Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  He remembered himself as carefree, earlier, in his youth. Carefree, thick-skinned, skipping light-footed over the surfaces, whistling in the dark, able to get through anything. Turning a blind eye. Now he found himself wincing away. The smallest setbacks were major - a lost sock, a jammed electric toothbrush. Even the sunrise was blinding. He was being rubbed all over with sandpaper. "Get a grip," he told himself. "Get a handle on it. Put it behind you. Move forward. Make a new you."

  Such positive slogans. Such bland inspirational promotions vomit. What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless.

  On the worst nights he'd call up Alex the parrot, long dead by then but still walking and talking on the Net, and watch him go through his paces. Handler: What colour is the round ball, Alex? The round ball? Alex, head on side, thinking: Blue. Handler: Good boy! Alex: Cork-nut, cork-nut! Handler: There you are! Then Alex would be given a cob of baby corn, which wasn't what he'd asked for, he'd asked for an almond. Seeing this would bring tears to Jimmy's eyes.

  Then he'd stay up too late, and once in bed he'd stare at the ceiling, telling over his lists of obsolete words for the comfort that was in them. Dibble. Aphasia. Breast plough. Enigma. Gat. If Alex the parrot were his, they'd be friends, they'd be brothers. He'd teach him more words. Knell. Kern. Alack.

  But there was no longer any comfort in the words. There was nothing in them. It no longer delighted Jimmy to possess these small collections of letters that other people had forgotten about. It was like having his own baby teeth in a box.

  At the edge of sleep a procession would appear behind his eyes, moving out of the shadows to the left, crossing his field of vision. Young slender girls with small hands, ribbons in their hair, bearing garlands of many-coloured flowers. The field would be green, but it wasn't a pastoral scene: these were girls in danger, in need of rescue. There was something - a threatening presence - behind the trees.

  Or perhaps the danger was in him. Perhaps he was the danger, a fanged animal gazing out from the shadowy cave of the space inside his own skull.

  Or it might be the girls themselves that were dangerous. There was always that possibility. They could be a bait, a trap. He knew they were much older than they appeared to be, and much more powerful as well. Unlike himself they had a ruthless wisdom.

  The girls were calm, they were grave and ceremonious. They'd look at him, they'd look into him, they would recognize and accept him, accept his darknesses. Then they would smile.

  Oh honey, I know you. I see you. I know what you want.

  11

  ~

  Pigoons

  ~

  Jimmy's in the kitchen of the house they lived in when he was five, sitting at the table. It's lunchtime. In front of him on a plate is a round of bread - a flat peanut butter head with a gleaming jelly smile, raisins for teeth. This thing fills him with dread. Any minute now his mother will come into the room. But no, she won't: her chair is empty. She must have made his lunch and left it for him. But where has she gone, where is she?

  There's a scraping sound; it's coming from the wall. There's someone on the other side, digging a hole through, breaking in. He looks at that part of the wall, below the clock with the different birds marking the hours. Hoot hoot hoot, says the robin. He'd done that, he'd altered the clock - the owl says caw caw, the crow says cheerup, cheerup. But that clock wasn't there when he was five, they'd got it later. Something's wrong, the time's wrong, he can't tell what it is, he's paralyzed with fright. The plaster begins to crumble, and he wakes up.

  He hates these dreams. The present's bad enough without the past getting mixed into it. Live in the moment. He'd put that on a giveaway calendar once, some fraudulent sex-enhancement product for women. Why chain your body to the clock, you can break the shackles of time, and so on and so forth. The picture was of a woman with wings, taking flight from a pile of dirty old wrinkled cloth, or possibly skin.

  So here it is then, the moment, this one, the one he's supposed to be living in. His head's on a hard surface, his body's crammed into a chair, he's one big spasm. He stretches, yelps with pain.

  It takes him a minute to place himself. Oh yes - the tornado, the gatehouse. All is quiet, no puffs of wind, no howling. Is it the same afternoon, or the night, or the next morning? There's light in the room, daylight; it's coming in through the window over the counter, the bulletproof window with the intercom, where once upon a time, long long ago, you'd had to state your business. The slot for your micro-coded documents, the twenty-four-hour videocam, the talking smiley-faced box that would put you through the Q&A - the whole mechanism is literally shot to hell. Grenades, possibly. There's a lot of fallen rubble.

