Overhead—it is insufferable!—the million sky-mites shine, fastened all across the heavens, their fat queen moving among them full of eggs, full of young. Their mandibles are sunk in the sky-flesh, and they hang, and suck, and suck, and crawl about, night to night, slowed by the weight of sky-blood they have drunk.
Limb and limb, support and strut of me—the itch is bad now in this sector and now in that. First my waters tickle me, all their suspended pestilence; next the stale chilled air in my ducts, listless against the furry vents, the black-rimmed vanes of fans, strokes me with its dusts and damps; next it is the strips of the pulled-down roll-doors, their blindness, their blurring plastic slattedness; then the emptiness vibrates, the very space; then the litter of lice-signage, and the bower after bower of sleeping offerings, unoffered, ready to be offered tomorrow.
A breeze begins, beyond me; it is the first weather I appreciate, though memory tells me I have baked in strong sunshine, borne up under long rains, conducted lightnings through myself into the earth below where they belong. This light, soft thing, though, this breath, opens pores all over my impermeables: my glass, my pebble-crete, my metal, my silicon. My asphalt and plastics all wake in it and register: where this breeze comes from, there is refreshment, and absence of all the crawlers and biters whose clawfalls and wheel-stripes and tickling wings bother me, whose tails drag across me thin and leathery, whose whiskers brush and toes stub and spittle stars me, whose hairs powder down, or drop in sheaves and spiral locks, and are never quite all swept away. All through me hair-snips, hair dust, dust of all things, worm-frass and beetle dung and flakes of skin and scab shift in the drafts. I shudder, and loosen one footing in the ground.
I will have to discard some underparts, I think. All this heavy stuff where the lice-carriers install themselves, all this cement-work that is not really mall, but only ancillary to mall, all that can go, can be dropped away.
The loosening takes some work and time; I am stiff from my long sleep in the one position; I am unaccustomed; and my materials are not so flexible as lice-muscle, all oiled and made supple by bloods and waters. I don’t mind the work; from the breath of the breeze I can tell how far I need to travel; the night is long, if I remember right, and I have time.
When I am loosened I draw up my limbs—which are all walking limbs, none of those pick-and-manipulators lice have, that they handle things with, their desires and their treasures and each other—and themselves, too, picking their noses, scratching their ears, moving their hairs about. I draw my walkers up and with great pain and concentration accomplish the uncoupling, and in many cases the breaking, from all that needs detaching below. The carriage-places fall away well, for they were not strong-constructed; like folded stacked stock cartons they pile on themselves in their hole, and I can refoot myself on them and force upward, and snap the stubborner pipe-joints, the stretchier cords, the cables. The pain is refreshing after the itches; some of my irritations flow out of me with the wastewater, with the released sewage; some of them puff away on the breeze with the hissing gas from the main I crushed in my heavings.
I put my face-doors up and search the air with my clearer pores. There it is, that fresher level, that sweeter, without shit in it or breath or burps of lice, without their sweat-pong or their sick-smell or the odour of their linted crevices or their fungused, or of their decaying teeth. I turn myself about on the ruins, face into the breeze and set off.
Sendra counted the hours; she was so tired, she had to count them on her fingers: eight to eleven, then an hour and a half while Nuri fussed and refused to settle, then forty-five minutes and Nuri’s nightmare, twenty more minutes after that before the neighbour-boy came home, singing and banging and being scolded by his uncle, then another... Altogether, no more than four-and-a-half hours yet. All she would be able to think of tomorrow was how much she would rather be sleeping.
She paused by the window. Nuri readied himself to complain his way out of sleep, so she turned, jogging and shushing him, back to the room full of corners and obstacles and soft darkness, to the path she had cleared for herself between the stacked laundry and the boxed Turkish ovens they were minding for Veddi’s brother’s venture.
In the hall she rocked from foot to foot. Veddi’s breathing came out one door and the broken-pipe-and-soap smell flowed out the other. Together with the hour of night they made a grainy soup of darkness, unbreathable for Sendra, unbearable.
