The MaddAddam Trilogy (39 page)

Then he’d turn it off, sit in front of the empty screen. All the women he’d ever known would pass in front of his eyes in the semi-darkness. His mother too, in her magenta dressing gown, young again. Oryx came last, carrying white flowers. She looked at him, then walked slowly out of his field of vision, into the shadows where Crake was waiting.

These reveries were almost pleasurable. At least while they were going on everyone was still alive.

He knew this state of affairs couldn’t continue much longer. Inside Paradice proper, the Crakers were munching up the leaves and grasses faster than they could regenerate, and one of these days the solar would fail, and the backup would fail too, and Jimmy had no idea about how to fix those things. Then the air circulation would stop and the doorlock would freeze, and both he and the Crakers would be trapped inside, and they’d all suffocate. He had to get them out while there was still time, but not too soon or there would still be some desperate people out there, and desperate would mean dangerous. What he didn’t want was a bunch of disintegrating maniacs falling on their knees, clawing at him:
Cure us! Cure us!
He might be immune from the virus – unless, of course, Crake had been lying to him – but not from the rage and despair of its carriers.

Anyway, how could he have the heart to stand there and say:
Nothing can save you?

In the half-light, in the dank, Snowman wanders from space to space. Here for instance is his office. His computer sits on the desk,
turning a blank face to him like a discarded girlfriend encountered by chance at a party. Beside the computer are a few sheets of paper, which must have been the last he’d ever written. The last he’d ever write. He picks them up with curiosity. What is it that the Jimmy he’d once been had seen fit to communicate, or at least to record – to set down in black and white, with smudges – for the edification of a world that no longer existed?

To whom it may concern
, Jimmy had written, in ballpoint rather than printout: his computer was fried by then, but he’d persevered, laboriously, by hand. He must still have had hope, he must still have believed that the situation could be turned around, that someone would show up here in the future, someone in authority; that his words would have a meaning then, a context. As Crake had once said, Jimmy was a romantic optimist.

I don’t have much time
, Jimmy had written.

Not a bad beginning, thinks Snowman.

I don’t have much time, but I will try to set down what I believe to be the explanation for the recent
extraordinary events
catastrophe. I have gone through the computer of the man known here as Crake. He left it turned on – deliberately, I believe – and I am able to report that the JUVE virus was made here in the Paradice dome by splicers hand-selected by Crake
and subsequently eliminated
, and was then encysted in the BlyssPluss product. There was a time-lapse factor built in to allow for wide distribution: the first batch of virus did not become active until all selected territories had been seeded, and the outbreak thus took the form of a series of rapidly overlapping waves. For the success of the plan, time was of the essence. Social disruption was maximized, and development of a vaccine effectively prevented. Crake himself had developed a vaccine concurrently with the virus, but he had destroyed it prior to his
assisted suicide
death.

Although various staff members of the BlyssPluss project contributed to JUVE on a piecework basis, it is my belief that none,
with the exception of Crake, was cognizant of what that effect would be. As for Crake’s motives, I can only speculate. Perhaps …

Here the handwriting stops. Whatever Jimmy’s speculations might have been on the subject of Crake’s motives, they had not been recorded.

Snowman crumples the sheets up, drops them onto the floor. It’s the fate of these words to be eaten by beetles. He could have mentioned the change in Crake’s fridge magnets. You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he’d thought much about them at the time.

On the second Friday of March – he’d been marking off the days on a calendar, god knows why – Jimmy showed himself to the Crakers for the first time. He didn’t take his clothes off, he drew the line at that. He wore a set of standard-issue Rejoov khaki tropicals, with mesh underarms and a thousand pockets, and his favourite fake-leather sandals. The Crakers gathered around him, gazing at him with quiet wonder: they’d never seen textiles before. The children whispered and pointed.

“Who are you?” said the one Crake had christened Abraham Lincoln. A tall man, brown, thinnish. It was not said impolitely. From an ordinary man Jimmy would have found it brusque, even aggressive, but these people didn’t go in for fancy language: they hadn’t been taught evasion, euphemism, lily-gilding. In speech they were plain and blunt.

