The Year of the Flood

THE FEAST OF SERPENT WISDOM

YEAR EIGHTEEN.

OF THE IMPORTANCE OF INSTINCTIVE KNOWING.

SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.

Dear Friends, Fellow Mortals, Fellow Creatures:

Today is our Feast of Serpent Wisdom, and our Children have once again excelled in their decoration. We have Amanda and Shackleton to thank for the gripping mural of the Fox Snake ingesting a Frog – an apt reminder to us of the intertwined nature of the Dance of Life. For this Feast we traditionally feature the Zucchini, a Serpent-shaped vegetable. Thanks to Rebecca, our Eve Eleven, for her innovative Zucchini and Radish Dessert Slice. We are certainly looking forward to it.

But first I must alert you to the fact that certain individuals have been making unofficial inquiries about Zeb, our many-talented Adam Seven. In our Father’s Garden there are many Species, and it takes all kinds to make an Ecosystem, and Zeb has chosen the non-violent option; so if questioned, do keep in mind that “I don’t know” is always the best answer.

Our text for Serpent Wisdom is from Matthew 10:16: “Be ye therefore wise as Serpents, and harmless as Doves.” To those former biologists among us who have made a study either of Serpents or of Doves, this sentence is puzzling. Serpents are expert hunters, paralyzing or strangling and crushing their prey, a gift that enables them to predate many Mice and Rats. Yet, despite their natural technology, one would not ordinarily call Serpents “wise.” And Doves, though harmless to us, are extremely aggressive to other Doves: a male will harass and kill a less dominant male if occasion offers. The Spirit of God is sometimes pictured as a Dove, which simply informs us that this Spirit is not always peaceful: it has a ferocious side to it as well.

The Serpent is a highly charged symbol throughout the Human Words of God, though its guises are varied. Sometimes it is shown as an evil enemy of Humankind – perhaps because, when our Primate ancestors slept in trees, the Constrictors were among their few nocturnal predators. And for these ancestors – shoeless as they were – to step on a Viper meant certain death. Yet the Serpent is also equated with Leviathan, that great water-beast God made to humble Mankind, and also named to Job as an awe-inspiring example of His Inventiveness.

Among the Ancient Greeks, serpents were sacred to the god of healing. In other religions, the Serpent with its tail in its mouth refers to the cycle of Life, and to the beginning and end of Time. Because they shed their skins, Serpents have also symbolized Renewal – the Soul casting off its old self, from which it emerges resplendent. A complicated symbol, indeed. Therefore, how are we to be “wise as Serpents”? Are we to eat our own tails, or tempt people to wrongdoing, or coil around our enemies and squeeze them to death? Surely not – because in the same sentence, we are told to be as harmless as Doves.

Serpent Wisdom – I propose – is the wisdom of feeling directly, as the Serpent feels vibrations in the Earth. The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is endlessly constructing for itself. For what in us is belief and faith, in the other Creatures is inborn knowledge. No Human can truly know the full mind of God. The Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vast-ness that encircles us.

As the Human Words of God have put it, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” That is the point: not seen. We cannot know God by reason and measurement; indeed, excess reason and measurement lead to doubt. Through them, we know that Comets and nuclear holocausts are among the possible tomorrows, not to mention the Waterless Flood, that we fear looms ever nearer. This fear dilutes our certainty, and through that channel comes loss of Faith; and then the temptation to enact malevolence enters our Souls; for if annihilation awaits us, why bother to strive for the Good?

We Humans must labour to believe, as the other Creatures do not. They know the dawn will come. They can sense it – that ruffling of the half-light, the horizon bestirring itself. Not only every Sparrow, not only every Rakunk, but every Nematode, and Mollusc, and Octopus, and Mo’Hair, and Liobam – all are held in the palm of His hand. Unlike us, they have no need for Faith.

As for the Serpent, who can tell where its head ends and its body begins? It experiences God in all parts of itself; it feels the vibrations of Divinity that run through the Earth, and responds to them quicker than thought.

This then is the Serpent Wisdom we long for – this wholeness of Being. May we greet with joy the few moments when, through Grace, and by the aid of our Retreats and Vigils and the assistance of God’s Botanicals, we are granted an apprehension of it.

Let us sing.

GOD GAVE UNTO THE ANIMALS

From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

43

The Feast of Serpent Wisdom. Old Moon. Toby enters the Feast Day and the moon phase on her pink notepaper with the winky eyes and kissy lips. Old moon is a pruning week, said the Gardeners. Plant by the new, slash by the old. A good time to apply sharp tools to yourself, hack off any extraneous parts that might need trimming. Your head, for instance.

“A joke,” she says out loud. She should avoid such morbid thoughts.

Today she will pare her fingernails. Toenails, as well: they shouldn’t be permitted to run rampant. She could give herself a manicure: there are lots of cosmetic supplies in this place, whole shelves of them. AnooYoo Luscious Polish. AnooYoo Plum Skin Plumper. AnooYoo Fountain of Yooth Total Immersion: Shed That Scaly Epidermis! But why bother to polish or plump or shed? But why not bother? Either choice is equally pointless.

Do it for Yoo, AnooYoo used to croon. The Noo Yoo. I could have a whole new me, thinks Toby. Yet another whole new me, fresh as a snake. How many would that add up to, by now?

She trudges up the stairs to the rooftop, hoists her binoculars, surveys her visible realm. There’s motion in the weeds, over by the forest edge: could it be the pigs? If so, they’re keeping a low profile. Vultures are still clustering around the dead boar. There’ll be lots of nanobioforms at work on it: it must be getting ripe by now.

Here’s something different. Closer to the building, a clump of sheep is grazing. Five of them: three Mo’Hairs – a green one, a pink one, and a bright purple one – and two other sheep that appear to be conventional. The long hair of the Mo’Hairs isn’t in good shape – there are clot-like snarls in it, and twigs and dry leaves. Onscreen, in advertisements, their hair had been shiny – you’d see the sheep tossing its hair, then a beautiful girl tossing a mane of the same hair. More hair with Mo’Hair! But they’re not faring so well without their salon treatments.

The sheep clump together, lift their heads. Toby sees why: crouching low in the weeds, two liobams are on the hunt. Maybe the sheep smell them, but the scent must be confusing – part lion, part lamb.

The purple Mo’Hair is the most jittery. Don’t look like prey, Toby thinks at it. Sure enough, it’s the purple one the liobams go after. They cut it out from the group and chase it for a short distance. The pathetic beast is impeded by its coiffure – it looks like a purple fright wig on legs – and the liobams quickly pull it down. Finding the throat under all that hair padding takes them a while, and the Mo’Hair scrambles to its feet several times before the liobams finish it off. Then they settle down to eat. The other sheep have run awkwardly away in a muddle of bleating, but now they’re grazing again.

She’d intended to do some gardening today, pick some greens: her stock of preserved and dried foods is waning like the moon. But she decides against it because of the liobams. Cats of all kinds will set ambushes: one frisks around in the open to distract your attention while another one slips quietly up behind.

