Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

“Just tell them it’s a Crake thing,” said Toby, so Crozier did. The Crake gambit was one-size-fits-all.

Some of the Crakers — a number of the women, several of the smaller kids — are over in the erstwhile playground outside the cobb-house boundary fence, munching away at the kudzu vines draping the swing set. Kudzu is one of their favourite plants, which shows foresight on the part of Crake because there won’t be a shortage of kudzu any time soon. They’ve got the red plastic slide almost uncovered, and the children are stroking it as if it’s alive. Who remembered the swing set was under there, before they started gnawing?

Toby heads for the violet biolet, not only because she needs to but also because she doesn’t want to arrive at the breakfast table before Swift Fox leaves it. She consciously suppresses the word slut : a woman should not use that word about another woman, especially with no exact cause.

Really? says her inner slut-uttering voice. You’ve seen the way she looks at Zeb. Eyelashes like Venus flytraps, and that sideways leer of the irises, like some outdated cut-rate prostibot commercial: Bacteria-Resistant Fibres, 100 % Fluid-Flushing, Lifelike Moans, ClenchOMeter for Optimal Satisfaction.

She takes a breath, calls on her Gardener meditation training. She visualizes her anger pushing out through her skin like a snail horn, then lets the small bud of fury wither and fall away. She smiles gently in the direction of Swift Fox, thinking, All you want is a quick jump, you want to snag him just to show you can. Nail him up on your trophy wall. You know nothing about him, you can’t truly value him, he isn’t yours, you don’t know how long I waited …

Which counts for nothing. Nobody cares. There’s no fairness, there’s no ownership. She has no claims. If Zeb tumbles into bed with Swift Fox — even if he tiptoes into that bed, even if he oozes into it — what she is entitled to say about that is exactly nothing. For all she knows he’s double-dipping already, leaving her in affectionate sleepy-time mode — though maybe a little too much like best pals, with a little too much camaraderie between them, no? — but all the time secretly still hungry; then ducking outside, then inside through a different doorway to slide himself voraciously into the voracious Swift Fox.

It doesn’t bear thinking about, so she won’t think about it. Will not think. Wills herself not .

The violet biolets are part of the original park installation: three stalls for men, three for women. Their solar cells are still operating, running the ultraviolet LEDs and the small aerating-fan motors. As long as the biolets are still functioning, the MaddAddamites won’t have to dig outhouse pits. Luckily there’s lots of toilet paper to be gleaned in the nearby streets, as it wasn’t an item heavily looted during the pillaging phase of the plague. What would you do with a skid of toilet paper? You couldn’t get drunk on it.

The walls inside the biolet are still covered with pleebland inscriptions: several generations of them, one layer on top of another. There’d been a time when those still devoted to some norm of propriety had tried to paint the words over, but a few kids bent on self-expressive anarchy could destroy in an hour a white surface it had taken a crew three days to blandify.

To Daryn, Im ur bitch, ur my King,

I <3 you more than anything

Fk the Corps

Loris a stuck up cunt

I hope ur raped by 100000 pit bulls

People who write on washroom walls, Shld roll their shit in little balls, And those who read these words of wit, Shld have to eat those balls of shit

Call me/ Best for ur $/ Ull scream 24/7 & die in a pond of Cum

STAY OUT MY WAY A HAT OR ILL KNIFE U

And shyly, unfinished: Try love the World needs

What to eat, where to shit, how to take shelter, who and what to kill: are these the basics? thinks Toby. Is this what we’ve come to, or come down to; or else come back to?

And who do you love? And who loves you? And who loves you not? And, come to think of it, who seriously hates you.

Under the trees Jimmy is still slumbering. Toby checks his pulse — calmer; changes his maggots — the wound on his foot has stopped festering; and pours some mushroom elixir into him, mixed with a little Poppy.

An oval of chairs is arranged around the hammock, as if Jimmy is the central offering at a feast: a giant salmon, a boar on a platter. Three Crakers are purring over him, taking turns: two men and a woman, gold, ivory, ebony. It’s a different three every few hours. Do they have only so much purring quotient, are they like batteries that have to be recharged? Naturally they need time off to graze and water themselves, but does the purring itself have a sort of electrical frequency?

We’ll never know, thinks Toby, holding Jimmy’s nose to make him open his mouth: no way of wiring up their brains for scientific studies, not any more. Which is lucky for them. In the olden days they’d have been kidnapped from the Paradice Project dome by some rival Corp, then injected and jolted and probed and sliced apart to see how they were put together. What made them tick, what made them purr, what made them click. What, if anything, made them sick. They’d have ended up as slabs of DNA in a freezer.

Jimmy swallows, sighs; his left hand twitches. “How has he been today?” Toby asks the three Crakers. “Has he been awake at all?”

“No, Oh Toby,” says the gold-coloured man. “He is travelling.” This one has bright red hair, long slender limbs; despite the skin colour, he looks like something from a children’s storybook. An Irish folktale.

“But now he has stopped,” says the ebony man. “He has climbed into a tree.”

“Not his real tree,” says the ivory woman. “Not the tree he lives in.”

“He has gone to sleep in this tree,” says the ebony man.

“You mean, he’s sleeping inside his sleep?” says Toby. This seems wrong: it shouldn’t be possible. “In the tree in his dream?”

“Yes, Oh Toby,” says the ivory woman. All three of them gaze at her with their lambent green eyes, as if she’s twirling a piece of string and they are bored cats.

“Perhaps he will sleep for a long time,” says the golden man. “He is stuck there, in the tree. If he will not wake up and travel to here, he will not wake up at all.”

“But he’s getting better!” says Toby.

“He is afraid,” says the ivory woman in a matter-of-fact voice. “He is afraid of what is in this world. He is afraid of the bad men, he is afraid of the Pig Ones. He doesn’t want to be awake.”

“Can you talk to him?” says Toby. “Can you tell him it’s better to be awake?” No harm in trying: maybe they have some form of inaudible communication that might reach Jimmy, wherever he is. A wavelength, a vibration.

But now they aren’t looking at her. They’re looking at Ren and Lotis Blue, who are walking over with Amanda in tow, sheltering behind them.

The three of them sit down on the empty chairs, Amanda hesitantly. Ren and Lotis Blue are muddy from their building activities, but Amanda is pristine. The other two give her a shower every morning, choose a fresh bedsheet for her, braid her hair.

“We thought we’d take a break from the house,” says Ren. “See how Jimmy — see how Snowman-the-Jimmy is doing.”

The ivory woman smiles widely at them, the two men smile less widely: the Craker men are nervous around the younger cobb-house women now. Ever since they’ve learned that rambunctious group copulation is not acceptable, they don’t know what’s expected of them. They begin conferring together in low voices, leaving the ivory woman as the sole purrer.