Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  Rampart

  ~

  Snowman's been so entranced - by the excitement, the food, the voices on the radio - that he's forgotten about the cut on his foot. Now it's reminding him: there's a jabbing sensation, like a thorn. He sits down at the kitchen table, pulls the foot up as high as he can to examine it. Looks like there's a sliver of bourbon-bottle glass still in there. He picks and squeezes and wishes he had some tweezers, or longer fingernails. Finally he gets a grip on the tiny shard, then pulls. There's pain but not much blood.

  Once he's got the glass piece out he washes the cut with a little of the beer, then hobbles into the bathroom and rummages in the medicine cabinet. Nothing of use, apart from a tube of sunblock - no good for cuts - some out-of-date antibiotic ointment, which he smears on the wound, and the dregs of a bottle of shaving lotion that smells like fake lemons. He pours that on too, because there must be alcohol in it. Maybe he should hunt for some drain cleaner or something, but he doesn't want to go too far, fry the entire foot sole. He'll just have to cross his fingers, wish for luck: an infected foot would slow him right down. He shouldn't have neglected the cut for so long, the floor downstairs must be percolating with germs.

  In the evening he watches the sunset, through the narrow slit of the tower window. How glorious it must have been when all ten of the videocam screens were on and you could get the full panoramic view, turn up the colour brightness, enhance the red tones. Toke up, sit back, drift on cloud nine. As it is the screens turn their blind eyes towards him, so he has to make do with the real thing, just a slice of it, tangerine, then flamingo, then watered-down blood, then strawberry ice cream, off to the side of where the sun must be.

  In the fading pink light the pigoons waiting for him down below look like miniature plastic figurines, bucolic replicas from a child's playbox. They have the rosy tint of innocence, as many things do at a distance. It's hard to imagine that they wish him ill.

  Night falls. He lies down on one of the cots in the bedroom, the bed that's made. Where I'm lying now, a dead man used to sleep, he thinks. He never saw it coming. He had no clue. Unlike Jimmy, who'd had clues, who ought to have seen but didn't. If I'd killed Crake earlier, thinks Snowman, would it have made any difference?

  The place is too hot and stuffy, though he's managed to pry the emergency air vents open. He can't get to sleep right away, so he lights one of the candles - it's in a tin container with a lid, survival supplies, you're supposed to be able to boil soup on those things - and smokes another cigarette. This time it doesn't make him so dizzy. Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.

  He thumbs through the sex-site printouts. The women aren't his type - too bulgy, too altered, too obvious. Too much leer and mascara, too much cowlike tongue. Dismay is what he feels, not lust.

  Revision: dismayed lust.

  "How could you," he murmurs to himself, not for the first time, as he couples in his head with a rent-a-slut decked out in a red Chinese silk halter and six-inch heels, a dragon tattooed on her bum.

  Oh sweetie.

  In the small hot room he dreams; again, it's his mother. No, he never dreams about his mother, only about her absence. He's in the kitchen. Whuff, goes the wind in his ear, a door closing. On a hook her dressing gown is hanging, magenta, empty, frightening.

  He wakes with his heart pounding. He remembers now that after she'd left he'd put it on, that dressing gown. It still smelled of her, of the jasmine-based perfume she used to wear. He'd looked at himself in the mirror, his boy's head with its cool practised fish-eye stare topping a neck that led down into that swaddling of female-coloured fabric. How much he'd hated her at that moment. He could hardly breathe, he'd been suffocating with hatred, tears of hatred had been rolling down his cheeks. But he'd hugged his arms around himself all the same.

  Her arms.

  He's set the alarm on the voice-operated digital clock for an hour before dawn, guessing when that must be. "Rise and shine," the clock says in a seductive female voice. "Rise and shine. Rise and shine."

  "Stop," he says, and it stops.

  "Do you want music?"

  "No," he says, because although he's tempted to lie in bed and interact with the woman in the clock - it would be almost like a conversation - he has to get a move on today. How long has he been away from the shore, from the Crakers? He counts on his fingers: day one, the hike to RejoovenEsense, the twister; day two, trapped by the pigoons. This must be the third day then.