In the afternoon she takes a nap. An old moon draws the past, said Pilar: whatever arrives from the shadows you must greet as a blessing. And the past does come back to her: the white frame house of her childhood, the ordinary trees, the woodland in the background, tinged with blue as if there’s haze. A deer is outlined against it, standing rigid as a lawn ornament, ears pricked. Her father’s digging with a shovel, over by the pile of picket fencing; her mother’s a momentary glimpse at the kitchen window. Perhaps she’s making soup. Everything tranquil, as if it would never end. But where is Toby in this picture? For it is a picture. It’s flat, like a picture on a wall. She’s not there.

She opens her eyes: tears on her cheeks. I wasn’t in the picture because I’m the frame, she thinks. It’s not really the past. It’s only me, holding it all together. It’s only a handful of fading neural pathways. It’s only a mirage.

Surely I was an optimistic person back then, she thinks. Back there. I woke up whistling. I knew there were things wrong in the world, they were referred to, I’d seen them in the onscreen news. But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else.

By the time she’d reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall, then the knock at the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.

We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake. It never went away, even among the Gardeners. Especially – as time wore on – among the Gardeners.

44

The Sunday after Serpent Wisdom Day was Saint Jacques Cousteau’s Day. It was Year Eighteen – the year of rupture, though Toby did not yet know that. She remembers negotiating the Sinkhole streets on her way to the Wellness Clinic for the regular Sunday-evening Adams and Eves Council. She wasn’t looking forward to it: lately those meetings had been sliding into squabbles.

The week before, they’d spent all their time on theological problems. The matter of Adam’s teeth, for starters.

“Adam’s teeth?” Toby had blurted. She needed to work on controlling such expressions of surprise, which might be read as criticism.

Adam One had explained that some of the children were upset because Zeb had pointed out the differences between the biting, rending teeth of carnivores and the grinding, munching teeth of herbivores. The children wanted to know why – if Adam was created as a vegetarian, as he surely was – human teeth should show such mixed characteristics.

“Shouldn’t have brought it up,” Stuart had muttered.

“We changed at the Fall,” Nuala had said brightly. “We evolved. Once Man started to eat meat, well, naturally…”

That would be putting the cart before the horse, said Adam One; they could not achieve their goal of reconciling the findings of Science with their sacramental view of Life simply by overriding the rules of the former. He asked them to ponder this conundrum, and propose solutions at a later date.

Then they turned to the problem of the animal-skin clothing provided by God for Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis 3. The troublesome “coats of skins.”

“The children are very worried about them,” Nuala had said. Toby could understand why they’d been so dismayed. Had God killed and peeled some of his beloved Creatures to make these skin coats? If so, He’d set a very bad example to Man. If not, where had these skin coats come from?

“Maybe those animals died a natural death.” That was Rebecca. “And God didn’t see them going to waste.” She was adamant about using up leftovers.

“Maybe very small animals,” Katuro had said. “Short life spans.”

“That is one possibility,” Adam One had said. “Let it stand for now, until a more plausible explanation presents itself.”

Early in her Eveship, Toby had asked if it was really necessary to split such theological hairs, and Adam One had said that it was. “The truth is,” he’d said, “most people don’t care about other Species, not when times get hard. All they care about is their next meal, naturally enough: we have to eat or die. But what if it’s God doing the caring? We’ve evolved to believe in gods, so this belief bias of ours must confer an evolutionary advantage. The strictly materialist view – that we’re an experiment animal protein has been doing on itself – is far too harsh and lonely for most, and leads to nihilism. That being the case, we need to push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction by pointing out the hazards of annoying God by a violation of His trust in our stewardship.”

“What you mean is, with God in the story there’s a penalty,” said Toby.

“Yes,” said Adam One. “There’s a penalty without God in the story too, needless to say. But people are less likely to credit that. If there’s a penalty, they want a penalizer. They dislike senseless catastrophe.”

What would the topic be today? Toby wondered. Which fruit Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge? It couldn’t have been an apple, considering the state of horticulture at that time. A date? A bergamot? The Council had long been deliberating over that one. Toby had thought of proposing a strawberry, but then, strawberries didn’t grow on trees.

As she walked, Toby was conscious, as always, of the others on the street. She could see in front of her and to the sides, despite her sunhat. She made use of pauses in doorways, of reflections in windows to check behind. But she could never shake the feeling that someone was sneaking up on her – that a hand would descend on her neck, a hand with red and blue veining and a bracelet of baby skulls. Blanco hadn’t been seen in the Sewage Lagoon for some time – still in Painball, said some; no, overseas fighting as a mercenary, said others – but he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.

There was someone behind her – she could feel it, like a tingling between her shoulders. She stepped into a doorway, turned to face the sidewalk, then sagged with relief: it was Zeb.

“Hi, babe,” he said. “Hot enough?”

He strolled along beside her, singing to himself:

Nobody gives a snot,

Nobody gives a snot,

That is why we’re on the fucking spot,

Cause nobody gives a snot!

“Maybe you shouldn’t sing,” said Toby neutrally. It wasn’t good policy to call attention to yourself on a pleeb sidewalk, especially not for Gardeners.

“Can’t help it,” said Zeb cheerfully. “God’s fault. Wove music into the fabric of our being. Hears you better when you sing, so He’s listening to this right now. I hope He’s enjoying it,” he added in a pious, mocking Adam One voice – a voice he was using a lot, though not when Adam One was around.

Lurking insubordination, thought Toby: he’s tired of being the Beta Chimp.

Since becoming an Eve she’d gained much insight into Zeb’s status among the Gardeners. Each Gardener Rooftop site and Truffle cell ran its own affairs, but every half-year they’d send delegates to a central convention, which for security reasons was never held in the same abandoned warehouse twice. Zeb was always a delegate: he was well equipped to make it through the more jagged pleebland neighbourhoods and around the CorpSeCorps checkpoints without being mugged, swarmed, spraygunned, or arrested. Maybe that was why he was allowed to stretch the Gardeners’ rules the way he did.

Adam One seldom attended the conventions. The journey was hazardous, and the implication was that although Zeb was expendable, Adam One was not. In theory the Gardener fellowship had no overall head, but in practice its leader was Adam One, revered founder and guru. The soft hammer of his word carried a lot of weight at the Gardener conventions, and since he was rarely there to use that hammer himself, Zeb wielded it for him. Which must be a temptation: what if Zeb were to jettison Adam One’s decrees and substitute his own? By such methods had regimes been changed and emperors toppled.

“You’ve had some bad news?” Toby asked Zeb now. The singing was the clue: Zeb was annoyingly upbeat whenever the news was bad.

“In point of fact,” said Zeb. “We’ve lost contact with one of our insiders in Compoundland – our boy courier. He’s gone dark.”

Toby had learned about the boy courier once she’d become an Eve. He’d run Pilar’s biopsy samples and brought her the fatal diagnosis – both of them concealed in a jar of honey. But that was all she knew: information was shared among the Adams and Eves, but only as much as was necessary. Pilar’s death was years ago: the boy courier couldn’t be much of a boy any longer.

“Gone dark?” she said. “How?” Had he had a pigmentation makeover? Surely not that.

“He used to be at HelthWyzer, but now he’s graduated from high school and moved over to the Watson-Crick Institute, and he’s fallen off our screen. Not that we have that much of a screen, as such,” he added.

Toby waited. With Zeb, there was no point in pushing or fishing.

