The MaddAddam Trilogy (32 page)

There. Not too heavy. Now to break out.

He tries smashing the kitchen window – he could lower himself down onto the Compound rampart with the bedsheet he’s torn into strips and twisted – but no luck: the glass is attack-proof. The narrow window overlooking the gateway is out of the question, as
even if he could get through it there’d be a sheer drop into a herd of slavering pigoons. There’s a small window in the bathroom, high up, but it too is on the pigoon side.

After three hours of painstaking labour and with the aid of – initially – a kitchen stepstool, a corkscrew, and a table knife, and – ultimately – a hammer and a battery-operated screwdriver he found at the back of the utility closet, he manages to disassemble the emergency air vent and dislodge the mechanism inside it. The vent leads up like a chimney, then there’s a bend to the side. He thinks he’s skinny enough to fit through – semi-starvation has its advantages – though if he gets stuck he’ll die an agonizing and also ludicrous death. Cooked in an air vent, very funny. He ties one end of his improvised rope to a leg of the kitchen table – happily it’s bolted to the floor – and winds the rest around his waist. He attaches his bag of supplies to the end of a second rope. Holding his breath, he squeezes in, torques his body, wriggles. Lucky he’s not a woman, the wide butt would foil him. No room to spare, but now his head’s in the outside air, then – with a twist – his shoulders. It’s an eight-foot drop to the rampart. He’ll have to go head first, hope the improvised rope will hold.

A last push, a wrench as he’s pulled up short, and he’s dangling askew. He grabs the rope, rights himself, unties the end around his waist, lowers himself hand over hand. Then he pulls the supply bag through. Nothing to it.

Damn and shit. He’s forgotten to bring the windup radio. Well, no going back.

The rampart is six feet wide, with a wall on either side. Every ten feet there’s a pair of slits, not opposite each other but staggered, meant for observation but useful too for the emplacement of last-ditch weaponry. The rampart is twenty feet high, twenty-seven counting the walls. It runs all the way around the Compound, punctuated at intervals by a watchtower like the one he’s just left.

The Compound is shaped like an oblong, and there are five other gates. He knows the plan, having studied it thoroughly during his days at Paradice, which is where he’s going now. He can see the dome, rising up through the trees, shining like half a
moon. His plan is to get what he needs out of there, then circle around via the rampart – or, if conditions are right, he can cut across the Compound space on level ground – and make his way out by a side gate.

The sun is well up. He’d better hurry, or he’ll fry. He’d like to show himself to the pigoons, jeer at them, but he resists this impulse: they’d follow along beside the rampart, keep him from descending. So every time he reaches an observation slit he crouches, holding himself below the sightline.

At the third watchtower along he pauses. Over the top of the rampart wall he can see something white – greyish white and cloudlike – but it’s too low down to be a cloud. Also it’s the wrong shape. It’s thin, like a wavering pillar. It must be near the seashore, a few miles north of the Craker encampment. At first he thinks it’s mist, but mist doesn’t rise in an isolated stem like that, it doesn’t puff. No question now, it’s smoke.

The Crakers often have a fire going, but it’s never a large one, it wouldn’t make smoke like this. It could be a result of yesterday’s storm, a lightning-strike fire that was dampened by the rain and has begun smouldering again. Or it might be that the Crakers have disobeyed orders and have come looking for him, and have built a signal fire to guide him home. That’s unlikely – it isn’t how they think – but if so, they’re way off course.

He eats half a Joltbar, downs some water, continues along the rampart. He’s limping a little now, conscious of his foot, but he can’t stop and tend to it, he has to go as fast as he can. He needs that spraygun, and not just because of the wolvogs and the pigoons. From time to time he looks over his shoulder. The smoke is still there, just the one column of it. It hasn’t spread. It keeps on rising.

Snowman limps along the rampart, towards the glassy white swell of the bubble-dome, which is receding from him like a mirage. Because of his foot he’s making poor time, and around eleven o’clock the concrete gets too hot for him to walk on. He’s got the sheet over his head, draped himself as much as possible, over his baseball cap and over the tropical shirt, but he could still burn, despite the sunblock and the two layers of cloth. He’s grateful for his new two-eyed sunglasses.

