The Year of the Flood Read online

  She'd venture out onto the street now, though she didn't go far from the Garden, and she'd cover herself well and wear a nose cone and a wide sunhat. She still had nightmares about Blanco -- the snakes on his arms, the headless women chained to his back, his skinless-looking blue-veined hands coming for her neck. Say you love me! Say it, bitch! During the worst times with him, during the most terror, the most pain, she'd focus on those hands coming off at the wrists. The hands, other parts of him. Grey blood gushing out. She'd picture him stuffed into a garboil boiler, alive. Those had been violent thoughts, and since joining the Gardeners she'd sincerely tried to erase them from her brain. But they kept coming back. She was told by those in nearby sleeping cubicles that she sometimes made what they called "signals of distress" in her sleep.

  Adam One was aware of these signals. She had come, over time, to realize it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Though his beard had now turned an innocent feathery white and his blue eyes were round and guileless as a baby's, though he seemed so trusting and vulnerable, Toby felt she would never encounter anyone as strong in purpose. He didn't wield this purpose like a weapon, he simply floated along inside it and let it carry him. That would be hard to attack: like attacking the tide.

  "He's in Painball now, my dear," he told her one fine Saint Mendel's Day. "He may not ever be released. Perhaps he will return to the elements there."

  Toby's heart fluttered. "What did he do?"

  "Killed a woman," said Adam One. "The wrong kind of woman. A woman from one of the Corps who was seeking excitement in the pleeblands. I wish they wouldn't do that. The CorpSeCorps were forced to act, this time."

  Toby had heard about Painball. It was a facility for condemned criminals, both political ones and the other kind: they had a choice of being spraygunned to death or doing time in the Painball Arena, which wasn't an arena at all, but more like an enclosed forest. You got enough food for two weeks, plus the Painball gun -- it shot paint, like a regular paintball gun, but a hit in the eyes would blind you, and if you got the paint on your skin you'd start to corrode, and then you'd be an easy target for the throat-slitters on the other team. For everyone who went in was assigned to one of two teams: the Red, the Gold.

  Woman criminals didn't choose Painball much, they chose the sprayguns. So did most of the politicals. They knew they wouldn't stand a chance in there, they preferred to just get it over with. Toby could understand that.

  For a long time they'd kept the Painball Arena secret, like cock-fighting and Internal Rendition, but now, it was said, you could watch it onscreen. There were cameras in the Painball forest, hidden in trees and built into rocks, but often there wasn't much to see except a leg or an arm or a blurry shadow, because the Painballers were understandably stealthy. But once in a while there'd be a hit, right on screen. If you survived for a month, you were good; longer than that, very good. Some got hooked on the adrenalin and didn't want to come out when their time was up. Even the CorpSeCorps professionals were scared of the long-term Painballers.

  Some teams would hang their kill on a tree, some would mutilate the body. Cut off the head, tear out the heart and kidneys. That was to intimidate the other team. Eat part of it, if food was running low or just to show how mean you were. After a while, thought Toby, you wouldn't just cross the line, you'd forget there ever were any lines. You'd do whatever it takes.

  She had a quick vision of Blanco, headless, hanging upside down. What did she feel about that? Pleasure? Pity? She couldn't tell.

  She asked to do a Vigil, and spent it on her knees, attempting to mind-meld with a plantful of green peas. The vines, the flowers, the leaves, the pods. So green and soothing. It almost worked.

  One day, old walnut-faced Pilar -- Eve Six -- asked Toby if she wanted to learn about bees. Bees and mushrooms -- these were Pilar's specialties. Toby liked Pilar, who seemed kind, and who had a serenity she envied; so she said yes.

  "Good," said Pilar. "You can always tell the bees your troubles." So Adam One wasn't the only person to have registered Toby's worry.

  Pilar took her to visit the beehives, and introduced her to the bees by name. "They need to know you're a friend," she said. "They can smell you. Just move slowly," she cautioned as the bees coated Toby's bare arm like golden fur. "They'll know you next time. Oh -- if they do sting, don't slap them. Just brush the sting off. But they won't sting unless they're frightened, because stinging kills them."

