Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood

  "The names," he said to Crake. "You raided Extinctathon!"

  "It's more than the names," said Crake. "These people are Extinctathon. They're all Grandmasters. What you're looking at is MaddAddam, the cream of the crop."

  "You're joking! How come they're here?" said Jimmy.

  "They're the splice geniuses," said Crake. "The ones that were pulling those capers, the asphalt-eating microbes, the outbreak of neon-coloured herpes simplex on the west coast, the ChickieNob wasps and so on."

  "Neon herpes? I didn't hear about that," said Jimmy. Pretty funny. "How did you track them down?"

  "I wasn't the only person after them. They were making themselves very unpopular in some quarters. I just got to them ahead of the Corps, that's all. Or I got to most of them, anyway."

  Jimmy was going to ask What happened to the others, but he thought better of it.

  "So you kidnapped them, or what?" That wouldn't have surprised Jimmy, brain-snatching being a customary practice; though usually the brains were snatched between countries, not within them.

  "I merely persuaded them they'd be a lot happier and safer in here than out there."

  "Safer? In Corps territory?"

  "I got them secure papers. Most of them agreed with me, especially when I offered to destroy their so-called real identities and all records of their previous existences."

  "I thought those guys were anti-Compound," said Jimmy. "The stuff MaddAddam was doing was pretty hostile, from what you showed me."

  "They were anti-Compound. Still are, probably. But after the Second World War in the twentieth century, the Allies invited a lot of German rocket scientists to come and work with them, and I can't recall anyone saying no. When your main game's over, you can always move your chessboard elsewhere."

  "What if they try sabotage, or ..."

  "Escape? Yeah," said Crake. "A couple were like that at the beginning. Not team players. Thought they'd take what they'd done here, cart it offshore. Go underground, or set up elsewhere."

  "What did you do?"

  "They fell off pleebland overpasses," said Crake.

  "Is that a joke?"

  "In a manner of speaking. You'll need another name," Crake said, "a MaddAddam name, so you'll fit in. I thought, since I'm Crake here, you could go back to being Thickney, the way you were when we were - how old?"

  "Fourteen."

  "Those were definitive times," said Crake.

  Jimmy wanted to linger, but Crake was already hurrying him along. He'd have liked to talk with some of these people, hear their stories - had any of them known his mother, for instance? - but maybe he could do that later. On the other hand, maybe not: he'd been seen with Crake, the alpha wolf, the silverback gorilla, the head lion. Nobody would want to get too cozy with him. They'd see his as the jackal position.

  Paradice

  ~

  They dropped in at Crake's office, so Jimmy could get a little oriented, said Crake. It was a large space with many gizmos in it, as Jimmy would have expected. There was a painting on the wall: an eggplant on an orange plate. It was the first picture Jimmy ever remembered seeing in a place of Crake's. He thought of asking if that was Crake's girlfriend, but thought better of it.

  He zeroed in on the minibar. "Anything in that?"

  "Later," said Crake.

  Crake still had a collection of fridge magnets, but they were different ones. No more science quips.

  Where God is, Man is not.

  There are two moons, the one you can see and the one you can't.

  Du musz dein Leben andern.

  We understand more than we know.

  I think, therefore.

  To stay human is to break a limitation.

  Dream steals from its lair towards its prey.

  "What are you really up to here?" said Jimmy.

  Crake grinned. "What is really?"

  "Bogus," said Jimmy. But he was thrown off balance.

  Now, said Crake, it was time to get serious. He was going to show Jimmy the other thing they were doing - the main thing, here at Paradice. What Jimmy was about to see was ... well, it couldn't be described. It was, quite simply, Crake's life's work.

  Jimmy put on a suitably solemn face. What next? Some gruesome new food substance, no doubt. A liver tree, a sausage vine. Or some sort of zucchini that grew wool. He braced himself.

