The MaddAddam Trilogy

by Margaret Atwood

  Three Crakers – two women and a man – are sitting beside Jimmy’s hammock on chairs that may once have belonged with the dining table: dark wood, with retro lyre backs and yellow-and-brown-striped satiny upholstery. The Crakers look wrong on these chairs, but they also look pleased with themselves, as if they’re doing something quietly adventurous. Their bodies gleam like gold-threaded spandex; huge pink kudzu moths are fluttering around their heads in living halos.

  They’re preternaturally beautiful, thinks Toby. Unlike us. We must seem subhuman to them, with our flapping extra skins, our aging faces, our warped bodies, too thin, too fat, too hairy, too knobbly. Perfection exacts a price, but it’s the imperfect who pay it.

  Each of the Crakers has one hand on Jimmy. They’re purring; the hum gets louder as Toby walks over to them.

  “Greetings, Oh Toby,” says the taller of the two women. How do they know her name? They must have listened more carefully than she’d thought last night. And how should she reply? What are their own names, and is it polite to ask?

  “Greetings,” she says. “How is Snowman-the-Jimmy today?”

  “He is growing stronger, Oh Toby,” says the shorter woman. The others smile.

  Jimmy does look somewhat better. He’s pinker, he’s cooler, and he’s sound asleep. They’ve fixed him up: tidied his hair, cleaned his beard. On his head is a battered red baseball cap, on his wrist a round watch with a blank face. A pair of sunglasses with one eye missing is perched awkwardly on his nose.

  “Maybe he’d be more comfortable without those things on him,” says Toby, indicating the hat and the sunglasses.

  “He must have those things,” says the man. “Those are the things of Snowman-the-Jimmy.”

  “He needs them,” says the shorter woman. “Crake says he must have them. See, here is the thing for listening to Crake.” She lifts the arm with the watch on it.

  “And he sees Crake with this,” says the man, pointing to the sunglasses. “Only he.” Toby wants to ask what the hat is for, but she refrains.

  “Why have you moved him outside?” she asks.

  “He did not like it in that dark place,” says the man. “In there.” He nods towards the house.

  “Snowman-the-Jimmy can travel better out here,” says the taller woman.

  “He’s travelling?” says Toby. “While he’s asleep?” Could they be describing some dream they imagine Jimmy is dreaming?

  “Yes,” says the man. “He is travelling to here.”

  “He is running, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. Sometimes walking, because he is tired. Sometimes the Pig Ones are chasing him, because they do not understand. Sometimes he is climbing into a tree,” says the shorter woman.

  “When he gets to here, he will wake up,” says the man.

  “Where was he when he started this travelling?” says Toby cautiously. She doesn’t want to convey disbelief.

  “He was in the Egg,” says the taller woman. “Where we were, in the beginning. He was with Crake, and with Oryx. They came out of the sky to meet with him in the Egg, and to tell him more of the stories, so he can tell them to us.”

  “That is where the stories come from,” says the man. “But the Egg is too dark now. Crake and Oryx can be there, but Snowman-the-Jimmy cannot be there any more.” The three of them smile warmly at Toby, as if certain she’s understood every word they’ve said.

  “May I look at Snowman-the-Jimmy’s hurt foot?” she asks politely. They have no objection, though they keep their hands in place and continue with their purring.

  Toby checks the maggots underneath the cloth she wrapped around Jimmy’s foot the night before. They’re busily at work, cleaning up the dead flesh; the swelling and oozing are diminishing. This batch of maggots is nearing maturity: she’ll have to get hold of some rotting meat tomorrow, leave it in the sun, attract flies, create new maggots.

  “Snowman-the-Jimmy is coming closer to us,” says the short woman. “Then he will tell us the stories of Crake, as he always did when he was living in his tree. But today you must tell them to us.”

  “Me?” says Toby. “But I don’t know the stories of Crake!”

  “You will learn them,” says the man. “It will happen. Because Snowman-the-Jimmy is the helper of Crake, and you are the helper of Snowman-the-Jimmy. That is why.”

  “You must put on this red thing,” says the shorter woman. “It is called a hat.”

