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 damn 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 passed clean through the translucent flesh, or embedded themselves in sheets of cartilage — and at last, to a great cry, an organ was hit. The whale lurched toward the surface of the worldlet, its skin crumpling. A mighty ceiling of flesh passed 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 massive machetes now, and soon the butchery would start. Rees, in his starved, dreamy state, wondered if whale blood would smell different from human—
And suddenly he found himself running, almost without conscious thought. With a light motion he hauled himself to the roof of one of the sturdier 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 passed 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 anticipated 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 spinnng 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 analyzing the damn situation and do something, before many more minutes passed he would be thrown off.