He hunches down in the shade of the next watchtower to wait out the noon, sucks water from a bottle. After the worst of the glare and heat is past, after the daily thunderstorm has come and gone, he’ll have maybe three hours to go. All things being equal, he can get there before nightfall.

Heat pours down, bounces up off the concrete. He relaxes into it, breathes it in, feels the sweat trickling down, like millipedes walking on him. His eyes waver shut, the old films whir and crackle through his head. “What the fuck did he need me for?” he says. “Why didn’t he leave me alone?”

No point thinking about it, not in this heat, with his brain turning to melted cheese. Not melted cheese: better to avoid food
images. To putty, to glue, to hair product, in creme form, in a tube. He once used that. He can picture its exact position on the shelf, lined up next to his razor: he’d liked neatness, in a shelf. He has a sudden clear image of himself, freshly showered, running the creme hair product through his damp hair with his hands. In Paradice, waiting for Oryx.

He’d meant well, or at least he hadn’t meant ill. He’d never wanted to hurt anyone, not seriously, not in real space-time. Fantasies didn’t count.

It was a Saturday. Jimmy was lying in bed. He was finding it hard to get up these days; he’d been late for work a couple of times in the past week, and added to the times before that and the times before that, it was going to be trouble for him soon. Not that he’d been out carousing: the reverse. He’d been avoiding human contact. The AnooYoo higher-ups hadn’t chewed him out yet; probably they knew about his mother and her traitor’s death. Well, of course they did, though it was the kind of deep dark open secret that was never mentioned in the Compounds – bad luck, evil eye, might be catching, best to act dumb and so forth. Probably they were cutting him some slack.

There was one good thing anyway: maybe now that they’d finally scratched his mother off their list, the Corpsmen would leave him alone.

“Get it up, get it up, get it up,” said his voice clock. It was pink, phallus-shaped: a Cock Clock, given to him as a joke by one of his lovers. He’d thought it was funny at the time, but this morning he found it insulting. That’s all he was to her, to all of them: a mechanical joke. Nobody wanted to be sexless, but nobody wanted to be nothing but sex, Crake said once. Oh yes siree, thought Jimmy. Another human conundrum.

“What’s the time?” he said to the clock. It dipped its head, sproinged upright again.

“It’s noon. It’s noon, it’s noon, it’s …”

“Shut up,” said Jimmy. The clock wilted. It was programmed to respond to harsh tones.

Jimmy considered getting out of bed, going to the kitchenette, opening a beer. That was quite a good idea. He’d had a late night. One of his lovers, the woman who’d given him the clock in fact, had made her way through his wall of silence. She’d turned up around ten with some takeout – Nubbins and fries, she knew what he liked – and a bottle of Scotch.

“I’ve been concerned about you,” she’d said. What she’d really wanted was a quick furtive jab, so he’d done his best and she’d had a fine time, but his heart wasn’t in it and that must have been obvious. Then they’d had to go through
What’s the matter, Are you bored with me, I really care about you
, and so forth and blah blah.

“Leave your husband,” Jimmy had said, to cut her short. “Let’s run away to the pleeblands and live in a trailer park.”

“Oh, I don’t think … You don’t mean that.”

“What if I did?

“You know I care about you. But I care about him too, and …”

“From the waist down.”

“Pardon?” She was a genteel woman, she said
Pardon?
instead of
What?

“I said, from the waist down. That’s how you really care about me. Want me to spell it out for you?”

“I don’t know what’s got into you, you’ve been so mean lately.”

“No fun at all.”

“Well, actually, no.”

“Then piss off.”

After that they’d had a fight, and she’d cried, which strangely enough had made Jimmy feel better. After that they’d finished the Scotch. After that they’d had more sex, and this time Jimmy had enjoyed himself but his lover hadn’t, because he’d been too rough and fast and had not said anything flattering to her the way he usually did.
Great ass
, and so on and so forth.

He shouldn’t have been so crabby. She was a fine woman with real tits and problems of her own. He wondered whether he’d
ever see her again. Most likely he would, because she’d had that
I can cure you
look in her eyes when she’d left.

After Jimmy had taken a leak and was getting the beer out of the fridge, his intercom buzzed. There she was, right on cue. Immediately he felt surly again. He went over to the speakerphone. “Go away,” he said.

