Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [61]
Figuro was a thin man, but he had not run for a long time and he took a little while to establish a gait he could sustain. Above and ahead the hems of creature moved on away; here below raced his mismanaged breath, and his unaccustomed legs, rubbering and paining and tiring. He willed the thing to stay in sight. He didn’t speak or call to it as once he might have—since his mother had died he obeyed her better than he ever had, and one of the things she had insisted was that tools and buildings and anything that you could not see had ears you did not address.
Now he saw the sea, the dark line of it through the railing beyond the paler stripe of empty highway. Now he smelt it over the other smells, muted as they were by morning’s coolness—the splashy, salt smell of play, of childhood. Now he heard it, beyond his own breaths and grunts, its thin collapsements on the shore beside the unawakened town. And he was out on the highway, and he could see the whole creature.
It brought the last several of its leg pairs, leg trios, over the railing after itself, while its jagged chin thrust out over the first shallows like a king’s sea-palace.
And palace it was, or at least architecture, Figuro saw clearly. It was made all of slabs and brittle stuff that ought not to move, and yet it had got something of sinew into itself, and something of flexible skin, something of a head— he wished he could see the face that belonged to this outreaching being, this clumsy animal, this great ugly child. Perhaps even it had ears, and if he went up close it would hear him. Perhaps he could help.
He ran straight across the highway, bent and stepped through the railing to the grassed area beyond. His joints were grateful for earth instead of paving; he had energy again with the creature-that-was-a-building in his sights, arrayed across the view and so unusual. He was glad his mother was gone; he would not have to describe the impossible thing to her. He could just see it and have it go unexplained, un-made-sense-of, wondrous.
He ran. He wished it would turn this way. ‘Hi!’ he cried, and ‘Hey!’, and he leaped and waved trying to make himself big enough to catch its eye.
Of course it did not see or hear him—or if it did, he was not important to it. Caterpillar-like it assembled its segments, hunching the shoulder-ish ones at the fore, sorting and shuffling the ones behind.
Then it shook its head—not monstrously, not cavalierly, but as if gathering courage before going to an interview with the High-Minded Milk boss, for instance. Momentarily it had a mane, and shards flew out of it, some black, some only flashes of beginning dawnlight, long triangles in the sky and then gone into the briefly furred sea-surface.
And into the water it walked. It was the wonderfullest thing. Figuro ran to the edge of the grass, scrambled down the slope of cemented rocks and stood, up to his ankles in the soft, cold sand. He struggled a few steps forward, but without the spring of grass his legs were uninterested, and his eyes were so busy—his mouth was open as if it could see, too—that he did not fight to force himself onward.
Anyway, he wanted this view of all of it, and to hear the creaks and grindings from its whole length, poppings and thumps. Besides, see all the stuff falling from its sides and undersides! If he went too close he could be speared, crushed, blinded by some small flying-off thing.
‘Oh!’ He clasped his hands and shook them up at the thing. ‘You are a marvel!’
Its forelegs sank in the soft watered sand and lifted, and sank again. On and in it went, still with its back end progressing across the grass. It breasted the little waves, breaking their ration of dawn-sheen into an unshining white splashiness. It was clumsy, of course, clumsier than a horse or elephant, meeting the water for the first-ever time and accustoming itself to its own shape against the water forces, the thickness and the wavebeats and the more tidal changes. It lumbered. Expecting the floor to be as flat as the city’s, it slumped and huffed and surged