While gathering up the breakfast dishes, Rebecca thought she saw a grim hatchet-face looking at her from under the trees. It seems to have been a false alarm, thinks Toby: no Painballers appeared, and, even better, no spraygun holes opened in Rebecca and no Craker child was yanked screaming into the shrubbery. Still, everyone’s tense.
Toby asks the Craker mothers to move closer to the cobb house. When they look puzzled, she tells them it’s a message from Oryx.
The day unscrolls without incident. No travellers return: no Shackleton, no Black Rhino or Katuro. No Zeb. Toby spends the rest of the morning in the kitchen garden, digging and weeding: a mindless exercise that calms her and fills the time. There are some chickenpeas beginning to sprout, and spinach leaves thrusting up, and the feathery tops of carrots. Her rifle is propped nearby.
Crozier and Zunzuncito herd the Mo’Hairs out of their paddock so they can graze. Both carry sprayguns: in a Painballer confrontation they’d have the advantage – two weapons against one – unless they were taken by surprise. Toby hopes they’ll remember to check above their heads if there are trees nearby: that must have been how the Painballers caught Amanda and Ren, by dropping down from above.
Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood. The loser falls over with a scream, followed with a foolish expression, mouth agape, eyes akimbo. Those old biblical kings, setting their feet on conquered necks, stringing up rival kings on trees, rejoicing in piles of heads – there was an element of childish glee in all of that.
Maybe it’s what drove Crake on, thinks Toby. Maybe he wanted to end it. Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew.
She eats her lunch early, in solitude, because she’s tagged for sentry with her rifle during the regular lunchtime. The food is cold pork and burdock root, with an Oreo cookie from a package gleaned from a pharmacy: a rare treat, carefully rationed. She opens her cookie and licks the white sweet filling before eating the two chocolatey halves: a guilty luxury.
Before the afternoon thunderstorm, five of the Crakers carry Jimmy into the cobb house, along with his Hey-Diddle-Diddle quilt. Toby sits with him while it rains, checks his wound, manages to raise his head so he drinks some of the mushroom elixir, even though he’s still unconscious. Her supply is running low, but she doesn’t know where to find the right mushrooms for a fresh brew.
A single Craker remains in the room with them, to purr: the others go away. They don’t like houses; they’d rather be wet than cooped up. Once the rain stops, four other Crakers appear to carry Jimmy outside again.
The clouds part, the sun comes out. Crozier and Zunzuncito return with the flock of Mo’Hairs. Nothing has happened, they say; or nothing you can put your finger on. The Mo’Hairs were jumpy; it was hard to keep them together. And the crows were making a racket, but what does that tell you? Crows are always making a racket about something.
“Jumpy, how?” says Toby. “What sort of racket?” But they can’t be more specific.
Tamaraw, with a denim shirt over her hunched shoulders and a canvas sunhat, attempts to milk the one Mo’Hair that’s producing. The milking doesn’t go smoothly: there’s kicking and bleating, and the pail tips and spills.
Crozier shows the Crakers how to work the hand pump: a retro decoration once but now the source of their drinking water. God knows what’s in it, thinks Toby: it’s groundwater, and every toxic spill for miles around may have leaked into it. She’ll push for rainwater, at least for drinking; though with faraway fires and maybe nuclear meltdowns sending dirty particulate into the stratosphere, God knows what’s in that as well.
The Crakers are delighted with the pump; the children scamper over and clamour to have water pumped onto them. After that, Crozier demonstrates the one piece of solar the MaddAddamites have managed to get running; it’s connected to a couple of light bulbs, one in the cooking shack and one in the yard. He tries to explain why the lights go on, but they’re puzzled. It’s obvious to them that the light bulbs are like lumiroses, or the green rabbits that come out at dusk: they glow because Oryx made them that way.