  Crake led Jimmy along and around; then they were standing in front of a large picture window. No: a one-way mirror. Jimmy looked in. There was a large central space filled with trees and plants, above them a blue sky. (Not really a blue sky, only the curved ceiling of the bubble-dome, with a clever projection device that simulated dawn, sunlight, evening, night. There was a fake moon that went through its phases, he discovered later. There was fake rain.)

  That was his first view of the Crakers. They were naked, but not like the Noodie News: there was no self-consciousness, none at all. At first he couldn't believe them, they were so beautiful. Black, yellow, white, brown, all available skin colours. Each individual was exquisite. "Are they robots, or what?" he said.

  "You know how they've got floor models, in furniture stores?" said Crake.

  "Yeah?"

  "These are the floor models."

  It was the result of a logical chain of progression, said Crake that evening, over drinks in the Paradice Lounge (fake palm trees, canned music, real Campari, real soda). Once the proteonome had been fully analyzed and interspecies gene and part-gene splicing were thoroughly underway, the Paradice Project or something like it had been only a matter of time. What Jimmy had seen was the next-to-end result of seven years of intensive trial-and-error research.

  "At first," said Crake, "we had to alter ordinary human embryos, which we got from - never mind where we got them. But these people are sui generis. They're reproducing themselves, now."

  "They look more than seven years old," said Jimmy.

  Crake explained about the rapid-growth factors he'd incorporated. "Also," he said, "they're programmed to drop dead at age thirty - suddenly, without getting sick. No old age, none of those anxieties. They'll just keel over. Not that they know it; none of them has died yet."

  "I thought you were working on immortality."

  "Immortality," said Crake, "is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be ..."

  "Sounds like Applied Rhetoric 101," said Jimmy.

  "What?"

  "Never mind. Martha Graham stuff."

  "Oh. Right."

  Other Compounds in other countries were following similar lines of reasoning, said Crake, they were developing their own prototypes, so the population in the bubble-dome was ultrasecret. Vow of silence, closed-circuit internal e-mailing only unless you had special permission, living quarters inside the security zone but outside the airlock. This would reduce the chances of infection in case any of the staff got sick; the Paradice models had enhanced immune-system functions, so the probability of contagious diseases spreading among them was low.

  Nobody was allowed out of the complex. Or almost nobody. Crake could go out, of course. He was the liaison between Paradice and the Rejoov top brass, though he hadn't let them in yet, he was making them wait. They were a greedy bunch, nervous about their investment; they'd want to jump the gun, start marketing too soon.

  Also they'd talk too much, tip off the competition. They were all boasters, those guys.

  "So, now that I'm in here I can never get out?" said Jimmy. "You didn't tell me that."

  "You'll be an exception," said Crake. "Nobody's going to kidnap you for what's inside your skull. You're just doing the ads, remember?" But the rest of the team, he said - the MaddAddamite contingent - was confined to base for the duration.

  "The duration?"

  "Until we go public," said Crake. Very soon, RejoovenEsense hoped to hit the market with the various blends on offer. They'd be able
to create totally chosen babies that would incorporate any feature, physical or mental or spiritual, that the buyer might wish to select. The present methods on offer were very hit-or-miss, said Crake: certain hereditary diseases could be screened out, true, but apart from that there was a lot of spoilage, a lot of waste. The customers never knew whether they'd get exactly what they'd paid for; in addition to which, there were too many unintended consequences.

  But with the Paradice method, there would be ninety-nine per cent accuracy. Whole populations could be created that would have pre-selected characteristics. Beauty, of course; that would be in high demand. And docility: several world leaders had expressed interest in that. Paradice had already developed a UV-resistant skin, a built-in insect repellant, an unprecedented ability to digest unrefined plant material. As for immunity from microbes, what had until now been done with drugs would soon be innate.

  Compared to the Paradice Project, even the BlyssPluss Pill was a crude tool, although it would be a lucrative interim solution. In the long run, however, the benefits for the future human race of the two in combination would be stupendous. They were inextricably linked - the Pill and the Project. The Pill would put a stop to haphazard reproduction, the Project would replace it with a superior method. They were two stages of a single plan, you might say.

  It was amazing - said Crake - what once-unimaginable things had been accomplished by the team here. What had been altered was nothing less than the ancient primate brain. Gone were its destructive features, the features responsible for the world's current illnesses. For instance, racism - or, as they referred to it in Paradice, pseudospeciation - had been eliminated in the model group, merely by switching the bonding mechanism: the Paradice people simply did not register skin colour. Hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it. Since they were neither hunters nor agriculturalists hungry for land, there was no territoriality: the king-of-the-castle hard-wiring that had plagued humanity had, in them, been unwired. They ate nothing but leaves and grass and roots and a berry or two; thus their foods were plentiful and always available. Their sexuality was not a constant torment to them, not a cloud of turbulent hormones: they came into heat at regular intervals, as did most mammals other than man.

  In fact, as there would never be anything for these people to inherit, there would be no family trees, no marriages, and no divorces. They were perfectly adjusted to their habitat, so they would never have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing. They would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money. Best of all, they recycled their own excrement. By means of a brilliant splice, incorporating genetic material from ...

  "Excuse me," said Jimmy. "But a lot of this stuff isn't what the average parent is looking for in a baby. Didn't you get a bit carried away?"

  "I told you," said Crake patiently. "These are the floor models. They represent the art of the possible. We can list the individual features for prospective buyers, then we can customize. Not everyone will want all the bells and whistles, we know that. Though you'd be surprised how many people would like a very beautiful, smart baby that eats nothing but grass. The vegans are highly interested in that little item. We've done our market research."

  Oh good, thought Jimmy. Your baby can double as a lawn mower.

  "Can they speak?" he asked.

  "Of course they can speak," said Crake. "When they have something they want to say."

  "Do they make jokes?"

  "Not as such," said Crake. "For jokes you need a certain edge, a little malice. It took a lot of trial and error and we're still testing, but I think we've managed to do away with jokes." He raised his glass, grinned at Jimmy. "Glad you're here, cork-nut," he said. "I needed somebody I could talk to."

  Jimmy was given his own suite inside the Paradice dome. His belongings were there before him, each one tidied away just where it ought to be - underwear in the underwear drawer, shirts neatly stacked, electric toothbrush plugged in and recharged - except that there were more of these belongings than he remembered possessing. More shirts, more underwear, more electric toothbrushes. The air conditioning was set at the temperature he liked it, and a tasty snack (melon, prosciutto, a French brie with a label that appeared authentic) was set out on the dining-room table. The dining-room table! He'd never had a dining-room table before.

  Crake in Love

  ~

  The lightning sizzles, the thunder booms, the rain's pouring down, so heavy the air is white, white all around, a solid mist; it's like glass in motion. Snowman - goon, buffoon, poltroon - crouches on the rampart, arms over his head, pelted from above like an object of general derision. He's humanoid, he's hominid, he's an aberration, he's abominable; he'd be legendary, if there were anyone left to relate legends.

  If only he had an auditor besides himself, what yarns he could spin, what whines he could whine. The lover's complaint to his mistress, or something along those lines. Lots to choose from there.

  Because now he's come to the crux in his head, to the place in the tragic play where it would say: Enter Oryx. Fatal moment. But which fatal moment? Enter Oryx as a young girl on a kiddie-porn site, flowers in her hair, whipped cream on her chin; or, Enter Oryx as a teenage news item, sprung from a pervert's garage; or, Enter Oryx, stark naked and pedagogical in the Crakers' inner sanctum; or, Enter Oryx, towel around her hair, emerging from the shower; or, Enter Oryx, in a pewter-grey silk pantsuit and demure half-high heels, carrying a briefcase, the image of a professional

  Compound globewise saleswoman? Which of these will it be, and how can he ever be sure there's a line connecting the first to the last? Was there only one Oryx, or was she legion?

