Under the Skin

11

BEFORE SHE WAS even properly conscious, Isserley was already aware of two smells, surreally blended: raw meat and recent rainfall. She opened her eyes. The endless night sky was all above her, glittering with a million distant stars.

She was lying on her back, in a vehicle with an open top, parked in a garage with an open roof.

It wasn’t her car; it wasn’t a car at all, she realized slowly. She was lying inside the splayed flip-top hull of the transport ship, under a yawning aperture in the steading roof.

‘I persuaded them the fresh air would do you good,’ said Amlis Vess, somewhere not so far away.

Isserley tried to turn her head to find him, but her neck was so stiff it might have been clamped in a vice. Barely breathing for fear of bringing on the pain, she lay very still, wondering what was raising her head up from the metal floor. With her clammy fingers she felt, alongside her paralysed hips, the texture of what lay beneath her: a rough woven mat, of the kind humans liked to sleep on.

‘When they brought you out of the lift, you seemed to be choking, almost suffocating,’ Amlis went on. ‘I wanted to take you outside, but the other men wouldn’t let me. And they refused to take you out themselves, either. So I got them to agree to this.’

‘Thanks,’ she murmured passionlessly. ‘I’m sure I would have survived regardless.’

‘Yes,’ he conceded, ‘no doubt you would.’

Isserley examined the sky more closely. There was still a trace of violet in it, and the moon was only just edging into view. It might be six o’clock in the evening, seven at the latest. She tried to lift her head. The response from her body was not so good.

‘Can I help you?’ said Amlis.

‘I’m just resting,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve had a very tiring day.’

Minutes passed. Isserley strove to adjust to her predicament, which struck her as both awful and laughable. She wiggled her toes, and then tried to wiggle her hips, unobtrusively. A needle of pain went through her tailbone.

Amlis Vess tactfully refrained from commenting on her sharp intake of breath. Instead he said, ‘I’ve been watching the sky ever since I got here.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Isserley. Her eyes felt unpleasantly encrusted when she blinked. She longed to wipe them.

‘Nothing I imagined really prepared me for it,’ Amlis went on. His sincerity was unmistakable, and Isserley found it oddly touching.

‘I felt the same, at first,’ she said.

‘It’s pure blue during the day,’ he observed, as if she might not have noticed this yet and he was calling her attention to it. Confronted with the sheer earnestness of his enthusiasm, she suddenly felt like shrieking with laughter.

‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed.

‘And many other colours,’ he added.

She really did have to laugh then, a snort that was mostly pain.

‘Yes, many,’ she said through clenched teeth. At last she had managed to lift her hands up, and clasped them across her belly, in a way she found comforting. Inch by inch, she was coming back to life.

‘You know,’ Amlis went on, ‘Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.’ His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. ‘It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.’

Isserley stroked the fabric of her top over her belly; it was slightly damp, but not very. The rain mustn’t have lasted very long.

‘The water stopped falling as abruptly as it started,’ said Amlis. ‘But even now the smell of everything has changed.’

Isserley was able to turn her head slightly now. She ascertained that she’d been laid out in front of one of the ship’s refrigerators. The base of her skull was resting on a broad pedal bar at the base of the unit, whose function was to raise the lid when stepped on. Her head wasn’t heavy enough to raise the lid; that required the body weight of a man.

To the right of her, on the metal floor almost at her shoulder, lay two trays of meat covered in transparent viscose. One tray was prime steaks, dark auburn and interleaved. The other, larger tray was densely packed with offal: bleached entrails perhaps, or brains. They smelled strong, even through the wrapping. The men really ought to have finished putting them away before leaving her here.

She turned her head to the left. Amlis was sitting some distance from her, beautiful as ever, his back limbs curled under him, his arms erect, his head raised slightly towards the open steading roof. She caught a glimpse of his sharp white teeth; he was eating something.

‘You needn’t have stayed with me,’ she said, trying to lift her knees without him noticing the effort it took.

‘I sit here most of the day and night,’ he explained. ‘The men won’t let me out of the building, of course. But I see the most extraordinary things just through this hole in the roof.’ However, he turned his attention to her now, and stood up to move closer to where she lay. She heard the gentle tick of his clawed fingers on the metal floor as he padded along.

He stopped a respectful distance from her body, an arm’s length perhaps, and let his haunches drop again, legs curling underneath. His arms remained erect, the tousled white fur of his breast pushing out between them. She had forgotten how black the down on his head was, how golden his eyes.

