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 passed, 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 fingers—
He 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 stitched 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 analytical. 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 scraped at his flesh and the putrid liquid splashed over his hair, his eyes—
With 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 scrap of food.
So the shifts passed, 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. Bees 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 circumstances 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?”
“Galling 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 clustered 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.