In addition to the outfit he got a new name, which was Horatio.
“Horatio?” says Toby.
“Laughter is uncalled for,” says Zeb. “It was someone’s idea of what a semi-legal Tex-Mex family who snuck under the Wall might have called a son they hoped would make good in the world. They thought I looked kind of Tex-Mex, or maybe like a hybrid that contained some of that DNA. Which I do, as was discovered not long after that.”
“Oh,” says Toby. “Pilar ran the DNA comparison.”
“You got it,” says Zeb. “Though it took a while for me to access the news. She couldn’t really be seen with me, because why would she know me? Anyway we’d have to go out of our way to meet, we were on different shifts. So we’d fixed up a fallback code when I gave her my cell sample.
“Before then, when I was on my way in the CryoJeenyus train car and she was putting my Disinfector identity together and getting it slotted into the system, she’d already learned I’d be cleaning the women’s washroom down the hall from the lab where she was working. I was night shift – it was all male Disinfectors for that shift, they didn’t want any groping or screaming, which might have taken place with a gender mix. So I had the run of the floor after dark. Second cubicle from the left: that was the one I needed to watch.”
“She left a note inside the toilet tank?”
“Nothing so obvious. Those toilet tanks were routinely checked; only an amateur would stash anything important in there. The dropbox was that square container thing they have in those washrooms, for what-have-you. Those items you aren’t supposed to flush. But it wouldn’t be a note, way too telltale.”
“So, a signal?” Toby wonders what kind. One for joy, two for sorrow? But one and two of what?
“Yeah. Something that wouldn’t be out of place, but wouldn’t be the usual. Pits, was what she decided.”
“Pits? What do you mean, pits?” Toby tries to visualize pits. Armpits, holes in the ground? “Like peach pits?” she guesses.
“Correct. Might be from a lunch that got eaten in the washroom. Some of the secretary-type women did that – they sat in the can for some peace and quiet. I did find sandwich remains in those boxes: the odd bacon rind, the odd cheesefood fragment. There was a lot of time pressure in HelthWyzer, and more of it the farther down the status ladder you were, so they liked to sneak breathers.”
“What was the pit selection?” Toby asks. “For the yes and the no?” The way Pilar thought has always intrigued her: she wouldn’t have made the fruit selections haphazardly.
“Peach pit for no: no relationship to the Rev. Date pit for yes: worse luck, the Rev is your dad, hear it and weep because you’re at least half psychopath.”
The peach choice makes sense to Toby: peaches were valued among the Gardeners as having been one of the possible candidates for the Fruit of Life in Eden. Not that the Gardeners disparaged dates, or any other fruit that had not been chemically sprayed.
“HelthWyzer must have had access to some pretty expensive fruit. I thought the peach and apple yields plummeted around then, when the big bee die-off was going on. And the plums,” she adds. “And the citrus varieties.”
“HelthWyzer was making a lot of money,” says Zeb. “Raking it in, from their vitamin pill business and the medical drugs end. So they could afford the cyber-pollinated imports. It was one of the perks of working at HelthWyzer, the fresh fruit. Only for the higher-ups, naturally.”
“Which did you find?” says Toby. “Pit-wise.”
“Peach. Two pits. She’d underlined it.”
“How did you feel about that?” Toby asks.
“About the overkill on the expensive fruit?” says Zeb. He’s dodging emotion.
“About finding out that your father wasn’t your father,” says Toby patiently. “You must have felt something.”
“Okay. I felt, I knew it,” says Zeb. “I always like to be right, who doesn’t? Also less guilty about, you know. Frothing him to death.”
“You felt guilty about that?” says Toby. “Even if he had been your father, he was such a …”
“Yeah, I know. But still. Blood is thicker than blood. It would’ve bothered me some. The downside was the Adam end of it. I didn’t feel so good about that: all of a sudden he was no relation to me. No genetic relation, that is.”
“Did you tell him?” Toby asks.
“Nope. As far as I was concerned, I figured he was my brother. Joined at the head. We shared a lot of stuff.”
