Yellowcake (10 page)
‘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 shore-wards as if a gust of wind had bent them. Many day-jobbers broke and ran for shore, shouting.
A slow shiver 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 flashed by, alone, whom I had thought so professional-looking this morning.
‘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 towards 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 passed a man in the water, neither standing nor crouching; excrement ran down his legs and dripped from the hem of his loongy; his wide eyes were fixed on the vast shuddering looming shadow 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 brain-case. 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 look 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 grey, a purplish grey. Once, I had seen some damaged ones go past, on a lorry; the good ones were shipped across to the Island for sterile processing.
Frog eggs, I thought. Sheep eyes. A lightning storm.
Inside each giant cell floated two masses 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 pass 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 re-drew.
‘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 economising 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 splashing 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 grey 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.’
The thing turned, from the sun to the land. There it stood, on its crooked hind-limb, loose pieces of gel sliding off it. How many houses high was it, how many hills? Its chest and limbs were patterned with rectangular excavations like a rock quarry; our last unfinished blanket of thigh flesh drooped, dripping. There was a neatly cut cavity where the sex had been, full of drips and runnels like a grotto in the hill caves. Its eye was still sealed, its mouth torn partly open. Brain-fluid and matter ran down either side of the grey-stopped nose, in the high sun.
My own head felt light and hollow. Good, was the only thought in it. My heart thumped hard, and burned red. Crush the whole town. And the
plan
, too, and everyone on it. Do that.
Three small, ornamental picture frames appeared in my mind, around three faces—Jumi’s, Dochi’s, Jupi’s—all looking downward, or to the side. Far overhead, guilt whipped at me as always, but it barely stung. I was deep in my insides; against my cheek and ear, some black inner organ, quite separate from my body’s functioning, turned and gleamed.
It’s only fair.
The beast managed, though one-legged, to take a kind of step. But it sagged towards the missing toe; it gripped and tried to hold itself upright with a toe that wasn’t there. Then the weakened knee gave, and the creature jerked and wobbled tremendously above us. And fell—of course it fell. But it fell away from us, stretching itself out across the farther
plans
.
And it lay still.
There were several moments of silence. Nothing moved but eyes.
Then there was an explosion around me, a fountain of striped shirts and shouting mouths, a surge forward.
I knew what they meant; I myself was hot-bowelled and shaking with relief. But I didn’t surge or shout or leap; I couldn’t quite believe. So vast a creature and so strange, and yet the life in it was one-moment-there, next-moment-gone, just as for a dog under a bus-wheel, or a chicken that a jumi pulls the neck of. And the world adjusts around it like water; as soon as the fear is gone, as soon as the danger is passed, normalness slips in on all sides, to cover up that any life was ever there.
The
plan
-workers rushed in. People came exclaiming into the yards from the town—those who had not seen had certainly heard, had felt the ground jump as the beast collapsed. Women and children crowded at the
plan
gates, and some of the little boys were allowed to run in, because they were not bad luck like the girls and women.
Lots of people—and I was one of these—felt we had to approach the beast, and touch it. Lots of us felt compelled to walk its length and see its motionlessness end to end for ourselves, see its dead face.
‘Oh, oh,’ I said, to no one, as I walked, as I stroked the skin. ‘All my Jupi’s careful work.’
All the
plans
from 16 to 13 were cracked clean through. The beast had crushed
plan
13’s steamer-shed to splinters, its trypots to copper pancakes; it had filled
plan
12’s hair house to the rafters with brain-spheres—dead spheres, grey-purplish spheres, spheres that held nothing unexpected.
The stretcher-men went to and fro with their serious faces, bearing their serious loads. The bosses withdrew; theirs was the most urgent work. The rest of us could do nothing until they had bargained our jobs back into being, weighed up the damage and set it against the value of the beast and parcelled everything out appropriately. Yet we couldn’t leave, could only wander dazed, and examine, and exclaim.
Finally they made us go, because some of the day-jobbers were found snipping pieces of hair, or taking chunks of eyeball or somesuch, and they put ribbons and guards all around the beast and brought the soldiers in to clear the
plans
and keep them clear.
So Jupi and Dochi and I, we walked, still all wobbly, back to our uncrushed home. There was Jumi, waiting to be told, and Jupi described how he had seen it, and Dochi how it had looked from his position up on the forelimb, and I told her yes, between them that was pretty much how it had seemed to me. There was too much to say, and yet none of it would tell properly what had happened, even to people who’d been there too.
Still people tried and tried. They came and went—we came and went ourselves—and everyone kept trying.
‘How would it be!’ said Mavourn.
We were all in the beer-shanty by then. I looked down at the thin foam on the beer he had bought me, and smelled the smell, and thought how I didn’t want
ever
to like drinking beer.
‘How would it be,’ he said, ‘to be a beast, to wake up and find yourself chopped half to pieces, and not in the ether any more, and with no fellow beast to hear your cry?’
‘No one can know that, Mavourn,’ said Jupi. ‘No one can know how a beast thinks, what a beast feels.’
I looked around the table. My colleagues shook their heads, muzzily some of them, with the beer. Some were my family—there was Jupi here, and two distant cousins across from me. I had wanted them all crushed, a few hours ago; what on earth made me want that, in the moment when the beast wavered, and the future was not set?
I could not say. That moment had gone, and the heat in my heart had gone with it. I picked up the beer. I closed my nose to the smell; I looked beyond the far rim so as not to see the slick on the surface from the unclean cup. And I sipped and swallowed, and I put the cup down, and I shook my head along with the other men.
