Year of the Flood: Novel (30 page)

TODAY WE PRAISE OUR SAINT DIAN

Today we praise our Saint Dian,
Whose blood for bounteous Life was spilled —
Although she interposed her Faith,
One Species more was killed.

For all around the misty hills
She tracked the wild Gorilla bands,
Until they learned to trust her Love,
And take her by the hand.

The timid giants, huge and strong,
She held in her courageous arms;
She guarded them with anxious care,
Lest they should come to harm.

They knew her as their Friend and kin,
Around her they would feast and play —
And yet cruel Murderers came by night,
And slew her where she lay.

Too many violent hands and hearts!
Dian, too sadly few like you —
For when a Species dies from Earth,
We die a little too.

Among the green and misty hills,
Where once the shy Gorillas gathered,
Your kindly Spirit wanders still,
In watchfulness, forever.

From
The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

55

REN

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

You create your own world by your inner attitude, the Gardeners used to say. And I didn’t want to create the world out there: the world of the dead and dying. So I sang some old Gardener hymns, especially the happy ones. Or I danced. Or I played the songs on my Sea/H/Ear Candy, though I couldn’t help thinking that now there’d be no more new music.

Say the Names, Adam One would tell us. And we’d chant these lists of Creatures: Diplodocus, Pterosaurus, Octopus, and Brontosaurus; Trilobite, Nautilus, Ichthyosaurus, Platypus. Mastodon, Dodo, Great Auk, Komodo. I could see all the names, as clear as pages. Adam One said that saying the names was a way of keeping those animals alive. So I said them.

I said other names too. Adam One, Nuala, Zeb. Shackie, Croze, and Oates. And Glenn — I just couldn’t picture anyone so smart being dead.

And Jimmy, despite what he’d done.

And Amanda.

I said those names over and over, in order to keep them alive.

Then I thought about what Mordis had whispered, at the end.
Your name,
he’d said. It must have been important.

I counted the food I had left. Four weeks’ worth, three weeks, two. I marked off the time with my eyebrow pencil. If I ate less, I could make it last longer. But if Amanda didn’t come soon, I’d be dead. I couldn’t really imagine it.

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word
I,
and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to
I don’t know,
and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know — the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it’s knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it’s an essential part of us, like water.

I said, in that case is God knitted in as well? And he said maybe so, but it hadn’t done us any good.

His explanation of God was a lot different from the Gardeners’ explanation. He said “God is a Spirit” was meaningless because you couldn’t measure a Spirit. Also he’d say
Use your meat computer
when he meant
Use your mind.
I found that idea repulsive: I hated the idea of my head being full of meat.

I kept thinking I could hear people walking around in the building, but when I scanned the rooms I couldn’t see anyone moving. At least the solar was still working.

I counted the food again. Five days left, and that was stretching it.

56

I first spotted Amanda as a shadow on the videoscreen. She came into the Snakepit carefully, hugging the wall: the lights were still on, so she wasn’t groping in the dark. The music was still blaring and thumping, and once she’d looked around to make sure the place was empty she went over behind the stage and switched it off.

“Ren?” I heard her say.

Then she went offscreen. After a pause the videocam mike in the hallway picked up her soft footsteps, and then I could see her. And she could see me. I was crying so much with relief I couldn’t speak.

“Hi,” she said. “There’s a dead guy right outside the door. He’s gross. I’ll be back.” Mordis was who she meant — he’d never been taken away. She told me later that she got him onto a shower curtain and dragged him down the hall and bundled him into an elevator, what was left of him. The rats had been having a party, she said, not just at Scales but anywhere even close to urban. She’d put on the gloves of someone’s Biofilm Bodysuit before touching him — even though she was daring, Amanda didn’t take stupid risks.

After a while she was back on my screen. “So,” she said. “Here I am. Stop crying, Ren.”

“I thought you’d never get here,” I managed to say.

“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “Now. How does the door open?”

“I don’t have the code,” I said. I explained about Mordis — how he was the only one who’d known the Sticky Zone numbers.

“He never told you?”

“He said why would we need to know the codes? He changed them every day — he didn’t want them leaking out because crazies might get in. He just wanted to protect us.” I was trying hard not to panic: there was Amanda, outside the door, but what if she couldn’t do anything?

“Any clue?” she said.

“He did say something about my name,” I said. “Just before he — before they — Maybe that’s what he meant.”

Amanda tried. “Nope,” she said. “Well then. Maybe it’s your birthday. Month and day? Year?”

I could hear her punching in numbers, swearing gently to herself. After what seemed a long time, I heard the clunk of the lock. The door swung open, and there she was, right in front of me.

