The MaddAddam Trilogy (98 page)

And so Crake poured away the chaos, to make a safe place where you could live. And then …

We know the story of Crake. We know it many times. Now tell us the story of Zeb, Oh Toby.

The story of how Zeb ate a bear!

Yes! Ate a bear! A bear! What is a
bear
?

We want to hear the story of Zeb. And the bear. The bear he ate.

Crake wants us to hear it. If Snowman-the-Jimmy was awake, he would tell us that story.

Well then. Let me listen to the shiny thing of Snowman-the-Jimmy. Then I can hear the words.

I am listening very hard. It doesn’t help me to listen when you are singing.

So. This is the story of Zeb and the bear. Only Zeb is in the story at first. He is all alone. The bear comes later. Maybe tomorrow the bear will come. For bears to come, you must be patient.

Zeb was lost. He sat down under a tree. The tree was in a big open space, wide and flat, like the beach except there was no sand and no sea, only some chilly pools and a lot of moss. All around but quite far away, there were mountains.

How did he get there? He flew there, in a … never mind. That part is in a different story. No, he cannot fly like a bird. Not any more.

Mountains? Mountains are very large and high rocks. No, those are
not mountains, those are buildings. Buildings fall down, and then they make a crash. Mountains fall down too, but they do it very slowly. No, the mountains did not fall down on Zeb.

So Zeb looked at the mountains that were all around him but quite far away, and he thought, How will I get through these mountains? They are so large and high.

He needed to get through the mountains because the people were on the other side. He wanted to be with the people. He didn’t want to be all alone. Nobody wants to be all alone, do they?

No, they were not people like you. They had clothes on. A lot of clothes, because it was cold there. Yes, it was in the time of the chaos, before Crake poured it all away.

So Zeb looked at the mountains and the pools and the moss, and he thought, What will I eat? And then he thought, Those mountains have a lot of bears living in them.

A bear is a very big, fur-covered animal with big claws and many sharp teeth. Bigger than a bobkitten. Bigger than a wolvog. Bigger than a pigoon. This big.

It speaks with a growl. It gets very hungry. It tears things apart.

Yes, bears are the Children of Oryx. I don’t know why she made them so big, with very sharp teeth.

Yes, we must be kind to them. The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

I don’t think there are any bears very close to us right now.

And Zeb thought, Maybe a bear has smelled me, and maybe it is coming right now, because it is hungry, it is starving, and it wants to eat me. And I will have to fight the bear, and all I have is this quite small knife, and this stick that can make holes in things. And I will have to win the fight, and kill the bear, and then I will have to eat it.

The bear will come into the story quite soon.

Yes, Zeb will win the fight. Zeb always wins the fight. Because that’s what happens.

Yes, he knew Oryx would be sad. Zeb felt sorry for the bear. He didn’t want to hurt it. But he didn’t want to be eaten by it. You don’t want to be eaten by a bear, do you? Neither do I.

Because bears can’t eat only leaves. Because it would make them sick.

Anyway, if Zeb didn’t eat the bear he would have died, and then he wouldn’t be here with us right now. And that would be a sad thing too, wouldn’t it?

If you don’t stop crying I can’t go on with the story.

There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

In the story of Zeb and the bear, Toby has left out the dead man, whose name was Chuck. He, too, was lost among the pools and moss and mountains and bears. He, too, did not know the way out. It’s unfair to deny him a mention, erase him from time, but putting him into the story would cause more knots and tangles than Toby is prepared to deal with. For instance, she doesn’t yet know how this dead man wormed his way into the story in the first place.

“Too bad the fucker died,” says Zeb. “I’d have twisted it out of him.”

“It?”

“Who hired him. What they wanted. Where he would have taken me.”

“
Died
is a euphemism, I take it. He didn’t have a heart attack,” says Toby.

“Don’t be harsh. You know what I mean.”

Zeb was lost. He sat down under a tree.

Or not lost completely. He did have a rough idea of where he was: he was somewhere on the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens, hundreds of miles from anywhere with fast food. And not under a tree, more like beside, and not a tree exactly, more like a shrub; though not bushy, more like spindly. A spindly kind of spruce. He noticed the details of
the trunk, the small dead underbranches, the grey lichen on it, frilly and intricate and see-through, like whores’ underpants.