“Now I’m coming to a part you won’t like much, babe,” says Zeb.
“Because it’s about Lucerne?” says Toby. Zeb’s not stupid. He must have suspected for a long time how she’d felt about Lucerne, his live-in at the Gardeners. Lucerne the Irritating, dodger of communal weeding duties, shirker of women’s sewing groups, sufferer from frequent excuse-making headaches, whiny possessor of Zeb, neglectful mother of Ren. Lucerne the Luscious, one-time denizen of the HelthWyzer Corp, married to a top geek. Lucerne, the romantic fantasist who’d run away with the raggle-taggle Zeb because she’d seen too many movies in which beautiful women did that.
Zeb, in Lucerne’s version, had been crazed with irresistible and relentless desire for her. He’d been cross-eyed with lust when he’d spotted her in her pink negligee at the AnooYoo Spa while he was planting lumiroses in his capacity as gardener, and he’d made mad passionate love to her right there and then, on the dew-damp morning grass. Toby had heard that story many times from Lucerne herself, back at the Gardeners, and she’d liked it less every time. If she leaned over the railing and spat, she might be able to hit the very spot where Zeb and Lucerne had first rolled around on the lawn. Or near enough.
“Right,” says Zeb. “Lucerne. That’s what came next in my life. I can skip over it if you like.”
“No,” says Toby. “I’ve never heard your side of it. But Lucerne told me about the lumirose petals. How you strewed them over her pulsating body and so forth.” She tries not to sound envious, but it’s difficult. Has anyone ever strewn lumirose petals over her own pulsating body, or even thought about it? No. She lacks the temperament for petal-strewing. She would spoil the moment – “What are you doing with those silly petals?” Or she would laugh, which would be fatal. Right now she needs to shut up and hold back on the commentary or she won’t get the story.
“Yeah, well, petal-strewing comes naturally to me, I used to be in the magic biz,” says Zeb. “It distracts the attention. But some of what she told you was most likely true.”
The first time Zeb and Lucerne set eyes on each other was not at the AnooYoo Spa, however. It was in the women’s washroom that Zeb was supposed to be cleaning – was cleaning, in fact – while pawing through the detritus in the metal box for pits, whether peach or date. He hadn’t found any yet – it was before Pilar had the results of the Rev mix ’n’ match DNA test, or possibly before she could amass the necessary pits – so he was emerging from the second cubicle from the left empty-handed, pit-wise. When who should come into the Women’s Room but Lucerne.
“This was the middle of the night?” says Toby.
“Affirmative. What was she doing there? I asked myself. Either she was a robinhooder like me, in which case she was really inept because she’d got caught out of place. Or else she was having it off with some HelthWyzer exec who’d given her an access key to the building so they could flail on his fancy carpet while he was supposed to be working late at the office and she was supposed to be at the gym. Though it was late even for that.”
“Or both,” says Toby. “The having it off and the robinhooding, both.”
“Yeah. They combine well: each can provide an excuse for the other. Oh no, I wasn’t pilfering, I was only cheating on my husband. Oh no, I wasn’t cheating, I was only pilfering. But it was the first one of those, for sure. No mistaking the symptoms.”
Lucerne gave a little scream when she saw Zeb emerging from the cubicle in his impermeable gloves and his alien-from-outer-space nose cone. It wasn’t the first ti
me that night she’d given a little scream, in his opinion: she was flushed and breathless, and what you might call dishevelled. Or maybe unbuttoned. Or, if you were being fancy, in disarray. Needless to say, she was very attractive at that moment.
Oh, needless to say, thinks Toby.
“What are you doing in the Ladies?” Lucerne said accusingly. The first rule: when caught wet-handed, accuse first. She did say Ladies, not Women’s. That was a clue in itself.
“To what?” says Toby.
“Her character. She had a pedestal complex. She wanted to be on one. Ladies was a step higher than Women.”