  Pilar had a fund of bee lore. A bee in the house means a visit from a stranger, and if you kill the bee, the visit will not be a good one. If the beekeeper dies, the bees must be told, or they will swarm and fly away. Honey helps an open wound. A swarm of bees in May, worth a cool day. A swarm of bees in June, worth a new moon. A swarm of bees in July, not worth a squashed fly. All the bees of a hive are one bee: that's why they'll die for the hive. "Like the Gardeners," Pilar said. Toby couldn't tell whether or not she was joking.

  The bees were agitated by her at first, but after a while they accepted her. They allowed her to extract the honey by herself, and she got stung only twice. "The bees made a mistake," Pilar told her. "You must ask permission of their Queen, and explain to them that you mean them no harm." She said you had to speak out loud because the bees couldn't read your mind precisely, any more than a person could. So Toby did speak, though she felt like a fool. What would anyone down there on the sidewalk think if they saw her talking to a swarm of bees?

  According to Pilar, the bees all over the world had been in trouble for decades. It was the pesticides, or the hot weather, or a disease, or maybe all of these -- nobody knew exactly. But the bees on the Rooftop Garden were all right. In fact, they were thriving. "They know they're loved," said Pilar.

  Toby doubted this. She doubted a lot of things. But she kept her doubts to herself, because doubt wasn't a word the Gardeners used much.

  After a while, Pilar took Toby down to the dank cellars below the Buenavista Condos and showed her where the mushrooms were grown. Bees and mushrooms went together, said Pilar: the bees were on good terms with the unseen world, being the messengers to the dead. She tossed that crazed little factoid off as if it was something everyone knew, and Toby pretended to ignore it. Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The part you could see -- what most people called a mushroom -- was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.

  There were mushrooms for eating, mushrooms for medicinal uses, and mushrooms for visions. These last were used only for the Retreats and the Isolation Weeks, though sometimes they might be good for certain medical conditions, and even to ease people through their Fallow states, when the Soul was refertilizing itself. Pilar said that everyone had a Fallow state sometime. But it was dangerous to stay Fallow too long, "It's like going down the stairs," she said, "and never coming back up. But the mushrooms can help with that."

  There were three kinds of mushrooms, said Pilar -- Never Poisonous, Employ with Caution and Advice, and Beware. They all had to be memorized. Puffballs, any species: Never Poisonous. The psilocybins: Employ with Caution and Advice. All amanitas, and especially amanita phalloides, the Death Angel: Beware.

  "Aren't those very dangerous?" said Toby.

  Pilar nodded. "Oh yes. Very dangerous."

  "Then why do you grow them?"

  "God wouldn't have made poisonous mushrooms unless He intended us to use them sometimes," said Pilar.

  Pilar was so mild-mannered and gentle that Toby couldn't believe she'd just heard this. "You wouldn't poison anyone!" she said.

  Pilar gave her a straight look. "You never know, dear," she said. "When you might have to."

  Now Toby spent all her spare hours with Pilar -- tending the Edencliff beehives and the crops of buckwheat and lavender grown for the bees on adjacent rooftops, extracting the honey and storing it in jars. They stamped the labels with the little bee stamp that Pilar used instead of lettering, and set some jars aside to add to the preserved foods in the Arar
at that Pilar had built behind a moveable cinder block in the Buenavista cellar wall. Or they cared for the Poppy plants and collected the thick juice from their seed pods, or pottered among the mushroom beds in the Buenavista cellar, or simmered elixirs and remedies and the honey-and-rose liquid skin emulsion they'd sell at the Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange.

  Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float.

  At night, Toby breathed herself in. Her new self. Her skin smelled like honey and salt. And earth.

  20

  New people kept arriving among the Gardeners. Some were genuine converts, but others didn't stay long. They'd be there for a while, wearing the same baggy, concealing clothes as everyone else, working at the most menial tasks, and, if they were women, weeping from time to time. Then they'd be gone. They were shadow people, and Adam One was moving them around in the shadows. As he'd moved Toby herself.

  This was guesswork: it hadn't taken Toby long to realize that the Gardeners did not welcome personal questions. Where you'd come from, what you'd done before -- all of that was irrelevant, their manner implied. Only the Now counted. Say about others as you would have them say about you. In other words, nothing.

