“Hey there, Death Squad,” says a voice. It’s Zeb, grinning down at her.
Toby scrambles to her feet. Her hands are dirty; she doesn’t know what to do with them. Has he been sleeping in until now, or what? She can’t ask what happened with Swift Fox, or if anything did: she refuses to sound like a shrew.
“I’m glad you came back safe,” she says. And she is glad, more glad than she can say, but even to herself her voice sounds fake.
“Me too,” he says. “Trip was more than I bargained for. Wiped me out, slept like a log, must be getting old.”
Is this a coverup? How suspicious can she get? “I missed you,” she says. There. Was that so hard?
He grins more. “Counted on that,” he says. “Brought you something.” It’s a compact, with a small round mirror.
“Thank you,” she says. She manages a smile. Is it a guilt gift, an apology? The roses for the wife after the husband’s furtive tumble with the office co-worker? But she’s not a wife.
“Got you some paper too. Couple of school notebooks, drugstore still carried them, I guess for pleeb kids who couldn’t afford the Wi-Fi tabs. Couple of rollerball pens, pencils. Felt markers.”
“How did you know I wanted those?” she says.
“I worked with a mind reader, once upon a time,” he says. “Cursive’s a Gardener skill, right? Figured you’d want to be keeping track of the days. Hey, what about a hug?”
“I’d get you all muddy,” she says, relenting, smiling.
“I’ve been dirtier.”
How could she not put her arms around him, despite her slug-slippery fingers?
And the sun is shining, and there are bees, among the yellow squash flowers. “You know what I really need?” she says to Zeb’s smoky beard. “Some reading glasses. And a hive.”
“Consider them yours.” There’s a pause. “I wanted you to look at this.”
From inside his sleeve he pulls out a shoe: a sandal. It’s handmade, with recycled materials: tire-tread sole, bicycle inner tube straps, silver duct tape accents. Although earth-stained, it’s not very worn. “Gardener,” Toby says. She remembers the fashion well, or rather the lack of it. Then she qualifies: “Or maybe it is. Not that other people didn’t make those, I guess.”
Already she has a picture in her head: Adam One and the surviving Gardeners, hunkered down in one of their Ararat hidey holes – the old mushroom-growing cellars, for instance – cobbling away by candlelight at their handcrafted sandals like a burrowful of elves, nibbling on their stores of honey and soybits while above their heads the cities flamed and collapsed and the human race melted away to nothingness. She wants so much to believe it that it can’t possibly be true.
“Where did you find it?” she asks.
“Near the piglet kill,” Zeb says. “I didn’t show the others.”
“You think it’s Adam. You think he’s still alive. You think he left this for you – or for someone – on purpose.” These aren’t questions.
“So do you,” says Zeb. “You think it too.”
“Don’t hope too much,” she says. “Hope can ruin you.”
“Okay. You’re right. But still.”
“If you’re right,” she says, “wouldn’t Adam be looking for you?”
Blacklight Headlamp
The Story of Zeb and Fuck
You don’t need to tell them a story every time. Come with me, instead. You can skip a night.
I already skipped one night. I can’t disappoint them too much. They might leave here and go back to the beach, and then they’d be easy to attack. Those Painballers would … I’d never forgive myself if …
Okay. But make it short?
I’m not sure that’s possible. They ask a lot of questions.
Tell them to piss off.
They wouldn’t understand that. They think piss is a good thing. Like fuck – they think there’s an invisible entity called Fuck. A helper of Crake’s in time of need. And of Jimmy’s, because they heard him saying Oh fuck.
I’m with them. Fuck! An invisible entity! A helper in time of need! Dead right!
They want to hear a story about him. About him and you, actually. The two of you, having boyish adventures. You’re both stars at the moment. They’ve been pestering me about it, that story.
Can I listen in?
No. You’d laugh.
See this mouth? Virtual duct tape! If I had some Krazy Glue, I could … Hey, I could glue my mouth to your …
Don’t be so warped.
