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 Mm, "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.