Oryx and Crake

But you don’t have any pants, says a voice in his head—a small voice this time, a sad little child’s voice. Joke! Joke! Don’t kill me!

Please, not now, thinks Snowman. Not in company. In company, he can’t answer back.

“We would come with you to protect you,” says Benjamin Franklin, looking at Snowman’s long stick. “From the bobkittens that bite, from the wolvogs.”

“Your smell is not very strong,” adds Napoleon.

Snowman finds this offensively smug. Also it’s too euphemistic by half: as they all know, his smell is strong enough, it just isn’t the right kind. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “You stay here.”

The men look dubious, but he thinks they’ll do as he says. To reinforce his authority he holds his watch up to his ear. “Crake says he’ll be watching over you,” he says. “To keep you safe.” Watch, watching over, says the small child’s voice. It’s a pun, you cork-nut.

“Crake watches over us in the daytime, and Oryx watches over us at night,” Abraham Lincoln says dutifully. He doesn’t sound too convinced.

“Crake always watches over us,” says Simone de Beauvoir serenely. She’s a yellow-brown woman who reminds Snowman of Dolores, his long-lost Philippina na

“He takes good care of us,” says Madame Curie. “You must tell him that we are grateful.”

Snowman goes back along the Snowman Fish Path. He feels mushy: nothing breaks him up like the generosity of these people, their willingness to be of help. Also their gratitude towards Crake. It’s so touching, and so misplaced.

“Crake, you dickhead,” he says. He feels like weeping. Then he hears a voice—his own!—saying boohoo; he sees it, as if it’s a printed word in a comic-strip balloon. Water leaks down his face.

“Not this again,” he says. What’s the sensation? It isn’t anger exactly; it’s vexation. An old word but serviceable. Vexation takes in more than Crake, and indeed why blame Crake alone?

Maybe he’s merely envious. Envious yet again. He too would like to be invisible and adored. He too would like to be elsewhere. No hope for that: he’s up to his neck in the here and now.

He slows to a shamble, then to a halt. Oh, boohoo! Why can’t he control himself? On the other hand, why bother, since nobody’s watching? Still, the noise he’s making seems to him like the exaggerated howling of a clown—like misery performed for applause.

Stop snivelling, son, says his father’s voice. Pull yourself together. You’re the man around here.

“Right!” Snowman yells. “What exactly would you suggest? You were such a great example!”

But irony is lost on the trees. He wipes his nose with his stick-free hand and keeps walking.

Blue

It’s nine in the morning, sun clock, by the time Snowman leaves the Fish Path to turn inland. As soon as he’s out of the sea breeze the humidity shoots up, and he attracts a coterie of small green biting flies. He’s barefoot—his shoes disintegrated some time ago, and in any case they were too hot and damp—but he doesn’t need them now because the soles of his feet are hard as old rubber. Nevertheless he walks cautiously: there might be broken glass, torn metal. Or there might be snakes, or other things that could give him a nasty bite, and he has no weapon apart from the stick.

At first he’s walking under trees, formerly parkland. Some distance away he hears the barking cough of a bobkitten. That’s the sound they make as a warning: perhaps it’s a male, and it’s met another male bobkitten. There’ll be a fight, with the wi

Those things were introduced as a control, once the big green rabbits had become such a prolific and resistant pest. Smaller than bobcats, less aggressive—that was the official story about the bobkittens. They were supposed to eliminate feral cats, thus improving the almost non-existent songbird population. The bobkittens wouldn’t bother much about birds, as they would lack the lightness and agility necessary to catch them. Thus went the theory.

All of which came true, except that the bobkittens soon got out of control in their turn. Small dogs went missing from backyards, babies from prams; short joggers were mauled. Not in the Compounds, of course, and rarely in the Modules, but there’d been a lot of grousing from the pleeblanders. He should keep a lookout for tracks, and be careful of overhanging branches: he doesn’t like the thought of one of those things landing on his head.

There are always the wolvogs to worry about. But wolvogs are nocturnal hunters: in the heat of the day they tend to sleep, like most things with fur.

Every so often there’s a more open space—the remains of a drive-in campsite, with a picnic table and one of those outdoor-barbecue fireplaces, though nobody used them very much once it got so warm and began to rain every afternoon. He comes upon one now, fungi sprouting from the decaying table, the barbecue covered in bindweed.

Off to the side, from what is probably a glade where the tents and trailers used to be set up, he can hear laughter and singing, and shouts of admiration and encouragement. There must be a mating going on, a rare-enough occasion among the people: Crake had worked out the numbers, and had decreed that once every three years per female was more than enough.

There’ll be the standard quintuplet, four men and the woman in heat. Her condition will be obvious to all from the bright-blue colour of her buttocks and abdomen—a trick of variable pigmentation filched from the baboons, with a contribution from the expandable chromosphores of the octopus. As Crake used to say, Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.

Since it’s only the blue tissue and the pheromones released by it that stimulate the males, there’s no more unrequited love these days, no more thwarted lust; no more shadow between the desire and the act. Courtship begins at the first whiff, the first faint blush of azure, with the males presenting flowers to the females—just as male penguins present round stones, said Crake, or as the male silverfish presents a sperm packet. At the same time they indulge in musical outbursts, like songbirds. Their penises turn bright blue to match the blue abdomens of the females, and they do a sort of blue-dick dance number, erect members waving to and fro in unison, in time to the foot movements and the singing: a feature suggested to Crake by the sexual semaphoring of crabs. From amongst the floral tributes the female chooses four flowers, and the sexual ardour of the unsuccessful candidates dissipates immediately, with no hard feelings left. Then, when the blue of her abdomen has reached its deepest shade, the female and her quartet find a secluded spot and go at it until the woman becomes pregnant and her blue colouring fades. And that is that.

No more No means yes, anyway, thinks Snowman. No more prostitution, no sexual abuse of children, no haggling over the price, no pimps, no sex slaves. No more rape. The five of them will roister for hours, three of the men standing guard and doing the singing and shouting while the fourth one copulates, turn and turn about. Crake has equipped these women with ultra-strong vulvas—extra skin layers, extra muscles—so they can sustain these marathons. It no longer matters who the father of the inevitable child may be, since there’s no more property to inherit, no father-son loyalty required for war. Sex is no longer a mysterious rite, viewed with ambivalence or downright loathing, conducted in the dark and inspiring suicides and murders. Now it’s more like an athletic demonstration, a free-spirited romp.