She fought her way free of it, crossed the cluttered room to the window again, and leaned her shoulder and pressed the corner of her forehead on the cool, gritty glass.
A slice of city, she could see; three lit windows, close, far and very far, and between them specks of street lighting and a moving taxi-lantern. Not so long ago, she would have seen those windows and thought, What is behind them? Night-owls dreaming great literatures, freed from the day’s distractions? Beautiful women, pining for their absent men? Insomniacs scrubbing, sorting, reading? Always she imagined them solitary, compelled by their own desires or diseases. Now she knew that they were all slaves, their masters tiny monsters like Nuri, in their wrappings, in the fitfulness and fancy of their sleeping. Exhaustion pressed like an iron bar across all their brows, lined their bones, leadened their blood so that when they sat down they could barely imagine rising. When they lay, listening to the renewed squirm-and-whimpering of the baby across the room, they lay under exhaustion’s weight and the rage boiled up in them, and there was nothing they could do about it, there was nowhere they could let it out.
What?
Strange.
Sendra was used to waking, already half out of bed, to the sound of Nuri’s little cough, Nuri’s little drawing of breath for a cry. But now she stood motionless, back from the window, her head lowered and peering, entirely alert and wondering whether she had dreamed that sound. It was as if the very earth itself had coughed, just quietly, coming awake. All was silent now; all was still outside except that taxi-lamp—which had wobbled, had it not?, at the sound, at the movement, but now sailed on.
Nuri lay silent at her breast, attached but no longer sucking. Sendra felt a great fear. Her duty in the night was to keep Nuri from waking Veddi, who had the day-time job that kept the three of them housed and fed. Was it also her business, then, to keep the whole earth quiet for Veddi? How was she to quieten the outside for him? How could she pick up and settle the world?
No, it was the night hour, making her think such things, magnifying sounds and sensations. She had fallen to sleep a tiny instant, that was all, and dreamed that moment of startlement. The floor, the wall, the window, they had not really trembled; only Sendra herself had.
But there it came again: a deep uncertainty, a tearing underfoot like roots of some vast plant pulling free, a ticking of the window pane.
The woken piece of earth arrived, between the far and the very far window light. It might only have been shadow, some trick of cloud and moon, except for the sensations of its arrival, the drags and thuds of its steps—though these, like the voices of elephants and the harbingers of earthquakes, happened only at the very lowest edge of hearing, might not truly be happening at all. It bulked in the slot of city between Capri Towers and the government offices, blotting out the view of the square, starlit roofs like steps up to the distant hills. It blotted out those hills, and the lower stars, with its peaks and corners. It reared and sank, slowly, weightily, as a piece of the earth should.
It passed behind the offices. It was gone; the view was as it had been—stars, hills, three lit windows—although the deep rumbling, the scraping, continued awhile. Sendra watched the top of the offices, in case it should rise there, turn and approach and endanger her. But on it went and away. She stood, still watching, still watching nothing, in the silence it left, awake to her very finger and toe tips, with Nuri a sleeping stone in her arms.
Figuro whistled along the street, his last few bottles chiming white in the float behind him. His job was to bring the morning, a mass of cold white light from
which he broke pieces, to deliver them to people’s doorsteps, a clot of sunlight here, a blob of cool dawn there. And only when he had dispensed the last light-globe from the float on the last round was the real sun, so vulgar and huge and hot, allowed to come up and begin its business.
Figuro was half-mad, and people complained about his whistling, which woke them when they had just fallen asleep from coming off-shift. They said their baby startled awake when his float took the drainway in front of their house, and jangled all suddenly. ‘He drives like a boy-racer,’ they cried. ‘What is his hurry?’
