The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (2009) (read in 2021)

“Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and a new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place.”

“This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died.”

“When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear.”

“Adam One sighed. “We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.””

“We should not have allowed Melissa to lag so far behind us. Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins. Put Light around her in your hearts. Let us sing.”

“And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.”

“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.”

We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God’s hand. Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free.

“When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear.”

“We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”

“They’re a quarter of the way across the meadow when it occurs to her they’ll be back. They’ll dig under at night and root up her garden in no time flat, and that will be the end of her long-term food supply. She’ll have to shoot them, it’s self-defence. She squeezes off a round, misses, tries again. The boar falls down. The two sows keep running. Only when they’ve reached the forest rim do they turn and look back. Then they meld with the foliage and are gone.”

“This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died.”

“No doctor could give her a diagnosis, though many tests were done by the HelthWyzer Corp clinics; they took an interest because she’d been such a faithful user of their products. They arranged for special care, with their own doctors. They charged for it, though, and even with the discount for members of the HelthWyzer Franchise Family it was a lot of money; and because the condition had no name, her parents’ modest health insurance plan refused to cover the costs. Nobody could get public wellness coverage unless they had no money of their own whatsoever.”

“Already, back then, the CorpSeCorps were consolidating their power. They’d started as a private security firm for the Corporations, but then they’d taken over when the local police forces collapsed for lack of funding, and people liked that at first because the Corporations paid, but now CorpSeCorps were sending their tentacles everywhere.”

“She’d burned her identity and didn’t have the cash to buy a new one — not even a cheap one, without the DNA infusion or the skin-colour change — so she couldn’t get a legitimate job: those were mostly controlled by the Corporations. But if you sank deep down — down where names disappeared and no histories were true — the CorpSeCorps wouldn’t bother with you.”

““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.”

““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.”

“But we affirm, also, the Divine agency that has caused us to be created in the way that we were, and this has enraged those scientific fools who say in their hearts, “There is no God.” These claim to prove the non-existence of God because they cannot put Him in a test tube and weigh and measure Him.

“But God is pure Spirit; so how can anyone reason that the failure to measure the Immeasurable proves its non-existence? God is indeed the No Thing, the Nothingness, that through which and by which all material things exist; for if there were not such a Nothingness, existence would be so crammed full of materiality that no one thing could be distinguished from another. The mere existence of separate material things is a proof of the Nothingness of God.

“Where were the scientific fools when God laid the foundations of the Earth by interposing his own Spirit between one blob of matter and another, thus giving rise to forms?”

“They looked as if they already owned everything from every single store and were bored with it. I envied that look so much. I just stood there, envying.”

““How do they stay alive in there?” She pointed to the silver knob where the bracelet fastened.

““This is an aerator,” she said. “It pumps in oxygen. You add the food twice a week.”

““What happens if you forget?”

““They eat each other,” said Amanda. She gave a little smile. “Some kids do that on purpose, they don’t add the food. Then it’s like a miniwar in there, and after a while there’s just one jellyfish left, and then it dies.”

““That’s horrible,” I said.

“Amanda kept the same smile. “Yeah. That’s why they do it.””

“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.”

““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.”

“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.”

“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.”

““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.””

“It was true that the Gardeners didn’t look down on Lucerne, or not for the reasons she thought they did. They might resent the way she slacked off on chores and could never learn how to chop a carrot, they might be scornful of the messiness of her living space and her pathetic attempt at windowsill tomato-growing and the amount of time she spent in bed, but they didn’t care about her infidelity, or her adultery, or whatever it had once been called.”

“Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much? I don’t know why, but it’s true. I found myself standing there and smelling all those smells, and hoping a lot that Shackie and Croze thought I was pretty.”

“I don’t know how long all of that lasted because time was like rubber, it stretched out like a long, long elastic rope or a huge piece of chewing gum. Then it snapped shut into a tiny black square and I passed out.”

“I point no fingers, for I know not where to point; but as we have just seen, malicious rumours can spread confusion. A careless remark can be as the cigarette butt casually tossed into the dumpster, smouldering until it bursts into flame and engulfs a neighbourhood. Do guard your words in future.”

“While the Flood rages, you must count the days, said Adam One. You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On your Meditations, do not travel so far on your inner journeys that you enter the Timeless before it is time. In your Fallow states, do not descend to a level that is too deep for any resurgence, or the Night will come in which all hours are the same to you, and then there will be no Hope.”

“Adam One sighed. “We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.””

“[…] how ruthlessly Bernice had been shouldered aside, once Amanda had appeared on the scene. They think we don’t see them, thought Toby. They think we don’t know what they’re up to. Their snobberies, their cruelties, their schemes.”

“I can’t stand this, she thought. I’m killing her. No: I’m helping her to die. I’m fulfilling her wishes. She watched as Pilar drank. “Thank you for learning,””

““Thank you for all you’ve taught me,” said Toby. I can’t stand this, she thought. I’m killing her. No: I’m helping her to die. I’m fulfilling her wishes. She watched as Pilar drank.

