Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam 1)

"Was it difficult, your journey into the sky?"

"Flowers too, flowers too!"

"What message does Crake send us?"

"Why do you think I've been into the sky?" Snowman asks, as neutrally as possible. He

's clicking through the legend files in his head. When did he ever mention the sky? Did he relate some fable about where Crake had come from? Yes, now he remembers. He'd given Crake the attributes of thunder and lightning. Naturally they assume Crake must have gone back up to cloudland.

"We know Crake lives in the sky. And we saw the whirling wind - it went the way you went."

"Crake sent it for you - to help you rise from the ground."

"Now you have been to the sky, you are almost like Crake."

Best not to contradict them, but he can't let them continue in a belief that he can fly: sooner or later they might expect him to demonstrate. "The whirling wind was so Crake could come down out of the sky," he says. "He made the wind to blow him down from above. He decided not to stay up there, because the sun was too hot. So that isn't where I saw him."

"Where is he?"

"He's in the bubble," Snowman says, truthfully enough. "The place we came from. He's in Paradice."

"Let us go there and see him," says one of the older children. "We know how to get there. We remember."

"You can't see him," Snowman says, a little too sharply. "You wouldn't recognize him. He's turned himself into a plant." Now where did that come from? He's very tired, he's losing it.

"Why would Crake become food?" asks Abraham Lincoln.

"It's not a plant you can eat," says Snowman. "It's more like a tree."

Some puzzled looks. "He talks to you. How does he talk, if he is a tree?"

This is going to be hard to explain. He's made a narrative mistake. He has the sensation that he's lost his balance at the top of a flight of stairs.

He flails for a grip. "It's a tree with a mouth," he says.

"Trees don't have mouths," says one of the children.

"But look," says a woman - Madame Curie, Sacajawea? "Snowman has hurt his foot." The women can always sense his discomfort, they try to ease it by changing the subject. "We must help him."

"Let us get him a fish. Would you like a fish now, Snowman? We will ask Oryx to give us a fish, to die for you."

"That would be good," he says with relief.

"Oryx wants you to be well."

Soon he's lying on the ground and they're purring over him.

The pain lessens, but although they try very hard, the swelling will not go all the way down.

"It must have been a deep hurt."

"It will need more."

"We will try again later."

They bring the fish, cooked now and wrapped in leaves, and watch joyfully while he eats it. He's not that hungry - it's the fever - but he tries hard because he doesn't want to frighten them.

Already the children are destroying the image they made of him, reducing it to its component parts, which they plan to return to the beach. This is a teaching of Oryx, the women tell him: after a thing has been used, it must be given back to its place of origin. The picture of Snowman has done its work: now that the real Snowman is among them once more, there is no reason for the other, the less satisfactory one. Snowman finds it odd to see his erstwhile beard, his erstwhile head, travelling away piecemeal in the hands of the children. It's as if he himself has been torn apart and scattered.