The Strange

by Masha du Toit

  Here, the water sparkled sea-green, and there was not a plastic bag, can, or cigarette butt in sight. Below the waterline the rocks that held up the pier were candy-striped with life, a miniature forest of anemone-like growths, fronded orange, red, and white, and encrustations of shells like black and silver buttons.

  A stirring in the water drew Elke’s eye. Dark arms rose dripping, and webbed hands grabbed the edge of the pier. The creature that heaved itself out was muscular and covered in a fur pelt like that of a seal. It shook itself hard, spraying water all around, sniffed loudly, and flicked its long hair away from its face.

  Elke was caught in the gaze of a pair of disconcertingly intelligent eyes. No doubt about it, it was definitely human. The seal-person smiled at her, revealing a double row of fishlike teeth.

  Looking out across the harbour, Elke spotted more of these marine people. Some were swimming back and forth between the boats, others lounged on the pier, apparently fast asleep.

  Loud voices drew Elke’s attention back to her own situation. Two overseers had emerged from the shed. One carried a bucket, out of which he hauled a dripping, eel-like creature with a blunt head that quested blindly from side to side.

  He summoned one of the slaves in Elke’s group with a curt command and draped the thing around his neck. The creature coiled itself around the man’s throat, nestling in tight.

  “What the hell’s that?” Elke murmured to a nearby slave, one of the people she’d guessed was a realsider.

  The woman glanced quickly at the overseers to check they weren’t watching.

  “It’s a choke-fish, see?” she said in an undertone. “Sends these little barbs into you, checks your blood chemistry. If you get too excited—” She put a hand around her own throat and squeezed a little. “Or if you try to get away. Means the guards don’t have to watch us all the time.”

  The overseer worked his way down the row of slaves, draping a choke-fish around each their throats. When Elke’s turn came she tried not to wince as the creature snuggled into place, surprisingly warm against her skin. The woman’s talk of barbs and blood chemistry had put her on edge, but the only sensation was a faint electric prickling that soon subsided.

  At first Elke got the simple jobs, mopping up pools of water, or sweeping sand from the piers. When the overseers noticed her competence, they moved her to a shed that held a water purification system. Here she was set to work cleaning filters and checking pipes for leaks.

  The overseers spoke some strangeside dialect, but they supplemented their commands with explanatory gestures, miming the task they wanted Elke to do. If she was slow to respond, or misunderstood something, they cuffed her. The blows were delivered casually and without animosity, as you might whack a recalcitrant pack-beast, or an uncooperative machine.

  Elke learnt not to look them in the eye and managed to avoid attracting too many blows.

  The work was a welcome distraction. It felt good to be busy, fixing and cleaning, unblocking tubes, adjusting the flow of water.

  The choke-fish occasionally pulsed or shifted position, but she tried to ignore it. As soon as her breathing or her heart rate sped up, or she felt the sting of anger and frustration, the thing would stir, threatening to tighten. Then she had to calm herself, taking deep breaths until the creature slackened and loosened its grip.

  “You better be careful,” one of the other slaves murmured, watching Elke fit a cleaned syphon back into place. “You’re too good at this, they’ll move you on to something else you won’t like so much.”

  But Elke just smiled. This was work she could do and could do well. Doing half a job or slacking off was not in her nature.

  When she was finished with the filters, they walked her down a pier out near the sea-wall. Here she was set to work fixing a broken ram pump.

  From here, she was far enough out of from cave to see the ocean itself, and the great cliff that frowned down above, riddled with windows. At the top of the cliff narrow banners streamed, floating in the sea-breeze.

  Out at sea, a line of objects dotted the horizon. Cargo ships, maybe, too big to risk the breakers that hammered the outside of the harbour-cave.

  Once they saw that Elke knew what she was doing, the overseers left her to her own devices. This meant that every now and then she could pause her work to look out at the view.

  Hills of water moved ponderously towards the cliff, translucent grey-green, streaked with silver bubbles. They broke with bone-shaking strength against the sea-wall, sending gouts of foam into the air.