  There were a lot of things Toby remained curious about. For instance, had Nuala ever got laid, and if not, was that why she flirted so much? Where had Marushka Midwife learned her skills? What exactly had Adam One done before the Gardeners? Had there ever been an Eve One, or even a Mrs. Adam One, or any child Adam Ones? If she came too close to such territory Toby would be granted a smile and a change of subject, and a hint that she might try avoiding the original sin of desiring too much knowledge, or possibly too much power. Because the two were connected -- didn't dear Toby agree?

  Then there was Zeb. Adam Seven. Toby didn't believe Zeb was a true Gardener, any more than she was. She'd seen a lot of men of that general shape and hairiness during her SecretBurger days, and she'd bet that he had some game going; he had that kind of alertness. Now what was a man like that doing at the Edencliff Rooftop?

  Zeb came and went; sometimes he'd vanish for days, and when he turned up again he might be wearing pleeblander clothes: solarbiker fleather gear, groundsman's coveralls, bouncer black. At first she'd worried that he was a Blanco affiliate, come to spy her out, but no, it wasn't that. Mad Adam, the kids nicknamed him, but he appeared sane enough. A little too sane to be hanging out with this clutch of sweet but delusional eccentrics. And what was the bond between him and Lucerne? Lucerne had pampered Compound wife written all over her: every time she broke a nail she went into a pout. She was an unlikely choice of partner for a man like Zeb -- a bullet-spitter, he'd have been called in Toby's childhood, back when bullets were common.

  Though maybe it was the sex, Toby thought. A mirage of the flesh, a hormone-fuelled obsession. It happened to a lot of people. She could remember a time when she herself might have been part of such a story, given the right man, but the longer she stayed with the Gardeners, the more that time receded.

  She'd had no sex recently, nor did she miss it: during her immersion in the Sewage Lagoon she'd had far too much sex, though not the kind anyone would want. Freedom from Blanco was worth a lot: she was lucky she hadn't ended up fucked into a puree and battered to a pulp and poured out onto a vacant lot.

  There had been one sex-linked incident at the Gardeners: old Mugi the Muscle had leapt on her when she was putting in an hour on one of the Run-For-Your-Light Treadmills in the former party room at the top of the Boulevard Condos. He'd pulled her off the treadmill and tussled her to the floor, then fallen heavily on top of her and groped under her denim skirt, wheezing like a faulty pump. But she was strong from all the soil-hauling and stair-climbing, and Mugi wasn't as fit as he must have been once, and she'd dug her elbow into him and levered him off, and left him sprawled and gasping on the floor.

  She'd told Pilar about it, as she now told her everything that puzzled her. "What should I do?" she said.

  "We never make a fuss about such things," said Pilar. "There's no harm in Mugi really. He's tried that on more than one of us -- even me, some years ago." She gave a dry little chuckle. "The ancient Australopithecus can come out in all of us. You must forgive him in your heart. He won't do it again, you'll see."

  So that was that, as far as sex went. Maybe it's temporary, thought Toby. Maybe it's like having your arm go to sleep. My neural connections for sex are blocked. But why don't I care?

  It was the afternoon of Saint Maria Sibylla Merian of Insect Metamorphosis Day, said to be a propitious time for working with bees. Toby and Pilar were extracting the honey. They had on their wide veiled hats; for the smoke they used a bellows, and a smudge of decaying wood.

  "Your parents -- are they living?" said Pilar, from behind her white veil.

  Toby was surprised by such a question, uncharacteristically direct for a Gardener. But Pilar wouldn't have asked such a thing without good reason. Toby couldn't bring herself to discuss her father, so instead she told Pilar about her mother's mysterious illness. What was so odd, she said, was that her mother had always been so keen on health: by weight she would have been half vitamin supplement.

  "Tell me," said Pilar. "What supplements was she taking?"

  "She ran a HelthWyzer franchise, so she took those."

  "HelthWyzer," said Pilar. "Yes. We've heard of this before."

  "Heard of what?" said Toby.

  "This kind of illness, coupled with those supplements. No wonder the HelthWyzer people wanted to treat your mother themselves."

  "What do you mean?" said Toby. She felt chilly, even though the morning sun was hot.

  "Did it ever occur to you, my dear," said Pilar, "that your mother may have been a guinea pig?"

  It hadn't occurred to Toby, but it occurred to her now. "I kind of wondered," she said. "Not about the pills, but ... I thought it was the developer who wanted Dad's land. I figured maybe they'd put something in the well."

  "In that case you'd all have been ill," said Pilar. "Now, promise me that you will never take any pill made by a Corporation. Never buy such a pill, and never accept any such pill if offered, no matter what they say. They'll produce data and scientists; they'll produce doctors -- worthless, they've all been bought."

  "Surely not all of them!" said Toby, shocked by Pilar's vehemence: she was usually so calm.

  "No," said Pilar. "Not all. But all who are still working with any of the Corporations. The others -- some have died unexpectedly. But those still alive -- those with any shred of the old medical ethic left in them ..." She paused. "There are doctors like that, still. But not at the Corps."

  "Where are they?" Toby asked.

  "Some of them are here, with us," said Pilar. She smiled. "Katuro the Wrench used to be an internist. He does our plumbing now. Surya was an eye surgeon. Stuart was an oncologist. Marushka was a gynecologist."

  "And the other doctors? If they aren't here?"

  "Let's just say they're safe, elsewhere," said Pilar. "For the moment. But now you must promise me: those Corporation pills are the food of the dead, my dear. Not our kind of dead, the bad kind. The dead who are still alive. We must teach the children to avoid these pills -- they're evil. It's not only a rule of faith among us, it's a matter of certainty."

  "But how can you be so sure?" Toby asked. "The Corps -- nobody knows what they're doing. They're locked into those Compounds of theirs, nothing gets out ..."

  "You'd be surprised," said Pilar. "No boat was ever built that didn't spring a leak eventually. Now, promise me."

  Toby promised.

  "One day," said Pilar, "when you're an Eve, you'll understand more."

  "Oh, I don't think I'll ever be an Eve," said Toby lightly. Pilar smiled.

  Later that same afternoon, when Pilar and Toby had finished the honey extraction and Pilar was thanking the hive and the queen for their cooperation, Zeb came up the fire-escape stairs. He was wearing a black
fleather jacket of the kind favoured by solarbikers. They slashed those jackets to let the hot air circulate while they were riding, but there were extra slashes in this one.

  "What happened?" said Toby. "What can I do?" Zeb's tree-stump hands were clutched to his stomach; blood was coming out from between his fingers. She felt a little sick. At the same time she felt an urge to say, "Don't drip on the bees."

  "Fell down and cut myself," said Zeb. "Broken glass." He was breathing heavily.

  "I don't believe that," said Toby.

  "Didn't think you would," said Zeb, grinning at her. "Here," he said to Pilar. "Brought you a present. SecretBurger special." He reached a hand into the pocket of his fleather jacket and brought out a fistful of ground meat. For a moment, Toby had the horrible impression that this was part of Zeb himself, but Pilar smiled.

  "Thank you, dear Zeb," she said. "I can always rely on you! Come with me, now, we'll fix it up. Toby, could you find Rebecca and ask her to bring some clean kitchen towels? And Katuro. Him too." She didn't seem at all flustered by the sight of blood.

  How old will I be, thought Toby, before I can be that calm? She felt cut open.

  21

  Pilar and Toby carried Zeb over to the Fallows Recovery Hut on the northwest corner of the Rooftop, which was used by Gardeners on Vigils, or those emerging from a Fallow state, or those who were moderately ill. As they were helping him to lie down, Rebecca came out from the enclosed shed at the back of the Rooftop, carrying a stack of dishtowels. "Now who did that?" she said. "That's a glass job! Bottle fight?"

  Katuro arrived, peeled the jacket off Zeb's stomach, took a professional look. "Stopped by ribs," he said. "Slash, not stab. No deep punctures -- lucky."

  Pilar handed the ground meat to Toby. "It's for the maggots," she said. "Could you take care of it this time, dear?" The meat was already going off, from the smell of it.