“Between us, right?” he said after a while.

“Of course,” said Toby. I’m just an ear, she thought. A doggie-type faithful companion. A well of silence. Nothing more to it. After Lucerne had flown the coop four years ago she’d wondered briefly if there might be more, sometime, between her and Zeb. But nothing had come of that hankering. I’m the wrong body type, she thought. Too muscular. No doubt he likes the jiggle.

“Council doesn’t know about this, okay?” said Zeb. “Him going dark will just make them nervous.”

“I’ll forget I heard it,” said Toby.

“His dad was a friend of Pilar’s – she used to be Botanic Splices, at HelthWyzer. I knew them both, at that time. But he got unhappy when he found out they were seeding folks with illnesses via those souped-up supplement pills of theirs – using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses. Nifty scam, charging top dollar for stuff they caused themselves. Troubled his conscience. So the dad fed us some interesting data. Then he had an accident.”

“Accident?” said Toby.

“Went off an overpass at rush hour. Blood gumbo.”

“That’s a bit graphic,” said Toby. “For a vegetarian.”

“Sorry about that,” said Zeb. “Suicide, was the rumour.”

“It wasn’t, I take it,” said Toby.

“We call it Corpicide. If you’re Corp and you do something they don’t like, you’re dead. It’s like you shot yourself.”

“I see,” said Toby.

“Anyway, back to our young guy. The mother was Diagnostics at HelthWyzer, he’d hacked her lab sign-in code, he could run stuff through the system for us. Genius hacker. The mom’s married a top corp guy at HelthWyzer Central and the kid went with her.”

“Where Lucerne is,” said Toby.

Zeb ignored this. “Burned through their firewalls, cooked up a few onscreen identities, got back in touch. We heard from him for a while, but then nothing.”

“Maybe he’s lost interest,” said Toby. “Or else they caught him.”

“Maybe,” said Zeb. “But he’s a three-dimensional chess player, he likes a challenge. He’s nimble. Also he’s got no fear.”

“How many like that do we have?” Toby asked. “In the Compounds?”

“Nobody that good at hacking,” said Zeb. “This guy’s one of a kind.”

45

They reached the Wellness Clinic and entered the Vinegar Room. Toby moved around behind the three huge barrels, unlocked the bottle shelf, and swung it out so she could open the inner door. She could hear Zeb sucking in his stomach to squeeze past the barrels: he wasn’t softly fat, but he was large.

The inner room was almost filled by a table patched together from old floorboards, with a motley collection of chairs. On one wall there was a recent watercolour – Saint E.O. Wilson of Hymenoptera – done by Nuala in one of her too frequent moments of artistic inspiration. The Saint was shown with the sun behind him, giving him a halo effect. On his face was an ecstatic smile, in his hand was a collecting jar containing several black spots. These were the bees, Toby supposed, or possibly the ants. As was often the case with Nuala’s paintings of Saints, one of the arms was longer than the other.

There was a gentle knock, and Adam One slipped through the door. The rest followed in their turn.

Adam One was a different person behind the scenes. Not entirely different – no less sincere – but more practical. Also more tactical. “Let us say a silent prayer for the success of our deliberations,” he began. The meetings always opened this way. Toby had some difficulty praying in the close confines of the hidden room: she was too aware of stomach rumblings, of the waftings of clandestine odours, of the creaks and shiftings of bodies. But then, she had some difficulty praying anyway.

The silent prayer seemed to be on a timer. As heads lifted and eyes opened, Adam One glanced around the room. “Is that a new picture?” he said. “On the wall?”

Nuala beamed. “It’s Saint E.O.,” she said. “ Wilson. Of Hymenoptera.”

“So like him, my dear,” said Adam One. “Especially the… You are blessed with such talent.” He coughed slightly. “Now to a pressing practical matter. We have just received a very special guest, originally from HelthWyzer Central, though she has been, shall we say, travelling. Despite all obstacles, she’s brought us a gift of genome codes, for which we owe her, not only temporary asylum, but secure Exfernal placement.”

“They’re looking for her,” said Zeb. “She shouldn’t have come back to this country. We’ll have to move her out as fast as possible. Through the FenderBender and over to the Street of Dreams, as usual?”

“If it’s a clear path,” said Adam One. “We can’t take unnecessary risks. We can always keep her hidden in this meeting room, if we have to.”

The ratio of women to men fleeing the Corporations was roughly three to one. Nuala said it was because women were more ethical, Zeb said it was because they were more squeamish, and Philo said it amounted to the same thing. Such fugitives often brought contraband information with them. Formulae. Long lines of code. Test secrets, proprietary lies. What did the Gardeners do with it all? Toby wondered. Surely they didn’t sell it as industrial corp espionage material, though it would fetch a bundle from foreign rivals. As far as she could tell, they just held on to it; though it was possible that Adam One harboured a dream of restoring all the lost Species via their preserved DNA codes, once a more ethical and technically proficient future had replaced the depressing present. They’d cloned the mammoth, so why not all? Was that his vision of the ultimate Ark?

“Our new guest wants to send a message to her son,” said Adam One. “She’s worried about having left him at what may have been a crucial time in his life. Jimmy is this lad’s name. I believe he’s now at the Martha Graham Academy.”

“A postcard,” said Zeb. “We’ll say it’s from Aunt Monica. Get me the address, I’ll relay it through England – one of our Truffle cellfolk has a trip there next week. The CorpSeCorps will read it, of course. They read all the postcards.”

“She wants us to say that his pet rakunk was released into the wilds of Heritage Park, where it is living a free and happy life. Its name is – ah – Killer.”

“Oh, Christ in a Zeppelin!” said Zeb.

“That language is uncalled for,” said Nuala.

“Sorry. But they make it so fucking complicated,” said Zeb. “That’s the third pet rakunk message this month. Next it’ll be gerbils and mice.”

“I think it’s touching,” said Nuala.

“Guess some people anyway practise what they preach,” said Rebecca.

Toby was assigned as minder to the new refugee. Her code name was the Hammerhead, because upon leaving HelthWyzer she was said to have taken her husband’s computer apart with a home handyman’s toolkit to disguise the extent of her data thefts. She was thin and blue-eyed, and far from calm. Like all Corp defectors, she thought she was the only one ever to have taken the momentous and heretical step of defying a Corp; and like all of them, she desperately wanted to be told what a good person she was.

Toby obliged. She said how brave the Hammerhead had been, which was true, and how smart she’d been to take a winding and devious path, and how much they appreciated the information she’d brought them. In reality she hadn’t told them anything they didn’t already know – it was that old human-to-pig neocortex transplant material – but it would have been less than kind to say so. We must cast a wide net, said Adam One, although some of the fish may be small. Also we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.

Toby shrouded the Hammerhead in a dark blue Gardener dress, adding a nose cone to conceal her face. But the woman was nervous and fidgety, and kept asking if she could have a cigarette. Toby said no Gardener smoked – not tobacco – so to be caught doing so would blow her cover. Anyway there weren’t any cigarettes up on the Rooftop.

The Hammerhead paced the floor and gnawed her fingernails until Toby felt like hitting her. We didn’t ask you to come here and put all our necks in a noose over a teaspoonful of stale-dated crap, she wanted to say. In the end she gave the woman some chamomile tea with Poppy in it, just to take her off the airwaves.

