‘This is your first time, isn’t it?’ came Amlis’s voice.
‘No,’ she retorted irritably, unnerved by how closely he must be watching her body language.
She had, in point of fact, been here just once before, at the very beginning before there were any animals. The men had wanted to show her what they’d constructed in honour of her coming to the farm, all ready and waiting for her vital contribution.
‘Very impressive,’ she’d said, or words to that effect, and fled.
Now, years later, she had returned, with one of the world’s wealthiest young men at her side, because he wanted to ask her a question. ‘Surreal’ did not begin to describe the situation.
The cages were grimier and more cramped than she remembered; the wooden beams pitted and discoloured, the wire mesh soiled, masked in places with the dark putty of faeces and other unidentifiable matter. And of course, the livestock added stench and the looming density of flesh, the humid ambience of recycled breath. In all, there were more than thirty vodsels impounded here, which came as rather a shock to Isserley: she hadn’t realized how hard she must constantly be working.
The few remaining monthlings were huddled together in a mound of fast-panting flesh, the divisions between one muscle-bound body and the next difficult to distinguish, the limbs confused. Hands and feet spasmed at random, as if a co-ordinated response was struggling vainly to emerge from a befuddled collective organism. Their fat little heads were identical, swaying in a cluster like polyps of an anemone, blinking stupidly in the sudden light. You would never guess they’d have the cunning to run if released.
All around the monthlings, their thick spiky carpet of straw glistened with the dark diarrhoea of ripeness. Nothing which might cause the slightest harm to human digestion survived in their massive guts; every foreign microbe had been purged and replaced with only the best and most well-trusted bacteria. They clung to each other, as if to keep their number undiminished. There were four of them left; yesterday there had been five, the day before, six.
Across the neatly swept division, the transitionals in the cages opposite squatted torpidly, each on his own little patch of straw. By dividing the available floor space according to an unspoken, instinctual arithmetic, they managed to keep themselves to themselves, if only by inches. They glowered at Isserley and Amlis, some chewing warily on their unfamiliar new feed, others scratching at hair that was growing sparse and mossy, others clenching their fists in their castrated laps. Though still vaguely differentiated in physique and colouring, they saw their own future constantly before them. They were slowly maturing towards their destiny, towards a natural mean.
At the end of the walkway, the three most recent arrivals were on their feet, leaning against the wire mesh, waving and gesticulating.
‘Ng! Ng! Ng!’ they cried.
Amlis Vess hastened to respond, his luxuriant tail swinging between his powerful silky buttocks as he ran. Isserley followed, advancing slowly and cautiously. She hoped all the vodsels’ tongues had been thoroughly seen to. What Amlis didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
As soon as Isserley had stepped within a body’s length of the enclosure, she was frightened half to death by a large projectile hurtling against the wire from within, bulging the web of metal directly towards her with a juddering crash. For a nauseous moment she was convinced the barrier had been penetrated, but the bulge sprang back and the vodsel collapsed to the floor, bawling in pain and fury. The inside of his gaping mouth was roasted black where the stub of tongue had been cauterized; white spittle clung to his moustache. He struggled to his feet, clearly intending to lunge at Isserley again, but two of the other vodsels seized hold of him and dragged him back from the wire.
Held down by a tall and athletic individual much younger than himself, the excitable vodsel slumped impotently in his nest of straw, his knees jerking. The third creature scrambled forwards and fell to his knees on a patch of soil right near the wire mesh. He stared down into it, grunting and snuffling in distress as if he’d lost something.
‘It’s all right, boy,’ encouraged Amlis earnestly. ‘Do it again. You can do it. I know you can.’
The vodsel bent over the earth, erasing his wild companion’s scuffed footprints from it with the edge of one hand. His empty scrotal sac, still speckled with dried blood from his gelding, swung back and forth as he smoothed the soil and picked fragments of scattered straw out of it. Then he gathered a handful of long straws together, twisted and folded them to make a stiff wand, and began to draw in the dirt.
‘Look!’ Amlis urged.
Isserley watched, disturbed, as the vodsel scrawled a five-letter word with great deliberation, even going to the trouble of fashioning each letter upside down, so that it would appear right-way-up for those on the other side of the mesh.
‘No-one told me they had a language,’ marvelled Amlis, too impressed, it seemed, to be angry. ‘My father always describes them as vegetables on legs.’
‘It depends on what you classify as language, I guess,’ said Isserley dismissively. The vodsel had slumped behind his handiwork, head bowed in submission, eyes wet and gleaming.
‘But what does it mean?’ persisted Amlis.
Isserley considered the message, which was M E R C Y. It was a word she’d rarely encountered in her reading, and never on television. For an instant she racked her brains for a translation, then realized that, by sheer chance, the word was untranslatable into her own tongue; it was a concept that just didn’t exist.
Isserley stalled, mouth hidden behind one hand, as if finding the stench increasingly hard to take. Though her face was impassive, her mind was racing. How to discourage Amlis from making an unwarranted fuss?
She considered trying to pronounce the strange word with a contortion of her lips and a frown on her brow, as if she were being asked to reproduce a chicken’s cackle or a cow’s moo. Then, if Amlis asked her what it meant, she could honestly say that there was no word for it in the language of human beings. She opened her lips to speak, but realized just in time that this would be a very stupid mistake. For her to speak the word at all dignified it with the status of being a word in the first place; Amlis would no doubt go into ecstasy over the vodsels’ ability to link a pattern of scrawled symbols with a specific sound, however guttural and unintelligible. At a stroke, she would be dignifying the vodsels, in his eyes, with both writing and speech.
But isn’t it true, she asked herself, that they have that dignity?
Isserley pushed the thought away. Just look at these creatures! Their brute bulk, their stink, their look of idiocy, the way the shit oozed up between their fat toes. Had she been so badly butchered, brought so close to an animal state physically, that she was losing her hold on humanity and actually identifying with animals? If she wasn’t careful, she would end up living among them, cackling and mooing in meaningless abandon like the cavorting oddities on television.
All this passed through her mind in a couple of seconds. In a second or two more, she had devised her response to Amlis.
‘What do you mean, “What does it mean”?’ she exclaimed testily. ‘It’s a scratch mark that means something to vodsels, obviously. I couldn’t tell you what it means.’
She looked straight into Amlis’s eyes, to add the power of conviction to her denial.
‘Well, I can guess what it means,’ he observed quietly.
‘Yes, I’m sure you wouldn’t let a little thing like ignorance stop you,’ sneered Isserley, noticing for the first time that he had a few pure white hairs around his eyelids.