  “Yes, a hat,” says the tall woman. “In the evening, when it is moth time. You will put this hat of Snowman-the-Jimmy on your head, and listen to this shiny round thing that you put on your arm.”

  “Yes,” says the other woman, nodding. “And then the words of Crake will come out of your mouth. That is how Snowman-the-Jimmy would do it.”

  “See?” says the man. He points to the lettering on the hat: Red Sox. “Crake made this. He will help you. Oryx will help too, if the story has an animal in it.”

  “We will bring a fish, when it is getting dark. Snowman-the-Jimmy always eats a fish, because Crake says he must eat it. Then you will put on the hat and listen to this Crake thing, and say the stories of Crake.”

  “Yes, how Crake made us in the Egg, and cleared away the chaos of bad men. How we left the Egg and walked here with Snowman-the-Jimmy, because there were more leaves for us to eat.”

  “You will eat the fish, and then you will say the stories of Crake, as Snowman-the-Jimmy always did,” says the shorter woman. They look at her with their uncanny green eyes and smile reassuringly. They seem entirely confident of her abilities.

  What are my choices? thinks Toby. I can’t say no. They may get disappointed, and go away by themselves, back to the beach, where the Painballers can grab them. They’d be easy prey, especially the children. How can I let that happen?

  “All right,” she says. “I will come in the evening. I will put on the hat of Jimmy, I mean Snowman-the-Jimmy, and tell you the stories of Crake.”

  “And listen to the shiny thing,” says the man. “And eat the fish.” It seems to be a ritual.

  “Yes, all of that,” says Toby.

  Shit, she thinks. I hope they cook the fish.

  Story

  While gathering up the breakfast dishes, Rebecca thought she saw a grim hatchet-face looking at her from under the trees. It seems to have been a false alarm, thinks Toby: no Painballers appeared, and, even better, no spraygun holes opened in Rebecca and no Craker child was yanked screaming into the shrubbery. Still, everyone’s tense.

  Toby asks the Craker mothers to move closer to the cobb house. When they look puzzled, she tells them it’s a message from Oryx.

  The day unscrolls without incident. No travellers return: no Shackleton, no Black Rhino or Katuro. No Zeb. Toby spends the rest of the morning in the kitchen garden, digging and weeding: a mindless exercise that calms her and fills the time. There are some chickenpeas beginning to sprout, and spinach leaves thrusting up, and the feathery tops of carrots. Her rifle is propped nearby.

  Crozier and Zunzuncito herd the Mo’Hairs out of their paddock so they can graze. Both carry sprayguns: in a Painballer confrontation they’d have the advantage – two weapons against one – unless they were taken by surprise. Toby hopes they’ll remember to check above their heads if there are trees nearby: that must have been how the Painballers caught Amanda and Ren, by dropping down from above.

  Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood. The loser falls over with a scream, followed with a foolish expression, mouth agape, eyes akimbo. Those old biblical kings, setting their feet on conquered necks, stringing up rival kings on trees, rejoicing in piles of heads – there was an element of childish glee in all of that.

  Maybe it’s what drove Crake on, thinks Toby. Maybe he wanted to end it. Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew.

  She eats her lunch early, in solitude, because she’s tagged for sentry with he
r rifle during the regular lunchtime. The food is cold pork and burdock root, with an Oreo cookie from a package gleaned from a pharmacy: a rare treat, carefully rationed. She opens her cookie and licks the white sweet filling before eating the two chocolatey halves: a guilty luxury.

  Before the afternoon thunderstorm, five of the Crakers carry Jimmy into the cobb house, along with his Hey-Diddle-Diddle quilt. Toby sits with him while it rains, checks his wound, manages to raise his head so he drinks some of the mushroom elixir, even though he’s still unconscious. Her supply is running low, but she doesn’t know where to find the right mushrooms for a fresh brew.

  A single Craker remains in the room with them, to purr: the others go away. They don’t like houses; they’d rather be wet than cooped up. Once the rain stops, four other Crakers appear to carry Jimmy outside again.

