Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam

“She went off with someone else?”

“Nothing so pleasant. The Corps decided to take over the sex trade: it was so lucrative. They bought a few politicians, got it legalized, set up SeksMart, forced everyone in the trade to roll in. Katrina played at first, but then they wanted to institute policies she found unacceptable. ‘Institute policies,’ that’s how they put it. She had scruples, so she became inconvenient. They got rid of the python too.”

“Oh,” says Toby. “I’m sorry.”

“So was I,” says Zeb. “Adam was more than sorry. He pined, he dwindled. Something went missing in him. I think he’d had a dream of installing Katrina in the Garden. Not that it would have worked out. Wrong wardrobe preferences.”

“That’s very sad,” says Toby.

“Yeah. It was. I should’ve been more understanding. Instead, I picked a fight.”

“Oh,” says Toby. “Only you?”

“Maybe both of us. But it was no holds barred. I said he was just like the Rev, really, only inside out, like a sock: neither one of them gave a shit about anyone else. It was always their way or zero. He said I’d always had criminal tendencies, and that was why I couldn’t understand pacifism and inner peace. I said that by doing nothing he was colluding with the powers that were fucking the planet, especially the OilCorps and the Church of PetrOleum. He said I had no faith, and that the Creator would sort the earth out in good time, most likely very soon, and that those who were attuned and had a true love for the Creation would not perish. I said that was a selfish view. He said I listened to the whisperings of earthly power and I only wanted attention, the way I always had as a child when I pushed the boundaries.” He sighs again.

“Then what?” says Toby.

“Then I got mad. So I said something I wish I’d never said.” A pause. Toby waits. “I said he wasn’t really my brother, not genetically. He was no relation to me.” Another pause. “He didn’t believe me at first. I backed it up, I told him about the test Pilar had done. He just crumpled.”

“Oh,” says Toby. “I’m sorry.”

“I felt terrible right away, but I couldn’t unsay it. After that we tried to patch it up and paper it over. But things festered. We had to go our own ways.”

“Katuro went with you,” says Toby. She knows this for a fact. “Rebecca. Black Rhino. Shackleton, Crozier, and Oates.”

“Amanda, at first,” says Zeb. “She got out, though. Then new ones joined. Ivory Bill, Lotis Blue, White Sedge. All of them.”

“And Swift Fox,” says Toby.

“Yeah. And her. We thought Glenn — we thought Crake was our inside guy, feeding us stuff from the Corps through the MaddAddam chatroom. But all along, he was setting us up so he could drag us into the Paradice dome to do his people-splicing for him.”

“And his plague-virus-mixing?” says Toby.

“Not from what I hear,” says Zeb. “He did that on his own.”

“To make his perfect world,” says Toby.

“Not perfect,” says Zeb. “He wouldn’t claim that. More like a reboot. And he succeeded in his own way. Up to now.”

“He didn’t anticipate the Painballers,” says Toby.

“He should have. Or something like them,” says Zeb.

It’s very quiet, down there in the forest. A Craker child is singing a little in its sleep. Around the swimming pool the Pigoons are dreaming, emitting small grunts like puffs of smoke. Far away something cries: a bobkitten?

There’s a faint cool breeze; the leaves go about their business, which is rustling; the moon travels through the sky, moving towards its next phase, marking time.

“You should get some sleep,” says Zeb.

“Both of us should,” says Toby. “We’ll need our energy.”

“I’ll spell you — two on, two off. Wish I was twenty years younger,” says Zeb. “Not that those Painball guys are in great shape, you’d think. God knows what they’ve been eating.”

“The Pigoons are fit enough,” says Toby.

“They can’t pull triggers,” says Zeb. He pauses. “If we both come out of this tomorrow, maybe we should do the bonfire thing. With the green branches.”

Toby laughs. “I thought you said it was a meaningless empty symbol.”

“Even a meaningless empty symbol can mean something sometimes,” says Zeb. “You rejecting me?”

“No,” says Toby. “How could you even think it?”

“I fear the worst,” says Zeb.

“Would that be the worst? Me rejecting you?”

“Don’t push a guy when he’s feeling skinless.”

“I just have trouble believing you’re serious,” says Toby.

Zeb sighs. “Get some sleep, babe. We’ll work it out later. Tomorrow’s on the way.”

Peach-coloured haze in the east. Day is breaking, so cool and delicate at first, the sun not yet a hot spotlight. The crows are abroad, signalling to one another. Caw! Cawcaw! Caw! What are they saying? Look out! Look out! Or maybe: Party time soon! Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.

Dump the morbid soliloquies, Toby tells herself. What’s needed is a positive outlook. That was what trumpet fanfares were for, and drums, and march music. We are invincible, that music told the soldiers. They had to believe in them, those lying melodies, because who can walk intrepidly towards death without? The bear-shirted berserkers were said to have doped themselves up before battle with northern hallucinogenic fungus: Amanita muscaria , perhaps, or so said Pilar, at the Gardeners. Historical Mushroom Practices, for senior students only .

Maybe I should spike the water bottles, she thinks. Poison your brain, then stride forth and kill people. Or be killed.

She stands, unwinds herself from the pink bedspread, shivers. There’s been a dew: dampness beads her hair, her eyebrows. Her foot’s asleep. Her rifle is where she left it, within reach; and the binoculars as well.

Zeb’s already up, leaning on the railing. “I dozed off last night,” she says to him. “Not much of a watchperson. Sorry.”

“So did I,” he says. “It’s okay, the Pigoons would’ve sounded the alarm.”

“Sounded?” she says, laughing a little.

“You’re such a stickler. Okay, grunted the alarm. Our porky pals have been busy.”

Toby looks where he’s looking: over and down. The Pigoons have levelled the meadow, all the way around the spa building, wherever there were tall weeds or shrubs. Five of the larger ones are still at work, trampling and rolling on anything higher than an ankle.

“Nobody’s going to be sneaking up on them, that’s for sure,” says Zeb. “Clever buggers, they know about cover.” They’ve left one tuft of foliage in the middle distance, Toby notes. She peers at it with the binoculars. It must mark the remains of that boar she’d killed, back when there was a turf war between her and the Pigoons over the subject of the AnooYoo garden. Oddly enough they hadn’t devoured the carcass, though they’d seemed willing enough to eat their dead piglet. Was there a hierarchy in such matters, among them? Sows eat their farrow, but nobody eats the boars? What next, commemorative statues?

“Too bad about the lumiroses,” she says.

“Yeah, planted them myself. But they’ll grow back. Darn things are as hard to kill as kudzu, once they get going.”

“What will the Crakers have for breakfast, though?” says Toby. “Now that the foliage is gone. We can’t have them wandering over there, close to the forest.”