Life is warped. I’m just in synch.
Thank you for the fish.
See, I am wearing the red hat, and I have listened to the round shiny thing I wear on my arm.
Tonight I will tell you the story of Zeb and Fuck. As you have asked me to do.
Once Zeb had left his home, where his father and his mother were not kind to him, he wandered around in the chaos. He did not know where to go next, and he did not know where his brother, Adam, was, who was his only friend and helper.
Yes, Fuck was his friend and helper too, but he could not be seen.
No, that is not an animal over there in the dark behind the shrub. That is Zeb. He is not laughing, he is coughing.
So, Zeb’s brother, Adam, was his only friend and helper that he could see and touch. Was Adam lost? Had he been stolen away? Zeb did not know, and that made him feel sad.
But Fuck kept him company and gave him advice. Fuck lived in the air and flew around like a bird, which was how he could be with Zeb one minute, and then with Crake, and then also with Snowman-the-Jimmy. He could be in many places at once. If you were in trouble and you called to him – Oh Fuck! – he would always be there, just when you needed him. And as soon as you said his name, you would feel better.
Yes, Zeb does have a bad cough. But you do not need to purr on him right now.
Yes, it would be good to have a friend and helper like Fuck. I wish I had one too.
No, Fuck is not my helper. I have a different helper, whose name is Pilar. She died, and took the form of a plant, and now she lives with the bees.
Yes, I talk to her even if I can’t see her. But she is not quite so … she is not so abrupt as Fuck. She is less like thunder, and more like a breeze.
I will tell you the story of Pilar some other time.
So Zeb wandered deeper and deeper into dangerous places, where there were a great many bad men doing cruel and hurtful things. And then he came to a place where they cooked and ate the Children of Oryx, which he knew was wrong. And when he called on Fuck for advice, Fuck told him he had to leave that place. And then he lived in some houses with water all around, and he came to know a snake. But it was dangerous there; and he said, Oh Fuck! And Fuck flew through the air, and spoke to Zeb, and said he would help Zeb get away safely.
That’s enough of the story for tonight. You already know that Zeb got away safely because he’s sitting right over there, isn’t he? And he’s very happy to be hearing this story. That is why he is laughing now, and not coughing any more.
Thank you for saying good night. I am happy to know that you want me to sleep soundly, without bad dreams.
Good night to you, as well.
Yes, good night.
Good night!
That’s enough. You can stop saying good night now.
Thank you.
Floating World
One day Zeb woke up next to Wynette, the SecretBurgers meatslinger, and realized that she smelled like grilled patties and stale cooking oil. As he did himself, granted, but that was different, because it always is, says Zeb, when it’s your own smell. But it’s not what you want the object of your lust to smell like. This is a primate thing, it’s basic, they’ve done the tests. Ask any of the MaddAddamite biogeeks here.
And the onions, don’t forget them, and the gruesome red sauce in squeeze bottles the customers craved so much it most likely had crack in it. When things got energetic and there was a brawl, someone would always go for that red sauce and start squi
rting it around. Then it would get mixed in with the scalp-wound splatter blood and you couldn’t tell whether someone was bleeding to death or had only been doused with red sauce.
The way that combo of smells would seep into their clothing and hair and even the skin pores was unavoidable, working where the two of them did. You couldn’t wash off that stink even when there was shower water available, and it didn’t blend too well with the cheap glop Wynette would rub on herself to neutralize it: Delilah, it was called, in lotion and cologne forms both, and it was heavy going, like wading through a sea of dying lilies, or a clutch of elderly church-women of the kind that populated the Church of PetrOleum. Those two smells – the SecretBurgers, the Delilah – were okay if you were really hungry or really horny, or both. But not so sweet otherwise.
Fuck, Zeb thought, lying there newly awakened that morning and inhaling the dire potpourri. There’s no future in this.