46

The next day was Saint Aleksander Zawadzki of Galicia. A minor saint but one of Toby’s favourites. He’d lived in turbulent times – what times in Poland had ever not been turbulent? – but had followed his own peaceful and slightly dotty pursuits nonetheless, cataloguing the flowers of Galicia, naming its beetles. Rebecca liked him too: she’d put on her apron with the butterfly appliqués and made beetle biscuits for the small children’s snack time, ornamenting each one with an A and a Z. The children had made up their own little song about him: Alexsander, Alexsander, beetle up your nose! Blow it on your handkerchief, stick it on a rose!

It was midmorning. The Hammerhead was still sleeping off the effects of yesterday’s Poppy: Toby had overdone it, but she didn’t feel too guilty, and now she had some time for her regular chores. She’d garbed up in her bee veil and gloves and lit the smudge in her bellows: as she’d explained to the bees, she intended to spend the morning extracting the full honeycombs. Before she’d begun the smoking, however, Zeb appeared.

“Crappy news,” he said. “Your Painball buddy’s out again.” Like everyone at the Gardeners, Zeb knew the story of Toby’s rescue from Blanco by Adam One and the Buds and Blooms – it was part of oral history. But he also sensed her fear. Though they’d never discussed it.

Toby felt an ice needle shoot through her. She lifted up her veil. “Really?”

“Older and meaner,” said Zeb. “Twisted fuck should have been vulture pellets long ago. He must have friends in high places, though, because he’s back managing SecretBurgers, over in the Sewage Lagoon.”

“As long as he stays there,” said Toby. She tried to make her voice sound strong.

“The bees can wait,” said Zeb. He took her arm. “You need to sit down. I’ll do a snoop. Maybe he’s forgotten all about you.”

He took Toby to the kitchen. “Sweetheart, you look beat,” said Rebecca. “What’s wrong?” Toby told her.

“Oh shit,” said Rebecca. “I’ll make you some Rescue Tea, you look like you need it. Don’t you worry – that man’s karma will kill him one day.” But, thought Toby, one day was far too distant.

It was afternoon. Many of the general-membership Gardeners were gathered on the roof. Some were retying the tomatoes and climbing zucchinis that had blown over in the storm, a more violent one than usual. Others sat in the shade, working at their knitting, their knotting, their mending. The Adams and Eves were restless, as they always were when they were harbouring a runaway – what if the Hammerhead had been followed? Adam One had posted sentinels; he himself was standing over by the roof’s edge in one-legged meditation pose, keeping an eye on the street below.

The Hammerhead had woken up, and Toby had set her to work picking snails off the lettuces; she’d told the rank-and-file Gardeners this was a new convert, and shy. They’d seen so many new converts come and go.

“If we have a visit,” Toby said to the Hammerhead, “anything like an inspection, pull your sunhat down and go on with the snails. Act like background.” She herself was smoking the bees, on the theory that it was best to carry on as usual.

Then Shackleton and Crozier and young Oates came pounding up the fire-escape stairs, followed by Amanda, then Zeb. They headed straight over to Adam One. He motioned to Toby with his chin: join us.

“There’s been a scuffle in the Sewage Lagoon,” said Zeb after they’d grouped around Adam One.

“Scuffle?” said Adam One.

“We were just looking,” said Shackleton. “But he saw us.”

“He called us fucking meat-stealers,” said Crozier. “He was drunk.”

“Not drunk: wasted,” said Amanda with authority. “He tried to hit me, but I did a satsuma.” Toby smiled a little: it was a mistake to underestimate Amanda. She was a tall sinewy Amazon by now, and she’d been studying Urban Bloodshed Limitation with Zeb. As had her two devoted henchmen. There were three if you counted Oates, though he was merely at the hopeless crush level.

“Who is ‘he’?” said Adam One. “Where was this?”

“SecretBurgers,” said Zeb. “We were checking it out – we heard Blanco was back.”

“Zeb pulled an unagi on him,” said Shackleton. “It was neat!”

“Did you have to actually go there?” said Adam One, a little peevishly. “We have other ways of…”

“Then the Asian Fusions swarmed him,” said Oates excitedly. “They had bottles!”

“He pulled a killer knife,” said Croze. “He notched a couple.”

“I hope there was no lasting damage,” said Adam One. “Much as we deplore the very existence of SecretBurgers, and the depredations of this – this unlucky individual, we want no violence.”

“Booth overturned, meat thrown around. All he suffered was cuts and bruises,” said Zeb.

“That is unfortunate,” said Adam One. “It’s true that we sometimes have to defend ourselves, and we’ve had trouble with this – with him before. But on this occasion, do I have the impression that we attacked first?” He frowned at Zeb. “Or provoked an attack? Is this correct?”

“Asshole had it coming,” said Zeb. “We should be getting medals.”

“Our way is the way of peace,” said Adam One, frowning even more.

“Peace goes only so far,” said Zeb. “There’s at least a hundred new extinct species since this time last month. They got fucking eaten! We can’t just sit here and watch the lights blink out. Have to begin somewhere. Today SecretBurgers, tomorrow that fucking gourmet restaurant chain. Rarity. That needs to go.”

“Our role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness,” said Adam One. “And to guard the memories and the genomes of the departed. You can’t fight blood with blood. I thought we’d agreed on that.”

There was a silence. Shackleton and Crozier and Oates and Amanda were staring at Zeb. Zeb and Adam One were staring at each other.

“Anyway, it’s too late now,” said Zeb. “Blanco’s raging.”

“Will he cross pleebmob boundaries?” said Toby. “Raid us here, in the Sinkhole?”

“Mood he’s in, no question,” said Zeb. “Ordinary mob guys don’t scare him any more. He’s multiple-session Painball.”

Zeb warned the assembled Gardeners, posted a line of watchers around the roof, and stationed the strongest gatekeepers at the bottom of the fire-escape stairs. Adam One protested, saying that to act like one’s enemies was to descend to their level. Zeb said that if Adam One wanted to handle defence matters in some other way he was free to do so, but if not he should keep his nose out of it.

“There’s movement,” said Rebecca, who was watching. “Three of them coming, it looks like.”

“Whatever you do,” Toby told the Hammerhead, “don’t cut and run. Don’t do anything that calls attention.” She went over to the roof’s edge to look.

Three heavyweights were muscling along the sidewalk. They had baseball bats. No sprayguns. Not CorpSeCorps then, just pleeb thugs: payback for the wreckage at SecretBurgers. One of the three was Blanco – she could spot him from any angle. What would he do? Bash her to death on the spot, or drag her away to do it more slowly elsewhere?

“What is it, my dear?” said Adam One.

“It’s him,” said Toby. “If he sees me, he’ll kill me.”

“Be of good cheer,” he said. “Nothing bad will be done to you.” But since Adam One thought that even the most terrible things happened for ultimately excellent though unfathomable reasons, Toby did not find this reassuring.

Zeb told her she’d better get their special guest out of sight, just in case, so she took the Hammerhead to her own cubicle and gave her a calming drink, heavy on the chamomile, with a little Poppy. The Hammerhead drifted off to sleep, and Toby sat watching her and hoping the two of them wouldn’t end up cornered. She found herself looking around for weapons. I suppose I could hit them with the Poppy bottle, she thought. But it’s not very big.

