Philo the Fog didn't say much to her; he just smiled at her a lot. The older Gardeners said he'd transcended language and was travelling with the Spirit, though Amanda said he was just wasted. Stuart the Screw, who made our furniture out of recycled junk, didn't like people much, but he liked Amanda. "That girl's got a good eye for wood," he'd say.
Amanda didn't like sewing, but she pretended to, so Surya praised her. Rebecca called her sweetheart and said she had good food taste, and Nuala cooed over her singing in the Buds and Blooms Choir. Even Dry Witch Toby would brighten up when she saw Amanda coming. She was the hardest nut to crack, but Amanda took a sudden interest in mushrooms, and helped old Pilar stamp bees on the honey labels, and that pleased Toby, though she tried not to show it.
"Why are you sucking up so much?" I asked Amanda.
"It's how you find stuff out," she said.
We told each other a lot of things. I told her about my father and my house in the HelthWyzer Compound, and how my mother ran off with Zeb.
"I bet she had hot panties for him," said Amanda. We were whispering all of this in our cubicle, at night, with Zeb and Lucerne right nearby, so it was hard not to hear the sex noises they'd make. Before Amanda came I'd found all of that shameful, but now found it funny because Amanda did.
Amanda told me about the droughts in Texas -- how her parents had lost their Happicuppa coffee franchise and couldn't sell their house because no one would buy it, and how there were no jobs and they'd ended up in a refugee camp with old trailers and a lot of Tex-Mexicans. Then their trailer was demolished in one of the hurricanes and her father was killed by a piece of flying metal. A lot of people drowned, but she and her mother held on to a tree and got rescued by some men in a rowboat. They were thieves, said Amanda, looking for stuff they could lift, but they said they'd take Amanda and her mother to dry land and a shelter if they'd do a trade.
"What kind of trade?" I said.
"Just a trade," said Amanda.
The shelter was a football stadium with tents in it. There was a lot of trading going on: people would do anything for twenty dollars, Amanda said. Then her mother got sick from the drinking water, but Amanda didn't because she traded for sodas. And there was no medicine, so her mother died. "A lot of people shat to death," said Amanda. "You should have smelled that place."
Amanda snuck away after that because more people were getting sick and no one was taking away the crap and garbage or bringing food. She changed her name, because she didn't want to be put back in the football stadium: the refugees were supposed to be farmed out to work in whatever job they were told to. "No free lunch," people were saying: you had to pay for everything, one way or another.
"What did you change it from?" I asked her. "Your name."
"It was a white-trash name. Barb Jones," said Amanda. "That was my identity. But I don't have an identity now. So I'm invisible." It was one more thing I could admire about her -- her invisibility.
Amanda walked north, along with thousands of other people. "I tried to hitch, but I only got one lift, with a guy who said he was a chicken farmer," she said. "He pushed his hand between my legs; you can tell that's coming when they breathe funny. I stuck my thumbs in his eyes and got out of there fast." She made it sound like thumbs in the eyes was normal in the Exfernal World. I wanted to learn how to do it, but I didn't think I could work up the nerve.
"Then I had to get past the Wall," she said.
"What wall?"
"Don't you watch the news? The Wall they're building to keep the Tex refugees out, because just the fence wasn't enough. There's men with sprayguns -- it's a CorpSeCorps wall. But they can't patrol every inch -- the Tex-Mex kids know all the tunnels, they helped me get through."
"You could've been shot," I said. "Then what?"
"Then I worked my way up here. For food and stuff. It took a while."
In her place I would have just laid down in a ditch and cried myself to death. But Amanda says if there's something you really want, you can figure out a way to get it. She says being discouraged is a waste of time.
I worried that there might be trouble with the other Gardener kids: after all, Amanda was a pleebrat -- one of our enemies. Bernice hated her, of course, but she didn't dare say so because like everyone else she was in awe of her. First of all, no Gardener kid could dance, and Amanda had excellent moves -- it was like her hips were dislocated. She'd teach me when Lucerne and Zeb weren't there. We'd get the music off her purple phone, which she kept hidden in our mattress, and when the card was used up she'd lift another one. She had some flashy pleeblander clothes hidden away as well, so when she needed to lift something she'd put those clothes on and go off to the Sinkhole mallway.
I could see that Shackleton and Crozier and the older boys were in love with her. She was very pretty, with her tawny skin and her long neck and her big eyes, but you could be pretty and still get called a carrot-sucker or a meat-hole on legs by those boys; they had a bunch of sick names for girls.
Not for Amanda, though: she had their respect. She had a piece of glass with duct tape along one edge to hold it with, and she said this glass had saved her life more than once. She showed us how to ram a guy in the crotch or trip him up and then kick him under the chin and break his neck. There were lots of tricks like that, she said -- ones you could use if you had to.
But on Festival days or at Buds and Blooms Choir practice, no one was as pious as her. You'd think she'd been washed in milk.
THE FESTIVAL OF ARKS
THE FESTIVAL OF ARKS
YEAR TEN.
