“It could be an owl,” she says.
“Could be,” says Zeb.
“The Pigoons keep saying there are three men. Not two.”
“I’d be surprised if they’re wrong,” says Zeb.
“Do you think it might be Adam?” says Toby.
“Remember what you said about hope?” says Zeb. “You said it can be bad for you. So I’m trying not to.”
There’s a flicker of something light, over among the branches. Is it a face? Gone again.
“The worst thing,” says Toby, “is the waiting.”
Blackbeard tugs at her bedspread. “Oh Toby,” he says. “Come! It is time for us to hear the story that you will tell to us. We have brought the red hat.”
The Train to CryoJeenyus
The Story of the Two Eggs and Thinking
Thank you. I am happy that you remembered to bring the red hat.
And the fish. It is not a fish exactly, it is more like a frog. But you caught it in the water, and we are far from the ocean, so I am sure that Crake will understand, and will know that it was too far for you to go all the way to the ocean in order to catch a fish there.
Thank you for cooking it. For asking Rebecca to cook it. Crake has told me that I do not have to eat all of it. A nibble will be enough.
There.
Yes, the frog … the fish has a bone in it. A smelly bone. That is why I spat it out. But we do not need to talk about the smelly bone right now.
Tomorrow is a very important day. Tomorrow, all of us with two skins must finish the work that Crake began – the work of clearing away the chaos. That work was the Great Rearrangement, and it made the Great Emptiness.
But that was only part of the work of Crake. The other part was when he made you. He made your bones out of the coral on the beach, which is white like bones but not smelly. And he made your flesh out of a mango, which is sweet and soft. He did all this inside the giant Egg, and he had some helpers there. And Snowman-the-Jimmy was his friend – he was inside the Egg as well.
And Oryx was there too. Sometimes she was in the form of a woman with green eyes like yours, and sometimes she was in the form of an owl. And she laid two smaller owl eggs, inside the giant Egg. One smaller owl egg was full of animals and birds and fish – all her Children. Yes, and bees. And butterflies too. And ants, yes. And beetles – very many beetles. And snakes. And frogs. And maggots. And rakunks, and bobkittens, and Mo’Hairs, and Pigoons.
Thank you, but I don’t think we need to list every one of them.
Because we would be here all night.
Let us just say that Oryx made very many Children. And each one was beautiful in its own special way.
Yes, it was kind of her to make each and every one of them, inside the smaller owl egg that she laid. Except maybe the mosquitoes.
The other egg she laid was full of words. But that egg hatched first, before the one with the animals in it, and you ate up many of the words, because you were hungry; which is why you have words inside you. And Crake thought that you had eaten all the words, so there were none left over for the animals, and that was why they could not speak. But he was wrong about that. Crake was not always right about everything.
Because when he was not looking, some of the words fell out of the egg onto the ground, and some fell into the water, and some blew away in the air. And none of the people saw them. But the animals and the birds and the fish did see them, and ate them up. They were a different kind of word, so it was sometimes hard for people to understand the animals. They had chewed the words up too small.
And the Pigoons – the Pig Ones – ate up more of the words than any of the other animals did. You know how they love to eat. So the Pig Ones can think very well.
Then Oryx made a new kind of thing, called singing. And she gave it to you because she loved birds and she wanted you to be able to sing that way as well. But Crake did not want you to do the singing. It worried him. He thought that if you could sing like birds you would forget to talk like people, and then you would not remember him or understand his work – all the work that he had done to make you.
And Oryx said, You will just have to suck it up. Because if these people cannot sing, they will be like … they will be like nothing. They will be like stones.
Suck it up means … we will talk about that some other time.
Now I will tell a different part of the story, which is about why Crake decided to make the Great Emptiness.
For a long time, Crake thought. He thought and thought. He told no one about all his thoughts, though he told some of them to Snowman-the-Jimmy and some of them to Zeb and some of them to Pilar and some of them to Oryx.