be found.
For the Waterless Flood is coming, in which all buying and selling will cease, and we will find ourselves thrown back upon our own resources, in the midst of God’s bounteous Garden. Which was your Garden also.
Let us sing.
OH SING WE NOW THE HOLY WEEDS
Oh sing we now the Holy Weeds
That flourish in the ditch,
For they are for the meek in needs,
They are not for the rich.
You cannot buy them at the mall,
Nor at the superstore,
They are despised because they all
Grow freely for the poor.
The Dandelion shoots, for spring,
Before their flowers burst;
The Burdock root is best in June
When it is fat with juice;
When autumn comes, the Acorn’s ripe,
The Walnut black is too;
Young Milkweed pods are sweet when boiled,
And Milkweed shoots when new.
The inner bark of Spruce and Birch
For extra Vitamin C —
But do not take too much of each,
Or you will kill the tree.
The Purslane, Sorrel, Lamb’s Quarters,
And Nettles, too, are good;
The Hawthorn, Elder, Sumac, Rose —
Their berries wholesome food.
The Holy Weeds are plentiful
And beautiful to see —
For who can doubt God put them there,
So starved we’ll never be?
From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook
24
REN
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE
I remember what the dinner was, that night in the Sticky Zone: it was ChickieNobs. I couldn’t deal with meat very well ever since the Gardeners, but Mordis said that ChickieNobs were really vegetables because they grew on stems and didn’t have faces. So I ate half of them.
Then I did some dancing to keep in practice. I had my own Sea/H/Ear Candy, and I sang along. Adam One said music was built into us by God: we could sing like the birds but also like the angels, because singing was a form of praise that came from deeper than just talking, and God could hear us better when we were singing. I try to remember that.
Then I looked in on the Snakepit again. There were three guys from Painball in the Snakepit — ones who’d just got out. You could always tell because they were freshly shaved, with new haircuts, and new clothes too, and they had a stunned look, like they’d been kept in a dark closet for a long time. Also they had a little tattoo at the base of their left thumb — a round circle, red or bright yellow, depending on whether they were Red Team or Gold Team. The other customers were sort of moving back from them, giving them room, but respectfully — as if they were webstars or sports heroes instead of Painball criminals. Rich guys loved to imagine themselves as Painball players. They gambled on the teams as well: Red against Gold. A lot of money changed hands over Painball.
There were always two or three CorpSeCorps guys minding the Painball vets — they could go berserk and do a lot of damage. We Scalies were never allowed to be alone with them: they didn’t understand make-believe, they never knew when to stop, and they could break a lot more than the furniture. It was best to get them wasted, but it had to be fast or they’d go into full rage mode.
“I’d bar those assholes myself,” said Mordis. “Nothing much human left inside that scar tissue of theirs. But SeksMart pays us a bigtime extra bonus when it’s them.”
We’d feed them drinks and pills, with a shovel if we could. There was something new they’d started using just after I went into the Sticky Zone — BlyssPluss, it was called. Hassle-free sex, total satisfaction, blow you right out of your skin, plus 100 percent protection — that was the word on it. Scales girls weren’t allowed to do drugs on the job — we weren’t paid to enjoy ourselves, said Mordis — but this was different, because if you took it you didn’t need a Biofilm Bodyglove, and a lot of customers would pay extra that way. Scales was testing the BlyssPluss for the ReJoov Corp, so they weren’t handing it out like candy — it was mostly for the top customers — but I could hardly wait to try it.
We always got huge tips on Painball nights, though none of us regular Scales girls had to do plank duty with the new vets because we were skilled artists and any damage to us would be pricey. For the basic bristle work they brought in the temporaries — smuggled Eurotrash or Tex-Mexicans or Asian Fusion and Redfish minors scooped off the streets because the Painball guys wanted membrane, and after they were finished you’d be judged