Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

“She decided it was too dangerous,” says Zeb. “For anyone to open them up and maybe let out whatever was inside them. They didn’t know how to get rid of them. So that bishop stayed right inside HelthWyzer Central as long as she was there. She brought it out with her when she left, and slipped those pills into her own white bishop, in the set she hand-carved. We played with that set of hers, you and me, that time I was recovering. From getting sliced up on one of those pleeb missions I was running for Adam.”

Toby has an image of it: Zeb in the shade, on a hazy afternoon. His arm. Her own hand, moving the white bishop, the death-carrier. Unknown to her then, like so much.

“You always played Black,” she says. “What happened to that bishop when Pilar died?”

“She willed her set to Glenn, along with a sealed letter. She’d taught him to play chess, back at HelthWyzer West, when he was little. But by the time she died, his mother had married the guy she’d been fooling around with — so-called Uncle Pete — and they’d been upgraded to HelthWyzer Central. Pilar kept in touch with Glenn through the cryptics, and Glenn was the one who arranged the cancer tests for her, found out she was terminal.”

“What was in the letter?”

“It was sealed. How to open the bishop, is my guess. I would have filched it, but Adam had firm control of it.”

“So Adam just handed that stuff over, the chess set with the pills inside? To Glenn — to Crake? He was only a teenager.”

“Pilar said he was mature for his age, and Adam felt Pilar’s deathbed wishes should be respected.”

“What about you? It was before I became an Eve, but you were on the council then. They discussed important decisions like that. You must have had an opinion. You were an Adam — Adam Seven.”

“The others agreed with Adam One. I thought it was a bad idea. What if the kid tried those things out on someone without knowing exactly what they’d do, the way I had?”

“He must have, later,” says Toby. “With some additions of his own. That must’ve been the core of the BlyssPluss pills: what you got after you’d experienced the bliss.”

“Yeah,” says Zeb. “I think you’re right.”

“Do you think Pilar knew what use he’d make of those microbes or viruses or whatever they were?” she asks. “Eventually?” She remembers Pilar’s wrinkled little face, her kindness, her serenity, her strength. But underneath, there had always been a hard resolve. You wouldn’t call it meanness or evil. Fatalism, perhaps.

“Let’s put it this way,” says Zeb. “All the real Gardeners believed the human race was overdue for a population crash. It would happen anyway, and maybe sooner was better.”

“But you weren’t a real Gardener.”

“Pilar thought I was, because of my Vigil. Part of the deal with Adam One was that I had to take on a title, that Adam Seven thing: he said it would confer the needed authority, as he put it. Status enhancer. To become one of those, you had to undergo a Vigil. See what was going on with your spirit animal.”

“I did that,” said Toby. “Talking tomato plants, in-depth stars.”

“Yeah, all of that. I don’t know what old Pilar mixed into the enhancer, but it was potent.”

“What did you see?”

A pause. “The bear. The one I killed and ate, when I was walking out of the Barrens.”

“Did it have a message for you?” says Toby. Her own spirit animal had been enigmatic.

“Not exactly. But it gave me to understand that it was living on in me. It wasn’t even pissed with me. It seemed quite friendly. Amazing what happens when you fuck with your own neurons.”

Once he was Adam Seven, Zeb could install himself and Lucerne and little Ren as bona fide members of the God’s Gardeners. They didn’t meld very well. Ren was homesick for the Compound and her father, and Lucerne had too great an interest in nail polish to make it as a female Gardener. Her investment in vegetable preparation was nil, and she hated the required outfits — the dark, baggy dresses, the bib aprons. Zeb ought to have known she wasn’t going to stick with this arrangement, over time.

Zeb himself had no affinity for slug and snail relocation or soap-making or kitchen cleanup, so he and Adam came to an understanding about what his duties would be. He taught the kids survival skills, and Urban Bloodshed Limitation, which was street fighting viewed from a loftier perspective. As the Gardeners gathered members and expanded, and set up branch locations in different cities, he ran courier among the different groups. The Gardeners refused to use cellphones or technology of any kind; apart, that is, from the one secret souped-up computer that Zeb kept at his own disposal, and fitted out with spyware so he could snoop on the CorpSeCorps, and firewalled up the yin-yang.

Running courier for Adam had its advantages — he was away from home, so he didn’t have to listen to Lucerne’s complaints. But it also had its disadvantages — he was away from home, which gave Lucerne more to complain about. She liked to nag on about his commitment issues: why, for instance, had he never asked her to go through the God’s Gardeners Partnership ceremony with him?

“Where you jumped over a bonfire together and then traded green branches while everyone stood in a circle, and then they had some kind of pious banquet,” says Zeb. “She really wanted me to do that with her. I said as far as I was concerned it was a meaningless empty symbol. Then she’d accuse me of humiliating her.”

“If it was meaningless, why didn’t you do it?” says Toby. “It might have satisfied her. Made her happier.”

“Fat chance,” says Zeb. “I just didn’t want to. I hated being pushed.”

“She was right, you had commitment issues,” says Toby.

“Guess so. Anyway, she dumped me. Went back to the Compounds, took Ren with her. And then I wanted the Gardeners to get more activist, and everything unravelled.”

“I wasn’t there any more, by that time,” says Toby. “Blanco got out of Painball and went after me. I was a liability to the Gardeners. You helped me change my identity.”

“Years of practice.” He sighs. “After you left, things got severe. The God’s Gardeners was getting too big and successful for the CorpSeCorps. To them, it looked like a resistance movement in the making.

“Adam was using the Garden as a safe house for escapees from the BioCorps, and they were beginning to figure that out; so the CorpSemen were paying the pleebmobs to attack us. Being a pacifist, Adam One couldn’t bring himself to weaponize the Garden. I could’ve helped him turn a toy potato gun into an effective short-range shrapnel thrower, but he wouldn’t hear of it. It was too unsaintly for him.”

“You’re making fun,” says Toby.

“Just describing. No matter what was at stake, he couldn’t go on the offensive, not directly. Remember, he was the firstborn; the Rev got hold of him early, before either of us figured out what a fraud the murderous old bugger actually was. What stuck with Adam was that he had to be good. Gooder than good, so God would love him. Guess he was going to do the Rev thing himself, but do it right — everything the Rev had pretended to be, he would be in reality. It was a tall order.”

“But none of that stuck with you.”

“Not so I noticed. I was the devil-kid, remember? That let me off the goodness hook. Adam depended on that: he never would have turned the Rev into a raspberry soda with his own two hands. He just put me in the way of it. Even so, he had some guilt issues: the Rev was his father, like it or not, and honour your parents, etcetera, even if one of them had buried the other one in the rock garden. He felt he should be forgiving. He beat himself up a lot, Adam did. It was worse after he lost Katrina WooWoo.”