Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)(103)

“I had some work to finish up,” Lucerne lied, as convincingly as she could. “My presence here is entirely legitimate. I have a pass.” Zeb could have called her on it, but he admired a woman who could use the word legitimate in such a fraudulent context. So he did not march her off to Security, which would have triggered a check via the spouse, and set off unpleasant repercussions for the lover, and would almost certainly have resulted – come to think of it – in Zeb himself being fired. So he let her get away with it.

“Right, okay, sorry,” he said with acceptable hangdog servility.

“Now, if you don’t mind, this is the Ladies, and I’d like some privacy, Horatio,” she said, caressing the name on his tag. She gazed deep into his eyes. It was a plea – Don’t rat me out – and also a promise: One day I’ll be yours. Not that she intended to honour that promise.

Well played, thought Zeb as he made his exit.


Thus, when he and Lucerne encountered each other for the second time, in the first flush of dawn, she barefoot and inadequately concealed in a diaphanous pink negligee, he with a phallic spade and an ardent lumirose bush in hand, right down there on the freshly sodded lawn of the just-completed AnooYoo Spa in the middle of Heritage Park, she recognized him. And she remembered that he’d once been Horatio, but was now, mysteriously – as his AnooYoo Spa grounds-keeper’s name tag had it – Atash.

“You were at HelthWyzer,” she’d said. “But you weren’t …” So, naturally, he’d kissed her, fervently and with unrestrainable passion. Because she couldn’t talk and kiss at the same time.

“Naturally,” says Toby. “You were supposed to be who? What’s Atash?”

“Iranian,” says Zeb. “Immigrant grandparents. Why not? There were a lot of them came over in the late twentieth. It was safe enough as long as I never bumped into any other Iranians and they started asking genealogy stuff, and where was your family from. Though I’d memorized the whole identity, just in case. I had a good backstory – just enough disappearances and atrocities in it to account for any time/place discrepancies.”

“So Lucerne meets Atash, and suspects he’s really Horatio,” says Toby. “Or vice versa.” She wants to get over the hurtful parts as quickly as possible: with luck, the hot, irresistible sex and the petal-strewing that Lucerne had never tired of describing to Toby won’t be mentioned again.

“Right. And that wasn’t good, because I’d had to go missing from HelthWyzer very fast. One of the computers had an alarm on it I didn’t spot until too late, and it showed that somebody’d been in there. I could tell I’d triggered it right after I did it, and they were going to start tracking who’d been in the building at the time, and that would pinpoint me. I used the MaddAddam chatroom and called for emergency help, and the cryptics got hold of Adam. He had a contact who could stick me into the AnooYoo Spa gardening job, though we both realized it was a stopgap and I’d have to move on soon.”

“So, she knows, and you know she knows, and she knows you know she knows,” says Toby. “At the lawn encounter.”

“Correct. I had two choices: murder or seduction. I chose the most attractive.”

“Understood,” says Toby. “I’d have done the same.” He’s made it sound like a seduction of convenience, but they both know there was more to it than that. Diaphanous pink negligees are their own excuse for being.


Lucerne was bad luck in some ways, said Zeb. Though she was good luck in others, because you couldn’t deny that she –

“You can skip that part,” says Toby.

“Okay, short version: she had me by the nuts, more ways than one. But I hadn’t ratted on her that time in the washroom, and she was inclined to return the favour as long as I was attentive enough to her. Then she got hooked on me, and you know the rest: nothing would do but an elopement with a mystery man first spotted when wearing a nose of a pig.

“I moved us around inside the deeper pleeblands, which she found romantic at first. Luckily no one – no one in the CorpSeCorps – was much interested in her disappearance, because she hadn’t stolen any IP. Wives did skedaddle from the Compounds out of sheer boredom, it wasn’t unheard of. The CorpSeCorps regarded such defections as private, insofar as they regarded anything as private. They didn’t bother with them much, especially if the husband wasn’t agitating. Which it appears that Lucerne’s husband did not.

“Trouble is, Lucerne took Ren with her. Cute little girl, I liked her. But it was way too dangerous for her in the deeper pleeblands. Kids like that could get snatched for the chicken-sex trade just walking along the street, even if they were with adults. There’d be a pleebrat mob scuffle, some SecretBurgers red sauce tossing, an overturned stand or solarcar – in other words, a honking big misdirection – and when you looked again, your child would be gone. I couldn’t risk that.”



Zeb got a few more alterations done to his ears and fingerprints and irises – they’d know by now he’d been up to no good on the HelthWyzer computers, they’d be looking for him – and then …

“And then the three of you turned up at the God’s Gardeners,” says Toby. “I remember that; I wondered from the first what you were doing there. You didn’t fit in with the rest of them.”