  The scraping continues: there's something in the corner of the room. He can't make it out at first: it looks like a skull. Then he sees it's a land crab, a rounded white-yellow shell as big as a shrunken head, with one giant pincer. It's enlarging a hole in the rubble. "What the shit are you doing in here?" he asks it. "You're supposed to be outside, ruining the gardens." He throws the empty bourbon bottle at it, misses; the bottle shatters. That was a stupid thing to do, now there's broken glass. The land crab whips around to face him, big pincer up, then backs into its half-dug hole, where it sits watching him. It must have come in here to escape the twister, just as he did, and now it can't find its way out.

  He unwinds himself from the chair, looking first for snakes and rats and any other thing he might not wish to step on. Then he drops the candle end and the matches into his plastic bag and walks carefully over to the doorway leading into the front reception area. He pulls the door shut behind him: he doesn't want any crab attacks from the back.

  At the outer doorway he pauses to reconnoitre. No animals about, apart from a trio of crows perched on the rampart. They exchange a few caws, of which he is probably the subject. The sky is the pearly grey-pink of early morning, hardly a cloud in it. The landscape has been rearranged since yesterday: more pieces of detached metal sheeting than before, more uprooted trees. Leaves and torn fronds litter the muddy ground.

  If he sets out now he'll have a good chance of making it to the central mall before mid-morning. Although his stomach is growling, he'll have to wait till he gets there to have breakfast. He wishes he had some cashews left, but there's only the SoyOBoy sardines, which he's saving as a last resort.

  The air is cool and fresh, the scent of crushed leaves luxurious after the dank, decaying smell of the gatehouse. He inhales with pleasure, then sets off in the direction of the mall. Three blocks along he stops: seven pigoons have materialized from nowhere. They're staring at him, ears forward. Are they the same as yesterday's? As he watches, they begin to amble in his direction.

  They have something in mind, all right. He turns, heads back towards the gatehouse, quickens his pace. They're far enough away so he can run if he has to. He looks over his shoulder: they're trotting now. He speeds up, breaks into a jog. Then he spots another group through the gateway up ahead, eight or nine of them, coming towards him across No Man's Land. They're almost at the main gate, cutting him off in that direction. It's as if they've had it planned, between the two groups; as if they've known for some time that he was in the gatehouse and have been waiting for him to come out, far enough out so they can surround him.

  He reaches the gatehouse, goes through the doorway, pulls the door shut. It doesn't latch. The electronic lock is nonfunctional, of course.

  "Of course!" he shouts. They'll be able to lever it open, pry with their trotters or snouts. They were always escape artists, the pigoons: if they'd had fingers they'd have ruled the world. He runs through the next doorway into the reception area, slams the door behind him. That lock's kaput as well, oh naturally. He shoves the desk he's just slept on up against the door, looks out through the bulletproof window: here they come. They've nosed the door open, they're in the first room now, twenty or thirty of them, boars an
d sows but the boars foremost, crowding in, grunting eagerly, snuffling at his footprints. Now one of them spots him through the window. More grunting: now they're all looking up at him. What they see is his head, attached to what they know is a delicious meat pie just waiting to be opened up. The two biggest ones, two boars, with - yes - sharp tusks, move side by side to the door, bumping it with their shoulders. Team players, the pigoons. There's a lot of muscle out there.

  If they can't push through the door they'll wait him out. They'll take it in relays, some grazing outside, others watching. They can keep it up forever, they'll starve him out. They can smell him in there, smell his flesh.

  Now he remembers to check for the land crab, but it's gone. It must have backed all the way into its burrow. That's what he needs, a burrow of his own. A burrow, a shell, some pincers.

  "So," he says out loud. "What next?"

  Honey, you're fucked.

