He looked around, his breath still trapped inside his body. He was, he realized, standing on a shelf of bones; his back rested against a small mountain of skulls and gaping, toothless jawbones, and his hands gripped a pillar of fused vertebrae. Starlight slanting through the entrance showed him a cross section of skulls, splintered tibiae and fibulae, ribcages like lightless lanterns; here was a forearm still attached to a child's hand. The bones were mostly bare, their color a weathered-looking brown or yellow; but here and there sc.r.a.ps of skin or hair still clung.

The planet was nothing more than a spa.r.s.e cage of bones, coated with human skin.

He felt a scream well up from deep within him; he forced it away and expelled his breath in one great sigh, then was forced to draw in the air of this foul place. It was hot, damp and stank of decaying meat.

Quid grinned at him, his gums glistening. "Come on, miner," he whispered, the sound m.u.f.fled. "We've a little way to go yet." And he began to work his way deeper into the interior.

After some minutes Rees followed.

The gravity grew lighter as they descended and a smaller residuum of corpses lay beneath them; at last Rees was pulling himself through the bone framework in virtual weightlessness. Bone fragments, splinters and knuckles and finger joints, battered at his face until it seemed he was pa.s.sing through a cloud of decay. As they descended the light grew fainter, lost in the intermeshing layers of bones, but Rees's eyes grew dark-adapted, so that it seemed he could see more and more of the dismal surroundings. The heat, the stench of meat became intolerable. Sweat coated his body, turning his tunic into a sodden ma.s.s on his back, and his breath grew shallow and labored; it seemed almost impossible to extract any oxygen from the grimy air.

He tried to remember that the radius of the worldlet was only some fifteen yards. The journey seemed the longest of his life.

At last they reached the heart of the bone world. In the gloom Rees squinted to make out Quid. The Boney waited for him, hands on hips; he was standing on some dark ma.s.s. Quid laughed. "Welcome," he hissed. He was running his fingers over the forest of bones around him, evidently looking for something.

Rees pushed his feet through a last layer of ribs to the surface on which Quid stood. It was metal, he realized with a shock; battered and coated with grease, but metal nevertheless. He stood cautiously. There was a respectable gravity pull. This had to be some kind of artefact, buried here at the heart of the Boneys' foul colony.

He dropped to his knees and ran probing fingers across the surface. It was too dark to make out a color but he could tell that the stuff wasn't iron. Could it be Ship hull-metal, like the Raft deck in the region of the Officers' quarters? He closed his eyes and probed at the surface, trying to recall the feel of that faraway deck. Yes, he decided with growing excitement; this had to be an artefact from the Ship.

Pushing his way through the bone framework he paced around the surface. The artefact was a cube some three yards on a side. He stubbed his toe against an extrusion of metal; it turned out to be the remnant of some kind of fin, reminiscent of the stumps he had observed on the Moles of the mine and the Raft's buses. Could this box once have been fitted with jets and flown through the air?

Speculation welled through his head, pushing aside thirst, revulsion, fear... He imagined the original Ship, huge, dark and crippled, opening like a skitter flower and emitting a shoal of sub-ships. There was the Bridge, its surface slick and fast; there were the buses/Moles, perhaps designed to carry one or two crew or to travel unmanned, to land and roll over uncertain surfaces - and then there was this new type, a box capable of carrying - perhaps - a dozen people. He imagined crewmen setting off in this bulky craft, maybe seeking food, or a way to return to Bolder's Ring...

But some unknowable accident had hit the box ship. It had been unable to return to the Ship. They had run out of provisions - and to survive, the crew had had to resort to other means.

When at last they had managed to return - or perhaps had been found by a rescue party - they were, in the eyes of their fellows, befouled by their taking of the meat of Nebula creatures - and of their companions.

And so they had been abandoned.

Somehow they had wrestled their wrecked box ship into a stable circular orbit around the Core. And some of them had survived; they had raised children and lived perhaps thousands of shifts before their eyes closed... And the children, horrified, had found there was no way of ejecting the corpses; in this billion-gee environment the ship's escape velocity was simply too high.

