Don’t Drink Death! said the posters. Union dockworkers in Australia, where they still had unions, refused to unload Happicuppa cargoes; in the United States, a Boston Coffee Party sprang up. There was a staged media event, boring because there was no violence—only balding guys with retro tattoos or white patches where they’d been taken off, and severe-looking baggy-boobed women, and quite a few overweight or spindly members of marginal, earnest religious groups, in T-shirts with smiley-faced angels flying with birds or Jesus holding hands with a peasant or God Is Green on the front. They were filmed dumping Happicuppa products into the harbour, but none of the boxes sank. So there was the Happicuppa logo, lots of copies of it, bobbing around on the screen. It could have been a commercial.
“Makes me thirsty,” said Jimmy.
“Shit for brains,” said Crake. “They forgot to add rocks.”
As a rule they watched the unfolding of events on the Noodie News, via the Net, but for a change they sometimes watched fully clothed newscasters on the wall-sized plasma screen in Uncle Pete’s leatherette-upholstered TV room. The suits and shirts and ties seemed bizarre to Jimmy, especially if he was mildly stoned. It was weird to imagine what all those serious-faced talking heads would look like minus their fashion items, full frontal on the Noodie News.
Uncle Pete sometimes watched too, in the evenings, when he was back from the golf course. He’d pour himself a drink, then provide a running commentary. “The usual uproar,” he said. “They’ll get tired of it, they’ll settle down. Everybody wants a cheaper cup of coffee—you can’t fight that.”
“No, you can’t,” Crake would say agreeably. Uncle Pete had a chunk of Happicuppa stock in his portfolio, and not just a little chunk. “What a mort,” Crake would say as he scanned Uncle Pete’s holdings on his computer.
“You could trade his stuff,” said Jimmy. “Sell the Happicuppa, buy something he really hates. Buy windpower. No, better—buy a croaker. Get him some South American cattle futures.”
“Nah,” said Crake. “I can’t risk that with a labyrinth. He’d notice. He’d find out I’ve been getting in.”
Things escalated after a cell of crazed anti-Happicuppa fanatics bombed the Lincoln Memorial, killing five visiting Japanese schoolkids that were part of a Tour of Democracy. Stop the Hipocrissy, read the note left at a safe distance.
“That’s pathetic,” said Jimmy. “They can’t even spell.”
“They made their point though,” said Crake.
“I hope they fry,” said Uncle Pete.
Jimmy didn’t answer, because now they were looking at the blockade of the Happicuppa head-office compound in Maryland. There in the shouting crowd, clutching a sign that read A Happicup Is a Crappi Cup, with a green bandanna over her nose and mouth, was—wasn’t it?—his vanished mother. For a moment the bandanna slipped down and Jimmy saw her clearly—her frowning eyebrows, her candid blue eyes, her determined mouth. Love jolted through him, abrupt and painful, followed by anger. It was like being kicked: he must have let out a gasp. Then there was a CorpSeCorps charge and a cloud of tear gas and a smattering of what sounded like gunfire, and when Jimmy looked again his mother had disappeared.
“Freeze the frame!” he said. “Turn back!” He wanted to be sure. How could she be taking such a risk? If they got hold of her she’d really disappear, this time forever. But after a brief glance at him Crake had already switched to another channel.
I shouldn’t have said anything, thought Jimmy. I shouldn’t have called attention. He was cold with fear now. What if Uncle Pete made the connection and phoned the Corpsmen? They’d be right on her trail, she’d be roadkill.
But Uncle Pete didn’t seem to have noticed. He was pouring himself another Scotch. “They should spraygun the whole bunch of them,” he said. “Once they’ve smashed those cameras. Who took that footage anyway? Sometimes you wonder who’s running this show.”
“So what was that about?” said Crake when they were alone.
“Nothing,” said Jimmy.
“I did freeze it,” said Crake. “I got the whole sequence.”
“I think you better erase it,” said Jimmy. He was past being frightened, he’d entered full-blown dejection. Surely at this very moment Uncle Pete was turning on his cellphone and punching in the numbers; hours from now it would be the CorpSeCorps interrogation all over again. His mother this, his mother that. He would just have to go through it.
“It’s okay,” said Crake, which Jimmy took to mean: You can trust me. Then he said, “Let me guess. Phylum Chordata, Class Vertebrata, Order Mammalia, Family Primates, Genus Homo, Species sapiens sapiens, subspecies your mother.”
“Big points,” said Jimmy listlessly.
“Not a stretch,” said Crake. “I spotted her right away, those blue eyes. It was either her or a clone.”
If Crake had recognized her, who else might have done so? Everyone in the HelthWyzer Compound had doubtless been shown pictures: You seen this woman? The story of his deviant mother had followed Jimmy around like an unwanted dog, and was probably half responsible for his poor showing at the Student Auction. He wasn’t dependable, he was a security risk, he had a taint.
“My dad was the same,” said Crake. “He buggered off too.”
“I thought he died,” said Jimmy. That’s all he’d ever got out of Crake before: dad died, full stop, change the subject. It wasn’t anything Crake would talk about.
“That’s what I mean. He went off a pleebland overpass. It was rush hour, so by the time they got to him he was cat food.”
“Did he jump, or what?” said Jimmy. Crake didn’t seem too worked up about it, so he felt it was okay to ask that.
“It was the general opinion,” said Crake. “He was a top researcher over at HelthWyzer West, so he got a really nice funeral. The tact was amazing. Nobody used the word suicide. They said ‘your father’s accident.’”
“Sorry about that,” said Jimmy.
“Uncle Pete was over at our place all the time. My mother said he was really supportive.” Crake said supportive like a quote. “She said, besides being my dad’s boss and best friend, he was turning out to be a really good friend of the family, not that I’d ever seen him around much before. He wanted things to be resolved for us, he said he was anxious about that. He kept trying to have these heart-to-heart talks with me—tell me all about how my father had problems.”
“Meaning your dad was a nutbar,” said Jimmy.
Crake looked at Jimmy out of his slanty green eyes. “Yeah. But he wasn’t. He was acting worried lately, but he didn’t have problems. He had nothing like that on his mind. Nothing like jumping. I’d have known.”
“You think he maybe fell off?”
“Fell off?”
“Off the overpass.” Jimmy wanted to ask what he’d been doing on a pleebland overpass in the first place, but it didn’t seem like the right time. “Was there a railing?”
“He was kind of uncoordinated,” said Crake, smiling in an odd way. “He didn’t always watch where he was going. He was head in the clouds. He believed in contributing to the improvement of the human lot.”
“You get along with him?”
Crake paused. “He taught me to play chess. Before it happened.”
“Well, I guess not after,” said Jimmy, trying to lighten things up, because by this time he was feeling sorry for Crake, and he didn’t like that at all.
How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid?