Year of the Flood: Novel (24 page)

46

The next day was Saint Aleksander Zawadzki of Galicia. A minor saint but one of Toby’s favourites. He’d lived in turbulent times — what times in Poland had ever not been turbulent? — but had followed his own peaceful and slightly dotty pursuits nonetheless, cataloguing the flowers of Galicia, naming its beetles. Rebecca liked him too: she’d put on her apron with the butterfly appliqués and made beetle biscuits for the small children’s snack time, ornamenting each one with an
A
and a Z. The children had made up their own little song about him:
Alexsander, Alexsander, beetle up your nose! Blow it on your handkerchief, stick it on a rose!

It was midmorning. The Hammerhead was still sleeping off the effects of yesterday’s Poppy: Toby had overdone it, but she didn’t feel too guilty, and now she had some time for her regular chores. She’d garbed up in her bee veil and gloves and lit the smudge in her bellows: as she’d explained to the bees, she intended to spend the morning extracting the full honeycombs. Before she’d begun the smoking, however, Zeb appeared.

“Crappy news,” he said. “Your Painball buddy’s out again.” Like everyone at the Gardeners, Zeb knew the story of Toby’s rescue from Blanco by Adam One and the Buds and Blooms — it was part of oral history. But he also sensed her fear. Though they’d never discussed it.

Toby felt an ice needle shoot through her. She lifted up her veil. “Really?”

“Older and meaner,” said Zeb. “Twisted fuck should have been vulture pellets long ago. He must have friends in high places, though, because he’s back managing SecretBurgers, over in the Sewage Lagoon.”

“As long as he stays there,” said Toby. She tried to make her voice sound strong.

“The bees can wait,” said Zeb. He took her arm. “You need to sit down. I’ll do a snoop. Maybe he’s forgotten all about you.”

He took Toby to the kitchen. “Sweetheart, you look beat,” said Rebecca. “What’s wrong?” Toby told her.

“Oh shit,” said Rebecca. “I’ll make you some Rescue Tea, you look like you need it. Don’t you worry — that man’s karma will kill him one day.” But, thought Toby,
one day
was far too distant.

It was afternoon. Many of the general-membership Gardeners were gathered on the roof. Some were retying the tomatoes and climbing zucchinis that had blown over in the storm, a more violent one than usual. Others sat in the shade, working at their knitting, their knotting, their mending. The Adams and Eves were restless, as they always were when they were harbouring a runaway — what if the Hammerhead had been followed? Adam One had posted sentinels; he himself was standing over by the roof’s edge in one-legged meditation pose, keeping an eye on the street below.

The Hammerhead had woken up, and Toby had set her to work picking snails off the lettuces; she’d told the rank-and-file Gardeners this was a new convert, and shy. They’d seen so many new converts come and go.

“If we have a visit,” Toby said to the Hammerhead, “anything like an inspection, pull your sunhat down and go on with the snails. Act like background.” She herself was smoking the bees, on the theory that it was best to carry on as usual.

Then Shackleton and Crozier and young Oates came pounding up the fire-escape stairs, followed by Amanda, then Zeb. They headed straight over to Adam One. He motioned to Toby with his chin:
join us.

“There’s been a scuffle in the Sewage Lagoon,” said Zeb after they’d grouped around Adam One.

“Scuffle?” said Adam One.

“We were just looking,” said Shackleton. “But he saw us.”

“He called us fucking meat-stealers,” said Crozier. “He was drunk.”

“Not drunk: wasted,” said Amanda with authority. “He tried to hit me, but I did a
satsuma.”
Toby smiled a little: it was a mistake to underestimate Amanda. She was a tall sinewy Amazon by now, and she’d been studying Urban Bloodshed Limitation with Zeb. As had her two devoted henchmen. There were three if you counted Oates, though he was merely at the hopeless crush level.

“Who is ‘he’?” said Adam One. “Where was this?”

“SecretBurgers,” said Zeb. “We were checking it out — we heard Blanco was back.”

“Zeb pulled an
unagi
on him,” said Shackleton. “It was neat!”

“Did you have to actually go there?” said Adam One, a little peevishly. “We have other ways of …”

“Then the Asian Fusions swarmed him,” said Oates excitedly. “They had bottles!”

“He pulled a killer knife,” said Croze. “He notched a couple.”

“I hope there was no lasting damage,” said Adam One. “Much as we deplore the very existence of SecretBurgers, and the depredations of this — this unlucky individual, we want no violence.”

“Booth overturned, meat thrown around. All he suffered was cuts and bruises,” said Zeb.

“That is unfortunate,” said Adam One. “It’s true that we sometimes have to defend ourselves, and we’ve had trouble with this — with him before. But on this occasion, do I have the impression that we attacked first?” He frowned at Zeb. “Or provoked an attack? Is this correct?”

“Asshole had it coming,” said Zeb. “We should be getting medals.”

“Our way is the way of peace,” said Adam One, frowning even more.

“Peace goes only so far,” said Zeb. “There’s at least a hundred new extinct species since this time last month. They got fucking eaten! We can’t just sit here and watch the lights blink out. Have to begin somewhere. Today SecretBurgers, tomorrow that fucking gourmet restaurant chain. Rarity. That needs to go.”

“Our role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness,” said Adam One. “And to guard the memories and the genomes of the departed. You can’t fight blood with blood. I thought we’d agreed on that.”

There was a silence. Shackleton and Crozier and Oates and Amanda were staring at Zeb. Zeb and Adam One were staring at each other.

“Anyway, it’s too late now,” said Zeb. “Blanco’s raging.”

“Will he cross pleebmob boundaries?” said Toby. “Raid us here, in the Sinkhole?”

“Mood he’s in, no question,” said Zeb. “Ordinary mob guys don’t scare him any more. He’s multiple-session Painball.”

Zeb warned the assembled Gardeners, posted a line of watchers around the roof, and stationed the strongest gatekeepers at the bottom of the fire-escape stairs. Adam One protested, saying that to act like one’s enemies was to descend to their level. Zeb said that if Adam One wanted to handle defence matters in some other way he was free to do so, but if not he should keep his nose out of it.

“There’s movement,” said Rebecca, who was watching. “Three of them coming, it looks like.”

“Whatever you do,” Toby told the Hammerhead, “don’t cut and run. Don’t do anything that calls attention.” She went over to the roof’s edge to look.

Three heavyweights were muscling along the sidewalk. They had baseball bats. No sprayguns. Not CorpSeCorps then, just pleeb thugs: payback for the wreckage at SecretBurgers. One of the three was Blanco — she could spot him from any angle. What would he do? Bash her to death on the spot, or drag her away to do it more slowly elsewhere?

“What is it, my dear?” said Adam One.

“It’s him,” said Toby. “If he sees me, he’ll kill me.”

“Be of good cheer,” he said. “Nothing bad will be done to you.” But since Adam One thought that even the most terrible things happened for ultimately excellent though unfathomable reasons, Toby did not find this reassuring.

Zeb told her she’d better get their special guest out of sight, just in case, so she took the Hammerhead to her own cubicle and gave her a calming drink, heavy on the chamomile, with a little Poppy. The Hammerhead drifted off to sleep, and Toby sat watching her and hoping the two of them wouldn’t end up cornered. She found herself looking around for weapons. I suppose I could hit them with the Poppy bottle, she thought. But it’s not very big.

Then she walked back out to the Rooftop. She was still in her bee gear. She adjusted her heavy gloves, took up her bellows, and lowered her veil. “Stand by me,” she said to the bees. “Be my messengers.” As if they could hear.

The fight didn’t last long. Later, Toby heard Shackleton and Crozier and Oates enacting the full battle story for the younger children, who’d been hurried out of the way by Nuala. According to them, it had been epic.

“Zeb was brilliant,” said Shackleton. “He had it all planned out! They must’ve thought since we’re so pacifist and all, they could just … Anyway, it was like an ambush — we backed up the stairs, with them following.”

“And then, and then,” said Oates.

“And then, at the top, Zeb let the first guy lunge at him, and then he got the end of the guy’s baseball bat and kind of flung it, and the guy almost crashed into Rebecca, and she had this two-pronged fork, and then he went screaming right over the edge of the roof.”

“Like this!” said Oates, arms flailing.

“Then Stuart sprayed the next one with the plant hydrator,” said Crozier. “He says it works on cats.”

“Amanda did something to him. Didn’t you?” Shackleton said to her fondly. “Like, some Bloodshed Limitation move, like a
hamachi,
or — I don’t know what she did, but he went over the railing too. Did you kick him in the nuts or what?”

“I relocated him,” said Amanda demurely. “Like a snail.”

“Then the third one ran away,” said Oates. “The biggest guy. With bees all over him. Toby did that, it was wicked. Adam One wouldn’t let us go after him.”

“Zeb says this won’t be the end of it,” said Amanda.

Toby had her own version, in which everything had moved both very fast and very slowly. She’d placed herself behind the hives, and then the three of them had been right there, just emerging from the stair-top. A pale-faced man with a dark chin and a baseball bat, a scarred Redfish type, and Blanco. Blanco had spotted her immediately. “I see you, stringy-assed bitch!” he’d yelled. “You’re meat!” Her bee veil was no disguise. He had his knife out; he was grinning.

The first man had tangled with Rebecca and gone over the railing somehow, screaming on the way down, but the second one was still coming. Then Amanda — who’d been standing off to the side, looking ethereal and harmless — had raised her arm. Toby had seen a flash of light: was that glass? But Blanco was almost upon her: there was nothing between them but the hives.

She pushed the hives over — three of them. She was veiled, Blanco was not. The bees poured out, whining with anger, and went for him like arrows. He fled howling down the fire-escape stairs, flailing and slapping, trailing a plume of bees.

It took some time for Toby to set the hives back up. The bees were furious, and several Gardeners got stung. Toby apologized to the victims, and she and Katuro treated them with calamine and chamomile; but she apologized much more profusely to the bees, once she’d smoked them enough to make them drowsy: they’d sacrificed many of their own in the battle.

47

The Adams and Eves had a tense meeting in the hidden room behind the vinegar barrels. “That shit wouldn’t attack without authorization,” said Zeb. “It’s the CorpSeCorps behind it — they’re aware of some of the folks we’ve been helping out, so they’re working up to branding us as terrorist fanatics, like the Wolf Isaiahists.”

“Nope, it’s personal,” said Rebecca. “That man is mean as a snake, no disrespect to Snakes, and he was after Toby, is all. Once he’s stuck his pole in some hole, he thinks it’s his.” When Rebecca got worked up, she tended to revert to her earlier vocabulary and then regret it. “No offence, Toby,” she said.

“Surely the proximate cause is among us,” said Adam One. “The young people provoked him. And Zeb. We should have let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Dogs is right,” said Rebecca. “No disrespect to Dogs.”

“Two dead bodies on the sidewalk will hardly do our peaceful reputation any good,” said Nuala.

“Accidents. They fell off the roof,” said Zeb.

“And one got his throat cut and the other had his eye put out on the way down,” said Adam One. “As any forensic investigation will show.”

“Dangerous, brick walls,” said Katuro. “Things stick. Nails. Broken glass. Sharp things.”

“Maybe you’d like a few dead Gardeners better?” said Zeb.

“If your premise is correct,” said Adam One, “and this is a CorpSeCorps plot, has it occurred to you that those three may have been sent to provoke exactly such an incident? To cause us to break the law, thus providing an excuse for reprisals?”

“What was our choice?” said Zeb. “Let them squash us like bugs? Not that we squash Bugs,” he added.

“He’ll come back,” said Toby. “Whatever the reason, CorpSeCorps or not. As long as I stay here, I’ll be a target.”

“I think,” said Adam One, “that it would be best for your safety, dear Toby, and also for the safety of the Garden, if we were to place you in one of our Truffle niches in the Exfernal World. You can be of much use to us there. We’ll ask our pleebrat connections to spread the news that you are no longer among us. Perhaps your foe may then lack motivation, and we will be protected from aggression from that quarter, at least for the moment. How soon can we move her?” he asked Zeb.

“Consider it done,” said Zeb.

Toby went to her sleeping cubicle and packed her most necessary items — the bottled extracts, the dried herbs, the mushrooms. Pilar’s honey, the last three jars. She left some of each thing behind for whoever might be filling her empty Eve Six shoes.

She remembered her early desire to leave the Garden, out of boredom and claustrophobia, and the desire for what she used to think of as a life of her own; but now that she was actually going, it felt like an expulsion. No: more like a wrenching, a severing, a skin peeling off. She resisted the urge to drink some Poppy, to dull the edge. She had to stay alert.

Another hurt: she was failing Pilar. Would she have time to say goodbye to the bees, and if she didn’t, would the hives die? Who would take over as beekeeper? Who had the skills? She covered her head with a scarf and hurried out to the hives.

“Bees,” she said out loud. “I have news.” Did the bees pause in mid-air, were they listening? Several came to investigate her; they lit on her face, exploring her emotions through the chemicals on her skin. She hoped they’d forgiven her for tipping their hives. “You must tell your Queen I’ve had to leave,” she said. “Nothing to do with you, you’ve performed your duties well. My enemy is forcing me to go. I’m sorry. I hope that when we meet again it will be under happier circumstances.” She always found herself using a formal style with the bees.

The bees buzzed and fizzed; they appeared to be discussing her. She wished she could take them with her like a large, golden, furry collective pet. “I’ll miss you, bees,” she said. As if in answer, one of them started crawling up her nostril. She breathed it sharply out. Maybe we wear hats for these interviews, she thought, so they won’t go into our ears.

She went back to her cubicle, where an hour later Adam One and Zeb joined her. “You’d better wear this, dear Toby,” said Adam One. He was carrying a furzoot — a fluffy pink duck with flapping red rubbery feet and a smiling yellow plastic bill. “The nose cone’s built in. It’s the latest fabric. Mo’Hair NeoBiofur — it exhales for you. Or so the label claims.”

The two of them waited on the other side of the cubicle curtain while Toby took off her sombre Gardener dress and put on the furzoot. NeoBiofur or not, it was hot in there. And dark. She knew she was looking out through a pair of round white eyes with big black pupils, but it felt like peering through a keyhole.

“Flap your wings,” said Zeb.

Toby moved her arms up and down inside the zoot arms and the duck suit quacked. It sounded like an old man blowing his nose.

“If you want to make the tail wiggle, stamp your left foot.”

“How do I talk?” said Toby. She had to say it again, louder.

“Through the right earhole,” said Adam One.

Oh great, thought Toby. You quack with your foot, you talk through your earhole. I won’t ask how to do any of the other bodily functions.

She changed back into her dress, and Zeb stuffed the furzoot into a duffle bag. “I’ll drive you in the truck,” he said. “It’s right out front.”

“We’ll be in touch very soon, my dear,” said Adam One. “I regret … it’s unfortunate that … Keep the Light around …”

“I’ll try,” said Toby.

The Gardeners’ forced-air truck now had a logo on it that said,
PARTY TIME
. Toby sat in the front with Zeb. The Hammerhead was in the back, disguised as a box of balloons: Zeb said he was killing two birds with one stone.

“Sorry,” he added.

“For what?” Toby asked. Sorry that she was going? She felt a small pulse-beat.

“Killing two birds. Not good to mention bird murder.”

“Oh. Right,” said Toby. “It’s okay.”

“We’ll send the Hammerhead down the line,” said Zeb. “We’ve got connections among the bag-heavers for the sealed bullet train; she can go as cargo, we’ll mark her as Fragile. We’ve got a Truffle cell in Oregon — they’ll keep her out of sight.”

“How about me?” said Toby.

“Adam One wants you closer to the Garden,” said Zeb, “in case Blanco gets Painballed again and you can come back. We’ve got an Exfernal spot for you, but it’ll take a few days to set up. Meanwhile, just hang out in your zoot. Street of Dreams, where they peddle the custom genes — that place is crawling with furzooters, nobody will notice you. Now, better scrunch down — we’re going through the Sewage Lagoon.”

Zeb delivered Toby to the FenderBender Body Shop, where the resident Gardeners whisked her out of the truck and stashed her in the former hydraulic-lift pit, which they’d covered with trapdoor flooring. There she breathed ancient engine-oil fumes and ate a sparse meal of damp soybits and mashed turnips, washed down with Sumac. She slept on an old futon, using her furzoot as a pillow. There was no biolet in there, only a rusted Happicuppa coffee can.
Use what’s to hand
was a cherished Gardener motto.

Not all the members of the FenderBender rat colony had been successfully relocated to the Buenavista Condos, she discovered. But those remaining were not overtly hostile.

The next morning she began her spurious job — waddling along the Street of Dreams inside a wodge of fake fur, quacking at intervals and wiggling her tail, wearing a sandwich board, and handing out brochures. On the front of the board it said,
UGLY DUCKLINGS TO LOVELY SWANS AT THE ANOOYOO SPA-IN-THE-PARK
!
Goose Your Self-Esteem!
On the back,
ANOOYOO
!
DO IT FOR YOO
! On the brochures it said,
Epidermal enhancement! Lower cost! Avoid gene errors! Fully reversible!
AnooYoo didn’t sell gene therapy — nothing so radical or permanent. Instead it sold more superficial treatments. Herbal elixirs, system cleansers, dermal mood lifts; vegetable nanocell injections, mildew-formula micromesh resurfacing, heavy-duty face creams, rehydrating balms. Iguana-based hue changes, microbial spot removal, flat-wart leech peels.

