Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

Scales kept a regularly updated register of Painballer identities, complete with face pics and ear profiles, which Katrina WooWoo obtained through some obscure back door using God-knows-what as trading cards. She must’ve been acquainted with someone on the running end of Painball — someone who wanted something she could supply, or else could withhold. Favours and anti-favours were the most respected currency of the deeper pleeblands.

“Hit first and hit dirty, was our rule for those Painball assholes,” says Zeb. “As soon as they started to get twitchy. Sometimes we’d spike their drinks, but sometimes we took them out permanently, because if we didn’t they’d be back for revenge. We had to be careful what we did with the bodies, though. They might have affiliates.”

“What did you do with the bodies?” says Toby.

“Let’s just say there was always a demand in the deeper pleebs for condensed protein packages, to be utilized for fun, profit, or pet food. But back then, in the early days, before the CorpSeCorps decided to make Painball legal and run it on TV, there weren’t very many out-of-control Painballers, so body disposal wasn’t a regular thing. More like an improvisation.”

“You make it sound like a leisure-time amusement,” says Toby. “These were human lives, whatever they’d done.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, slap my wrist, we were bad. Though you didn’t get into Painball unless you were already a multiple killer.

“Point of this whole recital being that it wasn’t unknown for us bar guards — me and Jeb — to take a personal interest in what went into the mixed drinks. Sometimes we even mixed them.”

All this time the white chess bishop with the six mystery pills in it had been kept safely hidden pending further instructions. The only people who knew where it was were Zeb himself, Katrina WooWoo, and Adam.

The hiding place was cunning, and right in plain view, a ploy Zeb had learned from old Slaight of Hand: the obvious is invisible. On a glass shelf behind the bar there was an array of novelty corkscrews, nutcrackers, and salt-and-peppers in the shapes of naked women. The arrangement of their parts was ingenious: the legs would open, the corkscrew would be revealed; the legs would open, the nut would be inserted, the legs would close, the nut would be cracked; the legs would open, the head would be screwed around, the salt or pepper would descend. Laughter all round.

The white bishop had been inserted into the salt cavity of one of these iron maidens, a green lady with enamelled scales. Her head still turned, salt still came out from between her thighs, but the bartenders had been told that this one was fragile — no man was too keen to have his salty sex toy’s head come off in mid-screw — so they should use the others instead, on the occasions when salt was required. Which were not frequent, though some liked to sprinkle salt in their beer and on their bar snacks.

Zeb kept an eye on the scaly green girl with the inner bishop. He felt he owed it to Pilar. Still, he was jumpy about the chosen location. What if someone got hold of the thing when he wasn’t there, fooled around with it, and found the pills? What if they thought the colourful little oblongs were brain candy, and took one or two just to try them? Since Zeb had no idea what the pills might actually do to a person, that possibility made him nervous.

Adam, on the other hand, was remarkably cool about it, taking the view that no one would think to look inside a salt shaker unless it ran out of salt. “Though I don’t know why I’m saying ‘remarkably,’ ” says Zeb. “He was always a cool little bugger.”

“He was living there too?” asks Toby. “At Scales and Tails?” She can’t picture it. What would Adam One have done there all day, among the exotic dancers and their unusual fashion items? When she’d known him — once he’d been Adam One — he’d been quietly disapproving of female vanity, and of colour and ostentation and cleavage and leg in a woman’s outfit. But there was no way he could have implemented the Gardener religion at Scales or convinced its workers to follow the simple life. Those women must have had expensive manicures. They wouldn’t have put up with being required to dig and delve and relocate slugs and snails, even if there had been any vegetable-plot space available at Scales: ladies of the night do not weed by day.

“Nope, he wasn’t living at Scales,” says Zeb. “Or not living as such. He came and went. It was like a safe house for him.”

“You have any idea what he was doing when he wasn’t there?” asks Toby.

“Learning things,” said Zeb. “Tracking ongoing stories. Watching for storm clouds. Gathering the disaffected under his wing. Making converts. He’d already had his big insight, or whatever you want to call it — the part where God lightning-bolted a message into the top of his skull. Save my beloved Species in whom I am well pleased , and all of that: you know the palaver. I never got one of those messages, personally, but it seems Adam did.

“By that time he was well on the way to assembling the God’s Gardeners. He’d even bought the flat-roofed pleeb-slum building for the Edencliff Garden using some of the ill-gotten gains we’d hacked out of the Rev’s account. Pilar was sending him secret recruits from inside HelthWyzer; she was already planning to join him at Edencliff. However, I didn’t know any of that yet.”

“Pilar?” asks Toby. “But she can’t have been Eve One! She was way too old!” Toby has always wondered about Eve One: Adam had been Adam One, but there had never been any mention of an Eve.

“Nope, it wasn’t her,” Zeb says.

One of the ongoing stories Adam was tracking was that of their mutual father, the Rev. After a pleasing flurry of activity surrounding his embezzlements from the Church of PetrOleum and the tragic discovery that the Rev’s first wife, Fenella, was buried in the rock garden, and then the scandalous publication of the tell-all memoir by his second wife, Trudy, the whole affair had fizzled out.

There was a trial, yes, but the evidence had been inconclusive, or so the jury had decided. Trudy had taken the proceeds from her memoir and gone on vacation to a Caribbean island with — some said — a Tex-Mex lawn-maintenance expert, and had been found washing about in the surf after an impetuous naked moonlight swim. Such dangerous things, undertows, said the local police. She must have been dragged down, and hit her head on a rock. Her companion, whoever he was, had vanished. Understandable, since he might have been blamed; though a whisper was going around that he might also have been paid.

So Trudy was not able to give evidence at the trial, and, without that, what could be proven about anything? The skeleton of Fenella had lain so long in the ground: anyone at all might have put it there. Anonymous men, immigrants as a rule, were always walking around with shovels in the more affluent areas of cities, ready to bang trusting, innocent, horticulturally minded ladies on the head, stuff gardening gloves into their mouths, ravish them in the potting shed despite their muffled screams, and plant hens and chicks on top of them, not to mention lamb’s ears and snow-in-summer and other drought-resistant succulents. It was a well-known hazard for female homeowners who took an interest in landscaping.

As for his sizable embezzlements, which were beyond a doubt, the Rev had gone the tried and true route: a public confession of temptation, followed by an account of his sinfulness in failing to resist it, then by a further account of the discovery of that sinfulness, which had been a bitter herb, but through his humiliation had saved him from himself. This was topped up with a grovelling, tearful request for forgiveness from both God and man, in particular from the members of the Church of PetrOleum. Bingo, he was absolved, washed clean of stains, and ready for a new start. For who could find it in his heart to withhold forgiveness from a fellow human being who was so obviously contrite?