““Thank you for learning,” said Pilar. “I’m going to sleep now. Don’t forget to tell the bees.””

“Final self-journeying is a moral option only for the experienced and, I have to say, only for the terminally ill, as Pilar was; but it’s not one we should make widely available — especially not to our young people, who are impressionable and prone to indulge in morbid sulking and false heroics. I trust you’ve taken charge of those medicine bottles of Pilar’s? We wouldn’t want any accidents.””

“On April Fish Day, which originated in France, we make fun of one another by attaching a Fish of paper, or, in our case, a Fish of recycled cloth, to the back of another person and then crying out, “April Fish!” Or, in the original French, “Poisson d’Avril!” In anglophone countries, this day is known as April Fool’s Day. But April Fish was surely first a Christian festival, as a Fish image was used by the early Christians as secret signals of their faith in times of oppression.”

“The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is endlessly constructing for itself. For what in us is belief and faith, in the other Creatures is inborn knowledge.”

“We cannot know God by reason and measurement; indeed, excess reason and measurement lead to doubt. Through them, we know that Comets and nuclear holocausts are among the possible tomorrows, not to mention the Waterless Flood, that we fear looms ever nearer. This fear dilutes our certainty, and through that channel comes loss of Faith; and then the temptation to enact malevolence enters our Souls; for if annihilation awaits us, why bother to strive for the Good?”

“We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake. It never went away, even among the Gardeners. Especially — as time wore on — among the Gardeners.”

“That would be putting the cart before the horse, said Adam One; they could not achieve their goal of reconciling the findings of Science with their sacramental view of Life simply by overriding the rules of the former. He asked them to ponder this conundrum, and propose solutions at a later date.”

“The strictly materialist view — that we’re an experiment animal protein has been doing on itself — is far too harsh and lonely for most, and leads to nihilism. That being the case, we need to push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction by pointing out the hazards of annoying God by a violation of His trust in our stewardship.”

““What you mean is, with God in the story there’s a penalty,” said Toby.

““Yes,” said Adam One. “There’s a penalty without God in the story too, needless to say. But people are less likely to credit that. If there’s a penalty, they want a penalizer. They dislike senseless catastrophe.””

“The Hammerhead paced the floor and gnawed her fingernails until Toby felt like hitting her. We didn’t ask you to come here and put all our necks in a noose over a teaspoonful of stale-dated crap, she wanted to say. In the end she gave the woman some chamomile tea with Poppy in it, just to take her off the airwaves.”

““Our role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness,” said Adam One. “And to guard the memories and the genomes of the departed. You can’t fight blood with blood. I thought we’d agreed on that.””

““Be of good cheer,” he said. “Nothing bad will be done to you.” But since Adam One thought that even the most terrible things happened for ultimately excellent though unfathomable reasons, Toby did not find this reassuring.”

“And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.”

“Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no matter how much you’ve been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It’s the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it’s the universal protest against Time.”

“Adam One would say that Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby so that Toby may demonstrate unselfishness and sharing and those higher qualities the Gardeners had been so eager to bring out in her. Toby can’t quite see it that way, not at the moment. But she’ll have to keep trying.”

“Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?”

“Saints Shackleton and Crozier, of Antarctic and Arctic fame; and Saint Laurence “Titus” Oates of the Scott Expedition, who hiked where no man had ever hiked before, and who sacrificed himself during a blizzard for the welfare of his companions. Let his immortal last words be an inspiration to us on our journey: “I am just going outside and may be some time.””

“We should not have allowed Melissa to lag so far behind us. Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins. Put Light around her in your hearts. Let us sing.”

“Are the new people Your idea of an improved model? Is this what the first Adam was supposed to be? Will they replace us? Or do You intend to shrug your shoulders and carry on with the present human race? If so, you’ve chosen some odd marbles: a clutch of one-time scientists, a handful of renegade Gardeners, two psychotics on the loose with a nearly dead woman. It’s hardly the survival of the fittest, except for Zeb; but even Zeb’s tired.”

“Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the World given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creatures. Other religions have taught that this World is to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and a new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly? No, my Friends. It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place.”

“For the Waterless Flood has swept over us — not as a vast hurricane, not as a barrage of comets, not as a cloud of poisonous gasses. No: as we suspected for so long, it is a plague — a plague that infects no Species but our own, and that will leave all other Creatures untouched. Our cities are darkened, our lines of communication are no more.”

“But let our going out be brave and joyous! Let us end with a prayer for All Souls. Among these are the Souls of those who have persecuted us; those who have murdered God’s Creatures, and extinguished His Species; those who have tortured in the name of Law; who have worshipped nothing but riches; and who, to gain wealth and worldly power, have inflicted pain and death.”

We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God’s hand. Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free.