Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  "Stuff it," says Snowman. Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits. Though he has the nagging feeling that he may well have written this gem himself.

  In happier days, naturally. Oh, so much happier.

  The pigoon organs could be customized, using cells from individual human donors, and the organs were frozen until needed. It was much cheaper than getting yourself cloned for spare parts - a few wrinkles left to be ironed out there, as Jimmy's dad used to say - or keeping a for-harvest child or two stashed away in some illegal baby orchard. In the OrganInc brochures and promotional materials, glossy and discreetly worded, stress was laid on the efficacy and comparative health benefits of the pigoon procedure. Also, to set the queasy at ease, it was claimed that none of the defunct pigoons ended up as bacon and sausages: no one would want to eat an animal whose cells might be identical with at least some of their own.

  Still, as time went on and the coastal aquifers turned salty and the northern permafrost melted and the vast tundra bubbled with methane, and the drought in the midcontinental plains regions went on and on, and the Asian steppes turned to sand dunes, and meat became harder to come by, some people had their doubts. Within OrganInc Farms itself it was noticeable how often back bacon and ham sandwiches and pork pies turned up on the staff cafe menu. Andre's Bistro was the official name of the cafe, but the regulars called it Grunts. When Jimmy had lunch there with his father, as he did when his mother was feeling harried, the men and women at nearby tables would make jokes in bad taste.

  "Pigoon pie again," they would say. "Pigoon pancakes, pigoon popcorn. Come on, Jimmy, eat up!" This would upset Jimmy; he was confused about who should be allowed to eat what. He didn't want to eat a pigoon, because he thought of the pigoons as creatures much like himself. Neither he nor they had a lot of say in what was going on.

  "Don't pay any attention to them, sweetheart," said Ramona. "They're only teasing, you know?" Ramona was one of his dad's lab technicians. She often ate lunch with the two of them, him and his dad. She was young, younger than his father and even his mother; she looked something like the picture of the girl in the haircut man's window, she had the same sort of puffed-out mouth, and big eyes like that, big and smudgy. But she smiled a lot, and she didn't have her hair in quills. Her hair was soft and dark. Jimmy's mother's hair was what she herself called dirty blonde. ("Not dirty enough," said his father. "Hey! Joke. Joke. Don't kill me!")

  Ramona would always have a salad. "How's Sharon doing?" she would say to Jimmy's father, looking at him with her eyes wide and solemn. Sharon was Jimmy's mother.

  "Not so hot," Jimmy's father would say.

  "Oh, that's too bad."

  "It's a problem. I'm getting worried."

  Jimmy watched Ramona eat. She took very small bites, and managed to chew up the lettuce without crunching. The raw carrots too. That was amazing, as if she could liquefy those hard, crisp foods and suck them into herself, like an alien mosquito creature on DVD.

  "Maybe she should, I don't know, see someone?" Ramona's eyebrows lifted in concern. She had mauve powder on her eyelids, a little too much; it made them crinkly. "They can do all sorts of things, there's so many new pills ..." Ramona was supposed to be a tech genius but she talked like a shower-gel babe in an ad. She wasn't stupid, said Jimmy's dad, she just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences. There were a lot of people like that at OrganInc, and not all of them were women. It was because they were numbers people, not word people, said Jimmy's father. Jimmy already knew that he himself was not a numbers person.

  "Don't think I haven't suggested it, I asked around, found the top guy, made the appointment, but she wouldn't go," said Jimmy's father, looking down at the table. "She's got her own ideas."

  "It's such a shame, a waste. I mean, she was so smart!"

  "Oh, she's still smart enough," said Jimmy's father. "She's got smart coming out of her ears."

  "But she used to be so, you know ..."

  Ramona's fork would slide out of her fingers, and the two of them would stare at each other as if searching for the perfect adjective to describe what Jimmy's mother used to be. Then they'd notice Jimmy listening, and beam their attention down on him like extraterrestrial rays. Way too bright.

  "So, Jimmy sweetheart, how's it going at school?"