“It’s Crake. I’m downstairs.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Jimmy. He punched in the numbers for the videocam in the lobby: it was Crake, all right, giving him the finger and the grin.

“Let me in,” said Crake, and Jimmy did, because right then Crake was about the only person he wanted to see.

Crake was much the same. He had the same dark clothing. He wasn’t even balder.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” said Jimmy. After the initial surge of pleasure he felt embarrassed that he wasn’t dressed yet, and that his apartment was knee-deep in dust bunnies and cigarette butts and dirty glassware and empty Nubbins containers, but Crake didn’t seem to notice.

“Nice to feel I’m welcome,” said Crake.

“Sorry. Things haven’t been too good lately,” said Jimmy.

“Yeah. I saw that. Your mother. I e-mailed, but you didn’t answer.”

“I haven’t been picking up my e-mails,” said Jimmy.

“Understandable. It was on brainfrizz: inciting to violence, membership in a banned organization, hampering the dissemination of commercial products, treasonable crimes against society. I guess that last was the demos she was in. Throwing bricks or something. Too bad, she was a nice lady.”

Neither
nice
nor
lady
was applicable in Jimmy’s view, but he wasn’t up to debating this, not so early in the day. “Want a beer?” he said.

“No thanks,” said Crake. “I just came to see you. See if you were all right.”

“I’m all right,” said Jimmy.

Crake looked at him. “Let’s go to the pleeblands,” he said. “Troll a few bars.”

“This is a joke, right?” said Jimmy.

“No, really. I’ve got the passes. My regular one, and one for you.”

By which Jimmy knew that Crake really must be somebody. He was impressed. But much more than that, he was touched that Crake would experience concern for him, would come all this way to seek him out. Even though they hadn’t been in close touch lately – Jimmy’s fault – Crake was still his friend.

Five hours later they were strolling through the pleeblands north of New New York. It had taken only a couple of hours to get there – bullet train to the nearest Compound, then an official Corps car with an armed driver, laid on by whoever was doing Crake’s bidding. The car had taken them into the heart of what Crake called the action, and dropped them off there. They’d be shadowed though, said Crake. They’d be protected. So no harm would come to them.

Before setting out, Crake had stuck a needle in Jimmy’s arm – an all-purpose, short-term vaccine he’d cooked himself. The pleeblands, he said, were a giant Petri dish: a lot of guck and contagious plasm got spread around there. If you grew up surrounded by it you were more or less immune, unless a new bioform came raging through; but if you were from the Compounds and you set foot in the pleebs, you were a feast. It was like having a big sign on your forehead that said, Eat Me.

Crake had nose cones for them too, the latest model, not just to filter microbes but also to skim out particulate. The air was worse in the pleeblands, he said. More junk blowing in the wind, fewer whirlpool purifying towers dotted around.

Jimmy had never been to the pleeblands before, he’d only looked over the wall. He was excited to finally be there, though
he wasn’t prepared for so many people so close to one another, walking, talking, hurrying somewhere. Spitting on the sidewalk was a feature he personally could skip. Rich pleeblanders in luxury cars, poor ones on solarbikes, hookers in fluorescent Spandex, or in short shorts, or – more athletically, showing off their firm thighs – on scooters, weaving in and out of traffic. All skin colours, all sizes. Not all prices though, said Crake: this was the low end. So Jimmy could window-shop, but he shouldn’t purchase. He should save that for later.

The pleebland inhabitants didn’t look like the mental deficients the Compounders were fond of depicting, or most of them didn’t. After a while Jimmy began to relax, enjoy the experience. There was so much to see – so much being hawked, so much being offered. Neon slogans, billboards, ads everywhere. And there were real tramps, real beggar women, just as in old DVD musicals: Jimmy kept expecting them to kick up their battered bootsoles, break into song. Real musicians on the street corners, real bands of street urchins. Asymmetries, deformities: the faces here were a far cry from the regularity of the Compounds. There were even bad teeth. He was gawking.

“Watch your wallet,” said Crake. “Not that you’ll need cash.”

“Why not?”

“My treat,” said Crake.

“I can’t let you do that.”

“Your turn next time.”

“Fair enough,” said Jimmy.