Wild ideas whirled in his head.
9
As the shifts had worn away the whale riders hadn’t disturbed Lura’s lengthy conversations with her machine, and the eerie figures it seemed to speak for. Lura supposed they were kept back by superstition or fear – as she felt only a little less, she suspected. But the riders were becoming increasingly disturbed by the Mole’s pronouncements. They went off towards the whale’s vast inverted face, so they could talk away from their captives.
But Lura was confused too. In the course of his latest conversation, Coton had told them they needed to find the Raft. It was as if they had been told to chase a fantasy from a child’s bedtime story!
Lura and Brother Pesten sat side by side, somewhere near the whale’s midriff. They had been left unbound for a few shifts now, and Pesten had been given a coarse, ill-smelling blanket to cover his nakedness. They drank water from sacks made of the skin of sky wolves. The Mole sat on the slippery skin-floor between them, silent for now, its transparent ‘eyes’ gazing out at what they had learned to call universe Beta.
The whale itself appeared to be feeding. Lura could see a series of ill-defined lumps passing down the huge digestive tract that spanned its diameter, from face to anus, passing above their heads.
And Lura watched the whale riders. The effective gravity imparted by the whale’s spin was weakest near its axis, and as Anka and Otho and the other half-dozen riders argued, they drifted in the air and spun around, clustering together under their mutual gravity and pushing each other away. They were like squabbling children, she thought.
In the shifts since they’d been taken she had seen something of how the riders lived. All she’d known of them before was their ferocity during raids. Now she had watched them eat, sleep, laugh, squabble, shit – they respected the whale, and kept their waste in containers that they dumped out through hull lesions. They lived naked, for the whale’s body cavity was too hot for them to need clothes. Their life seemed shabby, featureless, unfulfilled between bouts of raiding one Forest or another, and when they weren’t attacking somebody else, it seemed, they’d fight each other. Otho, who seemed a deeper-thinking individual than she’d imagined, sometimes broke this up, but not always; maybe he liked to keep his riders combat-ready.
And they rutted, coupling randomly, in shadowed corners of the whale’s body cavity. There seemed little tenderness in the sex. Lura wondered what became of their children.
Now Coton’s mention of this ‘Raft’ had sent the whale riders into a spin.
Pesten said, ‘I wonder if they regret taking us in the first place. We’ve brought them nothing but trouble.’
Lura murmured, ‘Do you believe all it says? The Mole. About the other “everything”, and all the people there—’
‘Well, I have no idea how it is saying these things to us – how your friend Coton can use it to speak to us at all – but, given all that, I don’t see why anyone would go to all that trouble to lie to us. And it does fit what we know of our history. Humans don’t belong here.’
‘A history you Brothers have been beating out of us for generations. You know, my uncle used to argue with my father. He used to say that we know mankind evolved here because our gods are here, living in the Core of Cores.’
He winked at her. ‘That was a particularly good lie, wasn’t it? Silenced a lot of doubters, such as your uncle . . .’
Thinking of her father and uncle reminded her how far she was from home. She glanced around, at the smoky sky that rotated grandly around the spinning carcass of the whale. ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see the Forest again.’
The Brother took her hand. ‘You will. If only because the riders will have to go back there if they’re to ransom me. I’ll make sure you get off when I do—’
The blunt end of a spear slammed down between them, and they flinched away. Anka loomed over them. ‘Making promises you can’t keep, Brother, to add to a lifetime of lies?’
‘Oh, leave them alone, Anka.’ Otho and some of the others came towards them, moving with big low-gravity footsteps.
Anka ground her spear butt into the floor. ‘Maybe we should truss them up again. What could your boyfriend Coton do about that, Lura? Oh, come on, Otho, enough of this. It’s all just some kind of trick. A voice in a box!’
‘It’s more than that,’ said one of the other riders – a woman who looked away from Lura and Pesten as she spoke. Most of the riders kept their distance from them, evidently spooked by the Mole. Even after so many shifts since her capture, Lura didn’t know their names. The woman said now, ‘If it’s just some trick, why would it tell us to go to the Raft? No tree pilot or kernel-grubber has ever seen the Raft. It’s just a story to them.’
Pesten frowned. ‘Wait – no one from the Forest has ever seen the Raft. Are you saying you’ve seen the Raft for yourself?’
‘I saw it,’ Otho said. ‘Long ago – as a kid.’ He waved a hand vaguely. ‘In a dead nebula, choked up, a few whale hops away from here.’
Lura tried to take this in. She really had always imagined the Raft was just another legend, a detail in the half-mythic saga of the Ship and its crew. ‘So when Coton said we should go there – you could take us?’
Anka loomed again. ‘What right have you got to make demands? What do you woodentops know about riders, and how we live?’
It all swirled inside Lura, her anger and fear, the strangeness of the words that had come out of the Mole – the extraordinary suggestion that the whole universe was dying. And on top of all that she had to deal with this ridiculous woman. She snapped back, ‘Oh, we know all we need to know about you and your kind.’
Pesten murmured, ‘Lura—’
‘Enough, Brother! Let her kill us if she wants – it can’t be worse than hearing her droning voice. While we work to feed the Core of Cores, you prey on us like rats, or fleas that bite the skin. That’s all you are – rats and fleas.’
‘Why, you—’ Anka raised her hand. ‘Otho, is she to speak of us like that?’
‘Oh, shut up, Anka, and let me think,’ Otho said, and he jammed his fists against his temples.
‘Of course you’re right, Lura,’ Pesten murmured smoothly. ‘The riders do prey on the Forest folk. And so they need us. But here’s another unwelcome truth. We need them.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘It’s true. When this nebula dies we’ll have to abandon it for another, as we have many times before. The only way we know to do that is to ride the whales, for the whales can pass through the airless spaces between the nebulae, as we can’t. Then we’ll need the whale riders’ skills, as we did before – and forgot!’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s always like this. Riders and Forest folk fighting out the generations, until it’s time to move again, and they remember how to cooperate. What a depressing picture of humanity. But we don’t forget – we Brothers. And I think you haven’t forgotten either – have you, Otho?’
‘Perhaps it will be different this time,’ snarled Otho. ‘Perhaps we’ll leave you behind, to choke.’
‘No, you won’t. What will you eat? How will you live? And who will take your babies?’
Otho turned away, and Lura saw, at last, what became of the children of whale riders. This place, this violent arena, was no nursery, no place for children. They must drop them off in communities like the Forest – and they made up their numbers through abductions, from those same communities. No wonder they were so savage, she thought, with a stab of pity.