  "Eat up, old buddy, eat the crusts, put some hair on your chest!"

  "Can I go look at the pigoons?" Jimmy would say.

  The pigoons were much bigger and fatter than ordinary pigs, to leave room for all of the extra organs. They were kept in special buildings, heavily secured: the kidnapping of a pigoon and its finely honed genetic material by a rival outfit would have been a disaster. When Jimmy went in to visit the pigoons he had to put on a biosuit that was too big for him, and wear a face mask, and wash his hands first with disinfectant soap. He especially liked the small pigoons, twelve to a sow and lined up in a row, guzzling milk. Pigoonlets. They were cute. But the adults were slightly frightening, with their runny noses and tiny, white-lashed pink eyes. They glanced up at him as if they saw him, really saw him, and might have plans for him later.

  "Pigoon, balloon, pigoon, balloon," he would chant to pacify them, hanging over the edge of the pen. Right after the pens had been washed out they didn't smell too bad. He was glad he didn't live in a pen, where he'd have to lie around in poop and pee. The pigoons had no toilets and did it anywhere; this caused him a vague sensation of shame. But he hadn't wet his bed for a long time, or he didn't think he had.

  "Don't fall in," said his father. "They'll eat you up in a minute."

  "No they won't," said Jimmy. Because I'm their friend, he thought. Because I sing to them. He wished he had a long stick, so he could poke them - not to hurt them, just to make them run around. They spent far too much time doing nothing.

  When Jimmy was really little they'd lived in a Cape Cod-style frame house in one of the Modules - there were pictures of him, in a carry-cot on the porch, with dates and everything, stuck into a photo album at some time when his mother was still bothering - but now they lived in a large Georgian centre-plan with an indoor swimming pool and a small gym. The furniture in it was called reproduction. Jimmy was quite old before he realized what this word meant - that for each reproduction item, there was supposed to be an original somewhere. Or there had been once. Or something.

  The house, the pool, the furniture - all belonged to the OrganInc Compound, where the top people lived. Increasingly, the middle-range execs and the junior scientists lived there too. Jimmy's father said it was better that way, because nobody had to commute to work from the Modules. Despite the sterile transport corridors and the high-speed bullet trains, there was always a risk when you went through the city.

  Jimmy had never been to the city. He'd only seen it on TV - endless billboards and neon signs and stretches of buildings, tall and short; endless dingy-looking streets, countless vehicles of all kinds, some of them with clouds of smoke coming out the back; thousands of people, hurrying, cheering, rioting. There were other cities too, near and far; some had better neighbourhoods in them, said his father, almost like the Compounds, with high walls around the houses, but those didn't get on TV much.

  Compound people didn't go to the cities unless they had to, and then never alone. They called the cities the pleeblands. Despite the fingerprint identity cards now carried by everyone, public security in the pleeblands was leaky: there were people cruising around in those places who could forge anything and who might be anybody, not to mention the loose change - the addicts, the muggers, the paupers, the crazies. So it was best for everyone at OrganInc Farms to live all in one place, with foolproof procedures.

  Outside the OrganInc walls and gates and searchlights, things were unpredictable. Inside, they were the way it used to be when Jimmy's father was a kid, before things got so serious, or that's what Jimmy's father said. Jimmy's mother said it was all artificial, it was just a theme park and you could never bring the old ways back, b
ut Jimmy's father said why knock it? You could walk around without fear, couldn't you? Go for a bike ride, sit at a sidewalk cafe, buy an ice-cream cone? Jimmy knew his father was right, because he himself had done all of these things.

  Still, the CorpSeCorps men - the ones Jimmy's father called our people - these men had to be on constant alert. When there was so much at stake, there was no telling what the other side might resort to. The other side, or the other sides: it wasn't just one other side you had to watch out for. Other companies, other countries, various factions and plotters. There was too much hardware around, said Jimmy's father. Too much hardware, too much software, too many hostile bioforms, too many weapons of every kind. And too much envy and fanaticism and bad faith.

