“This is how your name begins,” she says. “B. Like bees. It’s the same sound.” Why is she telling him this? What use will he ever have for it?
“That is not me,” says Blackbeard, frowning. “It is not bees either. It is only some marks.”
“Take this paper to Ren,” says Toby, smiling. “Ask her to read it, then come back and tell me if she says your name.”
Blackbeard stares at her. He doesn’t trust what she’s told him, but he takes the piece of paper anyway, holding it gingerly as if it’s coated with invisible poison. “Will you stay here?” he says. “Until I come back?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’ll be right here.” He backs out the doorway as he always does, keeping his eyes on her until he turns the corner.
She turns back to her journal. What else to write, besides the bare-facts daily chronicle she’s begun? What kind of story – what kind of history will be of any use at all, to people she can’t know will exist, in the future she can’t foresee?
Zeb and the Bear, she writes. Zeb and MaddAddam. Zeb and Crake. All of these stories could be set down. But why, but for whom? Only for herself because it gives her a chance to dwell upon Zeb?
Zeb and Toby, she writes. But surely that will be only a footnote.
Don’t jump to conclusions, she tells herself. He came to the garden, bringing gifts. You could be misinterpreting, about Swift Fox. And even if not, so what? Take what the moment offers. Don’t close doors. Be thankful.
Blackbeard slips into the room again. He’s carrying the sheet of paper, holding it in front of him like a hot shield. His face is radiant.
“It did, Oh Toby,” he says. “It said my name! It told my name to Ren!”
“There,” she says. “That is writing.”
Blackbeard nods: now he’s grasping the possibilities. “I can keep this?” he says.
“Of course,” says Toby.
“Show me again. With the black thing.”
Later – after it’s rained, after the rain has stopped – she finds him at the sandbox. He has a stick, and the paper. There’s his name in the sand. The other children are watching him. All of them are singing.
Now what have I done? she thinks. What can of worms have I opened? They’re so quick, these children: they’ll pick this up and transmit it to all the others.
What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?
Swarm
Breakfast is kudzu and other assorted forage greens, bacon, a strange flatbread with unidentified seeds in it, steamed burdock. Coffee from a blend of toasted roots: dandelion, chickory, something else. It has an undertaste of ashes.
They’re running out of sugar, and there’s no honey. But there is Mo’Hair milk. Another of the ewes – a blue-haired one – has given birth to twins, a blonde and a brunette. There have been some jokes about lamb stew, but no one wants to go there: somehow it would be hard to slaughter and eat an animal with human hair; especially human hair that so closely resembles, in its sheen and stylability, the shampoo ads of yore. Every time one of those Mo’Hairs shakes itself it’s like watching the back view of a TV hair beauty: the shining mane, the flirtatious ripple and swirl. At any minute, thinks Toby, you expect them to come out with a product spiel. Every day a bad-hair day? My hair was driving me crazy, but then … I died.
Don’t be so dark, Toby, it’s only hair. It’s not the end of the world.
Over the coffee they discuss other food options. Protein variety is lacking, they’re all agreed on that. Rebecca says she’d kill for some live chickens because then they could keep them in a henhouse and have eggs; but where are such chickens to be found? There are seabird eggs on top of the derelict towers offshore, down by the beach – there must be, the birds are nesting there – but who is willing to make the perilous trip down to the seashore through the increasingly overgrown Heritage Park that may harbour the Painballers, not to mention a squadron or two of large, malevolent pigs? And they shouldn’t even think about climbing up the inner stairs of those towers, which must be very unstable by now.