The MaddAddam Trilogy (21 page)

They probably would have gone back to interactives and state-sponsored snuff, and porn, as relaxation after their final exams, but that was the summer the gen-mod coffee wars got underway, so they watched those instead. The wars were over the new Happicuppa bean, developed by a HelthWyzer subsidiary. Until then the individual coffee beans on each bush had ripened
at different times and had needed to be handpicked and processed and shipped in small quantities, but the Happicuppa coffee bush was designed so that all of its beans would ripen simultaneously, and coffee could be grown on huge plantations and harvested with machines. This threw the small growers out of business and reduced both them and their labourers to starvation-level poverty.

The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafés were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army. Or by the armies, various armies; a number of countries were involved. But the soldiers and dead peasants all looked much the same wherever they were. They looked dusty. It was amazing how much dust got stirred up in the course of such events.

“Those guys should be whacked,” said Crake.

“Which ones? The peasants? Or the guys killing them?”

“The latter. Not because of the dead peasants, there’s always been dead peasants. But they’re nuking the cloud forests to plant this stuff.”

“The peasants would do that too if they had half a chance,” said Jimmy.

“Sure, but they don’t have half a chance.”

“You’re taking sides?”

“There aren’t any sides, as such.”

Nothing much to be said to that. Jimmy thought about shouting
bogus
, decided it might not apply. Anyway they’d used up that word. “Let’s change channels,” he said.

But there was Happicuppa coverage, it seemed, wherever you turned. There were protests and demonstrations, with tear gas and shooting and bludgeoning; then more protests, more demonstrations, more tear gas, more shooting, more bludgeoning. This went on day after day. There hadn’t been anything like it since the first decade of the century. Crake said it was history in the making.

Don’t Drink Death! said the posters. Union dockworkers in Australia, where they still had unions, refused to unload Happicuppa cargoes; in the United States, a Boston Coffee Party sprang up. There was a staged media event, boring because there was no violence – only balding guys with retro tattoos or white patches where they’d been taken off, and severe-looking baggy-boobed women, and quite a few overweight or spindly members of marginal, earnest religious groups, in T-shirts with smiley-faced angels flying with birds or Jesus holding hands with a peasant or God Is Green on the front. They were filmed dumping Happicuppa products into the harbour, but none of the boxes sank. So there was the Happicuppa logo, lots of copies of it, bobbing around on the screen. It could have been a commercial.

“Makes me thirsty,” said Jimmy.

“Shit for brains,” said Crake. “They forgot to add rocks.”

As a rule they watched the unfolding of events on the Noodie News, via the Net, but for a change they sometimes watched fully clothed newscasters on the wall-sized plasma screen in Uncle Pete’s leatherette-upholstered TV room. The suits and shirts and ties seemed bizarre to Jimmy, especially if he was mildly stoned. It was weird to imagine what all those serious-faced talking heads would look like minus their fashion items, full frontal on the Noodie News.

Uncle Pete sometimes watched too, in the evenings, when he was back from the golf course. He’d pour himself a drink, then provide a running commentary. “The usual uproar,” he said. “They’ll get tired of it, they’ll settle down. Everybody wants a cheaper cup of coffee – you can’t fight that.”

“No, you can’t,” Crake would say agreeably. Uncle Pete had a chunk of Happicuppa stock in his portfolio, and not just a little chunk. “What a mort,” Crake would say as he scanned Uncle Pete’s holdings on his computer.

“You could trade his stuff,” said Jimmy. “Sell the Happicuppa, buy something he really hates. Buy windpower.
No, better – buy a croaker. Get him some South American cattle futures.”

“Nah,” said Crake. “I can’t risk that with a labyrinth. He’d notice. He’d find out I’ve been getting in.”

Things escalated after a cell of crazed anti-Happicuppa fanatics bombed the Lincoln Memorial, killing five visiting Japanese schoolkids that were part of a Tour of Democracy.
Stop the Hipocrissy
, read the note left at a safe distance.