OF THE TWO FLOODS AND THE TWO COVENANTS.
SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.
Dear Friends and Fellow Mortals:
Today the Children have built their little Arks and launched them on the Arboretum Creek to carry their messages of respect for God's Creatures to other children who may happen to find them on the seashore. In an increasingly endangered world, what a caring act that is! Let us remember: It is better to hope than to mope!
This evening we will share a special Festival meal -- Rebecca's delicious lentil soup, representing the First Flood, with Noah's Ark dumplings stuffed with vegetable Animal forms. One of those dumplings contains a turnip Noah, and whoever finds that Noah will get a special prize -- thus teaching us not to gobble our food in a heedless manner.
That prize is a picture painted by Nuala, our talented Eve Nine: Saint Brendan the Voyager, shown with the essential items we must include in our Ararat storerooms in preparation for the Waterless Flood. In this artwork, Nuala has given the tinned soydines and the soybits their due prominence. But let us remind ourselves to refresh our Ararats regularly. You wouldn't want to open that tin of soydines on the day of need and find that the contents have gone bad.
Burt's worthy wife, Veena, is in a Fallow state and cannot be with us for this Festival, but we look forward to welcoming her among us very soon.
Now let us turn to our Devotion for the Festival of Arks.
On this day we mourn, but we also rejoice. We mourn the deaths of all those Creatures of the land that were destroyed in the First Flood of extinctions -- whenever those occurred -- but we rejoice that the Fishes and Whales, and the Corals, and the Sea Turtles and the Dolphins, and the Sea Urchins, yea, also the Sharks -- we rejoice that they were spared, unless a change in ocean temperature and salinity caused by the great downpour of fresh waters did harm to some Species unknown to us.
We mourn the carnage that took place among the Animals. God was evidently willing to do away with numerous Species, as the fossil records attest, but many were saved until our times, and these are the ones He bequeathed anew to our care. If you had composed a splendid symphony, would you want it to be obliterated? The Earth and the music thereof, the Universe and the harmony therein -- these are God's works of Creativity, of which Man's creativity is but a poor shadow.
According to the Human Words of God, the task of saving the chosen Species was given to Noah, symbolizing the aware ones among Mankind
. He alone was forewarned; he alone took upon himself Adam's original stewardship, keeping God's beloved Species safe until the waters of the Flood had receded and his Ark was beached upon Ararat. Then the rescued Creatures were set loose upon the Earth, as if at a second Creation.
At the first Creation all was rejoicing, but the second event was qualified: God was no longer so well pleased. He knew something had gone very wrong with his last experiment, Man, but that it was too late for him to fix it. "I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite every thing living, as I have done," say the Human Words of God in Genesis 8:21.
Yes, my Friends -- any further cursing of the ground would be done not by God but by Man himself. Consider the southern shores of the Mediterranean -- once fruitful farmland, now a desert. Consider the ruinations wrought in the Amazon River basin; consider the wholesale slaughter of ecosystems, each one a living reflection of God's infinite care for detail ... but these are subjects for another day.
Then God says a noteworthy thing. He says, "And the fear of you" -- that is, Man -- "and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air ... into your hand are they delivered." Genesis 9:2. This is not God telling Man that he has a right to destroy all the Animals, as some claim. Instead it is a warning to God's beloved Creatures: Beware of Man, and of his evil heart.
Then God establishes his Covenant with Noah, and with his sons, "and with every living creature." Many recall the Covenant with Noah, but forget the Covenant with all other living Beings. However, God does not forget it. He repeats the terms "all flesh" and "every living creature" a number of times, to make sure we get the point.
No one can make a Covenant with a stone: for a Covenant to exist, there must be a minimum of two live and responsible parties to it. Therefore the Animals are not senseless matter, not mere chunks of meat. No; they have living Souls, or God could not have made a Covenant with them. The Human Words of God affirm this: "But ask now the beasts," says Job 12, "and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee ... and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."
Let us today remember Noah, the chosen caregiver of the Species. We God's Gardeners are a plural Noah: we too have been called, we too forewarned. We can feel the symptoms of coming disaster as a doctor feels a sick man's pulse. We must be ready for the time when those who have broken trust with the Animals -- yes, wiped them from the face of the Earth where God placed them -- will be swept away by the Waterless Flood, which will be carried on the wings of God's dark Angels that fly by night, and in airplanes and helicopters and bullet trains, and on transport trucks and other such conveyances.
But we Gardeners will cherish within us the knowledge of the Species, and of their preciousness to God. We must ferry this priceless knowledge over the face of the Waterless Waters, as if within an Ark.
Let us construct our Ararats carefully, my Friends. Let us provision them with foresight, and with canned and dried goods. Let us camouflage them well.
May God deliver us from the snare of the fowler, and cover us with his feathers, and under his wings may we trust, as it says in Psalm 91; and thou shalt not be afraid of the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
May I remind you all about the importance of hand-washing, seven times a day at least, and after every encounter with a stranger. It is never too early to practise this essential precaution.
Avoid anyone who is sneezing.
