The MaddAddam Trilogy (128 page)

The chosen one would awaken ten hours later, convinced that he’d
just had the time of his life. Which he would have done, said Zeb, because all experience registered by the brain is real, no? Even if it didn’t happen in 3-
D
so-called real time.

This act usually worked fine with Corp exec types, a naive and trusting bunch when it came to the duplicitous mores of the pleeblands. Zeb knew their kind from the Floating World: out for thrills during their night on the town, eager for something they mistook for experience. They led sheltered lives inside their Corp Compounds and the other guarded spaces where they hung out, such as courthouses, statehouses, and religious institutions, and they were gullible about anything outside their walls. It was touching how easily they drank the Kool-Aid on offer, how rapidly they hit the hay or, in fact, the green satin bedspread, how softly they slept, and how cheerily they awoke.

But a different sort of client was establishing a presence at Scales: a less agreeable type, not easily deflected from his own angers. Hate-fuelled, hardened in the fire, bent on carnage and broken glassware. These were rockier cases, and called for an all-points alert.

“I speak of the Painballers, as you must’ve guessed,” says Zeb. “Painball had just begun back then.”

Painball Arenas were at that time highly illegal, like cockfighting and the slaughter and eating of endangered species. But, like them, Painball existed and was expanding, hidden from public view. Spectator positions were reserved for the upper echelons, who liked to watch duels to the death involving skill, cunning, ruthlessness, and cannibalism: it was Corp life in graphic terms. A lot of money was already changing hands at Painball in the form of highroller betting. So the Corps paid indirectly for the infrastructure and the upkeep of the Painball players, and those providing the locations and the services paid directly if caught, and sometimes with their lives when there were turf wars.

This arrangement suited the CorpSeCorps – in its adolescence then – as it provided ample blackmail material through which the CorpSeCorps men could tighten their hold on those considered to be the pillars of what still passed for society.

If you were already locked up in an ordinary prison, you could elect the Painball option: fight your fellow prisoners, eliminate them, and win big prizes, such as getting out of jail free and landing a stint as a pleebland grey-market enforcer. Perks all round. Of course, once you’d elected to enter Painball, the alternative to winning was death. That was why it was so much fun to watch. Those who survived it did so through guile, the ability to wrongfoot their opponents, and superior murderousness: the eating of gouged-out eyes was a favourite party trick. In a word, you had to be prepared to knife and fillet your best friend.

Once they’d graduated from a stint in Painball, the Painball vets had very high status in the deeper pleebs and also on the higher heights, as Roman gladiators must once have had. Corps wives would pay to have sex with them, Corps husbands would invite them to dinner for the thrill of astounding their friends and watching them smash up the champagne flutes, though security enforcers would always be present in case things looked like they were getting seriously out of hand. A little rampaging was acceptable on these occasions, but uncontrolled mayhem was not.

Fuelled by their greyworld celebrity position, the Painball vets were pumped full of I-won hormones and thought they could tackle anyone, and they welcomed the chance to take a poke at a large, solid-looking bouncer such as Zeb the Smokey Bear. He was warned by Jeb never to turn his back on a Painballer: they’d whack you in the kidneys, blam you on the skull with anything handy, squeeze your neck till your eyes popped out of your ears.

How to recognize them? The facial scars. The blank expressions: some of their human mirror neurons had gone missing, along with big chunks of the empathy module: show a normal person a child in pain and they’d wince, whereas these guys would smirk. According to Jeb you had to get quick at reading the signs because if you were dealing with a psycho you needed to know it. Otherwise they could mangle the female talent before you could say
snapped neck
, and this could be costly: trapeze dancers who could do an artistic strip while hanging from one foot high above the crowd didn’t come cheap. Or, for that matter, an orgasm-enhancing near-strangulation with a python. A Painball vet might well feel that biting off a python’s head would be
an unbeatable slice of alpha-chimp display, and even if the bite were to be intercepted, a damaged python would be hard to replace.

Scales kept a regularly updated register of Painballer identities, complete with face pics and ear profiles, which Katrina WooWoo obtained through some obscure back door using God-knows-what as trading cards. She must’ve been acquainted with someone on the running end of Painball – someone who wanted something she could supply, or else could withhold. Favours and anti-favours were the most respected currency of the deeper pleeblands.