Then she walked back out to the Rooftop. She was still in her bee gear. She adjusted her heavy gloves, took up her bellows, and lowered her veil. “Stand by me,” she said to the bees. “Be my messengers.” As if they could hear.

The fight didn’t last long. Later, Toby heard Shackleton and Crozier and Oates enacting the full battle story for the younger children, who’d been hurried out of the way by Nuala. According to them, it had been epic.

“Zeb was brilliant,” said Shackleton. “He had it all planned out! They must’ve thought since we’re so pacifist and all, they could just… Anyway, it was like an ambush – we backed up the stairs, with them following.”

“And then, and then,” said Oates.

“And then, at the top, Zeb let the first guy lunge at him, and then he got the end of the guy’s baseball bat and kind of flung it, and the guy almost crashed into Rebecca, and she had this two-pronged fork, and then he went screaming right over the edge of the roof.”

“Like this!” said Oates, arms flailing.

“Then Stuart sprayed the next one with the plant hydrator,” said Crozier. “He says it works on cats.”

“Amanda did something to him. Didn’t you?” Shackleton said to her fondly. “Like, some Bloodshed Limitation move, like a hamachi, or – I don’t know what she did, but he went over the railing too. Did you kick him in the nuts or what?”

“I relocated him,” said Amanda demurely. “Like a snail.”

“Then the third one ran away,” said Oates. “The biggest guy. With bees all over him. Toby did that, it was wicked. Adam One wouldn’t let us go after him.”

“Zeb says this won’t be the end of it,” said Amanda.

Toby had her own version, in which everything had moved both very fast and very slowly. She’d placed herself behind the hives, and then the three of them had been right there, just emerging from the stair-top. A pale-faced man with a dark chin and a baseball bat, a scarred Redfish type, and Blanco. Blanco had spotted her immediately. “I see you, stringy-assed bitch!” he’d yelled. “You’re meat!” Her bee veil was no disguise. He had his knife out; he was grinning.

The first man had tangled with Rebecca and gone over the railing somehow, screaming on the way down, but the second one was still coming. Then Amanda – who’d been standing off to the side, looking ethereal and harmless – had raised her arm. Toby had seen a flash of light: was that glass? But Blanco was almost upon her: there was nothing between them but the hives.

She pushed the hives over – three of them. She was veiled, Blanco was not. The bees poured out, whining with anger, and went for him like arrows. He fled howling down the fire-escape stairs, flailing and slapping, trailing a plume of bees.

It took some time for Toby to set the hives back up. The bees were furious, and several Gardeners got stung. Toby apologized to the victims, and she and Katuro treated them with calamine and chamomile; but she apologized much more profusely to the bees, once she’d smoked them enough to make them drowsy: they’d sacrificed many of their own in the battle.

47

The Adams and Eves had a tense meeting in the hidden room behind the vinegar barrels. “That shit wouldn’t attack without authorization,” said Zeb. “It’s the CorpSeCorps behind it – they’re aware of some of the folks we’ve been helping out, so they’re working up to branding us as terrorist fanatics, like the Wolf Isaiahists.”

“Nope, it’s personal,” said Rebecca. “That man is mean as a snake, no disrespect to Snakes, and he was after Toby, is all. Once he’s stuck his pole in some hole, he thinks it’s his.” When Rebecca got worked up, she tended to revert to her earlier vocabulary and then regret it. “No offence, Toby,” she said.

“Surely the proximate cause is among us,” said Adam One. “The young people provoked him. And Zeb. We should have let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Dogs is right,” said Rebecca. “No disrespect to Dogs.”

“Two dead bodies on the sidewalk will hardly do our peaceful reputation any good,” said Nuala.

“Accidents. They fell off the roof,” said Zeb.

“And one got his throat cut and the other had his eye put out on the way down,” said Adam One. “As any forensic investigation will show.”

“Dangerous, brick walls,” said Katuro. “Things stick. Nails. Broken glass. Sharp things.”

“Maybe you’d like a few dead Gardeners better?” said Zeb.

“If your premise is correct,” said Adam One, “and this is a CorpSeCorps plot, has it occurred to you that those three may have been sent to provoke exactly such an incident? To cause us to break the law, thus providing an excuse for reprisals?”

“What was our choice?” said Zeb. “Let them squash us like bugs? Not that we squash Bugs,” he added.

“He’ll come back,” said Toby. “Whatever the reason, CorpSeCorps or not. As long as I stay here, I’ll be a target.”

“I think,” said Adam One, “that it would be best for your safety, dear Toby, and also for the safety of the Garden, if we were to place you in one of our Truffle niches in the Exfernal World. You can be of much use to us there. We’ll ask our pleebrat connections to spread the news that you are no longer among us. Perhaps your foe may then lack motivation, and we will be protected from aggression from that quarter, at least for the moment. How soon can we move her?” he asked Zeb.

“Consider it done,” said Zeb.

Toby went to her sleeping cubicle and packed her most necessary items – the bottled extracts, the dried herbs, the mushrooms. Pilar’s honey, the last three jars. She left some of each thing behind for whoever might be filling her empty Eve Six shoes.

She remembered her early desire to leave the Garden, out of boredom and claustrophobia, and the desire for what she used to think of as a life of her own; but now that she was actually going, it felt like an expulsion. No: more like a wrenching, a severing, a skin peeling off. She resisted the urge to drink some Poppy, to dull the edge. She had to stay alert.

Another hurt: she was failing Pilar. Would she have time to say goodbye to the bees, and if she didn’t, would the hives die? Who would take over as beekeeper? Who had the skills? She covered her head with a scarf and hurried out to the hives.

“Bees,” she said out loud. “I have news.” Did the bees pause in mid-air, were they listening? Several came to investigate her; they lit on her face, exploring her emotions through the chemicals on her skin. She hoped they’d forgiven her for tipping their hives. “You must tell your Queen I’ve had to leave,” she said. “Nothing to do with you, you’ve performed your duties well. My enemy is forcing me to go. I’m sorry. I hope that when we meet again it will be under happier circumstances.” She always found herself using a formal style with the bees.

The bees buzzed and fizzed; they appeared to be discussing her. She wished she could take them with her like a large, golden, furry collective pet. “I’ll miss you, bees,” she said. As if in answer, one of them started crawling up her nostril. She breathed it sharply out. Maybe we wear hats for these interviews, she thought, so they won’t go into our ears.

She went back to her cubicle, where an hour later Adam One and Zeb joined her. “You’d better wear this, dear Toby,” said Adam One. He was carrying a furzoot – a fluffy pink duck with flapping red rubbery feet and a smiling yellow plastic bill. “The nose cone’s built in. It’s the latest fabric. Mo’Hair NeoBiofur – it exhales for you. Or so the label claims.”

The two of them waited on the other side of the cubicle curtain while Toby took off her sombre Gardener dress and put on the furzoot. NeoBiofur or not, it was hot in there. And dark. She knew she was looking out through a pair of round white eyes with big black pupils, but it felt like peering through a keyhole.

“Flap your wings,” said Zeb.