‘All this meat doesn’t put you off?’ she suggested tauntingly.

He ignored the barb in her comment.

‘It’s all dead now,’ he said simply. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that now, is there?’

‘I thought you might still be working on the minds and hearts of the men, you know,’ pursued Isserley, hearing herself overdoing the sarcasm.

‘Well, I did my best,’ said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. ‘But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it’s not your minds I need to change.’ And he glanced round at the contents of the ship’s hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.

Isserley watched his neck and shoulders, the way his fur was so soft it fluttered in the breeze. Her grasp on her ill-will towards him was growing weak, now that she was imagining him resting his warm fleecy breast on her back, his white teeth gently biting her neck.

‘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.

‘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.

‘There’s a rather nasty snack food,’ he was explaining, ‘that’s very popular in the Estates – very thin slices of a starchy tuber fried in fat and then dried to a crisp. Vess Incorporated has been flavouring these with some kind of vodsel by-product. The demand is phenomenal.’

‘Trash will eat trash,’ said Isserley, stretching to the skies again.

There was a hissing sound from outside the ship. Isserley and Amlis peered over the edge of the hull down into the steading, and watched Ensel and another man step out of the lift. The other two men gazed back at them across the empty expanse of concrete.

‘Just checking,’ called Ensel, his coarse voice reverberating hollowly against the metal walls, ‘to see if you were all right.’

‘I’m fine, Ensel,’ replied Isserley, barely acknowledging him. ‘And Mr Vess is quite safe.’

‘Uh… right,’ said Ensel. ‘Right.’ And without another word he turned tail and re-entered the lift, followed by his companion. Another hiss, and they were gone.

Amlis, at Isserley’s shoulder, spoke quietly.

‘Ensel really cares about you, you know.’

‘Well, he can go fuck himself with his own tail,’ said Isserley, and licked the icpathua cud back out of her cheek for further chewing.

Above their heads, it had started raining again, just lightly. Amlis looked up into the blackness, in wonder and puzzlement. The stars were gone; a haze had replaced them, and the luminous floating disc had moved almost out of sight. Droplets of water pattered against his fur, disappearing instantly into the dark smooth parts, glistening and trembling on his woolly white breast. Hesitantly, he reared up on his hind limbs, leaning back on his tail, and opened his mouth. Isserley had not seen his tongue before. It was as red and clean as the petal of an anemone flower.

‘Isserley,’ he said, swallowing. ‘Is it true about the sea?’

‘Mmm?’ She was enjoying the rain on her face; she wished it would pour down.

‘I heard the men talk about it,’ Amlis continued. ‘A body of water that sort of… lies right next to the land and stays there permanently. They’ve seen it in the distance. They say it’s vast, and that you go there all the time.’

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘It’s true.’

The aperture in the steading roof was starting to roll shut; Ensel had evidently decided she’d had quite enough fresh air.

‘And when I was letting those poor vodsels go,’ said Amlis, ‘even though it was pitch dark, I saw… what looked like… trees, except absolutely enormous, taller than this building.’ His plummy accent was pitiable now; he was like a child, trying to sum up the grandeur of the universe in the stilted language of the playpen.

‘Yes, yes,’ she smiled. ‘It’s all true. It’s all out there.’

The steading roof had been shut now, though; the outside world was gone.

‘Take me out to see it, please,’ Amlis said suddenly, his voice echoing faintly in the hangar.

‘Out of the question,’ she responded flatly.

‘It’s dark,’ he urged her. ‘We wouldn’t be seen.’

‘Out of the question,’ she repeated.

‘Is it vodsels you’re worried about? How dangerous can those dumb animals possibly be?’ he pleaded.

‘Very dangerous,’ she assured him.

‘To life and limb, or to the smooth running of Vess Industries?’

‘I don’t give a shit about Vess Industries.’

‘Then take me,’ he entreated. ‘In your vehicle. I’ll behave myself, I promise. I just want to look. Please.’

‘I said no.’

Minutes later, Isserley was driving slowly under the tangled bower of tree-branches, past Esswis’s farmhouse. The lights were on, as usual. Isserley’s car lights were off. She could see well enough by the light of the moon, and she didn’t have to bother with her glasses. Besides, she had travelled this path hundreds of times on foot.

‘Who built these houses?’ asked Amlis, squatting on the passenger seat, his hands on the edge of the dashboard.

