From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook
43
TOBY. THE FEAST OF SERPENT WISDOM
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
The Feast of Serpent Wisdom. Old Moon. Toby enters the Feast Day and the moon phase on her pink notepaper with the winky eyes and kissy lips. Old moon is a pruning week, said the Gardeners. Plant by the new, slash by the old. A good time to apply sharp tools to yourself, hack off any extraneous parts that might need trimming. Your head, for instance.
“A joke,” she says out loud. She should avoid such morbid thoughts.
Today she will pare her fingernails. Toenails, as well: they shouldn’t be permitted to run rampant. She could give herself a manicure: there are lots of cosmetic supplies in this place, whole shelves of them. AnooYoo Luscious Polish. AnooYoo Plum Skin Plumper. AnooYoo Fountain of Yooth Total Immersion: Shed That Scaly Epidermis! But why bother to polish or plump or shed? But why not bother? Either choice is equally pointless.
Do it for Yoo, AnooYoo used to croon. The Noo Yoo. I could have a whole new me, thinks Toby. Yet another whole new me, fresh as a snake. How many would that add up to, by now?
She trudges up the stairs to the rooftop, hoists her binoculars, surveys her visible realm. There’s motion in the weeds, over by the forest edge: could it be the pigs? If so, they’re keeping a low profile. Vultures are still clustering around the dead boar. There’ll be lots of nanobioforms at work on it: it must be getting ripe by now.
Here’s something different. Closer to the building, a clump of sheep is grazing. Five of them: three Mo’Hairs – a green one, a pink one, and a bright purple one – and two other sheep that appear to be conventional. The long hair of the Mo’Hairs isn’t in good shape – there are clot-like snarls in it, and twigs and dry leaves. Onscreen, in advertisements, their hair had been shiny – you’d see the sheep tossing its hair, then a beautiful girl tossing a mane of the same hair. More hair with Mo’Hair! But they’re not faring so well without their salon treatments.
The sheep clump together, lift their heads. Toby sees why: crouching low in the weeds, two liobams are on the hunt. Maybe the sheep smell them, but the scent must be confusing – part lion, part lamb.
The purple Mo’Hair is the most jittery. Don’t look like prey, Toby thinks at it. Sure enough, it’s the purple one the liobams go after. They cut it out from the group and chase it for a short distance. The pathetic beast is impeded by its coiffure – it looks like a purple fright wig on legs – and the liobams quickly pull it down. Finding the throat under all that hair padding takes them a while, and the Mo’Hair scrambles to its feet several times before the liobams finish it off. Then they settle down to eat. The other sheep have run awkwardly away in a muddle of bleating, but now they’re grazing again.
She’d intended to do some gardening today, pick some greens: her stock of preserved and dried foods is waning like the moon. But she decides against it because of the liobams. Cats of all kinds will set ambushes: one frisks around in the open to distract your attention while another one slips quietly up behind.
In the afternoon she takes a nap. An old moon draws the past, said Pilar: whatever arrives from the shadows you must greet as a blessing. And the past does come back to her: the white frame house of her childhood, the ordinary trees, the woodland in the background, tinged with blue as if there’s haze. A deer is outlined against it, standing rigid as a lawn ornament, ears pricked. Her father’s digging with a shovel, over by the pile of picket fencing; her mother’s a momentary glimpse at the kitchen window. Perhaps she’s making soup. Everything tranquil, as if it would never end. But where is Toby in this picture? For it is a picture. It’s flat, like a picture on a wall. She’s not there.
She opens her eyes: tears on her cheeks. I wasn’t in the picture because I’m the frame, she thinks. It’s not really the past. It’s only me, holding it all together. It’s only a handful of fading neural pathways. It’s only a mirage.
Surely I was an optimistic person back then, she thinks. Back there. I woke up whistling. I knew there were things wrong in the world, they were referred to, I’d seen them in the onscreen news. But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else.