Toby moved her arms up and down inside the zoot arms and the duck suit quacked. It sounded like an old man blowing his nose.

“If you want to make the tail wiggle, stamp your left foot.”

“How do I talk?” said Toby. She had to say it again, louder.

“Through the right earhole,” said Adam One.

Oh great, thought Toby. You quack with your foot, you talk through your earhole. I won’t ask how to do any of the other bodily functions.

She changed back into her dress, and Zeb stuffed the furzoot into a duffle bag. “I’ll drive you in the truck,” he said. “It’s right out front.”

“We’ll be in touch very soon, my dear,” said Adam One. “I regret… it’s unfortunate that… Keep the Light around…”

“I’ll try,” said Toby.

The Gardeners’ forced-air truck now had a logo on it that said, PARTY TIME. Toby sat in the front with Zeb. The Hammerhead was in the back, disguised as a box of balloons: Zeb said he was killing two birds with one stone.

“Sorry,” he added.

“For what?” Toby asked. Sorry that she was going? She felt a small pulse-beat.

“Killing two birds. Not good to mention bird murder.”

“Oh. Right,” said Toby. “It’s okay.”

“We’ll send the Hammerhead down the line,” said Zeb. “We’ve got connections among the bag-heavers for the sealed bullet train; she can go as cargo, we’ll mark her as Fragile. We’ve got a Truffle cell in Oregon – they’ll keep her out of sight.”

“How about me?” said Toby.

“Adam One wants you closer to the Garden,” said Zeb, “in case Blanco gets Painballed again and you can come back. We’ve got an Exfernal spot for you, but it’ll take a few days to set up. Meanwhile, just hang out in your zoot. Street of Dreams, where they peddle the custom genes – that place is crawling with furzooters, nobody will notice you. Now, better scrunch down – we’re going through the Sewage Lagoon.”

Zeb delivered Toby to the FenderBender Body Shop, where the resident Gardeners whisked her out of the truck and stashed her in the former hydraulic-lift pit, which they’d covered with trapdoor flooring. There she breathed ancient engine-oil fumes and ate a sparse meal of damp soybits and mashed turnips, washed down with Sumac. She slept on an old futon, using her furzoot as a pillow. There was no biolet in there, only a rusted Happicuppa coffee can. Use what’s to hand was a cherished Gardener motto.

Not all the members of the FenderBender rat colony had been successfully relocated to the Buenavista Condos, she discovered. But those remaining were not overtly hostile.

The next morning she began her spurious job – waddling along the Street of Dreams inside a wodge of fake fur, quacking at intervals and wiggling her tail, wearing a sandwich board, and handing out brochures. On the front of the board it said, UGLY DUCKLINGS TO LOVELY SWANS AT THE ANOOYOO SPA-IN-THE-PARK! Goose Your Self-Esteem! On the back, ANOOYOO! DO IT FOR YOO! On the brochures it said, Epidermal enhancement! Lower cost! Avoid gene errors! Fully reversible! AnooYoo didn’t sell gene therapy – nothing so radical or permanent. Instead it sold more superficial treatments. Herbal elixirs, system cleansers, dermal mood lifts; vegetable nanocell injections, mildew-formula micromesh resurfacing, heavy-duty face creams, rehydrating balms. Iguana-based hue changes, microbial spot removal, flat-wart leech peels.

She handed out many brochures, but she also got hassled by some of the gene-shop owners: on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream. There were a number of other furzooters working the Street – a lion, a Mo’Hair sheep, two bears, and three other ducks. Toby wondered how many of them were really who they claimed to be: if she was hiding out in plain view, others in need of invisibility must have discovered the same solution.

If she’d been working for a genuine furzoot outfit as she’d done once before, she’d have clocked her hours at day’s end, climbed out of her zoot, and pocketed the receipt for her e-pay. As it was, Zeb collected her in the pickup. Its logo now said, BIGZOOT – SAY IT WITH FURORE! She rolled herself into the back, still inside her zoot, and Zeb ferried her to another Gardener enclave – an abandoned bank in the Sewage Lagoon. The various banking corps had once paid the local pleebmob for protection, but soon their Tex-Mex identity-theft specialists were skipping in and out as freely as mice. Finally the banks had given up and decamped, because no employee’s idea of a business day well spent was lying on the floor with duct tape over your mouth while an identity filcher hacked the accounts, gaining access with your cut-off thumb.

The old-fashioned bank vault was a much better place to spend the night than the hydraulic-lift pit had been. Cool, rat-free, no gas fumes; a lingering odour of the gently oxidizing paper money of yesteryear. But then Toby started wondering what would happen if someone inadvertently closed and locked the vault door and then forgot about her, so she didn’t sleep very well.

The next day it was the Street of Dreams again. The duck costume was intolerable in the heat, one of her rubber feet was coming loose, and the nose-cone filter was dysfunctional. What if the Gardeners abandoned her and she was left to eddy around in the Dreams-land, transformed into a non-existent bird-animal and dehydrating herself to death, to be found one day in a welter of damp pink faux feathers, clogging up the drains?

But finally Zeb picked her up. He drove her to a clinic at the back of a Mo’Hair franchise outlet. “We’re doing the hair and skin,” he said. “You’re going dark. And the fingerprints, and the voiceprint. Plus a bit of recontouring.” The biotech for changing iris pigment was risky – there’d been some unpleasant bulging effects, said Zeb – so she’d have to use contacts. Green ones – he’d picked out the colour himself.

“Higher voice, or lower?” he asked her.

“Lower,” said Toby, hoping she wouldn’t come out a baritone.

“Good choice,” said Zeb.

The doctor was Chinese, and very smooth. There’d be an anaesthetic, and a recuperation time in the recovery unit upstairs – top of the line, said Zeb – and once Toby found herself inside it, the place did seem very clean. They didn’t do much cutting and stitching. Her fingertips lost their sensitivity – it would come back, said Zeb – and her throat was sore from the voicework, and her head itched a lot while the Mo’Hair scalp was bonding. The skin pigmentation was uneven at first, but Zeb told her it would be fine in six weeks: until then, she’d have to keep strictly out of the sun.

She spent the six weeks of seclusion at a Truffle cell in SolarSpace. Her contact, whose name was Muffy, collected Toby from the clinic in a very expensive all-electric coupé. “If anyone asks,” Muffy said, “just tell them you’re the new maid. I do have to apologize,” she continued, “but we have to eat meat at our place, it’s part of our cover. We feel terrible about it, but just about everyone in SolarSpace is a carnivore, and they’re very big on barbecues – organic, naturally, and some of it’s stretchy-rack-grown, you know, they grow just the muscle tissue, no brain, no pain – and it would be suspicious if we ducked it. But I’ll try to keep the cooking smells away from you.”

Too late for such a warning: Toby had already smelled something that came close to the aroma of the bone-stock soup her mother used to make. Though she was ashamed of herself, it made her hungry. Hungry, and also sad. Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

In her little maid’s room Toby read e-magazines, and practised sticking her contact lenses onto her eyeballs, and listened to music on a Sea/H/Ear Candy. It was a surreal interlude. “Think of yourself as a chrysalis,” Zeb had told her before the transformation process had begun. Sure enough, she’d gone in as Toby and had come out as Tobiatha. Less angla, more latina. More alto.

