Year of the Flood: Novel (18 page)

35

Once she’d pulled herself together and arranged her face, Toby went to tell Adam One. “Pilar died,” she said. “She took care of it herself.”

“Yes, my dear. I know,” said Adam One. “We discussed it. She used the Death Angel, and then the Poppy?” Toby nodded. “But — this is a delicate matter, and I am counting on your discretion — she didn’t feel the Gardeners at large should be told the entire truth. Final self-journeying is a moral option only for the experienced and, I have to say, only for the terminally ill, as Pilar was; but it’s not one we should make widely available — especially not to our young people, who are impressionable and prone to indulge in morbid sulking and false heroics. I trust you’ve taken charge of those medicine bottles of Pilar’s? We wouldn’t want any accidents.”

“Yes,” said Toby. I need to get a box made, she thought. A metal one. With a lock.

“And now you’re Eve Six,” said Adam One, beaming. “I’m so pleased, my dear!”

“You discussed that with Pilar too, I suppose,” said Toby. The whole Vigil thing was just a stall, she thought. Keeping me on hold until Pilar could clinch the sale.

“It was her earnest desire,” said Adam One. “She had such a deep love and respect for you.”

“And I hope to be worthy of her,” she said.

So the two of them had trapped her. What could she say? She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes.

Adam One called a general Gardeners meeting, at which he made a lying speech. “Unfortunately,” he began, “our dear Pilar — Eve Six — passed away tragically earlier today after making a species identification error. She had many years of impeccable practice to her credit — but perhaps this was God’s way of harvesting our beloved Eve Six for His greater purposes. Let me remind you of the importance of learning our mushrooms thoroughly; and do confine your mushrooming activities to well-known species, such as the Morels, the Shaggy Manes, and the Puffballs — those about which there cannot be any confusion.

“While she was alive, Pilar expanded our mushroom and fungus collection enormously, adding a number of wild specimens. Some of these can be an aid to meditation during your Retreats, but please, do not try them without taking informed advice, and watch for those telltale cups and rings — we do not want any more unfortunate incidents of this nature.”

Toby felt outrage: how could Adam One disparage Pilar’s mycological expertise? Pilar would never have made such a mistake: the older Gardeners must know that. But maybe it was only a way of talking, just as suicide used to be called “death by misadventure.”

“I am happy to announce,” Adam One continued, “that our worthy Toby has agreed to fill the position of Eve Six. This was Pilar’s wish, and I’m sure you’ll all agree that there is no one more suited to the position than she. I myself rely upon her completely for … for many things. Her great gifts include not only her extensive knowledge, but also her good sense, her fortitude in adversity, and her kind heart. This is why she was Pilar’s choice.” There was some subdued nodding and smiling in Toby’s direction.

“Our beloved Pilar wished to be composted in Heritage Park,” Adam One continued. “She herself thoughtfully selected the shrub she wished planted on top of her — a fine specimen of Elderberry — so that in time we may expect some foraging dividends. As you know, an unofficial composting is a risk, as it incurs heavy penalties — the Exfernal World believes that even death itself should be regimented and, above all, paid for — but we will prepare for this event with caution and carry it out with discretion. Meanwhile, those of you who desire to see Pilar for the last time may do so at her cubicle. If you wish to present a floral tribute, may I suggest the nasturtiums, which are plentiful at this season. Please do not pick any of the garlic flowers, as we are saving them for propagation.”

There were some tears, and some outright sobbing from the children — Pilar had been well loved. Then the Gardeners filed away. Some smiled again at Toby to show they were pleased by her promotion. Toby herself stayed where she was, because Adam One was holding on to her arm.

“Forgive me, dear Toby,” he said when the rest had gone. “I apologize for my excursion into fiction. I must sometimes say things that are not transparently honest. But it is for the greater good.”

Toby and Zeb were chosen to select the location for Pilar’s composting, and to pre-dig the hole. Time was of the essence, said Adam One: the Gardeners did not go in for refrigeration and the weather was warm, so if they didn’t compost Pilar soon she was likely to undertake the process a little too rapidly herself.

