Year of the Flood: Novel (10 page)

MY BODY IS MY EARTHLY ARK

My body is my earthly Ark,
It’s proof against the Flood;
It holds all Creatures in its heart,
And knows that they are good.

It’s builded firm of genes and cells,
And neurons without number;
My Ark enfolds the million years
That Adam spent in slumber.

And when Destruction swirls around,
To Ararat I’ll glide;
My Ark will then come safe to land
By light of Spirit’s guide.

With Creatures all, in harmony
I’ll pass my mortal days,
While each in its appointed voice
Sings the Creator’s praise.

From
The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

18

TOBY. SAINT CRICK’S DAY

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

In the northern meadow the dead boar is still lying. The vultures have been at it, though they can’t get through the tough hide: they’re limited to eyes and tongue. They’ll have to wait until it rots and bursts before they can really dig in.

Toby turns her binoculars skyward, at the crows racketing around. When she looks back, two liobams are crossing the meadow. A male, a female, strolling along as if they own the place. They stop at the boar, sniff briefly. Then they continue their walk.

Toby stares at them, fascinated: she’s never seen a liobam in the flesh, only pictures. Am I imagining things? she wonders. No, the liobams are actual. They must be zoo animals freed by one of the more fanatical sects in those last desperate days.

They don’t look dangerous, although they are. The lion-sheep splice was commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists in order to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They’d reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together. But the result hadn’t been strictly vegetarian.

Still, the liobams seem gentle enough, with their curly golden hair and twirling tails. They’re nibbling flower heads, they don’t look up; yet she has the sense that they’re perfectly aware of her. Then the male opens its mouth, displaying its long, sharp canines, and calls. It’s an odd combination of baa and roar: a bloar, thinks Toby.

Her skin prickles. She doesn’t relish the thought of one of those creatures leaping on her from behind a shrub. If it’s her fate to be mangled and devoured, she’d prefer a more conventional beast of prey. Still, they are astounding. She watches them while they gambol together, then sniff the air and saunter away to the edge of the forest, vanishing into dappled shade.

How Pilar would have enjoyed seeing those, she thinks. Pilar, and Rebecca, and little Ren. And Adam One. And Zeb. All dead now.

Stop it, she tells herself. Just stop that right now.

She sidesteps carefully down the stairs, using her mop handle for balance. She keeps expecting — still — that the elevator doors will open, the lights blink on, the air conditioning begins to breathe, and someone — who? — will step out.

She goes down the long hall, walking softly on the increasingly spongy carpet, past the line of mirrors. There’s no shortage of mirrors in the Spa: the ladies needed to be reminded by harsh light of how bad they looked, and then by soft light of how good they might yet appear with a little costly help. But after her first few weeks alone she’d covered the mirrors with pink towels to avoid being startled by her own shape as it flitted from one frame to the next.

“Who lives here?” she says out loud. Not me, she thinks. This thing I’m doing can hardly be called living. Instead I’m lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That’s all.

She spends the rest of the morning sitting in a kind of stupor. Once, this would have been meditation, but she can hardly call it that now. Paralyzing rage can still take hold of her, it seems: impossible to know when it will strike. It begins as disbelief and ends in sorrow, but in between those two phases her whole body shakes with anger. Anger at whom, at what? Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she’s here for a reason — to bear witness, to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can’t.

It’s wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There’s nothing to be accomplished by it.

During the heat of the day, she naps. Trying to stay awake through the noontime steambath is a waste of energy.

She sleeps on a massage table in one of the cubicles where the Spa clients took their organic-botanic treatments. There are pink sheets and pink pillows, and pink blankets too — soft cuddly colours, pampering infant colours — though she doesn’t need the blankets, not in this weather.

She’s been having some difficulty waking up. She must fight against lethargy. It’s a strong desire — to sleep. To sleep and sleep. To sleep forever. She can’t live only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can’t see any future. Maybe she’ll go on from day to day and year to year until she simply withers, folds in on herself, shrivels up like an old spider.

Or she could take a shortcut. There’s always the Poppy in its red bottle, there are always the lethal amanita mushrooms, the little Death Angels. How soon before she sets them loose inside herself and lets them fly away with her on their white, white wings?