Zeb shoved his nose cone up onto his forehead: now he looked like a blunted rhinoceros. “I’m a Disinfector, First Rank,” he added impressively but pompously. There’s something about a gorgeous woman who’s obviously been shagging another man that brings out the pompous in a guy: it’s a wound to his ego. “What are you doing in this building?” he counter-accused. He noted the wedding ring. Aha, he thought. Caged lioness. Needs a holiday from the tedium.
“I had some work to finish up,” Lucerne lied, as convincingly as she could. “My presence here is entirely legitimate. I have a pass.” Zeb could have called her on it, but he admired a woman who could use the word legitimate in such a fraudulent context. So he did not march her off to Security, which would have triggered a check via the spouse, and set off unpleasant repercussions for the lover, and would almost certainly have resulted – come to think of it – in Zeb himself being fired. So he let her get away with it.
“Right, okay, sorry,” he said with acceptable hangdog servility.
“Now, if you don’t mind, this is the Ladies, and I’d like some privacy, Horatio,” she said, caressing the name on his tag. She gazed deep into his eyes. It was a plea – Don’t rat me out – and also a promise: One day I’ll be yours. Not that she intended to honour that promise.
Well played, thought Zeb as he made his exit.
Thus, when he and Lucerne encountered each other for the second time, in the first flush of dawn, she barefoot and inadequately concealed in a diaphanous pink negligee, he with a phallic spade and an ardent lumirose bush in hand, right down there on the freshly sodded lawn of the just-completed AnooYoo Spa in the middle of Heritage Park, she recognized him. And she remembered that he’d once been Horatio, but was now, mysteriously – as his AnooYoo Spa grounds-keeper’s name tag had it – Atash.
“You were at HelthWyzer,” she’d said. “But you weren’t …” So, naturally, he’d kissed her, fervently and with unrestrainable passion. Because she couldn’t talk and kiss at the same time.
“Naturally,” says Toby. “You were supposed to be who? What’s Atash?”
“Iranian,” says Zeb. “Immigrant grandparents. Why not? There were a lot of them came over in the late twentieth. It was safe enough as long as I never bumped into any other Iranians and they started asking genealogy stuff, and where was your family from. Though I’d memorized the whole identity, just in case. I had a good backstory – just enough disappearances and atrocities in it to account for any time/place discrepancies.”
“So Lucerne meets Atash, and suspects he’s really Horatio,” says Toby. “Or vice versa.” She wants to get over the hurtful parts as quickly as possible: with luck, the hot, irresistible sex and the petal-strewing that Lucerne had never tired of describing to Toby won’t be mentioned again.
“Right. And that wasn’t good, because I’d had to go missing from HelthWyzer very fast. One of the computers had an alarm on it I didn’t spot until too late, and it showed that somebody’d been in there. I could tell I’d triggered it right after I did it, and they were going to start tracking who’d been in the building at the time, and that would pinpoint me. I used the MaddAddam chatroom and called for emergency help, and the cryptics got hold of Adam. He had a contact who could stick me into the AnooYoo Spa gardening job, though we both realized it was a stopgap and I’d have to move on soon.”
“So, she knows, and you know she knows, and she knows you know she knows,” says Toby. “At the lawn encounter.”
“Correct. I had two choices: murder or seduction. I chose the most attractive.”
“Understood,” says Toby. “I’d have done the same.” He’s made it sound like a seduction of convenience, but they both know there was more to it than that. Diaphanous pink negligees are their own excuse for being.
Lucerne was bad luck in some ways, said Zeb. Though she was good luck in others, because you couldn’t deny that she –
“You can skip that part,” says Toby.
“Okay, short version: she had me by the nuts, more ways than one. But I hadn’t ratted on her that time in the washroom, and she was inclined to return the favour as long as I was attentive enough to her. Then she got hooked on me, and you know the rest: nothing would do but an elopement with a mystery man first spotted when wearing a nose of a pig.
