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Zeb had a couple of Heritage Park groundsman suits -- green overalls and shirts, with the Park logo in white. The two of them put these on and set off with a couple of shovels and rakes and a mattock and a pitchfork rattling around in the back of their truck. It was news to Toby that the Gardeners had a truck, but they did. It was a compressed-air pickup, which they kept in a pet store over in the Sewage Lagoon. An abandoned pet store -- not much call for pet pampering in the Lagoon, said Zeb, because if you did have a cat there it was likely to end up in someone else's deep fryer.
The Gardeners painted different things on their truck, said Zeb, according to need. At the moment it had a Heritage Park logo on it, impeccably forged. "There's a number of ex-graphic artists in the Gardeners,
" said Zeb. "Of course, there's a number of ex-everything."
They drove along through the Sinkhole, honking to get the pleebrats out of their path and shooing away any who tried to force-clean their windows. "Have you done this before?" Toby asked.
"By 'this,' you mean burying old ladies illegally in public parkland? Nope," said Zeb. "No Eves died on my watch until this. But there's a first time for everything."
"How dangerous is it?" said Toby.
"Guess we'll find out," said Zeb. "Course, we could just leave her in a vacant lot for the scavengers, but she might end up in a SecretBurger. Animal protein's getting very pricey. Or she could get sold to the garboil folks, they'll take anything. We're saving her from that: old Pilar was death on oil, it was contra to her religion."
"Not to yours?" said Toby.
Zeb chuckled. "I leave the finer points of doctrine to Adam One. I just use what I have to, to get where I need to go. C'mon, let's grab a Happicuppa." He swerved into a mallway lot.
"We're drinking Happicuppa?" said Toby. "Gen-mod, sun-grown, sprayed with poisons? It kills birds, it ruins peasants -- we all know that."
"We're in deep cover," said Zeb. "You have to act the part!" He winked at her, then reached across her and opened the truck door. "Cut yourself some slack. I bet you used to be a babe until the Gardeners got to you."
Used to be, thinks Toby. That about sums up everything. Nevertheless she was pleased: she hadn't had a gender-weighted compliment for some time.
Happicuppa had once been a feature of such lunch breaks as she'd been able to snatch, back when she worked at SecretBurgers; it seemed a lifetime since she'd drunk any of the stuff. She ordered a Happicappuchino. She'd forgotten how delicious they could be. She drank it in sips: it could be years before she got another, if she ever did get one.
"We better go," said Zeb before she was quite finished. "We've got a hole to dig. Put your cap on, stick your hair up under it, that's how the girl parkies wear it."
"Hey, Park bitch," said a voice behind her. "Show us your shrub!" Toby was afraid to glance around. But Blanco was back in Painball again, Adam One had told her -- that was the word on the street.
Zeb picked up on her fear. "If any guy bothers you, I'll hit him with the mattock," he said.
Back in the truck, they mowed their way through the pleebland streets until they reached the Heritage Parkland north gate. Zeb waved his forged pass at the gatekeepers and they drove through. The Park was officially pedestrian, so there were no vehicles other than theirs.
Zeb drove slowly, passing families of pleeblanders seated at the picnic tables with their barbecues going full blast. Rowdy groups of pleebrats were drinking and messing around. A rock bounced off the truck: the Heritage Parkies weren't armed, and the pleebrats knew that. There'd been swarmings and even fatalities, Zeb told her. Something about a bunch of trees made people think they could cut loose. "Wherever there's Nature, there's assholes," he said cheerfully.
They found a good location -- a patch of open ground where the Elderberry shrub would get enough sunlight, and where they might not encounter too many tree roots while digging. Zeb set to work with the mattock, loosening the dirt; Toby shovelled. They'd put out a stand-alone sign: Planting Courtesy of HelthWyzer West. "If anyone asks, I've got the authorization," said Zeb. "Right here in my pocket. Didn't even cost that much."
When the hole was deep enough they packed up, leaving the sign in place.
Pilar's composting took place that afternoon. Pilar travelled to the site by truck, in a burlap sack labelled Mulch, with the Elderberry and a five-gallon water tank beside her. Nuala and Adam One marched the Buds and Blooms Choir through the Park, right past the burial spot, so anyone in the vicinity would be looking at them rather than at Zeb and Toby and their shrub planting. They were singing the "Mole Day Hymn" at the top of their lungs. When they came to the final verse, Shackleton and Crozier in their pleebrat T-shirt disguises jeered at them from the pathside. When Crozier tossed a bottle, the Buds and Blooms yelled and broke ranks and ran down the pathway. All the pleeblanders watched the chase with interest, hoping for violence. Zeb deftly slotted Pilar into the hole, still in her burlap sack, and positioned the Elderberry shrub on top of her. Toby shovelled and tamped; then they watered.
"Don't look mournful," Zeb told her. "Act like it's only a job."
There was another onlooker, a tall dark-haired boy. He wasn't distracted by the Buds and Blooms sideshow; he stood leaning against a tree, as if indifferent. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a slogan that said, THE LIVER IS EVIL AND MUST BE PUNISHED.
"You know that boy?" said Toby. The T-shirt looked wrong. If he was a real pleebrat it would have fit him better.
Zeb glanced over. "Him? Why?"
"He's taking an interest in us." CorpSeCorps, she thought? No. Surely too young.
"Don't stare," said Zeb. "He knew Pilar. I let him know we'd be here."
36
According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.
The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier. And so it was with Toby, once she'd become an Eve. She could feel the Eve Six title seeping into her, eroding her, wearing away the edges of what she'd once been. It was more than a hair shirt, it was a shirt of nettles. How had she allowed herself to be sewn into it this way?
