Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)(100)

Adam wrote: You are beneath vulgar.

Zeb wrote: That would be me! Never mind, I respect true love. He drew a heart, then a flower. He almost added, Even if she is running a fancypants blowjob emporium, but he thought better of it: Adam was getting very huffy, and he might forget himself and take a swipe at Zeb for just about the first time in his life. Then there would be an unseemly scuffle over the remains of their liquefied parent that would not end well for Zeb because he could never bear to deck Adam, not really; so he’d just have to let the pallid little weenie beat him up.

Adam looked mollified – maybe it was the heart and the flower – but still ruffled. He crumpled up all the notebook pages they’d been writing on, then tore them into pieces and went to the can, where – Zeb assumed – he flushed them onto the tracks. Even if some nosy spyster managed to gather them up and stick them together they’d hardly learn anything of interest. Just a bunch of low-calorie dirty talk, of the kind a Frasketsitter might be expected to employ while killing time out of the hearing of the paying customers.

The rest of the trip passed in silence, Adam with arms folded and a frowny but sanctimonious expression on his face, Zeb humming under his breath while the continent zipped past outside the window.


At the east coast end, the CryoJeenyus dedicated carriage was met by Pilar, posing as a concerned relative of the stiff – or, rather, of the temporarily life-suspended client – and three members from, Zeb assumed, the cryptic team.

“You know two of them,” says Zeb. “Katuro and Manatee. The third was a gal we lost during Crake’s scoop of the MaddAddamites, when he was designing the Crakers and gathering up the brainslaves for his Paradice Project. She tried to run, and I can only assume she went over an overpass and got turned into car tire mush. But none of that had happened yet.”

Pilar shed a few croc tears into a hanky just in case there were any mini-drones or spyware installations around. Then she supervised discreetly as the Frasket was loaded into a long vehicle. CryoJeenyus did not call those vehicles “hearses”: they were “Life2Life Shuttles.” They were boiled tomato colour and had the perky ever-burning flame of life on the doors: nothing dark to spoil the festive mood.

So into the L2Ls went the Rev in his Frasket, headed for an extreme security biosampling unit – not at CryoJeenyus, they weren’t equipped for that, but at HelthWyzer Central. Pilar got in as well, and also Zeb. Mordis would change his outfit and head to the local Scales and Tails, where they needed a tougher manager.

Adam would change into his increasingly bizarre streetwear and shuffle off to do whatever it was that Adam did, out there in the deep pleebs. He gave the white bishop to Pilar, having extracted it from the salty cavity of the girl salt shaker: the cryptic team wanted to take a close look at the contents of those pills, and they thought they finally had the equipment to do so without exposing themselves to contagion.

Zeb was slated for yet another identity, which Pilar had already prepared for him: he was to be embedded right inside HelthWyzer Central.

“Do me a favour,” said Zeb to Pilar, once she had assured them that the L2Ls had been thoroughly swept for spyware. “Run a DNA comparison for me. On the Rev. The guy in the Frasket.” He’d never shaken his childhood notion that the Rev was not his real father, and this was surely his last chance to find out.

Pilar said it would be no problem. He handed over a cheek swab sample of himself, improvised on a piece of tissue, and she tucked it carefully inside a small plastic envelope that contained what looked like a dried-up elf ear, wrinkly in appearance, yellow in colour.

“What’s that?” he asked her. He wanted to say, “What the f*ck’s that,” but proximity to Pilar did not encourage swearing. “Gremlin from outer space?”

“It’s a chanterelle,” she said. “A mushroom. An edible variety, not to be confused with the false chanterelle.”

“So, will I come out with the DNA of a fungus?”

Pilar laughed. “There’s not much chance of that,” she said.

“Good,” said Zeb. “Tell Adam.”

Only problem was, he thought later that night, when drifting off to sleep in his Spartan but acceptable HelthWyzer accommodations – only problem was that if Pilar ran the DNA comparison and the Rev wasn’t his dad, then Adam wouldn’t be his brother. Adam would be no relation to him at all. No blood relation.

Thus:

Fenella + the Rev = Adam.

Trudy + Unknown Semen Donor = Zeb.

= No shared DNA.



If that was the truth, did he really want to know it?





Lumiroses


Zeb’s new title at HelthWyzer Central was that of Disinfector, First Rank. He got a pair of lurid green overalls with the HelthWyzer logo and a big luminous orange D on the front; he got a hairnet to keep his own shed follicle-ware from littering the desk spaces of his betters; he got a nose filter cone that made him look like a cartoon pig; he got an endless supply of protective liquid-repelling nanobioform-impermeable gloves and shoes; and, most importantly, he got a passkey.

Only for the bureaucratic offices, however: not for the labs. Those were in another building. But you never could tell what sort of intel a nimble-fingered robinhooder with a few lines of entry code slipped to him by underground cryptics might be able to scoop off an untended computer, late at night, when all good citizens were sound asleep in other people’s beds. HelthWyzer was somewhat porous in the spouse department.