The violet biolets are part of the original park installation: three stalls for men, three for women. Their solar cells are still operating, running the ultraviolet LEDs and the small aerating-fan motors. As long as the biolets are still functioning, the MaddAddamites won’t have to dig outhouse pits. Luckily there’s lots of toilet paper to be gleaned in the nearby streets, as it wasn’t an item heavily looted during the pillaging phase of the plague. What would you do with a skid of toilet paper? You couldn’t get drunk on it.
The walls inside the biolet are still covered with pleebland inscriptions: several generations of them, one layer on top of another. There’d been a time when those still devoted to some norm of propriety had tried to paint the words over, but a few kids bent on self-expressive anarchy could destroy in an hour a white surface it had taken a crew three days to blandify.
To Daryn, Im ur bitch, ur my King,
I <3 you more than anything
Fk the Corps
Loris a stuck up cunt
I hope ur raped by 100000 pit bulls
People who write on washroom walls, Shld roll their shit in little balls, And those who read these words of wit, Shld have to eat those balls of shit
Call me/ Best for ur $/ Ull scream 24/7 & die in a pond of Cum
STAY OUT MY WAY A HAT OR ILL KNIFE U
And shyly, unfinished: Try love the World needs
What to eat, where to shit, how to take shelter, who and what to kill: are these the basics? thinks Toby. Is this what we’ve come to, or come down to; or else come back to?
And who do you love? And who loves you? And who loves you not? And, come to think of it, who seriously hates you.
Blink
Under the trees Jimmy is still slumbering. Toby checks his pulse – calmer; changes his maggots – the wound on his foot has stopped festering; and pours some mushroom elixir into him, mixed with a little Poppy.
An oval of chairs is arranged around the hammock, as if Jimmy is the central offering at a feast: a giant salmon, a boar on a platter. Three Crakers are purring over him, taking turns: two men and a woman, gold, ivory, ebony. It’s a different three every few hours. Do they have only so much purring quotient, are they like batteries that have to be recharged? Naturally they need time off to graze and water themselves, but does the purring itself have a sort of electrical frequency?
We’ll never know, thinks Toby, holding Jimmy’s nose to make him open his mouth: no way of wiring up their brains for scientific studies, not any more. Which is lucky for them. In the olden days they’d have been kidnapped from the Paradice Project dome by some rival Corp, then injected and jolted and probed and sliced apart to see how they were put together. What made them tick, what made them purr, what made them click. What, if anything, made them sick. They’d have ended up as slabs of DNA in a freezer.
Jimmy swallows, sighs; his left hand twitches. “How has he been today?” Toby asks the three Crakers. “Has he been awake at all?”
“No, Oh Toby,” says the gold-coloured man. “He is travelling.” This one has bright red hair, long slender limbs; despite the skin colour, he looks like something from a children’s storybook. An Irish folktale.
“But now he has stopped,” says the ebony man. “He has climbed into a tree.”
“Not his real tree,” says the ivory woman. “Not the tree he lives in.”
“He has gone to sleep in this tree,” says the ebony man.
“You mean, he’s sleeping inside his sleep?” says Toby. This seems wrong: it shouldn’t be possible. “In the tree in his dream?”
“Yes, Oh Toby,” says the ivory woman. All three of them gaze at her with their lambent green eyes, as if she’s twirling a piece of string and they are bored cats.
“Perhaps he will sleep for a long time,” says the golden man. “He is stuck there, in the tree. If he will not wake up and travel to here, he will not wake up at all.”
“But he’s getting better!” says Toby.
“He is afraid,” says the ivory woman in a matter-of-fact voice. “He is afraid of what is in this world. He is afraid of the bad men, he is afraid of the Pig Ones. He doesn’t want to be awake.”
“Can you talk to him?” says Toby. “Can you tell him it’s better to be awake?” No harm in trying: maybe they have some form of inaudible communication that might reach Jimmy, wherever he is. A wavelength, a vibration.
But now they aren’t looking at her. They’re looking at Ren and Lotis Blue, who are walking over with Amanda in tow, sheltering behind them.
The three of them sit down on the empty chairs, Amanda hesitantly. Ren and Lotis Blue are muddy from their building activities, but Amanda is pristine. The other two give her a shower every morning, choose a fresh bedsheet for her, braid her hair.
“We thought we’d take a break from the house,” says Ren. “See how Jimmy – see how Snowman-the-Jimmy is doing.”