To cheer herself up, she opens her jar of honey. It’s the last one remaining from the honey she extracted so long ago — she and Pilar — up on the Edencliff Rooftop. She’s been saving it all these years as if it’s a protective charm. Honey doesn’t decay, said Pilar, as long as you keep water out of it: that’s why the ancients called it the food of immortality.

She swallows one fragrant spoonful, then another. It was hard work collecting that honey: the smoking of the hives, the painstaking removal of the combs, the extracting. It took delicacy and tact. The bees had to be spoken to and persuaded, not to mention temporarily gassed, and sometimes they’d sting, but in her memory the whole experience is one of unblemished happiness. She knows she’s deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.

19

Gradually, Toby stopped thinking she should leave the Gardeners. She didn’t really believe in their creed, but she no longer disbelieved. One season blended into the next — rainy, stormy, hot and dry, cooler and dry, rainy and warm — and then one year into another. She wasn’t quite a Gardener, yet she wasn’t a pleeblander any more. She was neither the one nor the other.

She’d venture out onto the street now, though she didn’t go far from the Garden, and she’d cover herself well and wear a nose cone and a wide sunhat. She still had nightmares about Blanco — the snakes on his arms, the headless women chained to his back, his skinless-looking blue-veined hands coming for her neck.
Say you love me! Say it, bitch!
During the worst times with him, during the most terror, the most pain, she’d focus on those hands coming off at the wrists. The hands, other parts of him. Grey blood gushing out. She’d picture him stuffed into a garboil boiler, alive. Those had been violent thoughts, and since joining the Gardeners she’d sincerely tried to erase them from her brain. But they kept coming back. She was told by those in nearby sleeping cubicles that she sometimes made what they called “signals of distress” in her sleep.

Adam One was aware of these signals. She had come, over time, to realize it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Though his beard had now turned an innocent feathery white and his blue eyes were round and guileless as a baby’s, though he seemed so trusting and vulnerable, Toby felt she would never encounter anyone as strong in purpose. He didn’t wield this purpose like a weapon, he simply floated along inside it and let it carry him. That would be hard to attack: like attacking the tide.

“He’s in Painball now, my dear,” he told her one fine Saint Mendel’s Day. “He may not ever be released. Perhaps he will return to the elements there.”

Toby’s heart fluttered. “What did he do?”

“Killed a woman,” said Adam One. “The wrong kind of woman. A woman from one of the Corps who was seeking excitement in the pleeblands. I wish they wouldn’t do that. The CorpSeCorps were forced to act, this time.”

Toby had heard about Painball. It was a facility for condemned criminals, both political ones and the other kind: they had a choice of being spraygunned to death or doing time in the Painball Arena, which wasn’t an arena at all, but more like an enclosed forest. You got enough food for two weeks, plus the Painball gun — it shot paint, like a regular paintball gun, but a hit in the eyes would blind you, and if you got the paint on your skin you’d start to corrode, and then you’d be an easy target for the throat-slitters on the other team. For everyone who went in was assigned to one of two teams: the Red, the Gold.

Woman criminals didn’t choose Painball much, they chose the sprayguns. So did most of the politicals. They knew they wouldn’t stand a chance in there, they preferred to just get it over with. Toby could understand that.

For a long time they’d kept the Painball Arena secret, like cock-fighting and Internal Rendition, but now, it was said, you could watch it onscreen. There were cameras in the Painball forest, hidden in trees and built into rocks, but often there wasn’t much to see except a leg or an arm or a blurry shadow, because the Painballers were understandably stealthy. But once in a while there’d be a hit, right on screen. If you survived for a month, you were good; longer than that, very good. Some got hooked on the adrenalin and didn’t want to come out when their time was up. Even the CorpSeCorps professionals were scared of the long-term Painballers.

Some teams would hang their kill on a tree, some would mutilate the body. Cut off the head, tear out the heart and kidneys. That was to intimidate the other team. Eat part of it, if food was running low or just to show how mean you were. After a while, thought Toby, you wouldn’t just cross the line, you’d forget there ever were any lines. You’d do whatever it takes.

She had a quick vision of Blanco, headless, hanging upside down. What did she feel about that? Pleasure? Pity? She couldn’t tell.

She asked to do a Vigil, and spent it on her knees, attempting to mind-meld with a plantful of green peas. The vines, the flowers, the leaves, the pods. So green and soothing. It almost worked.