She looked at herself – her new skin, her new abundant hair, her more prominent cheekbones. Her new almond-shaped green eyes. She’d have to remember to put those lenses in every morning.

The alterations hadn’t made her stunningly beautiful, but that wasn’t the object. The object was to make her more invisible. Beauty is only skin deep, she thought. But why did they always say only?

Still, her new look wasn’t bad. The hair was a nice change, though the family cats were taking an interest in it, probably because of the faint lamb-like smell. When she woke up in the morning she was likely to find one of them sitting on her pillow, licking her hair and purring.

48

Once her scalp was firmly rooted to her head and her skin tone was uniform, Toby was ready to move into her new identity. Muffy explained to her what this was to be.

“We thought, the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park,” she said. “They’re heavy on the botanies there, so you’d fit right in, because of the mushrooms and the potions and all, Zeb told me – so you can get up to speed on their products really fast. They have an organic garden for the café, they pride themselves on that, with a compost heap and all of that; and they’re doing some plant splice tryouts you might find interesting. As for the rest, it’s like organizing anything else – product in, value added, product out. Supervising the books and the supplies, managing the staff – Zeb says you’re really good with people. The procedural templates are already in place – you’ll just need to follow them.”

“The product would be the customers?” said Toby.

“That’s right,” said Muffy.

“And the value added?”

“It’s an intangible,” said Muffy. “They feel they look better afterwards. People will pay a lot of money for that.”

“Do you mind telling me how you got me this position?” Toby asked.

“My husband’s on the AnooYoo board,” said Muffy. “Don’t worry, I didn’t lie to him. He’s one of us.”

Once installed at the AnooYoo Spa, Toby settled into her role as Tobiatha, the vaguely Tex-Mex but discreet and efficient manager. The days were placid, the nights were calm. True, there was an electric fence around the whole place and four gatehouses with guards, but the identi-checks were lax and the guards never bothered Toby. It wasn’t a high-security posting. The Spa had no big secrets to defend, so the guards did nothing but monitor the ladies who were going in, frightened by the first signs of droop and pucker, then going out again, buffed and tightened and resurfaced, irradiated and despotted.

But still frightened, because when might the whole problem – the whole thing – start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby – being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way. We’d rather have wings. Even the word flesh has a mushy sound to it.

We’re not selling only beauty, the AnooYoo Corp said in their staff instructionals. We’re selling hope.

Some of the customers could be demanding. They couldn’t understand why even the most advanced AnooYoo treatments wouldn’t make them twenty-one again. “Our laboratories are well on the way to age reversal,” Toby would tell them in soothing tones, “but they aren’t quite there yet. In a few years…”

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.

Toby took pains to be a convincing manager. She ran the Spa efficiently, she listened carefully to both staff and customers, she mediated disputes when necessary, she cultivated efficiency and tact. Having been an Eve Six helped: through that experience she’d discovered a talent within herself for gazing solemnly as if deeply interested, while saying nothing. “Remember,” she’d tell her staff, “every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.” Just don’t spit in their soup, she wanted to counsel, but that would have been going too far out of her Tobiatha character.

On the most aggravating days she amused herself by viewing the Spa as if it were a tabloid ‘zine: Socialite corpse found on lawn, toxic facial suspected. Amanita implicated in exfoliation death. Tragedy stalks the pool. But why take it out on the ladies? They only wanted to feel good and be happy, like everything else on the planet. Why should she begrudge them their obsessions with their puffy veins and tummy flubber? “Think pink,” she told her girls as per the AnooYoo Corp instructional template, and then she’d tell herself the same thing. Why not? It was a nicer colour than bilious yellow.

After a cautious pause, she began stashing away a few supplies – building her own private Ararat. She wasn’t sure she believed in the Waterless Flood – as time passed, the Gardeners and their theories seemed more and more remote, more fanciful, more creative – in a word, loonier – but she believed in it enough to take the rudimentary precautions. She was in charge of Spa inventory, so stockpiling was easy. She’d simply retrieve empty product containers from the recycling bins, a few at a time – those for AnooYoo Intestinal Whisk were especially useful, as they were large and had tops that snapped on – and fill them with soybits or dried seaweed or powdered milk substitute or tins of soydines. Then she’d replace the tops and store the containers at the very backs of the stockroom shelves. A couple of other staff members had the storeroom door code, but as Toby was known to be a strict inventory-taker and to be tough on pilferers, no one was likely to make off with any of her refilled containers.

She had an office of her own, and in that office there was a computer. She knew the hazards of out-of-bounds usage – some AnooYoo Corp functionary might be monitoring her searches and messages and checking to make sure staff wasn’t watching porno flicks on company time – so most days she scanned only for general news, hoping that way to pick up any word of the Gardeners.

There wasn’t much. From time to time there’d be a story on subversive acts by fanatical greenies, but there was a number of such groups by now. She glimpsed some Gardener faces in the crowd during the Boston Coffee Party, when they were dumping Happicuppa beans into the harbour, but she might have been wrong about that. Several people were wearing T-shirts with G IS G on them for “God Is Green,” which proved nothing: the Gardeners themselves hadn’t worn such T-shirts, not in the old days.

The CorpSeCorps could have shut down the Happicuppa riots. They could have spraygunned the lot, plus any TV camerafolk who happened to be nearby. Not that you could shut down coverage of such events completely: people used their cameraphones. Still, why didn’t the CorpSeCorps move in openly, blitz their opponents right in plain view, and impose overt totalitarian rule, since they were the only ones with weapons? They were even running the army, now that it had been privatized.

She’d once put this question to Zeb. He’d said that officially they were a private Corporation Security Corps employed by the brand-name Corporations, and those Corporations still wanted to be perceived as honest and trustworthy, friendly as daisies, guileless as bunnies. They couldn’t afford to be viewed by the average consumer as lying, heartless, tyrannical butchers.

“The Corps have to sell, but they can’t force people to buy,” he’d said. “Not yet. So the clean image is still seen as a must.”

That was the short answer: people didn’t want the taste of blood in their Happicuppas.

Muffy, her Truffle-cell minder, kept in touch with Toby by checking herself in for AnooYoo treatments. Occasionally she’d bring news: Adam One was well, Nuala sent regards, the Gardeners were still expanding their influence, but the situation was unstable. Once in a while she’d bring in a female fugitive in need of a temporary hide. She’d dress the woman in clothes like hers – rich SolarSpace matron colours, pastel blue, creamy beige – and book her in for treatments. “Just pile on the mud and smother her in towels, and no one will notice a thing,” she’d say, which turned out to be true.

One of these emergency guests was the Hammerhead. Toby recognized her – the fidgety hands, the intense blue martyr’s eyes – but she didn’t recognize Toby. So the Hammerhead hadn’t made it to a quiet life in Oregon after all, thought Toby: she’s still in the area, taking the risks, on the run all the time. Most likely she’d been sucked into the urban green-guerrilla scene; in which case her days were numbered, because the CorpSeCorps were said to be bent on eliminating all such activists. They’d have the samples from her old HelthWyzer identity, and once you were in their system you never got out of it except by turning up as a corpse with dental work and DNA that matched their records.

