Chapter 6: Breeding Stock

Charles held his hand the whole way, the way a man holds a child’s hand at a market, and Rook let himself be held.

The corridor was narrow and the walls were bare, and the door at the end of it did not go with the room behind them: no wood, no handle, a seam in the concrete with a light above it.

“Stand there,” Charles said, and let go.

Something above the door put a red light on him and ran it down him, head to feet and back up again, and the red got into the seams of his shirt and the corners of his eyes and did not care about either. A chime went off, one note up and one note down. The light went green, and the door swung in.

Rook looked past Charles’s hat, and for the length of one step he had the feeling of a serf’s hut giving onto some picture of the future. Then his eyes caught up with him. The future was a concrete path, a wall with wire strung along the top of it, and no sky at the end of the path or the wall either.

He had been walking corridors all week. This was another one.

So he studied the rat, since the rat was what he had.

Thick in the arms and the legs, thicker than any man, and up on two of them anyway, which was a bill paid somewhere he couldn’t see. The spectacles had dark lenses. Indoors, in a hole where the light was already the color of a bad evening. The nose stood out past the face as though it had been added afterward, and the ears were bigger than the face needed.

Dark glass in the dark, then. Either the rat was shy of the light or the whole breed was, and if the whole breed was, the nose and the ears were doing the work the eyes couldn’t, and nobody had hung the lamps down here with rats in mind. Which would put the rats a rung or two below the top of the ladder. He let it sit. Something was above them. That would keep.

Then the music.

It came around the corner ahead of the feet, a small tune on a harmonica, brisk, going up and staying up. Then the rat came with it, a wide-brimmed hat and a skirt, one paw on the harmonica and the other swinging, and behind her seven or eight fat children in a line, waddling to keep up, ducklings on a bad road.

Six was fourth in the line.

“Uncle Charles.” The hat came down and the harmonica with it. A paw reached out and tugged at Rook’s hair, not gently. “Hello, little lamb.”

Sophia. The name came with her face the way they all did now, and he had no use for it, and he did not say it.

“School let out?” Charles said.

“Half day. I brought the little ones down myself, I didn’t want them walking it alone.” She said it loudly, and she said it to her uncle, and she turned her hat a little while she said it. “Look at them. Not one of them tired.”

“Look at you.” Charles put his paw on her shoulder and shook it. “Home from school and straight into the work. That’s a worker.”

“I like the little things. If it wasn’t for the topsider card, what would I want school for? I’d have come back years ago and run the pens for you. Cat knows I’d do it better than you.”

“Hey.” Charles smacked her on the back. “Not in front of the little ones.” He smacked her again, fond as anything. “Go on with you now. End of the year. You know what the lines are like.”

She turned to go, and then turned back, because she was the kind that could not leave a room without being looked at in it one more time, and she caught up one side of her skirt in her paw and bent herself in two.

That was the curtsey. Her arms were too short to reach the hem, so she had to go down for one side of the skirt and then down again for the other, and she came up pink and pleased with herself.

Rook watched her do it and thought about a road full of acquaintances and the same bend and the same reach, over and over, the whole way home. Like a bridesmaid working a receiving line. He had to look at the floor.

Because the skirt and the bowing did not go with the rat. Nobody learned that on his own, and nobody taught it to a thing he didn’t want to be. Somewhere over the wall was a house with ranks in it, and hands, and dinner off a plate, probably; and what a house like that wanted with a pen full of rats he could not guess, and he put the question behind his teeth, where he kept everything.

“Bye, Rook,” Six said.

“Bye, Rook!” said the others all together, jumping a little, because a line is a boring thing to be in and a name is a good excuse to shout.

Six waited. He was a small fat boy with his hand still up, and he waited for the grown one to lift a hand back, and Rook looked at him and did not lift anything, and after a second Six went after the others.

“Fat little chicks, the lot of them,” Charles said, watching them go.

Then he filled his lungs and sang.

“The light down here don’t ever go out,
heigh-jig, heigh-jig,
the water down here don’t ever run dry,
heigh-jig, heigh-jig,
the farmer counts what’s hanging on the bough,
heigh-jig, heigh-jig,
and the girl going by, she gives me the eye.”

He stamped on the heigh-jigs. Rook got his feet into the beat the way you get into a pair of boots that aren’t yours, and Charles came at him hip-first and knocked him a step sideways, and Rook got his feet under him and came back the same way, and they stood in the corridor looking at each other, two idiots of two different species, and something went across that Rook had no name for and did not want.

Then they were both going, jigging down the concrete, the rat’s voice bouncing off the high walls.

Twenty-some yards of that was all he had in him. His lungs turned over, his heart got up into his teeth and started hitting them, and he put a hand on the wall and stopped, and the corridor tilted, and he swallowed what came up into his mouth and it was copper.

He could have caught the wall sooner. He hadn’t, for two reasons. The first was that a man who quits first is a man who gets remembered quitting, and Rook would rather be remembered as an idiot, which was a thing he could use. The second was that he did not want to go down on the concrete and be carried the rest of the way, and have Charles be sorry about it, loudly, all afternoon.

Charles stopped and turned and laughed at him.

“Nothing in you,” he said, delighted. “Nothing at all in you. Come on. We’re there.”

The corridor ended. A second door, as clever as the first, thought about him for a moment and then opened, and Rook straightened up and looked through it and said it the way he had heard it said, because it was the local shape of the word he wanted.

