The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam 2)

As she quick-stepped through the streets, Toby anticipated Lucerne's complaints. If true to pattern, they'd be about Zeb: why was he never there when Lucerne needed him? How had she ended up in this unsanitary septic tank with this clutch of dreamers -- I don't mean you, Toby, you've got some sense -- who didn't understand the first thing about how the world really worked? She was buried alive here with a monster of egotism, with a man who cared only about his own needs. Talking to him was like talking to a potato -- no, to a stone. He didn't hear you, he never told you what he was thinking, he was hard as flint.

Not that Lucerne hadn't tried. She wanted to be a responsible person, she really did believe that Adam One was right about so many things, and nobody loved animals more than she did, but really there was a limit and she did not believe for one instant that slugs had any central nervous system, and to say they had souls was to make a mockery of the whole idea of souls, and she resented that, because nobody had more respect for souls than she did, she'd always been a very spiritual person. As for saving the world, nobody wanted to save the world as much as she did, but no matter how much the Gardeners deprived themselves of proper food and clothing and even proper showers, for heaven's sake, and felt more high and mighty and virtuous than everyone else, it wouldn't really change anything. They were just like those people who used to whip themselves during the Middle Ages -- those flagrants.

"Flagellants," Toby had said, the first time this came up.

Then Lucerne had said she didn't mean it about the Gardeners, she was just feeling gloomy because of the headache. Also because they looked down on her for coming from a Corps, and for ditching her husband and running away with Zeb. They didn't trust her. They thought she was a slut. They made dirty jokes about her behind her back. Or the children did -- didn't they?

"The children make dirty jokes about everyone," Toby had said. "Including me."

"You?" Lucerne had said, opening her large eyes with their dark lashes. "Why would they make dirty jokes about you?" Nothing sexual about you, was what she meant. Flat as a board, back and front. Worker bee.

There was a plus to that: at least Lucerne wasn't jealous of her. In that respect, Toby stood alone among the Gardener women.

"They don't look down on you," Toby had said. "They don't think you're a slut. Now just relax and close your eyes and picture the Willow moving through your body, up to your head, where the pain is."

It was true that the Gardeners didn't look down on Lucerne, or not for the reasons she thought they did. They might resent the way she slacked off on chores and could never learn how to chop a carrot, they might be scornful of the messiness of her living space and her pathetic attempt at windowsill tomato-growing and the amount of time she spent in bed, but they didn't care about her infidelity, or her adultery, or whatever it had once been called.

That was because the Gardeners didn't bother with marriage certificates. They endorsed fidelity as long as a pair-bonding was current but there was no record of the first Adam and the first Eve going through a wedding, so in their eyes neither the clergymen of other religions nor any secular official had the power to marry people. As for the CorpSeCorps, they favoured official marriages only as a means for capturing your iris image, your fingerscans, and your DNA, all the better to track you with. Or so the Gardeners claimed, and this was one claim of theirs that Toby could believe without reservation.

Among the Gardeners, weddings were simple affairs. Both parties had to proclaim in front of witnesses that they loved each other. They exchanged green leaves to symbolize growth and fertility and jumped over a bonfire to symbolize the energy of the universe, then declared themselves married and went to bed. For divorces they did the whole thing in reverse: a public statement of non-love and separation, the exchange of dead twigs, and a swift hop over a heap of cold ashes.

A standing complaint of Lucerne's -- which was sure to come up if Toby wasn't quick enough with the Poppy -- was that Zeb had never invited her to do the green-leaf and bonfire-leaping ceremony with him. "Not that I think it means anything," she'd say. "But he must think it does, because he's one of them, right? So by not doing it, he's refusing commitment. Don't you agree?"

"I never know what anyone thinks," Toby would say.

"But if it was you, wouldn't you feel he was shirking his responsibility?"

"Why don't you ask him?" Toby would say. "Ask why he hasn't ..." Was proposed the right word?

"He'd just get angry." Lucerne would sigh. "He was so different when I first knew him!"

Then Toby would be treated to the story of Lucerne and Zeb -- a story Lucerne never tired of telling.

23

The story went like this. Lucerne met Zeb at the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park -- did Toby know the AnooYoo? Oh. Well, it was a fantastic place to unwind and get yourself resurfaced. This was right after it was built and they were still putting in the landscaping. The fountains, the lawns, the gardens, the bushes. The lumiroses. Didn't Toby just love lumiroses? She'd never seen them? Oh. Well, maybe sometime ...

Lucerne loved to get up at dawn, she was an early riser then, she liked to watch the sunrise; it was because she'd always been so sensitive to colour and light, she'd paid so much attention to the aesthetic values in her homes -- the homes she'd decorated. She loved to include at least one room in sunrise colours -- the sunrise room, she would think of that room.

Also she was restless in those days. She was really very restless, because her husband was cold as a crypt, and they never made love any more because he was too busy with his career. And she was a sensual person, she always had been, and her sensual nature was being starved to death. Which was bad for the health, and especially for the immune system. She'd read the studies on that!

So there she was, prowling around at dawn in her pink kimono and crying a little, and contemplating a divorce from her HelthWyzer Corp husband, or a separation at least, though she realized it would not be the best thing for Ren, so young then and fond of her father, not that he paid enough attention to Ren either. And suddenly there was Zeb, in the rising light, like a -- well, like a vision, all by himself, planting a lumirose bush. One of those roses that glow in the dark, the scent was so divine -- had Toby ever smelled them? -- she didn't suppose so because the Gardeners were death on anything new, but those roses were really pretty.

So there was a man, in the dawn, kneeling on the ground and looking as if he was holding a bouquet of live coals.

What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a m

oderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love? thought Toby. On Zeb's part there must have been something to be said for an attractive woman in a pink kimono, a loosely tied pink kimono, on a lawn in a pearly sunrise, especially when tearful. Because Lucerne was attractive. Simply from a visual point of view, she was very attractive. Even if whining, which was the way Toby saw her mostly.

Lucerne had wafted across the lawn, aware of her bare feet on the damp cool grass, aware of the brush of fabric across her thighs, aware of the tightness around her waist and the looseness below her collarbone. Billowing, like waves. She'd stopped in front of Zeb, who'd been watching her come towards him as if he'd been a sailor dumped into the ocean by mistake and she'd been either a mermaid or a shark. (Toby supplied these images: Lucerne said Fate.) They were both just so aware, she told Toby; she'd always been aware of other peoples' awareness, she was like a cat, or, or ... she had that talent, or was it a curse -- that was how she knew. So she could feel from the inside what Zeb was feeling as he watched her. That was overwhelming!

It was impossible to explain this in words, she'd say, as if nothing of the sort could ever have happened to Toby herself.

Anyway, there they stood, though they'd already foreseen what was about to happen -- what had to happen. Fear and lust pushed them together and held them apart, equally.

Lucerne did not call it lust. She called it longing.

At this point, Toby would have an image of the set of salt and pepper shakers that used to be on the kitchen table in her long-ago childhood home: a little china hen, a little china rooster. The hen had been the salt, the rooster had been the pepper. Salty Lucerne had stood there in front of peppery Zeb, smiling and looking up, and she'd asked him a simple question -- how many rose bushes would there be or something, she couldn't remember, so mesmerized was she by Zeb's ... (Here Toby would turn off her attention because she didn't want to hear about the biceps, triceps, and other muscular attractions of Zeb. Was she herself immune to them? No. Was she therefore jealous of this part of the story? Yes. We must be mindful of our own animal-nature tendencies and biases at all times, said Adam One.)