  The clouds part, the sun comes out. Crozier and Zunzuncito return with the flock of Mo’Hairs. Nothing has happened, they say; or nothing you can put your finger on. The Mo’Hairs were jumpy; it was hard to keep them together. And the crows were making a racket, but what does that tell you? Crows are always making a racket about something.

  “Jumpy, how?” says Toby. “What sort of racket?” But they can’t be more specific.

  Tamaraw, with a denim shirt over her hunched shoulders and a canvas sunhat, attempts to milk the one Mo’Hair that’s producing. The milking doesn’t go smoothly: there’s kicking and bleating, and the pail tips and spills.

  Crozier shows the Crakers how to work the hand pump: a retro decoration once but now the source of their drinking water. God knows what’s in it, thinks Toby: it’s groundwater, and every toxic spill for miles around may have leaked into it. She’ll push for rainwater, at least for drinking; though with faraway fires and maybe nuclear meltdowns sending dirty particulate into the stratosphere, God knows what’s in that as well.

  The Crakers are delighted with the pump; the children scamper over and clamour to have water pumped onto them. After that, Crozier demonstrates the one piece of solar the MaddAddamites have managed to get running; it’s connected to a couple of light bulbs, one in the cooking shack and one in the yard. He tries to explain why the lights go on, but they’re puzzled. It’s obvious to them that the light bulbs are like lumiroses, or the green rabbits that come out at dusk: they glow because Oryx made them that way.

  Supper takes place at the long table. White Sedge in an apron with bluebirds on it and Rebecca with a mauve bath towel tied around her middle with yellow satin ribbon dish out the food from the pots, then sit down. Ren and Lotis Blue are at the far end, coaxing Amanda to eat. The MaddAddamites not on sentry duty filter in from their chores.

  “Greetings, Inaccessible Rail,” says Ivory Bill. He takes pleasure in calling Toby by her old MaddAddam codename. He has a tulip-sprinkled bedsheet draped around his sparse form and a turban-like object made from a matching pillowcase on his head. His angular nose juts out from his leathery face like a beak. It was odd, thinks Toby, how the MaddAddamites chose codenames that mirrored parts of themselves.

  “How’s he doing?” says Manatee. He’s wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat that makes him look like a chubby plantation owner. “Our star patient.”

  “He’s not dead,” says Toby. “But he’s not what you’d call conscious.”

  “If he ever was,” says Ivory Bill. “We used to call him Thickney. That was his MaddAddam name, back in the early days.”

  “He was Crake’s jackal at the Paradice Project,” says Tamaraw. “Once he wakes up, there’s a lot he needs to tell us. Before I trample him to death.” She snorts to indicate that she’s joking.

  “Thickney by name, Thickney by nature,” says Manatee. “I don’t think he had the least freaking idea. He was just a dupe.”

  “Naturally we wouldn’t have had a high opinion of him, to be fair,” says Ivory Bill. “He was at the Project by choice. Unlike ourselves.” He sticks his fork into a chunk of meat. “Dear lady,” he says to White Sedge, “could you possibly identify this substance for me?”

  “Ahc-tually,” says White Sedge with her British accent, “actually, not.”

  “We were the brain slaves,” says Manatee, spearing another chop. “The captive science brainiacs, working the evolution machines for Crake. What a power-tripper, thought he could perfect humanity. Not that he wasn’t brilliant.”

  “He wasn’t alone there,” says slender Zunzuncito. “It was big business, the BioCorps were backing it. People were paying through the ceiling for those gene-splices. They were customizing their kids, ordering up the DNA like pizza toppings.” He’s wearing bifocals. Once we run out of optical products, Toby thinks, it really will be back to the Stone Age.

  “Just, Crake was better at it,” says Manatee. “He put some accessories into these guys nobody else even thought of. The built-in insect repellent: genius.”

  “And the women who can’t say no. That colour-coded hormonal thing, you have to admire it,” says Zunzuncito.

  “As a meat-computer set of problems to be solved, it was an intriguing challenge,” says Ivory Bill, turning his attention to Toby. “Let me elucidate.” He’s talking as if they’re all at a graduate seminar, while cutting his greens into small, even squares. “For instance, the rabbit gizzard, and the baboon platform for certain chromatic features of the reproductive system —”

  “The part where they turn blue,” says Zunzuncito helpfully to Toby.

