“You mean I hadn’t taken the vow of whatnot and drunk the Elixir of Life? God loves you, and he also loves aphids?”
“More or less.”
“No. I hadn’t. But Adam had to put up with me anyway, didn’t he? I was his brother.”
Edencliff
“Adam already had his ecofreakshow up and running by that time,” says Zeb. “At the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. You were there. So were Katuro and Rebecca. Nuala — wonder what happened to her? Marushka Midwife, and the others. And Philo. Too bad about him.”
“Freakshow?” says Toby. “That’s not very kind. Surely the God’s Gardeners was more than that.”
“Yeah, it was,” says Zeb. “Granted. But the pleebland slumfolk tagged it as a freakshow. Just as welclass="underline" best to be thought of as harmless and addled and poor, in those parts. Adam did nothing to discourage that view; in fact, he encouraged it. Roaming around in the pleebs wearing the simple but eye-catching garb of a lunatic recycler with his choir in tow singing nutbar hymns, then preaching the love of hoofed animals in front of SecretBurger stands — you’d have to be lobotomized to do that, was the street verdict.”
“If he hadn’t done those things I wouldn’t be here,” says Toby. “Him and the Gardener kids grabbed me during a street brawl. I was working — I was trapped at SecretBurgers at the time, and the manager had a thing for me.”
“Your pal Blanco,” says Zeb. “Third-time Painball vet, as I recall.”
“Yes. Girls he had a thing for ended up dead, and I was next on the list. He was already at the violent stage, he was working up to the kill; you could feel it. So I owe a lot to Adam — to Adam One, as I always knew him. Freakshow or not,” she says defensively.
“Don’t get it wrong,” says Zeb. “He’s my brother. We had our disagreements, and he had his way of doing things and I had mine, but that’s different.”
“You didn’t mention Pilar,” says Toby to deflect the conversation from Adam One. It’s uncomfortable for her to listen to criticism of him. “She was there too. At Edencliff.”
“Yeah, HelthWyzer finally got too much for her. She’d been feeding inside stuff to Adam, which was useful to him — he liked to know who might jump ship from a Corp, come over to the side of virtue, which was his side, naturally. But she said she couldn’t stay there any longer. With the CorpSeCorps takeover of so-called law-and-order functions, the Corps had the power to bulldoze and squash and erase anything they liked. Their addiction to making a buck was becoming toxic for her: it was poisoning, I quote, her soul.
“The cryptics helped her put together a cover story that allowed her to vanish without inspiring any trackers: she’d had an unfortunate stroke, with instant shipment to CryoJeenyus in a Frasket, and presto, there she was on top of a pleebland tenement building, dressed in a cloth bag and mixing potions.”
“And growing mushrooms, and teaching me about maggots, and keeping bees. She was very good at it,” says Toby a little ruefully. “Convincing. She had me talking to the bees. I was the one who told them when she died.”
“Yeah. I remember all of that. But she wasn’t bullshitting,” said Zeb. “She believed the whole sackful, in a way. That’s why she was willing to run the risks she did at HelthWyzer. Remember what happened to Glenn’s dad? She could have gone off an overpass, like him. If they’d caught her; especially if they’d caught her with that white bishop and the three pills.”
“She held on to those?” says Toby. “I thought she was going to have them analyzed. After Adam gave them to her.”
“She decided it was too dangerous,” says Zeb. “For anyone to open them up and maybe let out whatever was inside them. They didn’t know how to get rid of them. So that bishop stayed right inside HelthWyzer Central as long as she was there. She brought it out with her when she left, and slipped those pills into her own white bishop, in the set she hand-carved. We played with that set of hers, you and me, that time I was recovering. From getting sliced up on one of those pleeb missions I was running for Adam.”
Toby has an image of it: Zeb in the shade, on a hazy afternoon. His arm. Her own hand, moving the white bishop, the death-carrier. Unknown to her then, like so much.
“You always played Black,” she says. “What happened to that bishop when Pilar died?”
“She willed her set to Glenn, along with a sealed letter. She’d taught him to play chess, back at HelthWyzer West, when he was little. But by the time she died, his mother had married the guy she’d been fooling around with — so-called Uncle Pete — and they’d been upgraded to HelthWyzer Central. Pilar kept in touch with Glenn through the cryptics, and Glenn was the one who arranged the cancer tests for her, found out she was terminal.”
“What was in the letter?”
“It was sealed. How to open the bishop, is my guess. I would have filched it, but Adam had firm control of it.”
“So Adam just handed that stuff over, the chess set with the pills inside? To Glenn — to Crake? He was only a teenager.”
“Pilar said he was mature for his age, and Adam felt Pilar’s deathbed wishes should be respected.”
“What about you? It was before I became an Eve, but you were on the council then. They discussed important decisions like that. You must have had an opinion. You were an Adam — Adam Seven.”
“The others agreed with Adam One. I thought it was a bad idea. What if the kid tried those things out on someone without knowing exactly what they’d do, the way I had?”
“He must have, later,” says Toby. “With some additions of his own. That must’ve been the core of the BlyssPluss pills: what you got after you’d experienced the bliss.”
“Yeah,” says Zeb. “I think you’re right.”
“Do you think Pilar knew what use he’d make of those microbes or viruses or whatever they were?” she asks. “Eventually?” She remembers Pilar’s wrinkled little face, her kindness, her serenity, her strength. But underneath, there had always been a hard resolve. You wouldn’t call it meanness or evil. Fatalism, perhaps.
“Let’s put it this way,” says Zeb. “All the real Gardeners believed the human race was overdue for a population crash. It would happen anyway, and maybe sooner was better.”
“But you weren’t a real Gardener.”
“Pilar thought I was, because of my Vigil. Part of the deal with Adam One was that I had to take on a title, that Adam Seven thing: he said it would confer the needed authority, as he put it. Status enhancer. To become one of those, you had to undergo a Vigil. See what was going on with your spirit animal.”
“I did that,” said Toby. “Talking tomato plants, in-depth stars.”
“Yeah, all of that. I don’t know what old Pilar mixed into the enhancer, but it was potent.”
“What did you see?”
A pause. “The bear. The one I killed and ate, when I was walking out of the Barrens.”
“Did it have a message for you?” says Toby. Her own spirit animal had been enigmatic.
“Not exactly. But it gave me to understand that it was living on in me. It wasn’t even pissed with me. It seemed quite friendly. Amazing what happens when you fuck with your own neurons.”
Once he was Adam Seven, Zeb could install himself and Lucerne and little Ren as bona fide members of the God’s Gardeners. They didn’t meld very well. Ren was homesick for the Compound and her father, and Lucerne had too great an interest in nail polish to make it as a female Gardener. Her investment in vegetable preparation was nil, and she hated the required outfits — the dark, baggy dresses, the bib aprons. Zeb ought to have known she wasn’t going to stick with this arrangement, over time.