  But any would do, thinks Snowman as the rain runs down his face. They are all time present, because they are all here with me now.

  Oh Jimmy, this is so positive. It makes me happy when you grasp this. Paradice is lost, but you have a Paradice within you, happier far. Then that silvery laugh, right in his ear.

  Jimmy hadn't spotted Oryx right away, though he must have seen her that first afternoon when he was peering through the one-way mirror. Like the Crakers she had no clothes on, and like the Crakers she was beautiful, so from a distance she didn't stand out. She wore her long dark hair without ornament, her back was turned, she was surrounded by a group of other people; just part of the scene.

  A few days later, when Crake was showing him how to work the monitor screens that picked up images from the hidden minicams among the trees, Jimmy saw her face. She turned into the camera and there it was again, that look, that stare, the stare that went right into him and saw him as he truly was. The only thing that was different about her was her eyes, which were the same luminescent green as the eyes of the Crakers.

  Gazing into those eyes, Jimmy had a moment of pure bliss, pure terror, because now she was no longer a picture - no longer merely an image, residing in secrecy and darkness in the flat printout currently stashed between his mattress and the third cross-slat of his new Rejoov-suite bed. Suddenly she was real, three-dimensional. He felt he'd dreamed her. How could a person be caught that way, in an instant, by a glance, the lift of an eyebrow, the curve of an arm? But he was.

  "Who's that?" he asked Crake. She was carrying a young rakunk, holding out the small animal to those around; the others were touching it gently. "She's not one of them. What's she doing in there?"

  "She's their teacher," said Crake. "We needed a go-between, someone who could communicate on their level. Simple concepts, no metaphysics."

  "What's she teaching?" Jimmy said this indifferently: bad plan for him to show too much interest in any woman, in the presence of Crake: oblique mockery would follow.

  "Botany and zoology," said Crake with a grin. "In other words, what not to eat and what could bite. And what not to hurt," he added.

  "For that she has to be naked?"

  "They've never seen clothes. Clothes would only con
fuse them."

  The lessons Oryx taught were short: one thing at a time was best, said Crake. The Paradice models weren't stupid, but they were starting more or less from scratch, so they liked repetition. Another staff member, some specialist in the field, would go over the day's item with Oryx - the leaf, insect, mammal, or reptile she was about to explain. Then she'd spray herself with a citrus-derived chemical compound to disguise her human pheromones - unless she did that there could be trouble, as the men would smell her and think it was time to mate. When she was ready, she'd slip through a reconforming doorway concealed behind dense foliage. That way she could appear and disappear in the homeland of the Crakers without raising awkward questions in their minds.

  "They trust her," said Crake. "She has a great manner."

  Jimmy's heart sank. Crake was in love, for the first time ever. It wasn't just the praise, rare enough. It was the tone of voice.

  "Where'd you find her?" he asked.

  "I've known her for a while. Ever since post-grad at Watson-Crick."

  "She was studying there?" If so, thought Jimmy, what?

  "Not exactly," said Crake. "I encountered her through Student Services."

  "You were the student, she was the service?" said Jimmy, trying to keep it light.

  "Exactly. I told them what I was looking for - you could be very specific there, take them a picture or a video stimulation, stuff like that, and they'd do their best to match you up. What I wanted was something that looked like - do you remember that Web show? ..."

  "What Web show?"

  "I gave you a printout. From HottTotts - you know."

  "Rings no bells," said Jimmy.

  "That show we used to watch. Remember?"

  "I guess," said Jimmy. "Sort of."

  "I used the girl for my Extinctathon gateway. That one."

  "Oh, right," said Jimmy. "Each to his own. You wanted the sex-kiddie look?"

  "Not that she was underage, the one they came up with."

  "Of course not."

  "Then I made private arrangements. You weren't supposed to, but we all bent the rules a little."

  "Rules are there to be bent," said Jimmy. He was feeling worse and worse.