“What do you know about whore’s underpants?” says Toby.

“More than you want me to,” says Zeb. “So. When you focus on details like that – close up, really clear, totally useless – you know you’re in shock.”

The
AOH
’thopter was still smouldering. Lucky he got clear before it burst, or before the blimp component did, and thank shit the digital release on the seatbelts had still been working: otherwise he’d have been dead.

Chuck was lying belly down on the tundra, his head at a sick angle, peering over his own shoulder one-eighty degrees, like an owl. Not looking at Zeb, though. Looking up at the sky. No angels there, or none had showed up yet.

Blood was coming from somewhere on the top of Zeb’s head, he could feel the warmth trickling down. Scalp wound. Not dangerous, but they bleed a lot. Your head’s the most shallow part of you, his sociopath of a father had been in the habit of saying. Except for your brain. And your soul, supposing you’ve been blessed with one, which I doubt. The Rev had been a big cheerleader for souls, in addition to which he thought he was the boss of them.

Now Zeb found himself wondering if Chuck had a soul, and if it was still hovering over his body like a feeble smell. “Chuck, you stupid fuck,” Zeb said out loud. If he’d been given a brief to kidnap himself on behalf of the brainscrapers, he’d have done a way better job of it than Chuck had, the fuckwit.

Too bad Chuck was dead, in a way – he must’ve had some good sides to him, maybe he liked puppies – but now there was one less asshole in the world, and wasn’t that a plus? A checkmark in the column of the forces of light. Or darkness, depending on who was doing the double-entry moral accounting.

Though Chuck hadn’t been an ordinary asshole; not grouchy, not aggressive, not like Zeb himself on his asshole setting. Too much the other way. Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete,
dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort.

They weren’t all furfuckers, however: some claimed to be along for the challenge. Adventurous, devil-may-care, no strings on me, tattoo-upholstered, with greasy ponytails like bikers in old movies – boundary-pushing muscle-flexers, boot soles a little too hot for ordinary strolling. That was how Zeb had positioned himself: bulked up on natural steroids, do what had to be done, could take the pace, wings on the ankles, needed the money, liked the shadowy rimlands where nobody official could stick their tentacles into your back pocket, within which the contents of other people’s hacked bank accounts might be bashfully lurking.

The card-carrying furfuckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, but they didn’t push that my-shit-don’t-stink agenda too hard. They needed the manpower because not everyone on the planet thought it was a great idea to aero/orno/helithopter numerous dumpsterloads of rancid biotrash around the far north so a bunch of mangy Ursidae could gobble it free of charge.

“This was before the oil shortage really kicked in?” says Toby. “And the carbon garboil business took off. Otherwise, they’d never have let you waste such valuable primary material on bears.”

“It was before a lot of things,” says Zeb. “Though the oil prices were already getting pretty steep.”

Bearlift had four old-model ’thopters they’d bought on the grey market. The Flying Pufferfish was their nickname. ’thopters claimed to use biodesign: they had a helium/hydrogen gas-filled blimp with a skin that sucked in or exhaled molecules like a fish’s swim bladder that contracted and expanded and allowed them to lift heavy weights. Plus, they had stabilizing ventral fins, a couple of heli-blades for hovering, and four bird-like flapping wings for manoeuvrability at slow speeds. The upside being minimum fuel consumption, ultra-high freight weight, and the ability to fly low and slow; the downside being that a ’thopter flight took forever, the software on the things failed
regularly, and few among them knew how to fix the brutes. Questionable digimechanics had to be called in, or rather smuggled in from Brazil, where the digital darkside flourished.

They’d hack you as soon as look at you down there. Roaring business in politicians’ medical records and sordid affairs, celebrities’ plastic surgeries – that was the small end. At the big end it was one Corp hacking another. Hacking a powerful Corp was the kind of thing that could get you into the real crapola, even if you were firewalled by being on the blackbox payroll of another powerful Corp.

“So I suppose you did it,” says Toby. “The kind of thing with the real crapola.”

“Yeah, I’d been down there, just making a living,” says Zeb. “That was one reason I was taking a breather at Bearlift: it was ultra far from Brazil.”

