Raft

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.

Now his feet lost their tenuous hold. His body swung away from the whale’s, so that he was dangling from his hands. The cartilage in his clamped fingers twisted like elastic, and with each swing of his torso pain coursed through his biceps and elbows. The centrifugal force continued to rise, through one, one and a half, two gee…

Perhaps he could head for one of the stationary “poles,” maybe at the joint between the flukes and the main body. He looked sideways toward the rear of the body; he could see the linking tube of cartilage as a misty blur through the walls of flesh.

It might have been a world away. It was all he could do to cling on here.

The spin increased further. Stars streaked below him and he began to grow groggy; he imagined blood pooling somewhere near his feet, starving his brain. He could hardly feel his arms now, but when he stared up through black-speckled vision he could see that the fingers of his left hand, the weaker, were loosening.

With a cry of panic he forced fresh strength into his hands. His fingers tightened as if in a spasm.

And the cartilage ripped.

It was like a curtain parting along a seam. From the interior of the whale a hot, foul gas billowed out over him, causing him to gasp, his eyes to stream. The ruptured cartilage began to sag. Soon a great fold of it was suspended beneath the belly of the whale; Rees clung on, still swinging painfully.

Now a ripple a foot high came rolling down the whale’s belly wall. The whale’s nervous system must be slow to react, but surely it could feel the agony of this massive hernia. The wave reached the site of the rupture. The dangling fold of cartilage jerked up and down, once, twice, again; Rees’s shoulders felt as if they were being dragged from their sockets and needles thrust into the joints.

Again his fingers loosened.

The rip in the sheet was like a narrow door above him.

Shoulders shaking, Rees hauled himself up until his chin was level with his fists. He released his left hand—

— and almost fell altogether; but his right hand still clutched at the cartilage, and now his left hand was locked over the lip of the wound. He released his right hand; the weaker, numb left slipped over greasy cartilage but — now — he had both hands clamped at the edge of the aperture.

He rested there for a few seconds, the muscles of his arms screaming, his fingers slipping.

Now he worked the muscles of his back and dragged his feet up before his face, shoved them over his head and through the aperture. Then his legs and back slid easily over the inner surface of the cartilage and into the body of the whale, and finally he was able to uncurl his fingers. With the last of his strength he rolled away from the aperture.

Breathing hard he lay on his back, spread-eagled against the whale’s inner stomach wall. Below him, obscured by the translucent flesh, were the wheeling stars, and far above, like huge machines in some vast, dimly lit hall, were the organs of the whale.

His lungs rattled; his arms and hands were on fire. Blackness fell over him and the pain dropped away.

He awoke to a raging thirst.

He stared up into the cavernous interior of the whale. The light seemed dimmer: perhaps the whale, for reasons of its own, was flying deeper into the Nebula.

The air was hot, damp, and foul with a stench like sweat; but, though his chest ached slightly, he seemed to be breathing normally. Cautiously he propped himself up on his elbows. The muscles of his arms felt ripped and the fingernails on both hands were torn; but the bones of his fingers seemed intact and in place.

He climbed cautiously to his feet.

Stars still wheeled around the whale, but if he averted his eyes he felt no dizziness. It was as if he were standing in a steady gravity well of about two gees. Looking down he saw that his bare feet had sunk a couple of inches into the resilient cartilage. With some experimentation he found he could walk with little difficulty, provided he avoided slipping on the slick surface.

Again thirst tore at his throat; it felt as if the back of his mouth were closing up with the dryness.

He made his way to the aperture he had torn in the cartilage sheet. The wound had already closed to a narrow slit barely as wide as his waist. He had no way of telling how long he had been unconscious, but surely it must have taken a shift at least for the healing to progress this far. He knelt down, the cartilage beneath his knees a warm, wet carpet, and pushed his face close to the wound. A breeze bore him welcome fresh air. He could see the dangling flap of cartilage up which he had scrambled to safety: the ripped skin had grown opaque and was covered in a mass of fine creases. Perhaps eventually the dangling fold would be isolated outside the body, atrophy and fall away.