“Oh, Amanda,” I said. She was sunburned, tattered, and grimy, but she was real. I reached out my arms to her, but she stepped back and away.

“It was a simple A equals One code,” she said. “It was your name, after all. Brenda, only backwards. Don’t touch me, I might have germs. I need to shower.”

While Amanda was taking her shower in my Sticky Zone bathroom I propped the door open with a chair because I didn’t want it to swing shut and lock both of us inside. The air outside my room smelled awful compared with the filtered air I’d been breathing: rotting meat, and also smoke and burnt chemicals, because there’d been fires and nobody to put them out. It was lucky that Scales hadn’t caught fire and burned down with me inside it.

After Amanda had taken a shower I took one too, so I’d be as clean as her. Then we put on the green Scales dressing gowns Mordis kept for his best girls and sat around eating Joltbars from the minifridge and microwaving ChickieNobs, and drinking some beers we’d found downstairs, and telling each other the stories of why it was that we were still alive.

57

TOBY. SAINT KAREN SILKWOOD

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

Toby wakes up suddenly, her blood rushing in her head:
katoush, katoush, katoush.
She knows at once that something in her space has changed. Someone’s sharing her oxygen.

Breathe, she tells herself. Move as if swimming. Don’t smell like fear.

She lifts the pink sheet off her damp body as slowly as she can, sits up, looks carefully around. Nothing large, not in this cubicle: there isn’t room. Then she sees it. It’s only a bee. A honeybee, walking along the sill.

A bee in the house means a visitor, said Pilar; and if the bee dies, the visit will not be good. I mustn’t kill it, Toby thinks. She folds it carefully in a pink washcloth. “Send a message,” she says to it. “Tell those in the Spirit world: ‘Please send help soon.’” Superstition, she knows that; yet she feels oddly encouraged. Though maybe the bee is one of the transgenics they let loose after the virus wiped out the natural bees; or it may even be a cyborg spy, wandering around with no one left to control it. In which case it will make a very poor messenger.

She slips the washcloth into the pocket of her top-to-toe: she’ll take the bee up to the roof, release it there, watch it set off on its errand to the dead. But in slinging the rifle over her shoulder by the strap she must have crushed the pocket, because when she unwraps the bee it looks less than alive. She shakes the cloth over the railing, hoping the bee will fly. It moves through the air, but more like a seed than an insect: the visit will not be a good one.

She walks to the garden side of the roof, looks over. Sure enough, the bad visit has already occurred: the pigs have been back. They’ve dug under the fence, then gone on a rampage. Surely it was less like a feeding frenzy than a deliberate act of revenge. The earth is furrowed and trampled: anything they haven’t eaten they’ve bulldozed.

If she were a cryer, she’d cry. She lifts her binoculars, scans the meadow. At first she doesn’t see them, but then she spots two pinkish-grey heads — no, three — no, five — lifting above the weedy flowers. Beady eyes, one per pig: they’re looking at her sideways. They’ve been watching for her: it’s as if they want to witness her dismay. Moreover, they’re out of range: if she shoots at them she’ll waste the bullets. She wouldn’t put it past them to have figured that out.

“You fucking pigs!” she yells at them, “Fuck-pigs! Pig-faces!” Of course, for them none of these names would be insults.

What now? Her supply of dried greens is tiny, her goji berries and chia are almost gone, her plant protein is finished. She was counting on the garden for all of that. Worst of all, she’s out of fats: she’s already eaten the last of the Shea and Avocado Body Butter. There’s fat in Joltbars — she still has some of those — but not enough to last for long. Without lipids your body eats your fat and then your muscles, and the brain is pure fat and the heart is a muscle. You become a feedback loop, and then you fall over.

She’ll have to resort to foraging. Go out into the meadow, the forest: find protein and lipids. The boar will be putrid by now, she can’t eat that. She could shoot a green rabbit, maybe; but no, it’s a fellow mammal and she isn’t up to that kind of slaughter. Ant larvae and eggs, or grubs of any kind, for starters.

Is that what the pigs want her to do? Go outside her defensive walls, into the open, so they can jump her, knock her down, then rip her open? Have a pig-style outdoor picnic. A pig-out. She has a fair idea of what that would look like. The Gardeners weren’t squeamish about describing the eating habits of God’s various Creatures: to flinch at these would be hypocritical. No one comes into the world clutching a knife and fork and a frying pan, Zeb was fond of saying. Or a table napkin. And if we eat pigs, why shouldn’t pigs eat us? If they find us lying around.