Or if there was a future, it was a negative one, because in addition to smelling funny Wynette was getting nosy. In the name of love and getting to know and understand the real, total him, she wanted to explore his deeper depths, figuratively speaking. She wanted his lid off. If she pried too hard – if she unwrapped one after another of his flimsy cover stories, which he hadn’t constructed with enough care, he realized, and he vowed to do better next time he conned someone – if she did the unwrapping, there was nothing very convincing immediately underneath. And then if she kept going, she might make some guesses about where he’d come from and who he’d been originally, and then it would only be a matter of time before she weaselled on him so she could collect whatever greyland reward must be on offer, out there in the word-of-mouth rat networks of the pleeblands.
Zeb had no doubt that there was such a reward. There might even be some of his biometrics circulating, such as photos of his ears, and animated silhouettes of his walk, and his schooltime thumbprints. Wynette wasn’t connected gangwise so far as he knew, and luckily she was too poor to own a PC or a tab. But there was cheap netstuff available on time-rental in cafés, and she might do some identity surfing if he pissed her off enough.
Already she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through the magic of his first-contact-with-aliens puppy-on-speed gonadal enthusiasm. Young guys have no taste as such in sexual matters – no discrimination. They’re like those penguins that shocked the Victorians, they’ll bonk anything with a cavity, and Wynette had been the beneficiary in Zeb’s case. Not to brag, but during their nightly tangles her eyes had rolled so far up into her head that she looked like the undead half the time, and the amplified rockband noises she made had caused thumping and banging both from the alcohol store on the ground floor and from whatever nestful of mournful wage slaves lived above them.
But now she was mistaking Zeb’s animal energies for something more profound. She wanted post-hump chat. She wanted them to share their essences, on a spiritual level. She was starting to ask things like, were her breasts big enough, and did this colour of lime green look good on her, and why weren’t they doing it twice a night the way they did at first? Questions that mantrapped you any way you answered. These nightly interrogation sessions were becoming wearisome. Maybe, Zeb concluded, his feelings for Wynette hadn’t been true love after all.
“Don’t look at me like that. I was really young. And don’t forget, I’d been improperly socialized,” says Zeb.
“Look at you like what?” says Toby. “It’s darker than the inside of a goat. You can’t see me.”
“I can feel the glacial chill of your stone-cold gaze.”
“I just feel sorry for her, that’s all,” says Toby.
“No, you don’t. If I’d stayed with her, I wouldn’t be here with you, right?”
“Okay. True enough. I withdraw the sorrow. But still.”
He wasn’t a complete shit about it. He left Wynette some cash and a note of undying adoration, with a P.S. saying that his life had been threatened because of a dirty deal – he didn’t say what kind – and he couldn’t bear the thought of putting her in peril because of him.
“You used that word?” says Toby. “Peril?”
“She liked romance,” says Zeb. “Knights and stuff. She had some old paperbacks; they’d been in the room when she rented it. Falling apart.”
“And you didn’t want to play the knight?”
“Not for her,” says Zeb. “For you” – he kisses the tips of her fingers – “swords at dawn, any time.”
“I can’t believe that,” says Toby. “You’ve just told me what a liar you are!”
“At least I take the trouble to lie, for you,” says Zeb. “Lying’s more work than the bare-naked truth. Think of it as a courtship display. I’m aging badly, I’ve got wear and tear, I don’t have a giant blue dong like our Craker friends out there, so I need to use my wits. What’s left of them.”
Zeb travelled hastily south on the Truck-A-Pillar route, coming to rest in the remnants of Santa Monica. The rising sea had swept away the beaches, and the once-upmarket hotels and condos were semi-flooded. Some of the streets had become canals, and nearby Venice was living up to its name. The district as a whole was known as the Floating World, and it really was floating most of the time, especially when the full moon brought a spring tide.
None of the original owners lived there any more. Unable to collect insurance – for what was the encroaching sea but an Act of God? – they’d fled uphill. Squatters and transients of many kinds had moved in, though there were no municipal services left: the sewage system and the water mains were kaput, and the electricity had been cut off some time ago.
