The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam 2)

Wherever they are found.

They live their whole lives in the dark,

Unseen by Human sight;

The earth is like the air to them,

Their day is like our night.

They turn the soil and till it,

They make the plants to thrive;

The Earth would be a desert,

If they were not alive.

The little Carrion Be

etles

That seek unlikely places

Return our Husks to Elements,

And tidy up our spaces.

And so for God's small Creatures

Beneath the field and wood,

Let us today give joyful thanks,

For God has found them good.

From The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

31

TOBY. MOLE DAY

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

While the Flood rages, you must count the days, said Adam One. You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On your Meditations, do not travel so far on your inner journeys that you enter the Timeless before it is time. In your Fallow states, do not descend to a level that is too deep for any resurgence, or the Night will come in which all hours are the same to you, and then there will be no Hope.

Toby's been keeping track of the days on some old AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park notepaper. Each pink page is topped with two long-lashed eyes, one of them winking, and with a lipstick kiss. She likes these eyes and smiling mouths: they're companions of a sort. At the top of each fresh page she prints the Gardener Feast Day or Saint's Day. She can still recite the entire list off by heart: Saint E.F. Schumacher, Saint Jane Jacobs, Saint Sigurdsdottir of Gullfoss, Saint Wayne Grady of Vultures; Saint James Lovelock, The Blessed Gautama Buddha, Saint Bridget Stutchbury of Shade Coffee, Saint Linnaeus of Botanical Nomenclature, The Feast of Crocodylidae, Saint Stephen Jay Gould of the Jurassic Shales, Saint Gilberto Silva of Bats. And the rest.

Under each Saint's Day name she writes her gardening notes: what was planted, what was harvested, what phase of the moon, what insect guests.

Mole Day, she writes now. Year Twenty-five. Do the laundry. Gibbous Moon. Mole Day was part of Saint Euell's Week. It wasn't such a good anniversary.

On the bright side, there should be some polyberries by now, ripe ones. The strength of the polyberry gene splice is that it produces at all seasons. Perhaps in the late afternoon she'll go down and pick them.

Two days back -- on Saint Orlando Garrido of Lizards -- she made an entry that wasn't about gardening. Hallucination? she'd written. She ponders this entry now. It did seem like a hallucination at the time.

It was after the daily thunderstorm. She was up on the roof, checking the rain barrel connections: the flow from the single tap she's kept open downstairs was blocked. She found the problem -- drowned mouse clogging the intake -- and was turning to go back down the stairs when she heard an odd sound. It was like singing, but not any singing she'd ever heard before.

She scanned with the binoculars. At first there was nothing, but then at the far end of the field a strange procession appeared. It seemed to consist entirely of naked people, though one man walking at the front had clothes on, and some sort of red hat, and -- could it be? -- sunglasses. Behind him there were men and women and children, every known skin colour; as she focused, she could see that several of the naked people had blue abdomens.