‘What are you eating?’ she demanded, because his jaws seemed to be in constant motion.
‘I’m not eating anything,’ he declared insouciantly, and resumed chewing.
Isserley felt a flash of contempt: he was like all rich powerful people – smugly comfortable with lying, arrogantly indifferent to the evidence of other people’s senses. She pulled a face of disapproval, as if to say, Have it your way. He read this at once, despite the alienness of her features.
‘I’m not eating, I’m chewing,’ he solemnly protested, but his amber eyes had a twinkle in them. ‘Icpathua, actually.’
Isserley remembered now his notoriety on this account and, though intrigued, she affected a look of hauteur.
‘I would have thought you’d grown out of that sort of thing,’ she said.
But Amlis was not to be baited.
‘Icpathua is not a behaviour, adolescent or otherwise,’ he pointed out coolly. ‘It’s a plant, with its own unique properties.’
‘Fine, fine,’ sighed Isserley, turning her head, shifting her attention back to the starry sky. ‘You’ll wind up dead, anyhow.’
She heard him laugh but missed seeing it. She regretted missing it, then was irritated with herself for regretting.
‘I’d have to swallow a bale of it the size of my own body,’ Amlis was saying.
She laughed then, despite herself; the thought of him attempting such a thing was bizarr ely funny. She tried to cover her laughter with her hand, but the pain in her back was too vicious and she lay rigid, chortling helplessly, her face naked to him. The more she laughed, the less she could control it; she could only hope he understood she was laughing at a ridiculous vision of Amlis Vess swollen like a pregnant cow.
‘Icpathua is an exceptionally effective pain killer, you know,’ he remarked gently. ‘Why not try some?’
That wiped the grin off Isserley’s face.
‘I’m not in pain,’ she told him frigidly.
Of course you’re in pain,’ he said, in a chiding tone which accentuated his pampered vowels. Enraged, she heaved herself up onto her elbows and fixed him with her sharpest glare.
‘I’m not in pain, all right?’ she repeated, as the cold sweat of agony prickled the flesh of her torso.
For an instant his eyes glowed in antagonism, then he blinked slowly and languorously, as if another trace of sedative had leaked into his bloodstream.
‘Whatever you say, Isserley.’
He had not, that she could recall, spoken her name before. Not until now. She wondered what had made him speak it, and whether the same conditions were likely to come around again soon.
But she should really get rid of him somehow. She badly needed to do some exercises to get herself back in shape, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to do them in front of him.
The obvious thing would be to excuse herself and walk to her cottage, where he couldn’t follow. But she was in too much pain to attempt the half-dozen metal steps between the hull of the ship and the steading floor.
Now that she was on her elbows, she could flex her shoulders and her spine a bit, without it being too obvious. She could distract him by making conversation.
‘What do you think your father will do to you when you get back?’ she asked.
‘Do to me?’ The question seemed at first to make no sense to him. Again she had innocently collided with his pampered experience of life. Plainly, the notion of anyone doing anything to him against his will was an alien one. Vulnerability was for the lower orders.
‘My father doesn’t actually know I’m here,’ he said at last, unable to keep a hint of relish out of his tone. ‘He thinks I’m in Yssiis, or somewhere in the Middle East. That’s where I said I might be heading, anyway, last time we spoke.’
‘But you came here in this,’ Isserley reminded him, nodding at the meat and the refrigerators all around. ‘A Vess Industries transport ship.’
‘Yes,’ he grinned, ‘but not with anyone’s official consent.’ His grin was boyish, even childlike. He looked up into the sky, and again the fur on his throat rearranged itself like wheat in the wind. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘my father still has this forlorn hope I’ll take over the business some day. “Let’s keep this in the family,” he says. What he means, of course, is that he would hate the most valuable new commodity in the world to be poached by a competitor. Right now, the words “voddissin” and “Vess” are inseparable; anyone who yearns for a taste of something unimaginably divine just thinks “Vess”.’
‘How convenient for the both of you,’ said Isserley.
‘It’s nothing to do with me – well, not since I was old enough to ask questions, anyway. My father treats me like a sassynil. “What’s to know?” he says. “This stuff grows, we harvest it and ship it home.” But he’s not quite as secretive with me as he is with everybody else. I only have to show a glimmer of interest in the business, and you can see him weakening. Still hoping I’ll see the light. I suppose that’s why he’s always given me access everywhere – including the Vess docking bays.’
‘So?’
‘So what I’m trying to say is… On this trip I was a… what’s the word? A stowaway.’
She laughed again. The bones and muscles in her arms gave way and she landed on her back once more.
‘I suppose the richer you are, the further you have to go to find thrills,’ she remarked.
He took offence, at last.
‘I had to see for myself what’s going on here,’ he growled.
Isserley tried to raise herself again, and covered her failure with a sigh of condescension.
‘There’s nothing so unusual going on here,’ she said. ‘Just… supply and demand.’ She spoke these last words in a sing-song, as if they were an eternal, inseparable pairing like night and day, male and female.
‘Well, I’ve confirmed my worst fears,’ he went on, disregarding her claim. ‘This whole trade is based on terrible cruelty.’
‘You don’t know what cruelty is,’ she said, feeling all the places on and inside her body where she had been mutilated. How lucky this cosseted young man was, to have a ‘worst fear’ that concerned the welfare of exotic animals rather than any horrors he himself might have to face in the struggle for survival.
‘Have you ever been down in the Estates, Amlis?’ she challenged.
‘Yes,’ he said, with his exaggeratedly perfect diction. ‘Of course. Everyone should see what it’s like down there.’
‘But not for so long that it starts to get uncomfortable, huh?’
Her retort roused him to exasperation; his ears stiffened.
‘What would you want me to do?’ he said. ‘Volunteer for hard labour? Get my head smashed in by thugs? I’m rich, Isserley. Do I have to get myself killed to atone for that?’
Isserley declined to answer. Her fingers had found the crust around her eyes. It was a fragile limescale of dried tears, wept in her sleep. She wiped it away.
‘You came here,’ said Amlis, ‘to get far away from a harsh life, isn’t that so? I never had to suffer a harsh life, for which I’m very grateful, I promise you. Nobody wants to suffer if they can get away with it. Surely, as human beings, we want the same thing.’
‘You’ll never know what I want,’ she hissed at him with a vehemence that surprised even her.
The conversation froze into stillness for a while. Gusts of cold wind blew in through the steading roof; the sky darkened further; the moon rose, a circular loch of floating phosphorescence. In time, the wind carried a single leaf into the building; it fluttered down into the hull and was immediately pounced on by Amlis. He turned it over and over in the space between his hands, while Isserley struggled to turn away.