Margaret Atwood: MaddAddam

The Crakers all started talking at once. “Snowman must stay with us! We must put Snowman back into his tree.” “That is what he likes, he likes a tree.” “Yes, only he can talk with Crake.” “Only he can tell the words of Crake, about the Egg.” “About the chaos.” “About Oryx, who made the animals.” “About how Crake made the chaos go away.” “Good, kind Crake.” They began singing.

“We need to get medicine,” said Toby desperately. “Otherwise, Jimmy — otherwise, Snowman might die.” Blank stares. Did they even understand what dying was?

“What is a Jimmy ?” Puzzled frowns.

She’d made an error: wrong name. “Jimmy is another name for Snowman.”

“Why?” “Why is it another name?” “What does a Jimmy mean?” This seemed to interest them much more than death. “Is it the pink skin on Snowman?” “I want a Jimmy too!” This last from a small boy.

How to explain? “Jimmy is a name. Snowman has two names.”

“His name is Snowman-the-Jimmy?”

“Yes,” said Toby, because it was now.

“Snowman-the-Jimmy, Snowman-the-Jimmy,” they repeated to one another.

“Why are there two?” one asked, but the others had switched their attention to the next bewildering word. “What is medicine ?”

“Medicine is something to help Snowman-the-Jimmy get better,” she ventured. Smiles: they liked that idea.

“Then we will come too,” said the one who seemed in charge — a tall, brownish-yellow man with a Roman nose. “We will carry Snowman-the-Jimmy.”

Two of the Craker men lifted Jimmy easily. Toby was alarmed by his eyes: by the thin slits of white shining between his lids. “Flying,” he said as the Crakers swung him into the air.

Toby found Jimmy’s spraygun and gave it to Ren to carry, clicking the safety on first: the girl didn’t know how to use the thing — why would she? — but it would be sure to come in handy later on.

She’d assumed that only the two Craker volunteers would come back to the cobb house, but the whole crowd tagged along, children included. They all wished to be close to Snowman. The men took turns carrying him; the rest held their torches high, singing from time to time in their eerie waterglass voices.

Four of the women walked with Ren and Amanda, patting them and touching their arms or hands. “Oryx will take care of you,” they said to Amanda.

“Don’t let any of those blue dicks fucking touch her again,” said Ren to them fiercely.

“What is blue dicks ?” they asked, bewildered. “What is fucking touch ?”

“Just don’t, or else,” said Ren. “Or it’s trouble!”

“Oryx will make her happy,” said the women, though they sounded unsure. “What is trouble ?”

“I’m okay,” said Amanda faintly to Ren. “What about you?”

“You are not fucking okay! Let’s just get you back to where the MaddAddams are,” said Ren. “They’ve got beds, and a water pump, and everything. We can clean you up. Jimmy too.”

“Jimmy?” said Amanda. “That’s Jimmy? I thought he’d be dead, like everyone else.”

“Yeah, so did I. But a lot of people aren’t. Well, some people. Zeb’s not, and Rebecca, and you and me, and Toby, and …”

“Where did those two guys go?” said Amanda. “The Painballers. I should’ve brained them when I had the chance.” She laughed a little, blowing off pain in her old pleebrat way. “How far is it?” she said.

“They can carry you,” said Ren.

“No. I’m fine.”

Moths fluttered around the torches, overhead leaves riffled in the night breeze. How long did they walk? To Toby it seemed like hours, but time is unclear in moonlight. They were heading west, through the Heritage Park; behind them the sound of the waves receded. Though there was a path, she was unsure of the way, but the Crakers appeared to know where they were going.

She listened for sounds, off among the trees — a footfall, a stick cracking, a grunt — keeping herself to the rear of the procession, her rifle at the ready. There was a croaking, a chirp or two: some amphibian, a night bird stirring. She was conscious of the darkness at her back: her shadow stretched huge, blending with the deeper shadows behind.

Finally they reached the cobb-house enclave. A single light bulb was burning in the yard; behind the barrier fence, Crozier and Manatee and Tamaraw were standing sentry with their sprayguns, wearing battery-run headlamps gleaned from a bike shop.

Ren ran forward. “It’s us!” she called. “It’s okay! We found Amanda!”

Crozier’s headlamp bobbed as he opened the gate. “Way to go!” he shouted.

“Great! I’ll tell the others!” said Tamaraw. She hurried off to the main building.

“Croze! We did it!” Ren said. She threw her arms around him, dropping the spraygun she’d been carrying, and he lifted her, twirled her around, and kissed her. Then he set her down.

“Hey, where’d you get the spraygun?” he said. Ren started crying.

“I thought they’d kill us!” she said. “Them, the two … But you should’ve seen Toby! She was so badass! She had her old gun, and then we hit them with rocks, and then we tied them up, but then …”

“Wow,” said Manatee, surveying the Crakers who were crowding in through the gate, talking among themselves. “It’s the Paradice dome circus.”

“So these are them, right?” said Crozier. “The creepo naked people Crake made? The ones who live down by the shore?”

“I don’t think you should call them creepo,” said Ren. “They can hear you.”

“It wasn’t only Crake,” said Manatee. “All of us worked on them at the Paradice Project. Me, Swift Fox, Ivory Bill …”

“Why’d they come with you?” said Crozier. “What do they want?”

“They’re only trying to help,” said Toby. Suddenly she was very tired; all she wanted to do was stumble into her cubicle and conk out. “Has anyone else been here?” Zeb had left the cobb house at the same time she did, on a search for Adam One and any of the God’s Gardeners who might have survived. She wanted to know if he’d returned, but she didn’t want to be obvious about it: pining was whining, as the Gardeners used to say, and she’d never worn her heart anywhere near her sleeve.

“Only those pigs again,” said Crozier. “Trying to dig under the garden fence. We shone the lights on them and they ran off. They know what a spraygun is.”

“Ever since we turned a couple of them into bacon,” said Manatee. “Frankenbacon, considering they’re splices. I still feel kind of weird about eating them. They’ve got human neocortex tissue.”

“I hope Crake’s Frankenpeople aren’t moving in with us,” said a blond woman who’d come out of the main cobb building with Tamaraw. Toby recognized her from the brief time she’d spent at the cobb house before her search for Amanda: Swift Fox. She must have been over thirty, but she was wearing what looked like a twelve-year-old’s ruffle-edged nightie. Now where had she picked that up? Toby wondered. Some looted HottTottsTogs or Hundred-Dollar Store?

“You must be exhausted,” Tamaraw said to Toby.

“I don’t know why you brought them with you,” said Swift Fox. “There’s too many of them. We can’t feed them.”

“We won’t have to,” said Manatee. “They eat leaves, remember? That’s how Crake designed them. So they’d never need agriculture.”

“Right,” said Swift Fox. “You worked on that module. Me, I did the brains. The frontal lobes, the sensory-input modifications. I tried to make them less boring, but Crake wanted no aggression, no jokes even. They’re walking potatoes.”