Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

Is she blue? One is blue. Two others were blue, we joined our blue to their blue but we did not make them happy. They are not like our women, they are not happy, they are broken. Did Crake make them? Why did he make them that way, so they are not happy? Oryx will take care of them. Will Oryx take care of them, if they are not like our women? When Snowman-the-Jimmy wakes up, we will ask him these things .

I’d like to be a fly on the wall, thinks Toby. Listening to Jimmy justifying the ways of Crake towards men, or semi-men.

“Will Jimmy — will Snowman-the-Jimmy be okay?” asks Lotis Blue.

“I think so,” says Toby. “It will depend on his …” She doesn’t want to say “immune system” because the Crakers will hear. ( What is an immune system? It is something you have inside yourself that helps you and makes you strong. Where can we find an immune system? Is it from Crake, will he send us an immune system? , and so on.) “It depends on his dreaming.” No comment from the Crakers: so far, so good. “But I’m sure he’ll wake up soon.”

“He needs to eat,” says Lotis Blue. “He’s so thin! He can’t live on nothing.”

“You can go a long time without food,” says Ren. “They did fasts, at the Gardeners? You can go for days. Weeks.” She leans over and reaches out, smoothing back Jimmy’s hair. “I wish we could give him a shampoo,” she says. “He’s getting rank.”

“I think he just said something,” says Lotis Blue.

“It was only a mumble. We could sponge him off,” says Ren. “Like, a sponge bath.” She leans closer. “He looks a bit shrivelled. Poor Jimmy. I hope he doesn’t die.”

“I’m hydrating him,” says Toby. “And there’s the honey, I’m feeding him that.” Why is she sounding like a head nurse? “We do wash him,” she says defensively. “We do it every day.”

“Well anyway, he’s not so feverish,” says Lotis Blue. “He’s cooling down. Don’t you think?”

Ren feels Jimmy’s forehead. “I don’t know,” she says. “Jimmy, can you hear me?” They all watch: Jimmy doesn’t twitch. “I’d say he’s warm. Amanda? See what you think.” She’s trying to involve her, thinks Toby. Get her interested in something. Ren was always a kindly child.

If she is blue, the Lotis one, should we mate with her? No, we should not. Do not sing to them, do not pick flowers for them, do not wag your penis at them. These women scream with fright, they do not choose us even if we give them a flower, they do not like a wagging penis. We do not make them happy, we do not know why they scream. But sometimes they do not scream with fright, sometimes they …

“I need to lie down,” says Amanda. She stands up, walks unsteadily away towards the cobb house.

“I’m really worried about her,” says Ren. “She threw up this morning, she couldn’t eat any breakfast. That’s extreme Fallow.”

“Maybe it’s a bug,” says Lotis Blue. “Something she ate. We really need a better way of washing the dishes, I don’t think the water is …”

“Look,” says Ren. “He blinked.”

“He is hearing you,” says the ivory woman. “He is hearing your voice, and now he is walking. He is happy, he wants to be with you.”

“With me?” says Ren. “Really?”

“Yes. Look, he is smiling.” There is indeed a smile, or the trace of a smile, thinks Toby. Though maybe it’s only gas, as with babies.

The ivory woman waves away a mosquito that has settled on Jimmy’s mouth. “Soon he will be awake,” she says.

It’s evening. Toby has dodged her storytime session with the Crakers. Those stories take a lot out of her. Not only does she have to put on the absurd red hat and eat the ritual fish, which isn’t always what you’d call cooked, but there’s so much she needs to invent. She doesn’t like to tell lies, not deliberately, not lies as such, but she skirts the darker and more tangled corners of reality. It’s like trying to keep toast from burning while still having it transform into toast.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” she told them. “Tonight I must do an important thing for Zeb.”

“What is the important thing you must do, Oh Toby? We would like to be your helpers.” At least they didn’t ask what important means. They seem to have put together an idea of it: somewhere between dangerous and delicious.

“Thank you,” she said. “But it is a thing that only I can do.”

“Is it about the bad men?” asked little Blackbeard.

“No,” Toby said. “We have not seen the bad men for many days. Maybe they have gone far away. But we must still be careful, and tell others if we see them.”

One of the Mo’Hairs has gone missing, Crozier has told her privately — the red-headed one with the braids — but it may simply have strayed off while grazing. Or else a liobam got it.

Or something worse, thinks Toby: something human.

The day has been stifling. Even the afternoon thunderstorm hasn’t cleared away the humidity. Under normal conditions — but what is normal? — lust should have been drained of its supercharge by this weather; muffled, as if under a damp mattress. She and Zeb should have been limp, enervated, exhausted. But instead they’d snuck away from the others even earlier than usual, slippery with longing, every pore avid, every capillary suffused, and thrashed around like newts in a puddle.

Now it’s deep twilight. Purple darkness wells up from the earth, bats flit past like leathery butterflies, night flowers open, musking the air. They’re sitting outside in the kitchen garden for the evening breeze, what there is of it. Their fingers are loosely entwined; Toby can feel, still, a small current of electricity moving between them. Tiny iridescent moths are shimmering around their heads. What do we smell like to them? she wonders. Like mushrooms? Like crushed petals? Like dew?

“Help me out here,” says Toby. “I need more to go on, for the Crakers. They’re insatiable on the subject of you.”

“Like what?”

“You’re their hero. They want your life story. Your miraculous origins, your supernatural deeds, your favourite recipes. You’re like royalty to them.”

“Why me?” says Zeb. “I thought Crake did away with all that. They aren’t supposed to be interested.”

“Well, they are. They’re obsessed with you. You’re their rock star.”

“Lord fuck a dog. Can’t you just make up some piece of crap?”

“They cross-examine like lawyers,” says Toby. “At the very least I need the basics. The raw material.” Does she want to know about Zeb for the sake of the Crakers, or for herself? Both. But mostly for herself.

“I’m an open book,” says Zeb.

“Don’t be evasive.”

Zeb sighs. “I hate going back to all that. I had to live it, I don’t like reliving it. Who cares?”

“I do,” says Toby. And so do you, she thinks. You still do care. “I’m listening.”

“Persistent, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got all night. So, you were born …”

“Yeah, admitted.” Another sigh. “Okay. First you need to understand: we got the wrong mothers.”

“Wrong, how?” she says to the face she can barely see. A plane of cheekbone, a shadow, a glint of eye.

I have put on the red hat of Snowman. I have eaten the fish. I have listened to the shiny thing. Now I will tell the story of the birth of Zeb.

You don’t have to sing.

Zeb did not come from Crake, not like Snowman. And he wasn’t made by Oryx, not like rabbits. He was born, the same way you are born. He grew in a bone cave, just like you, and came out through a bone tunnel, just like you.