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still there."
"And Katuro?" says Toby.
"Doing fine. Had a germ of some kind, but not the bad one; he's over it now. He's off with Zeb and Shackleton, and Black Rhino. They're looking for Adam One and the rest of them. Zeb says if anyone could get through, they could."
"Really? There's a chance?" says Toby. Did he look for me? she wants to ask. Probably not. He'd have thought she'd do fine on her own. And she had, hadn't she?
"We've been listening on the windup shortwave, 24/7, and sending too. Couple of days ago we finally got an answer," says Rebecca.
"It was him?" Toby's prepared to believe anything now. "Adam One?"
"We just heard the one voice. All it said was, 'I'm here, I'm here.'"
"Let's hope," says Toby. And she does hope; or she tries to.
There's the barking of dogs outside, and a confusion of shouting. "Shit. Dog attack," says Rebecca. "Bring that gun."
The MaddAddams with sprayguns are already at the fence. Big dogs and small ones, maybe fifteen, bounding towards them wagging their tails. The spraygunners begin shooting. Before Toby can fire, seven of the dogs are dead and the rest have run away.
"Watson-Crick splices," says Ivory Bill. "They're not really dogs, they only look like it. They'll tear out your throat. Used them in prison moats and such -- you couldn't hack them, not like an alarm system code -- but they got loose during the Flood."
"Are they breeding?" says Toby. Will they have to fight off wave after wave of these non-dogs, or are they few in number?
"Lord knows," says Ivory Bill.
Lotis Blue and White Sedge go out to make sure the dogs are dead. Then Tamaraw and Swift Fox and Rebecca and Toby join them, and they skin and butcher, with the spraygunners standing guard in case the other dogs come back. Toby's hands remember how to do this from long ago. The smell is the same too. A childhood smell.
The dog skins are laid aside, the meat's cut up and put into a pot. Toby feels a little sick. But she also feels hungry.
73
REN. SAINT RACHEL AND ALL BIRDS
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
I ask Croze if I should be helping to skin the dogs, but Croze says there's enough people doing it and I look tired, so why don't I lie down on his bed, inside the cobb house? The room is cool and smells the cobb-house way I remember, so I feel safe. Croze's bed is just a platform, but it has a silver Mo'Hair fleece on it with a sheet, and Croze says, Sleep tight and then goes away, and I take off my AnooYoo top and pants because it's getting too hot, and the Mo'Hair is soft and silky, and I go to sleep.
When the afternoon thunderstorm wakes me up, Croze is curled around behind me, and I can tell he's worried and sad; so I turn around and then we're hugging each other, and he wants to have sex. But all of a sudden I don't want to have sex without loving the person, and I haven't really loved anybody in that way since Jimmy; certainly not at Scales, where it was just acting, with other people's kinky scripts.
Also there's a dark place in me, like ink spilled into my brain -- I can't think about sex, in that place. It has brambles in it, and something about Amanda, and I don't want to be there. So I say, "Not yet." And even though Croze used to be kind of crude he seems to understand, so we just hold on to each other and talk.
He's full of plans. They'll build this, they'll build that; they'll get rid of the pigs, or else tame them. After the two Painballers are dead -- he personally will take care of that -- he'll take me, and Amanda and Shackie too, and we'll all go down to the beach and do some fishing. As for the MaddAddam group -- Bill and Sedge and Tamaraw and Rhino, all them -- they're really smart, so they'll have the communications going in no time.
"Who are we going to communicate with?" I ask, and Croze says there must be others out there. Then he tells me about the MaddAddams -- how they were working with Zeb, but then the CorpSeCorps tracked them down through a MaddAddam codenamed Crake, and they ended up as brain slaves in a place called the Paradice Project dome. It was a choice between that and being spraygunned, so they took the jobs. Then when the Flood came and the guards vanished, they deactivated the security and walked out, but that wasn't too hard for them because they're all brainiacs.
He's told me some of this before, but he hasn't said Paradice Project or Crake. "Just a minute," I say. "That's what they were working on inside the dome? Immortality?"
Yes, Croze says: they were all helping Crake with his big experiment: some kind of perfectly beautiful human gene splice that could live forever. They were the ones who'd done the heavy lifting on the BlyssPluss pill too, but they weren't allowed to take it themselves. Not that they were tempted: it gave you the best sex ever, but it had serious side effects, such as death.
"That's how the pandemic plague got started," Croze says. "They said Crake ordered them to put it in the supersex pill." I felt lucky all over again that I'd been in the Sticky Zone because I might've gulped down the BlyssPluss pill secretly even though Mordis said no drugs for Scalies. It sounded so great, like a whole other reality.
"Who'd do a thing like that?" I say. "A poison sex pill?" It was Glenn, it must have been. That's the sort of stuff he was telling the ReJoov Mr. Bigs, at Scales. He didn't tell about the poison part, of course. I remembered those nicknames, Oryx and Crake. I'd thought it was just sex talk, with Glenn and his main plank: a lot of people used animal names at such times. Panther and Tiger and Wolverine, Pussycat and Doggie-wog. So, not sex talk: codenames. Or maybe both.
For one split second I think about saying all this to Croze -- how I know quite a lot about this Crake from a former life. But then I'd have to tell about what I used to do at Scales -- not just the trapeze dancing or even Glenn making us purr and sing like birds, but the other things, the feather-ceiling room things. Croze wouldn't want to hear about that: guys hate to picture other guys doing sex things with you that they want to do themselves.
So instead I ask, "What about the splice people? The perfect ones? Did they actually make them?" Glenn always wanted everything to be more perfect.
"Yeah, they made them," says Croze, as if it's an everyday thing, making people.
