Crake allotted the special piss to men only; he said they’d need something important to do, something that didn’t involve childbearing, so they wouldn’t feel left out. Woodworking, hunting, high finance, war, and golf would no longer be options, he’d joked.
There are some disadvantages to this plan, in action—the ring-of-pee boundary line smells like a rarely cleaned zoo—but the circle is large enough so that there’s ample smell-free room inside it. Anyway Snowman is used to it by now.
He waits politely for the men to finish. They don’t ask him to join them: they already know his piss is useless. Also it’s their habit to say nothing while performing their task: they need to concentrate, to make sure their urine lands in exactly the right place. Each has his own three feet of borderland, his own area of responsibility. It’s quite a sight: like the women, these men—smooth-skinned, well-muscled—look like statues, and grouped like this they resemble an entire Baroque fountain. A few mermaids and dolphins and cherubs and the scene would be complete. Into Snowman’s head comes the image of a circle of naked car mechanics, each holding a wrench. A whole squad of Mr. Fix-its. A gay magazine centrefold. Witnessing their synchronized routine, he almost expects them to break into some campy chorus line from one of the seedier nightclubs.
The men shake off, break their circle, look over at Snowman with their uniformly green eyes, smile. They’re always so goddamn affable.
“Welcome, oh Snowman,” says the one called Abraham Lincoln. “Will you join us inside our home?” He’s getting to be a bit of a leader, that one. Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That’s how it’s always gone.
Snowman steps over the wet line on the ground, ambles along with the men. He’d just had a brilliant idea: what if he were to take some of the saturated earth with him on his journey, as a protective device? It might ward off the wolvogs. But on second thought, the men would find the gap dug in their defences and would know he’d done it. Such an act could be misinterpreted: he wouldn’t want to be suspected of weakening their fortress, exposing their young to danger.
He’ll have to cook up a new directive from Crake, present it to them later. Crake has told me you must collect an offering of your scent. Get them all to piss in a tin can. Sprinkle it around his tree. Make a fairy ring. Draw his own line in the sand.
They reach the open space at the centre of the territorial circle. Off to one side, three of the women and one man are tending to a little boy, who appears to be hurt in some way. These people are not immune from wounds—the children fall down or bash their heads on trees, the women burn their fingers tending the fires, there are cuts and scrapes—but so far the injuries have been minor, and easily cured by purring.
Crake had worked for years on the purring. Once he’d discovered that the cat family purred at the same frequency as the ultrasound used on bone fractures and skin lesions and were thus equipped with their own self-healing mechanism, he’d turned himself inside out in the attempt to install that feature. The trick was to get the hyoid apparatus modified and the voluntary nerve pathways connected and the neocortex control systems adapted without hampering the speech abilities. There’d been quite a few botched experiments, as Snowman recalled. One of the trial batch of kids had manifested a tendency to sprout long whiskers and scramble up the curtains; a couple of the others had vocal-expression impediments; one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.
Crake did it though, thinks Snowman. He pulled it off. Just look at the four of them now, heads down close to the child, purring away like car engines.
“What happened to him?” he asks.
“He was bitten,” says Abraham. “One of the Children of Oryx bit him.”
This is something new. “What kind?”
“A bobkitten. For no reason.”
“It was outside our circle, it was in the forest,” says one of the women—Eleanor Roosevelt? Empress Josephine?—Snowman can’t always remember their names.
“We were forced to hit it with rocks, to make it go away,” says Leonardo da Vinci, the man in the purring quartet.
So the bobkittens are hunting kiddies now, thinks Snowman. Maybe they’re getting hungry—as hungry as he is himself. But they have lots of rabbits to choose from, so it can’t be simple hunger. Maybe they see the Children of Crake, the little ones anyway, as just another kind of rabbit, though easier to catch.
“Tonight we will apologize to Oryx,” says one of the women—Sacajawea?—“for the rocks. And we will request her to tell her children not to bite us.”
He’s never seen the women do this—this communion with Oryx—although they refer to it frequently. What form does it take? They must perform some kind of prayer or invocation, since they can hardly believe that Oryx appears to them in person. Maybe they go into trances. Crake thought he’d done away with all that, eliminated what he called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons, he’d maintained. It had been a difficult problem, though: take out too much in that area and you got a zombie or a psychopath. But these people are neither.
They’re up to something though, something Crake didn’t anticipate: they’re conversing with the invisible, they’ve developed reverence. Good for them, thinks Snowman. He likes it when Crake is proved wrong. He hasn’t caught them making any graven images yet, however.
“Will the child be all right?” he asks.
“Yes,” says the woman calmly. “Already the tooth holes are closing. See?”
The rest of the women are doing the things they usually do in the morning. Some are tending the central fire; others squat around it, warming themselves. Their body thermostats are set for tropical conditions, so they sometimes find it cold before the sun is high. The fire is fed with dead twigs and branches, but primarily with dung, made into patties the size and shape of hamburgers and dried in the noonday sun. Since the Children of Crake are vegetarians and eat mostly grass and leaves and roots, this material burns well enough. As far as Snowman can tell, fire-tending is about the only thing the women do that might be classified as work. Apart from helping to catch his weekly fish, that is. And cooking it for him. On their own behalf they do no cooking.
“Greetings, oh Snowman,” says the next woman he comes to. Her mouth is green from the breakfast she’s been chewing. She’s breastfeeding a year-old boy, who looks up at Snowman, lets the nipple pop out of his mouth, and begins to cry. “It’s only Snowman!” she says. “He won’t hurt you.”
Snowman still hasn’t got used to it, the growth rate of these kids. The yearling looks like a five-year-old. By the age of four he’ll be an adolescent. Far too much time was wasted in childrearing, Crake used to say. Childrearing, and being a child. No other species used up sixteen years that way.
Some of the older children have spotted him; they come closer, chanting, “Snowman, Snowman!” So he hasn’t yet lost his allure. Now all the people are gazing at him curiously, wondering what he’s doing here. He never arrives without a reason. On his first visits they’d thought—judging from his appearance—that he must be hungry, and they’d offered him food—a couple of handfuls of choice leaves and roots and grass, and several caecotrophs they’d kept especially for him—and he’d had to explain carefully that their food was not his food.
He finds the caecotrophs revolting, consisting as they do of semi-digested herbage, discharged through the anus and reswallowed two or three times a week. This had been another boy-genius concept on the part of Crake. He’d used the vermiform appendix as the base on which to construct the necessary organ, reasoning that at an earlier evolutionary stage, when the ancestral diet had been higher in roughage, the appendix must have fulfilled some such function. But he’d stolen the specific idea from the Leporidae, the hares and rabbits, which depend on caecotrophs rather than on several stomachs like the ruminants. Maybe this is why bobkittens have started hunting the young Crakers, Snowman thinks: beneath the citrus overlay, they can smell the rabbity aroma of the caecotrophs.