Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  The resistance movement was global. Riots broke out, crops were burned, Happicuppa cafes were looted, Happicuppa personnel were car-bombed or kidnapped or shot by snipers or beaten to death by mobs; and, on the other side, peasants were massacred by the army. Or by the armies, various armies; a number of countries were involved. But the soldiers and dead peasants all looked much the same wherever they were. They looked dusty. It was amazing how much dust got stirred up in the course of such events.

  "Those guys should be whacked," said Crake.

  "Which ones? The peasants? Or the guys killing them?"

  "The latter. Not because of the dead peasants, there's always been dead peasants. But they're nuking the cloud forests to plant this stuff."

  "The peasants would do that too if they had half a chance," said Jimmy.

  "Sure, but they don't have half a chance."

  "You're taking sides?"

  "There aren't any sides, as such."

  Nothing much to be said to that. Jimmy thought about shouting bogus, decided it might not apply. Anyway they'd used up that word. "Let's change channels," he said.

  But there was Happicuppa coverage, it seemed, wherever you turned. There were protests and demonstrations, with tear gas and shooting and bludgeoning; then more protests, more demonstrations, more tear gas, more shooting, more bludgeoning. This went on day after day. There hadn't been anything like it since the first decade of the century. Crake said it was history in the making.

  Don't Drink Death! said the posters. Union dockworkers in Australia, where they still had unions, refused to unload Happicuppa cargoes; in the United States, a Boston Coffee Party sprang up. There was a staged media event, boring because there was no violence - only balding guys with retro tattoos or white patches where they'd been taken off, and severe-looking baggy-boobed women, and quite a few overweight or spindly members of marginal, earnest religious groups, in T-shirts with smiley-faced angels flying with birds or Jesus holding hands with a peasant or God Is Green on the front. They were filmed dumping Happicuppa products into the harbour, but none of the boxes sank. So there was the Happicuppa logo, lots of copies of it, bobbing around on the screen. It could have been a commercial.

  "Makes me thirsty," said Jimmy.

  "Shit for brains," said Crake. "They forgot to add rocks."

  As a rule they watched the unfolding of events on the Noodie News, via the Net, but for a change they sometimes watched fully clothed newscasters on the wall-sized plasma screen in Uncle Pete's leatherette-upholstered TV room. The suits and shirts and ties seemed bizarre to Jimmy, especially if he was mildly stoned. It was weird to imagine what all those serious-faced talking heads would look like minus their fashion items, full frontal on the Noodie News.

  Uncle Pete sometimes watched too, in the evenings, when he was back from the golf course. He'd pour himself a drink, then provide a running commentary. "The usual uproar," he said. "They'll get tired of it, they'll settle down. Everybody wants a cheaper cup of coffee - you can't fight that."

  "No, you can't," Crake would say agreeably. Uncle Pete had a chunk of Happicuppa stock in his portfolio, and not just a little chunk. "What a mort," Crake would say as he scanned Uncle Pete's holdings on his computer.

  "You could trade his stuff," said Jimmy. "Sell the Happicuppa, buy something he really hates. Buy windpower.

  No, better - buy a croaker. Get him some South American cattle futures."

  "Nah," said Crake. "I can't risk that with a labyrinth. He'd notice. He'd find out I've been getting in."

  Things escalated after a cell of crazed anti-Happicuppa fanatics bombed the Lincoln Memorial, killing five visiting Japanese schoolkids that were part of a Tour of Democracy. Stop the Hipocrissy, read the note left at a safe distance.

  "That's pathetic," said Jimmy. "They can't even spell."

  "They made their point though," said Crake.

  "I hope they fry," said Uncle Pete.

  Jimmy didn't answer, because now they were looking at the blockade of the Happicuppa head-office compound in Maryland. There in the shouting crowd, clutching a sign that read A Happicup Is a Crappi Cup, with a green bandanna over her nose and mouth, was - wasn't it? - his vanished mother. For a moment the bandanna slipped down and Jimmy saw her clearly - her frowning eyebrows, her candid blue eyes, her determined mouth. Love jolted through him, abrupt and painful, followed by anger. It was like being kicked: he must have let out a gasp. Then there was a CorpSeCorps charge and a cloud of tear gas and a smattering of what sounded like gunfire, and when Jimmy looked again his mother had disappeared.

  "Freeze the frame!" he said. "Turn back!" He wanted to be sure. How could she be taking such a risk? If they got hold of her she'd really disappear, this time forever. But after a brief glance at him Crake had already switched to another channel.

  I shouldn't have said anything, thought Jimmy. I shouldn't have called attention. He was cold with fear now. What if Uncle Pete made the connection and phoned the Corpsmen? They'd be right on her trail, she'd be roadkill.

  But Uncle Pete didn't seem to have noticed. He was pouring himself another Scotch. "They should spraygun the whole bunch of them," he said. "Once they've smashed those cameras. Who took that footage anyway? Sometimes you wonder who's running this show."

  "So what was that about?" said Crake when they were alone.

  "Nothing," said Jimmy.

