‘All I’m trying to get across to you,’ he persisted, nettled, ‘is that the meat you were eating a few minutes ago is the same meat that is trying to communicate with us down here.’
Isserley sighed and folded her arms across her chest, feeling sick from the fluorescent glare, the laboured breathing of thirty beasts inside a fissure far beneath the ground.
‘It doesn’t communicate to me, Amlis,’ she said, then blushed at having carelessly addressed him by his first name. ‘Can we leave now?’
Amlis frowned, and looked down at the scratches in the dirt.
‘Are you sure you don’t know what these marks mean?’ he asked, with a sharp edge of disbelief in his voice.
‘I don’t know what you expect of me,’ Isserley burst out, suddenly near tears. ‘I’m a human being, not a vodsel.’
Amlis looked her up and down, as if only now noticing her horrific disfigurements. He stood there in all his beauty, his black pelt glistening in the humid air, and stared at Isserley, and then at the vodsels and the marks in the dirt.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, and turned his head towards the lift.
Hours later, as Isserley was driving on the open road, breathing in great mouthfuls of sky from her open window, she thought about how the encounter with Amlis Vess had gone.
She’d coped well, she thought. She had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d been out of line. He had apologized.
The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions.
In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn.
And, when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.
If you were looking clearly, that is.
So, that’s why it was better that Amlis Vess didn’t know that the vodsels had a language.
She’d have to be careful, then, never to speak it in his earshot. It would only provoke him. It would achieve nothing. In a case like this, a little knowledge was more dangerous than none at all.
It was a good thing the vodsels were always unconscious when they were carried into the steading. Then by the time they were up and about again, they’d already been seen to, so they couldn’t make any more noise. That nipped any problems in the bud.
If Amlis could just be kept out of trouble until the transport ship was ready to leave, he need never know any… anything else.
And then, once he was in the ship heading home, he could indulge his overdeveloped conscience, his sentimentality, to his heart’s content. If he wanted to throw what remained of the vodsels overboard as a way of granting the creatures posthumous freedom, he could go right ahead, and it would be someone else’s problem, not hers.
Her problem was more basic, and self-indulgence didn’t come into it: she had a difficult job to do, and no-one but her could do it.
Driving past Dalmore Farm in Alness, she spotted a hitcher up ahead. He stood out like a beacon on the crest of a hill. She wound her window closed and turned up the heating. Work had begun.
Even from a distance of a hundred metres or more, she could tell that this one was built like a piece of heavy farm machinery, a creature who would put a strain on any set of wheels. His massive bulk was all the more conspicuous for being crammed into yellow reflective overalls. He might have been an experimental traffic fixture.
As Isserley drove closer, she noted that the yellow overalls were so old and tarnished that they were almost black: the colours of rotting banana peel. Overalls as filthy and decrepit as that couldn’t belong to an employee of a company, surely; this fellow must be his own boss; perhaps he didn’t work at all.
That was good. Unemployed vodsels were always a good risk. Although to Isserley they looked just as fit as vodsels who had jobs, she’d found that they were often cast out from their society, isolated and vulnerable. And, once exiled, they seemed to spend the rest of their lives skulking at the peripheries of the herd, straining for a glimpse of the high-ranking males and nubile females they yearned to befriend but could never approach for fear of a swift and savage punishment. In a way, the vodsel community itself seemed to be selecting those of its members it was content to have culled.
Isserley reached the hitcher and drove past him, at her usual leisurely speed. He registered her passing, her apparent snub of him, with a squint of indifference; he knew perfectly well that his rotting banana colours would be rejected as an unsuitable match for the taupe upholstery of most cars. But there were plenty more motorists where Isserley came from, he seemed to be thinking, so stuff her.
She assessed him while she drove on. Undoubtedly he had more than enough meat on him; too much, perhaps. Fat was a bad thing: not only was it worthless padding that had to be discarded, but it infiltrated deep inside – or so Unser, the chief processor, had once told her. Fat blighted good meat like a burrowing worm.
This hitcher might well be all muscle, though. She pulled off the road, waited for the right time, and carefully executed a U-turn.
The other thing was: he was totally bald, not a hair on his head – which didn’t matter, she supposed, since if she took him he would end up hairless anyway. But what made vodsels go hairless before their time? She hoped it wasn’t some defect that would affect the quality of the meat, a disease of some kind. A disembodied voice on television had told her once that victims of cancer went bald. This hitcher in the yellow overalls – there he was again now! – didn’t strike her as a victim of cancer; he looked as if he could demolish a hospital with his bare hands. And what about that vodsel she’d had in the car a while back, the one who had cancer of the lung? He’d had plenty of hair, as far as she could recall.
She drove past the baldhead again, confirming that he had enough muscle on him to satisfy anyone. As soon as possible, she made another U-turn.
It was funny, really, that she’d never had a totally bald hitcher before. Statistically, she ought to have. His shining hairless head, coupled with his steely physique and queer clothing, might account for these irrational misgivings she felt, as she slowed to stop for him.
‘Want a lift?’ she called unnecessarily, as he lumbered up to the door she was opening.
‘Ta,’ he said, trying to ease himself in. His overalls squeaked comically as he doubled over; she released the seat lock, to give him more room.
He seemed embarrassed by her kindness, and, once seated, looked straight ahead through the windscreen while he fumbled with the seatbelt; he had to pull out the strap for what seemed like yards before it would encompass his girth.
‘Right,’ he said as soon as the buckle had clicked.
She drove off, with him blushing beside her, his face a pink melon set atop a bulging stack of grimy yellow.
After a full minute, the hitcher at last turned slowly towards her. He looked her up and down. He turned back to the window.
He was thinking, My lucky day.
‘My lucky day,’ he said.
‘I hope so,’ said Isserley, in a tone of warm good humour, while an inexplicable chill travelled down her spine. ‘Where are you heading?’