The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  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 shin, 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 sex, sewing and sealing up the bags and passing 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 splashing 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 shoreward 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, 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 passed 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 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 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 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 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.”

  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 gray-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 toward 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 try-pots to copper pancakes; it had filled plan 12’s hair-shed to the rafters with brain-spheres—dead spheres, gray-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 parceled 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 some such, 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 anymore, 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, some of them muzzy 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.

  MARGO LANAGAN was born in 1960 and grew up in the Hunter Valley (New South Wales) and Melbourne, Australia. She traveled a bit, studied history at university in Perth and Sydney, and has worked as a kitchen hand and encyclopedia seller, as well as spending ten years as a freelance book editor. She is now a technical writer as well as a creative one. She has written three books of junior fiction—Wild Game, The Tankermen, and Walking Through Albert— and two books of YA realistic fiction—The Best Thing and Touching Earth Lightly. Her short fiction has been collected in White Time and World Fantasy Award winner Black Juice. Her most recent book is the collection Red Spikes.

  She lives in Sydney with her partner and their two sons. Her Web site is www.amongamidwhile.blogspot.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “An Honest Day’s Work” is directly inspired by photographs (particularly Edward Burtynsky’s photographs) and a documentary I saw on TV about shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh, where retired ships are taken apart by workers using only the most basic equipment—such as their own bare hands. The workplaces are highly dangerous and thoroughly contaminated with a
sbestos, heavy metals, and poisons. The main causes of death and injury are explosions or fires, falls, being hit by falling steel plates and the like, suffocation, and the inhalation of carbon dioxide.

  This is also a whaling-station story—I have stolen some of the tools and jargon from whalers—only the “whales” are larger than oil tankers and similar in nature to humans.

  It’s also about communities that operate on the fringes (and largely out of sight and out of mind) of more prosperous, more technologically advanced nations than themselves—how they manage to survive and how they regard themselves and their invisible, distant bosses.

  But mainly it’s about sense of scale, about tiny humans working on vast objects that they only partly understand.

  LOST CONTINENT

  Greg Egan

  1

  Ali’s uncle took hold of his right arm and offered it to the stranger, who gripped it firmly by the wrist.

  “From this moment on, you must obey this man,” his uncle instructed him. “Obey him as you would obey your father. Your life depends on it.”

  “Yes, Uncle.” Ali kept his eyes respectfully lowered.

  “Come with me, boy,” said the stranger, heading for the door.

  “Yes, haji,” Ali mumbled, following meekly. He could hear his mother still sobbing quietly in the next room, and he had to fight to hold back his own tears. He had said good-bye to his mother and his uncle, but he’d had no chance for any parting words with his cousins. It was halfway between midnight and dawn, and if anyone else in the household was awake, they were huddled beneath their blankets, straining to hear what was going on but not daring to show their faces.