Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

“Crake, you dickhead,” he says. He feels like weeping. Then he hears a voice—his own!—saying boohoo ; he sees it, as if it’s a printed word in a comic-strip balloon. Water leaks down his face.

“Not this again,” he says. What’s the sensation? It isn’t anger exactly; it’s vexation. An old word but serviceable. Vexat ion takes in more than Crake, and indeed why blame Crake alone?

Maybe he’s merely envious. Envious yet again. He too would like to be invisible and adored. He too would like to be elsewhere. No hope for that: he’s up to his neck in the here and now.

He slows to a shamble, then to a halt. Oh, boohoo! Why can’t he control himself? On the other hand, why bother, since nobody’s watching? Still, the noise he’s making seems to him like the exaggerated howling of a clown—like misery performed for applause.

Stop s nivelling, son, says his father’s voice. Pull yourself together. You’re the man around here.

“Right!” Snowman yells. “What exactly would you suggest? You were such a great example!”

But irony is lost on the trees. He wipes his nose with his stick-free hand and keeps walking.

It’s nine in the morning, sun clock, by the time Snowman leaves the Fish Path to turn inland. As soon as he’s out of the sea breeze the humidity shoots up, and he attracts a coterie of small green biting flies. He’s barefoot—his shoes disintegrated some time ago, and in any case they were too hot and damp—but he doesn’t need them now because the soles of his feet are hard as old rubber. Nevertheless he walks cautiously: there might be broken glass, torn metal. Or there might be snakes, or other things that could give him a nasty bite, and he has no weapon apart from the stick.

At first he’s walking under trees, formerly parkland. Some distance away he hears the barking cough of a bobkitten. That’s the sound they make as a warning: perhaps it’s a male, and it’s met another male bobkitten. There’ll be a fight, with the winner taking all—all the females in the territory—and dispatching their kittens, if he can get away with it, to make room for his own genetic package.

Those things were introduced as a control, once the big green rabbits had become such a prolific and resistant pest. Smaller than bobcats, less aggressive—that was the official story about the bobkittens. They were supposed to eliminate feral cats, thus improving the almost non-existent songbird population. The bobkittens wouldn’t bother much about birds, as they would lack the lightness and agility necessary to catch them. Thus went the theory.

All of which came true, except that the bobkittens soon got out of control in their turn. Small dogs went missing from backyards, babies from prams; short joggers were mauled. Not in the Compounds, of course, and rarely in the Modules, but there’d been a lot of grousing from the pleeblanders. He should keep a lookout for tracks, and be careful of overhanging branches: he doesn’t like the thought of one of those things landing on his head.

There are always the wolvogs to worry about. But wolvogs are nocturnal hunters: in the heat of the day they tend to sleep, like most things with fur.

Every so often there’s a more open space—the remains of a drive-in campsite, with a picnic table and one of those outdoor-barbecue fireplaces, though nobody used them very much once it got so warm and began to rain every afternoon. He comes upon one now, fungi sprouting from the decaying table, the barbecue covered in bindweed.

Off to the side, from what is probably a glade where the tents and trailers used to be set up, he can hear laughter and singing, and shouts of admiration and encouragement. There must be a mating going on, a rare-enough occasion among the people: Crake had worked out the numbers, and had decreed that once every three years per female was more than enough.

There’ll be the standard quintuplet, four men and the woman in heat. Her condition will be obvious to all from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen—a trick of variable pigmentation filched from the baboons, with a contribution from the expandable chromosphores of the octopus. As Crake used to say, Think of an ad aptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.

Since it’s only the blue tissue and the pheromones released by it that stimulate the males, there’s no more unrequited love these days, no more thwarted lust; no more shadow between the desire and the act. Courtship begins at the first whiff, the first faint blush of azure, with the males presenting flowers to the females—just as male penguins present round stones, said Crake, or as the male silverfish presents a sperm packet. At the same time they indulge in musical outbursts, like songbirds. Their penises turn bright blue to match the blue abdomens of the females, and they do a sort of blue-dick dance number, erect members waving to and fro in unison, in time to the foot movements and the singing: a feature suggested to Crake by the sexual semaphoring of crabs. From amongst the floral tributes the female chooses four flowers, and the sexual ardour of the unsuccessful candidates dissipates immediately, with no hard feelings left. Then, when the blue of her abdomen has reached its deepest shade, the female and her quartet find a secluded spot and go at it until the woman becomes pregnant and her blue colouring fades. And that is that.

No more No means yes , anyway, thinks Snowman. No more prostitution, no sexual abuse of children, no haggling over the price, no pimps, no sex slaves. No more rape. The five of them will roister for hours, three of the men standing guard and doing the singing and shouting while the fourth one copulates, turn and turn about. Crake has equipped these women with ultra-strong vulvas—extra skin layers, extra muscles—so they can sustain these marathons. It no longer matters who the father of the inevitable child may be, since there’s no more property to inherit, no father-son loyalty required for war. Sex is no longer a mysterious rite, viewed with ambivalence or downright loathing, conducted in the dark and inspiring suicides and murders. Now it’s more like an athletic demonstration, a free-spirited romp.

Maybe Crake was right, thinks Snowman. Under the old dispensation, sexual competition had been relentless and cruel: for every pair of happy lovers there was a dejected onlooker, the one excluded. Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn’t get in there yourself.

That had been the milder form: the single man at the window, drinking himself into oblivion to the mournful strains of the tango. But such things could escalate into violence. Extreme emotions could be lethal. If I can’t have you nobody will , and so forth. Death could set in.

“How much misery,” Crake said one lunchtime—this must have been when they were in their early twenties and Crake was already at the Watson-Crick Institute—“how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won’t or can’t love you. As a species we’re pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there’d be no more sexual torment. Better plan—make it cyclical and also inevitable, as in the other mammals. You’d never want someone you couldn’t have.”

“True enough,” Jimmy replied. Or Jim, as he was now insisting, without results: everyone still called him Jimmy. “But think what we’d be giving up.”

“Such as?”