10

Toby’s first weeks with the Gardeners were not reassuring. Adam One gave her no instructions: he simply watched her, by which she understood that she was on probation. She tried to fit in, to help when needed, but at the routine tasks she was inept. She couldn’t sew tiny stitches, the way Eve Nine — Nuala — wanted, and after she’d bled into a few salads, Rebecca told her to lay off the vegetable chopping. “If I want it to look like beets I’ll put in beets,” was what she said. Burt — Adam Thirteen, in charge of garden vegetables — discouraged her from weeding after she’d uprooted some of the artichokes by mistake. She could clean out the violet biolets, though. It was a simple chore that took no special training. So that is what she did.

Adam One was well aware of her efforts. “The biolets aren’t so bad, are they?” he said to her one day. “After all, we’re strict vegetarians here.” Toby wondered what he meant, but then she realized: less smelly. Cow rather than dog.

Figuring out the Gardener hierarchy took her some time. Adam One insisted that all Gardeners were equal on the spiritual level, but the same did not hold true for the material one: the Adams and the Eves ranked higher, though their numbers indicated their areas of expertise rather than their order of importance. In many ways it was like a monastery, she thought. The inner chapter, then the lay brothers. And the lay sisters, of course. Except that chastity was not expected.

Since she was accepting Gardener hospitality, and under false pretenses at that — she wasn’t really a convert — she felt she should pay by working very hard. To the violet biolet cleaning she added other tasks. She carted fresh soil up to the rooftop via the fire escape — the Gardeners had a supply of it, gathered from deserted building sites and vacant lots — to be mixed with compost, and with violet biolet by-products. She melted down soap ends and decanted and labelled vinegar. She packaged worms for the Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange, she mopped the floor of the Run-For-Your-Light Treadmills gym, she swept out the dormitory cubicles on the level below the Rooftop where the single members of the group slept every night on futons stuffed with dried plant materials.

After several months of this, Adam One suggested that she put her other talents to work. “What other talents?” said Toby.

“Didn’t you study Holistic Healing?” he asked. “At Martha Graham?”

“Yes,” Toby said. There was no point in asking how Adam One knew that about her. He just knew things.

So she set to work making herbal lotions and creams. There wasn’t much chopping involved, and she had a strong arm with the mortar and pestle. Soon after that, Adam One asked her to share her skills with the children, so she added several daily classes to her routine.

By now she was used to the dark, sack-like garments the women wore. “You’ll want to grow your hair,” said Nuala. “Get rid of that scalped look. We Gardener women all wear our hair long.” When Toby asked why, she was given to understand that the aesthetic preference was God’s. This kind of smiling, bossy sanctimoniousness was a little too pervasive for Toby, especially among the female members of the sect.

From time to time she thought of deserting. For one thing, she was swept with periodic but shameful cravings for animal protein. “You ever feel like eating a SecretBurger?” she asked Rebecca. Rebecca was from her former world: such things could be discussed with her.

“I must admit it,” said Rebecca. “I do have those thoughts. They put something in them — it has to be. Some addictive thing.”

The food was pleasant enough — Rebecca did her best with the limited materials available — but it was repetitious. In addition to that, the prayers were tedious, the theology scrambled — why be so picky about lifestyle details if you believed everyone would soon be wiped off the face of the planet? The Gardeners were convinced of impending disaster, through no solid evidence that Toby could see. Maybe they were reading bird entrails.

A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to overpopulation and wickedness, but the Gardeners exempted themselves: they intended to float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were stashing away in the hidden storeplaces they called Ararats. As for the flotation devices in which they would ride out this flood, they themselves would be their own Arks, stored with their own collections of inner animals, or at least the names of those animals. Thus they would survive to replenish the Earth. Or something like that.

Toby asked Rebecca whether she really believed the Gardener total-disaster talk, but Rebecca wouldn’t be drawn. “They are good people,” was all she’d say. “What comes just comes, so what I say is, Relax.” Then she’d give Toby a honey/soy doughnut.

Good people or not, Toby couldn’t see herself sticking it out among these fugitives from reality for long. But she couldn’t just walk away openly. That would be too blatantly ungrateful: after all, these people had saved her skin. So she pictured herself slipping down the fire escape, past the sleeping level and the pachinko joint and the massage parlour on the floors below, and running off under cover of darkness, then hitching a solarcar ride to some other city farther north. Planes were out of the question, being far too expensive and intensely scrutinized by the CorpSeCorps. Even if she’d had the money for it, she couldn’t take the bullet train — they checked identities there, and she didn’t have one.

Not only that, but Blanco would still be on the lookout for her, down on the pleeb streets — him and his two thug pals. No woman ever got away from him, was his boast. Sooner or later he’d track her down and make her pay. That kick of hers would be very expensive. It would take a publicly advertised gang rape or her head on a pole to wipe the slate.

Was it possible that he didn’t know where she was? No: the pleebrat gangs must have picked up such knowledge the way they picked up every rumour and sold it to him. She’d been avoiding the streets, but what was to stop Blanco from coming after her up the fire escape and onto the rooftop? Finally she shared her fears with Adam One. He knew about Blanco and what he was likely to do — he’d seen him in action.

“I don’t want to put the Gardeners in danger,” was how Toby put it.

“My dear,” said Adam One, “you are safe with us. Or moderately safe.” Blanco was Sewage Lagoon pleebmob, he explained, and the Gardeners were next door, in the Sinkhole. “Different pleebs, different mobs,” he said. “They don’t trespass unless they’re having a mob war. In any case, the CorpSeCorps run the mobs, and according to our information they’ve declared us off-limits.”

“Why would they bother to do that?” asked Toby.

“It would be bad for their image to eviscerate anything with God in its name,” said Adam One. “The Corporations wouldn’t approve of it, considering the influence of the Petrobaptists and the Known Fruits among them. They claim to respect the Spirit and to favour religious toleration, as long as the religions don’t take to blowing things up: they have an aversion to the destruction of private property.”

“They can’t possibly like us,” said Toby.

“Of course not,” said Adam One. “They view us as twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical attitude towards shopping. But we own nothing they want, so we don’t qualify as terrorists. Sleep easier, dear Toby. You’re guarded by angels.”

Curious angels, thought Toby. Not all of them angels of light. But she did sleep easier, on her mattress of rustling husks.