Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)(113)

“Good,” he says to Toby. “Always knew you had potential.”

“They are going to the Egg,” says Blackbeard. “They say they will not move too close to those men. They will be careful about the stick things, with blood coming out.”

“Hope they make it,” says Zeb. “Let’s hike.”

“It’s not far,” says Jimmy. “Anyway, they can’t shoot us from the windows because there aren’t any windows.” He laughs feebly.

“Zeb?” says Toby as they move off down the road. “The third guy? I’m not sure. But I think it’s Adam One.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Zeb. “I figured that for a while.”

“What can we do to get him back?”

“They’ll want to trade him,” says Zeb.

“For what?”

“Sprayguns, supposing the pigs block them out. Other stuff.”

“Like, for instance?”

“Like, for instance, you,” says Zeb. “In their place, it’s what I’d do.”

Right, thinks Toby. They’ll want revenge.


The Paradice dome lies in front of them. All is silent. The airlock door is open. Three shoats go through it, then come out again. “They are inside, the men,” says Blackbeard. “But far inside. Not near the door.”

“I need to go in first,” says Jimmy. “Just for a minute.” Toby stays close behind him.

There are two destroyed skeletons on the floor of the airlock. The bones have been gnawed and jumbled, no doubt by animals. Rags of mouldering cloth, a small pink and red sandal.

Jimmy falls to his knees; his hands are over his face. Toby touches his shoulder. “We need to go now,” she says, but he says, “Leave me alone!”

There’s a dirty pink ribbon tied in the long black hair of one of the skulls: hair decays very slowly, the Gardeners always said. Jimmy unties the bow, twists the ribbon in his fingers. “Oryx. Oh God,” he says. “You f*cker, Crake! You didn’t have to kill her!”

Zeb is standing beside Toby now. “Maybe she was already sick,” he says to Jimmy. “Maybe he couldn’t live without her. Come on, we need to get in there.”

“Oh f*ck, spare me the f*cking clichés!” says Jimmy.

“We can just leave him here for now, he’ll be safe; let’s go in,” says Toby. “We need to be sure they didn’t get into the storage room.”

The others are right outside the doorway – the MaddAddamites, the main body of the Pigoons. “What’s up?” says Rhino.

Little Blackbeard is tugging at her hand. “Please, Oh Toby, what is clichés?” he says.

Toby hardly knows what she answers, because now the truth is hitting him: Oryx and Crake are these skeletons. He heard Jimmy say that; it registered. He turns his frightened face up to her: she can see the sudden fall, the crash, the damage.

“Oh Toby, is this Oryx, and is this Crake?” he says. “Snowman-the-Jimmy said! But they are a smelly bone, they are many smelly bones! Oryx and Crake must be beautiful! Like the stories! They cannot be a smelly bone!” He begins to cry as if his heart will break.

Toby kneels, folds her arms around him, hugs him tight. What to say? How to comfort him? In the face of this terminal sorrow.





The Story of the Battle


Toby cannot tell the story tonight. She is too sad, because of the dead ones. The ones who became dead, in the battle. So now I will try to tell this story to you. I will tell it in the right way, if I can.

First I am putting the red hat on my head, the hat of Snowman-the-Jimmy. These markings on it – look, it is a voice, and it is saying: RED. And it is saying: SOX.

SOX is a special word of Crake. We do not know what it means. Toby does not know either. Maybe we will know later.

But see – the red hat is on my head, and it does not hurt me. I am not growing an extra skin, I have my own skin, the same. I can take the hat off, I can put it back on again. It does not stick to my head.

Now I will eat the fish. We do not eat a fish, or a smelly bone; that is not what we eat. It is a hard thing to do, eating a fish. But I must do it. Crake did many hard things for us, when he was on the earth in the form of a person. He cleared away the chaos for us, and …

You do not have to sing.

… and he did many other hard things, so I will try to do this hard thing of eating the smelly bone fish. It is cooked. It is very small. Perhaps it will be enough for Crake if I put it into my mouth and take it out again.

There.

I am sorry for making the noises of a sick person.

Please take the fish away and throw it into the forest. The ants will be happy. The maggots will be happy. The vultures will be happy.

Yes, it does taste very bad. It tastes like the smell of a smelly bone, or the smell of a dead one. I will chew many leaves to get rid of that taste. But if I did not do the hard thing with the bad taste, I would not be able to hear the story Crake is telling me, and then tell it to you. That is the way it was with Snowman-the-Jimmy, and that is the way it is with Toby. The hard thing of eating the fish, the smelly bone taste – that is what needs to be done. First the bad things, then the story.

Thank you for the purring. I am not feeling so sick now.


This is the Story of the Battle. It tells how Zeb and Toby and Snowman-the-Jimmy and the other two-skinned ones and the Pig Ones cleared away the bad men, just as Crake cleared away the people in the chaos to make a good and safe place for us to live.