“My name is Snowman,” said Jimmy, who had thought this over. He no longer wanted to be Jimmy, or even Jim, and especially not Thickney: his incarnation as Thickney hadn’t worked out well. He needed to forget the past – the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form. He needed to exist only in the present,
without guilt, without expectation. As the Crakers did. Perhaps a different name would do that for him.

“Where have you come from, oh Snowman?”

“I come from the place of Oryx and Crake,” he said. “Crake sent me.” True, in a way. “And Oryx.” He keeps the sentence structure simple, the message clear: he knows how to do this from watching Oryx through the mirror wall. And from listening to her, of course.

“Where has Oryx gone?”

“She had some things to do,” said Snowman. That was all he could come up with: simply pronouncing her name had choked him up.

“Why have Crake and Oryx sent you to us?” asked the woman called Madame Curie.

“To take you to a new place.”

“But this is our place. We are content where we are.”

“Oryx and Crake wish you to have a better place than this,” said Snowman. “Where there will be more to eat.” There were nods, smiles. Oryx and Crake wished them well, as they’d always known. It seemed to be enough for them.

“Why is your skin so loose?” said one of the children.

“I was made in a different way from you,” Snowman said. He was beginning to find this conversation of interest, like a game. These people were like blank pages, he could write whatever he wanted on them. “Crake made me with two kinds of skin. One comes off.” He took off his tropical vest to show them. They stared with interest at the hair on his chest.

“What is that?”

“These are feathers. Little feathers. Oryx gave them to me, as a special favour. See? More feathers are growing out of my face.” He lets the children touch the stubble. He’d been lax about shaving lately, there seemed little point to it, so his beard was sprouting.

“Yes. We see. But what are feathers?”

Oh, right. They’d never seen any. “Some of the Children of
Oryx have feathers on them,” he said. “That kind are called birds. We’ll go to where they are. Then you’ll know about feathers.”

Snowman marvelled at his own facility: he was dancing gracefully around the truth, light-footed, light-fingered. But it was almost too easy: they accepted, without question, everything he said. Much more of this – whole days, whole weeks of it – and he could see himself screaming with boredom. I could leave them behind, he thought. Just leave them. Let them fend for themselves. They aren’t my business.

But he couldn’t do that, because although the Crakers weren’t his business, they were now his responsibility. Who else did they have?

Who else did he have, for that matter?

Snowman planned the route in advance: Crake’s storeroom was well supplied with maps. He’d take the Children of Crake to the seashore, where he himself had never been. It was something to look forward to: at last he would see the ocean. He’d walk on a beach, as in stories told by the grown-ups when he was young. He might even go swimming. It wouldn’t be too bad.

The Crakers could live in the park near the arboretum, coloured green on the map and marked with a tree symbol. They’d feel at home there, and certainly there would be lots of edible foliage. As for himself, there would surely be fish. He gathered together some supplies – not too much, not too heavy, he’d have to carry it all – and loaded up his spraygun with the full complement of virtual bullets.

The evening before the departure, he gave a talk. On the way to their new, better place, he would walk ahead – he said – with two of the men. He picked the tallest. Behind them would come the women and children, with a file of men to either side. The rest of the men would walk behind. They needed to do this because Crake had said that this was the proper way. (It was best to avoid mentioning the possible dangers: those would require
too much exposition.) If the Crakers noticed anything moving – anything at all, in whatever shape or form – they were to tell him at once. Some of the things they might see would be puzzling, but they were not to be alarmed. If they told him in time, these things would not be able to hurt them.

“Why would they hurt us?” asked Sojourner Truth.

“They might hurt you by mistake,” said Snowman. “As the ground hurts you when you fall on it.”

“But it is not the ground’s wish to hurt us.”

“Oryx has told us that the ground is our friend.”

“It grows our food for us.”

“Yes,” said Snowman. “But Crake made the ground hard. Otherwise we would not be able to walk on it.”

