Those left behind stood in silence for a while.
‘She likes you,’ said Yns to Amlis Vess at last. ‘I can tell.’
6
ON THE WINDSWEPT A9 an hour later and forty miles away, a bleary-eyed Isserley squinted up at a vast electronic traffic sign that said TIREDNESS CAN KILL: TAKE A BREAK. It was a self-confessedly ‘experimental’ sign, inviting comment from motorists by means of a telephone number on its bottom rim.
Isserley had passed under this sign hundreds of times on her way to Inverness, always wondering if it might one day display important traffic information: news of an accident or tailback up ahead, perhaps, or of severe weather conditions on the Kessock Bridge. There was never any message of that kind. Only generic homilies about speed, courtesy and tiredness.
Today, she smiled ruefully at the sign’s advice. It was true: she was tired, and she ought to take a break. To be reminded of this by a soulless machine was funny, in a way – but easier to obey. She’d never been very good at listening to advice when it came from her fellow human beings.
She pulled the car in at a layby and switched off its engine. A belligerent sun was staring her right in the eyes and she considered darkening the windows, but thought better of it, in case she fell asleep and was wakened by police banging on her opaquely amber windows. That had never happened yet, but if it did, it would be the end of her. There were quite a few things police might ask to see which she didn’t have – including a pair of vodsel-sized eyes behind those big thick glasses of hers.
Isserley’s eyes were sore right now, irritated by lack of sleep and the strain of looking through two layers of glass. She blinked, then blinked again, slower and slower, until the lids stayed shut. She would rest her eyes for just a little while, then drive back north for a proper sleep. Not on the farm, somewhere else. The farm might well be in an uproar again, with that idiot Amlis Vess at large.
There was a spot she knew off the main road, on the B9166 to Balintore, where she sometimes pulled in at the ruins of a medieval abbey to doze. Nobody ever went there, despite it being an official tourist attraction; its far-flung web of promotional signs was too sparse to draw motorists in. It was just the place for Isserley when she’d had almost no sleep and been forced to chase lost vodsels for hours before dawn.
Imagining herself in Fearn Abbey already, Isserley fell asleep, her head and one arm cradled inside the padded steering wheel.
She dreamed, at first, of the abbey’s roofless ruins as if she were sleeping inside them, with the ocean of sky above, azure and cirrus-striped. But then, as so often happened, she slipped down into a deeper level of dream, as if through a treacherous crust of pulverulent earth, and landed in the subterranean hell of the Estates.
‘This is a mistake,’ she told the overseer as he led her deeper into labyrinths of compacted bauxite. ‘I have powerful friends in high places. They’re absolutely shocked that I was sent here. Even now they’re working on my reclassification.’
‘Good, good,’ murmured the overseer as he pulled her deeper. ‘Now, I’ll show you what your job will be.’
They had arrived at the dark centre of the factory, the smooth cervix of a giant concrete crater filled with a luminous stew of decomposing plant matter. Huge roots and tubers turned lazily in the albumescent gleet, obese leaves convulsed on its silvery surface like beached manta rays, and billows of blueish gas ejaculated from sudden interruptions in the surface tension. All around and above this great churning cavity, the stifling air swirled with green vapour and particles of sphagnum.
Peering closer despite her revulsion, Isserley noticed the hundreds of tubes, thick as industrial hose, draped over the rim all round, disappearing into the glutinous murk at intervals of a few metres. One of these tubes was being reeled in by an indistinct mechanical agent, the sheer glistening length of it a clue to how deep the crater really was. After some time, at the very end of the tube, attached to it by an artificial umbilicus, emerged a baggy diver’s suit enslimed in black muck. Still clutching a spade-like implement in its gloves, the diver’s suit slithered clumsily onto the concrete rim and struggled to raise itself to its knees.
‘This,’ the overseer explained, ‘is where we make oxygen for those above.’
Isserley screamed herself awake.
She found herself sitting inside a vehicle by the side of a road stretching from eternity to eternity, in a strange and far-off land. Outside, the sky was blue, transparent and without upper limits. Millions, billions, maybe trillions of trees were making oxygen without human intervention. A newly mature sun was shining, and only a few minutes had passed since she had fallen asleep.
Isserley stretched, rotating her thin arms through 360 degrees with a grunt of discomfort. She was still exhausted, but the dream had put her off sleep for the time being, and she felt she was no longer in immediate danger of dozing off at the wheel. She would do some work, then assess how she was feeling by sundown. Obviously, the pressure she’d felt herself under yesterday to deliver the goods for the boss’s son, the distinguished visitor, to admire, had vanished now. Bringing home a vodsel for Amlis Vess was plainly not the way to his heart, or whatever part of him she’d been hoping to impress. However, visiting crackpots aside, she did have her own expectations to live up to.
Still driving south, just beyond Inverness, she spotted a big hitcher holding up a cardboard sign saying GLASGOW.
She drove past him out of habit, out of adherence to procedure, but she had no doubt that she would pick him up on the second approach: he was powerfully built and in the prime of life. It would be criminal to leave a specimen like that standing there.
Despite his bulk, he ran quite nimbly to meet her when she stopped the car near him; always a good sign, since drunk or disabled vodsels could only stumble.
‘Pitlochry all right?’ she offered, judging from his open, eager-to-please expression that this would be more than enough.
‘Brilliant!’ he enthused, jumping in.
He had a big meaty face, a bit like a monthling already, with tight blond curls at the top. The curls were sparse, though, and the skin rough and blotchy, as if the vodsel’s head had been lost at sea at some stage in its life, then cast ashore and weathered for years in the sun before finally being reunited with the body.
‘Mah name’s Dave.’ He reached one hand over to her, and she awkwardly allowed one of hers to be grasped, trying not to wince as he pressed on the place where her sixth finger had been. It was so unusual for a hitcher to introduce himself, she was slow to think of a reply.
‘Louise,’ she said, after a few moments.
‘Pleased tae meet you,’ he beamed, busily buckling himself in as if they were about to embark on a professional adventure together, like breaking the sound barrier in a racing vehicle, or test-driving a jeep in rocky terrain.
‘You seem to be in a good mood,’ observed Isserley as she pulled away from the kerb.
‘Too right, hen, Ah’m well pleased,’ affirmed Dave.
‘Is it something to do with what’s waiting for you in Glasgow?’ she pursued.
‘Right again, hen,’ he grinned. ‘Ah goat tickets tae see John Martyn.’
Isserley mentally scrolled through the entertainers she’d seen on television during her morning exercises, or who’d figured in the evening news for some reason. John Martyn was not a name she remembered, so quite possibly he did not bend spoons by psychic power or break laws against inhaling vegetable smoke.
‘I don’t know him,’ she said.
‘You’ll ken some ae his songs for sure,’ promised Dave, his brow crinkled with incredulity. ‘“May You Never” is a big yin.’ All of a sudden, without warning, he began singing loudly. ‘Ah-M-A-A-AY YOU never lay your head down, without a hand to hold… No?’