. Sex is no longer a mysterious rite, viewed with ambivalence or downright loathing, conducted in the dark and inspiring suicides and murders. Now it’s more like an athletic demonstration, a free-spirited romp.

Maybe Crake was right, thinks Snowman. Under the old dispensation, sexual competition had been relentless and cruel: for every pair of happy lovers there was a dejected onlooker, the one excluded. Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn’t get in there yourself.

That had been the milder form: the single man at the window, drinking himself into oblivion to the mournful strains of the tango. But such things could escalate into violence. Extreme emotions could be lethal.
If I can’t have you nobody will
, and so forth. Death could set in.

“How much misery,” Crake said one lunchtime – this must have been when they were in their early twenties and Crake was already at the Watson-Crick Institute – “how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won’t or can’t love you. As a species we’re pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there’d be no more sexual torment. Better plan – make it cyclical and also inevitable, as in the other mammals. You’d never want someone you couldn’t have.”

“True enough,” Jimmy replied. Or Jim, as he was now insisting, without results: everyone still called him Jimmy. “But think what we’d be giving up.”

“Such as?”

“Courtship behaviour. In your plan we’d just be a bunch of hormone robots.” Jimmy thought he should put things in Crake’s terms, which was why he said
courtship behaviour
. What he meant was the challenge, the excitement, the chase. “There’d be no free choice.”

“There’s courtship behaviour in my plan,” said Crake, “except that it would always succeed. And we’re hormone robots anyway, only we’re faulty ones.”

“Well, what about art?” said Jimmy, a little desperately. He was, after all, a student at the Martha Graham Academy, so he felt some need to defend the art-and-creativity turf.

“What about it?” said Crake, smiling his calm smile.

“All that mismatching you talk about. It’s been an inspiration,
or that’s what they say. Think of all the poetry – think Petrarch, think John Donne, think the
Vita Nuova
, think …”

“Art,” said Crake. “I guess they still do a lot of jabbering about that, over where you are. What is it Byron said? Who’d write if they could do otherwise? Something like that.”