  Winches were bolted to the sea-wall, big contraptions of wood and metal that whirred into life every now and then, hoisting cables out of the water, or paying them out. From the thickness of the cables, they must be adjusting some enormous underwater structure or device, but Elke could only guess at its purpose.

  Each of the winches appeared to be garlanded with flowers. Bright, paper-thin clusters draped around the blocks, where the cables ran over the rollers. At first Elke thought that this was her first sight of pollution in the Strange, scraps of paper or plastic that had somehow been whisked there by the wind, but soon she saw that she was mistaken.

  The scraps were alive. Bird, or insect, she couldn’t see, possibly attracted to the oil that lubricated the winches. They fluttered and settled to feed, and were instantly drawn into the blocks and jammed, their pretty wings fanning and flaring as they were crushed between roller and cable. The area beneath each winch was littered with wing fragments, gold, and blue, and cherry-pink.

  Elke turned away, feeling a little sick.

  Small, heavily loaded sailing vessels set out from the harbour every now and then, making their way to the distant cargo-ships, or returned, sails snapping as they dodged neatly into the gap in the sea-wall that formed the harbour mouth. She admired the sailors’ skill and was surprised at how tense they seemed.

  One little boat swept past close enough that she could make out the sailors’ strained expressions. A man clasped another’s shoulder in silent gratitude, clearly rattled by the danger they’d just braved. Navigating the harbour entrance and the heaving ocean beyond was certainly a risk, but surely this was a journey they completed several times a day?

  The boat made its way into the quieter water of the harbour, drifting past a group of mere-people lounging on the pier. A ripple of quiet but contemptuous laughter rose from the meres as they turned to watch the boat’s passage.

  The boat’s crew responded with vehement looks. One sailor shook his fist at the meres and spat at them.

  Elke looked at the mere-people with interest. They showed a greater variety than she’d first assumed. Some were seal-like, but others had fish-skin, scales, or legs fused into a single, kicking tail. Many sported gills, and some clearly couldn’t survive out of water.

  As she methodically dismantled the pump, inspecting and cleaning each part, she had time to notice that none of mere-people seemed to be doing any work. The sailors working the little sailing vessels were not visibly modified, and neither were any of the people hauling nets or fixing vessels.

  The mere-people swam languidly or lounged in groups on the edge of the pier, watching the workers. Their indolence created animosity, more than once an angry glance or word was thrown in their direction.

  Once, Elke thought she saw Kiran on the far side of the harbour, carrying something, but she was gone before Elke was sure that she’d not been mistaken.

  When Elke was done with the ram pump, the overseer took her to a warren of rooms and workshops below the level of the harbour.

  Elke had a glimpse of what might be a hydroponics lab, but she was hurried along the damp corridor, splashing through puddles that had the sulphurous reek of anaerobic bacteria.

  Voices echoed against the stone walls. A pump drummed. A rapid, musical tapping was threaded through these sounds, hollow and metallic.

  They stepped into a room that had been carved out of the rock below the harbour. It held an interlocking mass of metal and ru
bber pipes that squatted in a walled sump-tank. The tank brimmed with green-black fluid, rainbow-slicked and reeking of rotten eggs.

  At the far end of the room, a group of workers was dismantling a spurting section of pipe. Others clambered around, through, and under the pipes, adjusting valves, and tapping with small hammers, listening, adjusting, and tapping again. Sections of pipe lay on the ground around the tank, and the whole thing had the look of something that had been half dismantled.

  Elke saw a woman rapidly unscrew a capped section. As soon as the cap came free, a length of something white began pushing out of the opening. It twitched and flexed, something like a cross between an eel and an earthworm, pale, grubby, and damp.

  The woman worked her fingers along the creature’s length, forcing it to sick up gobs of black goo into the sump tank below. Elke was still staring at this in fascinated disgust when the overseer slapped the back of her head and thrust a bucket into her hands. He rattled out an incomprehensible command and went to join his colleagues who were playing dice on a bench near the entrance.