Thanks to Rees’s scrambling the area of cartilage around the wound was scraped clear of flesh; only a few clumps clung here and there, like isolated patches of foliage on an old tree. Rees lay on the warm floor, took a fold of cartilage in his left hand, and thrust his head and right arm out through the wound. He swept his arm around the outer wall of the whale’s belly, hauling in as much flesh matter as he could reach. As he worked the breeze of the whale’s rotation washed steadily over his face and bare arms.

When he was done he withdrew from the wound and hauled away his meager supply. He shoved a fistful into his mouth immediately. Sticky whale juice trickled, soothing, down his parched throat and fluffy flesh clung to his straggling beard; he squatted on the warm floor and, for a few minutes, ate steadily, postponing thoughts of an impossible future.

When he was done, his thirst and hunger at least partially sated, his pile of flesh was reduced by at least half. The damn stuff would last hardly any time at all… He crammed the rest into the pockets of his filthy coverall.

Now he became aware of another problem, as the pressure in his bladder and lower bowels began to grow painful. He felt oddly reluctant to relieve himself inside the body of another creature; it seemed an obscene violation. But, the muscles of his lower stomach told him, he didn’t really have a lot of choice.

At last he loosened his trousers and squatted over the narrowest section of the rent in the stomach wall.

He had a bizarre image of his waste being flung through the air in a cloud of brown and yellow. It was highly unlikely, of course, but perhaps one day the stuff would reach the Belt, or the Raft; would one of his acquaintances look up in horror for the source of this foul rain — and think of him?

He laughed out loud; the sound was absorbed by the soft wall around him. He could think of a few nominations for the recipient of such a message. Gover, Roch, Quid… Maybe he should take aim.

His needs satisfied, his curiosity began to reassert itself, and he stared around at the mysterious interior of the whale. It was like being inside some great, glass-wailed ship. From the leading face a wide tube stretched down the axis of the body, contracting as it neared the rear. Entrails of some kind branched off, looking like fat, pale worms that coiled around the principal esophagus. Sacs which could hold four men were suspended around the axial tube, filled with obscure, unmoving forms. Organs were clustered around the main axial canal; and others, vast and anonymous, were fixed to the inner wall of the skin.

Beyond the body’s rear Rees could make out the joint to the fluke section, and then the great semicircular flukes themselves, washing through the air with immense assurance and power. The motion of the flukes and the wheeling shadows cast by the starlight through the translucent skin gave the place a superficial impression of motion; but otherwise, apart from a subdued humming, the vast space was still and calm. Rees had read of the great cathedrals of Earth; he remembered staring at the old pictures and wondering what it would be like to stand inside such ancient, huge, still spaces.

Perhaps it would be something like this.

Stepping cautiously over the slippery, yielding surface, he began to make his way toward the whale’s leading face.

He neared an organ fixed to the floor. It was an opaque, flattened sphere, twice as tall as he was, and its mass tugged gently at him. He pressed his palm to the tough, lumpy flesh; beneath the surface he could feel hot liquid churn. Perhaps this was the equivalent of a liver or kidney. Crouching, he could see how the organ was attached to the stomach wall by a tight, wrinkled ring of flesh; the ring was clear enough for him to see liquid pulse to and from the dense cartilage.

A Boney spear protruded from the organ, its tip buried an arm’s length inside the soft material. Rees took the shaft and carefully slid the spear away from the organ; it emerged damp and sticky. He propped the spear safely within a fold of flesh and walked on.

The floor slanted sharply upwards as he began to climb the slope of the body toward the axis of rotation. At last he was climbing a near-vertical, sheer surface, and he was forced to dig his hands into the cartilage. As he climbed toward the axis the centripetal force lessened, although a Coriolis effect began to make him stagger.