By the time she’d reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall, then the knock at the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.
We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake. It never went away, even among the Gardeners. Especially – as time wore on – among the Gardeners.
44
The Sunday after Serpent Wisdom Day was Saint Jacques Cousteau’s Day. It was Year Eighteen – the year of rupture, though Toby did not yet know that. She remembers negotiating the Sinkhole streets on her way to the Wellness Clinic for the regular Sunday-evening Adams and Eves Council. She wasn’t looking forward to it: lately those meetings had been sliding into squabbles.
The week before, they’d spent all their time on theological problems. The matter of Adam’s teeth, for starters.
“Adam’s teeth?” Toby had blurted. She needed to work on controlling such expressions of surprise, which might be read as criticism.
Adam One had explained that some of the children were upset because Zeb had pointed out the differences between the biting, rending teeth of carnivores and the grinding, munching teeth of herbivores. The children wanted to know why – if Adam was created as a vegetarian, as he surely was – human teeth should show such mixed characteristics.
“Shouldn’t have brought it up,” Stuart had muttered.
“We changed at the Fall,” Nuala had said brightly. “We evolved. Once Man started to eat meat, well, naturally …”
That would be putting the cart before the horse, said Adam One; they could not achieve their goal of reconciling the findings of Science with their sacramental view of Life simply by overriding the rules of the former. He asked them to ponder this conundrum, and propose solutions at a later date.
Then they turned to the problem of the animal-skin clothing provided by God for Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis 3. The troublesome “coats of skins.”
“The children are very worried about them,” Nuala had said. Toby could understand why they’d been so dismayed. Had God killed and peeled some of his beloved Creatures to make these skin coats? If so, He’d set a very bad example to Man. If not, where had these skin coats come from?
“Maybe those animals died a natural death.” That was Rebecca. “And God didn’t see them going to waste.” She was adamant about using up leftovers.
“Maybe very small animals,” Katuro had said. “Short life spans.”
“That is one possibility,” Adam One had said. “Let it stand for now, until a more plausible explanation presents itself.”
Early in her Eveship, Toby had asked if it was really necessary to split such theological hairs, and Adam One had said that it was. “The truth is,” he’d said, “most people don’t care about other Species, not when times get hard. All they care about is their next meal, naturally enough: we have to eat or die. But what if it’s God doing the caring? We’ve evolved to believe in gods, so this belief bias of ours must confer an evolutionary advantage. The strictly materialist view – that we’re an experiment animal protein has been doing on itself – is far too harsh and lonely for most, and leads to nihilism. That being the case, we need to push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction by pointing out the hazards of annoying God by a violation of His trust in our stewardship.”
“What you mean is, with God in the story there’s a penalty,” said Toby.
“Ye
s,” said Adam One. “There’s a penalty without God in the story too, needless to say. But people are less likely to credit that. If there’s a penalty, they want a penalizer. They dislike senseless catastrophe.”
What would the topic be today? Toby wondered. Which fruit Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge? It couldn’t have been an apple, considering the state of horticulture at that time. A date? A bergamot? The Council had long been deliberating over that one. Toby had thought of proposing a strawberry, but then, strawberries didn’t grow on trees.
As she walked, Toby was conscious, as always, of the others on the street. She could see in front of her and to the sides, despite her sunhat. She made use of pauses in doorways, of reflections in windows to check behind. But she could never shake the feeling that someone was sneaking up on her – that a hand would descend on her neck, a hand with red and blue veining and a bracelet of baby skulls. Blanco hadn’t been seen in the Sewage Lagoon for some time – still in Painball, said some; no, overseas fighting as a mercenary, said others – but he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.
There was someone behind her – she could feel it, like a tingling between her shoulders. She stepped into a doorway, turned to face the sidewalk, then sagged with relief: it was Zeb.
“Hi, babe,” he said. “Hot enough?”