  “I was doing the chemical composition of the urine,” says Tamaraw. “The carnivore-deterrent element. Hard to test at the Paradice Project – we didn’t have any carnivores.”

  “I was working on the voice box: now that was complex,” says Manatee.

  “Too bad you didn’t code in a Cancel button for the singing,” says Ivory Bill. “It gets on the nerves.”

  “The singing was not my idea,” says Manatee sulkily. “We couldn’t erase it without turning them into zucchinis.”

  “I have a question,” says Toby. They turn and look at her, as if surprised that she’s spoken.

  “Yes, dear lady?” says Ivory Bill.

  “They want me to tell them a story,” says Toby. “About being made by Crake. But who do they think Crake was, and how do they think he made them? What were they told about that, back in the Paradice dome?”

  “They think Crake is some sort of a god,” says Crozier. “But they don’t know what he looks like.”

  “How do you know that?” says Ivory Bill. “You weren’t in Paradice with us.”

  “Because they fucking told me,” says Crozier. “I’m their pal now. I even get to piss with them. It’s, like, an honour.”

  “Good thing they can’t ever meet Crake,” says Tamaraw.

  “No shit,” says Swift Fox, who has now joined them. “They’d take one look at their lunatic of a creator and jump off a skyscraper. If there were still any skyscrapers to jump off,” she adds morosely. She makes a show of yawning, stretching her arms up and behind her head, thrusting her breasts up and out. Her straw-coloured hair is pulled into a high ponytail, held in place by a powder-blue crocheted scrunchie. Her bedsheet has a dainty border of daisies and butterflies, cinched at the waist with a wide red belt. It’s a startling touch: angel cloud meets butcher’s cleaver.

  “No point in repining, fair lady,” says Ivory Bill, switching his gaze from Toby to Swift Fox. He’ll be even more pompous, thinks Toby, once the beard he’s working on grows in. “Carpe diem. Take every moment as it comes. Gather ye rosebuds.” He smiles, a demi-leer; his eyes move down to the red belt. Swift Fox stares at him blankly.

  “Tell them a happy story,” says Manatee. “Vague on the details. Crake’s girlfriend, Oryx, used to do that sort of thing in Paradice, it kept them placid. I just hope that fucker Crake doesn’t start performing miracles from beyond the grave.”

  “Like turning everything to diarrhea,” says Swift Fox. “Oh, excuse me, he’s already done that. Is there any coffee?”

  “Alas,” says Ivory Bill, “we a
re bereft of coffee, dear lady.”

  “Rebecca says she has to roast some kind of root,” says Manatee.

  “And there won’t be any real cream for it when we do get it,” says Swift Fox. “Only sheep goo. It’s enough to make you ice-pick your own temples.”

  The light is fading now, the moths are flying, dusky pink, dusky grey, dusky blue. The Crakers have gathered around Jimmy’s hammock. This is where they want Toby to tell the story about Crake and how they came out of the Egg.

  Snowman-the-Jimmy wants to listen to the story too, they say. Never mind that he’s unconscious: they’re convinced he can hear it.

  They already know the story, but the important thing seems to be that Toby must tell it. She must make a show of eating the fish they’ve brought, charred on the outside and wrapped in leaves. She must put on Jimmy’s ratty red baseball cap and his faceless watch and raise the watch to her ear. She must begin at the beginning, she must preside over the creation, she must make it rain. She must clear away the chaos, she must lead them out of the Egg and shepherd them down to the seashore.

  At the end, they want to hear about the two bad men, and the campfire in the forest, and the soup with a smelly bone in it: they’re obsessed by that bone. Then she must tell about how they themselves untied the men, and how the two bad men ran away into the forest, and how they may come back at any time and do more bad things. That part makes them sad, but they insist on hearing it anyway.

  Once Toby has made her way through the story, they urge her to tell it again, then again. They prompt, they interrupt, they fill in the parts she’s missed. What they want from her is a seamless performance, as well as more information than she either knows or can invent. She’s a poor substitute for Snowman-the-Jimmy, but they’re doing what they can to polish her up.