Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  Purring

  ~

  The men are performing their morning ritual, standing six feet apart in a long line curving off into the trees at either side. They're facing outward as in pictures of muskoxen, pissing along the invisible line that marks their territory. Their expressions are grave, as befits the seriousness of their task. They remind Snowman of his father heading out the door in the morning, briefcase in hand, an earnest aiming-for-the-target frown between his eyes.

  The men do this twice a day, as they've been taught: it's necessary to keep the volume constant, the odour renewed. Crake's model had been the canids and the mustelids, and a couple of other families and species as well. Scent-marking was a wideranging mammalian leitmotif, he'd said, nor was it confined to the mammals. Certain reptiles, various lizards ...

  "Never mind about the lizards," said Jimmy.

  According to Crake - and Snowman has seen nothing since to disprove it - the chemicals programmed into the men's urine are effective against wolvogs and rakunks, and to a lesser extent against bobkittens and pigoons. The wolvogs and bobkittens are reacting to the scent of their own kind and must imagine a huge wolvog or bobkitten, from which they would be wise to keep their distance. The rakunks and pigoons imagine large predators. Or this was the theory.

  Crake allotted the special piss to men only; he said they'd need something important to do, something that didn't involve child-bearing, so they wouldn't feel left out. Woodworking, hunting, high finance, war, and golf would no longer be options, he'd joked.

  There are some disadvantages to this plan, in action - the ring-of-pee boundary line smells like a rarely cleaned zoo - but the circle is large enough so that there's ample smell-free room inside it. Anyway Snowman is used to it by now.

  He waits politely for the men to finish. They don't ask him to join them: they already know his piss is useless. Also it's their habit to say nothing while performing their task: they need to concentrate, to make sure their urine lands in exactly the right place. Each has his own three feet of borderland, his own area of responsibility. It's quite a sight: like the women, these men - smooth-skinned, well-muscled - look like statues, and grouped like this they resemble an entire Baroque fountain. A few mermaids and dolphins and cherubs and the scene would be complete. Into Snowman's head comes the image of a circle of naked car mechanics, each holding a wrench. A whole squad of Mr. Fix-its. A gay magazine centrefold. Witnessing their synchronized routine, he almost expects them to break into some campy chorus line from one of the seedier nightclubs.

  The men shake off, break their circle, look over at Snowman with their uniformly green eyes, smile. They're always so goddamn affable.

  "Welcome, oh Snowman," says the one called Abraham Lincoln. "Will you join us inside our home?" He's getting to be a bit of a leader, that one. Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone.

  Snowman steps over the wet line on the ground, ambles along with the men. He'd just had a brilliant idea: what if he were to take some of the saturated earth with him on his journey, as a protective device? It might ward off the wolvogs. But on second thought, the men would find the gap dug in their defences and would know he'd done it. Such an act could be misinterpreted: he wouldn't want to be suspected of weakening their fortress, exposing their young to danger.

  He'll have to cook up a new directive from Crake, present it to them later. Crake has told me you must collect an offering of your scent. Get them all to piss in a tin can. Sprinkle it around his tree. Make a fairy ring. Draw his own line in the sand.

  They reach the open space at the centre of the territorial circle. Off to one side, three of the women and one man are tending to a little boy, who appears to be hurt in some way. These people are not immune from wounds - the children fall down or bash their heads on trees, the women burn their fingers tending the fires, there are cuts and scrapes - but so far the injuries have been minor, and easily cured by purring.

  Crake had worked for years on the purring. Once he'd discovered that the cat family purred at the same frequency as the ultrasound used on bone fractures and skin lesions and were thus equipped with their own self-healing mechanism, he'd turned himself inside out in the attempt to install that feature. The trick was to get the hyoid apparatus modified and the voluntary nerve pathways connected and the neocortex control systems adapted without hampering the speech abilities. There'd been quite a few botched experiments, as Snowman recalled. One of the trial batch of kids had manifested a tendency to sprout long whiskers and scramble up the curtains; a couple of the others had vocal-expression impediments; one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.