‘We did,’ said Isserley evenly. She was pleased no houses were visible beyond the farm, and that her own decrepit cottage looked like something that might have been cobbled together from bits of stone and debris lying about. Of Esswis’s far grander dwelling she said: ‘That one was built for Esswis. He’s sort of my boss. He mends the fences, organizes the animal feed, that sort of thing.’

They passed close by Esswis’s house, close enough for Amlis to see the condensation-clouded windows, with their chunky wooden ornaments on the sills.

‘Who carved those?’

Isserley glanced at the sculptures.

‘Oh, Esswis,’ she said, automatically as they drove past. But the lie might, she suddenly realized, be the truth after all. Glowing, fading, in her mind’s eye was a row of driftwood shapes, whittled and honed to a skeletal elegance, frozen in balletic attitudes of torture, lined up side by side behind the double glazing. Maybe this was how Esswis filled the lonelier hours of winter.

Isserley drove through the open fields, where massive round hay-bales lay scattered like black holes in the horizon. One field lay fallow, the opposite one was lush with the dark secretive greenery of potatoes. Here and there, bushes and trees that served no agricultural purpose sprouted up towards the heavens, displaying hardy flowers or long fragile twigs, each according to its kind.

Isserley knew what Amlis must be feeling: here was plant life that did not need to be grown in tanks or grubbed out of chalky, slimy soil, but that grew straight up into the air like a gush of joy. Here was acre upon acre of tranquil fecundity, taking care of itself with no apparent help from humans. And he was seeing Ablach’s fields in winter: if only he could see what happened here in spring!

She drove very, very slowly. The path to the shore wasn’t designed for two-wheel-drive vehicles and she didn’t want to damage her car. Also, she was nagged by an irrational fear that a bump in the track might jolt her right hand off the steering wheel and she’d trip the icpathua toggle by mistake. Although Amlis wasn’t belted in and kept shifting around on the seat in his excitement, the needles might still get him.

At the great gate at the end of the Ablach path, not far short of the cliffs, Isserley stopped the car and turned off the engine. From here there was a clear view of the North Sea, which was silver tonight, under a sky whose eastern reaches were grey with advancing snow, while the west was still bright with the moon and stars.

‘Oh,’ said Amlis feebly.

He was in shock, more or less, she could tell. He stared straight ahead at the immense, impossible waters, and she stared at the side of his face, secure in the knowledge that he was unaware of her longing.

After a long time, Amlis was ready to ask a question. Isserley knew what it was going to be before he even opened his mouth, and answered him before he could speak.

‘That thin line of brightness there,’ she pointed. ‘That’s where the sea ends. Well, it doesn’t really end there, it goes on forever. But that’s where our perception of it ends. And above that: that’s where the sky begins. You see?’

It was almost cruelly poignant, but delightful too, the way Amlis seemed to regard her as the custodian of an entire world, as if it belonged to her. Which, perhaps, it did.

The terrible price she’d paid had made this world her own, in a sense. She was showing Amlis what could be the natural domain of anyone willing to submit to the ultimate sacrifice – a sacrifice no-one but she had dared to make. Well, she and Esswis. But Esswis rarely left his farmhouse. Too devastated, probably, by his disfigurement. The beauties of nature meant nothing to him; they were insufficient consolation. She, by contrast, kept pushing herself out there to see what there was to be seen. She exposed herself daily to the great impartial skies, glad to be consoled.

In time, a flock of sheep walked single-file along the fringe of cliff at Ablach’s boundary. Their fleeces glowed in the moonlight, their black faces almost invisible against the tenebrous gorse.

‘What are those?’ marvelled Amlis, his nose almost squashed against the windscreen.

‘They’re called sheep,’ Isserley told him.

‘How do you know?’

Isserley thought fast.

‘That’s what they call themselves,’ she said.

‘You speak their language?’ he goggled as the creatures trotted past.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘A few words.’

He watched them, every last one of them, his head moving closer and closer to Isserley’s as he followed their slow progress out of his experience.

‘Have you tried using them for meat?’ asked Amlis.

Isserley was dumbfounded. ‘Are you serious?’

‘How do I know what you people have got up to?’

Isserley blinked repeatedly, fumbling for something to say. How could he even think of such a thing? Was it a ruthlessness that linked father and son?

‘They’re… they’re on all fours, Amlis, can’t you see that? They’ve got fur – tails – facial features not that different from ours…’

‘Listen,’ he began testily, ‘if you’re going to eat the flesh of a living creature…’

Isserley sighed; she yearned to just place her forefinger against his lips and quieten him.

