The lift closed with a hiss. Isserley and Unser were alone in the big room with the Cradle and the smell of burning.
‘Uhr-rhum,’ announced Unser as the silence grew awkward. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
Isserley clutched herself tightly, keeping it all in.
‘I was just… wondering,’ she said, ‘Are you… are there any… any monthlings still to be… processed?’
Unser trotted over to the vat of water and plunged his arms into it.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we’ve done as many as we need to.’
The agitation of water harmonized with the music issuing from the loudspeakers.
‘You mean,’ said Isserley, ‘there aren’t any others that are ready?’
‘Oh, there is one left,’ said Unser, extracting his arms and shaking the excess water aside with vehement flicks. ‘But he’ll keep. He can go next time.’
‘Why can’t he go this time?’ pursued Isserley. ‘I’d love to see’ – she bit her lips again – ‘to see the way you do it. The end product.’
Unser smiled modestly as he dropped back onto all fours.
‘The usual quota has been loaded, I’m afraid,’ he remarked with the merest hint of regret.
‘You mean,’ persisted Isserley, ‘there’s no room in the transport ship for more?’
Unser was looking down, examining his hands, lifting them from the wet floor one at a time.
‘Oh, there’s plenty room, plenty room,’ he replied pensively. ‘It’s just that… uhr-rhum… well, They’ (he rolled his eyes heavenwards) ‘are expecting a certain amount of meat, you know. Based on what we usually deliver.If we put any more in, they might expect us to deliver the same amount next month, you see?’
Isserley pressed her hands to her breast, trying to calm the hammering of her heart. There was just too much padding in the way.
‘It’s all right,’ she assured Unser, her voice tight with urgency. ‘I… I can bring in more vodsels. No problem. There’s lots of them around just now. I’m getting better at the job all the time.’
Unser stared at her, frowning, puzzled, obviously not knowing what to make of her.
Isserley stared back, half dead with need. The parts of a woman’s face she could have used to plead with him, to implore him without words, had all been removed or mutilated. Only her eyes remained. They shone brightly as she gazed unblinking through space.
Minutes later, on Unser’s instruction, the last of the month-lings was brought into the Processing Hall.
Unlike the paralysed newcomer who’d preceded him, this one did not need to be carried. He walked upright, meekly, led by two men. In fact, he hardly needed to be led; he shuffled his massive pink self forwards as if in sleep. The men merely nudged him with their flanks whenever he seemed about to stumble or deviate. They accompanied him: that was the word. They accompanied him to the Cradle.
The swollen rigidity of his bulk was such that when he had reached the Cradle and was pushed off-balance, he tipped right over like a felled tree, falling backwards onto the smooth receptacle with a fleshy thwump. He looked surprised as his own elephantine weight carried him down the slippery slope of the chute; all the men had to do was guide his progress so that his shoulders came to rest in the designated hollows.
Isserley had edged closer, aching to see his face. The porcine eyes twinkling in his bald head were too small to read from a distance. At all costs she must not miss what was to be written there.
The monthling’s eyes were blinking rapidly; a frown was forming on his dome-like forehead. Something was going to happen to him which might be beyond his capacity to stoically endure. He had come to rely on his own bulk, his own indifference to discomfort. Now he sensed he was about to be taken out of his depth. Anxiety was growing in him, searching for expression somewhere among the cells of his fully crammed physiognomy.
Sedated though he was, the vodsel struggled, but not with the men who were holding him; rather, with his own memory. It seemed to him he’d seen Isserley somewhere before. Or perhaps he merely recognized she was the only creature in the room who looked anything like him. If anyone was going to do anything for him, it would have to be her.
Isserley edged forward further still, allowing the vodsel to focus on her. She, too, was trying to place him in her memory. His eyelashes, the only hairs remaining on his head, were remarkably long.
So intently was the vodsel striving now to retrieve his memory of Isserley that he seemed not to notice something being lowered towards his forehead that resembled the nozzle of a petrol pump, attached to the base of the Cradle by a long flexible cable. Unser touched the metal tip of the instrument to the unwrinkled flesh of the vodsel’s brow, and squeezed the handle. There was an almost imperceptible dimming of the lights in the building. The vodsel’s eyes blinked just once as the current travelled through his brain and down the filament of his spine. A subtle plume of smoke curled up from a darkening smudge on his brow.
Unser yanked the chin up to expose the neck. With two graceful flicking motions of his wrist, he slashed open the arteries in the vodsel’s neck, then stood back as a jet of blood gushed out, steaming hot and startlingly red against the silvery trough.
‘Yes!’ screamed Isserley involuntarily. ‘Yes!’
Even as her cry was still ringing out in the Processing Hall, all activity had already stopped dead. A terrible silence fell, made worse by a lull in the piped music. Nothing moved except the unstoppable gush of blood from the vodsel’s gaping neck, the frothy liquid glimmering and seething, immersing the vodsel’s face and head, swirling his eyelashes in the tide like sprigs of seaweed. The men – Unser, Ensel and the others – stood frozen. Their eyes were all turned on Isserley.
Isserley cringed so low that she was almost falling forward. She was clenching and unclenching her hands in an agony of frustrated anticipation.
The point of Unser’s knife was hovering over the vodsel’s torso; Isserley knew that the next action must surely be to slit the animal open from neck to crotch, peeling the flesh aside like the front of a pair of overalls. She stared longingly at the knife as it hung in the air for a long moment. Then, devastatingly, Unser withdrew it and allowed it to fall onto the tray.
‘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.’