And generations had pa.s.sed, until the layers of bones covered the original wreck.

Evidently Quid had found what he was looking for. He tugged at Rees's sleeve, and Rees followed him to the far edge of the craft. Quid knelt and pointed downwards; Rees followed suit and peered over the lip of the craft. In the wall below him there was a break, and just enough light seeped in to let Rees make out the contents of the craft.

At first he could make no sense of it. The ship was jammed with cylindrical bundles of some glistening, red substance; some of the bundles were linked to each other by joints, while others were fixed in rough piles to the walls by ropes. Some of the material had been baked to a gray-black crisp. There was a stench of decay, of ageing meat.

Rees stared, bemused. Then, in one "bundle," he saw eyesockets.

Quid's face floated in the gloom, a tormenting mask of wrinkles. "We're not animals, you see, miner," he whispered. "These are the ovens. Where we bake the sickness out of the meat... Usually it's hot enough down here, what with the decay and all; but sometimes we have to bank fires around the walls..."

The bodies were all ages and sizes; flayed and butchered, the "bundles" were limbs, torsos, heads and fingersHe dragged his head back. Quid was grinning. Rees closed his eyes, forcing down the bile that burned the back of his throat. "And there's no waste," Quid whispered with relish. "The dried skin is st.i.tched into the surface, so that we walk on the flesh of our ancestors-"

He felt as if the whole, grotesque worldlet were pulsing around him, so that the forest of bones encroached and receded in huge waves. He took deep breaths, letting the air whistle through his nostrils. "You brought me down here for drink," he said as evenly as he could. "Where is it?"

Quid led Rees to a formation of bone. It was a set of vertebrae, almost intact; Rees saw that it was part of a branching series of bones which seemed to reach almost to the surface. Quid touched the spine and his finger came away glistening with moisture. Rees looked more closely and realized that a slow trickle of fluid was working its way down the channel of bones.

Quid pressed his face to the vertebrae, extending a long tongue to lap at the liquid. "Runoff from the surface, see," he said. "By the time it's diluted by the odd bit of rain and filtered through all those layers up there, it's fit enough to drink. Almost tasty..." He laughed, and with a grotesque flourish invited Rees to take his turn.

Rees stared at the brackish stuff, feeling life and death choices once more weighing on him. He tried to be a.n.a.lytical. Perhaps the Boney was right; perhaps the crude filtering mechanism above his head would remove much of the worst substances... After all, the Boney was healthy enough to tell him about it.

He sighed. If he wanted to survive through more than another shift or two he really had no choice.

He stepped forward, extended his tongue until it almost touched the vertebrae, and allowed the liquid to trickle into his mouth. The taste of it was foul and the stuff was almost impossible to swallow; but swallow it he did, and he reached for another mouthful.

Quid laughed. The Boney's angular hand clamped over the back of his neck and Rees's face was forced into the slim pillar of bone; the edges of it sc.r.a.ped at his flesh and the putrid liquid splashed over his hair, his eyesWith a cry of disgust Rees lashed out with both fists. He felt them connect with perspiring flesh; with a winded grunt the Boney fell away, landing amid a splintering nest of bones. Wiping his face clear Rees jumped into the network of bones and began to clamber up toward the light, his thrusting feet crushing ribs and skeletal fingers. At last he reached the underside of the surface, but he realized with dismay that he had lost his orientation; the surface of skin spread over him like some huge ceiling, unbroken and lightless. With a strangled scream he shoved his hands into the soft material and tore layers of it aside.

At last he broke through to Nebula air.

He dragged himself from the hole and lay exhausted, staring up at the ruddy starlight.

Rees sought out Gord. The former engineer admitted him without a word, and Rees threw himself to the ground and fell into a deep sleep.

