Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam 1)

Right, Grandmaster Rednecked Crake. We'll talk later. Crake closed down.

Jimmy had a cold feeling, a feeling that reminded him of the time his mother had left home: the same sense of the forbidden, of a door swinging open that ought to be kept locked, of a stream of secret lives, running underground, in the darkness just beneath his feet. "What was all that about?" he said. It might not be about anything, he told himself. It might be about Crake showing off. It might be an elaborate setup, an invention of Crake's, a practical joke to frighten him.

"I'm not sure," said Crake. "I thought at first they were just another crazy Animal Liberation org. But there's more to it than that. I think they're after the machinery. They're after the whole system, they want to shut it down. So far they haven't done any people numbers, but it's obvious they could."

"You shouldn't be messing around!" said Jimmy. "You don't want to be connected! Someone could think you're part of it. What if you get caught? You'll end up on brainfrizz!" He was frightened now.

"I won't get caught," said Crake. "I'm just cruising. But do me a favour and don't mention this when you e-mail."

"Sure," said Jimmy. "But why even take the chance?"

"I'm curious, that's all," said Crake. "They've let me into the waiting room, but not any further. They've got to be Compound, or Compound-trained. These are sophisticated bioforms they're putting together; I don't think a pleeblander would be able to make anything like that." He gave Jimmy his green-eyed sideways look - a look (Snowman thinks now) that meant trust. Crake trusted him. Otherwise he wouldn't have shown him the hidden playroom.

"It could be a CorpSeCorps flytrap," said Jimmy. The Corpsmen were in the habit of setting up schemes of that sort, to capture subversives in the making. Weeding the pea patch, he'd heard it called. The Compoun

ds were said to be mined with such potentially lethal tunnels. "You need to watch your step."

"Sure," said Crake.

What Jimmy really wanted to know was: Out of all the possibilities you had, out of all the gateways, why did you choose her? He couldn't ask, though.

He couldn't give himself away.

Something else happened during that visit; something important, though Jimmy hadn't realized it at the time.

The first night, as he was sleeping on Crake's pullout sofa bed, he'd heard shouting. He'd thought it was coming from outside - at Martha Graham it would have been student pranksters - but in fact it was coming from Crake's room. It was coming from Crake.

More than shouting: screaming. There were no words. It happened every night he was there.

"That was some dream you were having," said Jimmy the next morning, after the first time it happened.

"I never dream," said Crake. His mouth was full and he was looking out the window. For such a thin man he ate a lot. It was the speed, the high metabolic rate: Crake burned things up.

"Everyone dreams," Jimmy said. "Remember the REM-sleep study at HelthWyzer High?"

"The one where we tortured cats?"

"Virtual cats, yeah. And the cats that couldn't dream went crazy."

"I never remember my dreams," said Crake. "Have some more toast."

"But you must have them anyway."

"Okay, point taken, wrong words. I didn't mean I never dream. I'm not crazy, therefore I must dream. Hypothesis, demonstration, conclusion, if A then not B. Good enough?" Crake smiled, poured himself some coffee.

So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.

9

~

Hike

~

After an hour of walking, Snowman comes out from the former park. He picks his way farther inland, heading along the trashed pleebland boulevards and avenues and roads and streets. Wrecked solarcars are plentiful, some piled up in multi-vehicle crashes, some burnt out, some standing intact as if temporarily parked. There are trucks and vans, fuel-cell models and also the old gas or diesel kind, and ATVs. A few bicycles, a few motorcycles - not a bad choice considering the traffic mayhem that must have lasted for days. On a two-wheeled item you'd have been able to weave in and out among the larger vehicles until someone shot you or ran into you, or you fell off.

This was once a semi-residential sector - shops on the ground floor, gutted now; small dim apartments above. Most of the signs are still in place despite the bullet holes in them. People had hoarded the lead bullets from the time before sprayguns, despite the ban on the pleebs having any kind of gun at all. Snowman's been unable to find any bullets; not that he'd had a rusty old firearm that would have taken them.