He strolled along beside her, singing to himself:
Nobody gives a snot,
Nobody gives a snot,
That is why we’re on the fucking spot,
Cause nobody gives a snot!
“Maybe you shouldn’t sing,” said Toby neutrally. It wasn’t good policy to call attention to yourself on a pleeb sidewalk, especially not for Gardeners.
“Can’t help it,” said Zeb cheerfully. “God’s fault. Wove music into the fabric of our being. Hears you better when you sing, so He’s listening to this right now. I hope He’s enjoying it,” he added in a pious, mocking Adam One voice – a voice he was using a lot, though not when Adam One was around.
Lurking insubordination, thought Toby: he’s tired of being the Beta Chimp.
Since becoming an Eve she’d gained much insight into Zeb’s status among the Gardeners. Each Gardener Rooftop site and Truffle cell ran its own affairs, but every half-year they’d send delegates to a central convention, which for security reasons was never held in the same abandoned warehouse twice. Zeb was always a delegate: he was well equipped to make it through the more jagged pleebland neighbourhoods and around the CorpSeCorps checkpoints without being mugged, swarmed, spraygunned, or arrested. Maybe that was why he was allowed to stretch the Gardeners’ rules the way he did.
Adam One seldom attended the conventions. The journey was hazardous, and the implication was that although Zeb was expendable, Adam One was not. In theory the Gardener fellowship had no overall head, but in practice its leader was Adam One, revered founder and guru. The soft hammer of his word carried a lot of weight at the Gardener conventions, and since he was rarely there to use that hammer himself, Zeb wielded it for him. Which must be a temptation: what if Zeb were to jettison Adam One’s decrees and substitute his own? By such methods had regimes been changed and emperors toppled.
“You’ve had some bad news?” Toby asked Zeb now. The singing was the clue: Zeb was annoyingly upbeat whenever the news was bad.
“In point of fact,” said Zeb. “We’ve lost contact with one of our insiders in Compoundland – our boy courier. He’s gone dark.”
Toby had learned about the boy courier once she’d become an Eve. He’d run Pilar’s biopsy samples and brought her the fatal diagnosis – both of them concealed in a jar of honey. But that was all she knew: information was shared among the Adams and Eves, but only as much as was necessary. Pilar’s death was years ago: the boy courier couldn’t be much of a boy any longer.
“Gone dark?” she said. “How?” Had he had a pigmentation makeover? Surely not that.
“He used to be at HelthWyzer, but now he’s graduated from high school and moved over to the Watson-Crick Institute, and he’s fallen off our screen. Not that we have that much of a screen, as such,” he added.
Toby waited. With Zeb, there was no point in pushing or fishing.
“Between us, right?” he said after a while.
“Of course,” said Toby. I’m just an ear, she thought. A doggie-type faithful companion. A well of silence. Nothing more to it. After Lucerne had flown the coop four years ago she’d wondered briefly if there might be more, sometime, between her and Zeb. But nothing had come of that hankering. I’m the wrong body type, she thought. Too muscular. No doubt he likes the jiggle.
“Council doesn’t know about this, okay?” said Zeb. “Him going dark will just make them nervous.”
“I’ll forget I heard it,” said Toby.
“His dad was a friend of Pilar’s – she used to be Botanic Splices, at HelthWyzer. I knew them both, at that time. But he got unhappy when he found out they were seeding folks with illnesses via those souped-up supplement pills of theirs – using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses. Nifty scam, charging top dollar for stuff they caused themselves. Troubled his conscience. So the dad fed us some interesting data. Then he had an accident.”
“Accident?” said Toby.
“Went off an overpass at rush hour. Blood gumbo.”
“That’s a bit graphic,” said Toby. “For a vegetarian.”
“Sorry about that,” said Zeb. “Suicide, was the rumour.”
“It wasn’t, I take it,” said Toby.
“We call it Corpicide. If you’re Corp and you do something they don’t like, you’re dead. It’s like you shot yourself.”
“I see,” said Toby.