Toby ordered the Total Aromatics for the Hammerhead, and an extra Deep Pore Relax. She looked as if she needed them.

There was one serious hazard at the AnooYoo: Lucerne was a regular customer. She came every month, toting a Compound senior-level wife’s wardrobe. She always had the Luscious Polish, the Plum Skin Plumper, and the AnooYoo Fountain of Yooth Total Immersion. She looked more stylish than she’d been at the Gardeners – not difficult, thought Toby, because in a plastic bag you’d be more stylish than a Gardener – but she also looked older and more desiccated. Her once-lush lower lip had developed a downward sag, despite all the collagen and plant extracts Toby knew had been pumped into it, and her eyelids were getting the crinkly texture of poppy petals. These signs of decline were gratifying to Toby, though it dismayed her to be burdened with such a petty and jealous emotion. Give it up, she told herself. Just because Lucerne ’s turning into an old puffball doesn’t mean you’re a hot babe.

It would of course be catastrophic if Lucerne were suddenly to burst out from behind a shrub or a shower curtain and shout out Toby’s real name. So Toby took evasive action. She’d review the advance bookings so she’d know exactly when Lucerne was going to show up. Then she’d assign her most vigorous operatives – Melody with her big shoulders, Symphony with her firm hands – and keep herself out of Lucerne’s sightline. But as Lucerne was usually prone and covered with brown goop and eye pads, she was unlikely to spot Toby; and even if she did see her, she’d be sure to look right through her. To women like Lucerne, women like Tobiatha were faceless.

What if I crept up on her during the Fountain of Yooth Total Immersion and gunned the lasers? Toby wondered. Or shorted the heat lamp? She’d melt like a marshmallow. A nematode snack. The Earth would cheer.

Dear Eve Six, said Adam One’s voice. Such fantasies are unworthy of you. What would Pilar think?

One afternoon there was a knock at Toby’s office door. “Come in,” she said. It was a large man in a groundsman’s green denim overall. He was whistling – surely – a familiar tune.

“I’m here to prune the lumiroses,” he said. Toby looked up, drew her breath in sharply. She knew better than to say anything: her office could be crawling with bugs.

Zeb glanced back along the hallway, then stepped in and shut the door. He sat down at her computer, then took a Sharpie and wrote on her desk pad: Watch what I do.

The Gardeners? Toby wrote. Adam One?

Schism, Zeb wrote. Own group now. “Having any trouble with the plantings?” he said out loud.

Shackleton and Crozier? Toby wrote. With you?

Manner of speaking, Zeb replied. Oates. Katuro, Rebecca. New ones too.

Amanda?

Got out. Higher education. Art. Smart.

He’d pulled up a site: EXTINCTATHON. Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?

MaddAddam? Toby wrote on her desk pad. Your group? You’re plural? She was elated: Zeb was here, beside her, in the flesh. After she’d thought for so long that she’d never see him again.

I contain multitudes, wrote Zeb. Pick a codename. Life form, extinct.

Dodo, Toby wrote.

Last fifty years, Zeb wrote. Not much time. Pruning team waiting. Ask about aphids.

“There’s aphids on the lumiroses,” Toby said. She was riffling through the old Gardener lists in her head – animals, fish, birds, flowers, clams, lizards, recently extinct. Inaccessible Rail, she wrote. That bird had gone ten years ago. Can they hack this site?

“We can take care of that,” Zeb said. “Though there’s supposed to be a built-In insecticidal deterrent… I’ll take some samples. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” No, he wrote. Made our own virtual private networks. Quadrupally encrypted. Sorry about the cat-skinning ref. Here’s your number.

He wrote her new codename and a pass number on the pad. Then he typed his own number and code into the log-in space provided. Welcome, Spirit Bear. Do you want to play a general game or do you want to play a Grandmaster? said the screen.

Zeb clicked on Grandmaster. Good. Find your playroom. MaddAddam will meet you there.

Watch, he wrote on her pad. He entered a site advertising Mo’Hair transplants, skipped through a pixel gateway on the eye of a magenta-haired sheep, entered the blue percolating stomach of an ad for a HelthWyzer antacid, which led to the avid open mouth of a SecretBurger customer caught in mid-chomp. Then a wide green landscape unfolded – trees in the distance, a lake in the foreground, a rhino and three lions drinking. A scene from the past.

A line of type unscrolled across it: Welcome to MaddAddam’s playroom, Spirit Bear. You have a message.

Deliver message, Zeb clicked.

The liver is evil and must be punished.

I hear you, Red-necked Crake, Zeb typed. All is well.

Then he closed the site and stood up. “Call me if there are any aphid recurrences,” he said. “If you’d check our work from time to time and keep me informed, that would be good.” He wrote on her pad: The hair’s great, babe. Love the slanty eyes. Then he was gone.

Toby gathered up all the desk-pad pages. Luckily she had some matches to burn them with; she’d been hoarding matches for her Ararat, storing them in a container labelled Lemon Meringue Facial.

After Zeb’s visit she felt less isolated. She’d log in to Extinctathon at irregular intervals and trace the path to the MaddAddam Grandmaster chat-room. Codenames and messages flitted across the screen: Black Rhino to Spirit Bear: Newbies coming. Ivory Bill to Swift Fox: Fear no weevil. White Sedge and Lotis Blue: Micesplice a ten. Red-necked Crake to MaddAddam: Marshmallow hiways nice one! She had no idea what most of these messages meant, but at least she felt included.

Sometimes there were e-bulletins that appeared to be CorpSeCorps classified information. Many of these were about strange outbreaks of new diseases, or peculiar infestations – the splice porcubeaver that was attacking the fan belts in cars, the bean weevil that was decimating Happicuppa coffee plantations, the asphalt-eating microbe that was melting highways.

Then the Rarity restaurant chain was obliterated by a series of lethal bombings. She saw the regular news, where these events were blamed on unspecified eco-terrorists; but she also read a detailed analysis on MaddAddam. It was the Wolf Isaiahists who’d done the bombings, they said, because Rarity had introduced a new menu item – liobam, a sacred animal for the Wolf Isaiahists. MaddAddam had added a P.S.: Warning all God’s Gardeners: They’ll pin this on you. Go to ground.

Shortly after that, Muffy came to the Spa unexpectedly. She was her usual elegant self; her manner gave nothing away. “Let’s walk on the lawn,” she said. When they were out in the open and away from any hidden mikes, she whispered, “I’m not here for a treatment. I just needed to tell you that we’re going away, I can’t say where. Don’t worry. It’s only urgent on the inside.”

“Will you be all right?” Toby asked.

“Time will tell,” said Muffy. “Good luck, dear Toby. Dear Tobiatha. Put Light around me.”

She and her husband were listed as fatalities in an airship accident a week later. The CorpSeCorps were good at arranging high-class mishaps for highly placed suspects, Zeb had told her – people whose disappearance without a trace would cause a stir, up there among the Corps anointed.

Toby didn’t go near the MaddAddam chatroom for months after that. She waited for the knock on the door, the shattering of glass, the zipzip of a spraygun. But nothing happened. When she finally screwed up the courage to enter MaddAddam again, there was a message for her:

Inaccessible Rail from Spirit Bear: The Garden is destroyed. Adams and Eves gone dark. Watch and wait.