Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)(42)

“I will take you to Snowman-the-Jimmy,” Blackbeard says importantly, once she’s ready. “So you can help him. With the maggots.” He’s proud of having learned this word, so he says it again: “The maggots!” He smiles radiantly. “The maggots are good. Oryx made them. They will not hurt us.” A glance up at her, scanning her face to make sure he’s got it right, then another smile. “And soon Snowman-the-Jimmy will not be sick.” He takes her by the hand, tugs her forward. He knows the drill, he’s her little shadow, he’s absorbing everything.

If I’d had a child, thinks Toby, would he have been like this? No. He would not have been like this. Don’t repine.


Jimmy’s still asleep, but his colour is better and his high temperature is gone. She spoons some honey-and-water into him, along with the mushroom elixir. His foot is healing rapidly; soon he won’t need the maggots any more.

“Snowman-the-Jimmy is walking,” the Crakers tell her. Four of them are on duty this morning, three men and a woman. “He is walking very quickly, inside his head. Soon he will be here.”

“Today?” she asks them.

“Today, tomorrow,” they say. “Soon.” They smile at her. “Do not be worried, Oh Toby,” the woman says. “Snowman-the-Jimmy is safe now. Crake is sending him back to us.”

“And Oryx too,” says the tallest man: Abraham Lincoln, possibly. She really must try to sort out their names. “She, too, is sending him.”

“She told her Children not to harm him,” says the woman. Empress Josephine?

“Even though his piss is weak, and they did not understand at first that they could not eat him.”

“Our piss is strong. The piss of our men. The Children of Oryx understand such piss.”

“The Children with sharp teeth eat those with weak piss.”

“The Children with tusks eat them, sometimes.”

“The Children who are like a bear, big, with claws. We have not seen a bear. Zeb ate one, he knows what is a bear.”

“But Oryx told them not to.”

“Not to eat Snowman-the-Jimmy.”

“Crake sent Snowman-the-Jimmy to take care of us. And Oryx sent him too.”

“Yes, Oryx too,” the others agree. One of them begins to sing.





Girl Stuff


The breakfast table is lively this morning.

Ivory Bill, Manatee, Tamaraw, and Zunzuncito have cleared their plates and are deep into a discussion of epigenetics. How much of Craker behaviour is inherited, how much is cultural? Do they even have what you could call a culture, separate from the expression of their genes? Or are they more like ants? What about the singing? Granted, it must be some form of communication, but is it territorial, like the singing of birds, or might it be termed art? Surely not the latter, says Ivory Bill. Crake couldn’t account for it and didn’t like it, says Tamaraw, but the team hadn’t been able to eliminate it without producing affectless individuals who never went into heat and didn’t last long.

The mating cycle is genetic, obviously, says Zunzuncito, as are the changes in female abdominal and genital pigmentation that accompany estrus, and the male equivalent, leading to the polysexual acts. Which in a deer or a sheep you’d have to call rutting, says Ivory Bill, but in the Crakers, would these phenomena vary with circumstances? There’d been no chance to test it, back there in the Paradice dome, which was a pity, they all agree. They could have made some variations, run studies on them, says Manatee. But Crake ruled with an iron hand, says Tamaraw, and he was so dogmatic: he didn’t want to hear about any possible improvements apart from those he thought up himself. And he sure as hell didn’t want his prize experiment ruined via the introduction of possibly inferior segments, says Zunzuncito, because the Crakers were going to be a mega-money-spinner. Or that was his story, says Tamaraw.

“Of course he was bullshitting us all along,” said Zunzuncito.

“True, but he got results,” says Ivory Bill.

“For what they’re worth,” says Manatee. “The f*cker.”

“The question is more why than how,” says Ivory Bill, gazing up at the sky as if Crake really is up there and could send down a thunderous answer. “Why did he do it? The lethal wipeout virus in the BlyssPluss pills? Why did he want the human race to go extinct?”

“Maybe he was just very, very messed up,” says Manatee.

“For the sake of argument, and to do him justice, he might have thought that everything else was,” says Tamaraw. “What with the biosphere being depleted and the temperature skyrocketing.”

“And if the Crakers were his solution, he’d have known he’d need to protect them from the likes of us, with our aggressive if not murderous ways,” says Ivory Bill.

“That’s what megalomaniac f*ckers like him always think,” says Manatee.

“He’d have seen the Crakers as indigenous people, no doubt,” says Ivory Bill. “And Homo sapiens sapiens as the greedy, rapacious Conquistadors. And, in some respects …”

“Well, we came up with Beethoven,” says Manatee. “And, you know, the major world religions, and whatnot. Fat chance of anything like that with this bunch.”

White Sedge is beside them, gazing at them attentively but possibly not listening. If anyone’s hearing voices, thinks Toby, it might be her. She’s a pretty girl, perhaps the prettiest of the MaddAddamites. Yesterday she proposed that they start a morning yoga and meditation group, but there weren’t any takers. She’s wearing a grey bedsheet with white lilies on it; her black hair’s knotted into a chignon.