MaddAddam (MaddAddam 3)

"It's one of my life-span regrets," says Zeb, "but no. I didn't even give it a try. Hands stayed in the pockets, firmly clenched. Jaw clenched likewise. It was an effort to restrain myself, but that's the bare-naked truth: I didn't give it a single grope. Not even a wink."

"Because?"

"One, she was my boss when I was working at Scales. It's not a smart move to roll around on the floor with a woman boss. It confuses them."

"Oh please," says Toby. "That's so twentieth century!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm a sexist-wexist pig and so forth, but that happens to be accurate. Hormone overdrive craps up efficiency. I've watched it in action - women bosses getting all coy and weird about issuing orders to some bullet-headed stud who's just erased their rational faculties and blown off the top of their heads and made them growl like a rakunk in heat and scream like a dying rabbit. It alters the power hierarchy. 'Take me, take me, write my speech, get me a coffee, you're fired.' So there's that." He pauses. "Plus."

"Plus what?" She's hoping for some revolting feature on the part of Katrina WooWoo, whom, granted, she has never seen, and who is 99.999 per cent likely to be dead; but envy crosses all borders. Maybe she was knock-kneed, or had halitosis or hopeless taste in music. Even a pimple would have been some comfort.

"Plus," says Zeb, "Adam loved her. No doubt of it. I'd never poach in his goldfish pond. He was - he's my brother. He's my family. There's limits."

"You're kidding!" says Toby. "Adam One? In love? With Katrina WooWoo?"

"She was Eve One," says Zeb.

The Train to CryoJeenyus

"That's hard to believe," says Toby. "How do you know?"

Zeb is silent. Will this be a painful story? It's likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably.

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators hunting their dispersed flesh, transformed now into grasshoppers and mice.

There's a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones. There's a couple of them down there now, jumping about in the meadow, glowing with a faint greenish light. Some used to think there was a giant rabbit up there on the moon: they could clearly make out its ears. Others thought there was a smiling face, yet others an old woman with a basket. What will the Crakers decide about that when they get around to astrology, in a hundred years, or ten, or one? As they will, or will not.

But is the moon waxing or waning? Her moontime sense isn't as sharp as it used to be in the days of the Gardeners. How many times had she watched over Vigils when the moon was full? Wondering, from time to time, why there was an Adam One but no Eve One, nor ever any mention of such. Now she'll find out.

"Picture it," says Zeb. "Adam and me were on the sealed bullet train together for three days. I'd only seen him twice since we cleared out the Rev's bank account and went our separate ways: in the Happicuppa joint, in the back room at Scales. No time to dig down. So naturally I asked him stuff."

Zeb had to sacrifice his face waffle, of which he'd become moderately fond despite the meticulous upkeep, what with those stubbly mini-squares to sculpt. He clear-cut the thing with a shaver: all that remained of it was a goatee. He had some new head growth - an unconvincing Mo'Hair glue-on from the early days of that Corp - in a shade of glossy pimp-oil brown.

Luckily he could cover up some of the more fraudulent effects with the dorky hat that was part of the CryoJeenyus outfit for the position that would have once been called "undertaker's assistant," though CryoJeenyus used the label Temporary Inertness Caretaker instead. The hat was a modified turban, referencing both magicians and genies. It was reddish in colour and had a flame design on the front.

"Ever-burning flame of life, right?" says Zeb. "When they showed that third-rate magic-show headrag to me, I said, 'You can't be fucking serious! I'm not wearing a boiled tomato on my head!' But then I saw the beauty of it. With it, and with the rest of the ensemble - a purple thing like pyjamas, or maybe a karate concept, with the CryoJeenyus logo plastered across the front - no one could mistake me for anything but an overgrown dim bulb who couldn't get any other job. Frasketsitting on a train - how pathetic was that? 'If you're where no one expects you to be,' old Slaight of Hand used to say, 'you're invisible.' "

Adam had the same uniform, and he looked even stupider in it than Zeb did. So that was some comfort. Anyway, who was going to see them? They were locked into the special CryoJeenyus car with the Frasket plugged into its own separate generator to keep it subzero inside. CryoJeenyus prided itself on being extra secure: DNA theft, not to mention the pilfering of other, larger body parts, was a worry among those who were in love with their own carbon structures: in those circles, the theft of Einstein's brain had not been forgotten.

Thus an armed guard travelled with all Frasket-sitters, riding shotgun near the door. On bona fide CryoJeenyus missions, this individual would have been a member of the consolidated and ever-expanding CorpSeCorps and would have been armed with a spraygun. But since everything about this particular caper was bogus, the role was played by a Scales manager named Mordis. He looked the part: tough, bright eyes like a shiny black beetle, smile impartial as a falling rock.

His weaponry wasn't real, however: the cryptic team could imitate clothing, but they couldn't reproduce that kind of triple-security moving-part tech. So the spraygun was a cunning plastic and painted-foam imitation, which wouldn't matter at all unless someone got close enough to be hit with a fist.

But why would they? As far as anyone else was concerned, this was just a routine dead-run. Or rather, a ferrying of the subject of a life-suspending event from the shore of life on a round trip back to the shore of life. It was a mouthful, but CryoJeenyus went in for that kind of evasive crapspeak. They had to, considering the business they were in: their two best sales aids being gullibility and unfounded hope.

"It was the most bizarre trip I ever took," says Zeb. "Dressed up like Aladdin, sitting in a locked train compartment with my brother, who was wearing half a squa

shed pumpkin on his head, and between us a Frasket containing our dad in the form of soup stock. Though we did put the bones and teeth in there, as well. Those didn't dissolve. There was some discussion at Scales about the osseous materials - you could get a good price for human bones in the deeper pleeblands, where carved artisanal human-products jewellery was a fashion: Bone Bling, it was called. But the cooler heads of Adam and Katrina and, I have to say, your humble self overruled the enthusiasts, because even if you boiled those things there was no telling what microbes might remain. As yet, we knew nothing about them."

A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow Frasket, Zeb sang.

Adam took out a little notebook and a pencil and wrote: Watch what you say. We're most likely bugged.

After showing it to Zeb under cover of his hand, he erased it, and wrote: And please do not sing. It is very irritating.

Zeb motioned for the little notebook. After a slight hesitation, Adam handed it over. Zeb wrote: FU+PO. Then he wrote, underneath them: Fuck You and Piss Off. Then: You manage to get yourself laid yet?

Adam read this and blushed. Watching him blush was a novelty: Zeb had never witnessed such a thing before. Adam was so pale you could almost see his capillaries. He wrote: None of your business.