  Outside the window there's a mouse-grey light. He pisses into the kitchen sink, splashes water onto his face from the toilet tank. He shouldn't have drunk that stuff yesterday without boiling it. He boils up a potful now - there's still gas for the propane burner - and washes his foot, a little red around the cut but nothing to freak about, and makes himself a cup of instant coffee with lots of sugar and whitener. He chews up a Three-Fruit Joltbar, savouring the familiar taste of banana oil and sweetened varnish, and feels the energy surge.

  Somewhere in all the running around yesterday he lost his water bottle, just as well considering what was in it. Bird dung, mosquito wrigglers, nematodes. He fills up an empty beer bottle with boiled water, then snaffles a standard-issue micro-fibre laundry bag from the bedroom, into which he packs the water, all the sugar he can find, and the half-dozen Joltbars. He rubs on sunblock and bags the rest of the tube, and puts on a lightweight khaki shirt. There's a pair of sunglasses too, so he discards his old single-eyed ones. He deliberates over a pair of shorts, but they're too big around the waist and wouldn't protect the backs of his legs, so he hangs on to his flowered sheet, doubling it over, knotting it like a sarong. On second thought he takes it off and packs it into the laundry bag: it might snag on something while he's in transit, he can put it back on later. He replaces his lost aspirin and candles, and throws in six small boxes of matches and a paring knife, and his authentic-replica Red Sox baseball cap. He wouldn't want to have that fall off during the great escape.

  There. Not too heavy. Now to break out.

  He tries smashing the kitchen window - he could lower himself down onto the Compound rampart with the bedsheet he's torn into strips and twisted - but no luck: the glass is attack-proof. The narrow window overlooking the gateway is out of the question, as even if he could get through it there'd be a sheer drop into a herd of slavering pigoons. There's a small window in the bathroom, high up, but it too is on the pigoon side.

  After three hours of painstaking labour and with the aid of - initially - a kitchen stepstool, a corkscrew, and a table knife, and - ultimately - a hammer and a battery-operated screwdriver he found at the back of the utility closet, he manages to disassemble the emergency air vent and dislodge the mechanism inside it. The vent leads up like a chimney, then there's a bend to the side. He thinks he's skinny enough to fit through - semi-starvation has its advantages - though if he gets stuck he'll die an agonizing and also ludicrous death. Cooked in an air vent, very funny. He ties one end of his improvised rope to a leg of the kitchen table - happily it's bolted to the floor - and winds the rest around his waist. He attaches his bag of supplies to the end of a second rope. Holding his breath, he squeezes in, torques his body, wriggles. Lucky he's not a woman, the wide butt would foil him. No room to spare, but now his head's in the outside air, then - with a twist - his shoulders. It's an eight-foot drop to the rampart. He'll have to go head first, hope the improvised rope will hold.

  A last push, a wrench as he's pulled up short, and he's dangling askew. He grabs the rope, rights himself, unties the end around his waist, lowers himself hand over hand. Then he pulls the supply bag through. Nothing to it.

  Damn and shit. He's forgotten to bring the windup radio. Well, no going back.

  The rampart is six feet wide, with a wall on either side. Every ten feet there's a pair of slits, not opposite each other but staggered, meant for observation but useful too f
or the emplacement of last-ditch weaponry. The rampart is twenty feet high, twenty-seven counting the walls. It runs all the way around the Compound, punctuated at intervals by a watchtower like the one he's just left.

  The Compound is shaped like an oblong, and there are five other gates. He knows the plan, having studied it thoroughly during his days at Paradice, which is where he's going now. He can see the dome, rising up through the trees, shining like half a moon. His plan is to get what he needs out of there, then circle around via the rampart - or, if conditions are right, he can cut across the Compound space on level ground - and make his way out by a side gate.

  The sun is well up. He'd better hurry, or he'll fry. He'd like to show himself to the pigoons, jeer at them, but he resists this impulse: they'd follow along beside the rampart, keep him from descending. So every time he reaches an observation slit he crouches, holding himself below the sightline.

