The Starry Rift Part 24

People laughed. Now we could see that the thing was more than rumor and hope.

"I will be happy when I hold that new reel of net-yarn in my hands."

"I will be happy when I'm seated in the club with the biggest plate of charfish and onion in front of me-"

"And Cacohao, he'll be happy when he's lying in the dirt behind the club-won't you, Caco?-singing love songs to a bottle of best throb-head."

"Oh. I can see her beautiful face now!"

People were spending their day-wage all around me. But when the incoming reached the tugs and they attached their ropes and lined it up for the tide to bring it onto number 17, all fell quiet. The beast's head loomed, a soft dark shape inside the radiant shroud, which had protected the skin from damage during the burning of the aura. The shape beyond the head was long, narrow, uneven, with a lump at the foot. Jupi jabbered nervously on the talkie to the tugs, checked the time on the clock tower, and his gang around him grew now murmurous with advice, now silent with attention. Things could go wrong at this point; the moment must be judged exactly.

A breeze came ahead of the beast. Our s.h.i.+rts rattled on us; the hems of pants and loongies stung our calves. The air stank of the burnt plastics of the aura, a terrible smell that all the children of Portellian learned early to love, because it meant full bellies, smiling jupis and jumis. Coming in from the ether burnt the aura to almost nothing, to the pale dust we'd seen on the wind-all gone now- to this nasty smell. The sun crept up and took a c.h.i.n.k out of the horizon. A lot of the men had gone forward into the mauve and silver wavelets that crawled up the plan.

The tugs, now unhooked from the beast, rode beside it, their engines laboring against the tide. Jupi stood with his arms folded, chewing his lip with the responsibility. The tugs retreated to the beast's far end, and with Jupi warning and checking them through the talkie, helped the tide move the great shape the last little way to the plan. The head began to rise independently of the body, nudged upward by the plan's slope. A cheer went up; the beast had arrived.

Teams were forming. Horse-piecers gathered with their spades at the head of the plan near the winches. Mincers, some with their own knives, drifted toward the try-house where the copper pots and boilers glowed in the shadows. Gangers came through the crowd shouting, claiming the workers they knew were good. As a team-onlooker, I didn't have to jump and wave my arms and call out gangers' names. I was a contractor, not a loose day-job man dependent on luck and favor. I could stand calm in the middle of the scramble.

As the incoming edged up the plan, the cutting-teams threw grapplers and swung themselves up the cloudy gel. Though they mustn't drop any gel while the beast was moving, they could make all their preparatory slits. This they did with ropes and weights, pulling the ropes through the gel just the way a merchant cuts wax-cheese with a wire. The shroud began to look fringed about the head and shoulders. The nimble rope-clippers darted in and out; chanters' voices rang on the stinking air from high on the beast's torso.

The message came through on the talkie: the tugs were done. The beast was beached, all head to foot of it. Jupi walked up the plan and signaled the bell-man. The bell clanged, the teams cheered, the ground teams scuttled away from the body. Great strips of the gel began tumbling from above. They splashed in the shallows and bounced and jounced and sometimes leaped into curls across the other strips. Hookmen straightened them flat on the ground, making a wide platform on which the beast's parts could be deposited.

Another smell took over from the burnt-shroud odor. I had smelt it before as I helped Jumi, as I cleaned and cooked and span. She would lift her head, happy because the work-Jupi's and Dochi's work-was going on, and if one of the other mothers was there, she would say, Smell that? It always reminds me of the smell of Dochi when he was born. Like inside-of-body, but clean, clean. New.

Smell of clean, warm womb, the other might say.

Yes, and hot, too! Hot from me and hot from him.

When I was born to her, I must have smelled not so good, not so enchanting, for it was always Dochi she mentioned. Maybe it was only the firstborn who brought out the clean smell with him. I did not want the details of in what way I had smelt bad-or perhaps, how she had not noticed my smell from being in such horror at my leg. So I never asked.

Anyway, there would be other smells soon against this one: oil and fuel, sweat and scorched rope, hot metal, sawn bone, sea and mud and stirred-up putrefaction.

"Amarlis?"

The way I sprang to face Mavourn showed that I'd been waiting not moments but years to hear my name, to be called to usefulness.

"I'm putting you on a thigh-team," he said. "It's got a good man, Mister Chopes, heading it. Are you happy with that?"

"Very happy, sir!"

"There is Mister Chopes with the kerchief on his head. I've told him you're on your way."

"And I am!"

I swung myself across the watery plan, watching Mister Chopes count heads, scan the hopping hopefuls, pick out a good clean man and give him a job-ticket, shoo away a sneaky-looking boy. The team's chanter stood with his drum and beaters, wrapped in his white cloth and his dignity. He too was a contractor; he had no need to fuss.

Mister Chopes counted again, then sent them off for their hooks and spades, and turned and saw me. "You Amarlis?"

"I am, sir, Mister Chopes!"

"You ready to look sharp?"

"Sharp as a shark-tooth, sir!"

"Mavourn says you'll be good, but you're new, right?"

"That's right, sir. This is my first day ever."

"I'll give you plenty of advice, then. You won't sulk at that, boy? You'll take that in good spirit?"

"I'll be grateful for all you can give me."

"Then we'll do fine. Main thing, no one gets hurt. All those boys have mothers. All those men have wives and children waiting on them, right? Your job's to make sure they come home on their own legs, right? Not flat and busted by beast-bits. This here is Trawbrij; he's our chanter."

"How do you do, Trawbrij?" I shook hands with him.

"Twenty years on the plans," said Mister Chopes. "He'll tell you anything more you need to know. Now, let's get down the thigh." Because all the team was tooled-up and running back to us.

Some of the hopefuls, lingering nearby in case Mister Chopes changed his mind, cast jealous looks at me. They were angry, no doubt, that someone so clearly handicapped could gain a job when they, able-bodied, could not. I swung away from them.

Trawbrij the chanter gave us a beat; I walked with him, behind the twenty-five chosen workers, while Mister Chopes went ahead. The knee-team preceded us, with their chanter and their onlooker; I tried to hold my head as high and my back as straight as their onlooker's, to look as casual and unself-conscious as he.

We took a safe path wide of the torso, well behind the row of waiting hookmen. Slabs of shroud slapped down and jiggled on the plan, sending wavelets over the hookmen's feet.

I had watched other incomings, up with the women and children on the hill behind town. What you don't see from there are the surfaces of things: the coa.r.s.e head-hair, which is like a great tangle of endless curving double-edged combs-with fish in there, too, and seaweed; the damp, waxy skin, pale as the moon, hazed with its own form of hair, dewy with packaging fluid; the eye, the ear-hole, and the mouth-slit, all sealed with gray gum by the hunters. What you don't see from the hills is the size, is the wall of the cheek going up, behind the heaps of the hair, which themselves tower three houses high above the running workers. My eyes couldn't believe what was in front of them.

"He's enormous, isn't he?" said Trawbrij beside me.

"He makes us look like ants," I said. "Smaller than ants, even. Just look how much of the sky he takes up!"

"And yet we smaller-than-ants, we little crawling germs, we're going to set upon him, and pull him apart and bring him down and saw him into plates, and melt him into pots and pints, and there'll be nothing left of him in three weeks' time."

"Is there any part of him that's not useful to someone?" I turned to look properly at the chanter. He was slender and white haired and wise looking.

"I have only ever seen tumor rocks left lying on the plan, though even these reduce in time, and become parts of people's walls and houses, though they do not export. And sometimes if an organ bursts, or if the tides delay the incoming and the beast is putrefying on arrival, there may be lumps of dirty gel that won't melt, that sit about for a while."

As we came level with the thigh, the first of our team threw up his grappler and s.h.i.+nnied up the rope, chopping footholds as he went. Others followed, each just far enough behind the previous man not to be kicked in the head. In this way we quickly had half a team at the top.

Mister Chopes turned with his foot in the first slot. "Where's my looker? Amarlis."

"Here," I said.

"What do you reckon your job is?"

"Keep an eye out down here."

" 'S right. Main thing is, teams getting in each other's ways. So, stand well back, watch how stuff falls, and give a hoy before someone gets hurt."

"I'm on it."

I swung around, pa.s.sed Trawbrij tucking up his robes for the climb, and went back as far as the other onlookers. There I could see right to the edges of my team's activities, and keep track of Mister Chopes and the team up on top. I blew my whistle straightaway, and the whole ground-team turned as if I had them on strings.

I cleared my throat. "Back up," I said clearly through the megaphone, and waved them toward me. "Back to where these other teams are standing." And up they came to safety, which seemed a wonder to me, a great respectful gesture. I tried not to smile, not to look surprised.