Over the ensuing shifts he stayed with Gord, largely in silence. Rees forced himself to drink - even accompanying Gord on a trip into the interior of the worldlet to fill fresh globes - but he could not eat. Gord gloomily studied him in the darkness of the cabin. "Don't think about it," he said. He dropped a fragment of meat into his mouth, chewed the tough stuff and swallowed it. "See? It's just meat. And it's that or die."

Rees let a slice of meat lie in the palm of his hand, visualizing the actions of raising it to his lips, biting into it, swallowing it.

He couldn't do it. He threw the fragment into a corner of the hut and turned away. After a while he heard the slow footsteps of Gord as the engineer crossed the room to collect the sc.r.a.p of food.

So the shifts pa.s.sed, and Rees felt his strength subsiding. Brushing a hand over the remnants of his uniform he could feel ribs emerging from their mantle of flesh, and his head seemed to swell.

The Boneys' singing seemed to pulse like blood.

At length Gord laid a hand on his shoulder. Rees sat up, his head floating. "What is it?"

"The whale," Gord said with a hint of excitement. "They're preparing to hunt it. You'll have to come and see, Rees; even in these circ.u.mstances it's an incredible sight."

With care Rees stood and followed Gord from the hut.

Peering around groggily he made out the usual groups of adults in their little circles in the huts. They were chanting rhythmically. Even the children seemed spellbound: they sat in attentive groups near the adults, chanting and swaying as best they could.

Gord walked slowly around the worldlet. Rees followed, stumbling; the entire colony seemed to be singing now, so that the skin surface pulsated like a drum.

"What are they doing?"

"Calling to the whale. Somehow the song lures the creature closer."

Rees, befuddled and irritated, said; "I don't see any whale."

Gord squatted patiently on the floor. "Wait a while and you will."

Rees sat beside Gord and closed his eyes. Slowly the singing worked its way into his consciousness until he was swaying with the cyclic rhythms; a mood of calm acceptance, of welcome even, seemed to spread over him.

Was this what the music was supposed to make the whale feel?

"Gord, where do you think the word 'whale' comes from?"

The engineer shrugged. "You were the Scientist. You tell me. Perhaps there was some great creature on Earth with that name."

Rees scratched the tangle of beard on his jaw. "I wonder what an Earth whale looked like-"

Gord's eyes were widening. "Maybe something like that," he said, pointing.

The whale rose over the horizon of skin like some huge, translucent sun. The bulk of its body was a sphere perhaps fifty yards wide, dwarfing the bone world; within its clear skin organs cl.u.s.tered like immense machines. The leading face of the whale was studded with three spheres about the size of a man. The way they rotated, fixing on the worldlet and the nearby stars, reminded Rees irresistibly of eyes. Attached to the rear of the body were three huge flukes; these semicircles of flesh were as large as the main sphere and they rotated gently, connected to the body by a tube of dense flesh. The whale coasted through the air and the flukes soared no more than twenty yards over Rees's head, washing his laughing face with cool air. "It's fantastic!" he said.

Gord smiled faintly.

The Boneys, still singing, emerged from their huts. Their eyes were fixed on the whale and they carried spears of bone and metal.

Gord leaned close to Rees and said through the song, "Sometimes they just attach ropes to the creatures, have the whales drag the colony a little way out of the Nebula. Adjusting the orbit, you see; otherwise they might have fallen into the Core long ago. This shift, though, it seems they need meat."

Rees was puzzled. "How can you kill a creature like that?"

Gord pointed. "Not difficult. All you have to do is puncture the skin. It loses its structure, you see. The thing simply crumples into the worldlet's gravity well. Then the trick is to slice the d.a.m.n thing up fast enough to avoid us all being smothered by flesh..."

Now the first spears were flying. The song broke up into shouts of victory. The whale, evidently agitated, began to turn its flukes more quickly. Spears pa.s.sed clean through the translucent flesh, or embedded themselves in sheets of cartilage - and at last, to a great cry, an organ was. .h.i.t. The whale lurched toward the surface of the worldlet, its skin crumpling. A mighty ceiling of flesh pa.s.sed no more than ten feet above Rees's head.