  Crake did it though, thinks Snowman. He pulled it off. Just look at the four of them now, heads down close to the child, purring away like car engines.

  "What happened to him?" he asks.

  "He was bitten," says Abraham. "One of the Children of Oryx bit him."

  This is something new. "What kind?"

  "A bobkitten. For no reason."

  "It was outside our circle, it was in the forest," says one of the women - Eleanor Roosevelt? Empress Josephine? - Snowman can't always remember their names.

  "We were forced to hit it with rocks, to make it go away," says Leonardo da Vinci, the man in the purring quartet.

  So the bobkittens are hunting kiddies now, thinks Snowman. Maybe they're getting hungry - as hungry as he is himself. But they have lots of rabbits to choose from, so it can't be simple hunger. Maybe they see the Children of Crake, the little ones anyway, as just another kind of rabbit, though easier to catch.

  "Tonight we will apologize to Oryx," says one of the women - Sacajawea? - "for the rocks. And we will request her to tell her children not to bite us."

  He's never seen the women do this - this communion with Oryx - although they refer to it frequently. What form does it take? They must perform some kind of prayer or invocation, since they can hardly believe that Oryx appears to them in person. Maybe they go into trances. Crake thought he'd done away with all that, eliminated what he called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons, he'd maintained. It had been a difficult problem, though: take out too much in that area and you got a zombie or a psychopath. But these people are neither.

  They're up to something though, something Crake didn't anticipate: they're conversing with the invisible, they've developed reverence. Good for them, thinks Snowman. He likes it when Crake is proved wrong. He hasn't caught them making any graven images yet, however.

  "Will the child be all right?" he asks.

  "Yes," says the woman calmly. "Already the tooth holes are closing. See?"

  The rest of the women are doing the things they usually do in the morning. Some are tending the central fire; others squat around it, warming themselves. Their body thermostats are set for tropical conditions, so they sometimes find it cold before the sun is high. The fire is fed with dead twigs and branches, but primarily with dung, made into patties the size and shape of hamburgers and dried in the noonday sun. Since the Children of Crake are vegetarians and eat mostly grass and leaves and roots, this material burns well enough. As far as Snowman can tell, fire-tending is about the only thing the women do that might be classified as work. Apart from helping to catch his weekly fish, that is. And cooking it for him. On their own behalf they do no cooking.

  "Greetings, oh Snowman," says the next woman he comes to. Her mouth is green from the breakfast she's been chewing. She's breastfeeding a year-old boy, who looks up at Snowman, lets the nipple pop out of his mouth, and begins to cry. "It's only Snowman!" she says. "He won't hurt you."

  Snowman still hasn't got used to it, the growth rate of these kids. The yearling looks like a five-year-old. By the age of four he'll be an adolescent. Far too much time was wasted in child-rearing, Crake used to say. Childrearing, and being a child. No other species used up sixteen years that way.

  Some
of the older children have spotted him; they come closer, chanting, "Snowman, Snowman!" So he hasn't yet lost his allure. Now all the people are gazing at him curiously, wondering what he's doing here. He never arrives without a reason. On his first visits they'd thought - judging from his appearance - that he must be hungry, and they'd offered him food - a couple of handfuls of choice leaves and roots and grass, and several caecotrophs they'd kept especially for him - and he'd had to explain carefully that their food was not his food.

  He finds the caecotrophs revolting, consisting as they do of semi-digested herbage, discharged through the anus and re-swallowed two or three times a week. This had been another boy-genius concept on the part of Crake. He'd used the vermiform appendix as the base on which to construct the necessary organ, reasoning that at an earlier evolutionary stage, when the ancestral diet had been higher in roughage, the appendix must have fulfilled some such function. But he'd stolen the specific idea from the Leporidae, the hares and rabbits, which depend on caecotrophs rather than on several stomachs like the ruminants. Maybe this is why bobkittens have started hunting the young Crakers, Snowman thinks: beneath the citrus overlay, they can smell the rabbity aroma of the caecotrophs.

