MaddAddam (MaddAddam 3)

And shyly, unfinished: Try love the World needs

What to eat, where to shit, how to take shelter, who and what to kill: are these the basics? thinks Toby. Is this what we've come to, or come down to; or else come back to?

And who do you love? And who loves you? And who loves you not? And, come to think of it, who seriously hates you.

Blink

Under the trees Jimmy is still slumbering. Toby checks his pulse - calmer; changes his maggots - the wound on his foot has stopped festering; and pours some mushroom elixir into him, mixed with a little Poppy.

An oval of chairs is arranged around the hammock, as if Jimmy is the central offering at a feast: a giant salmon, a boar on a platter. Three Crakers are purring over him, taking turns: two men and a woman, gold, ivory, ebony. It's a different three every few hours. Do they have only so much purring quotient, are they like batteries that have to be recharged? Naturally they need time off to graze and water themselves, but does the purring itself have a sort of electrical frequency?

We'll never know, thinks Toby, holding Jimmy's nose to make him open his mouth: no way of wiring up their brains for scientific studies, not any more. Which is lucky for them. In the olden days they'd have been kidnapped from the Paradice Project dome by some rival Corp, then injected and jolted and probed and sliced apart to see how they were put together. What made them tick, what made them purr, what made them click. What, if anything, made them sick. They'd have ended up as slabs of DNA in a freezer.

Jimmy swallows, sighs; his left hand twitches. "How has he been today?" Toby asks the three Crakers. "Has he been awake at all?"

"No, Oh Toby," says the gold-coloured man. "He is travelling." This one has bright red hair, long slender limbs; despite the skin colour, he looks like something from a children's storybook. An Irish folktale.

"But now he has stopped," says the ebony man. "He has climbed into a tree."

"Not his real tree," says the ivory woman. "Not the tree he lives in."

"He has gone to sleep in this tree," says the ebony man.

"You mean, he's sleeping inside his sleep?" says Toby. This seems wrong: it shouldn't be possible. "In the tree in his dream?"

"Yes, Oh Toby," says the ivory woman. All three of them gaze at her with their lambent green eyes, as if she's twirling a piece of string and they are bored cats.

"Perhaps he will sleep for a long time," says the golden man. "He is stuck there, in the tree. If he will not wake up and travel to here, he will not wake up at all."

"But he's getting better!" says Toby.

"He is afraid," says the ivory woman in a matter-of-fact voice. "He is afraid of what is in this world. He is afraid of the bad men, he is afraid of the Pig Ones. He doesn't want to be awake."

"Can you talk to him?" says Toby. "Can you tell him it's better to be awake?" No harm in trying: maybe they have some form of inaudible communication tha

t might reach Jimmy, wherever he is. A wavelength, a vibration.

But now they aren't looking at her. They're looking at Ren and Lotis Blue, who are walking over with Amanda in tow, sheltering behind them.

The three of them sit down on the empty chairs, Amanda hesitantly. Ren and Lotis Blue are muddy from their building activities, but Amanda is pristine. The other two give her a shower every morning, choose a fresh bedsheet for her, braid her hair.

"We thought we'd take a break from the house," says Ren. "See how Jimmy - see how Snowman-the-Jimmy is doing."

The ivory woman smiles widely at them, the two men smile less widely: the Craker men are nervous around the younger cobb-house women now. Ever since they've learned that rambunctious group copulation is not acceptable, they don't know what's expected of them. They begin conferring together in low voices, leaving the ivory woman as the sole purrer.

Is she blue? One is blue. Two others were blue, we joined our blue to their blue but we did not make them happy. They are not like our women, they are not happy, they are broken. Did Crake make them? Why did he make them that way, so they are not happy? Oryx will take care of them. Will Oryx take care of them, if they are not like our women? When Snowman-the-Jimmy wakes up, we will ask him these things.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall, thinks Toby. Listening to Jimmy justifying the ways of Crake towards men, or semi-men.

"Will Jimmy - will Snowman-the-Jimmy be okay?" asks Lotis Blue.

"I think so," says Toby. "It will depend on his ..." She doesn't want to say "immune system" because the Crakers will hear. (What is an immune system? It is something you have inside yourself that helps you and makes you strong. Where can we find an immune system? Is it from Crake, will he send us an immune system?, and so on.) "It depends on his dreaming." No comment from the Crakers: so far, so good. "But I'm sure he'll wake up soon."

"He needs to eat," says Lotis Blue. "He's so thin! He can't live on nothing."

"You can go a long time without food," says Ren. "They did fasts, at the Gardeners? You can go for days. Weeks." She leans over and reaches out, smoothing back Jimmy's hair. "I wish we could give him a shampoo," she says. "He's getting rank."

"I think he just said something," says Lotis Blue.