MaddAddam (MaddAddam 3)

"Just describing. No matter what was at stake, he couldn't go on the offensive, not directly. Remember, he was the firstborn; the Rev got hold of him early, before either of us figured out what a fraud the murderous old bugger actually was. What stuck with Adam was that he had to be good. Gooder than good, so God would love him. Guess he was going to do the Rev thing himself, but do it right - everything the Rev had pretended to be, he would be in reality. It was a tall order."

"But none of that stuck with you."

"Not so I noticed. I was the devil-kid, remember? That let me off the goodness hook. Adam depended on that: he never would have turned the Rev into a raspberry soda with his own two hands. He just put me in the way of it. Even so, he had some guilt issues: the Rev was his father, like it or not, and honour your parents, etcetera, even if one of them had buried the other one in the rock garden. He felt he should be forgiving. He beat himself up a lot, Adam did. It was worse after he lost Katrina WooWoo."

"She went off with someone else?"

"Nothing so pleasant. The Corps decided to take over the sex trade: it was so lucrative. They bought a few politicians, got it legalized, set up SeksMart, forced everyone in the trade to roll in. Katrina played at first, but then they wanted to institute policies she found unacceptable. 'Institute policies,' that's how they put it. She had scruples, so she became inconvenient. They got rid of the python too."

"Oh," says Toby. "I'm sorry."

"So was I," says Zeb. "Adam was more than sorry. He pined, he dwindled. Something went missing in him. I think he'd had a dream of installing Katrina in the Garden. Not that it would have worked out. Wrong wardrobe preferences."

"That's very sad," says Toby.

"Yeah. It was. I should've been more understanding. Instead, I picked a fight."

"Oh," says Toby. "Only you?"

"Maybe both of us. But it was no holds barred. I said he was just like the Rev, really, only inside out, like a sock: neither one of them gave a shit about anyone else. It was always their way or zero. He said I'd always had criminal tendencies, and that was why I couldn't understand pacifism and inner peace. I said that by doing nothing he was colluding with the powers that were fucking the planet, especially the OilCorps and the Church of PetrOleum. He said I had no faith, and that the Creator would sort the earth out in good time, most likely very soon, and that those who were attuned and had a true love for the Creation would not perish. I said that was a selfish view. He said I listened to the whisperings of earthly power and I only wanted attention, the way I always had as a child when I pushed the boundaries." He sighs again.

"Then what?" says Toby.

"Then I got mad. So I said something I wish I'd never said." A pause. Toby waits. "I said he wasn't really my brother, not genetically. He was no relation to me." Another pause. "He didn't believe me at first. I backed it up, I told him about the test Pilar had done. He just crumpled."

"Oh," says Toby. "I'm sorry."

"I felt terrible right away, but I couldn't unsay it. After that we tried to patch it up and paper it over. But things festered. We had to go our own ways."

"Katuro went with you," says Toby. She knows this for a fact. "Rebecca. Black Rhino. Shackleton, Crozier, and Oates."

"Amanda, at first," says Zeb. "She got out, though. Then new ones joined. Ivory Bill, Lotis Blue, White Sedge. All of them."

"And Swift Fox," says Toby.

"Yeah. And her. We thought Glenn - we thought Crake was our inside guy, feeding us stuff from the Corps through the MaddAddam chatroom. But all along, he was setting us up so he could drag us into the Paradice dome to do his people-splicing for him."

"And his plague-virus-mixing?" says Toby.

"Not from what I hear," says Zeb. "He did that on his own."

"To make his perfect world," says Toby.

"Not perfect," says Zeb. "He wouldn't claim that. More like a reboot. And he succeeded in his own way. Up to now."

"He didn't anticipate the Painballers," says Toby.

"He should have. Or something like them," says Zeb.

It's very quiet, down there in the forest. A Craker child is singing a little in its sleep. Around the swimming pool the Pigoons are dreaming, emitting small grunts like puffs of smoke. Far away something cries: a bobkitten?

There's a faint cool breeze; the leaves go about their business, which is rustling; the m

oon travels through the sky, moving towards its next phase, marking time.

"You should get some sleep," says Zeb.

"Both of us should," says Toby. "We'll need our energy."