  Long ago, in the days of knights and dragons, the kings and dukes had lived in castles, with high walls and drawbridges and slots on the ramparts so you could pour hot pitch on your enemies, said Jimmy's father, and the Compounds were the same idea. Castles were for keeping you and your buddies nice and safe inside, and for keeping everybody else outside.

  "So are we the kings and dukes?" asked Jimmy.

  "Oh, absolutely," said his father, laughing.

  Lunch

  ~

  At one time Jimmy's mother had worked for OrganInc Farms. That was how his mother had met his father: they'd both worked at the same Compound, on the same project. His mother was a microbiologist: it had been her job to study the proteins of the bioforms unhealthy to pigoons, and to modify their receptors in such a way that they could not bond with the receptors on pigoon cells, or else to develop drugs that would act as blockers.

  "It's very simple," she said to Jimmy in one of her explaining moods. "The bad microbes and viruses want to get in through the cell doors and eat up the pigoons from the inside. Mummy's job was to make locks for the doors." On her computer screen she showed Jimmy pictures of the cells, pictures of the microbes, pictures of the microbes getting into the cells and infecting them and bursting them open, close-up pictures of the proteins, pictures of the drugs she had once tested. The pictures looked like the candy bins at the supermarket: a clear plastic bin of round candies, a clear plastic bin of jelly beans, a clear plastic bin of long licorice twizzles. The cells were like the clear plastic bins, with the lids you could lift up.

  "Why aren't you making the locks for the doors any more?" said Jimmy.

  "Because I wanted to stay home with you," she said, looking over the top of Jimmy's head and puffing on her cigarette.

  "What about the pigoons?" said Jimmy, alarmed. "The microbes will get into them!" He didn't want his animal pals to burst open like the infected cells.

  "Other people are in charge of that now," said his mother. She didn't seem to care at all. She let Jimmy play with the pictures on her computer, and once he learned how to run the programs, he could play war games with them - cells versus microbes. She said it was all right if he lost stuff off the computer, because all that material was out of date anyway. Though on some days - days when she appeared brisk and purposeful, and aimed, and steady - she would want to fool around on the computer herself. He liked it when she did that - when she seemed to be enjoying herself. She was friendly then, too. She was like a real mother and he was like a real child. But those moods of hers didn't last long.

  When had she stopped working at the lab? When Jimmy started at the OrganInc School full-time, in the first grade. Which didn't make sense, because if she'd wanted to stay home with Jimmy, why had she started doing that when Jimmy stopped being at home? Jimmy could never figure out the reasons, and when he'd first heard this explanation he'd been too young to even think about them. All he'd known was that Dolores, the live-in from the Philippines, had been sent away, and he'd missed her a lot. She'd called him Jim-Jim and had smiled and laughed and cooked his egg just the way he liked it, and had sung songs and indulged him. But Dolores had to go, because now Jimmy's real mummy would be there all the time - this was held out to him like a treat - and nobody needed two mummies, did they?

  Oh yes they did, thinks Snowman. Oh yes, they really did.

  ~

  Snowman has a clear image of his mother - of Jimmy's mother - sitting at the kitchen table, still in her bathrobe when he came home from school for his lunch. She would have a cup of coffee in front of her, untouched; she would be looking out the window and smoking. The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it. As a rule there would be no lunch ready for him and he would have to make it himself, his mother's only participation being to issue directions in a flat voice. ("The milk's in the fridge. To the right. No, the right. Don't you know which is your right hand?") She sounded so tired; maybe she was tired of him. Or maybe she was sick.

  "Are you infected?" he asked her one day.

  "What do you mean, Jimmy?"

  "Like the cells."

  "Oh. I see. No, I'm not," she said. Then, after a moment, "Maybe I am." But when his face crumpled, she took it back.

  More than anything, Jimmy had wanted to make her laugh - to make her happy, as he seemed to remember her being once. He would tell her funny things that had happened at school, or things he tried to make funny, or things he simply invented. ("Carrie Johnston went poo on the floor.") He would caper around the room, crossing his eyes and cheeping like a monkey, a trick that worked with several of the little girls in his class and almost all of the boys. He would put peanut butter on his nose and try to lick it off with his tongue. Most of the time these activities just irritated his mother: "That is not amusing, that is disgusting." "Stop it, Jimmy, you're giving me a headache." But then he might get a smile out of her, or more. He never knew what would work.