  "I did freeze it," said Crake. "I got the whole sequence."

  "I think you better erase it," said Jimmy. He was past being frightened, he'd entered full-blown dejection. Surely at this very moment Uncle Pete was turning on his cellphone and punching in the numbers; hours from now it would be the CorpSeCorps interrogation all over again. His mother this, his mother that. He would just have to go through it.

  "It's okay," said Crake, which Jimmy took to mean: You can trust me. Then he said, "Let me guess. Phylum Chordata, Class Vertebrata, Order Mammalia, Family Primates, Genus Homo, Species sapiens sapiens, subspecies your mother."

  "Big points," said Jimmy listlessly.

  "Not a stretch," said Crake. "I spotted her right away, those blue eyes. It was either her or a clone."

  If Crake had recognized her, who else might have done so? Everyone in the HelthWyzer Compound had doubtless been shown pictures: You seen this woman? The story of his deviant mother had followed Jimmy around like an unwanted dog, and was probably half responsible for his poor showing at the Student Auction. He wasn't dependable, he was a security risk, he had a taint.

  "My dad was the same," said Crake. "He buggered off too."

  "I thought he died," said Jimmy. That's all he'd ever got out of Crake before: dad died, full stop, change the subject. It wasn't anything Crake would talk about.

  "That's what I mean. He went off a pleebland overpass. It was rush hour, so by the time they got to him he was cat food."

  "Did he jump, or what?" said Jimmy. Crake didn't seem too worked up about it, so he felt it was okay to ask that.

  "It was the general opinion," said Crake. "He was a top researcher over at HelthWyzer West, so he got a really nice funeral. The tact was amazing. Nobody used the word suicide. They said 'your father's accident.' "

  "Sorry about that," said Jimmy.

  "Uncle Pete was over at our place all the time. My mother said he was really supportive." Crake said supportive like a quote. "She said, besides being my dad's boss and best friend, he was turning out to be a really good friend of the family, not that I'd ever seen him around much before. He wanted things to be resolved for us, he said he was anxious about that. He kept trying to have these heart-to-heart talks with me - tell me all about how my father had problems."

  "Meaning your dad was a nutbar," said Jimmy.

  Crake looked at Jimmy out of his slanty green eyes. "Yeah. But he wasn't. He was acting worried lately, but he didn't have problems. He had nothing like that on his mind. Nothing like jumping. I'd have known."

  "You think he maybe fell off?"

  "Fell off?"
<
br />   "Off the overpass." Jimmy wanted to ask what he'd been doing on a pleebland overpass in the first place, but it didn't seem like the right time. "Was there a railing?"

  "He was kind of uncoordinated," said Crake, smiling in an odd way. "He didn't always watch where he was going. He was head in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot."

  "You get along with him?"

  Crake paused. "He taught me to play chess. Before it happened."

  "Well, I guess not after," said Jimmy, trying to lighten things up, because by this time he was feeling sorry for Crake, and he didn't like that at all.

  ~

  How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid?

  No, not stupid. He can't describe himself, the way he'd been. Not unmarked - events had marked him, he'd had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate.

  There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He'd grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out.

  Applied Rhetoric

  ~

  At the end of that vacation, Crake went off to Watson-Crick and Jimmy to Martha Graham. They shook hands at the bullet-train station.

  "See you around," said Jimmy.

  "We'll e-mail," said Crake. Then, noticing Jimmy's dejection, he said, "Come on, you did okay, the place is famous."

  "Was famous," said Jimmy.

  "It won't be that bad."

  Crake was wrong, for once. Martha Graham was falling apart. It was surrounded - Jimmy observed as the train pulled in - by the tackiest kind of pleeblands: vacant warehouses, burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and huts put together from scavenged materials - sheets of tin, slabs of plywood - and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people exist? Jimmy had no idea. Yet there they were, on the other side of the razor wire. A couple of them raised their middle fingers at the train, shouted something that the bulletproof glass shut out.

  The security at the Martha Graham gateway was a joke. The guards were half asleep, the walls - scrawled all over with faded graffiti - could have been scaled by a one-legged dwarf. Inside them, the Bilbao-ripoff cast-concrete buildings leaked, the lawns were mud, either baked or liquid depending on the season, and there were no recreational facilities apart from a swimming pool that looked and smelled like a giant sardine can. Half the time the air conditioning in the dorms didn't work; there was a brownout problem with the electrical supply; the food in the cafeteria was mostly beige and looked like rakunk shit. There were arthropods in the bedrooms, families and genera various, but half of them were cockroaches. Jimmy found the place depressing, as did - it seemed - everyone there with any more neural capacity than a tulip. But this was the hand life had dealt him, as his dad had said during their awkward goodbye, and now Jimmy would just have to play it as well as he could.

  Right, Dad, Jimmy had thought. I've always known I could count on you for really, really sage advice.