One day, old walnut-faced Pilar — Eve Six — asked Toby if she wanted to learn about bees. Bees and mushrooms — these were Pilar’s specialties. Toby liked Pilar, who seemed kind, and who had a serenity she envied; so she said yes.

“Good,” said Pilar. “You can always tell the bees your troubles.” So Adam One wasn’t the only person to have registered Toby’s worry.

Pilar took her to visit the beehives, and introduced her to the bees by name. “They need to know you’re a friend,” she said. “They can smell you. Just move slowly,” she cautioned as the bees coated Toby’s bare arm like golden fur. “They’ll know you next time. Oh — if they do sting, don’t slap them. Just brush the sting off. But they won’t sting unless they’re frightened, because stinging kills them.”

Pilar had a fund of bee lore. A bee in the house means a visit from a stranger, and if you kill the bee, the visit will not be a good one. If the beekeeper dies, the bees must be told, or they will swarm and fly away. Honey helps an open wound. A swarm of bees in May, worth a cool day. A swarm of bees in June, worth a new moon. A swarm of bees in July, not worth a squashed fly. All the bees of a hive are one bee: that’s why they’ll die for the hive. “Like the Gardeners,” Pilar said. Toby couldn’t tell whether or not she was joking.

The bees were agitated by her at first, but after a while they accepted her. They allowed her to extract the honey by herself, and she got stung only twice. “The bees made a mistake,” Pilar told her. “You must ask permission of their Queen, and explain to them that you mean them no harm.” She said you had to speak out loud because the bees couldn’t read your mind precisely, any more than a person could. So Toby did speak, though she felt like a fool. What would anyone down there on the sidewalk think if they saw her talking to a swarm of bees?

According to Pilar, the bees all over the world had been in trouble for decades. It was the pesticides, or the hot weather, or a disease, or maybe all of these — nobody knew exactly. But the bees on the Rooftop Garden were all right. In fact, they were thriving. “They know they’re loved,” said Pilar.

Toby doubted this. She doubted a lot of things. But she kept her doubts to herself, because
doubt
wasn’t a word the Gardeners used much.

After a while, Pilar took Toby down to the dank cellars below the Buenavista Condos and showed her where the mushrooms were grown. Bees and mushrooms went together, said Pilar: the bees were on good terms with the unseen world, being the messengers to the dead. She tossed that crazed little factoid off as if it was something everyone knew, and Toby pretended to ignore it. Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The part you could see — what most people called a mushroom — was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.

There were mushrooms for eating, mushrooms for medicinal uses, and mushrooms for visions. These last were used only for the Retreats and the Isolation Weeks, though sometimes they might be good for certain medical conditions, and even to ease people through their Fallow states, when the Soul was refertilizing itself. Pilar said that everyone had a Fallow state sometime. But it was dangerous to stay Fallow too long, “It’s like going down the stairs,” she said, “and never coming back up. But the mushrooms can help with that.”

There were three kinds of mushrooms, said Pilar — Never Poisonous, Employ with Caution and Advice, and Beware. They all had to be memorized. Puffballs, any species: Never Poisonous. The psilocybins: Employ with Caution and Advice. All amanitas, and especially amanita phalloides, the Death Angel: Beware.

“Aren’t those very dangerous?” said Toby.

Pilar nodded. “Oh yes. Very dangerous.”

“Then why do you grow them?”

“God wouldn’t have made poisonous mushrooms unless He intended us to use them sometimes,” said Pilar.

Pilar was so mild-mannered and gentle that Toby couldn’t believe she’d just heard this. “You wouldn’t poison anyone!” she said.

Pilar gave her a straight look. “You never know, dear,” she said. “When you might have to.”

Now Toby spent all her spare hours with Pilar — tending the Edencliff beehives and the crops of buckwheat and lavender grown for the bees on adjacent rooftops, extracting the honey and storing it in jars. They stamped the labels with the little bee stamp that Pilar used instead of lettering, and set some jars aside to add to the preserved foods in the Ararat that Pilar had built behind a moveable cinder block in the Buenavista cellar wall. Or they cared for the Poppy plants and collected the thick juice from their seed pods, or pottered among the mushroom beds in the Buenavista cellar, or simmered elixirs and remedies and the honey-and-rose liquid skin emulsion they’d sell at the Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange.

Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.

At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth.