Under the Skin

  ‘I’m sorry, Isserley,’ he announced quietly, ‘but I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to be here.’

  ‘Oh please,’ entreated Isserley, squirming. ‘Don’t let me put you off.’

  ‘We are doing a job here,’ the Chief Processor reminded her sternly. ‘Feelings don’t enter into it.’

  ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ cringed Isserley. ‘Please, just carry on as if I’m not here.’

  Unser leaned across the Cradle, obscuring her view of the vodsel’s steaming head.

  ‘I think it would be better if you left,’ he said, with exaggerated clarity. Ensel and the others looked nervously back and forth between him and the object of his disapproval.

  ‘Look …’ croaked Isserley. ‘What’s all the fuss? Can’t you just … just …’

  She glanced down at her hands because she sensed they were being stared at. She was shocked to observe her fingers hacking downwards through the air, as if she were trying to claw something out of the atmosphere with her nails.

  ‘Ensel,’ said Unser warily. ‘I think Isserley may be … unwell.’

  The men started to move across the wet floor towards Isserley, their reflections vibrating in the brilliant sheen.

  ‘Keep away from me,’ she warned.

  ‘Please, Isserley,’ said Ensel, still advancing. ‘You look …’ He grimaced awkwardly. ‘It’s terrible to see you looking like this.’

  ‘Keep away from me,’ she repeated.

  In the lurid confines of the Processing Hall, it seemed to Isserley that the light had begun to intensify weirdly, its wattage multiplying second by second. The music also seemed to be sagging out of tune, keening nauseously into her spine. Stinging sweat ran into her eyes and down her back. She was, she remembered suddenly, deep inside the ground. The air was vile, recycled through tons of solid rock, with a horrible fake aroma of sea-spray. She was trapped, surrounded by beings for whom this was all normal.

  Suddenly sinewy male arms were rearing up at her from all directions, seizing her wrists, her shoulders, her clothing.

  ‘Get your stinking paws off me!’ she hissed. But their grip was stronger then her own desperate flails of resistance.

  ‘No! No-o-o! No-o-o-o!’ she screamed as they pulled her off her feet.

  The instant she fell, everything around her began to contract sickeningly. The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.

  Shrieking, she tried to roll herself into a ball, but she was caught spread-eagled by many strong hands. Then, the walls and ceiling gulped shut on her and she was engulfed in darkness.

  11

  BEFORE SHE WAS even properly conscious, Isserley was already aware of two smells, surreally blended: raw meat and recent rainfall. She opened her eyes. The endless night sky was all above her, glittering with a million distant stars.

  She was lying on her back, in a vehicle with an open top, parked in a garage with an open roof.

  It wasn’t her car; it wasn’t a car at all, she realized slowly. She was lying inside the splayed flip-top hull of the transport ship, under a yawning aperture in the steading roof.

  ‘I persuaded them the fresh air would do you good,’ said Amlis Vess, somewhere not so far away.

  Isserley tried to turn her head to find him, but her neck was so stiff it might have been clamped in a vice. Barely breathing for fear of bringing on the pain, she lay very still, wondering what was raising her head up from the metal floor. With her clammy fingers she felt, alongside her paralysed hips, the texture of what lay beneath her: a rough woven mat, of the kind humans liked to sleep on.

  ‘When they brought you out of the lift, you seemed to be choking, almost suffocating,’ Amlis went on. ‘I wanted to take you outside, but the other men wouldn’t let me. And they refused to take you out themselves, either. So I got them to agree to this.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she murmured passionlessly. ‘I’m sure I would have survived regardless.’

  ‘Yes,’ he conceded, ‘no doubt you would.’

  Isserley examined the sky more closely. There was still a trace of violet in it, and the moon was only just edging into view. It might be six o’clock in the evening, seven at the latest. She tried to lift her head. The response from her body was not so good.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said Amlis.

  ‘I’m just resting,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve had a very tiring day.’

  Minutes passed. Isserley strove to adjust to her predicament, which struck her as both awful and laughable. She wiggled her toes, and then tried to wiggle her hips, unobtrusively. A needle of pain went through her tailbone.

  Amlis Vess tactfully refrained from commenting on her sharp intake of breath. Instead he said, ‘I’ve been watching the sky ever since I got here.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Isserley. Her eyes felt unpleasantly encrusted when she blinked. She longed to wipe them.

  ‘Nothing I imagined really prepared me for it,’ Amlis went on. His sincerity was unmistakable, and Isserley found it oddly touching.

  ‘I felt the same, at first,’ she said.

  ‘It’s pure blue during the day,’ he observed, as if she might not have noticed this yet and he was calling her attention to it. Confronted with the sheer earnestness of his enthusiasm, she suddenly felt like shrieking with laughter.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed.

  ‘And many other colours,’ he added.

  She really did have to laugh then, a snort that was mostly pain.

  ‘Yes, many,’ she said through clenched teeth. At last she had managed to lift her hands up, and clasped them across her belly, in a way she found comforting. Inch by inch, she was coming back to life.

  ‘You know,’ Amlis went on, ‘Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.’ His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. ‘It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.’