The shroud on the side of the thigh, because it was so flat, could be cut away in a single piece. When it came down-with a smack and two bounces that I felt up my spine and in my armpits through the crutches-there above it was the white-clay wall of the thigh, height of a tanker s.h.i.+p, running with pack-fluid. That clean, warm, newborn-Dochi smell was all there was to breathe now. The fluid ran off, and the skin-hairs lifted from the skin, then separated from each other, gleaming in the early sun. And as I watched, the side-lit skin covered itself with little bluish triangles, bluish scallops of shadow, as if the hairs were not just drying and springing free but pulling b.u.mps up on the skin, in the sudden chill of the sea-breeze.

But then, without warning, the whole leg sprang free of the plan. Daylight shone underneath it, and water-splash, and I saw the tiny black feet of the far thigh-team fleeing-and in my fright I forgot about the gooseflesh on the thigh.

The limb smacked back down and did not move again.

One man on my team had been shaken loose. He hung swinging and screaming from the cutting-rope. Several farther down the limb had fallen right off the top. Some had hit the gel; two had bounced from it onto the plan. Out of all the sounds that happened in those few moments, I managed to hear the ones their heads made breaking on the ground two teams away. It sounded unremarkable, like wooden mallets striking the concrete, but of course they were not tools but people who struck, not wood but brother or father or son, as Mister Chopes had said. My heart rushed out-but less to the fallen ones than to their onlooker. He could have done nothing, poor man, it had happened so quickly. How anguished he must be! What a failure I would feel, if that were me! And then relief swept through me, a professional relief, that it had not been me, here on my first day.

All our team, except for those helping the hanging worker, were clawing gel, or each other, or watery ground, trying to hold the world steady. "How can such a thing happen?" I said to the man nearest me.

"It's a nerve thing," he said. "I've heard of it. It's electricity. It's metal on a nerve. It'll be that team on the knee. See how they've just shot their cap-lever in there? You can do the same thing to a dead frog. Poke it in the nerve and the leg jumps, though the heart is still and the head is cut right off."

"Don't the bosses know about that nerve?" I said. "Shouldn't they have the knee team do their work first, rather than endanger so many workers?"

The man shrugged. "When no two beasts are quite the same, how is anyone to learn all the nerves?"

A boss and some stretcher-men had run past us toward the s.h.i.+n, followed by day-jobbers eager to offer themselves as replacements for the dead and the injured. Mister Chopes got his top-team up and moving again. The hip-men were back at work; the knee-people cleavered open flesh so that the knee-cap could be brought free; the wall of the thigh was smooth, sunlit. The hairs had a slight red-gold tint; perhaps that was why the flesh looked so rosy in the strengthening sun.

Once all the shroud was off the thigh, our job was a plain job, a meat job. The top-team cut blanket pieces of thigh flesh and lowered them to the ground-team. Hooked ropes were brought along from the winches at the top of the plan, and the ground-team hooked the flesh on, then jumped aside as it slid away, followed by the flesh from the calf-cutters, smaller and more shaped pieces than ours.

The hip-team to our left didn't send anything up on the first load rope, or the second. Theirs was more technical work, cutting away the bags and scrags that were the beast's s.e.x, sewing and sealing up the bags and pa.s.sing them down in tarpaulin sheathing so that not a drop of the profitable aphrodisiacs could seep out and be wasted on the plan, on our splas.h.i.+ng feet, on the sea. Then they must excavate the pelvis, which was complicated-valuable organs lay there and must not be punctured in the processing.

"That's a lot of muck, on the shroud," someone said as the smallest of the three toes, on the last few rope hooks, slid up past us.

"'Cause it's so fresh," came the satisfied answer. "Them star-men done a good job this time. They're getting more efficienter with every beast, I say."

"Do we want it this fresh?" said the first. "Seems like a lot of the good oils coming dribbling and drabbling out of the thing, that could be bottled and used and profited from."

"Ah, but what's left must be such quality!" The man kissed his fingers. "Unearthly good. Purest essence of money, trickling into the bosses' pockets-"

And then the bell rang, from the top of the plan, mad and loud and on and on.

The whole crowd of workers swayed sh.o.r.eward as if a gust of wind had bent them. Many day-jobbers broke and ran for sh.o.r.e, shouting.

A slow s.h.i.+ver went through the whole length of the beast. At its foot, water splashed up from the drumming of its heel on the plan.

The knee-team's onlooker, whom I had thought so professional looking this morning, flashed by, alone.

"Down the ropes!" Mister Chopes shouted.

My men, their knees bent to spring into a run, looked to me for the word.

"Back up here!" I megaphoned through the noise. A man fleeing past me clapped his hand to his ear and scowled as he ran on. "We'll wait for the boss!"

