An oval of chairs is arranged around the hammock, as if Jimmy is the central offering at a feast: a giant salmon, a boar on a platter. Three Crakers are purring over him, taking turns: two men and a woman, gold, ivory, ebony. It’s a different three every few hours. Do they have only so much purring quotient, are they like batteries that have to be recharged? Naturally they need time off to graze and water themselves, but does the purring itself have a sort of electrical frequency?
We’ll never know, thinks Toby, holding Jimmy’s nose to make him open his mouth: no way of wiring up their brains for scientific studies, not any more. Which is lucky for them. In the olden days they’d have been kidnapped from the Paradice Project dome by some rival Corp, then injected and jolted and probed and sliced apart to see how they were put together. What made them tick, what made them purr, what made them click. What, if anything, made them sick. They’d have ended up as slabs of DNA in a freezer.
Jimmy swallows, sighs; his left hand twitches. “How has he been today?” Toby asks the three Crakers. “Has he been awake at all?”
“No, Oh Toby,” says the gold-coloured man. “He is travelling.” This one has bright red hair, long slender limbs; despite the skin colour, he looks like something from a children’s storybook. An Irish folktale.
“But now he has stopped,” says the ebony man. “He has climbed into a tree.”
“Not his real tree,” says the ivory woman. “Not the tree he lives in.”
“He has gone to sleep in this tree,” says the ebony man.
“You mean, he’s sleeping inside his sleep?” says Toby. This seems wrong: it shouldn’t be possible. “In the tree in his dream?”
“Yes, Oh Toby,” says the ivory woman. All three of them gaze at her with their lambent green eyes, as if she’s twirling a piece of string and they are bored cats.
“Perhaps he will sleep for a long time,” says the golden man. “He is stuck there, in the tree. If he will not wake up and travel to here, he will not wake up at all.”
“But he’s getting better!” says Toby.
“He is afraid,” says the ivory woman in a matter-of-fact voice. “He is afraid of what is in this world. He is afraid of the bad men, he is afraid of the Pig Ones. He doesn’t want to be awake.”
“Can you talk to him?” says Toby. “Can you tell him it’s better to be awake?” No harm in trying: maybe they have some form of inaudible communication that might reach Jimmy, wherever he is. A wavelength, a vibration.
But now they aren’t looking at her. They’re looking at Ren and Lotis Blue, who are walking over with Amanda in tow, sheltering behind them.
The three of them sit down on the empty chairs, Amanda hesitantly. Ren and Lotis Blue are muddy from their building activities, but Amanda is pristine. The other two give her a shower every morning, choose a fresh bedsheet for her, braid her hair.
“We thought we’d take a break from the house,” says Ren. “See how Jimmy — see how Snowman-the-Jimmy is doing.”
The ivory woman smiles widely at them, the two men smile less widely: the Craker men are nervous around the younger cobb-house women now. Ever since they’ve learned that rambunctious group copulation is not acceptable, they don’t know what’s expected of them. They begin conferring together in low voices, leaving the ivory woman as the sole purrer.
Is she blue? One is blue. Two others were blue, we joined our blue to their blue but we did not make them happy. They are not like our women, they are not happy, they are broken. Did Crake make them? Why did he make them that way, so they are not happy? Oryx will take care of them. Will Oryx take care of them, if they are not like our women? When Snowman-the-Jimmy wakes up, we will ask him these things.
I’d like to be a fly on the wall, thinks Toby. Listening to Jimmy justifying the ways of Crake towards men, or semi-men.
“Will Jimmy — will Snowman-the-Jimmy be okay?” asks Lotis Blue.
“I think so,” says Toby. “It will depend on his …” She doesn’t want to say “immune system” because the Crakers will hear. (What is an immune system? It is something you have inside yourself that helps you and makes you strong. Where can we find an immune system? Is it from Crake, will he send us an immune system?, and so on.) “It depends on his dreaming.” No comment from the Crakers: so far, so good. “But I’m sure he’ll wake up soon.”
“He needs to eat,” says Lotis Blue. “He’s so thin! He can’t live on nothing.”
“You can go a long time without food,” says Ren. “They did fasts, at the Gardeners? You can go for days. Weeks.” She leans over and reaches out, smoothing back Jimmy’s hair. “I wish we could give him a shampoo,” she says. “He’s getting rank.”
“I think he just said something,” says Lotis Blue.
“It was only a mumble. We could sponge him off,” says Ren. “Like, a sponge bath.” She leans closer. “He looks a bit shrivelled. Poor Jimmy. I hope he doesn’t die.”
“I’m hydrating him,” says Toby. “And there’s the honey, I’m feeding him that.” Why is she sounding like a head nurse? “We do wash him,” she says defensively. “We do it every day.”
“Well anyway, he’s not so feverish,” says Lotis Blue. “He’s cooling down. Don’t you think?”
Ren feels Jimmy’s forehead. “I don’t know,” she says. “Jimmy, can you hear me?” They all watch: Jimmy doesn’t twitch. “I’d say he’s warm. Amanda? See what you think.” She’s trying to involve her, thinks Toby. Get her interested in something. Ren was always a kindly child.
If she is blue, the Lotis one, should we mate with her? No, we should not. Do not sing to them, do not pick flowers for them, do not wag your penis at them. These women scream with fright, they do not choose us even if we give them a flower, they do not like a wagging penis. We do not make them happy, we do not know why they scream. But sometimes they do not scream with fright, sometimes they …
“I need to lie down,” says Amanda. She stands up, walks unsteadily away towards the cobb house.
“I’m really worried about her,” says Ren. “She threw up this morning, she couldn’t eat any breakfast. That’s extreme Fallow.”
“Maybe it’s a bug,” says Lotis Blue. “Something she ate. We really need a better way of washing the dishes, I don’t think the water is …”
“Look,” says Ren. “He blinked.”
“He is hearing you,” says the ivory woman. “He is hearing your voice, and now he is walking. He is happy, he wants to be with you.”
“With me?” says Ren. “Really?”
“Yes. Look, he is smiling.” There is indeed a smile, or the trace of a smile, thinks Toby. Though maybe it’s only gas, as with babies.
The ivory woman waves away a mosquito that has settled on Jimmy’s mouth. “Soon he will be awake,” she says.
Zeb in the Dark
Zeb in the Dark
It’s evening. Toby has dodged her storytime session with the Crakers. Those stories take a lot out of her. Not only does she have to put on the absurd red hat and eat the ritual fish, which isn’t always what you’d call cooked, but there’s so much she needs to invent. She doesn’t like to tell lies, not deliberately, not lies as such, but she skirts the darker and more tangled corners of reality. It’s like trying to keep toast from burning while still having it transform into toast.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” she told them. “Tonight I must do an important thing for Zeb.”
“What is the important thing you must do, Oh Toby? We would like to be your helpers.” At least they didn’t ask what important means. They seem to have put together an idea of it: somewhere between dangerous and delicious.