Raft

9

Jame brought the plate to a smooth landing on the crackling surface of the worldlet. Silently he set to work unlashing the batches of iron from the net.

Rees clung to the net and stared wildly around. The cramped horizon was made up of sheets of hairy, brownish material, stirring sluggishly. Again Rees saw the white of bone protruding through breaks in the surface.

He felt his bladder loosen. He closed his eyes and clamped down. Come on, Rees; you’ve faced greater perils than this, more immediate dangers…

But the Boneys were a myth from his childhood, sleep-time monsters to frighten recalcitrant children. Surely, in a universe which contained the cairn, machined interior of the Bridge, there was no room for such ugliness?

“Welcome,” a high, dry voice said. “So you’ve yet another guest for us, Jame?” The man Rees had seen from the air was standing over the plate now, accepting an armful of iron from Jame. A few conventional-looking food packages were stacked at the man’s feet. Briskly Jame bundled them onto the plate and fixed them to the net.

The Boney was squat and barrel-chested, his head a wrinkled, hairless globe. He was dressed in a crudely cut sheet of surface material. He grinned and Rees saw that his cavernous mouth was totally without teeth. “What’s the matter, boy? Aren’t you going to give old Quid a hand?”

Rees found his fingers tightening about the strands of the net. Jame stood over him with a package of iron. “Come on, lad. Take this stuff and get off the plate. You haven’t any choice, you know. And if you show you’re afraid it will go the worse for you.”

Rees felt a whimper rising in his throat; it was as if all the revolting speculation he had ever heard about the Boneys’ way of life had returned to unman him.

He clamped his lips together. Damn it, he was a Scientist Second Class. He summoned up the steady, tired gaze of Hollerbach. He would come through this. He had to.

He untwined his fingers from the netting and stood up, forcing the rational half of his mind to work. He felt heavy, sluggish; the gravity was perhaps one and a half gee. So the mass of the little planet must have been — what? Thirty tons?

He took the iron and, without hesitation, stepped off the plate and onto the surface. His feet sank a few inches into the stuff. It was soft, like a coarse cloth, and covered with hair strands which scratched his ankles; and, oh, god, it was warm, like the hide of some huge animal—

Or human.

Now, to his horror, his bladder released; dampness slid down his legs.

Quid opened his toothless mouth and roared with laughter.

Jame, from the security of the plate, said: “There’s no shame, lad. Remember that.”

The strange trade was over, and Jamie worked his controls. With a puff of hot steam the plate lifted, leaving four charred craters in the soft surface. Within a few seconds the plate had dwindled into a fist-sized toy in the air.

Rees dropped his eyes. His urine had formed a pool about his feet and was seeping into the surface.

Quid stepped toward him, his footsteps crunching. “You’re a Boney now, lad! Welcome to the arsehole of the Nebula.” He gestured to the puddle at Rees’s feet. “And I wouldn’t worry about that.” He grinned and licked his lips. “You’ll be glad of it when you’re a bit thirstier…”

Foul speculations ran through Rees’s mind; he shuddered, but kept his gaze steady on Quid. “What do I do now?”

Again Quid laughed. “Well, that’s up to you. Stand here and wait for a ride that will never come. Or follow me.” He winked and, the iron under his arm, strode away across the yielding surface.

Rees stood there for a few seconds, reluctant to leave even the faint shadow of his link with the world away from this place. But he really had no option; this grotesque character was his only fixed point.

Shifting the weight of iron in his arms he stepped cautiously across the hot, uneven ground.

They walked about halfway round the worldlet’s circumference. They passed crude shacks scattered in random patterns over the surface; most of the buildings were simple tents of surface material, barely enough to keep out the rain, but others were more substantial, based, Rees saw, on iron frames. Quid laughed. “Impressed, miner? We’re coming up in society, aren’t we? See, they all used to shun us. The Raft, the miners, everybody. Much too proud to associate with the likes of the Boneys, after the ‘crime’ we commit to live… But now the stars are going out. Eh, miner? Suddenly they’re all struggling to survive; and suddenly they’re learning the lessons we learned, all those thousands of shifts ago.” He leaned closer to Rees and winked again. “It’s all trade, you see. For a bit of iron, a few luxuries, we fill the miners’ empty food pods. As long as they get a nicely packaged pod they don’t have to think too hard about what’s in it. Am I right?” And he laughed again, spraying Rees’s face with spittle.

Rees shrank away, unable to speak.

A few children emerged from the huts to stare at Rees, their faces dull, their naked bodies squat and filthy. The adults barely registered his passing; they sat in tight circles in their huts, chanting a low, haunting song. Rees could not make out words but the melody was cyclic and compelling.

Quid said, “So sorry if we seem antisocial. There’s a whale in the Coreward sky, see; soon we’ll be singing him close.” Quid’s eyes grew dreamy and he licked his lips.

Skirting a particularly shabby hut Rees’s foot broke through the surface. He found himself ankle-deep in foul, stinking waste. With a cry he backed away and began rubbing his feet against a cleaner section of surface.

Quid roared with laughter.

From within the hut a voice told him, “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.”

Rees glanced up, startled by the voice’s familiarity. Forgetting the filth he stepped closer to the gloom of the hut, peered inside. A man sat alone. He was short and blond, and his frame was gaunt and wrapped in the remnants of a tunic. His face was obscured by a tangle of beard—"Gord. Is it you?”

The man who had once been the Belt’s chief engineer nodded ruefully. “Hello, Rees. I can’t say I expected to see you. I thought you’d stowed away to the Raft.”