She handed out many brochures, but she also got hassled by some of the gene-shop owners: on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream. There were a number of other furzooters working the Street — a lion, a Mo’Hair sheep, two bears, and three other ducks. Toby wondered how many of them were really who they claimed to be: if she was hiding out in plain view, others in need of invisibility must have discovered the same solution.

If she’d been working for a genuine furzoot outfit as she’d done once before, she’d have clocked her hours at day’s end, climbed out of her zoot, and pocketed the receipt for her e-pay. As it was, Zeb collected her in the pickup. Its logo now said, BIGZOOT — SAY IT WITH FURORE! She rolled herself into the back, still inside her zoot, and Zeb ferried her to another Gardener enclave — an abandoned bank in the Sewage Lagoon. The various banking corps had once paid the local pleebmob for protection, but soon their Tex-Mex identity-theft specialists were skipping in and out as freely as mice. Finally the banks had given up and decamped, because no employee’s idea of a business day well spent was lying on the floor with duct tape over your mouth while an identity filcher hacked the accounts, gaining access with your cut-off thumb.

The old-fashioned bank vault was a much better place to spend the night than the hydraulic-lift pit had been. Cool, rat-free, no gas fumes; a lingering odour of the gently oxidizing paper money of yesteryear. But then Toby started wondering what would happen if someone inadvertently closed and locked the vault door and then forgot about her, so she didn’t sleep very well.

The next day it was the Street of Dreams again. The duck costume was intolerable in the heat, one of her rubber feet was coming loose, and the nose-cone filter was dysfunctional. What if the Gardeners abandoned her and she was left to eddy around in the Dreams-land, transformed into a non-existent bird-animal and dehydrating herself to death, to be found one day in a welter of damp pink faux feathers, clogging up the drains?

But finally Zeb picked her up. He drove her to a clinic at the back of a Mo’Hair franchise outlet. “We’re doing the hair and skin,” he said. “You’re going dark. And the fingerprints, and the voiceprint. Plus a bit of recontouring.” The biotech for changing iris pigment was risky — there’d been some unpleasant bulging effects, said Zeb — so she’d have to use contacts. Green ones — he’d picked out the colour himself.

“Higher voice, or lower?” he asked her.

“Lower,” said Toby, hoping she wouldn’t come out a baritone.

“Good choice,” said Zeb.

The doctor was Chinese, and very smooth. There’d be an anaesthetic, and a recuperation time in the recovery unit upstairs — top of the line, said Zeb — and once Toby found herself inside it, the place did seem very clean. They didn’t do much cutting and stitching. Her fingertips lost their sensitivity — it would come back, said Zeb — and her throat was sore from the voicework, and her head itched a lot while the Mo’Hair scalp was bonding. The skin pigmentation was uneven at first, but Zeb told her it would be fine in six weeks: until then, she’d have to keep strictly out of the sun.

She spent the six weeks of seclusion at a Truffle cell in SolarSpace. Her contact, whose name was Muffy, collected Toby from the clinic in a very expensive all-electric coupé. “If anyone asks,” Muffy said, “just tell them you’re the new maid. I do have to apologize,” she continued, “but we have to eat meat at our place, it’s part of our cover. We feel terrible about it, but just about everyone in SolarSpace is a carnivore, and they’re very big on barbecues — organic, naturally, and some of it’s stretchy-rack-grown, you know, they grow just the muscle tissue, no brain, no pain — and it would be suspicious if we ducked it. But I’ll try to keep the cooking smells away from you.”

Too late for such a warning: Toby had already smelled something that came close to the aroma of the bone-stock soup her mother used to make. Though she was ashamed of herself, it made her hungry. Hungry, and also sad. Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

In her little maid’s room Toby read e-magazines, and practised sticking her contact lenses onto her eyeballs, and listened to music on a Sea/H/Ear Candy. It was a surreal interlude. “Think of yourself as a chrysalis,” Zeb had told her before the transformation process had begun. Sure enough, she’d gone in as Toby and had come out as Tobiatha. Less angla, more latina. More alto.

She looked at herself — her new skin, her new abundant hair, her more prominent cheekbones. Her new almond-shaped green eyes. She’d have to remember to put those lenses in every morning.

The alterations hadn’t made her stunningly beautiful, but that wasn’t the object. The object was to make her more invisible. Beauty is only skin deep, she thought. But why did they always say
only?

Still, her new look wasn’t bad. The hair was a nice change, though the family cats were taking an interest in it, probably because of the faint lamb-like smell. When she woke up in the morning she was likely to find one of them sitting on her pillow, licking her hair and purring.