  Isserley stroked the fabric of her top over her belly; it was slightly damp, but not very. The rain mustn’t have lasted very long.

  ‘The water stopped falling as abruptly as it started,’ said Amlis. ‘But even now the smell of everything has changed.’

  Isserley was able to turn her head slightly now. She ascertained that she’d been laid out in front of one of the ship’s refrigerators. The base of her skull was resting on a broad pedal bar at the base of the unit, whose function was to raise the lid when stepped on. Her head wasn’t heavy enough to raise the lid; that required the body weight of a man.

  To the right of her, on the metal floor almost at her shoulder, lay two trays of meat covered in transparent viscose. One tray was prime steaks, dark auburn and interleaved. The other, larger tray was densely packed with offal: bleached entrails perhaps, or brains. They smelled strong, even through the wrapping. The men really ought to have finished putting them away before leaving her here.

  She turned her head to the left. Amlis was sitting some distance from her, beautiful as ever, his back limbs curled under him, his arms erect, his head raised slightly towards the open steading roof. She caught a glimpse of his sharp white teeth; he was eating something.

  ‘You needn’t have stayed with me,’ she said, trying to lift her knees without him noticing the effort it took.

  ‘I sit here most of the day and night,’ he explained. ‘The men won’t let me out of the building, of course. But I see the most extraordinary things just through this hole in the roof.’ However, he turned his attention to her now, and stood up to move closer to where she lay. She heard the gentle tick of his clawed fingers on the metal floor as
he padded along.

  He stopped a respectful distance from her body, an arm’s length perhaps, and let his haunches drop again, legs curling underneath. His arms remained erect, the tousled white fur of his breast pushing out between them. She had forgotten how black the down on his head was, how golden his eyes.

  ‘All this meat doesn’t put you off?’ she suggested tauntingly.

  He ignored the barb in her comment.

  ‘It’s all dead now,’ he said simply. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that now, is there?’

  ‘I thought you might still be working on the minds and hearts of the men, you know,’ pursued Isserley, hearing herself overdoing the sarcasm.

  ‘Well, I did my best,’ said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. ‘But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it’s not your minds I need to change.’ And he glanced round at the contents of the ship’s hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.

  Isserley watched his neck and shoulders, the way his fur was so soft it fluttered in the breeze. Her grasp on her ill-will towards him was growing weak, now that she was imagining him resting his warm fleecy breast on her back, his white teeth gently biting her neck.

  ‘What are you eating?’ she demanded, because his jaws seemed to be in constant motion.

  ‘I’m not eating anything,’ he declared insouciantly, and resumed chewing.

  Isserley felt a flash of contempt: he was like all rich powerful people – smugly comfortable with lying, arrogantly indifferent to the evidence of other people’s senses. She pulled a face of disapproval, as if to say, Have it your way. He read this at once, despite the alienness of her features.

  ‘I’m not eating, I’m chewing,’ he solemnly protested, but his amber eyes had a twinkle in them. ‘Icpathua, actually.’

  Isserley remembered now his notoriety on this account and, though intrigued, she affected a look of hauteur.

  ‘I would have thought you’d grown out of that sort of thing,’ she said.

  But Amlis was not to be baited.

  ‘Icpathua is not a behaviour, adolescent or otherwise,’ he pointed out coolly. ‘It’s a plant, with its own unique properties.’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ sighed Isserley, turning her head, shifting her attention back to the starry sky. ‘You’ll wind up dead, anyhow.’

  She heard him laugh but missed seeing it. She regretted missing it, then was irritated with herself for regretting.

  ‘I’d have to swallow a bale of it the size of my own body,’ Amlis was saying.

  She laughed then, despite herself; the thought of him attempting such a thing was bizarr ely funny. She tried to cover her laughter with her hand, but the pain in her back was too vicious and she lay rigid, chortling helplessly, her face naked to him. The more she laughed, the less she could control it; she could only hope he understood she was laughing at a ridiculous vision of Amlis Vess swollen like a pregnant cow.

  ‘Icpathua is an exceptionally effective pain killer, you know,’ he remarked gently. ‘Why not try some?’

  That wiped the grin off Isserley’s face.

  ‘I’m not in pain,’ she told him frigidly.

  Of course you’re in pain,’ he said, in a chiding tone which accentuated his pampered vowels. Enraged, she heaved herself up onto her elbows and fixed him with her sharpest glare.

  ‘I’m not in pain, all right?’ she repeated, as the cold sweat of agony prickled the flesh of her torso.

  For an instant his eyes glowed in antagonism, then he blinked slowly and languorously, as if another trace of sedative had leaked into his bloodstream.

  ‘Whatever you say, Isserley.’

  He had not, that she could recall, spoken her name before. Not until now. She wondered what had made him speak it, and whether the same conditions were likely to come around again soon.

  But she should really get rid of him somehow. She badly needed to do some exercises to get herself back in shape, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to do them in front of him.

  The obvious thing would be to excuse herself and walk to her cottage, where he couldn’t follow. But she was in too much pain to attempt the half-dozen metal steps between the hull of the ship and the steading floor.