But the district had acquired a raunchy cachet, and middle-aged punters from posher locations on higher ground were willing to venture down to the Floating World for the odd dose of bohemian thrill, navigating the drowned streets in tiny runabout water taxis with solar putt-putt engines on them. They came for the gambling and the illegal-substance dealing and the girls, but also for the real-time carny acts that operated from building to crumbling building, moving shop when the premises got too waterlogged or when a violent storm had swept away yet more of the shoreline and the real estate.
Much was on offer in the Floating World; profitably so, since none of the operators paid rent or taxes. There was a crap game in progress morning and night, with a revolving set of bleary-eyed players left unsatisfied by online gaming and craving the addictive nerve-jangle of potential danger. In addition, they wanted freedom from oversight: they believed that the internet was as full of peepholes as a Truck-A-Pillar motel, and they didn’t want to leave any of their virtual DNA on it.
There was a moppet shop, with a mix of real girls and prostibots, depending on how much pre-programmed interaction you wanted, not that you could always tell the difference. There was a group of street acrobats who did torch-lit high-wire acts on ropes strung across the flooded streets, and sometimes fell and broke parts of themselves, such as their necks. The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.
Among the carny acts there was a magician, a sad-eyed guy of maybe fifty, with a baggy-kneed suit he must have purloined from a thrift store: there wasn’t a lot of margin in what he did. He’d set up a makeshift stage on the rapidly mildewing mezzanine floor of a former platinum-grade hotel, where he manipulated cards and coins and handkerchiefs, and sawed women in half and made them disappear from cabinets, and read minds. Those delights had vanished from television and online, since such displays of skill lacked tangibility in the digital realm and were therefore distrusted: how could you tell it wasn’t just special effects? But when the Floating World magician put a handful of needles into his mouth you could see they were real needles, and when they emerged threaded you could touch the thread; and when he threw a pa
ck of cards up into the air and the ace of spades stayed there on the ceiling, you’d seen that happen in real time, right in front of your eyes.
The mezzanine was always crowded on Friday and Saturday nights when the Floating World magician put on his shows. He called himself Slaight of Hand, after Allan Slaight, a twentieth-century historian of the hermetic arts. Though few in the audience would know that.
Zeb learned it, however, because it was with Slaight of Hand that he found work. He played Lothar, the muscular assistant, clad in a cornball outfit made of faux-fur leopard skin. He’d heave the cabinet around, turning it upside down to show there was nothing in it, or he’d place the beautiful girl assistant into the box in which she would be sawn in two. Though sometimes he posed as an audience member, gathering information for the mind-reading act, or expressing amazement and thus distracting attention. In the daytimes he was sent on shopping errands outside the Floating World, to where there were mini-supermarkets and people who were awake during the day.
“I learned a lot from old Slaight of Hand,” Zeb says.
“How to saw a woman in half?”
“That too, though anyone can saw a woman in half. The trick is to have them smile while you’re doing it.”
“I guess that takes mirrors,” Toby says. “And smoke.”
“I’m sworn to secrecy. Best thing old Slaight taught me was misdirection. Make them look at something else, away from what you’re really doing, and you can get away with a lot. Slaight called each one of his beautiful assistants Miss Direction. It was his generic name for them.”
“Maybe he couldn’t tell one from another?”
“Maybe not. They didn’t interest him in that way. But they had to look good in sequins, not very many sequins. The Miss Direction of the moment was Katrina Wu, a lynx-eyed Asian-Fusion hybrid from Palo Alto. I thought of her as Katrina WooWoo, and tried to get friendly with her – Wynette the SecretBurgers meatslinger had opened up a whole world of possibility, and I was feeling reckless – but Miss Direction WooWoo was having none of it. I held her in my arms every weekend while stuffing her into boxes and cabinets to be sawed and disappeared and laying her out on a table so she could be levitated, and I’d give her the odd squeeze and what I must’ve thought was a marrow-melting leer, but she’d hiss at me through her smile: Stop that right now.”
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