No point in trying to repair the garden. The pigs would just wait until there was something worth destroying, and then destroy it. Maybe she should build a rooftop garden, like the old Gardener ones: then she’d never have to go outside the main building. But she’d have to haul the soil up all those stairs, in pails. Then there’s the watering in the dry seasons and the drainage in the wet seasons: without the Gardeners’ elaborate systems the thing would be impossible.

There are the pigs, peering at her above the daisies. They have a festive air. Are they snorting in derision? Certainly there’s some grunting going on, and some juvenile squealing, as there used to be when the topless bars in the Sewage Lagoon closed at night.

“Assholes!” she screams at them. It makes her feel better to scream. At least she’s talking to someone other than herself.

58

REN

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

The worst, said Amanda, was the thunderstorms — she thought she was dead a couple of times, the lightning came so close. But then she’d lifted a rubber mat from a mallway hardware store to crouch on, and she’d felt safer after that.

She’d avoided people as much as possible. She abandoned the solarcar in upstate New York because the highway was too jammed with scrap metal. There’d been some spectacular crashes: the drivers must have started dissolving right inside their cars. “Blood hand lotion,” she said. There’d been about a million vultures. Some people would have been freaked out by them, but not Amanda — she’d worked with them in her art. “That highway was the biggest Vulture Sculpture you could imagine,” she said. She wished she’d had a camera.

After ditching the solarcar she’d walked for a while and then lifted another solar, a bike this time — easier to get through the metal snarls. When in doubt she’d kept to the urban fringes, or else the woods. She’d had a couple of close calls because other people must’ve had the same idea — she’d almost tripped over a few bodies. Good thing she hadn’t actually touched them.

She’d seen some living people. A couple of them had seen her too, but by then everyone must have known this bug was ultra-catching, so they’d stayed far away from her. Some of them were in the last stages, wandering around like zombies; or they were already down, folded in on themselves like cloth.

She slept on top of garages whenever she could, or inside abandoned buildings, though never on the main floor. Otherwise, in trees: the ones with sturdy forks. Uncomfortable but you got used to it, and best to be above ground level because there’d been some strange animals around. Huge pigs, those lion/lamb splices, packs of wild dogs on the prowl — one pack had almost cornered her. Anyway you were safer from the zombie people, up in trees: you wouldn’t want a clot on legs to fall on top of you in the darkness.

What she was telling was gruesome, but we laughed a lot that night. I guess we should have been mourning and wailing, but I’d already done that, and anyway what good would it be? Adam One said we should always look on the positive side, and the positive side was that we were still alive.

We didn’t talk about anyone we knew.

I didn’t want to sleep in my Sticky Zone room because I’d been there long enough, and we couldn’t use my old room either because the husk of Starlite was still in it. Finally we chose one of the client facilities, the one with the giant bed and the green satin bedspread and the feather-work ceiling. That room looked elegant if you didn’t think too much about what it had been used for.

The last time I’d seen Jimmy had been in that room. But having Amanda there was like an eraser: it smudged that earlier memory. It made me safer.

We slept in the next morning. Then we got up and put on our green dressing gowns and went into the Scales kitchen where they used to make the bar snacks. We microwaved some frozen soybread out of the main freezer and had that for breakfast, with instant Happicuppa.

“Didn’t you think I must be dead?” I asked Amanda. “And so maybe you shouldn’t bother coming here?”

“I knew you weren’t dead,” said Amanda. “You get a feeling when someone’s dead. Someone you know really well. Don’t you think?”

I wasn’t sure about that. So I said, “Anyway, thanks.” Whenever you thanked Amanda for something she pretended not to hear; or else she’d say, “You’ll pay me back.” That’s what she said now. She wanted everything to be a trade, because giving things for nothing was too soft.

“What should we do now?” I said.

“Stay here,” said Amanda. “Until the food’s gone. Or if the solar shuts off and the stuff in the freezers begins to rot. That could get ugly.” “Then what?” I said. “Then we’ll go somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“We don’t need to worry about that now,” said Amanda.

Time got stretchy. We’d sleep as long as we wanted, then get up and have showers — we still had water because of the solar — and then eat something out of the freezers. Then we’d talk about things we’d done at the Gardeners — old stuff. We’d sleep some more when it got too hot. Later we’d go into the Sticky Zone rooms and turn on the air conditioning and watch DVDs of old movies. We didn’t feel like going outside the building.

In the evenings we’d have a few drinks — there were still some unbroken bottles behind the bar — and raid the expensive tinned foods Mordis kept for the high-roller clients and also for his best girls. Loyalty Snacks, he called them; he’d dish them out when you’d gone the extra mile, though you never knew in advance what that extra mile would be. That’s how I got to eat my first caviar. It was like salty bubbles.

There was no more caviar left at Scales for me and Amanda, though.