  Radio

  ~

  After an interval of blankness during which nothing at all occurs to him, Snowman gets up out of the chair. He can't remember having sat down in it but he must have done. His guts are cramping, he must be really scared, though he doesn't feel it; he's quite calm. The door is moving in time to the pushing and thumping from the other side; it won't be long before the pigoons break through. He takes the flashlight out of his plastic bag, turns it on, goes back to the inner room where the two guys in the biosuits are lying on the floor. He shines all around. There are three closed doors; he must have seen them last night, but last night he wasn't trying to get out.

  Two of the doors don't move when he tries them; they must be locked somehow, or blocked on the other side. The third one opens easily. There, like sudden hope, is a flight of stairs. Steep stairs. Pigoons, it occurs to him, have short legs and fat stomachs. The opposite of himself.

  He scrambles up the stairs so fast he trips on his flowered sheet. From behind him comes an excited grunting and squealing, and then a crash as the desk topples over.

  He emerges into a bright oblong space. What is it? The watchtower. Of course. He ought to have known that. There's a watchtower on either side of the main gate, and other towers all the way around the rampart wall. Inside the towers are the searchlights, the monitor videocams, the loudspeakers, the controls for locking the gates, the tear-gas nozzles, the long-range sprayguns. Yes, here are the screens, here are the controls: find the target, zero in on it, push the button. You never needed to see the actual results, the splatter and fizzle, not in the flesh. During the period of chaos the guards probably fired on the crowd from up here while they still could, and while there was still a crowd.

  None of this high-tech stuff is working now, of course. He looks for manually operated backups - it would be fine to be able to mow down the pigoons from above - but no, there's nothing.

  Beside the wall of dead screens there's a little window: from it he has a bird's-eye view of the pigoons, the group of them that's posted outside the checkpoint cubicle door. They look at ease. If they were guys, they'd be having a smoke and shooting the shit. Alert, though; on the lookout. He pulls back: he doesn't want them to see him, see that he's up here.

  Not that they don't know already. They must have figured out by now that he went up the stairs. But do they also know they've got him trapped? Because there's no way out of here that he can see.

  He's in no immediate danger - they can't climb the stairs or they'd have done it by now. There's time to explore and regroup. Regroup, what an idea. There's only one of him.

  The guards must have taken catnaps up here, turn and turn about: there's a couple of standard-issue cots in a side room. Nobody in them, no bodies. Maybe the guards tried to get out of RejoovenEsense, just like everyone else. Maybe they too had hoped they could outrun contagion.

  One of the beds is made, the other not. A digital voice-operated alarm clock is still flashing beside the unmade bed. "What's the time?" he asks it, but he gets no answer. He'll have to reprogram the thing, set it to his own voice.

  The guys were well equipped: twin entertainment centres, with the screens, the players, the headphones attached. Clothes hanging on hooks, the standard off-duty tropicals; a used towel on the floor, ditto a sock. A dozen downloaded printouts on one of the night tables. A skinny girl wearing nothing but high-heeled sandals and standing on her head; a blonde dangling from a hook in the ceiling in some kind of black-leather multiple-fracture truss, blindfolded but with her mouth sagging open in a hit-me-again drool; a big woman with huge breast implants and wet red lipstick, bending over and sticking out her pierced tongue. Same old stuff.

  The guys must have left in a hurry. Maybe it's them downstairs, the ones in the biosuits. That would make sense. Nobody seems to have come up here though, after the two of them left; or if they did, there'd been nothing they'd wanted to take.

  In one of the night-table drawers there's a pack of cigarettes, only a couple gone. Snowman taps one out - damp, but right now he'd smoke pocket fluff - and looks around for a way to light it. He has matches in his garbage bag, but where is it? He must've dropped it on the stairs in his rush to get up here. He goes back to the stairwell, looks down. There's the bag all right, four stairs from the bottom. He starts cautiously downward. As he's stretching out his hand, something lunges. He jumps up out of reach, watches while the pigoon slithers back down, then launches itself again. Its eyes gleam in the half-light; he has the impression it's grinning.