He paused for breath and looked back over the slope he had climbed. The organs fixed to the apparent floor and walls of the chamber were like mysterious engines. The tube of the esophagus stretched away above his head; he noticed now that wrapped around it, close behind the eyes, was a large, spongy mass; filaments like rope connected the sponge to the eyes — optic nerves? Perhaps the convoluted lump was the whale’s brain; if so its mass relative to its body must compare favorably with a human’s.

Could the whale be intelligent? That seemed absurd… but then he remembered the song of the Boney hunters. The whale must have a reasonably sophisticated sensorium to be able to respond to such a lure.

At last he reached a position just below the join of the esophagus to the face. The whale’s triple eyes hung over him like vast lamps, staring calmly ahead; it felt as if he were clinging to the inside of some huge mask.

The face rippled, almost casting him free; he clung tighter to the cartilage. Staring up he saw that the center of the face had split, becoming an open mouth which led directly into the huge throat.

Rees looked out through the face. He made out a blur of motion which slowly resolved itself into a shoal of ghost-white plates which whirled in the air before the whale. These plate creatures were no more than three or four feet wide; some of them, perhaps the young, were far smaller. The creatures had upturned rims — no doubt for aerodynamic reasons — and Rees saw how purplish veins crisscrossed the upper surface of the discs.

The creatures scattered in alarm as the whale approached. The whale’s three eyes locked on the plate animals, triangulating with hungry precision. Soon the plates were impacting the great, flat face; the cartilage resounded like a drumskin, making Rees flinch. Doomed plate creatures, still spinning feebly, slid into the whale’s maw and disappeared into the opaque esophagus, and soon a series of bulges were passing down the great tube. Rees imagined the still living plates hurling themselves against the walls that had closed around them after a lifetime of free air. After some minutes the first bulge reached a branch to the semitransparent entrails. Battered plates emerged into the comparative stillness of the intestines, some still turning feebly. With vast pulses of clear muscle the bodies were worked along the entrails, dissolving as they moved through vats of digestive gases or fluids.

For perhaps thirty minutes the whale cut a path through the cloud of plate creatures… and then something fast moved at the rim of Rees’s peripheral vision. He twisted, peering.

There was a blur, something red and dense that shot across the sky. Now another, and a third; and now a whole flock of them, raining through the air like missiles. The things descended on the shoal of plate creatures in a great, frenzied blur of motion and blood; when they moved on they left behind a cloud of blood and meat scraps—

— and one of the blurs flew at Rees’s face. He cried out and flinched backwards, almost losing his grip on the cartilage mask; then he steadied himself and stared back at the creature.

It had come to a halt mere yards before him. It was little more than a flying mouth. A red stump of a body, limbless, perhaps two yards long, was fronted by a circular maw wider than Rees could reach. Eyes like beads clustered round the mouth, which was ringed by long teeth, needle points turned inwards. Now the mouth closed, the flesh stretching over a rudimentary bone structure, until teeth met in a grind of white flashes.

Rees could almost imagine this sky wolf licking its lips as it studied him.

But the eyes of the whale fixed the wolf with a haughty glare, and after a few seconds the wolf shot away to join its companions amid the easier meat of the plate creatures.

Apparently satiated, the whale surged out of the cloud of plates and into clear air. Looking back, Rees could see the sky wolves continue to feast on the hapless plates.

The sky wolves were creatures of children’s tales; Rees had never encountered one before. No doubt, like uncounted other species of Nebula flora and fauna, the plates and wolves were careful to avoid the homes of man. Was he the first human to see such a sight? And would the Nebula die before mankind could explore the marvels this strange universe had to offer?

A heavy depression fell upon Rees, and he pressed his face against the inner face of the whale.

The whale forged ever deeper into the heart of the Nebula; the air outside grew darker.

Rees woke from a dream of falling.

His back was pressed against the inner face of the whale, his hands locked around folds of cartilage; cautiously he uncurled his fingers and worked the stiff joints.