Rees glanced around; Quid seemed prepared to wait for him, evidently highly amused. Rees squatted down and briefly outlined his story. Gord nodded sympathetically. His eyes were bloodshot and seemed to loom out of the darkness.

“But what are you doing here?”

Gord shrugged. “One foundry implosion too many. One death too many. Finally they decided it was all my fault and sent me down here… There are quite a few of us Belters here, you know. At least, quite a few have been brought here… Times have worsened since you escaped. A few thousand shifts ago exiling someone down here would have been unthinkable. We barely acknowledged the existence of the place; until we started trading I wasn’t even sure the damn Boneys existed.” He reached for a globe of some liquid; he raised it to his lips, suppressing a shudder as he drank.

Rees, watching him, became abruptly aware of his own powerful thirst.

Gord lowered the globe and wiped his lips. “But I’ll tell you, in a way I was glad when they finally found me guilty.” His eyes were red. “I was so sick of it, you see; the deaths, the stink of burning, the struggle to rebuild walls that couldn’t even support themselves—” He dropped his eyes. “You see, Rees, those of us who are sent here have earned what’s happening to us. It’s a judgment.”

“I’ll never believe that,” Rees murmured.

Gord laughed; it was a ghastly, dry sound. “Well, you’d better.” He held out his globe. “Here. Are you thirsty?”

Rees stared at it with longing, imagining the cool trickle of water over his tongue — but then speculations about the origin of the liquid filled him with disgust, and he pushed it away, shaking his head.

Gord, eyes locked on Rees’s, took another deep draught. “Let me give you some advice,” he said softly. “They’re not killers here. They won’t harm you. But you have a stark choice. You either accept their ways — eat what they eat, drink what they drink — or you’ll finish in the ovens. That’s the way it is.

“You see, in some ways it makes sense. Nothing is wasted.” He laughed, then fell silent.

An eerie, discordant song floated into the hut. “Quid said something about singing to the whales,” Rees said, eyes wide. “Could that be—”

Gord nodded. “The legends are true… and quite a sight to see. Maybe you’ll understand it better than I do. It makes a kind of sense. They need some input of food from outside, don’t they? Something to keep this world from devouring itself to skin and bones — although the native life of the Nebula isn’t all that nutritious, and there are a few interesting bugs you can catch — I suspect that’s the reason the original Boneys weren’t allowed to return to the Raft…”

“Come on, lad,” Quid called, shifting the load of iron under his arm.

Rees looked at him, then back to Gord. The temptation to stay with Gord, with at least a reminder of the past, was strong… Gord dropped his head to his chest, words still dribbling from his mouth. “You’d better go,” he mumbled.

If Rees wanted any hope of escaping this place there was only one choice.

Wordlessly he gripped Gord’s shoulder. The engineer did not look up. Rees got to his feet and walked out of the hut.

Quid’s home was comparatively spacious, constructed around a framework of iron poles. There were no windows, but panels of scraped-thin skin admitted a sickly brown light.

Quid let Rees stay; Rees settled cautiously into one dark corner, his back against the wall. But Quid barely spoke to him and, at length, after a meal of some nameless meat, the Boney threw himself to the floor and settled into a comfortable sleep.

Rees sat for some hours, eyes wide; the eerie keening of the whale-singers washed around him in a tapestry of sound, and he shrank into himself, as if to escape the strangeness of it all. At last fatigue crept over him and he lowered himself to the ground. He rested his face on his folded forearm. The surface was so warm that he had no need for a blanket and he settled into a broken sleep.

Quid, ignoring Rees, came and went on his mysterious errands. He lived alone, but — to judge from the visits he made to his neighbors’ tents bearing packets of iron, and from which he would return adjusting his clothing and wiping his mouth — his iron was buying him out of loneliness.

At first Rees suspected Quid was some kind of leader here, but it soon became apparent that there was little in the way of a formal structure. Some of the Boneys had fairly well-defined roles — for example, Quid was the principal interface with the visitors from the mine. But the hideous ecology seemed largely self-sustaining, and there was little need for organized maintenance. Only the whale hunts, it seemed, brought the population together in any sort of cooperation.

Rees stayed in his corner for perhaps two shifts. Then his thirst became an unbearable pain, and with a cracked voice he asked Quid for drink.

The Boney laughed — but, instead of reaching for one of his stock of drink globes, he beckoned to Rees and left the hut.

Rees climbed stiffly to his feet and followed.

They walked around a quarter of the worldlet’s circumference and came to a break in the skin surface. It was a ragged hole perhaps a yard wide, looking disturbingly like a dried-out wound. Splinters of bone obtruded from its lip.

Quid squatted by the hole, “So you want a drink, miner?” he demanded, his mouth a down turned slash of darkness. “Well, old Quid’s going to show you how you can get as much as you like to eat and drink, but the catch is, it’s what the rest of us eat and drink. It’s either that or starve, laddie; and Quid for one isn’t going to mourn the loss of your sneering face from his hut. Right?” And he dropped his feet through the hole and swung himself into the planet’s interior.

Fear stirring — but his throat still burning with thirst — Rees approached the hole and peered inside.

The hole was full of bones. A stench like warm meat-sim billowed into his face.

He gagged but held his ground. Shaking his head free of the fumes he sat on the ragged lip of the hole and found purchase for his feet. He stood carefully, holding his breath, and worked his way down into the network of bones.

It was like climbing inside some huge, ancient corpse.

The light, filtering through thick layers of skin, was brown and uncertain. The bright eyes of Quid glittered out of the gloom.

And all around Rees there were bones.

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, rib-cages 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 scraps of skin or hair still clung.

The planet was nothing more than a sparse 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 muffled. “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 passing 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 mass 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 mass. 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 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.

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.