“Hit first and hit dirty, was our rule for those Painball assholes,” says Zeb. “As soon as they started to get twitchy. Sometimes we’d spike their drinks, but sometimes we took them out permanently, because if we didn’t they’d be back for revenge. We had to be careful what we did with the bodies, though. They might have affiliates.”

“What
did
you do with the bodies?” says Toby.

“Let’s just say there was always a demand in the deeper pleebs for condensed protein packages, to be utilized for fun, profit, or pet food. But back then, in the early days, before the CorpSeCorps decided to make Painball legal and run it on
TV
, there weren’t very many out-of-control Painballers, so body disposal wasn’t a regular thing. More like an improvisation.”

“You make it sound like a leisure-time amusement,” says Toby. “These were human lives, whatever they’d done.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, slap my wrist, we were bad. Though you didn’t get into Painball unless you were already a multiple killer.

“Point of this whole recital being that it wasn’t unknown for us bar guards – me and Jeb – to take a personal interest in what went into the mixed drinks. Sometimes we even mixed them.”

All this time the white chess bishop with the six mystery pills in it had been kept safely hidden pending further instructions. The only people who knew where it was were Zeb himself, Katrina WooWoo, and Adam.

The hiding place was cunning, and right in plain view, a ploy Zeb had learned from old Slaight of Hand: the obvious is invisible. On a glass shelf behind the bar there was an array of novelty corkscrews, nutcrackers, and salt-and-peppers in the shapes of naked women. The arrangement of their parts was ingenious: the legs would open, the corkscrew would be revealed; the legs would open, the nut would be inserted, the legs would close, the nut would be cracked; the legs would open, the head would be screwed around, the salt or pepper would descend. Laughter all round.

The white bishop had been inserted into the salt cavity of one of these iron maidens, a green lady with enamelled scales. Her head still turned, salt still came out from between her thighs, but the bartenders had been told that this one was fragile – no man was too keen to have his salty sex toy’s head come off in mid-screw – so they should use the others instead, on the occasions when salt was required. Which were not frequent, though some liked to sprinkle salt in their beer and on their bar snacks.

Zeb kept an eye on the scaly green girl with the inner bishop. He felt he owed it to Pilar. Still, he was jumpy about the chosen location. What if someone got hold of the thing when he wasn’t there, fooled around with it, and found the pills? What if they thought the colourful little oblongs were brain candy, and took one or two just to try them?
Since Zeb had no idea what the pills might actually do to a person, that possibility made him nervous.

Adam, on the other hand, was remarkably cool about it, taking the view that no one would think to look inside a salt shaker unless it ran out of salt. “Though I don’t know why I’m saying ‘remarkably,’ ” says Zeb. “He was always a cool little bugger.”

“He was living there too?” asks Toby. “At Scales and Tails?” She can’t picture it. What would Adam One have done there all day, among the exotic dancers and their unusual fashion items? When she’d known him – once he’d been Adam One – he’d been quietly disapproving of female vanity, and of colour and ostentation and cleavage and leg in a woman’s outfit. But there was no way he could have implemented the Gardener religion at Scales or convinced its workers to follow the simple life. Those women must have had expensive manicures. They wouldn’t have put up with being required to dig and delve and relocate slugs and snails, even if there had been any vegetable-plot space available at Scales: ladies of the night do not weed by day.

“Nope, he wasn’t living at Scales,” says Zeb. “Or not living as such. He came and went. It was like a safe house for him.”

“You have any idea what he was doing when he wasn’t there?” asks Toby.

“Learning things,” said Zeb. “Tracking ongoing stories. Watching for storm clouds. Gathering the disaffected under his wing. Making converts. He’d already had his big insight, or whatever you want to call it – the part where God lightning-bolted a message into the top of his skull.
Save my beloved Species in whom I am well pleased
, and all of that: you know the palaver. I never got one of those messages, personally, but it seems Adam did.

