Oryx and Crake

These reveries were almost pleasurable. At least while they were going on everyone was still alive.

He knew this state of affairs couldn’t continue much longer. Inside Paradice proper, the Crakers were munching up the leaves and grasses faster than they could regenerate, and one of these days the solar would fail, and the backup would fail too, and Jimmy had no idea about how to fix those things. Then the air circulation would stop and the doorlock would freeze, and both he and the Crakers would be trapped inside, and they’d all suffocate. He had to get them out while there was still time, but not too soon or there would still be some desperate people out there, and desperate would mean dangerous. What he didn’t want was a bunch of disintegrating maniacs falling on their knees, clawing at him: Cure us! Cure us! He might be immune from the virus—unless, of course, Crake had been lying to him—but not from the rage and despair of its carriers.

Anyway, how could he have the heart to stand there and say: Nothing can save you?

In the half-light, in the dank, Snowman wanders from space to space. Here for instance is his office. His computer sits on the desk, turning a blank face to him like a discarded girlfriend encountered by chance at a party. Beside the computer are a few sheets of paper, which must have been the last he’d ever written. The last he’d ever write. He picks them up with curiosity. What is it that the Jimmy he’d once been had seen fit to communicate, or at least to record—to set down in black and white, with smudges—for the edification of a world that no longer existed?

To whom it may concern, Jimmy had written, in ballpoint rather than printout: his computer was fried by then, but he’d persevered, laboriously, by hand. He must still have had hope, he must still have believed that the situation could be turned around, that someone would show up here in the future, someone in authority; that his words would have a meaning then, a context. As Crake had once said, Jimmy was a romantic optimist.

I don’t have much time, Jimmy had written.

Not a bad begi

I don’t have much time, but I will try to set down what I believe to be the explanation for the recent [extraordinary events] catastrophe. I have gone through the computer of the man known here as Crake. He left it turned on—deliberately, I believe—and I am able to report that the JUVE virus was made here in the Paradice dome by splicers hand-selected by Crake [and subsequently eliminated], and was then encysted in the BlyssPluss product. There was a time-lapse factor built in to allow for wide distribution: the first batch of virus did not become active until all selected territories had been seeded, and the outbreak thus took the form of a series of rapidly overlapping waves. For the success of the plan, time was of the essence. Social disruption was maximized, and development of a vaccine effectively prevented. Crake himself had developed a vaccine concurrently with the virus, but he had destroyed it prior to [his assisted suicide] death.

Although various staff members of the BlyssPluss project contributed to JUVE on a piecework basis, it is my belief that none, with the exception of Crake, was cognizant of what that effect would be. As for Crake’s motives, I can only speculate. Perhaps…

Here the handwriting stops. Whatever Jimmy’s speculations might have been on the subject of Crake’s motives, they had not been recorded.

Snowman crumples the sheets up, drops them onto the floor. It’s the fate of these words to be eaten by beetles. He could have mentioned the change in Crake’s fridge magnets. You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets, not that he’d thought much about them at the time.

Remnant

On the second Friday of March—he’d been marking off the days on a calendar, god knows why—Jimmy showed himself to the Crakers for the first time. He didn’t take his clothes off, he drew the line at that. He wore a set of standard-issue Rejoov khaki tropicals, with mesh underarms and a thousand pockets, and his favourite fake-leather sandals. The Crakers gathered around him, gazing at him with quiet wonder: they’d never seen textiles before. The children whispered and pointed.

“Who are you?” said the one Crake had christened Abraham Lincoln. A tall man, brown, thi

“My name is Snowman,” said Jimmy, who had thought this over. He no longer wanted to be Jimmy, or even Jim, and especially not Thickney: his incarnation as Thickney hadn’t worked out well. He needed to forget the past—the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form. He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation. As the Crakers did. Perhaps a different name would do that for him.

“Where have you come from, oh Snowman?”

“I come from the place of Oryx and Crake,” he said. “Crake sent me.” True, in a way. “And Oryx.” He keeps the sentence structure simple, the message clear: he knows how to do this from watching Oryx through the mirror wall. And from listening to her, of course.

“Where has Oryx gone?”

“She had some things to do,” said Snowman. That was all he could come up with: simply pronouncing her name had choked him up.

“Why have Crake and Oryx sent you to us?” asked the woman called Madame Curie.

“To take you to a new place.”

“But this is our place. We are content where we are.”

“Oryx and Crake wish you to have a better place than this,” said Snowman. “Where there will be more to eat.” There were nods, smiles. Oryx and Crake wished them well, as they’d always known. It seemed to be enough for them.

“Why is your skin so loose?” said one of the children.

“I was made in a different way from you,” Snowman said. He was begi

“What is that?”

“These are feathers. Little feathers. Oryx gave them to me, as a special favour. See? More feathers are growing out of my face.” He lets the children touch the stubble. He’d been lax about shaving lately, there seemed little point to it, so his beard was sprouting.

“Yes. We see. But what are feathers?”

Oh, right. They’d never seen any. “Some of the Children of Oryx have feathers on them,” he said. “That kind are called birds. We’ll go to where they are. Then you’ll know about feathers.”

Snowman marvelled at his own facility: he was dancing gracefully around the truth, light-footed, light-fingered. But it was almost too easy: they accepted, without question, everything he said. Much more of this—whole days, whole weeks of it—and he could see himself screaming with boredom. I could leave them behind, he thought. Just leave them. Let them fend for themselves. They aren’t my business.

But he couldn’t do that, because although the Crakers weren’t his business, they were now his responsibility. Who else did they have?

Who else did he have, for that matter?

Snowman pla