“I moved us around inside the deeper pleeblands, which she found romantic at first. Luckily no one – no one in the CorpSeCorps – was much interested in her disappearance, because she hadn’t stolen any IP. Wives did skedaddle from the Compounds out of sheer boredom, it wasn’t unheard of. The CorpSeCorps regarded such defections as private, insofar as they regarded anything as private. They didn’t bother with them much, especially if the husband wasn’t agitating. Which it appears that Lucerne’s husband did not.
“Trouble is, Lucerne took Ren with her. Cute little girl, I liked her. But it was way too dangerous for her in the deeper pleeblands. Kids like that could get snatched for the chicken-sex trade just walking along the street, even if they were with adults. There’d be a pleebrat mob scuffle, some SecretBurgers red sauce tossing, an overturned stand or solarcar – in other words, a honking big misdirection – and when you looked again, your child would be gone. I couldn’t risk that.”
Zeb got a few more alterations done to his ears and fingerprints and irises – they’d know by now he’d been up to no good on the HelthWyzer computers, they’d be looking for him – and then …
“And then the three of you turned up at the God’s Gardeners,” says Toby. “I remember that; I wondered from the first what you were doing there. You didn’t fit in with the rest of them.”
“You mean I hadn’t taken the vow of whatnot and drunk the Elixir of Life? God loves you, and he also loves aphids?”
“More or less.”
“No. I hadn’t. But Adam had to put up with me anyway, didn’t he? I was his brother.”
Edencliff
“Adam already had his ecofreakshow up and running by that time,” says Zeb. “At the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. You were there. So were Katuro and Rebecca. Nuala – wonder what happened to her? Marushka Midwife, and the others. And Philo. Too bad about him.”
“Freakshow?” says Toby. “That’s not very kind. Surely the God’s Gardeners was more than that.”
“Yeah, it was,” says Zeb. “Granted. But the pleebland slumfolk tagged it as a freakshow. Just as well: best to be thought of as harmless and addled and poor, in those parts. Adam did nothing to discourage that view; in fact, he encouraged it. Roaming around in the pleebs wearing the simple but eye-catching garb of a lunatic recycler with his choir in tow singing nutbar hymns, then preaching the love of hoofed animals in front of SecretBurger stands – you’d have to be lobotomized to do that, was the street verdict.”
“If he hadn’t done those things I wouldn’t be here,” says Toby. “Him and the Gardener kids grabbed me during a street brawl. I was working – I was trapped at SecretBurgers at the time, and the manager had a thing for me.”
“Your pal Blanco,” says Zeb. “Third-time Painball vet, as I recall.”
“Yes. Girls he had a thing for ended up dead, and I was next on the list. He was already at the violent stage, he was working up to the kill; you could feel it. So I owe a lot to Adam – to Adam One, as I always knew him. Freakshow or not,” she says defensively.
“Don’t get it wrong,” says Zeb. “He’s my
brother. We had our disagreements, and he had his way of doing things and I had mine, but that’s different.”
“You didn’t mention Pilar,” says Toby to deflect the conversation from Adam One. It’s uncomfortable for her to listen to criticism of him. “She was there too. At Edencliff.”
“Yeah, HelthWyzer finally got too much for her. She’d been feeding inside stuff to Adam, which was useful to him – he liked to know who might jump ship from a Corp, come over to the side of virtue, which was his side, naturally. But she said she couldn’t stay there any longer. With the CorpSeCorps takeover of so-called law-and-order functions, the Corps had the power to bulldoze and squash and erase anything they liked. Their addiction to making a buck was becoming toxic for her: it was poisoning, I quote, her soul.
“The cryptics helped her put together a cover story that allowed her to vanish without inspiring any trackers: she’d had an unfortunate stroke, with instant shipment to CryoJeenyus in a Frasket, and presto, there she was on top of a pleebland tenement building, dressed in a cloth bag and mixing potions.”
“And growing mushrooms, and teaching me about maggots, and keeping bees. She was very good at it,” says Toby a little ruefully. “Convincing. She had me talking to the bees. I was the one who told them when she died.”
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 100