“Cat’s teeth.”

The song rolled around the walls and died there.

Behind the door a wall went up forty-five feet and came around in a circle, and inside the circle somebody had built a cage.

Eight tiers. No doors, no windows. Tier set on tier with wire mesh between them and the walkway, and behind the mesh, cubicles, twenty-odd to a tier, each one big enough for a heap of straw and not much else, and in each one of them five or six children. Above the ground floor, no tier cleared five feet of headroom. None of the children could have stood up in there and none of them tried. They came up against the wire instead when the door went, hands hooked through, and every face pressed out through the mesh was squeezed by fat into the same face, and the ones on top were the same as the ones underneath, and the ones underneath were the same.

The smell came then, all at once, hot and sweet and filthy: milk and ammonia and wet straw and a great deal of breath in a small room.

The ground tier was taller. Six and a half feet under the ceiling, enough to stand a grown adult in, and it opened onto a yard, which is where they had put the yard: a walled square with the tower of the cage standing over it the way a silo stands over a farmyard. There was a fence across the middle of the square, iron, with a lock on it, and it cut the yard into a big side and a small side.

The big side had the women. Twenty-odd of them. The oldest looked thirty and forty, and there were girls there who were only just into it, narrow-hipped and short, standing around with the rest as though they were the rest. Every one of them was either carrying or had a child on her. Some were washing themselves. Some were washing children. Some stood in twos and threes with their heads together, saying something that was funny, and a baby made a noise in the middle of it, and the yard was, Rook thought, cheerful. It was cheerful.

The Countess was there with a hose in her paw, spraying down a woman who was going to drop before the week was out, and the woman stood in the water with her hands on her belly and her hair flattened to her head, and turned and said, “Rook. You’re back. All better?”

Rook gave her the face. The wide one, the one with the teeth in it.

She waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t any rest of it. She put her head back and let the water go over her throat, and the Countess moved the hose along.

Nobody in that yard looked away from any of it. Not one woman, not one rat. It was a yard. They lived in it.

On the other side of the fence, the small side, there was a man.

Five feet by six, the small side, with a roof on it, and a man in it lying on his back with his eyes open. Middle-aged. His face was a mix of two kinds of people and it was a beautiful face, the kind somebody had once paid for, and there was nothing on it now but the bones showing through. He had a short wrap on and nothing else, some print on it that hurt to look at, and his ribs went up and down, and he was looking straight up at the lamps as though there were something up there worth seeing.

Nobody called him anything. That was the answer, and it came to Rook the way the other answers came now: no number, no name. The sire, when they had to call him something.

Charles kicked the iron.

“Hey.”

The man went on looking at the lamps.

“Hey!” Charles kicked it again, and then dug out his keys, and opened the door, and put one paw over his nose, and went in.

He crouched. He looked at the eyes, and then he lifted one of the man’s arms and looked at that, and put it down. He came out fast and locked the door behind him.

“Cheap berry,” he said, breathing through his mouth. “That’s Hog all over. He’s about done. Might be carrying something; I’m not having it in the pens.” He wiped his paw on his overalls, twice. “First thing tomorrow, before it gets light, find somebody to drag him out of here.”

The song was already gone. So was the laughing. The women in the big yard had stopped what they were doing, and they were looking at each other, one and then another, and then at their own feet, and not one of them said a thing.

“What do I do with this.” Charles stood in the middle of his yard with his hat pushed back and thought about it with his whole head. Then he dug in the pocket of his overalls and came out with a little pen-shaped thing and pointed it at the Countess.

A blue light came off it and crossed her throat. A spot came up beside her pulse, smaller than a pimple, and blinked once. Then the light came off her and crossed the yard and found Rook’s throat and sat there, and something happened that he could not hear or feel or smell, and then the spot blinked and was gone.

He put his hand up.

The door had wanted all of him, head to feet and back again. This wanted one spot on his neck.

It was a copy and a paste, that was what it was. Something lifted off her and set down on him, and now it was stuck on him, and the sticking was the part he did not care for, and he rubbed at it and there was nothing to rub off.

“You keep him with you,” Charles said. “These next days he’s in with you. Wash him, look at him, he’s matted to the skin. Buyer comes for him, nothing else goes wrong. You hear me?”

The Countess nodded.

“Two cans a day on top of the regular. Buyer paid nutrition money on him. Too thin and I’m the one doing the explaining.” He said the next part to the middle distance, to nobody. “Stock eats dearer than people in this house.”

He scratched under his hat.

“When the balance comes in on Rook I’m going up to buy a new sire. Proper, this time. No more bargains off Hog.” He rocked back on his heels. “And you’ll give me two more litters off the new one, and then—“

He put his paw out and touched her arm. Then he took it back.

“One more. One more and you’re retired. I can’t run the pens with no sheepdog. Fifteen years of breeding left in that one. At least. What a waste.”

The Countess nodded.

Then he went along the fence and looked at the middles of three of the women and told them when they would drop, and two of them nodded, and one said something back that made him laugh, and he came back and counted his keys.

“Anything happens, you ring the bell.”

He went out. The outer gate came down with a bang and the lock turned over after it.

For a few seconds the yard was quiet, all that breath in a small place, and Rook stood with his hand still on his neck.

Then somebody laughed, and the voices came back up.