  Once in a while there would be a real lunch waiting for him, a lunch that was so arranged and extravagant it frightened him, for what was the occasion? Place setting, paper napkin - coloured paper napkin, like parties - the sandwich peanut butter and jelly, his preferred combo; only it would be open-face and round, a peanut butter head with a jelly smile-face. His mother would be carefully dressed, her lipstick smile an echo of the jelly smile on the sandwich, and she would be all sparkling attention, for him and his silly stories, looking at him directly, her eyes bluer than blue. What she reminded him of at such times was a porcelain sink: clean, shining, hard.

  He knew he was expected to appreciate all the effort she had put into this lunch, and so he too made an effort. "Oh boy, my favourite!" he would say, rolling his eyes, rubbing his stomach in a caricature of hunger, overdoing it. But he'd get what he wanted, because then she would laugh.

  As he grew older and more devious, he found that on the days when he couldn't grab some approval, he could at least get a reaction. Anything was better than the flat voice, the blank eyes, the tired staring out of the window.

  "Can I have a cat?" he would begin.

  "No, Jimmy, you cannot have a cat. We've been over this before. Cats might carry diseases that would be bad for the pigoons."

  "But you don't care." This in a sly voice.

  A sigh, a puff of smoke. "Other people care."

  "Can I have a dog then?"

  "No. No dogs either. Can't you find something to do in your room?"

  "Can I have a parrot?"

  "No. Now stop it." She wouldn't really be listening.

  "Can I have nothing?"

  "No."

  "Oh good," he would crow. "I can't have nothing! So I get to have something! What do I get to have?"

  "Jimmy, sometimes you are a pain in the ass, do you know that?"

  "Can I have a baby sister?"

  "No!"

  "A baby brother then? Please?"

  "No means no! Didn't you ear me? I said no!"

  "Why not?"

  That was the key, that would do it. She might start crying and jump up and run out of the room, banging the door behind her, whuff. Or else she might start crying and hugging him. Or she might throw the coffee cup across the room and start yelling, "It's all shit, it's total shit, it's hope
less!" She might even slap him, and then cry and hug him. It could be any combination of those things.

  Or it would just be the crying, with her head down on her arms. She would shake all over, gasp for breath, choking and sobbing. He wouldn't know what to do then. He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which. He would pat her, standing well back as with strange dogs, stretching out his hand, saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." And he was sorry, but there was more to it: he was also gloating, congratulating himself, because he'd managed to create such an effect.

  He was frightened, as well. There was always that knife-edge: had he gone too far? And if he had, what came next?

  3

  ~

  Nooners

  ~

  Noon is the worst, with its glare and humidity. At about eleven o'clock Snowman retreats back into the forest, out of sight of the sea altogether, because the evil rays bounce off the water and get at him even if he's protected from the sky, and then he reddens and blisters. What he could really use is a tube of heavy-duty sunblock, supposing he could ever find one.

  In the first week, when he'd had more energy, he'd made himself a lean-to, using fallen branches and a roll of duct tape and a plastic tarp he'd found in the trunk of a smashed-up car. At that time he'd had a knife, but he lost it a week later, or was it two weeks? He must keep better track of such things as weeks. The knife was one of those pocket items with two blades, an awl, a tiny saw, a nail file, and a corkscrew. Also a little pair of scissors, which he'd used to cut his toenails and the duct tape as well. He regrets the loss of the scissors.

  He was given a knife like that for his ninth birthday, by his father. His father was always giving him tools, trying to make him more practical. In his father's opinion Jimmy couldn't screw in a light bulb. So who wants to screw in a light bulb? says the voice in Snowman's head, a stand-up comic this time. I'd rather do it in bed.

  "Shut up," says Snowman.