The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam 2)

In the afternoon she takes a nap. An old moon draws the past, said Pilar: whatever arrives from the shadows you must greet as a blessing. And the past does come back to her: the white frame house of her childhood, the ordinary trees, the woodland in the background, tinged with blue as if there's haze. A deer is outlined against it, standing rigid as a lawn ornament, ears pricked. Her father's digging with a shovel, over by the pile of picket fencing; her mother's a momentary glimpse at the kitchen window. Perhaps she's making soup. Everything tranquil, as if it would never end. But where is Toby in this picture? For it is a picture. It's flat, like a picture on a wall. She's not there.

She opens her eyes: tears on her cheeks. I wasn't in the picture because I'm the frame, she thinks. It's not really the past. It's only me, holding it all together. It's only a handful of fading neural pathways. It's only a mirage.

Surely I was an optimistic person back then, she thinks. Back there. I woke up whistling. I knew there were things wrong in the world, they were referred to, I'd seen them in the onscreen news. But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else.

By the time she'd reached college, the wrongness had moved closer. She remembers the oppressive sensation, like waiting all the time for a heavy stone footfall, then the knock at the door. Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.

We're using up the Earth. It's almost gone. You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake. It never went away, even among the Gardeners. Especially -- as time wore on -- among the Gardeners.

44

The Sunday after Serpent Wisdom Day was Saint Jacques Cousteau's Day. It was Year Eighteen -- the year of rupture, though Toby did not yet know that. She remembers negotiating the Sinkhole streets on her way to the Wellness Clinic for the regular Sunday-evening Adams and Eves Council. She wasn't looking forward to it: lately those meetings had been sliding into squabbles.

The week before, they'd spent all their time on theological problems. The matter of Adam's teeth, for starters.

"Adam's teeth?" Toby had blurted. She needed to work on controlling such expressions of surprise, which might be read as criticism.

Adam One had explained that some of the children were upset because Zeb had pointed out the differences between the biting, rending teeth of carnivores and the grinding, munching teeth of herbivores. The children wanted to know why -- if Adam was created as a vegetarian, as he surely was -- human teeth should show such mixed characteristics.

"Shouldn't have brought it up," Stuart had muttered.

"We changed at the Fall," Nuala had said brightly. "We evolved. Once Man started to eat meat, well, naturally ..."

That would be

putting the cart before the horse, said Adam One; they could not achieve their goal of reconciling the findings of Science with their sacramental view of Life simply by overriding the rules of the former. He asked them to ponder this conundrum, and propose solutions at a later date.

Then they turned to the problem of the animal-skin clothing provided by God for Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis 3. The troublesome "coats of skins."

"The children are very worried about them," Nuala had said. Toby could understand why they'd been so dismayed. Had God killed and peeled some of his beloved Creatures to make these skin coats? If so, He'd set a very bad example to Man. If not, where had these skin coats come from?

"Maybe those animals died a natural death." That was Rebecca. "And God didn't see them going to waste." She was adamant about using up leftovers.

"Maybe very small animals," Katuro had said. "Short life spans."

"That is one possibility," Adam One had said. "Let it stand for now, until a more plausible explanation presents itself."

Early in her Eveship, Toby had asked if it was really necessary to split such theological hairs, and Adam One had said that it was. "The truth is," he'd said, "most people don't care about other Species, not when times get hard. All they care about is their next meal, naturally enough: we have to eat or die. But what if it's God doing the caring? We've evolved to believe in gods, so this belief bias of ours must confer an evolutionary advantage. The strictly materialist view -- that we're an experiment animal protein has been doing on itself -- is far too harsh and lonely for most, and leads to nihilism. That being the case, we need to push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction by pointing out the hazards of annoying God by a violation of His trust in our stewardship."

"What you mean is, with God in the story there's a penalty," said Toby.

"Yes," said Adam One. "There's a penalty without God in the story too, needless to say. But people are less likely to credit that. If there's a penalty, they want a penalizer. They dislike senseless catastrophe."

What would the topic be today? Toby wondered. Which fruit Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge? It couldn't have been an apple, considering the state of horticulture at that time. A date? A bergamot? The Council had long been deliberating over that one. Toby had thought of proposing a strawberry, but then, strawberries didn't grow on trees.

As she walked, Toby was conscious, as always, of the others on the street. She could see in front of her and to the sides, despite her sunhat. She made use of pauses in doorways, of reflections in windows to check behind. But she could never shake the feeling that someone was sneaking up on her -- that a hand would descend on her neck, a hand with red and blue veining and a bracelet of baby skulls. Blanco hadn't been seen in the Sewage Lagoon for some time -- still in Painball, said some; no, overseas fighting as a mercenary, said others -- but he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.

There was someone behind her -- she could feel it, like a tingling between her shoulders. She stepped into a doorway, turned to face the sidewalk, then sagged with relief: it was Zeb.

"Hi, babe," he said. "Hot enough?"

He strolled along beside her, singing to himself:

Nobody gives a snot,

Nobody gives a snot,

That is why we're on the fucking spot,