Zeb had a couple of Heritage Park groundsman suits — green overalls and shirts, with the Park logo in white. The two of them put these on and set off with a couple of shovels and rakes and a mattock and a pitchfork rattling around in the back of their truck. It was news to Toby that the Gardeners had a truck, but they did. It was a compressed-air pickup, which they kept in a pet store over in the Sewage Lagoon. An abandoned pet store — not much call for pet pampering in the Lagoon, said Zeb, because if you did have a cat there it was likely to end up in someone else’s deep fryer.

The Gardeners painted different things on their truck, said Zeb, according to need. At the moment it had a Heritage Park logo on it, impeccably forged. “There’s a number of ex-graphic artists in the Gardeners,” said Zeb. “Of course, there’s a number of ex-everything.”

They drove along through the Sinkhole, honking to get the pleebrats out of their path and shooing away any who tried to force-clean their windows. “Have you done this before?” Toby asked.

“By ‘this,’ you mean burying old ladies illegally in public parkland? Nope,” said Zeb. “No Eves died on my watch until this. But there’s a first time for everything.”

“How dangerous is it?” said Toby.

“Guess we’ll find out,” said Zeb. “Course, we could just leave her in a vacant lot for the scavengers, but she might end up in a SecretBurger. Animal protein’s getting very pricey. Or she could get sold to the garboil folks, they’ll take anything. We’re saving her from that: old Pilar was death on oil, it was contra to her religion.”

“Not to yours?” said Toby.

Zeb chuckled. “I leave the finer points of doctrine to Adam One. I just use what I have to, to get where I need to go. C’mon, let’s grab a Happicuppa.” He swerved into a mallway lot.

“We’re drinking Happicuppa?” said Toby. “Gen-mod, sun-grown, sprayed with poisons? It kills birds, it ruins peasants — we all know that.”

“We’re in deep cover,” said Zeb. “You have to act the part!” He winked at her, then reached across her and opened the truck door. “Cut yourself some slack. I bet you used to be a babe until the Gardeners got to you.”

Used to be, thinks Toby. That about sums up everything. Nevertheless she was pleased: she hadn’t had a gender-weighted compliment for some time.

Happicuppa had once been a feature of such lunch breaks as she’d been able to snatch, back when she worked at SecretBurgers; it seemed a lifetime since she’d drunk any of the stuff. She ordered a Happicappuchino. She’d forgotten how delicious they could be. She drank it in sips: it could be years before she got another, if she ever did get one.

“We better go,” said Zeb before she was quite finished. “We’ve got a hole to dig. Put your cap on, stick your hair up under it, that’s how the girl parkies wear it.”

“Hey, Park bitch,” said a voice behind her. “Show us your shrub!” Toby was afraid to glance around. But Blanco was back in Painball again, Adam One had told her — that was the word on the street.

Zeb picked up on her fear. “If any guy bothers you, I’ll hit him with the mattock,” he said.

Back in the truck, they mowed their way through the pleebland streets until they reached the Heritage Parkland north gate. Zeb waved his forged pass at the gatekeepers and they drove through. The Park was officially pedestrian, so there were no vehicles other than theirs.

Zeb drove slowly, passing families of pleeblanders seated at the picnic tables with their barbecues going full blast. Rowdy groups of pleebrats were drinking and messing around. A rock bounced off the truck: the Heritage Parkies weren’t armed, and the pleebrats knew that. There’d been swarmings and even fatalities, Zeb told her. Something about a bunch of trees made people think they could cut loose. “Wherever there’s Nature, there’s assholes,” he said cheerfully.

They found a good location — a patch of open ground where the Elderberry shrub would get enough sunlight, and where they might not encounter too many tree roots while digging. Zeb set to work with the mattock, loosening the dirt; Toby shovelled. They’d put out a stand-alone sign: Planting Courtesy of HelthWyzer West. “If anyone asks, I’ve got the authorization,” said Zeb. “Right here in my pocket. Didn’t even cost that much.”