Let us sing.
MY BODY IS MY EARTHLY ARK
My body is my earthly Ark,
It's proof against the Flood;
It holds all Creatures in its heart,
And knows that they are good.
It's builded firm of genes and cells,
And neurons without number;
My Ark enfolds the million years
That Adam spent in slumber.
And when Destruction swirls around,
To Ararat I'll glide;
My Ark will then come safe to land
By light of Spirit's guide.
With Creatures all, in harmony
I'll pass my mortal days,
While each in its appointed voice
Sings the Creator's praise.
From The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook
18
TOBY. SAINT CRICK'S DAY
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
In the northern meadow the dead boar is still lying. The vultures have been at it, though they can't get through the tough hide: they're limited to eyes and tongue. They'll have to wait until it rots and bursts before they can really dig in.
Toby turns her binoculars skyward, at the crows racketing around. When she looks back, two liobams are crossing the meadow. A male, a female, strolling along as if they own the place. They stop at the boar, sniff briefly. Then they continue their walk.
Toby stares at them, fascinated: she's never seen a liobam in the flesh, only pictures. Am I imagining things? she wonders. No, the liobams are actual. They must be zoo animals freed by one of the more fanatical sects in those last desperate days.
They don't look dangerous, although they are. The lion-sheep splice was commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists in order to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They'd reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together. But the result hadn't been strictly vegetarian.
Still, the liobams seem gentle enough, with their curly golden hair and twirling tails. They're nibbling flower heads, they don't look up; yet she has the sense that they're perfectly aware of her. Then the male opens its mouth, displaying its long, sharp canines, and calls. It's an odd combination of baa and roar: a bloar, thinks Toby.
Her skin prickles. She doesn't relish the thought of one of those creatures leaping on her from behind a shrub. If it's her fate to be mangled and devoured, she'd prefer a more conventional beast of prey. Still, they are astounding. She watches them while they gambol together, then sniff the air and saunter away to the edge of the forest, vanishing into dappled shade.
How Pilar would have enjoyed seeing those, she thinks. Pilar, and Rebecca, and little Ren. And Adam One. And Zeb. All dead now.
Stop it, she tells herself. Just stop that right now.
She sidesteps carefully down the stairs, using her mop handle for balance. She keeps expecting -- still -- that the elevator doors will open, the lights blink on, the air conditioning begins to breathe, and someone -- who? -- will step out.
She goes down the long hall, walking softly on the increasingly spongy carpet, past the line of mirrors. There's no shortage of mirrors in the Spa: the ladies needed to be reminded by harsh light of how bad they looked, and then by soft light of how good they might yet appear with a little costly help. But after her first few weeks alone she'd covered the mirrors with pink towels to avoid being startled by her own shape as it flitted from one frame to the next.
"Who lives here?" she says out loud. Not me, she thinks. This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all.
She spends the rest of the morning sitting in a kind of stupor. Once, this would have been meditation, but she can hardly call it that now. Paralyzing rage can still take hold of her, it seems: impossible to know when it will strike. It begins as disbelief and ends in sorrow, but in between those two phases her whole body shakes with anger. Anger at whom, at what? Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she's here for a reason -- to bear witness, to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can't.
It's wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There's nothing to
be accomplished by it.
During the heat of the day, she naps. Trying to stay awake through the noontime steambath is a waste of energy.
She sleeps on a massage table in one of the cubicles where the Spa clients took their organic-botanic treatments. There are pink sheets and pink pillows, and pink blankets too -- soft cuddly colours, pampering infant colours -- though she doesn't need the blankets, not in this weather.
She's been having some difficulty waking up. She must fight against lethargy. It's a strong desire -- to sleep. To sleep and sleep. To sleep forever. She can't live only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can't see any future. Maybe she'll go on from day to day and year to year until she simply withers, folds in on herself, shrivels up like an old spider.
Or she could take a shortcut. There's always the Poppy in its red bottle, there are always the lethal amanita mushrooms, the little Death Angels. How soon before she sets them loose inside herself and lets them fly away with her on their white, white wings?
To cheer herself up, she opens her jar of honey. It's the last one remaining from the honey she extracted so long ago -- she and Pilar -- up on the Edencliff Rooftop. She's been saving it all these years as if it's a protective charm. Honey doesn't decay, said Pilar, as long as you keep water out of it: that's why the ancients called it the food of immortality.
She swallows one fragrant spoonful, then another. It was hard work collecting that honey: the smoking of the hives, the painstaking removal of the combs, the extracting. It took delicacy and tact. The bees had to be spoken to and persuaded, not to mention temporarily gassed, and sometimes they'd sting, but in her memory the whole experience is one of unblemished happiness. She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.
19
Gradually, Toby stopped thinking she should leave the Gardeners. She didn't really believe in their creed, but she no longer disbelieved. One season blended into the next -- rainy, stormy, hot and dry, cooler and dry, rainy and warm -- and then one year into another. She wasn't quite a Gardener, yet she wasn't a pleeblander any more. She was neither the one nor the other.