“Anyway, back to our young guy. The mother was Diagnostics at HelthWyzer, he’d hacked her lab sign-in code, he could run stuff through the system for us. Genius hacker. The mom’s married a top corp guy at HelthWyzer Central and the kid went with her.”
“Where Lucerne is,” said Toby.
Zeb ignored this. “Burned through their firewalls, cooked up a few onscreen identities, got back in touch. We heard from him for a while, but then nothing.”
“Maybe he’s lost interest,” said Toby. “Or else they caught him.”
“Maybe,” said Zeb. “But he’s a three-dimensional chess player, he likes a challenge. He’s nimble. Also he’s got no fear.”
“How many like that do we have?” Toby asked. “In the Compounds?”
“Nobody that good at hacking,” said Zeb. “This guy’s one of a kind.”
45
They reached the Wellness Clinic and entered the Vinegar Room. Toby moved around behind the three huge barrels, unlocked the bottle shelf, and swung it out so she could open the inner door. She could hear Zeb sucking in his stomach to squeeze past the barrels: he wasn’t softly fat, but he was large.
The inner room was almost filled by a table patched together from old floorboards, with a motley collection of chairs. On one wall there was a recent watercolour – Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera – done by Nuala in one of her too frequent moments of artistic inspiration. The Saint was shown with the sun behind him, giving him a halo effect. On his face was an ecstatic smile, in his hand was a collecting jar containing several black spots. These were the bees, Toby supposed, or possibly the ants. As was often the case with Nuala’s paintings of Saints, one of the arms was longer than the other.
There was a gentle knock, and Adam One slipped through the door. The rest followed in their turn.
Adam One was a different person behind the scenes. Not entirely different – no less sincere – but more practical. Also more tactical. “Let us say a silent prayer for the success of our deliberations,” he began. The meetings always opened this way. Toby had some difficulty praying in the close confines of the hidden room: she was too aware of stomach rumblings, of the waftings of clandestine odours, of the creaks and shiftings of bodies. But then, she had some difficulty prayi
ng anyway.
The silent prayer seemed to be on a timer. As heads lifted and eyes opened, Adam One glanced around the room. “Is that a new picture?” he said. “On the wall?”
Nuala beamed. “It’s Saint E.O.,” she said. “Wilson. Of Hymenoptera.”
“So like him, my dear,” said Adam One. “Especially the … You are blessed with such talent.” He coughed slightly. “Now to a pressing practical matter. We have just received a very special guest, originally from HelthWyzer Central, though she has been, shall we say, travelling. Despite all obstacles, she’s brought us a gift of genome codes, for which we owe her, not only temporary asylum, but secure Exfernal placement.”
“They’re looking for her,” said Zeb. “She shouldn’t have come back to this country. We’ll have to move her out as fast as possible. Through the FenderBender and over to the Street of Dreams, as usual?”
“If it’s a clear path,” said Adam One. “We can’t take unnecessary risks. We can always keep her hidden in this meeting room, if we have to.”
The ratio of women to men fleeing the Corporations was roughly three to one. Nuala said it was because women were more ethical, Zeb said it was because they were more squeamish, and Philo said it amounted to the same thing. Such fugitives often brought contraband information with them. Formulae. Long lines of code. Test secrets, proprietary lies. What did the Gardeners do with it all? Toby wondered. Surely they didn’t sell it as industrial corp espionage material, though it would fetch a bundle from foreign rivals. As far as she could tell, they just held on to it; though it was possible that Adam One harboured a dream of restoring all the lost Species via their preserved DNA codes, once a more ethical and technically proficient future had replaced the depressing present. They’d cloned the mammoth, so why not all? Was that his vision of the ultimate Ark?
“Our new guest wants to send a message to her son,” said Adam One. “She’s worried about having left him at what may have been a crucial time in his life. Jimmy is this lad’s name. I believe he’s now at the Martha Graham Academy.”
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 53