It took them a minute to work this one through. Then there was much nodding of heads. Snowman’s brain was spinning; the illogic of what he’d just said dazzled him. But it seemed to have done the trick.

In the dawn light he punched in the door code for the last time and opened up the bubble, and led the Crakers out of Paradice. They noticed the remains of Crake lying on the ground, but as they had never seen Crake when alive, they believed Snowman when he told them this was a thing of no importance – only a sort of husk, only a sort of pod. It would have been a shock to them to have witnessed their creator in his present state.

As for Oryx, she was face down and wrapped in silk. No one they’d recognize.

The trees surrounding the dome were lush and green, everything seemed pristine, but when they reached the RejoovenEsense Compound proper, the evidence of destruction and death lay all around. Overturned golf carts, sodden, illegible print-outs, computers with their guts ripped out. Rubble, fluttering cloth, gnawed carrion. Broken toys. The vultures were still at their business.

“Please, oh Snowman, what is that?”

It’s a dead body, what do you think?
“It’s part of the chaos,” said Snowman. “Crake and Oryx are clearing away the chaos, for you – because they love you – but they haven’t quite finished yet.” This answer seemed to content them.

“The chaos smells very bad,” said one of the older children.

“Yes,” said Snowman, with something he meant for a smile. “Chaos always smells bad.”

Five blocks from the main Compound gate, a man staggered out of a side street towards them. He was in the penultimate stages of the disease: the sweat of blood was on his forehead. “Take me with you!” he shouted. The words were hardly audible. The sound was animal, an animal enraged.

“Stay where you are,” Snowman yelled. The Crakers stood amazed, staring, but – it appeared – not frightened. The man came on, stumbled, fell. Snowman shot him. He was worried about contagion – could the Crakers get this thing, or was their genetic material too different? Surely Crake would have given them immunity. Wouldn’t he?

When they reached the peripheral wall, there was another one, a woman. She lurched abruptly out of the gatehouse, weeping, and grabbed at a child.

“Help me!” she implored. “Don’t leave me here!” Snowman shot her too.

During both incidents the Crakers looked on in wonder: they didn’t connect the noise made by Snowman’s little stick with the crumpling of these people.

“What is the thing that fell down, oh Snowman? Is it a man or a woman? It has extra skins, like you.”

“It’s nothing. It’s a piece of a bad dream that Crake is dreaming.”

They understood about dreaming, he knew that: they dreamed themselves. Crake hadn’t been able to eliminate dreams.
We’re hard-wired for dreams
, he’d said. He couldn’t get rid of the singing either.
We’re hard-wired for singing
. Singing and dreams were entwined.

“Why does Crake dream a bad dream like that?”

“He dreams it,” said Snowman, “so you won’t have to.”

“It is sad that he suffers on our behalf.”

“We are very sorry. We thank him.”

“Will the bad dream be over soon?”

“Yes,” said Snowman. “Very soon.” The last one had been a close call, the woman was like a rabid dog. His hands were shaking now. He needed a drink.

“It will be over when Crake wakes up?”

“Yes. When he wakes up.”

“We hope he will wake up very soon.”

And so they walked together through No Man’s Land, stopping here and there to graze or picking leaves and flowers as they went, the women and children hand in hand, several of them singing, in their crystal voices, their voices like fronds unrolling. Then they wound through the streets of the pleeblands, like a skewed parade or a fringe religious procession. During the afternoon storms they took shelter; easy to do, as doors and windows had ceased to have meaning. Then, in the freshened air, they continued their stroll.

Some of the buildings along the way were still smouldering. There were many questions, and much explaining to do.
What is that smoke? It is a thing of Crake’s. Why is that child lying down, with no eyes? It was the will of Crake
. And so forth.

Snowman made it up as he went along. He knew what an improbable shepherd he was. To reassure them, he tried his best to appear dignified and reliable, wise and kindly. A lifetime of deviousness came to his aid.

Finally they reached the edge of the park. Snowman had to shoot only two more disintegrating people. He was doing them a favour, so he didn’t feel too bad about it. He felt worse about other things.