  The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century who'd apparently mowed quite a swath in her day. There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration building, in her role - said the bronze plaque - as Judith, cutting off the head of a guy in a historical robe outfit called Holofernes. Retro feminist shit, was the general student opinion. Every once in a while the statue got its tits decorated or steel wool glued onto its pubic region - Jimmy himself had done some of this glueing - and so comatose was the management that the ornaments often stayed up there for months before they were noticed. Parents were always objecting to this statue - poor role model, they'd say, too aggressive, too bloodthirsty, blah blah - whereupon the students would rally to its defence. Old Martha was their mascot, they'd say, the scowl, the dripping head and all. She represented life, or art, or something. Hands off Martha. Leave her alone.

  The Academy had been set up by a clutch of now-dead rich liberal bleeding hearts from Old New York as an Arts-and-Humanities college at some time in the last third of the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the Performing Arts - acting, singing, dancing, and so forth. To that had been added Film-making in the 1980s, and Video Arts after that. These things were still taught at Martha Graham - they still put on plays, and it was there Jimmy saw Macbeth in the flesh and reflected that Anna K. and her Web site for peeping Toms had done a more convincing job of Lady Macbeth while sitting on her toilet.

  The students of song and dance continued to sing and dance, though the energy had gone out of these activities and the classes were small. Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century - no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status. Theatrical events had dwindled into versions of the singalong or the tomato bombardment or the wet T-shirt contest. And though various older forms had dragged on - the TV sitcom, the rock video - their audience was ancient and their appeal mostly nostalgic.

  So a lot of what went on at Martha Graham was like studying Latin, or book-binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything, though every once in a while the college president would subject them to some yawner about the vital arts and their irresistible reserved seat in the big red-velvet amphitheatre of the beating human heart.

  As for Film-making and Video Arts, who needed them? Anyone with a computer could splice together whatever they wanted, or digitally alter old material, or create new animation. You could download one of the standard core plots and add whatever faces you chose, and whatever bodies too. Jimmy himself had put together a naked Pride and Prejudice and a naked To the Lighthouse, just for laughs, and in sophomore VizArts at HelthWyzer he'd done The Maltese Falcon, with costumes by Kate Greenaway and depth-and-shadow styling by Rembrandt. That one had been good. A dark tonality, great chiaroscuro.

  With this kind of attrition going on - this erosion of its former intellectual territory - Martha Graham had found itself without a very convincing package to offer. As the initial funders had died off and the enthusiasm of the dedicated artsy money had waned and endowment had been sought in more down-to-earth quarters, the curricular emphasis had switched to other arenas. Contemporary arenas, they were called. Webgame Dynamics, for instance; money could still be made from that. Or Image Presentation, listed in the calendar as a sub-branch of Pictorial and Plastic Arts. With a degree in PicPlarts, as the students called it, you could go into advertising, no sweat.

  Or Problematics. Problematics was for word people, so that was what Jimmy took. Spin and Grin was its nickname among the students. Like everything at Martha Graham it had utilitarian aims. Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills, ran the motto underneath the original Latin motto, which was Ars Longa Vita Brevis.

  Jimmy had few illusions. He knew what sort of thing would be open to him when he came out the other end of Problematics with his risible degree. Window-dressing was what he'd be doing, at best - decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2-D verbiage. Depending on how well he did in his Problematics courses - Applied Logic, Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology, and the rest - he'd have a choice between well-paid window-dressing for a big Corp or flimsy cut-rate stuff for a borderline one. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn't say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

  Nevertheless, he dug himself in at Martha Graham as if into a trench, and hunkered down for the duration. He shared a dorm suite - one cramped room either side, silverfish-ridden bathroom in the mi
ddle - with a fundamentalist vegan called Bernice, who had stringy hair held back with a wooden clip in the shape of a toucan and wore a succession of God's Gardeners T-shirts, which - due to her aversion to chemical compounds such as underarm deodorants - stank even when freshly laundered.

  Bernice let him know how much she disapproved of his carnivorous ways by kidnapping his leather sandals and incinerating them on the lawn. When he protested that they hadn't been real leather, she said they'd been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate. After he'd had a few girls up to his room - none of Bernice's business, and they'd been quiet enough, apart from some pharmaceutically induced giggling and a lot of understandable moans - she'd manifested her views on consensual sex by making a bonfire of all Jimmy's jockey shorts.

  He'd complained about that to Student Services, and after a few tries - Student Services at Martha Graham was notoriously grumpy, staffed as it was by burnt-out TV-series actors who could not forgive the world for their plunge from marginal fame - he got himself moved to a single room. (First my sandals, then my underwear. Next it'll be me. The woman is a pyromaniac, let me rephrase that, she is reality-challenged in a major way. You wish to see the concrete evidence of her crotchwear auto-da-fe? Look into this tiny envelope. If you see me next in an urn, gritty ashes, couple of teeth, you want the responsibility? Hey, I'm the Student here and you're the Service. Here it is, right on the letterhead, see? I've e-mailed this to the president.)

  (This is not what he actually said, of course. He knew better than that. He smiled, he presented himself as a reasonable human being, he enlisted their sympathy.)