  They were waiting for him, using the garbage bag as bait. They must have been able to tell there was something in it he'd want, that he'd come down to get. Cunning, so cunning. His legs are shaking by the time he reaches the top level again.

  Off the nap room is a small bathroom, with a real toilet in it. Just in time: fear has homogenized his bowels. He takes a dump - there's paper, a small mercy, no need for leaves - and is about to flush when he reasons that the tank at the back must be full of water, and it's water he may need. He lifts the tank top: sure enough, it's full, a mini-oasis. The water is a reddish colour but it smells okay, so he sticks his head down and drinks like a dog. After all that adrenalin, he's parched.

  Now he feels better. No need to panic, no need to panic yet. In the kitchenette he finds matches and lights the cigarette. After a couple of drags he feels dizzy, but still it's wonderful.

  "If you were ninety and you had the chance for one last fuck but you knew it would kill you, would you still do it?" Crake asked him once.

  "You bet," said Jimmy.

  "Addict," said Crake.

  Snowman finds himself humming as he goes through the kitchen cupboards. Chocolate in squares, real chocolate. A jar of instant coffee, ditto coffee whitener, ditto sugar. Shrimp paste for spreading on crackers, ersatz but edible. Cheese food in a tube, ditto mayo. Noodle soup with vegetables, chicken flavour. Crackers in a plastic snap-top. A stash of Joltbars. What a bonanza.

  He braces himself, then opens the refrigerator, betting on the fact that these guys wouldn't have kept too much real food in there, so the stench won't be too repulsive. Frozen meat gone bad in a melted freezer unit is the worst; he came across quite a lot of that in the early days of rummaging through the pleeblands.

  There's nothing too smelly; just a shrivelled apple, an orange covered with grey fur. Two bottles of beer, unopened - real beer! The bottles are brown, with thin retro necks.

  He opens a beer, downs half of it. Warm, but who cares? Then he sits down at the table and eats the shrimp paste, the crackers, the cheese food and the mayo, finishing off with a spoonful of coffee powder mixed with whitener and sugar. He saves the noodle soup and the chocolate and the Joltbars for later.

  In one of the cupboards there's a windup radio. He can remember when those things started being doled out, in case of tornadoes or floods or anything else that might disrupt the electronics. His parents had one when they were still his parents; he used to play with it on the sly. It had a handle that turned to recharge the batteries, it would run for half an hour.


  This one looks undamaged, so he cranks the thing up. He doesn't expect to hear anything, but expectation isn't the same as desire.

  White noise, more white noise, more white noise. He tries the AM bands, then the FM. Nothing. Just that sound, like the sound of starlight scratching its way through outer space: kkkkkkkk. Then he tries the short-wave. He moves the dial slowly and carefully. Maybe there are other countries, distant countries, where the people may have escaped - New Zealand, Madagascar, Patagonia - places like that.

  They wouldn't have escaped though. Or most of them wouldn't. Once it got started, the thing was airborne. Desire and fear were universal, between them they'd been the gravediggers.

  Kkkkk. Kkkkk. Kkkkk.

  Oh, talk to me, he prays. Say something. Say anything.

  Suddenly there's an answer. It's a voice, a human voice. Unfortunately it's speaking some language that sounds like Russian.

  Snowman can't believe his ears. He's not the only one then - someone else has made it through, someone of his own species. Someone who knows how to work a short-wave transmitter. And if one, then likely others. But this one isn't much use to Snowman, he's too far away.

  Dickhead! He's forgotten about the CB function. That was what they'd been told to use, in emergencies. If there's anyone close by, the CB is what they'd be doing.

  He turns the dial. Receive, is what he'll try.

  Kkkkkk.

  Then, faintly, a man's voice: "Is anyone reading me? Anyone out there? Do you read me? Over."

  Snowman fumbles with the buttons. How to send? He's forgotten. Where is the fucker?

  "I'm here! I'm here!" he shouts.

  Back to Receive. Nothing.

  Already he's having second thoughts. Was that too hasty of him? How does he know who's at the other end? Quite possibly no one he'd care to have lunch with. Still, he feels buoyant, elated almost. There are more possibilities now.