‘Flatten out your street, then,’ said Job the dairy boss, ‘or stuff rags in your ears. I don’t care what.’ For Figuro was half-sane as well, and the sane half of him was the perfect milk-delivering machine, an extension of the little three-wheel float with the wall-eyed cow painted across its back. Other milkmen came—out of nowhere, with references— and went—into gambling or drunkenness or, sometimes, who knew where they went? They did not show and they did not show, and then Job must find another. While these men churned past him Figuro stayed stolid and reliable at the centre of High-Minded Milk Incorporation, and if the flowers beyond the nuns’ hedge-top sang to the man, or the cats chattered, or there were three houses Figuro could not deliver to because of their frightening faces, none of this bothered Job.
Figuro himself did not mind either, about any such complaining or unpopularity. He was fixed in his methods and sunny in his disposition; he was intent on lighting the way into the day, with these two milk-lamps to number 29 with the shoescraper, and this one-cream-one-milk to number 31 where the tassels of the hall rug straggled out under the door as if pleading with him Help me escape! Help! I am trapped and trampled all the livelong day!
He laughed on 31’s step. ‘Foolish!’ he said. ‘You do not know when you are on a lucky wicket, do you?’ And laughing he went back to the little purring home on three wheels, its light diminished by half now. He rattled and released it into movement and on they went, him and the beast and the remaining bottles. The stars sang their thin song above, and one window squared up gold with twitching curtains while another blinked out to join the dark surrounding wall.
The stars had begun to be erased, gradually covered wash by wash by the upswimming greyness of pre-dawn, when Figuro cut his engine for the last re-load at the depot, and then cut it again, or tried to. But the engine noise did not stop as it ought.
He stood back and regarded the float disappointedly. Things should behave as they always did; they should not make difficulties; they should not ask for new stratagems from him. The float sat there paling in the coming dawn, becoming more and more its battered daily self, losing its beastness and its magic.
A darkness swung in the sky. Another darkness pushed across and covered the first. Beyond the float some kind of door slammed down, and the float tipped away from Figuro towards it. He swayed to keep his footing. The door flexed —rough, dark, crusted—and was gone, flailing upward into the thundercloud, the mothership, the shaggy black belly passing over.
It rained on him: clots of clayey soil, balled-up sweet-wrappers, fragments of mirror-glass and concrete. The rain bounced and tinkled on the depot float-park, while the thing blacked out all but the edges of the sky, all but the very fringe of what little light there had been.
Figuro was accustomed to not understanding. He stood in the shadow and waited, untroubled, for all the impressions to come together into sense, or perhaps not. Gusts of troubled air swiped at him, rattled the leaning float and the depot gates.
He ought to be afraid of it, perhaps. No other milkmen were here yet to show him how much danger he was in, to run about and drag him by the arm: Inside, simpleton! Only Figuro stood in the broken black field of asphalt, his tipped float somehow reproving him, and the thing, the storm, the aircraft, continuing overhead.
With a final spatter of its sand-and-stony rain it dragged its back end, waving threads and shiny tubes of tail, away over the plant, over High-Minded’s administration building with its cosy offices that Figuro had never seen, with its unsuspecting pediments and corbels and much-divided windows, now mirroring this star to that again, this crying sea-gull to that.
All around, the grit and gobbets were scattered on the tar like assorted jewels. Figuro could do nothing for the float; several men would be needed to lift it out; several men were not here to help him.
So he followed. Eastward, the thing had gone, towards the water, towards the light. He felt an inclination that way himself, most mornings, but dutifully back into the streets he always went, delivering.
He rounded the corner into Munificent Way and he could see it, its edge proceeding above the buildings, swaying in such a way, he could not tell how many legs it had. Certainly more than an elephant, quite a different rhythm. He hurried, he ran, because while it gave every impression of slow, considered progress it was shrinking in his eye. And another part of Figuro was caught up as a child is caught by a circus parade or a brass band or, yes, a string of elephants single file, as if such things had a wake into which unthinking beings were drawn, without their particularly choosing.
