MaddAddam (MaddAddam 3)

Over near the garden, Ren and Lotis Blue are sitting in the shade, deep in conversation. Amanda is sitting with them, staring off into the distance. Fallow state, the Gardeners would say. They used that diagnosis for a wide range of conditions, from depression to post-traumatic stress to being permanently stoned. The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe. Toby really hopes this is true of Amanda. She'd been such a lively child in Toby's class at the Gardener school, back there on the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. When was that? Ten, fifteen years ago? Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

Ivory Bill and Manatee and Tamaraw are fortifying the boundary fence. In daylight it looks flimsy, permeable. Onto the skeleton of the old ornamental ironwork paling they've attached an assortment of materials: lengths of wire fencing interwoven with duct tape, a mixture of poles, a row of pointed sticks with their ends set in the ground and the points facing out. Manatee is adding more sticks; Ivory Bill and Tamaraw are on the other side of the fence, with shovels. They appear to be filling in a hole.

"Morning," says Toby.

"Take a look at this," says Manatee. "Something was trying to tunnel under. Last night. Sentries didn't see them, they were chasing those pigs off at the front."

"Any tracks?" said Toby.

"We think it was maybe more of those pigs," Tamaraw says. "Smart - distracting attention, then trying a sneaky dig. Anyway, they didn't get in."

Beyond the boundary fence there's a semicircle of male Crakers, evenly spaced, facing outward, peeing in unison. A man in a striped bedsheet who looks like Crozier - in fact, it is Crozier - is standing with them, joining in the group pee-in.

What next? Is Crozier going native? Will he shed his clothes, take up a cappella singing, grow a huge penis that turns blue in season? If the first two items were the price of entry for the third, he'd do it in a shot. Soon every single human male among the MaddAddamites will be yearning for one of those. And once that starts, how long before the rivalries and wars break out, with clubs and sticks and stones, and then ...

Get a grip, Toby, she tells herself. Don't borrow trouble. You really, really, really need some coffee. Any kind of coffee. Dandelion root. Happicuppa. Black mud, if that's all there is.

And if there were any booze, she'd drink that too.

A long dining room table has been set

up beside the cooking shack. There's a shade sail deployed above it, gleaned from some deserted backyard. All the patios must be derelict now, the swimming pools cracked and empty or clogged with weeds, the broken kitchen windows invaded by the probing green snoutlets of vines. Inside the houses, nests in the corners made from chewed-up carpets, wriggling and squeaking with hairless baby rats. Termites mining through the rafters. Bats hawking for moths in the stairwells.

"Once the tree roots get in," Adam One had been fond of saying to the Gardener inner circle, "once they really take hold, no human-built structure stands a chance. They'll tear a paved road apart in a year. They'll block the drainage culverts, and once the pumping systems fail, the foundations will be eaten away, and no force on earth will be able to stop that kind of water, and then, when the generating stations catch fire or short out, not to mention the nuclear ..."

"Then you can kiss your morning toast goodbye," Zeb had once added to this litany. He'd just blown in from one of his mysterious courier missions; he looked battered, and his black pleather jacket was ripped. Urban Bloodshed Limitation was one of the subjects he taught the Gardener kids, but he didn't always practise it. "Yeah, yeah, we know, we're doomed. Any hope of some elderberry pie around here? I'm starving." Zeb did not always show a proper reverence towards Adam One.

Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been - long ago, briefly - a queasy form of popular entertainment. There had even been online TV shows about it: computer-generated landscape pictures with deer grazing in Times Square, serves-us-right finger-wagging, earnest experts lecturing about all the wrong turns taken by the human race.

There was only so much of that people could stand, judging from the ratings, which spiked and then plummeted as viewers voted with their thumbs, switching from imminent wipeout to real-time contests about hotdog-swallowing if they liked nostalgia, or to sassy-best-girlfriends comedies if they liked stuffed animals, or to Mixed Martial Arts Felony Fights if they liked bitten-off ears, or to Nitee-Nite live-streamed suicides or HottTotts kiddy porn or Hedsoff real-time executions if they were truly jaded. All of it so much more palatable than the truth.

"You know I've always sought the truth," said Adam One that time, in the aggrieved tone he sometimes adopted with Zeb. He didn't use this tone with anyone else.

"Yeah, right, I do know that," said Zeb. "Seek and ye shall find, eventually. And you found. You're right, I don't dispute that. Sorry. Chewing with my mind full. Stuff comes out my mouth." And that tone said, This is the way I am. You know that. Suck it up.

If only Zeb were here, thinks Toby. She has a quick flash of him disappearing under a cascade of glass shards and chunks of cement as another burnt-out high-rise crashes down, or howling as a chasm opens under his feet and he plummets into an underground torrent no longer controlled by pumps and sewers, or humming carelessly as from behind him appears an arm, a hand, a face, a rock, a knife ...

But it's too early in the morning to think like that. Also it's no use. So she tries to stop.

Around the table is a collection of random chairs: kitchen, plastic, upholstered, swivel. On the tablecloth - a rosebud-and-bluebird motif - are plates and glasses, some already used, and cups, and cutlery. It's like a surrealist painting from the twentieth century: every object ultra-solid, crisp, hard-edged, except that none of them should be here.

But why not? thinks Toby. Why shouldn't they be here? Nothing in the material world died when the people did. Once, there were too many people and not enough stuff; now it's the other way around. But physical objects have shucked their tethers - Mine, Yours, His, Hers - and have gone wandering off on their own. It's like the aftermath of those riots they used to show in documentaries of the early twenty-first century, when kids would join phone-swarms and then break windows and mob shops and grab stuff, and what you could have was limited only by what you could carry.

And so it is now, she thinks. We have laid claim to these chairs, these cups and glasses, we've lugged them here. Now that history is over, we're living in luxury, as far as goods and chattels go.

The plates look antique, or at least expensive. But now she could break the whole set and it wouldn't cause a ripple anywhere but in her own mind.

Rebecca emerges from the kitchen cooking shack with a platter.

"Sweetheart!" she says. "You made it back! And they told me you found Amanda too! Five stars!"

"She's not in the best shape," says Toby. "Those two Painballers almost killed her, and then, last night ... I'd say she's in shock. Fallow state." Rebecca's old Gardener, so she'll understand Fallow.

"She's tough," says Rebecca. "She'll mend."

"Maybe," says Toby. "Let's hope she's disease-free, and no internal injuries. I guess you heard the Painballers got away. They took a spraygun too. I really messed up on that."

"Win some, lose some," says Rebecca. "I can't tell you how cheered up I am that you're not dead. I thought those two scumbags would kill you for sure, and Ren too. I was worried sick. But here you are, though I have to say you look like shit."