‘Please,’ she implored, as the last of the sheep vanished into a tunnel of gorse. ‘Don’t spoil this.’

But, typical man, he was not to be dissuaded from wrecking the perfection of the moment; he only chose a different tack.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve talked to the men quite a lot.’

‘What men?’

‘The men you work with.’

‘I work alone.’

Amlis took a deep breath; began again.

‘The men say you’re not yourself.’

Isserley snorted contemptuously. This would be Ensel he had in mind. Ensel, all mange and scars and swollen balls, spilling his guts to the visiting big shot. Man-to-man confessions.

Sensing the poison of hatred trickling back into her system, she was sad, almost ashamed: what a relief it had been to be without it, if only for a little while! Could this little cud she’d been chewing really have such a placating effect? She turned to Amlis, and smiled awkwardly.

‘Have you got any more… uh…’ Don’t make me say the word, she thought.

Amlis handed her another sprig of icpathua, from the clump he’d brought along.

‘The men are saying you’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Has anything bad happened to you?’

With his gift to her still in her hand, Isserley did her best to keep her bitterness in check.

‘Oh, the odd stroke of bad luck, from time to time. Wealthy young men promising they’ll take care of me, then standing by as I get sent down to the shithole. My body being carved up. That sort of thing.’

‘I mean just recently.’

Isserley leaned her head back against the seat, adding the icpathua to what she still had in her mouth.

‘I’m fine,’ she sighed. ‘I have a difficult job, that’s all. It has its ups and downs. You wouldn’t understand.’

On the horizon, a cloud of snow was gathering with great speed. She knew he hadn’t a clue what it was, and cherished this knowledge.

‘Why not quit?’ he suggested.

‘Quit?’

‘Quit. Just stop doing it.’

Isserley rolled her eyes up to heaven, or the ceiling of her car. The upholstery of that ceiling was, she noticed, in some decay.

‘I’m sure Vess Incorporated would be most impressed,’ she sighed. ‘Your old man would send me his personal best wishes, I’m sure.’

Amlis laughed dismissively.

‘You think my father is going to come all the way out here and bite you in the neck?’ he said. ‘He’ll just send somebody to take your place. There are hundreds of people begging for the chance.’

This was news to Isserley – horrifying, sickening news.

‘That can’t be true,’ she breathed.

Amlis went quiet for a moment, as he tried to find his way safely through what had opened up between them: the jagged traps of her grief.

‘I don’t for a moment want to minimize what you’ve suffered,’ he said carefully, ‘but you must understand there are rumours back home about what this place is like – the skies, the visibility of the stars, the purity of the air, the lushness of everything. There are even stories about giant bodies of water – about how they go on and on for‘(he laughed)’a mile at a stretch.’

He said no more for a while, waiting for her to be ready. She was leaning back in her seat, her eyes falling shut. In the moonlight, her damp eyelids were silvery and intricately patterned, like the leaf he had admired in the steading.

She is beautiful, he thought. In her own strange, strange way.

Eventually, Isserley spoke again.

‘Look, I couldn’t just quit,’ she pointed out. ‘My job provides me with a home… food…’ She struggled to come up with more.

Amlis didn’t wait. ‘The men tell me you basically live on bread and mussanta paste as it is,’ he said. ‘Ensel says you seem to live mostly on thin air. Are you telling me there’s nothing growing in this world you couldn’t survive on? And nowhere you could make a home for yourself?’

Isserley gripped the steering wheel angrily.

‘Are you suggesting I live like an animal?’

They sat in silence for a long time, while the snow-clouds gathered on the firth and then drifted over the farm. Isserley, taking surreptitious glances at Amlis, noted that his awe and excitement were now tinged with unease: the unease of having hurt her, the unease of what was happening above him. To his inexperienced eyes, the snow-clouds no doubt resembled the noxious smogs of home, the kind that were sometimes so foully toxic that even the Elite were forced underground.

‘Are… are we going to be all right?’ he asked at last, just as the moon was being extinguished by the swirling grey haze.

Isserley smirked. ‘No adventure without risk, Amlis,’ she chided him.

Snowflakes began to whirl through the air, careering wildly, trembling, spiralling, diving against the windscreen. Amlis flinched. Then a few flakes blew in through the open passenger window, settling on his fur.

Isserley felt him shudder next to her, smelled a new odour on him. It was a long time since she’d smelled human fear.