When the hole was deep enough they packed up, leaving the sign in place.

Pilar’s composting took place that afternoon. Pilar travelled to the site by truck, in a burlap sack labelled Mulch, with the Elderberry and a five-gallon water tank beside her. Nuala and Adam One marched the Buds and Blooms Choir through the Park, right past the burial spot, so anyone in the vicinity would be looking at them rather than at Zeb and Toby and their shrub planting. They were singing the “Mole Day Hymn” at the top of their lungs. When they came to the final verse, Shackleton and Crozier in their pleebrat T-shirt disguises jeered at them from the pathside. When Crozier tossed a bottle, the Buds and Blooms yelled and broke ranks and ran down the pathway. All the pleeblanders watched the chase with interest, hoping for violence. Zeb deftly slotted Pilar into the hole, still in her burlap sack, and positioned the Elderberry shrub on top of her. Toby shovelled and tamped; then they watered.

“Don’t look mournful,” Zeb told her. “Act like it’s only a job.”

There was another onlooker, a tall dark-haired boy. He wasn’t distracted by the Buds and Blooms sideshow; he stood leaning against a tree, as if indifferent. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a slogan that said,
THE LIVER IS EVIL AND MUST BE PUNISHED
.

“You know that boy?” said Toby. The T-shirt looked wrong. If he was a real pleebrat it would have fit him better.

Zeb glanced over. “Him? Why?”

“He’s taking an interest in us.” CorpSeCorps, she thought? No. Surely too young.

“Don’t stare,” said Zeb. “He knew Pilar. I let him know we’d be here.”

36

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier. And so it was with Toby, once she’d become an Eve. She could feel the Eve Six title seeping into her, eroding her, wearing away the edges of what she’d once been. It was more than a hair shirt, it was a shirt of nettles. How had she allowed herself to be sewn into it this way?

She knew more now, however. As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.

For instance: the Adams and Eves had a laptop. Toby had been shocked to discover this — wasn’t such a device in direct contravention of Gardener principles? — but Adam One had reassured her: they never went online with it except with extreme precaution, they used it mostly for the storage of crucial data pertaining to the Exfernal World, and they took care to conceal such a dangerous object from the Gardener membership at large — especially the children. Nevertheless, they had one. “It’s like the Vatican’s porn collection,” Zeb told her. “Safe in our hands.”

They kept their laptop in a concealed wall compartment in the small room behind the vinegar barrels, which was also where they held the bi-weekly Adam and Eve meetings. There was a door to this room, but before Eveship had closed in around her Toby had been told there was only a closet behind it, used for bottle storage. There were indeed some shelves for empty bottles, but the whole shelf unit swung open to reveal the room’s actual door. Both doors were kept locked: only the Adams and Eves had keys. Now Toby had a key too.

She ought to have realized the Adams and the Eves had some way of meeting together. They appeared to move and think as one, and they didn’t use phones or computers, so how would they have made their group decisions except face to face? She must have supposed they exchanged information chemically, like trees. But no, nothing so vegetable: they sat around a table like any other conclave and hammered out their positions — theological as well as practical — as ruthlessly as medieval monks. And, as with the monks, there was increasingly much at stake. That was worrying to Toby, for the Corporations tolerated no opposition, and the Gardener stance against commercial activities in the larger sense might well come to be construed as that. So Toby was not wrapped in some otherworldly sheepfold-like cocoon, as she’d once supposed. Instead she was walking the edge of a real and potentially explosive power.

For the Gardeners, it seemed, were no longer a tiny localized cult. They were growing in influence: far from being confined to the Sinkhole Edencliff Rooftop Garden and its neighbouring rooftops and the other buildings they controlled, they had branches in different pleebs, and even in other cities. They also had cells of hidden Exfernal sympathizers embedded at every level, even within the Corporations themselves. The information provided by these sympathizers was indispensable, according to Adam One: by means of it, the intentions and movements of their enemies could be monitored, at least in part.

