The MaddAddam Trilogy Read online

  ALSO BY MARGARET ATWOOD

  FICTION

  The Edible Woman

  Surfacing

  Lady Oracle

  Dancing Girls

  Life Before Man

  Bodily Harm

  Murder in the Dark

  Bluebeard’s Egg

  The Handmaid’s Tale

  Cat’s Eye

  Wilderness Tips

  Good Bones

  The Robber Bride

  Alias Grace

  The Blind Assassin

  Good Bones and Simple Murders

  The Penelopiad

  The Tent

  Moral Disorder

  POETRY

  Double Persephone

  The Circle Game

  The Animals in That Country

  The Journals of Susanna Moodie

  Procedures for Underground

  Power Politics

  You Are Happy

  Selected Poems: 1965–1975

  Two-Headed Poems

  True Stories

  Interlunar

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986

  Morning in the Burned House

  Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965–1995

  The Door

  NONFICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

  Days of the Rebels, 1815–1840

  Second Words

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

  Two Solicitudes: Conversations (with Victor-Lévy Beaulieu)

  Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

  Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004

  Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing

  Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983–2005

  Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

  In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

  FOR CHILDREN

  Up in the Tree

  Anna’s Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse)

  For the Birds

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut

  Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes

  Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda

  Wandering Wenda

  VINTAGE CANADA E-OMNIBUS, 2013

  Copyright © 2013 O. W. Toad Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Oryx and Crake

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2009. Originally published in hardcover by McClelland & Stewart in 2003. All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 O. W. Toad Ltd.

  e-ISBN: 9780307400840

  The Year of the Flood

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2010. Originally published in hardcover by McClelland & Stewart in 2009. All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2009 O. W. Toad Ltd.

  e-ISBN: 9780307398925

  MaddAddam

  Originally published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2013. All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2013 O. W. Toad Ltd.

  e-ISBN: 9780771008979

  E-omnibus edition published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2013.

  Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The MaddAddam Trilogy e-ISBN: 9780345808752

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Oryx and Crake

  The Year of the Flood

  MaddAddam

  A Note On the Author

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009

  COPYRIGHT © 2003 O.W. TOAD LTD.

  EXCERPT FROM THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD COPYRIGHT © 2009 O.W. TOAD LTD.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2009. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto, in 2003, and in trade paperback by Emblem Editions, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd., in 2005. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Atwood, Margaret, 1939–

  Oryx and Crake / Margaret Atwood.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-40084-0

  I. Title.

  PS8501.t86o79 2009 c813′.54 c2009-900380-5

  v3.0

  For my family

  I could perhaps like others have astonished you

  with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose

  to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest

  manner and style; because my principal design

  was to inform you, and not to amuse you.

  Jonathan Swift,

  Gulliver’s Travels

  Was there no safety? No learning by heart of

  the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter,

  but all was miracle and leaping from the

  pinnacle of a tower into the air?

  Virginia Woolf,

  To the Lighthouse

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  Mango ~ Flotsam ~ Voice

  2

  Bonfire ~ OrganInc Farms ~ Lunch

  3

  Nooners ~ Downpour

  4

  Rakunk ~ Hammer ~ Crake ~ Brainfrizz ~ HottTotts

  5

  Toast ~ Fish ~ Bottle

  6

  Oryx ~ Birdcall ~ Roses ~ Pixieland Jazz

  7

  Sveltana ~ Purring ~ Blue

  8

  SoYummie ~ Happicuppa ~ Applied Rhetoric ~ Asperger’s U. ~ Wolvogs ~ Hypothetical ~ Extinctathon

  9

  Hike ~ RejoovenEsense ~ Twister

  10

  Vulturizing ~ AnooYoo ~ Garage ~ Gripless

  11

  Pigoons ~ Radio ~ Rampart

  12

  Pleebcrawl ~ BlyssPluss ~ MaddAddam ~ Paradice ~ Crake in Love ~ Takeout ~ Airlock

  13

  Bubble ~ Scribble ~ Remnant

  14

  Idol ~ Sermon

  15

  Footprint

  Acknowledgments

  1

  ~

  Mango

  ~

  Snowman wakes be
fore dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep.

  On the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon. The shrieks of the birds that nest out there and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble sound almost like holiday traffic.

  Out of habit he looks at his watch – stainless-steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

  “Calm down,” he tells himself. He takes a few deep breaths, then scratches his bug bites, around but not on the itchiest places, taking care not to knock off any scabs: blood poisoning is the last thing he needs. Then he scans the ground below for wildlife: all quiet, no scales and tails. Left hand, right foot, right hand, left foot, he makes his way down from the tree. After brushing off the twigs and bark, he winds his dirty bedsheet around himself like a toga. He’s hung his authentic-replica Red Sox baseball cap on a branch overnight for safekeeping; he checks inside it, flicks out a spider, puts it on.

  He walks a couple of yards to the left, pisses into the bushes. “Heads up,” he says to the grasshoppers that whir away at the impact. Then he goes to the other side of the tree, well away from his customary urinal, and rummages around in the cache he’s improvised from a few slabs of concrete, lining it with wire mesh to keep out the rats and mice. He’s stashed some mangoes there, knotted in a plastic bag, and a can of Sveltana No-Meat Cocktail Sausages, and a precious half-bottle of Scotch – no, more like a third – and a chocolate-flavoured energy bar scrounged from a trailer park, limp and sticky inside its foil. He can’t bring himself to eat it yet: it might be the last one he’ll ever find. He keeps a can opener there too, and for no particular reason an ice pick; and six empty beer bottles, for sentimental reasons and for storing fresh water. Also his sunglasses; he puts them on. One lens is missing but they’re better than nothing.

  He undoes the plastic bag: there’s only a single mango left. Funny, he remembered more. The ants have got in, even though he tied the bag as tightly as he could. Already they’re running up his arms, the black kind and the vicious little yellow kind. Surprising what a sharp sting they can give, especially the yellow ones. He rubs them away.

  “It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity,” he says out loud. He has the feeling he’s quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another. He can’t recall ever having read such a thing, but that means nothing. There are a lot of blank spaces in his stub of a brain, where memory used to be. Rubber plantations, coffee plantations, jute plantations. (What was jute?) They would have been told to wear solar topis, dress for dinner, refrain from raping the natives. It wouldn’t have said raping. Refrain from fraternizing with the female inhabitants. Or, put some other way …

  He bets they didn’t refrain, though. Nine times out of ten.

  “In view of the mitigating,” he says. He finds himself standing with his mouth open, trying to remember the rest of the sentence. He sits down on the ground and begins to eat the mango.

  Flotsam

  ~

  On the white beach, ground-up coral and broken bones, a group of the children are walking. They must have been swimming, they’re still wet and glistening. They should be more careful: who knows what may infest the lagoon? But they’re unwary; unlike Snowman, who won’t dip a toe in there even at night, when the sun can’t get at him. Revision: especially at night.

  He watches them with envy, or is it nostalgia? It can’t be that: he never swam in the sea as a child, never ran around on a beach without any clothes on. The children scan the terrain, stoop, pick up flotsam; then they deliberate among themselves, keeping some items, discarding others; their treasures go into a torn sack. Sooner or later – he can count on it – they’ll seek him out where he sits wrapped in his decaying sheet, hugging his shins and sucking on his mango, in under the shade of the trees because of the punishing sun. For the children – thick-skinned, resistant to ultraviolet – he’s a creature of dimness, of the dusk.

  Here they come now. “Snowman, oh Snowman,” they chant in their singsong way. They never stand too close to him. Is that from respect, as he’d like to think, or because he stinks?

  (He does stink, he knows that well enough. He’s rank, he’s gamy, he reeks like a walrus – oily, salty, fishy – not that he’s ever smelled such a beast. But he’s seen pictures.)

  Opening up their sack, the children chorus, “Oh Snowman, what have we found?” They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

  Snowman feels like weeping. What can he tell them? There’s no way of explaining to them what these curious items are, or were. But surely they’ve guessed what he’ll say, because it’s always the same.

  “These are things from before.” He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between pedagogue, soothsayer, and benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.

  “Will they hurt us?” Sometimes they find tins of motor oil, caustic solvents, plastic bottles of bleach. Booby traps from the past. He’s considered to be an expert on potential accidents: scalding liquids, sickening fumes, poison dust. Pain of odd kinds.

  “These, no,” he says. “These are safe.” At this they lose interest, let the sack dangle. But they don’t go away: they stand, they stare. Their beachcombing is an excuse. Mostly they want to look at him, because he’s so unlike them. Every so often they ask him to take off his sunglasses and put them on again: they want to see whether he has two eyes really, or three.

  “Snowman, oh Snowman,” they’re singing, less to him than to one another. To them his name is just two syllables. They don’t know what a snowman is, they’ve never seen snow.

  It was one of Crake’s rules that no name could be chosen for which a physical equivalent – even stuffed, even skeletal – could not be demonstrated. No unicorns, no griffins, no manticores or basilisks. But those rules no longer apply, and it’s given Snowman a bitter pleasure to adopt this dubious label. The Abominable Snowman – existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints. Mountain tribes were said to have chased it down and killed it when they had the chance. They were said to have boiled it, roasted it, held special feasts; all the more exciting, he supposes, for bordering on cannibalism.

  For present purposes he’s shortened the name. He’s only Snowman. He’s kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt.

  After a few moments of hesitation the children squat down in a half-circle, boys and girls together. A couple of the younger ones are still munching on their breakfasts, the green juice running down their chins. It’s discouraging how grubby everyone gets without mirrors. Still, they’re amazingly attractive, these children – each one naked, each one perfect, each one a different skin colour – chocolate, rose, tea, butter, cream, honey – but each with green eyes. Crake’s aesthetic.

  They’re gazing at Snowman expectantly. They must be hoping he’ll talk to them, but he isn’t in the mood for it today. At the very most he might let them see his sunglasses, up close, or his shiny, dysfunctional watch, or his baseball cap. They like th
e cap, but don’t understand his need for such a thing – removable hair that isn’t hair – and he hasn’t yet invented a fiction for it.

  They’re quiet for a bit, staring, ruminating, but then the oldest one starts up. “Oh Snowman, please tell us – what is that moss growing out of your face?” The others chime in. “Please tell us, please tell us!” No nudging, no giggling: the question is serious.

  “Feathers,” he says.

  They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time – two months, three? He’s lost count – they’ve accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he’s forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he’s cold because he eats fish, and fish are cold. No: he wraps himself up because he’s missing his man thing, and he doesn’t want us to see. That’s why he won’t go swimming. Snowman has wrinkles because he once lived underwater and it wrinkled up his skin. Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone.

  “I want feathers too,” says the youngest. A vain hope: no beards on the men, among the Children of Crake. Crake himself had found beards irrational; also he’d been irritated by the task of shaving, so he’d abolished the need for it. Though not of course for Snowman: too late for him.

  Now they all begin at once. “Oh Snowman, oh Snowman, can we have feathers too, please?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Why not, why not?” sing the two smallest ones.

  “Just a minute, I’ll ask Crake.” He holds his watch up to the sky, turns it around on his wrist, then puts it to his ear as if listening to it. They follow each motion, enthralled. “No,” he says. “Crake says you can’t. No feathers for you. Now piss off.”

  “Piss off? Piss off?” They look at one another, then at him. He’s made a mistake, he’s said a new thing, one that’s impossible to explain. Piss isn’t something they’d find insulting. “What is piss off?”