  Elke, bewildered, nearly called him back. Up to now she’d been able to figure out what she was supposed to do, but she’d never seen anything like this room before. It looked like the metal innards of some constipated beast, but she couldn’t guess if it was the digestive system, the heart, or some other, unimaginable organ.

  The bucket, when she lifted the lid, was full of wet, coiled up rope, off-white and soft looking. Elke had a horrible feeling that she knew what it was, and her suspicions were confirmed when the thing convulsed, briefly displaying an eyeless, earthworm head.

  “Damn.”

  She’d had no food for hours and was lightheaded with hunger. The cramping in her lower abdomen was now a constant ache. Her muscles trembled with fatigue, but if she didn’t get started, those overseers would soon notice, slapping and punching, or worse.

  The woman she’d been watching coiled her eel-thing back into its bucket. She gave Elke a nod and clipped the bucket’s lid into place before she swung herself down.

  She was tall and skinny and, Elke realised, more of a girl than a woman. Her body still had the flat-chested, lanky grace of early adolescence. Her face, under its layer of dirt, was young, although her eyes were wary.

  After a glance to check that the overseers were not watching them, she directed a question at Elke, speaking in one of the slurring, clicking strangeside dialects.

  Elke had to gesture her incomprehension.

  After several more attempts in different languages, the girl gave up on speech, and simply tapped Elke’s bucket.

  “Huurpat!” she said, enunciating clearly and Elke nodded her comprehension.

  “Huurpat,” Elke repeated, to show that she understood that this was what the creature was called.

  The girl reached into the bucket, tickling the coils into spasms and twitches. The moment the creature exposed its head, she caught it deftly behind its gaping jaws.

  “Ya.” She mimed the grabbing action with her free hand, holding the creature’s sucker-mouth near the bare skin of her arm. She shook her head, pulling her face into an exaggerated grimace of disgust. “Hayi!”

  “I get it,” said Elke. “It bites.” She mimed biting her own arm, mirroring the disgusted grimace, which drew an unexpectedly bright smile in response.

  “Yah!” the girl agreed, nodding in disgusted comradeship. She drew the huurpat from its bucket, coil by coil, and with another glance to check that the overseers were still distracted, she turned to the pipe-tangle.

  Here she demonstrated how to plan the huurpat’s intended route, opening valves and closing others to prevent the creature from slithering away and escaping into the maze of pipes. Once that was done, she unscrewed a pipe-cap and poked at it, drawing Elke’s attention to the fact that the pipe was nearly full of oozy black muck.

  “So—” She held the huurpat’s head to the opening. The creature seemed to know what was expected of it, and its mouth flexed in anticipation. It sucked itself into the opening and as soon as its head was well inside, the girl let go, and the huurpat worked its way into the pipe.

  “So.” The girl nodded in satisfaction, patting the pipe.

  She drew her hammer out of her belt, and tapped her way along the pipe, pausing to listen. Elke quickly realised that this was how she traced the progress of the huurpat. When it slowed, the girl drummed at the pipe with her fists, which seemed to encourage the creature along.

  At last the huurpat reached the end of the pipe, and this time Elke was ready to catch the thing as it emerged, securing its head, and then milking her fingers down the length of its body, making it sick up the muck it had eaten.

  “Ah!” The girl thumped Elke’s shoulder, grinning with satisfaction that she’d understood what she was meant to do. She frowned and held up her hammer questioningly.

  Elke shook her head. “I don’t have a hammer.”

  “Hmm.” The girl patted her own pockets, and produced a bolt, tapping it on a nearby pipe in demonstration.

  “Thanks!” Elke said as the girl pressed the bolt into her hand. “That will do nicely.”

  “Sho,” the girl said, waving away the thanks. She pressed her hand on her chest and gave a little bow. “Tiptin,” she said, and looked at Elke expectantly.

  “Elke,” Elke said, mirroring the gesture and the bow. “Thanks for the help, Tiptin.”