  Now that she was on her elbows, she could flex her shoulders and her spine a bit, without it being too obvious. She could distract him by making conversation.

  ‘What do you think your father will do to you when you get back?’ she asked.

  ‘Do to me?’ The question seemed at first to make no sense to him. Again she had innocently collided with his pampered experience of life. Plainly, the notion of anyone doing anything to him against his will was an alien one. Vulnerability was for the lower orders.

  ‘My father doesn’t actually know I’m here,’ he said at last, unable to keep a hint of relish out of his tone. ‘He thinks I’m in Yssiis, or somewhere in the Middle East. That’s where I said I might be heading, anyway, last time we spoke.’

  ‘But you came here in this,’ Isserley reminded him, nodding at the meat and the refrigerators all around. ‘A Vess Industries transport ship.’

  ‘Yes,’ he grinned, ‘but not with anyone’s official consent.’ His grin was boyish, even childlike. He looked up into the sky, and again the fur on his throat rearranged itself like wheat in the wind. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘my father still has this forlorn hope I’ll take over the business some day. “Let’s keep this in the family,” he says. What he means, of course, is that he would hate the most valuable new commodity in the world to be poached by a competitor. Right now, the words “voddissin” and “Vess” are inseparable; anyone who yearns for a taste of something unimaginably divine just thinks “Vess”.’

  ‘How convenient for the both of you,’ said Isserley.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me – well, not since I was old enough to ask questions, anyway. My father treats me like a sassynil. “What’s to know?” he says. “This stuff grows, we harvest it and ship it home.” But he’s not quite as secretive with me as he is with everybody else. I only have to show a glimmer of interest in the business, and you can see him weakening. Still hoping I’ll see the light. I suppose that’s why he’s always given me access everywhere – including the Vess docking bays.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what I’m trying to say is … On this trip I was a … what’s the word? A stowaway.’

  She laughed again. The bones and muscles in her arms gave way and she landed on her back once more.

  ‘I suppose the richer you are, the further you have to go to find thrills,’ she remarked.

  He took offence, at last.

  ‘I had to see for myself what’s going on here,’ he growled.

  Isserley tried to raise herself again, and covered her failure with a sigh of condescension.

  ‘There’s nothing so unusual going on here,’ she said. ‘Just … supply and demand.’ She spoke these last words in a sing-song, as if they were an eternal, inseparable pairing like night and day, male and female.

  ‘Well, I’ve confirmed my worst fears,’ he went on, disregarding her claim. ‘This whole trade is based on terrible cruelty.’

  ‘You don’t know what cruelty is,’ she said, feeling all the places on and inside her body where she had been mutilated. How lucky this cosseted young man was, to have a ‘worst fear’ that concerned the welfare of exotic animals rather than any horrors he himself might have to face in the struggle for survival.

  ‘Have you ever been down in the Estates, Amlis?’ she challenged.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with his exaggeratedly perfect diction. ‘Of course. Everyone should see what it’s like down there.’

  ‘But not for so long that it starts to get uncomfortable, huh?’

  Her retort roused him to exasperation; his ears stiffened.

  ‘What would you want me to do?’ he said. ‘Volunteer for hard labour? Get my head smashed in by thugs? I’m rich, Isserley. Do I have to get myself killed to atone for that???
?

  Isserley declined to answer. Her fingers had found the crust around her eyes. It was a fragile limescale of dried tears, wept in her sleep. She wiped it away.

  ‘You came here,’ said Amlis, ‘to get far away from a harsh life, isn’t that so? I never had to suffer a harsh life, for which I’m very grateful, I promise you. Nobody wants to suffer if they can get away with it. Surely, as human beings, we want the same thing.’

  ‘You’ll never know what I want,’ she hissed at him with a vehemence that surprised even her.

  The conversation froze into stillness for a while. Gusts of cold wind blew in through the steading roof; the sky darkened further; the moon rose, a circular loch of floating phosphorescence. In time, the wind carried a single leaf into the building; it fluttered down into the hull and was immediately pounced on by Amlis. He turned it over and over in the space between his hands, while Isserley struggled to turn away.

  ‘Tell me about your parents,’ he said at last, as if inviting her to fulfil her side of the most benign and easy bargain imaginable. Isserley felt a nudge against a hard mass of undigested hatred in her guts.

  ‘I don’t have any parents,’ she warned him stonily.

  ‘Well, the way they were, then, when they were alive,’ he amended.

  ‘I don’t talk about my parents,’ stated Isserley. ‘Ever. There’s nothing to say.’

  Amlis looked into her eyes, and immediately accepted that this was an area where, despite being Amlis Vess, he was not going to be granted access. He sighed.

  ‘You know,’ he said, almost dreamily, ‘I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.’

  ‘Yes,’ snapped Isserley, ‘Like why some people are born into a life of lazing around and philosophizing, and others are shoved into a hole and told to fucking get busy.’

  Amlis chewed on his icpathua, his eyes narrowed in anger and pity.

  ‘There’s always a price attached, Isserley,’ he said. ‘Even for being born rich.’