Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [19]
At first, all we could see was the backlit bulk of the thing, with a few bright rags of aura streaming in the wind, thinning as it came closer. The light from the sun, which as yet was below the horizon, made the thick shroud glow, and the body shape was a dark blur within it. I thought I could see a head, against a bigger torso. But you can’t be sure with these things; they’re never the same twice in their build and features, in their arrangement of limbs.
What kind of people could afford to send craft up into the ether to find and kill such beasts? They must be so rich! A boy born bung-legged to those people would be no shame or disadvantage, I was sure—they would get him a new leg and sew that on. Or they would get him a little car, to drive himself around on their smooth roads. There would be so many jobs for him, his leg wouldn’t matter; he might do finecrafts with his hands, or grow a famous brain, or work with computers. Nobody would be anxious for him or disappointed; he wouldn’t have to forever apologise for himself and make up to his family for having come out wrong.
‘It’s a long-hair, I think,’ said someone near me. ‘I think I can see hair around that head—if it is the head.’
‘Hair? That’s good.’
‘Oh, every part of it is good.’
‘It’s low in the water,’ said another. ‘Good and fresh. Quality cuttings. Everything cheaper to process. Bosses will be happy.’
‘Everyone will be happy!’
People laughed. Now we could see that the thing was more than rumour 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 lovesongs 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 shirts 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 chink 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 labouring 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 was 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 towards the try-house where the copper pots and boilers glowed in the shadows. Gangers came through the