How did he get there? He flew there, in a … never mind. That part is in a different story. No, he cannot fly like a bird. Not any more.
Mountains? Mountains are very large and high rocks. No, those are not mountains, those are buildings. Buildings fall down, and then they make a crash. Mountains fall down too, but they do it very slowly. No, the mountains did not fall down on Zeb.
So Zeb looked at the mountains that were all around him but quite far away, and he thought, How will I get through these mountains? They are so large and high.
He needed to get through the mountains because the people were on the other side. He wanted to be with the people. He didn’t want to be all alone. Nobody wants to be all alone, do they?
No, they were not people like you. They had clothes on. A lot of clothes, because it was cold there. Yes, it was in the time of the chaos, before Crake poured it all away.
So Zeb looked at the mountains and the pools and the moss, and he thought, What will I eat? And then he thought, Those mountains have a lot of bears living in them.
A bear is a very big, fur-covered animal with big claws and many sharp teeth. Bigger than a bobkitten. Bigger than a wolvog. Bigger than a pigoon. This big.
It speaks with a growl. It gets very hungry. It tears things apart.
Yes, bears are the Children of Oryx. I don’t know why she made them so big, with very sharp teeth.
Yes, we must be kind to them. The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
I don’t think there are any bears very close to us right now.
And Zeb thought, Maybe a bear has smelled me, and maybe it is coming right now, because it is hungry, it is starving, and it wants to eat me. And I will have to fight the bear, and all I have is this quite small knife, and this stick that can make holes in things. And I will have to win the fight, and kill the bear, and then I will have to eat it.
The bear will come into the story quite soon.
Yes, Zeb will win the fight. Zeb always wins the fight. Because that’s what happens.
Yes, he knew Oryx would be sad. Zeb felt sorry for the bear. He didn’t want to hurt it. But he didn’t want to be eaten by it. You don’t want to be eaten by a bear, do you? Neither do I.
Because bears can’t eat only leaves. Because it would make them sick.
Anyway, if Zeb didn’t eat the bear he would have died, and then he wouldn’t be here with us right now. And that would be a sad thing too, wouldn’t it?
If you don’t stop crying I can’t go on with the story.
The Fur Trade
There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.
In the story of Zeb and the bear, Toby has left out the dead man, whose name was Chuck. He, too, was lost among the pools and moss and mountains and bears. He, too, did not know the way out. It’s unfair to deny him a mention, erase him from time, but putting him into the story would cause more knots and tangles than Toby is prepared to deal with. For instance, she doesn’t yet know how this dead man wormed his way into the story in the first place.
“Too bad the fucker died,” says Zeb. “I’d have twisted it out of him.”
“It?”
“Who hired him. What they wanted. Where he would have taken me.”
“Died is a euphemism, I take it. He didn’t have a heart attack,” says Toby.
“Don’t be harsh. You know what I mean.”
Zeb was lost. He sat down under a tree.
Or not lost completely. He did have a rough idea of where he was: he was somewhere on the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens, hundreds of miles from anywhere with fast food. And not under a tree, more like beside, and not a tree exactly, more like a shrub; though not bushy, more like spindly. A spindly kind of spruce. He noticed the details of the trunk, the small dead underbranches, the grey lichen on it, frilly and intricate and see-through, like whores’ underpants.
“What do you know about whore’s underpants?” says Toby.
“More than you want me to,” says Zeb. “So. When you focus on details like that – close up, really clear, totally useless – you know you’re in shock.”
The AOH ’thopter was still smouldering. Lucky he got clear before it burst, or before the blimp component did, and thank shit the digital release on the seatbelts had still been working: otherwise he’d have been dead.
Chuck was lying belly down on the tundra, his head at a sick angle, peering over his own shoulder one-eighty degrees, like an owl. Not looking at Zeb, though. Looking up at the sky. No angels there, or none had showed up yet.