MaddAddam 03 - MaddAddam

by Margaret Atwood

  “It was the most bizarre trip I ever took,” says Zeb. “Dressed up like Aladdin, sitting in a locked train compartment with my brother, who was wearing half a squashed pumpkin on his head, and between us a Frasket containing our dad in the form of soup stock. Though we did put the bones and teeth in there, as well. Those didn’t dissolve. There was some discussion at Scales about the osseous materials – you could get a good price for human bones in the deeper pleeblands, where carved artisanal human-products jewellery was a fashion: Bone Bling, it was called. But the cooler heads of Adam and Katrina and, I have to say, your humble self overruled the enthusiasts, because even if you boiled those things there was no telling what microbes might remain. As yet, we knew nothing about them.”

  A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow Frasket, Zeb sang.

  Adam took out a little notebook and a pencil and wrote: Watch what you say. We’re most likely bugged.

  After showing it to Zeb under cover of his hand, he erased it, and wrote: And please do not sing. It is very irritating.

  Zeb motioned for the little notebook. After a slight hesitation, Adam handed it over. Zeb wrote: FU+PO. Then he wrote, underneath them: Fuck You and Piss Off. Then: You manage to get yourself laid yet?

  Adam read this and blushed. Watching him blush was a novelty: Zeb had never witnessed such a thing before. Adam was so pale you could almost see his capillaries. He wrote: None of your business.

  Zeb wrote: Haha, was it K and did you pay? Since he had long suspected which way the wind of Adam was blowing.

  Adam wrote: I refuse to have that lady spoken about in such a manner. She has been a devoted furtherer of our efforts.

  Zeb should have written: What efforts? Then he would have known more. Instead he wrote, Haha, hole in one for my score, so to speak :D!! At least you’re not gay! :D :D

  Adam wrote: You are beneath vulgar.

  Zeb wrote: That would be me! Never mind, I respect true love. He drew a heart, then a flower. He almost added, Even if she is running a fancypants blowjob emporium, but he thought better of it: Adam was getting very huffy, and he might forget himself and take a swipe at Zeb for just about the first time in his life. Then there would be an unseemly scuffle over the remains of their liquefied parent that would not end well for Zeb because he could never bear to deck Adam, not really; so he’d just have to let the pallid little weenie beat him up.

  Adam looked mollified – maybe it was the heart and the flower – but still ruffled. He crumpled up all the notebook pages they’d been writing on, then tore them into pieces and went to the can, where – Zeb assumed – he flushed them onto the tracks. Even if some nosy spyster managed to gather them up and stick them together they’d hardly learn anything of interest. Just a bunch of low-calorie dirty talk, of the kind a Frasket-sitter might be expected to employ while killing time out of the hearing of the paying customers.

  The rest of the trip passed in silence, Adam with arms folded and a frowny but sanctimonious expression on his face, Zeb humming under his breath while the continent zipped past outside the window.

  At the east coast end, the CryoJeenyus dedicated carriage was met by Pilar, posing as a concerned relative of the stiff – or, rather, of the temporarily life-suspended client – and three members from, Zeb assumed, the cryptic team.

  “You know two of them,” says Zeb. “Katuro and Manatee. The third was a gal we lost during Crake’s scoop of the MaddAddamites, when he was designing the Crakers and gathering up the brainslaves for his Paradice Project. She tried to run, and I can only assume she went over an overpass and got turned into car tire mush. But none of that had happened yet.”

  Pilar shed a few croc tears into a hanky just in case there were any mini-drones or spyware installations around. Then she supervised discreetly as the Frasket was loaded into a long vehicle. CryoJeenyus did not call those vehicles “hearses”: they were “Life2Life Shuttles.” They were boiled tomato colour and had the perky ever-burning flame of life on the doors: nothing dark to spoil the festive mood.

  So into the L2Ls went the Rev in his Frasket, headed for an extreme security biosampling unit – not at CryoJeenyus, they weren’t equipped for that, but at HelthWyzer Central. Pilar got in as well, and also Zeb. Mordis would change his outfit and head to the local Scales and Tails, where they needed a tougher manager.