“That’s pathetic,” said Jimmy. “They can’t even spell.”

“They made their point though,” said Crake.

“I hope they fry,” said Uncle Pete.

Jimmy didn’t answer, because now they were looking at the blockade of the Happicuppa head-office compound in Maryland. There in the shouting crowd, clutching a sign that read A Happicup Is a Crappi Cup, with a green bandanna over her nose and mouth, was – wasn’t it? – his vanished mother. For a moment the bandanna slipped down and Jimmy saw her clearly – her frowning eyebrows, her candid blue eyes, her determined mouth. Love jolted through him, abrupt and painful, followed by anger. It was like being kicked: he must have let out a gasp. Then there was a CorpSeCorps charge and a cloud of tear gas and a smattering of what sounded like gunfire, and when Jimmy looked again his mother had disappeared.

“Freeze the frame!” he said. “Turn back!” He wanted to be sure. How could she be taking such a risk? If they got hold of her she’d really disappear, this time forever. But after a brief glance at him Crake had already switched to another channel.

I shouldn’t have said anything, thought Jimmy. I shouldn’t have called attention. He was cold with fear now. What if Uncle Pete made the connection and phoned the Corpsmen? They’d be right on her trail, she’d be roadkill.

But Uncle Pete didn’t seem to have noticed. He was pouring himself another Scotch. “They should spraygun the whole bunch of them,” he said. “Once they’ve smashed those cameras. Who
took that footage anyway? Sometimes you wonder who’s running this show.”

“So what was that about?” said Crake when they were alone.

“Nothing,” said Jimmy.

“I did freeze it,” said Crake. “I got the whole sequence.”

“I think you better erase it,” said Jimmy. He was past being frightened, he’d entered full-blown dejection. Surely at this very moment Uncle Pete was turning on his cellphone and punching in the numbers; hours from now it would be the CorpSeCorps interrogation all over again. His mother this, his mother that. He would just have to go through it.

“It’s okay,” said Crake, which Jimmy took to mean:
You can trust me
. Then he said, “Let me guess. Phylum Chordata, Class Vertebrata, Order Mammalia, Family Primates, Genus
Homo
, Species
sapiens sapiens
, subspecies your mother.”

“Big points,” said Jimmy listlessly.

“Not a stretch,” said Crake. “I spotted her right away, those blue eyes. It was either her or a clone.”

If Crake had recognized her, who else might have done so? Everyone in the HelthWyzer Compound had doubtless been shown pictures:
You seen this woman?
The story of his deviant mother had followed Jimmy around like an unwanted dog, and was probably half responsible for his poor showing at the Student Auction. He wasn’t dependable, he was a security risk, he had a taint.

“My dad was the same,” said Crake. “He buggered off too.”

“I thought he died,” said Jimmy. That’s all he’d ever got out of Crake before: dad died, full stop, change the subject. It wasn’t anything Crake would talk about.

“That’s what I mean. He went off a pleebland overpass. It was rush hour, so by the time they got to him he was cat food.”

“Did he jump, or what?” said Jimmy. Crake didn’t seem too worked up about it, so he felt it was okay to ask that.

“It was the general opinion,” said Crake. “He was a top researcher over at HelthWyzer West, so he got a really nice funeral. The tact was amazing. Nobody used the word
suicide
. They said ‘your father’s accident.’”

“Sorry about that,” said Jimmy.

“Uncle Pete was over at our place all the time. My mother said he was really
supportive
.” Crake said
supportive
like a quote. “She said, besides being my dad’s boss and best friend, he was turning out to be a really good friend of the family, not that I’d ever seen him around much before. He wanted things to be
resolved
for us, he said he was anxious about that. He kept trying to have these heart-to-heart talks with me – tell me all about how my father had
problems
.”

“Meaning your dad was a nutbar,” said Jimmy.

Crake looked at Jimmy out of his slanty green eyes. “Yeah. But he wasn’t. He was acting worried lately, but he didn’t have
problems
. He had nothing like that on his mind. Nothing like jumping. I’d have known.”

