‘Tell me about your parents,’ he said at last, as if inviting her to fulfil her side of the most benign and easy bargain imaginable. Isserley felt a nudge against a hard mass of undigested hatred in her guts.
‘I don’t have any parents,’ she warned him stonily.
‘Well, the way they were, then, when they were alive,’ he amended.
‘I don’t talk about my parents,’ stated Isserley. ‘Ever. There’s nothing to say.’
Amlis looked into her eyes, and immediately accepted that this was an area where, despite being Amlis Vess, he was not going to be granted access. He sighed.
‘You know,’ he said, almost dreamily, ‘I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.’
‘Yes,’ snapped Isserley, ‘Like why some people are born into a life of lazing around and philosophizing, and others are shoved into a hole and told to fucking get busy.’
Amlis chewed on his icpathua, his eyes narrowed in anger and pity.
‘There’s always a price attached, Isserley,’ he said. ‘Even for being born rich.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she sneered, miserable with desire to stroke the white plush of his chest, to follow the line of his silky flank. ‘I can see how it’s damaged you.’
‘Not all damage is obvious,’ he said in a soft voice.
‘No,’ she retaliated bitterly, ‘but it’s the obvious damage that gets those heads turning, don’t you find? The brand everyone recognizes, eh, Mr Vess?’
Alarmingly, he reared up, stood at her shoulder, and lowered his head close to hers, shockingly close.
‘Isserley, listen to me,’ he urged her, the black down of his face bristling, the warm breath from his mouth tickling her neck. ‘Do you think I can’t see that half of your face has been carved off? Do you think I haven’t noticed that you’ve had strange humps grafted onto you, your breasts removed, your tail amputated, your fur shaved off? Do you think I can’t imagine how you might feel about these things?’
‘I doubt it,’ she wheezed, her eyes stinging.
‘Of course I can see what’s been done to you, but what I’m really interested in is the inner person,’ he pressed on.
‘Oh please, Amlis: spare me this shit,’ groaned Isserley, looking away from him as the tears squirmed out of her eyes and ran down one cheek to disappear inside the ugly stoma of her mutilated ear.
‘Do you think nobody is capable of noticing you’re a human being underneath?’ he exclaimed.
‘If your kind had noticed I was a fucking human being they wouldn’t have sent me to the Estates, would they?’ she yelled back at him.
‘Isserley, I didn’t send you to the Estates.’
‘Oh no,’ she raged, ‘nobody has any individual responsibility, do they?’
She turned violently away from him, forgetting to brace herself for the pain. It shot down her spine, like a skewer piercing her from ribcage to rectum. Amlis was at her side the instant she screamed.
‘Let me help you,’ he said, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, and his tail around the small of her back.
‘Leave me alone!’ she wept.
‘Let’s get you sitting up first,’ was his response.
He helped haul her to her knees, his velvety, bony forehead brushing against her throat, then immediately he backed away, allowing her to find her centre of gravity.
She flexed her stiff limbs, feeling the spastic tension deep inside her flesh, the lingering thrill of his touch on the surface. Her shoulder-blades cracked dangerously as she rotated them; she couldn’t afford to worry about what sort of impression she made now. She looked around for Amlis, saw he’d just made a brief foray deeper inside the hold.
‘Here, have some of this,’ he said, approaching her on three limbs, holding up a clump of something vegetal in his free hand. He seemed quite serious, which struck Isserley as unaccountably funny.
‘I don’t approve of drugs,’ she protested, then immediately burst out laughing, her fragile defences unhinged by pain. Wiping fresh tears from her cheeks, she accepted a mossy sprig of icpathua from him and put it into her mouth.
‘I just chew it, do I?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘After a while it turns into a sort of cud, and you don’t even have to think about it anymore.’
Half an hour later, Isserley felt much better. A feeling of anaesthesia, even well-being, was disseminating through her body. She was doing her exercises, right in front of Amlis Vess, and she didn’t mind. He was going on and on about the evils of meat-eating, and everything he said seemed to her pathetic and amusing. He really was a very amusing young man, if you didn’t take his sanctimonious ravings too much to heart. Enjoying the low tones of his voice as it droned, she gyrated her limbs slowly, trying to focus on her own body, chewing the bitter weed over and over.
‘You know,’ Amlis was saying, ‘since people have started eating meat, some mysterious new diseases have been reported. There have been unexplained deaths.’
Isserley smirked; his preachings of doom were solemnly hilarious.
‘Even the Elite are hinting there may be dangers,’ he insisted.
‘Well,’ she replied airily, ‘All I can say is that everything is done to the highest standards at this end.’
She snorted with laughter again, and, to her surprise, so did he.
‘How much does a fillet of voddissin cost, anyway, back home?’ she enquired, stretching her arms up towards the night sky.
‘About nine, ten thousand liss.’
She stopped her gyrations to look at him in disbelief. Ten thousand liss was, for an ordinary person, a whole month’s worth of water and oxygen.
‘Are you joking?’ she gaped, her hands falling to her sides.
‘If it costs less than nine thousand, you can bet it’s been adulterated with something else.’
‘But… who can afford that?’
‘Almost no-one. Which makes it fantastically desirable, of course.’
Amlis sniffed thoughtfully at a stack of scarlet meat under viscose wrapping, as if trying to decide whether he’d smelled it, back home, in its final form. ‘If someone wants to bribe an official, flatter a client… seduce a woman .. There’s no better way.’
Isserley still couldn’t quite grasp it.
‘Ten thousand liss…’ she marvelled.
‘In fact,’ Amlis went on, ‘meat is so valuable that they’re actually trying to make it grow in laboratories.’
‘Do me out of a job, huh?’ said Isserley, getting back to her exercises.
‘Maybe,’ said Amlis. ‘Vess Industries spends a fortune on transport.’
‘I’m sure they can easily afford it.’
‘Of course they can. But they’d rather not bother, all the same.’
Isserley stretched her arms out horizontally and slowly skimmed them through the air.
‘Rich people will always want the real thing,’ she declared.
Amlis played with his leaf, manipulating it as much as he could without destroying it.
‘There are plans,’ he said, ‘to market meat to the poor, in a debased form. My father’s cagey about it, of course. But I happen to know there have been some pretty weird experiments done. It’s business. My father would chop the planet into pieces if he thought there was profit in it.’
Isserley was spinning slowly on her feet, like a propeller or a weather-vane. It was something she could not have done if her body hadn’t been tampered with. In a shy way, she was showing off to Amlis.