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, Ms 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 Hol-lerbach 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.