Oryx and Crake

“Jimmy, you’re a genius,” said Crake.

“This is BioDefences,” said Crake. “Last stop, I promise.” He could tell Jimmy was flagging. The truth was that all this was too reminiscent. The labs, the peculiar bioforms, the socially spastic scientists—they were too much like his former life, his life as a child. Which was the last place he wanted to go back to. Even Martha Graham was preferable.

They were standing in front of a series of cages. Each contained a dog. There were many different breeds and sizes, but all were gazing at Jimmy with eyes of love, all were wagging their tails.

“It’s a dog pound,” said Jimmy.

“Not quite,” said Crake. “Don’t go beyond the guardrail, don’t stick your hand in.”

“They look friendly enough,” said Jimmy. His old longing for a pet came over him. “Are they for sale?”

“They aren’t dogs, they just look like dogs. They’re wolvogs—they’re bred to deceive. Reach out to pat them, they’ll take your hand off. There’s a large pit-bull component.”

“Why make a dog like that?” said Jimmy, taking a step back. “Who’d want one?”

“It’s a CorpSeCorps thing,” said Crake. “Commission work. A lot of funding. They want to put them in moats, or something.”

“Moats?”

“Yeah. Better than an alarm system—no way of disarming these guys. And no way of making pals with them, not like real dogs.”

“What if they get out? Go on the rampage? Start breeding, then the population spirals out of control—like those big green rabbits?”

“That would be a problem,” said Crake. “But they won’t get out. Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“Meaning what?” said Jimmy. He wasn’t paying close attention, he was worrying about the ChickieNobs and the wolvogs. Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

“Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.”

“Them?”

“Nature and God.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy.

“I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.”

Hypothetical

“So, you got a girlfriend?” said Jimmy on the fourth day. He’d been saving this question for the right time. “I mean, there’s quite an array of babes to choose from.” He meant this to be ironic. He couldn’t picture himself with the Woody Woodpecker—laugh girl or the ones with numbers all over their chests, but he couldn’t picture Crake with one of them either. Crake was too suave for that.

“Not as such,” said Crake shortly.

“What do you mean, not as such? You’ve got a girl, but she’s not a human being?”

“Pair-bonding at this stage is not encouraged,” said Crake, sounding like a guidebook. “We’re supposed to be focusing on our work.”

“Bad for your health,” said Jimmy. “You should get yourself fixed up.”

“Easy for you to say,” said Crake. “You’re the grasshopper, I’m the ant. I can’t waste time in unproductive random sca

For the first time in their lives, Jimmy wondered—could it be?—whether Crake might be jealous of him. Though maybe Crake was just being a pompous tightass; maybe Watson-Crick was having a bad effect on him. So what’s the super-cerebellum-triathlon ultralife mission? Jimmy felt like saying. Deign to divulge? “I wouldn’t call it a waste,” he said instead, trying to lighten Crake up, “unless you fail to score.”

“If you really need to, you can arrange that kind of thing through Student Services,” Crake said, rather stiffly. “They deduct the price from your scholarship, same as room and board. The workers come in from the pleeblands, they’re trained professionals. Naturally they’re inspected for disease.”

“Student Services? In your dreams! They do what?”

“It makes sense,” said Crake. “As a system, it avoids the diversion of energies into unproductive cha

At first Jimmy thought Crake might be joking, but he wasn’t. Jimmy longed to ask him what he’d tried—had he done a double amputee, for instance? But all of a sudden such a question seemed intrusive. Also it might be mistaken for mockery.

The food in Crake’s faculty dining hall was fantastic—real shrimps instead of the CrustaeSoy they got at Martha Graham, and real chicken, Jimmy suspected, though he avoided that because he couldn’t forget the ChickieNobs he’d seen; and something a lot like real cheese, though Crake said it came from a vegetable, a new species of zucchini they were trying out.

The desserts were heavy on the chocolate, real chocolate. The coffee was heavy on the coffee. No burnt grain products, no molasses mixed in. It was Happicuppa, but who cared? And real beer. For sure the beer was real.

So all of that was a welcome change from Martha Graham, though Crake’s fellow students tended to forget about cutlery and eat with their hands, and wipe their mouths on their sleeves. Jimmy wasn’t picky, but this verged on gross. Also they talked all the time, whether anyone was listening or not, always about the ideas they were developing. Once they found Jimmy wasn’t working on a space—was attending, in fact, an institution they clearly regarded as a mud puddle—they lost any interest in him. They referred to other students in their own faculties as their conspecifics, and to all other human beings as nonspecifics. It was a ru

So Jimmy had no yen to mingle after hours. He was happy enough to hang out at Crake’s, letting Crake beat him at chess or Three-Dimensional Waco, or trying to decode Crake’s fridge magnets, the ones that didn’t have numbers and symbols. Watson-Crick was a fridge-magnet culture: people bought them, traded them, made their own.

Sometimes they’d watch TV or Web stuff, as in the old days. The Noodie News, brainfrizz, alibooboo, comfort eyefood like that. They’d microwave popcorn, smoke some of the enhanced weed the Botanical Transgenic students were raising in one of the greenhouses; then Jimmy could pass out on the couch. After he got used to his status in this brainpound, which was equivalent to that of a house plant, it wasn’t too bad. You just had to relax and breathe into the stretch, as in workouts. He’d be out of here in a few days. Meanwhile it was always interesting to listen to Crake, when Crake was alone, and when he was in the mood to say anything.

On the second to last evening, Crake said, “Let me walk you through a hypothetical scenario.”

“I’m game,” said Jimmy. Actually he was sleepy—he’d had too much popcorn and beer—but he sat up and put on his paying-attention look, the one he’d perfected in high school. Hypothetical scenarios were a favourite thing of Crake’s.

“Axiom: that illness isn’t productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it’s an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it.”