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She lifts her binoculars. The trees look as innocent as ever; yet she has the feeling that someone's watching her -- as if even the most inert stone or stump can sense her, and doesn't wish her well.
Isolation produces such effects. She'd trained for them during the God's Gardeners Vigils and Retreats. The floating orange triangle, the talking crickets, the writhing columns of vegetation, the eyes in the leaves. Still, how to distinguish between such illusions and the real thing?
The sun's fully up now -- smaller, hotter. Toby makes her way down from the rooftop, covers herself in her pink top-to-toe, sprays with SuperD for the bugs, and adjusts her broad pink sunhat. Then she unlocks the front door and goes out to tend the garden. This is where they used to grow the ladies' organic salads for the Spa Cafe -- their garnishes, their exotic spliced vegetables, their herbal teas. There's overhead netting to thwart the birds, and a chain-link fence because of the green rabbits and the bobkittens and the rakunks that might wander in from the Park. These weren't numerous before the Flood, but it's astonishing how quickly they've been multiplying.
She's counting on this garden: her supplies in the storeroom are getting low. Over the years she'd stashed what she thought would be enough for an emergency like this, but she'd underestimated, and now she's running out of soybits and soydines. Luckily, everything in the garden is doing well: the chickenpeas have begun to pod, the beananas are in flower, the polyberry bushes are covered with small brown nubbins of different shapes and sizes. She picks some spinach, flicks off the iridescent green beetles on it, steps on them. Then, feeling remorseful, she makes a thumbprint grave for them and says the words for the freeing of the soul and the asking of pardon. Even though no one's watching her, it's hard to break such ingrained habits.
She relocates several slugs and snails and pulls out some weeds, leaving the purslane: she can steam that later. On the delicate carrot fronds she finds two bright-blue kudzu-moth caterpillars. Though developed as a biological control for invasive kudzu, they seem to prefer garden vegetables. In one of those jokey moves so common in the first years of gene-splicing, their designer gave them a baby face at the front end, with big eyes and a happy smile, which makes them remarkably difficult to kill. She pulls them off the carrots, their mandibles chewing ravenously beneath their cutie-pie masks, lifts the edge of the netting, and tosses them outside the fence. No doubt they'll be back.
On the way back to the building, she finds the tail of a dog beside the path -- an Irish setter, it looks like -- its long fur matted with burrs and twigs. A vulture's dropped it there, most likely: they're always dropping things. She tries not to think of the other things they dropped in the first weeks after the Flood. Fingers were the worst.
Her own hands are getting thicker -- stiff and brown, like roots. She's been digging in the earth too much.
4
TOBY. SAINT BASHIR ALOUSE DAY
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
She takes her baths in the early mornings, before the sun's too hot. She keeps a number of pails and bowls up on the rooftop, for collecting the afternoon-storm rainwater: the Spa has its own well, but the solar system's broken so the pumps are useless. She does her laundry on the rooftop too, spreading it out on the benches to dry. She uses the grey-water to flush her toilet.
She rubs herself with soap -- there's still a lot of soap, all of it pink -- and sponges off. My body is shrinking, she thinks. I'm puckering, I'm dwindling. Soon I'll be nothing but a hangnail. Though she's always been on the skinny side -- Oh Tobiatha, the ladies used to say, if only I had your figure!
She dries herself off, slips on a pink smock. This one says, Melody. There's no need to label herself now that nobody's left to read the labels, so she's begun wearing the smocks of the others: Anita, Quintana, Ren, Carmel, Symphony. Those girls had been so cheerful, so hopeful. Not Ren, though: Ren had been sad. But Ren had left earlier.
Then all of them had left, once the trouble hit. They'd gone home to be with their families, believing love could save them. "You go ahead, I'll lock up," Toby had told them. And she had locked up, but with herself inside.
She scrubs her long dark hair, twists it into a wet bun. She really must cut it. It's thick and too hot. Also it smells of mutton.
As she's drying her hair she hears an odd sound. She goes cautiously to the rooftop railing. Three huge pigs are nosing around the swimming pool -- two sows and a boar. The morning light shines on their plump pinky-grey forms; they glisten like wrestlers. They seem too large and bulbous to be normal. She's spotted pigs like this before, in the meadow, but they've never come this close. Escapees, they must be, from some experimental farm or other.
They're grouped by the shallow end of the pool, gazing at it as if in thought, their snouts twitching. Maybe they're sniffing the dead rakunk floating on the surface of the scummy water. Will they try to retrieve it? They grunt softly to one another, then back away: the thing must be too putrid even for them. They pause for a final sniff, then trot around the corner of the building.
Toby follows the railing, tracking them. They've found the garden fence, they're looking in. Then one of them begins to dig. They'll tunnel under.
"Get away from there!" Toby shouts at them. They peer up at her, dismiss her.
She scrambles down the stairs as fast as she can without slipping. Idiot! She should keep the rifle with her at all times. She grabs it from her bedside, hurries back up to the roof. She holds one of the pigs in the scope -- the boar, an easy shot, he's sideways -- but then she hesitates. They're God's Creatures. Never kill without just cause, said Adam One.
"I'm warning you!" she yells. Amazingly they seem to understand her. They must've seen a weapon before -- a spraygun, a stun gun. They squeal in alarm, then turn and run.
They're a quarter of the way across the meadow when it occurs to her they'll be back. They'll dig under at night and root up her garden in no time flat, and that will be the end of her long-term food supply. She'll have to shoot them, it's self-defence. She squeezes off a round, misses, tries again. The boar falls down. The two sows keep running. Only when they've reached the forest rim do they turn and look back. Then they meld with the foliage and are gone.
Toby's hands are shaking. You've snuffed a life, she tells herself. You've acted rashly and from anger. You ought to feel guilty. Still, she thinks of going out with one of the kitchen knives and sawing off a ham. She'd taken the Vegivows when she joined the Gardeners, but the prospect of a bacon sandwich is a great temptation right now. She resists it, however: animal protein should be the last resort.
She murmurs the standard Gardener words of apology, though she doesn't feel apologetic. Or not apolog
etic enough.
She needs to do some target practice. Shooting the boar, missing at first, letting the sows get away -- that was clumsy.
In recent weeks she's grown lax about the rifle. Now she vows to cart it around with her wherever she goes -- even up to the rooftop for a bath, even to the toilet. Even to the garden -- especially to the garden. Pigs are smart, they'll keep her in mind, they won't forgive her. Should she lock the door when she goes out? What if she has to run back into the Spa building in a hurry? But if she leaves the door unlocked, someone or something could slip in when she's working in the garden and be waiting for her inside.
She'll need to think of every angle. An Ararat without a wall isn't an Ararat at all, as the Gardener children used to chant. A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended. The Gardeners loved their instructive rhymes.
5
Toby went in search of the rifle a few days after the first outbreaks. It was the night after the girls had fled from AnooYoo, leaving their pink smocks behind them.