"What about this, miner?" Quid stood beside him, spear in hand. The Boney grinned. "This is the way to live, eh? Better than scratching in the vitals of some dead star-"

More spears hissed through the air; with increasing precision they looped through the compound gravity field of planet and whale and found soft targets within the body of the whale.

"Quid, how can they be so accurate?"

"It's easy. Imagine the planet as a lump below you. And the whale as another small lump somewhere about there-" He pointed. "-Close to its center. That's where all the pull comes from, right? So then you just imagine the path you want your spear to follow and - throw!"

Rees scratched his head, wondering what Hollerbach would have made of this distillation of orbital mechanics. But the need for the Boneys - trapped on their little world - to develop such spear-throwing skills was obvious.

The spears continued to fly until it seemed impossible for the whale to escape. Now its belly was almost brushing the rooftops of the colony. Men and women were producing ma.s.sive machetes now, and soon the butchery would start. Rees, in his starved, dreamy state, wondered if whale blood would smell different from humanAnd suddenly he found himself running, almost without conscious thought. With a light motion he hauled himself to the roof of one of the st.u.r.dier huts - could he have moved so cleanly without his recent weight loss? - and stood, staring upwards at the wrinkled, semitransparent roof of flesh that slid over him. It was still just out of his reach - and then a fold a few feet deep came towards him like a descending curtain. He jumped and grabbed with both hands. His fingers pa.s.sed through flesh that crumbled, dry. He scrabbled for a firm hold, believing for one, panicky second that he would fall again; and then, his arms elbow-deep in pulpy flesh, his fingers bit into a shank of some tougher material and he pulled himself higher onto the whale's body. He managed to swing his feet up and embed them in the fleshy ceiling; and so upside down, he sailed over the Boney colony.

His boarding seemed to galvanize the whale. Its flukes beat the air with renewed vigor and it rose from the surface with wrenches that threatened to tear Rees from his precarious hold.

Angry voices were raised at him, and a spear whistled past his ear and into the soft flesh. Quid and the other Boneys waved furious fists. He saw the pale, upturned face of Gord streaming with tears.

The whale continued to rise and the colony turned from a landscape into a small, brown ball, lost in the sky. The human voices faded to the level of the wind. The warm skin of the whale pulsed with its steady motion; and Rees was alone.

10.

ITS TORMENTORS FAR BEHIND, the great beast moved cautiously through the air; the flukes turned with slow strength, and the vast body shuddered. It was as if it were exploring the dull pain of the punctures it had suffered. Through the translucent walls of the body Rees could see triple eyes turn fully backwards, as if the whale were inspecting its own interior.

Then, with a sound like the wind, the flukes' speed of rotation increased. The whale surged forward. Soon it had climbed clear of the bone world's gravity well, and Rees's sensation of clinging to a ceiling was transformed into a sense of being pinned against a soft wall.

With some curiosity he examined the substance before his face. His fingers were still locked in the layer of cartilage beneath the whale's six-inch layer of flesh. The flesh itself had no epidermis and was vaguely pink in color; the stuff had little more consistency than a thick foam and there was no sign of blood, although Rees noticed that his arms and legs had become coated with some sticky substance. He recalled that the Boneys hunted this creature for food, and on impulse he pushed his face into the flesh and tore away a mouthful. The stuff seemed to melt in his mouth, compacting from a fluffy bulk to a small, tough lozenge. The taste was strong and slightly bitter; he chewed and swallowed easily. The stuff even seemed to soothe the dryness of his throat.

Suddenly he was starving, and he buried his face in the whale flesh, tearing chunks away with his teeth.

After some minutes he had cleared perhaps a square foot of the soft flesh, exposing cartilage, and his stomach felt filled. So, then, he could expect the whale to provide for him for some considerable time.