  At the third watchtower along he pauses. Over the top of the rampart wall he can see something white - greyish white and cloudlike - but it's too low down to be a cloud. Also it's the wrong shape. It's thin, like a wavering pillar. It must be near the seashore, a few miles north of the Craker encampment. At first he thinks it's mist, but mist doesn't rise in an isolated stem like that, it doesn't puff. No question now, it's smoke.

  The Crakers often have a fire going, but it's never a large one, it wouldn't make smoke like this. It could be a result of yesterday's storm, a lightning-strike fire that was dampened by the rain and has begun smouldering again. Or it might be that the Crakers have disobeyed orders and have come looking for him, and have built a signal fire to guide him home. That's unlikely - it isn't how they think - but if so, they're way off course.

  He eats half a Joltbar, downs some water, continues along the rampart. He's limping a little now, conscious of his foot, but he can't stop and tend to it, he has to go as fast as he can. He needs that spraygun, and not just because of the wolvogs and the pigoons. From time to time he looks over his shoulder. The smoke is still there, just the one column of it. It hasn't spread. It keeps on rising.

  12

  ~

  Pleebcrawl

  ~

  Snowman limps along the rampart, towards the glassy white swell of the bubble-dome, which is receding from him like a mirage. Because of his foot he's making poor time, and around eleven o'clock the concrete gets too hot for him to walk on. He's got the sheet over his head, draped himself as much as possible, over his baseball cap and over the tropical shirt, but he could still burn, despite the sunblock and the two layers of cloth. He's grateful for his new two-eyed sunglasses.

  He hunches down in the shade of the next watchtower to wait out the noon, sucks water from a bottle. After the worst of the glare and heat is past, after the daily thunderstorm has come and gone, he'll have maybe three hours to go. All things being equal, he can get there before nightfall.

  Heat pours down, bounces up off the concrete. He relaxes into it, breathes it in, feels the sweat trickling down, like millipedes walking on him. His eyes waver shut, the old films whir and crackle through his head. "What the fuck did he need me for?" he says. "Why didn't he leave me alone?"

  No point thinking about it, not in this heat, with his brain turning to melted cheese. Not melted cheese: better to avoid food images. To putty, to glue, to hair product, in creme form, in a tube. He once used that. He can picture its exact position on the shelf, lined up next to his razor: he'd liked neatness, in a shelf. He has a sudden clear image of himself, freshly showered, running the creme hair product through his damp hair with his hands. In Paradice, waiting for Oryx.

  He'd meant well, or at least he hadn't meant ill. He'd never wanted to hurt anyone, not seriously, not in real space-time. Fantasies didn't count.

  It was a Saturday. Jimmy was lying in bed. He was finding it hard to get up these days; he'd been late for work a couple of times in the past week, and added to the times before that and the times before that, it was going to be trouble for him soon. Not that he'd been out carousing: the reverse. He'd been avoiding human contact. The AnooYoo higher-ups hadn't chewed him out yet; probably they knew about his mother and her traitor's death. Well, of course they did, though it was the kind of deep dark open secret that was never mentioned in the Compounds - bad luck, evil eye, might be catching, best to act dumb and so forth. Probably they were cutting him some slack.

  There was one good thing anyway: maybe now that they'd finally scratched his mother off their list, the Corpsmen would leave him alone.

  "Get it up, get it up, get it up," said his voice clock. It was pink, phallus-shaped: a Cock Clock, given to him as a joke by one of his lovers. He'd thought it was funny at the time, but this morning he found it insulting. That's all he was to her, to all of them: a mechanical joke. Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex, Crake said once. Oh yes siree, thought Jimmy. Another human conundrum.

  "What's the time?" he said to the clock. It dipped its head, sproinged upright again.

  "It's noon. It's noon, it's noon, it's ..."

  "Shut up," said Jimmy. The clock wilted. It was programmed to respond to harsh tones.

  Jimmy considered getting out of bed, going to the kitchenette, opening a beer. That was quite a good idea. He'd had a late night. One of his lovers, the woman who'd given him the clock in fact, had made her way through his wall of silence. She'd turned up around ten with some takeout - Nubbins and fries, she knew what he liked - and a bottle of Scotch.

