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 Ms 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 Ms 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 Ms head, pushing aside thirst, revulsion, fear… He imagined the original Ship, huge, dark and crippled, opening like a skitter flower and emitting
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 Ms 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