  With another smile, and another fearful glance at the overseers, Tiptin grabbed her own huurpat in its bucket and climbed back onto the pipe-tangle.

  Elke chose a likely looking pipe, a fat one that was easy to follow through the tangle. The nearest valve was tight, and she had no tools to help her.

  She was still struggling to open the valve when a blow smashed her face into the oily rim of the pipe. In her distraction, she’d not heard the approach of an overseer. He grabbed her by the arm and shoved her at the pipe tangle, and though Elke could not understand the words he shouted at her, their meaning was clear.

  No slacking. Get on with it.

  One look at his face, tight with impatience and self-importance, was enough to put her off asking for tools.

  He released her arm and stood glaring while she tried again to open the valve, and luckily, this time she succeeded. The overseer, after watching for a few moments more nodded and walked away.

  The work was easy enough, at first. It was even interesting to figure out exactly which valves to close and which to open, so that the huurpat would root its way along, cleaning the section of pipe she intended, without escaping.

  The creature was cold to the touch and had a sand-paper quality to its skin, which was good as it made it easier to get a grip on it. It stank of vinegar and kept coiling back, trying to fasten its sucker-mouth on whatever part of Elke it could reach. It seemed to scent her, and its wide mouth would pulse open in a most unnerving way as its muscular body struggled in her hands.

  The other workers didn’t pay her much attention. Now and then she would catch somebody’s eye and get a nod of acknowledgement, usually followed by a glance at the overseers, who’d broken up their game and were patrolling up and down the room, chatting to one another.

  Tiptin had worked her way along the tangle to the far side of the room, and Elke saw no more of her than an occasional glimpse of her gawky figure balancing on top of the pipes or clambering along with the ease of much practice.

  Soon, Elke began to run into problems. More and more of the valves she needed to access were below the surface of the fluid in the sump-tank. The fluid was not water, as she’d first assumed, but something thinner, a powder rather than a liquid, which misted up when disturbed, making her eyes sting and her throat close up.

  More and more often Elke had to reach down into the murky stuff, feeling for the pipes, and worse, catching the spasming huurpat as it worked its way out of the submerged pipe.

  Another unpleasant discovery came when she was searching for the bottom of the tank with a foot. It was not
a tank at all, but the top end of a shaft, much deeper than the floor of the room. Some of the pipes ended well below the surface, so that Elke had to lower herself reluctantly into the narrow gap between the pipe-tangle and the tank wall, trying not to think what would happen if she lost her footing.

  It was far too easy to picture herself sliding down between the pipes and the inner wall of the tank, the powdery fluid closing over her head and invading her lungs when she finally had to gasp for breath. The fluid was not dense enough to buoy her up as water would have done, as she found when she lost her grip and plunged at least a metre down, ending up wedged between a crook of pipe and the rough concrete tank wall.

  Eyes and mouth shut as tight, she clawed her way out, one hand clasped around the flailing huurpat, the thing hell-bent on sucking onto her. It took several moments of hanging over the tank wall, coughing and spluttering, before she regained her breath.

  “Shit!” she gasped and spat out a mouthful of acrid black. “Ugh!”

  Several workers were quite close, but none of them so much as glanced her way.

  What if she’d got stuck? Would any of them have tried to rescue her? Elke doubted it. She felt a surge of shame so intense it burned, and in its wake, a rising anger. All at once, the last thing she wanted was their help.

  She’d forgotten the choke-fish. It sensed her rage and tightened around her throat, and she was forced to calm herself, closing her eyes and breathing deeply and evenly till the creature slacked its hold.

  How deep is this bloody shaft anyway? She peered down, but all she could see was her own distorted reflection.

  It took all her willpower not to simply scramble out and fling the huurpat back into its bucket. When the rage finally receded her body shook, and not with cold.

  It wasn’t fear of the punishment she would receive that stopped her. It was the fact that it would be the first step in the journey to defeat. The thought of those other slaves just sitting there while she got knocked about was unbearable.