  "I've been concerned about you," she'd said. What she'd really wanted was a quick furtive jab, so he'd done his best and she'd had a fine time, but his heart wasn't in it and that must have been obvious. Then they'd had to go through What's the matter, Are you bored with me, I really care about you, and so forth and blah blah.

  "Leave your husband," Jimmy had said, to cut her short. "Let's run away to the pleeblands and live in a trailer park."

  "Oh, I don't think ... You don't mean that."

  "What if I did?

  "You know I care about you. But I care about him too, and ..."

  "From the waist down."

  "Pardon?" She was a genteel woman, she said Pardon? instead of What?

  "I said, from the waist down. That's how you really care about me. Want me to spell it out for you?"

  "I don't know what's got into you, you've been so mean lately."

  "No fun at all."

  "Well, actually, no."

  "Then piss off."

  After that they'd had a fight, and she'd cried, which strangely enough had made Jimmy feel better. After that they'd finished the Scotch. After that they'd had more sex, and this time Jimmy had enjoyed himself but his lover hadn't, because he'd been too rough and fast and had not said anything flattering to her the way he usually did. Great ass, and so on and so forth.

  He shouldn't have been so crabby. She was a fine woman with real tits and problems of her own. He wondered whether he'd ever see her again. Most likely he would, because she'd had that I can cure you look in her eyes when she'd left.

  After Jimmy had taken a leak and was getting the beer out of the fridge, his intercom buzzed. There she was, right on cue. Immediately he felt surly again. He went over to the speakerphone. "Go away," he said.

  "It's Crake. I'm downstairs."

  "I don't believe it," said Jimmy. He punched in the numbers for the videocam in the lobby: it was Crake, all right, giving him the finger and the grin.

  "Let me in," said Crake, and Jimmy did, because right then Crake was about the only person he wanted to see.

  Crake was much the same. He had the same dark clothing. He wasn't even balder.

  "What the fuck are you doing here?" said Jimmy. After the initial surge of pleasure he felt embarrassed that he wasn't dressed yet, and that his apartment was knee-deep in dust bunnies and cigarette butts and dirty glassware and empty Nubbins containers, but Crake didn't seem to notice.

  "Nice to feel I'm welcome," said Crake.

  "Sorry
. Things haven't been too good lately," said Jimmy.

  "Yeah. I saw that. Your mother. I e-mailed, but you didn't answer."

  "I haven't been picking up my e-mails," said Jimmy.

  "Understandable. It was on brainfrizz: inciting to violence, membership in a banned organization, hampering the dissemination of commercial products, treasonable crimes against society. I guess that last was the demos she was in. Throwing bricks or something. Too bad, she was a nice lady."

  Neither nice nor lady was applicable in Jimmy's view, but he wasn't up to debating this, not so early in the day. "Want a beer?" he said.

  "No thanks," said Crake. "I just came to see you. See if you were all right."

  "I'm all right," said Jimmy.

  Crake looked at him. "Let's go to the pleeblands," he said. "Troll a few bars."

  "This is a joke, right?" said Jimmy.

  "No, really. I've got the passes. My regular one, and one for you."

  By which Jimmy knew that Crake really must be somebody. He was impressed. But much more than that, he was touched that Crake would experience concern for him, would come all this way to seek him out. Even though they hadn't been in close touch lately - Jimmy's fault - Crake was still his friend.

  Five hours later they were strolling through the pleeblands north of New New York. It had taken only a couple of hours to get there - bullet train to the nearest Compound, then an official Corps car with an armed driver, laid on by whoever was doing Crake's bidding. The car had taken them into the heart of what Crake called the action, and dropped them off there. They'd be shadowed though, said Crake. They'd be protected. So no harm would come to them.

  Before setting out, Crake had stuck a needle in Jimmy's arm - an all-purpose, short-term vaccine he'd cooked himself. The pleeblands, he said, were a giant Petri dish: a lot of guck and contagious plasm got spread around there. If you grew up surrounded by it you were more or less immune, unless a new bioform came raging through; but if you were from the Compounds and you set foot in the pleebs, you were a feast. It was like having a big sign on your forehead that said, Eat Me.