What had woken him? He scanned the cavernous interior of the whale. Shafts of starlight still swept through the body like torch beams — but, surely, more slowly than before. Was the whale coming to rest?

He turned to look out of the whale’s face… and felt a tingle of wonder at the base of his skull. Peering in at him, not a dozen yards from where he stood, were the three eyes of a second whale. Its face was pressed to that of “his” whale, and he saw how the mouths of the two vast creatures worked in sympathetic patterns, almost as if they were speaking to each other.

Now the other whale peeled away, its flukes beating, and the view ahead cleared. Again wonder surged through Rees, causing him to gasp. Beyond the second whale was another, side on, forging through the air — and beyond that another, and another; as far as Rees’s eyes could see, above him and below him, there was a great array of whales which swam through the Nebula. The school must have been spread through cubic miles: the more distant of them were like tiny lanterns illuminated by starlight.

Like a great, pinkish river, the whales were all streaming toward the Core.

From behind Rees there was a low grind, as if some great machine were stirring. Turning, he saw that the joint connecting the main body of the whale to its fluke section was swivelling; bones and muscles the size of men hauled at the mass of turning flesh. Soon the whale was banking around a wide arc, its flukes beating purposefully. The whale’s rotation increased once more, turning the school of whales into a kaleidoscope of whirling flukes; and at last the whale settled into a place in the vast migration.

For hours the school forged on into increasing darkness. The stars at these depths were older, dimmer, their proximity increasing as the Core neared. Rees made out two stars so close they almost touched: their tired fires were drawn out in great mounds, and they whirled around each other in a pirouette seconds long. Later the whales passed a massive star, miles across; its fusion processes seemed exhausted, but the iron of its surface, compressed by gravity, gave off a dull, somber glow. The surface was a place of constant motion: every few minutes a portion would subside, leaving a crater perhaps yards wide and a spray of molten particles struggling a few feet into the air. Smaller stars circled the giant in orbits of several minutes, and Rees was reminded of Hollerbach’s orrery: here was another “solar system” model, made not of metal beads but of stars…

The school reached another collection of stars bound by gravity; but this time there was no central giant: instead a dozen small stars, some still burning, whirled through a complex, chaotic dance. At one moment it seemed two stars must collide… but no; they passed no more than yards apart, spun around and hurtled off in new directions. The motion of the star family showed no structure, no periodicity — and Rees, who in his time on the Raft had studied the chaotic aspects of the three-body problem, was not surprised.

Still the gloom deepened. A gathering blackness ahead told Rees they were nearing the Core. He remembered the Telescopic journey into the Nebula he had taken at the time of the revolt with that young Class Three — what was his name? Nead? Little had he dreamt that one day he would repeat the journey in person, and in such a fantastic fashion…

Again he thought briefly of Hollerbach. What would that old man give to be seeing these wonders? A mood of contentment, perhaps brought on by his memories, settled over Rees.

Now, as on his Telescopic journey, the mists of the Nebula’s heart lifted away like veils from a face, and he began to make out the sphere of debris around the Core itself. Through breaks in the shell of rubble a pink light flickered.

Slowly Rees began to realize he was staring at his own death. What would get him first? The hard radiation sleeting from the black hole? Perhaps the tidal effects of the Core’s gravitation would tear his head and limbs from his body… or, as the softer structure of the whale disintegrated, maybe he would find himself tumbling helpless in the air, baked or asphyxiated in the oxygen-starved atmosphere.

But still the odd mood of contentment lingered, and now he felt a slow, soothing music sound within his head. He let his muscles relax and he settled comfortably against the inner face of the whale. If this really were to be his death — well, at least it had been an interesting journey.

And perhaps, after all, death wouldn’t be the final end. He recalled some of the simple religious beliefs of the Belt. What if the soul survived the body, somehow? What if his journey were to continue on some other plane? He was struck by a vision of a stream of disembodied souls streaking out into space, their flukes slowly beating—

Flukes? What the hell—?