“You think he maybe fell off?”

“Fell off?”

“Off the overpass.” Jimmy wanted to ask what he’d been doing on a pleebland overpass in the first place, but it didn’t seem like the right time. “Was there a railing?”

“He was kind of uncoordinated,” said Crake, smiling in an odd way. “He didn’t always watch where he was going. He was head in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot.”

“You get along with him?”

Crake paused. “He taught me to play chess. Before it happened.”

“Well, I guess not
after,”
said Jimmy, trying to lighten things up, because by this time he was feeling sorry for Crake, and he didn’t like that at all.

~   ~   ~

How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid?

No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked – events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate.

There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.

At the end of that vacation, Crake went off to Watson-Crick and Jimmy to Martha Graham. They shook hands at the bullet-train station.

“See you around,” said Jimmy.

“We’ll e-mail,” said Crake. Then, noticing Jimmy’s dejection, he said, “Come on, you did okay, the place is famous.”

“Was famous,” said Jimmy.

“It won’t be that bad.”

Crake was wrong, for once. Martha Graham was falling apart. It was surrounded – Jimmy observed as the train pulled in – by the tackiest kind of pleeblands: vacant warehouses, burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and huts put together from scavenged materials – sheets of tin, slabs of plywood – and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people exist? Jimmy had no idea. Yet there they were, on the other side of the razor wire. A couple of them raised their middle fingers at the train, shouted something that the bulletproof glass shut out.

The security at the Martha Graham gateway was a joke. The guards were half asleep, the walls – scrawled all over with faded graffiti – could have been scaled by a one-legged dwarf. Inside
them, the Bilbao-ripoff cast-concrete buildings leaked, the lawns were mud, either baked or liquid depending on the season, and there were no recreational facilities apart from a swimming pool that looked and smelled like a giant sardine can. Half the time the air conditioning in the dorms didn’t work; there was a brownout problem with the electrical supply; the food in the cafeteria was mostly beige and looked like rakunk shit. There were arthropods in the bedrooms, families and genera various, but half of them were cockroaches. Jimmy found the place depressing, as did – it seemed – everyone there with any more neural capacity than a tulip. But this was the hand life had dealt him, as his dad had said during their awkward goodbye, and now Jimmy would just have to play it as well as he could.

Right, Dad, Jimmy had thought. I’ve always known I could count on you for really, really sage advice.

The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century who’d apparently mowed quite a swath in her day. There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration building, in her role – said the bronze plaque – as Judith, cutting off the head of a guy in a historical robe outfit called Holofernes. Retro feminist shit, was the general student opinion. Every once in a while the statue got its tits decorated or steel wool glued onto its pubic region – Jimmy himself had done some of this glueing – and so comatose was the management that the ornaments often stayed up there for months before they were noticed. Parents were always objecting to this statue – poor role model, they’d say, too aggressive, too bloodthirsty, blah blah – whereupon the students would rally to its defence. Old Martha was their mascot, they’d say, the scowl, the dripping head and all. She represented life, or art, or something. Hands off Martha. Leave her alone.

The Academy had been set up by a clutch of now-dead rich liberal bleeding hearts from Old New York as an Arts-and-Humanities college at some time in the last third of the twentieth
century, with special emphasis on the Performing Arts – acting, singing, dancing, and so forth. To that had been added Filmmaking in the 1980s, and Video Arts after that. These things were still taught at Martha Graham – they still put on plays, and it was there Jimmy saw
Macbeth
in the flesh and reflected that Anna K. and her Web site for peeping Toms had done a more convincing job of Lady Macbeth while sitting on her toilet.

The students of song and dance continued to sing and dance, though the energy had gone out of these activities and the classes were small. Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century – no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status. Theatrical events had dwindled into versions of the singalong or the tomato bombardment or the wet T-shirt contest. And though various older forms had dragged on – the TV sitcom, the rock video – their audience was ancient and their appeal mostly nostalgic.