“By that time he was well on the way to assembling the God’s Gardeners. He’d even bought the flat-roofed pleeb-slum building for the Edencliff Garden using some of the ill-gotten gains we’d hacked out of the Rev’s account. Pilar was sending him secret recruits from inside HelthWyzer; she was already planning to join him at Edencliff. However, I didn’t know any of that yet.”

“Pilar?” asks Toby. “But she can’t have been Eve One! She was way
too old!” Toby has always wondered about Eve One: Adam had been Adam One, but there had never been any mention of an Eve.

“Nope, it wasn’t her,” Zeb says.

One of the ongoing stories Adam was tracking was that of their mutual father, the Rev. After a pleasing flurry of activity surrounding his embezzlements from the Church of PetrOleum and the tragic discovery that the Rev’s first wife, Fenella, was buried in the rock garden, and then the scandalous publication of the tell-all memoir by his second wife, Trudy, the whole affair had fizzled out.

There was a trial, yes, but the evidence had been inconclusive, or so the jury had decided. Trudy had taken the proceeds from her memoir and gone on vacation to a Caribbean island with – some said – a Tex-Mex lawn-maintenance expert, and had been found washing about in the surf after an impetuous naked moonlight swim. Such dangerous things, undertows, said the local police. She must have been dragged down, and hit her head on a rock. Her companion, whoever he was, had vanished. Understandable, since he might have been blamed; though a whisper was going around that he might also have been paid.

So Trudy was not able to give evidence at the trial, and, without that, what could be proven about anything? The skeleton of Fenella had lain so long in the ground: anyone at all might have put it there. Anonymous men, immigrants as a rule, were always walking around with shovels in the more affluent areas of cities, ready to bang trusting, innocent, horticulturally minded ladies on the head, stuff gardening gloves into their mouths, ravish them in the potting shed despite their muffled screams, and plant hens and chicks on top of them, not to mention lamb’s ears and snow-in-summer and other drought-resistant succulents. It was a well-known hazard for female homeowners who took an interest in landscaping.

As for his sizable embezzlements, which were beyond a doubt, the Rev had gone the tried and true route: a public confession of temptation, followed by an account of his sinfulness in failing to resist it, then by a further account of the discovery of that sinfulness, which had been a bitter herb, but through his humiliation had saved him
from himself. This was topped up with a grovelling, tearful request for forgiveness from both God and man, in particular from the members of the Church of PetrOleum. Bingo, he was absolved, washed clean of stains, and ready for a new start. For who could find it in his heart to withhold forgiveness from a fellow human being who was so obviously contrite?

“He’s on the loose,” said Adam. “Exonerated, reinstated. His OilCorps associates got him off.”

“Fucker,” said Zeb. “Make that plural.”

“He’ll be wanting to hunt us down, and now he’ll be able to access the cash to do it,” said Adam. “His OilCorps friends will supply it. So be alert.”

“Right,” said Zeb. “The world needs more lerts.” It was an old joke of his. It used to make Adam laugh, or rather smile, but he didn’t smile that time.

One evening, when Zeb was loitering around the Scales bar in his Smokey the Bear shades and black suit and snake lapel pin, wearing his non-smile, non-frown, and listening to the chatter from the fauxgold tooth in his mouth, he heard something from one of the guys at the front door that made him stand up a little straighter.

It wasn’t a Painballer warning this time. On the contrary.

“Top of the pyramid, four of them, coming in,” said the voice. “Three OilCorps, one Church of PetrOleum. That preacher who was on the news.”

Zeb felt the adrenalin shooting through his veins. It had to be the Rev. Would the twisted, kiddie-bashing, wife-murdering sadist recognize him or not? He checked the location of every potential missile within reach, in case there might be a need for one. If there was a cry of “Seize that man” or any similar melodrama, he’d hurl a few cut-glass decanters and run like shit. His muscles were so taut they were twanging.

Here they came now, in a festive mood, judging from the japes and laughter and the modified backslaps – more like tentative pats – that were the main phrases of the quasi-brotherly body language permitted
at the top levels of the Corps. They were on their way to champagne and tidbits, and everything that went with them. Tips would be lavish, supposing they could all get it up. Why be rich if you can’t flaunt it by bestowing patronizing sums of dosh on those who aid you in your quest for self-aggrandizement?