  Jimmy had argued with Crake over this feature. However you look at it, he'd said, what it boiled down to was eating your own shit. But Crake had merely smiled. For animals with a diet consisting largely of unrefined plant materials, he'd pointed out, such a mechanism was necessary to break down the cellulose, and without it the people would die. Also, as in the Leporidae, the caecotrophs were enriched with Vitamin B1, and with other vitamins and minerals as well, at four or five times the level of ordinary waste material. Caecotrophs were simply a part of alimentation and digestion, a way of making maximum use of the nutrients at hand. Any objections to the process were purely aesthetic.

  That was the point, Jimmy had said.

  Crake had said that if so it was a bad one.

  Snowman is now surrounded by an attentive circle. "Greetings, Children of Crake," he says. "I have come to tell you that I'm going on a journey." The adults must have deduced this already, from his long stick and the way he's tied his sheet: he's gone on journeys before, or that's what he's called his looting forays into the trailer parks and adjacent pleeblands.

  "Are you going to see Crake?" asks one of the children.

  "Yes," says Snowman. "I'll try to see him. I'll see him if he's there."

  "Why?" says one of the older children.

  "There are some things I need to ask him," says Snowman cautiously.

  "You must tell him about the bobkitten," says Empress Josephine. "The one that bit."

  "That is a matter for Oryx," says Madame Curie. "Not for Crake." The other women nod.

  "We want to see Crake too," the children begin. "We too, we too! We want to see Crake too!" It's one of their favourite ideas, going to see Crake. Snowman blames himself: he shouldn't have told them such exciting lies at the beginning. He'd made Crake sound like Santa Claus.

  "Don't bother Snowman," says Eleanor Roosevelt gently. "Surely he is making this journey to help us. We must thank him."

  "Crake is not for children," says Snowman, looking as stern as he can manage.

  "Let us come too! We want to see Crake!"

  "Only Snowman can ever see Crake," Abraham Lincoln says mildly. That seems to settle it.

  "This will be a longer journey," Snowman says. "Longer than the other journeys. Maybe I won't come back for two days." He holds up two fingers. "Or three," he adds. "So you shouldn't worry. But while I'm away, be sure to stay here in your home, and do everything the way Crake and Oryx have taught you."

  A chorus of yesses, much nodding of heads. Snowman doesn't mention the possibility of danger to himself. Perhaps it isn't a thing they ever consider, nor is it a subject he brings up - the more invulnerable they think he is, the better.

  "We will come with you," says Abraham Lincoln. Several of the other men look at him, then nod.

  "No!" says Snowman, taken aback. "I mean, you can't see Crake, it isn't allowed." He doesn't want them tagging along, absolutely not! He doesn't want them witnessing any weaknesses or failures on his part. Also, some of the sights along the way might be bad for their state of mind. Inevitably they would shower him with questions. In addition to all of which, a day in their company would bore the pants off him.

  But you don't have any pants, says a voice in his head - a small voice this time, a sad little child's voice. Joke! Joke! Don't kill me!

  Please, not now, thinks Snowman. Not in company. In company, he can't answer back.

  "We would come with you to protect you," says Benjamin Franklin, looking at Snowman's long stick. "From the bobkittens that bite, from the wolvogs."

  "Your smell is not very strong," adds Napoleon.

  Snowman finds this offensively smug. Also it's too euphemistic by half: as they all know, his smell is strong enough, it just isn't the right kind. "I'll be fine," he says. "You stay here."

  The men look dubious, but he thinks they'll do as he says. To reinforce his authority he holds his watch up to his ear. "Crake says he'll be watching over you," he says. "To keep you safe." Watch, watching over, says the small child's voice. It's a pun, you cork-nut.

  "Crake watches over us in the daytime, and Oryx watches over us at night," Abraham Lincoln says dutifully. He doesn't sound too convinced.