  Adam would change into his increasingly bizarre streetwear and shuffle off to do whatever it was that Adam did, out there in the deep pleebs. He gave the white bishop to Pilar, having extracted it from the salty cavity of the girl salt shaker: the cryptic team wanted to take a close look at the contents of those pills, and they thought they finally had the equipment to do so without exposing themselves to contagion.

  Zeb was slated for yet another identity, which Pilar had already prepared for him: he was to be embedded right inside HelthWyzer Central.

  “Do me a favour,” said Zeb to Pilar, once she had assured them that the L2Ls had been thoroughly swept for spyware. “Run a DNA comparison for me. On the Rev. The guy in the Frasket.” He’d never shaken his childhood notion that the Rev was not his real father, and this was surely his last chance to find out.

  Pilar said it would be no problem. He handed over a cheek swab sample of himself, improvised on a piece of tissue, and she tucked it carefully inside a small plastic envelope that contained what looked like a dried-up elf ear, wrinkly in appearance, yellow in colour.

  “What’s that?” he asked her. He wanted to say, “What the fuck’s that,” but proximity to Pilar did not encourage swearing. “Gremlin from outer space?”

  “It’s a chanterelle,” she said. “A mushroom. An edible variety, not to be confused with the false chanterelle.”

  “So, will I come out with the DNA of a fungus?”

  Pilar laughed. “There’s not much chance of that,” she said.

  “Good,” said Zeb. “Tell Adam.”

  Only problem was, he thought later that night, when drifting off to sleep in his Spartan but acceptable HelthWyzer accommodations – only problem was that if Pilar ran the DNA comparison and the Rev wasn’t his dad, then Adam wouldn’t be his brother. Adam would be no relation to him at all. No blood relation.

  Thus:

  Fenella + the Rev = Adam.

  Trudy + Unknown Semen Donor = Zeb.

  = No shared DNA.

  If that was the truth, did he really want to know it?

  Lumiroses

  Zeb’s new title at HelthWyzer Central was that of Disinfector, First Rank. He got a pair of lurid green overalls with the HelthWyzer logo and a big luminous orange D on the front; he got a hairnet to keep his own shed follicle-ware from littering the desk spaces of his betters; he got a nose filter cone that made him look like a cartoon pig; he got an endless supply of protective liquid-repelling nanobioform-impermeable gloves and shoes; and, most importantly, he got a passkey.

  Only for the bureaucratic offices, however: not for the labs. Those were in another building. But you never could tell what sort of intel a nimble-fingered robinhooder with a few lines of entry code slipped to him by underground cryptics might be able to scoop off an untended computer, late at night, when all good citizens were sound asleep in other people’s beds. HelthWyzer was somewhat porous in the spouse department.

  Once upon a time Zeb’s Disinfector position would have been called “cleaner,” and before that “janitor,” and before that “charwoman”; but this was the twenty-first century and they’d added some nanobioform consciousness to the title. To deserve that title Zeb was supposed to have passed a rigid security check, for what hostile Corp – possibly from a foreign clime – wouldn’t think of disguising one of their keyboard pirates as a minor functionary and ordering him to grab whatever he could find?

  To qualify as a Disinfector, Zeb was also supposed to have taken a training course replete with updated modern babble about where germs might lurk and how to render them unconscious. Needless to say, he hadn’t taken it; but Pilar had given him the condensed ve
rsion before he started.

  Germs were said to hang out on the usual toilet seats, floors, sinks, and doorknobs, of course. But also on elevator buttons, on telephone receivers, and on computer keyboards. So he had to wipe down all of these with antimicrobial cloths and zap them with death rays, in addition to the floor-washing in hallways and such, and the dust-sucking on the carpets in the plushier offices to pick up anything the daily robots might have missed. Those things were always rolling to and fro, backing up to wall outlets to plug themselves in and replenish their battery power, then scuttling away again, emitting beeping sounds so you wouldn’t trip over them. It was like navigating a beach littered with giant crabs. When he was alone on a floor he used to kick them into corners or turn them over on their backs, just to see how fast they could recover.

  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 sh
e 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 time 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.