Figuro was a thin man, but he had not run for a long time and he took a little while to establish a gait he could sustain. Above and ahead the hems of creature moved on away; here below raced his mismanaged breath, and his unaccustomed legs, rubbering and paining and tiring. He willed the thing to stay in sight. He didn’t speak or call to it as once he might have—since his mother had died he obeyed her better than he ever had, and one of the things she had insisted was that tools and buildings and anything that you could not see had ears you did not address.
Now he saw the sea, the dark line of it through the railing beyond the paler stripe of empty highway. Now he smelt it over the other smells, muted as they were by morning’s coolness—the splashy, salt smell of play, of childhood. Now he heard it, beyond his own breaths and grunts, its thin collapsements on the shore beside the unawakened town. And he was out on the highway, and he could see the whole creature.
It brought the last several of its leg pairs, leg trios, over the railing after itself, while its jagged chin thrust out over the first shallows like a king’s sea-palace.
And palace it was, or at least architecture, Figuro saw clearly. It was made all of slabs and brittle stuff that ought not to move, and yet it had got something of sinew into itself, and something of flexible skin, something of a head— he wished he could see the face that belonged to this outreaching being, this clumsy animal, this great ugly child. Perhaps even it had ears, and if he went up close it would hear him. Perhaps he could help.
He ran straight across the highway, bent and stepped through the railing to the grassed area beyond. His joints were grateful for earth instead of paving; he had energy again with the creature-that-was-a-building in his sights, arrayed across the view and so unusual. He was glad his mother was gone; he would not have to describe the impossible thing to her. He could just see it and have it go unexplained, un-made-sense-of, wondrous.
He ran. He wished it would turn this way. ‘Hi!’ he cried, and ‘Hey!’, and he leaped and waved trying to make himself big enough to catch its eye.
Of course it did not see or hear him—or if it did, he was not important to it. Caterpillar-like it assembled its segments, hunching the shoulder-ish ones at the fore, sorting and shuffling the ones behind.
Then it shook its head—not monstrously, not cavalierly, but as if gathering courage before going to an interview with the High-Minded Milk boss, for instance. Momentarily it had a mane, and shards flew out of it, some black, some only flashes of beginning dawnlight, long triangles in the sky and then gone into the briefly furred sea-surface.
And into the water it walked. It was the wonderfullest thing. Figuro ran to the edge of the grass, scrambled down the slope of cemented rocks and stood, up to his ankles in the soft, cold sand. He struggled a few steps forward, but without the spring of grass his legs were uninterested, and his eyes w
ere so busy—his mouth was open as if it could see, too—that he did not fight to force himself onward.
Anyway, he wanted this view of all of it, and to hear the creaks and grindings from its whole length, poppings and thumps. Besides, see all the stuff falling from its sides and undersides! If he went too close he could be speared, crushed, blinded by some small flying-off thing.
‘Oh!’ He clasped his hands and shook them up at the thing. ‘You are a marvel!’
Its forelegs sank in the soft watered sand and lifted, and sank again. On and in it went, still with its back end progressing across the grass. It breasted the little waves, breaking their ration of dawn-sheen into an unshining white splashiness. It was clumsy, of course, clumsier than a horse or elephant, meeting the water for the first-ever time and accustoming itself to its own shape against the water forces, the thickness and the wavebeats and the more tidal changes. It lumbered. Expecting the floor to be as flat as the city’s, it slumped and huffed and surged in surprise at the slope; it stumbled. Its underneath splatted wide sprays out to the sides and front. It seemed to fall to its knees, all its different sets of knees, one after another, floundering and slanting and gathering itself up to try again, as if it fled, rather than sought its right place.
But there, the back end of it was now over the sea-rim, and the front was shouldered well in, up to the eyebrows maybe—Figuro wished he could see. Spray flew up off the front edge and onto the roof. Would it float? Figuro hoped it would finish as something like a crocodile, just the top of it snaking its lumps and spines away into the sunrise, the legs working invisibly below.