  "Crake always watches over us," says Simone de Beauvoir serenely. She's a yellow-brown woman who reminds Snowman of Dolores, his long-lost Philippina nanny; he sometimes has to resist the urge to drop to his knees and throw his arms around her waist.

  "He takes good care of us," says Madame Curie. "You must tell him that we are grateful."

  Snowman goes back along the Snowman Fish Path. He feels mushy: nothing breaks him up like the generosity of these people, their willingness to be of help. Also their gratitude towards Crake. It's so touching, and so misplaced.

  "Crake, you dickhead," he says. He feels like weeping. Then he hears a voice - his own! - saying boohoo; he sees it, as if it's a printed word in a comic-strip balloon. Water leaks down his face.

  "Not this again," he says. What's the sensation? It isn't anger exactly; it's vexation. An old word but serviceable. Vexation takes in more than Crake, and indeed why blame Crake alone?

  Maybe he's merely envious. Envious yet again. He too would like to be invisible and adored. He too would like to be elsewhere. No hope for that: he's up to his neck in the here and now.

  He slows to a shamble, then to a halt. Oh, boohoo! Why can't he control himself? On the other hand, why bother, since nobody's watching? Still, the noise he's making seems to him like the exaggerated howling of a clown - like misery performed for applause.

  Stop snivelling, son, says his father's voice. Pull yourself together. You're the man around here.

  "Right!" Snowman yells. "What exactly would you suggest? You were such a great example!"

  But irony is lost on the trees. He wipes his nose with his stickfree hand and keeps walking.

  Blue

  ~

  It's nine in the morning, sun clock, by the time Snowman leaves the Fish Path to turn inland. As soon as he's out of the sea breeze the humidity shoots up, and he attracts a coterie of small green biting flies. He's barefoot - his shoes disintegrated some time ago, and in any case they were too hot and damp - but he doesn't need them now because the soles of his feet are hard as old rubber. Nevertheless he walks cautiously: there might be broken glass, torn metal. Or there might be snakes, or other things that could give him a nasty bite, and he has no weapon apart from the stick.

  At first he's walking under trees, formerly parkland. Some distance away he hears the barking cough of a bobkitten. That's the sound they make as a warning: perhaps it's a male, and it's met another male bobkitten. There'll be a fight, with the winner taking all - all the females in the territory - and dispatching their kittens, if he can get away with it, to make room for his own genetic package.
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br />   Those things were introduced as a control, once the big green rabbits had become such a prolific and resistant pest. Smaller than bobcats, less aggressive - that was the official story about the bobkittens. They were supposed to eliminate feral cats, thus improving the almost non-existent songbird population. The bobkittens wouldn't bother much about birds, as they would lack the lightness and agility necessary to catch them. Thus went the theory.

  All of which came true, except that the bobkittens soon got out of control in their turn. Small dogs went missing from backyards, babies from prams; short joggers were mauled. Not in the Compounds, of course, and rarely in the Modules, but there'd been a lot of grousing from the pleeblanders. He should keep a lookout for tracks, and be careful of overhanging branches: he doesn't like the thought of one of those things landing on his head.

  There are always the wolvogs to worry about. But wolvogs are nocturnal hunters: in the heat of the day they tend to sleep, like most things with fur.

  Every so often there's a more open space - the remains of a drive-in campsite, with a picnic table and one of those outdoor-barbecue fireplaces, though nobody used them very much once it got so warm and began to rain every afternoon. He comes upon one now, fungi sprouting from the decaying table, the barbecue covered in bindweed.

  Off to the side, from what is probably a glade where the tents and trailers used to be set up, he can hear laughter and singing, and shouts of admiration and encouragement. There must be a mating going on, a rare-enough occasion among the people: Crake had worked out the numbers, and had decreed that once every three years per female was more than enough.

  There'll be the standard quintuplet, four men and the woman in heat. Her condition will be obvious to all from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen - a trick of variable pigmentation filched from the baboons, with a contribution from the expandable chromosphores of the octopus. As Crake used to say, Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.