Even if she could bring herself to start a conversation, the thought of how much work it would be to keep it going made her heart sink. He was obviously a typical male of the species; stupid, uncommunicative, yet with a rodent cunning for evasion. She would talk to him, and in return he would grunt, surrender one-word answers to her cleverest questions, lapse into silence at every opportunity. She would play her game, he would play his, on and on, perhaps for hours.
Isserley realized, suddenly, that she just didn’t have the energy to play anymore.
Eyes fixed on the bleak road stretching out in front of her, she was humiliated by the absurd labour of it all, this wearisome nudging and winkling at him as if he were some priceless pearl to be drawn out by infinitesimal degrees from his secretive shell. The patience it required of her was superhuman. And for what? A vodsel the same as all the other vodsels, one of billions infesting the planet. A few parcels’ worth of meat.
Why must she put so much effort into playing this game day after day? Was this how she would spend the rest of her life? Endlessly putting on these performances, turning herself inside out, only to finish up empty-handed (more often than not) and having to start all over again?
She couldn’t bear it.
She looked in her rear-view mirror, then askance at the hitcher. His eyes met hers; he blushed and smirked cretinously, breathing hard. The sheer brute alienness of him hit her like a blow; and, with a heady rush like the nausea after a sudden loss of blood, she hated him.
‘Hasusse,’ she said between clenched teeth, and flipped the icpathua toggle.
He began to fall towards her; she shoved him back with the flat of her hand. He swayed away from her, his big shoulders tipping like a unstable bale of hay, his head bumping against the passenger window. Isserley flicked the indicator and eased the car off the road.
Safely parked in a layby, her motor still on, she pressed the button to darken the windscreen. It was the first time she’d ever been aware of doing so. Usually she was floating somewhere in space when this moment came; today she was solidly anchored in the driver’s seat, her hands on the controls. The glass went deep amber all around her, the world went dark and disappeared, and the little cabin light came on. She leaned her head back against the headrest and removed her glasses, listening to the rumble of distant traffic over the purr of her engine.
Her breathing, she noted, was perfectly normal. Her heart, which admittedly had been labouring a bit when she’d first let the vodsel into her car, was now beating quite tranquilly.
Whatever the problem had been, in the past, with her physical reactions, she seemed finally to have solved it.
She bent down to open the glove compartment. Two tears fell out of her eyes, onto the hitcher’s jeans. She frowned, unable to account for it.
Isserley drove directly back to Ablach Farm, trying to fathom, all the way there, what could possibly be wrong.
Of course the events of yesterday … or was it the day before? … She wasn’t exactly sure how long she had spent on the jetty afterwards … but anyway, those events … well, they
had
upset her, there was no denying that. But it was all in the past now. Water under the bridge, as the vodsels … as she’d heard it said.
Now she was driving past the abandoned steelworks, almost home, with a nice big vodsel propped up next to her, just like any other day. Life went on, there was work to be done. The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention. She flicked her indicator at the Ablach sign.
As she drove over Rabbit Hill, she was ready to admit that she was perhaps not in such good shape. But, determined to pull herself together without wasting any more time, she already had a vision of what it would take for her to feel better. Something inside her was trapped. Something small: nothing serious. But still trapped.
To complete her recovery, to get herself back to normal, she needed to release it.
She felt sure she knew how.
Parking in front of the steading, she sounded her car’s horn, impatient for the men to come out.
The door rolled open to reveal, as usual, Ensel and the two cronies whose names she’d never bothered to memorize. Ensel, as usual, hurried out to peer through the car’s passenger window at what she’d brought home for them. Isserley braced herself for the usual platitude about the quality of the specimen.
‘Are you all right?’ grimaced Ensel through the glass. He was looking straight at her, ignoring the vodsel slumped under ill-fitting blond wig and sloppily applied anorak. ‘You’re … ah … you have some mud on your clothes.’
‘It will wash off,’ said Isserley frostily.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Ensel, cowed by her tone. He opened the door and the vodsel, poorly balanced, tumbled out like a sack of potatoes. Ensel leapt back in alarm, then snorted self-consciously and tried to rise above the mishap with panache. ‘Um … he’s a good one, isn’t he?’ he leered. ‘One of the best ever.’
Isserley didn’t deign to respond, but threw open her own door and stepped out of the car. Ensel, already busy with the other men dragging the vodsel backwards, registered her approach with a puzzled squint.
‘Something wrong?’ he grunted as he struggled to lift his burden onto a wheeled pallet. The weave of the vodsel’s knitted jumper was very loose and almost useless as a grip-handle.
‘No,’ said Isserley. ‘I’m coming with you, that’s all.’
She strode on ahead and leaned against the steading while the men staggered to catch up, pulling the pallet with the vodsel on it.
‘Uh … is there some problem?’ said Ensel.
‘No,’ said Isserley, calmly watching them bumble through the door at last. ‘I just want to see what happens.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Ensel, bewildered. The other men swivelled their heads to regard each other. Mutely they shuffled across the hangar floor, with Isserley walking beside them.
At the lift, there was an even more embarrassing moment. Clearly, there was only enough room inside for the men and their burden, not for Isserley as well.
‘Um … you know there’s really not that much to see,’ simpered Ensel as he jostled with his companions inside the great drum.
Isserley clawed off her glasses and hung them on the frayed neckline of her top, fixing Ensel with a steely glare as the lift began to seal itself shut.
‘Don’t start without me,’ she warned.
*
*
*
Isserley, standing alone in the dimly lit lift, allowed herself to be borne deeper and deeper into the earth. She passed the Dining and Recreation level, descended lower than the men’s sleeping quarters.
As she sank through the well-oiled, frictionless shaft, she kept her eyes on the seam that would open when she reached Transit Level. Transit Level was three storeys below the ground. There was nothing lower than Transit Level except the vodsel pens themselves.
She’d expected to feel uneasy, even panicky, going down so far. But when the lift stopped moving and the door slid open, all those arm’s-lengths below the ground, Isserley wasn’t aware of any nausea. She knew she was going to be all right. She was going to get what she needed.
The Processing Hall was the largest of the linked maze of rooms that made up Transit Level. Its ceiling was high, its dimensions generous, its lighting fierce, leaving no corner in the slightest shadow. It was like an automobile showroom gutted of its contents and sparsely reappointed for more organic purposes. There was plenty of air, breezing out of the many air-conditioning grilles in the whitewashed walls. There was even a hint of marine tang to it.
The hall was lined on three sides with long metal work-benches, unattended just now. Ensel and the other men, as well as Unser, the Chief Processor, were all gathered in the centre of the room, converged around a mechanical contraption Isserley knew must be the Cradle.
The Cradle, constructed from pieces of farm equipment, was a masterpiece of specialized design. Its base was the cannibalized mechanism of an earthmover, welded to a stainless-steel drinking trough. Mounted on top, chest-high to a human, was a two-metre segment of a grain chute, artfully beaten into an amended shape so that its sharp edges were curled harmlessly in on themselves. Gleaming and elegant like a giant gravy boat, the chute was being tilted mechanically on its unseen fulcrum, assuming a perfectly horizontal position.
The person adjusting the balance of the Cradle was Ensel, smug in his responsibility of personally assisting the Chief Processor; his two cronies were engaged in the less precise task of undressing the vodsel, lying nearby.
Unser, the Chief Processor – or the butcher, as he still insisted on calling himself – was washing himself. He was a compact, wiry man, who would have been scarcely taller than Isserley if he’d been a biped. He had massive knobbly wrists, though, and powerful hands, which he was holding aloft as he squatted on his hindquarters next to a metal tub.
He lifted his almost freakishly small, coarse-bristled head and sniffed the air, as if he was smelling the arrival of an unfamiliar scent – Isserley’s, not the vodsel’s.
‘Uhr-rhum,’ he said. It was the language of neither humans nor vodsels. He was simply clearing his throat.
Isserley had stepped out of the lift, and it had closed behind her. She waited to be challenged or greeted. The men did neither, carrying on with their activities as if she was invisible. Ensel rolled a small metal trolley of shiny instruments into Unser’s reach. The two cronies undressing the vodsel were huffing and puffing with effort, but the sound was smoothed over somewhat by the music all around.
Real music, human music, was being piped into the hall by loudspeakers nestled in the walls. Soft singing and the strumming of instruments imparted a reassuring flavour of home, a pervasive smell of melodies half remembered from childhood. They hissed and hummed soothingly.
The men had already managed to pull off the new arrival’s fleecy jumper and were struggling with the rest. The pale flesh was wreathed in many layers of clothing, like layers of cabbage or radish. There was less actual vodsel inside than Isserley had thought.
‘Careful, careful,’ muttered Unser as the men scrabbled clumsily at the vodsel’s ankles to remove tight woollen socks. An animal’s shanks were close to where its faeces would fall once it was in the pens; any lacerations would be liable to fester.
Panting from exertion, the men finished their task, tossing the last tiny garment on top of a pile. All these years, Isserley had always been handed the vodsels’ clothing and personal effects in a bag, just inside the steading door; this was the first time she’d seen how that bag came to be filled.
‘Uhr-rhum,’ said Unser again. Using his tail for balance, he waddled up against the Cradle on his hind legs, still holding his arms aloft. His arms were shiny black, as black as Amlis’s, in contrast to the rest of his fur, which was grey. However, this was only because his arms had just been washed right up to the shoulders, and the fur was saturated with water, slicked flat.
He looked sharply at Isserley, as if noticing her presence only now.
‘Can I help you?’ he demanded, squeezing the fur on his forearms a bit smoother still with his encircling hands. Drops of water pattered on the floor at his feet.
‘I … just came to watch,’ said Isserley.
The Chief Processor’s suspicious glare burned into her; she realized she was hunching over, her arms folded over her breasts, trying to look as human as possible.
‘Watch?’ Unser repeated in bemusement as the men struggled to lift the vodsel off the floor.
Isserley nodded. She was only too well aware that she had avoided coming here for four years, had only ever spoken to Unser in the dining hall. She hoped he would at least have noticed, from their rare conversations, that she respected him, even feared him a little. He, like her, was a true professional.
Unser cleared his throat again. He was always clearing his throat; he had a disease, the men said.
‘Well … keep well back,’ he advised her gruffly. ‘You look as if you’ve been crawling through the muck.’
Isserley nodded, and took a step backward.
‘OK,’ said Unser. ‘Put him on.’
The vodsel’s lolling body was flopped onto the Cradle, then turned to face the fluorescent ceiling. His limbs were arranged neatly, his shoulders fitted snugly into a special shoulder-shaped indentation which had been sculpted into the metal of the chute. His head came to rest on the lip of the chute, his loose red hair dangling just above the great metal trough.
Throughout all this the vodsel, though placidly flexible, made not the slightest movement himself, except for the autonomic squirming of his testes inside the shrinking scrotal sac.
When the body had been arranged to Unser’s satisfaction and the tray of instruments pushed against the edge of the Cradle, the butcher began his task. Balancing on his tail and one hind leg, he lifted his other hind leg up to the vodsel’s face and hooked two fingers of his foot into the vodsel’s nostrils. An upward tug pulled the animal’s head right back and opened its mouth wide. Pausing only to make sure of his balance, Unser flexed his free hands. Then, from the tray beside him, he selected one silver tool shaped like an elongated letter q, and another shaped like a tiny sickle. Both of these instruments were immediately inserted into the vodsel’s mouth.
Isserley strained to see, but Unser’s big wrists and the twisting motion of his fingers obscured the view as he carved out the vodsel’s tongue. Blood began to gurgle out onto the vodsel’s cheeks as Unser turned to drop his tools on the tray with a clatter. Unhesitatingly he snatched up an electrical appliance resembling a large star-point screwdriver and, squinting with concentration, guided it into the vodsel’s mouth. Flashes of light glowed through the gaps in Unser’s nimble fingers as he searched out the incontinent blood vessels and fried them shut with a crackling buzz.
He was already busy sluicing out the vodsel’s mouth with a suction pump by the time the smell of burning flesh had permeated the air. The vodsel coughed: the first real evidence that, far from being dead, it was suffering from nothing more serious than icpathuasi.