But Mister Chopes, tiny on top of the quaking beast, was swinging his arms as if he would scoop us all up and throw us toward the head. "We'll go," I said. "On boss's orders. Form up and I'll be the chanter."

And so my men-all of them older than me, because it's the younger and limberer workers who go up top-made two lines in front of me. I used my whistle like a chanter's drum and held them to a rhythm. It was a fast one, but still I kept swinging nearly into the rearmost men-a crutch-pace is longer than a normal stride. We pa.s.sed a man in the water, neither standing nor crouching, excrement running down his legs and dripping from the hem of his loongy. His wide eyes were fixed on the vast shuddering shadow looming over us all, and his lips had drawn right back from his big, sticking-out teeth. Beyond him some stretcher-men were busy lifting a misshapen, screaming thing with red spikes coming out of it. I tried to watch only the water shooting out flat to the sides when my men's feet hit it.

"Is it electricity?" one of my men asked the knowledgeable one, as we ran.

"Is what electricity?"

"With the dead frog. Has somebody hit a nerve?"

"A nerve? There's no nerve in a body can make the whole thing shake like that."

When we got to the head end, people in the beast's shadow were calling for help, but no stretcher-men ran to them. The harvested hair made a mountain on the plan, winched halfway to the hair-shed, strands trailing behind like giant millipedes. The shorn scalp had been taken off, and the sawyers had cut the full oval in the braincase. As we hurried past-we were not close; it only felt close because the head was so big-the beast's convulsions made this dish of bone tip slowly outward.

My rhythm went ragged, but my men kept it anyway, bringing me back into rhythm though it should have been me bringing them.

At the top of the plan near the steamer-sheds was a thick, panicky crowd, all trying not to be the outermost layer. I drew my team up on number 18 plan. Our formation was all gone to beggary, but we were together, tight together; none of us was missing, don't worry. From number 17 we must have looked like a row of heads upon a single candy-striped body.

"Is that Mister Chopes?" I looked back down the plan. I wanted a boss. I wanted to be in charge of nothing, no one.

"Look at them! And look at those raggedy foot-people coming after! Chopes will get commended for this, being so neat and ordered."

"If he doesn't die."

"If we don't all die."

"Look! Look at the stuff inside!"

The bone lid had tipped right out from the beast's head. The head-contents sat packed in their cavity. They were supposed to be gray, a purplish gray. Once, I had seen some damaged ones go past, on a lorry; the good ones were s.h.i.+pped across to the Island for sterile processing.

Frog eggs, I thought. Sheep eyes. A lightning storm.

Inside each giant cell floated two ma.s.ses of blackness, joined by a black bar. Through each cell, and among them, pulsed, flashed, webs, veins, sheets, streaks, and sparks of light. Each flicker and pa.s.s began yellow, flashed up to white, faded away through yellow again-and so quickly that it took me many flickers to see this, to separate single flashes from the patterns, from the maps the light fast drew, then fast redrew.

"That's the brain," said Trawbrij the chanter. "Those lights must be its thinking. It's alive. They've not killed it properly."

"They've taken their economizing too far," said Mister Chopes. "They've skimped on the drug."

All workers were clear of the beast now, except for the dead, the injured, and two laden stretcher-teams splas.h.i.+ng up the plan through the shallows. The lightning storm flickered and played in the head, now in fine, clear webs at the surface, now deeper and vaguer.

The beast lifted its upper limb, a giant unsteady thing with three clasping digits at the end, from its far side to its head. It felt, with delicate clumsiness, the bald skin above the ear, the angled dish of the skull top.

One of the digits slipped into the cavity, dislodging a single globe there, and whatever tension had held the cells in position was broken. The head-contents collapsed like a fruit stack from a market stall. Many rolled right out of the skull, onto the plan.

The beast tried to paw the spilt cells back into its skull. Some it retrieved; others it knocked farther away, and they sat gray and lightless on the plan. Like a flirty old drunk man fumbling for his fancy Western hat, it groped for its skull-dish. It clamped it back onto its head-but crookedly. Several cells were crushed. Their contents burst out; the black barbells cringed and withered, the oils spread upon the seawater; the rest of the filling lay jellied against the casing.

Holding its head together, the beast used a great contraction of its as-yet-uncut abdomen to curve itself up, to roll itself onto its single foot.

Oh my, I thought. It could be mistaken for a person, this one. Like what you see of a person sidling in through a nearly closed door.

"It can crush the whole town," said Trawbrij. "If it falls that way."