He shook his head, trying to clear it of the bizarre images and sounds. Damn it, he knew himself well enough to know that he shouldn’t be facing death with an elegiac smile and a vision of the afterlife. He should be fighting, looking for a way out…

But if these thoughts weren’t his own, whose were they? With a shudder he turned and stared at the bulge of brain around the whale’s esophagus. Could the beast be semi telepathic? Were the images seeping into his head from that great mound, mere yards from him?

He remembered how the chanting of the Boney hunters had attracted the whales. Perhaps the chanting set up some sort of telepathic lure which baffled and attracted the whales. With a start he realized that the steady music in his head had the same structure, the same compelling rhythm and cyclical melodies, as the Boneys’ song. It must be coming from outside him — though whether through his ears or by telepathic means he found it impossible to distinguish. So the Boneys, perhaps by chance, had found a way to make the whales believe they were swimming, not toward a slow death at the hands of tiny, malevolent humans, but toward—

What? Where did these whales, swimming to the Core, think they were going, and why were they so happy to be going there?

There was only one way to find out. He quailed at the thought of opening his mind to further violation; but he fixed his hands tightly around the cartilage, closed his eyes, and tried to welcome the bizarre images.

Again the whales streaked into the air. He tried to observe the scene as if it were a photograph before him. Were these things really whales? Yes; but somehow their bulk had been reduced drastically, so that they became pencil-shaped missiles soaring against minimal air resistance to… where? He struggled, compressing his eyes with the back of one hand, but it wouldn’t come. Well, wherever it was, “his” whale felt nothing but delight at the prospect.

If he couldn’t see the destination, what about the source?

Deliberately he lowered his head. The image in his mind panned down, as if he were tracking a Telescope across the sky.

And he saw the source of the whales’ flight. It was the Core.

He opened gritty eyes. So the creatures were not plunging to their deaths; somehow they were going to use the Core to gain enormous velocities, enough to send them hurtling out—

— out, he realized with a sudden burst of insight, of the Nebula itself.

The whales knew the Nebula was dying. And, in this fantastic fashion, they were migrating; they would abandon the fading ruin of the Nebula and cross space to a new home. Perhaps they had done this dozens, hundreds of times before; perhaps they had spread among the nebulae in this way for hundreds of thousands of shifts…

And what the whales could do, surely man could emulate. A great wave of hope crashed over Rees; he felt the blood burn in his cheeks.

The Core was very near now; shafts of hellish light glared through the shell of debris, illuminating the rubble. Ahead of him he could see whales expelling air through their mouths in great moist plumes; their bodies contracted like slowly collapsing balloons.

The rotation of Rees’s whale slowed. Soon it would enter the deepening throat of the Core’s gravity well… and surely Rees would die. As rapidly as it had grown his bubble of hope disintegrated, wiping away the last traces of his false contentment. He had perhaps minutes to live, and locked in his doomed head was the secret of the survival of his race.

A howl of despair broke from his throat, and his hands clenched convulsively around the cartilage of the face.

The whale shuddered.

Rees stared unbelieving at his hands. Up to now the whale had shown no more awareness of his presence than would he of an individual microbial parasite. But if his physical actions had not disturbed the whale, perhaps his flood of despair had impacted on that vast, slow brain a few yards away…

And perhaps there was a way out of this.

He closed his eyes and conjured up faces. Hollerbach, Jaen, Sheen, Pallis tending his forest; he let the agony of their anticipated deaths, his longing to return to and to save his people flood through him and focus into a single, hard point of pain. He physically hauled at the whale’s face, as if by brute force he could drag the great creature from its path into the Core.

A monstrous sadness assailed Rees now, a pleading that this human infection should leave the whale be to follow its herd to safety. Rees felt as if he were drowning in sorrow. He fixed on a single image: the wonder on the face of the young Third, Nead, as he had watched the beauty of the Nebula’s rim unfold in the Telescope monitor; and the whale shuddered again, more violently.