Bearlift was a scam, or partly a scam. It didn’t take anyone with half a brain too long to figure that one out. Unlike many scams it was well meaning, but it was a scam nonetheless. It lived off the good intentions of city types with disposable emotions who liked to think they were saving something – some rag from their primordial authentic ancestral past, a tiny shred of their collective soul dressed up in a cute bear suit. The concept was simple: the polar bears are starving because the ice is almost gone and they can’t catch seals any more, so let’s feed them our leftovers until they learn to adapt, “
adapt
being the buzzword of those days, if you’ll recall, though I doubt you’re old enough; you must still have been in playskirts. Learning to wiggle your little mantrap.”

“Stop flirting,” said Toby.

“Why? You like it.”

“I remember
adapt
,” says Toby. “It was another way of saying
tough luck
. To people you weren’t going to help out.”

“You got it,” said Zeb. “Anyway, feeding trash to the bears didn’t help them adapt, it just taught them that food falls out of the sky. They’d start slavering every time they heard the sound of a ’thopter, they had their very own cargo cult.

“But here’s the scammiest part. Yes, the ice had mostly melted;
yes, some polar bears had starved, but the rest of them were drifting southwards, mating up with the grizzlies, from which they’d separated themselves a mere two hundred thousand years ago. So you’d get bears that were white with brown patches or bears that were brown with white patches, or all brown or all white, but whatever was on the outside was no predictor of temperament: the pizzlies would avoid you most of the time, like grizzlies; the grolars would attack you most of the time, like polar bears. You never knew which kind any given bear might be. What you did know was that you didn’t want your ’thopter to fall out of the air over bear country.”

As Zeb’s had just done.

“You stupid fuck,” he said again to Chuck. “And whoever hired you is a double stupid fuck,” he added, not that they were listening. Or – he had a sudden nasty thought – maybe they were.

Everything was going fine at Bearlift until Chuck turned up. Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough …

“Unlike at any other time,” says Toby.

“You laughing at me? Victim of a confused youth due to parental abuse? Plus, I grew too fast?”

“Would I laugh?”

“Matter of fact, you would,” says Zeb. “Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking.”

Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough, but nobody at Bearlift Central seemed to know or care: half of them were in trouble themselves, so it was Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

The chores were straightforward: load up the edible refuse, in Whitehorse or Yellowknife, sometimes maybe Tuk, where the Beaufort Sea offshore oilrig tankers dumped their garbage when they weren’t tipping it illegally. The oilrigs still produced a lot of real-animal-protein leftovers in those days because nothing was too good for the tanker crews. Pork – they ate a lot of pork byproducts – and chicken, or something next door to it. When it was labmeat it was top grade, camouflaged in sausages or meatloaf so you really couldn’t tell.

You’d pack the postmeal slops into the ’thopter, then grab a beer, then fly the ’thopter to the Bearlift drop locations, hover while dumping off the loads, fly back. Nothing to it except mind-numbing boredom unless there was bad weather or mechanical failure. In that case you’d have to set the ’thopter down while trying to give the mountain-sides
a miss, then wait out the weather or kick your heels until Repair showed up. Then repeat. Pretty routine. The worst of it was listening to the green-nosed furfucker sermonizing that went on in the Bearlift-town bars when you were trying to get spongefaced on the crapulous booze they hauled in there and dispensed by the vatful.

Apart from that, it was eat, sleep, and on a good day have a tussle with one or another of the girl staff, though Zeb had to be careful about that because some of them were snarly and others were taken, and he tried to stay out of brawls, never having seen any percentage in rolling around under bar stools with some enraged moron who considered he’d staked eternal twat rights because of his pre-eminent cock and his dimples, and who might have a knife. Unlikely a handgun any more because it was around that time that the CorpSeCorps was confiscating those, having raised the spurious banner of civic safety and thus effectively securing a monopoly for themselves on killing at a distance. Some guys hid their Glocks and other name brands, dug them in under stones in case of dire need, but for the same reason they were unlikely to be carrying. Though not every law and declaration was respected up there in the boonies. Things in the north were always a little fuzzy around the edges, law-wise. So you never knew.