Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1)(9)
A mirror is what she needs. Hard to know how much of a wreck she is without one. Maybe she’ll be able to get mirrors onto the next gleaning list. Those, and toothbrushes.
She slings her knapsack with her health-care items over one shoulder: the maggots, the honey, the mushroom elixir, the Willow and Poppy. She’ll tend to Jimmy first thing, supposing he’s still alive. But only after she’s had some breakfast: she can’t face the day, much less Jimmy’s festering foot, on an empty stomach. Then she picks up her rifle and steps out into the full glare of morning.
Although it’s still early, the sun’s already burning white. She hoists one end of her bedsheet over her head for protection, checks out the cobb-house yard. The red-headed Mo’Hair, still at large, is eyeing the vegetables through the kitchen-garden fence while chewing on some kudzu. Its friends in the Mo’Hair pen are bleating at it: silver Mo’Hairs, blue ones, green ones and pink ones, brunettes and blondes: the full range of colours. Hair Today, Mo’Hair Tomorrow went the ad when the creatures had first been launched.
Toby’s present-day hair is a Mo’Hair transplant: she didn’t use to be so raven-hued. Maybe that was why the Mo’Hair had come into her cubicle to lick her on the leg. It wasn’t the salt, it was the faint smell of lanolin. It thought she was a relative.
Just so long as I don’t get jumped by one of the rams, she thinks. She’ll have to watch herself for signs of sheepishness. Rebecca must be up by now, dealing with breakfast issues over at the cooking shack; maybe she’s got some floral-scented shampoo tucked away in her supply room.
Over near the garden, Ren and Lotis Blue are sitting in the shade, deep in conversation. Amanda is sitting with them, staring off into the distance. Fallow state, the Gardeners would say. They used that diagnosis for a wide range of conditions, from depression to post-traumatic stress to being permanently stoned. The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe. Toby really hopes this is true of Amanda. She’d been such a lively child in Toby’s class at the Gardener school, back there on the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. When was that? Ten, fifteen years ago? Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.
Ivory Bill and Manatee and Tamaraw are fortifying the boundary fence. In daylight it looks flimsy, permeable. Onto the skeleton of the old ornamental ironwork paling they’ve attached an assortment of materials: lengths of wire fencing interwoven with duct tape, a mixture of poles, a row of pointed sticks with their ends set in the ground and the points facing out. Manatee is adding more sticks; Ivory Bill and Tamaraw are on the other side of the fence, with shovels. They appear to be filling in a hole.
“Morning,” says Toby.
“Take a look at this,” says Manatee. “Something was trying to tunnel under. Last night. Sentries didn’t see them, they were chasing those pigs off at the front.”
“Any tracks?” said Toby.
“We think it was maybe more of those pigs,” Tamaraw says. “Smart – distracting attention, then trying a sneaky dig. Anyway, they didn’t get in.”
Beyond the boundary fence there’s a semicircle of male Crakers, evenly spaced, facing outward, peeing in unison. A man in a striped bedsheet who looks like Crozier – in fact, it is Crozier – is standing with them, joining in the group pee-in.
What next? Is Crozier going native? Will he shed his clothes, take up a cappella singing, grow a huge penis that turns blue in season? If the first two items were the price of entry for the third, he’d do it in a shot. Soon every single human male among the MaddAddamites will be yearning for one of those. And once that starts, how long before the rivalries and wars break out, with clubs and sticks and stones, and then …
Get a grip, Toby, she tells herself. Don’t borrow trouble. You really, really, really need some coffee. Any kind of coffee. Dandelion root. Happicuppa. Black mud, if that’s all there is.
And if there were any booze, she’d drink that too.
A long dining room table has been set up beside the cooking shack. There’s a shade sail deployed above it, gleaned from some deserted backyard. All the patios must be derelict now, the swimming pools cracked and empty or clogged with weeds, the broken kitchen windows invaded by the probing green snoutlets of vines. Inside the houses, nests in the corners made from chewed-up carpets, wriggling and squeaking with hairless baby rats. Termites mining through the rafters. Bats hawking for moths in the stairwells.
“Once the tree roots get in,” Adam One had been fond of saying to the Gardener inner circle, “once they really take hold, no human-built structure stands a chance. They’ll tear a paved road apart in a year. They’ll block the drainage culverts, and once the pumping systems fail, the foundations will be eaten away, and no force on earth will be able to stop that kind of water, and then, when the generating stations catch fire or short out, not to mention the nuclear …”
“Then you can kiss your morning toast goodbye,” Zeb had once added to this litany. He’d just blown in from one of his mysterious courier missions; he looked battered, and his black pleather jacket was ripped. Urban Bloodshed Limitation was one of the subjects he taught the Gardener kids, but he didn’t always practise it. “Yeah, yeah, we know, we’re doomed. Any hope of some elderberry pie around here? I’m starving.” Zeb did not always show a proper reverence towards Adam One.