The cells were referred to as Truffles because they were underground, rare, and valuable, because you never could tell where they might appear next, and because pigs and dogs were employed to sniff them out. Not that the Gardeners had anything against actual Pigs and Dogs, Adam One made haste to explain — only against their enslavement by the forces of darkness.

Although they’d hidden their distress from the mass of the Gardeners, the Adams and Eves had been badly frightened by the arrest of Burt. Some claimed the CorpSeCorps would offer the age-old devil’s bargain — information in exchange for your life. But the CorpSeCorps didn’t need to make deals, Zeb said grimly, because once they got started on their Internal Rendition procedures a person would say anything. Who knew how many buckets of incriminating lies were being squeezed out of poor Burt, along with his blood, shit, and vomit?

So the Adams and Eves expected a CorpSeCorps raid on the Garden at any moment. They set their rapid-evacuation plans in place, and alerted the Truffle cells, who could be counted on to hide them. Then Burt had been discovered in the vacant lot behind Scales and Tails, with freezer burns on his skin and minus his vital organs.

“They want it to look like a mob hit,” Zeb said at the Council meeting behind the Vinegar Room. “But it’s not convincing. A mob would do more gratuitous mutilation. Fun stuff.”

Nuala said it was disrespectful of Zeb to use the word
fun
in this context. Zeb said he was speaking ironically. Marushka Midwife, who rarely said anything, said that irony was overvalued. Zeb said he hadn’t noticed such overvaluation much among the Gardeners. Rebecca — who was now a powerful new Eve — Eve Eleven of Nutriment Combining — said everyone should get a grip and bite their tongues. Adam One said that a house divided against itself could not stand.

A spirited debate then took place concerning the disposal of Burt’s body. Burt had been an Adam, said Rebecca: he deserved to be illegally composted in the Heritage Park, like any other Adam or Eve. That would be fair. Philo the Fog — who was less foggy inside the Council Room than outside it — said this would be too dangerous: what if the CorpSeCorps had planted Burt’s cadaver as bait and were watching to see who came to collect it? Stuart the Screw said the CorpSeCorps already knew Burt had been a Gardener, so what would they learn by that? Zeb said maybe dead Burt was a message from the CorpSeCorps to the pleebmobs, to tell them to tighten up their operations and root out maverick freeloaders.

Nuala said, well, if they couldn’t compost poor Burt, maybe they could just go at night and sprinkle a spoonful of earth on him as a symbolic thing: she personally would feel a lot better in the Spirit if she could do that. Mugi said Burt was a meat-breath pig-eater who’d betrayed them, and he didn’t know why they were even talking about this. Adam One said they should take a moment of silence and put Light around Burt in their hearts, and Zeb said they’d already put so much light around him the guy was probably burning like a suicide bomber in a fried-chicken franchise. Nuala said Zeb was being frivolous. Adam One said they should meditate overnight and perhaps the solution would arrive by visionary inspiration. Philo said in that case he’d toke up.

But the next day, Burt’s corpse was no longer in the vacant lot: he’d been scooped by the early-bird garboil collectors, Zeb informed them, and was doubtless fuelling some Corps employee’s cityvan. Toby asked how he was sure of that, and Zeb grinned and said he had connections among the pleebrat gangs who’d snitch on anyone if you paid them.

Adam One made a speech to the Gardener membership at large in which he outlined the fate of Burt, called him a victim seduced by the spirit of materialist greed whom they should pity rather than condemn, and asked them all to be extra vigilant and to report any overly curious tourists and especially any unusual activities.

But no unusual activities were reported. Months went by, then more months. The daily chores and teaching hours went on as usual, and the Saints’ Days and Festivals kept their appointed rounds. Toby took up macramé, hoping it would cure her of idle daydreaming and fruitless desires, and increase her focus on the moment. The bees increased and multiplied, and Toby delivered the news to them every morning. The moon emerged from darkness, then plumped out, then dwindled. Several babies appeared, and an infestation of shiny green beetles, and a number of new Gardener converts. The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.