‘Relax, Amlis,’ she purred serenely, ‘It’s only water.’

He pawed nervously at the alien substance on his breast, then murmured in wonder as it melted between his fingers. He looked at Isserley as if she had organized this whole display herself; as if she had just up-ended the whole universe for him, in case it might charm him for a moment.

‘Just watch,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk. Just watch.’

Together they sat in Isserley’s little car as the sky unburdened its load. Within half an hour all the land around them was dusted with white, and a brilliant crystalline lather was climbing up the windscreen.

‘This is… a miracle,’ Amlis said at last. ‘It’s as if there’s another sea, floating in the air.’

Isserley nodded eagerly: how intuitively he understood! She had often thought exactly the same thing herself.

‘Just wait till the sun comes up! You won’t believe it!’

Something happened in the air between them then, something molecularly disturbing.

‘I’m not going to see it, Isserley,’ Amlis said sadly. ‘I’ll be gone by then.’

‘Gone?’

‘I’m leaving tonight,’ he said.

Still she seemed unable to grasp what he could possibly mean.

‘The ship,’ he reminded her, ‘is leaving in a couple of hours. I’m going to be on it, of course.’

She sat very still, taking the information in.

‘It’s not like you to do what you’re told,’ she joked feebly, after a while.

‘I need to get back home,’ explained Amlis, ‘to talk about what I’ve seen here. People need to be told what’s being done with their blessing.’

Isserley laughed harshly. ‘So it’s Amlis the Crusader,’ she sneered, ‘bringing the light of truth to the whole human race.’

He grinned, hurt twinkling in his eyes. ‘You’re a cynical creature, Isserley. Listen, if it’s easier for you to digest, you could say I’ve got no ideals really. You could say I just want to go back and annoy the hell out of my father.’

She smiled wearily. The snow had almost completely obscured the windscreen by now; she would have to shift it soon, or she’d start feeling claustrophobic.

‘Parents, eh?’ griped Amlis awkwardly, trying to maintain a fragile bridge between them. ‘Fuck ’em.’ The vulgarism sounded forced and self-conscious coming from him; he’d misjudged his tone, lost his grip a little. And, shyly, he reached across and laid a hand gently on her arm.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it would be very easy to get seduced by this world. It’s very, very… beautiful.’

Isserley lifted her arms up to take hold of the steering wheel. His hand slipped off her as she found the ignition unerringly in the gloom. The engine thrummed into life, the headlights came on.

‘I’ll drive you back to the steading, then,’ Isserley said. ‘Time’s getting away.’

Back at the steading, the great aluminium door was open a crack, and Isserley could see Ensel’s snout already poking through. He’d have been sweating, she could well imagine, all through the hours of Amlis’s absence; he was probably on guard duty. Let’s see him come out now and tell her that this catch of hers was the best ever, the little creep.

Ensel stayed right where he was, however, waiting.

Isserley reached across Amlis’s body to open the passenger side door, the mechanism of which was defeating him. Her forearm brushed momentarily against his fur, and she smelled the warm flesh underneath. The door swung open, letting in a blast of cold air and feathery snowflakes.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Amlis asked.

‘I have my own place to go to,’ Isserley told him. ‘And I’ve got work in the morning.’

One last time he locked eyes with her, a flash of antagonism sparking between them. Then:

‘Take care of yourself,’ he muttered, lowering himself out of the car onto the white ground. ‘There’s a voice inside you. Listen to what it says.’

‘It says fuck off,’ she said, but she was smiling crookedly, and crying too.

He padded through the snow, towards the door which was rolling open for him.

‘I’ll come back sometime,’ he called, turning his head over his shoulder as he walked. Then, grinning: ‘If I can get transport, of course.’

Isserley drove to her cottage, parked the car in the garage, walked herself into the house. Since she’d last been home, mysterious trespassers had slipped some glossy leaflets under her front door. An assortment of vodsels far too puny to make the grade wanted her to vote for them in an election; Scotland’s future was at stake and the power lay in her hands. There was also a note from Esswis, which Isserley did not attempt to read. Instead, she went straight to bed, covered her naked body in blankets, and wept and wept for hours.

The little numbers on her depleted digital clock had stopped flashing altogether, but she estimated it was about four in the morning when the transport ship finally launched itself with its characteristic groan.

Afterwards, she listened to the roof of the steading rolling shut. Then, soothed by the music of the waves playing in the stillness of Ablach, she rocked herself to sleep.