He looked around. Clouds and stars stretched all around him, a vast, sterile array without walls or floor. He was, of course, utterly adrift in the red sky, and surely now beyond hope of seeing another human face again. The thought did not frighten him; rather, he became gently wistful. At least he had escaped the degradation of the Boneys. If he had to die, then let it be like this, with his eyes open to new wonders.

He shifted his position comfortably against the bulk of the whale. It took very little effort to stay in place, and the steady motion, the pumping of the flukes were surprisingly soothing. It might be possible to survive quite some time here, before he weakened and fell away...

His arms were beginning to ache. Carefully, one hand at a time, he shifted the position of his fingers; but soon the pain was spreading to his back and shoulders.

Could he be tiring so quickly? The effort to cling on here, in these weightless conditions, was minimal. Wasn't it?

He looked back over his shoulder.

The world was wheeling around him. The stars and clouds executed vast rotations around the whale; once again he was clinging to a ceiling from which he might fall at any moment...

He almost lost his grip. He closed his eyes and dug his fingers tighter into the sheet of cartilage. He should have antic.i.p.ated this, of course. The whale had rotational symmetry; of course it would spin. It would have to compensate for the turning of its flukes, and spinning would give it stability as it forged through the air. It all made perfect sense...

Wind whipped over Rees's face, pushing back his hair. The rate of spin was increasing; he felt the strain on his fingers mount. If he didn't stop a.n.a.lyzing the d.a.m.n situation and do something, before many more minutes pa.s.sed he would be thrown off.

Now his feet lost their tenuous hold. His body swung away from the whale's, so that he was dangling from his hands. The cartilage in his clamped fingers twisted like elastic, and with each swing of his torso pain coursed through his biceps and elbows. The centrifugal force continued to rise, through one, one and a half, two gee...

Perhaps he could head for one of the stationary "poles," maybe at the joint between the flukes and the main body. He looked sideways toward the rear of the body; he could see the linking tube of cartilage as a misty blur through the walls of flesh.

It might have been a world away. It was all he could do to cling on here.

The spin increased further. Stars streaked below him and he began to grow groggy; he imagined blood pooling somewhere near his feet, starving his brain. He could hardly feel his arms now, but when he stared up through black-speckled vision he could see that the fingers of his left hand, the weaker, were loosening.

With a cry of panic he forced fresh strength into his hands. His fingers tightened as if in a spasm.

And the cartilage ripped.

It was like a curtain parting along a seam. From the interior of the whale a hot, foul gas billowed out over him, causing him to gasp, his eyes to stream. The ruptured cartilage began to sag. Soon a great fold of it was suspended beneath the belly of the whale; Rees clung on, still swinging painfully.

Now a ripple a foot high came rolling down the whale's belly wall. The whale's nervous system must be slow to react, but surely it could feel the agony of this ma.s.sive hernia. The wave reached the site of the rupture. The dangling fold of cartilage jerked up and down, once, twice, again; Rees's shoulders felt as if they were being dragged from their sockets and needles thrust into the joints.

Again his fingers loosened.

The rip in the sheet was like a narrow door above him.

Shoulders shaking, Rees hauled himself up until his chin was level with his fists. He released his left hand-and almost fell altogether; but his right hand still clutched at the cartilage, and now his left hand was locked over the lip of the wound. He released his right hand; the weaker, numb left slipped over greasy cartilage but - now - he had both hands clamped at the edge of the aperture.

He rested there for a few seconds, the muscles of his arms screaming, his fingers slipping.

Now he worked the muscles of his back and dragged his feet up before his face, shoved them over his head and through the aperture. Then his legs and back slid easily over the inner surface of the cartilage and into the body of the whale, and finally he was able to uncurl his fingers. With the last of his strength he rolled away from the aperture.

Breathing hard he lay on his back, spread-eagled against the whale's inner stomach wall. Below him, obscured by the translucent flesh, were the wheeling stars, and far above, like huge machines in some vast, dimly lit hall, were the organs of the whale.

His lungs rattled; his arms and hands were on fire. Blackness fell over him and the pain dropped away.