held on their waists, gathering things from the sea as they waded through it, putting what they collected
in their baskets.
They hadn’t seen him, so he swam on, making a slow, crawling motion with his arms and kicking feebly with his legs.
The people harvesting the sea didn’t appear to notice him; they kept on wading through the surf, stooping occasionally to
pick from the
sands underneath, their eyes sweeping and probing, scanning and searching, but too close in; not seeing him.
His stroke slowed to a gasping,
dying crawl. He could not lift his hands free of the water, and his legs stayed paralyzed….
Then through the surf noise, like something from a dream, he heard several people shouting nearby, and splashes coming close.
He was
still swimming weakly when another wave lifted him, and he saw several of the skinny people clad in loincloths and
tattered tunics, wading
through the water toward him.
They helped Horza in through the breaking waves, over sunstreaked shallows and onto the golden sands. He lay there while the
thin and
haggard people crowded round. They talked quietly to each other in a language he hadn’t heard before. He tried to
move but couldn’t. His
muscles felt like lengths of limp rag.
“Hello," he croaked. He tried it in all the languages he knew, but none seemed to work. He looked into the faces of the people
around him.
They were human, but that word covered so many different species throughout the galaxy it was a continuing subject
for debate who was and
who wasn’t human. As in all too many matters, the consensus of opinion was starting to resemble what
the Culture had to say on the subject.
The Culture would lay down the law (except, of course, that the Culture didn’t have
any real laws) about what being human was, or how
intelligent a particular species was (while at the same time making clear
that pure intelligence didn’t really mean much on its own), or on how
long people should live (though only as a rough guide,
naturally), and people would accept these things without question, because everybody
believed the Culture’s own propaganda,
that it was fair, unbiased, disinterested, concerned only with absolute truth… and so on.
So were these people around him really human. They were about Horza’s height, they seemed to have roughly the same bone structure,
bilateral symmetry and respiratory system; and their faces—though each was different—all had eyes, mouth, nose and ears.
But they all looked thinner than they ought to have been, and their skin, regardless of hue or shade, looked somehow diseased.
Horza lay still. He felt very heavy again, but at least he was on dry land. On the other hand, it didn’t look as though there
was much food on
the island, judging by the state of the bodies around him. He assumed that was why they were so thin. He
raised his head weakly and tried to
see through the clumps of thin legs toward the shuttle craft he had seen earlier. He could
just see the top of the machine, sticking up above one
of the large canoes beached on the sands. Its rear doors were open.
A smell wafted under Horza’s nose and made him feel sick. He put his head down onto the sand again, exhausted.
The talking stopped and the people turned, their thin, tanned or anyway dark bodies shuffling round to face up the beach.
A space opened
in their ranks just above Horza’s head, and try as he might he couldn’t get up on one elbow or swivel his head
to see what or who was coming.
He lay and waited, then the people to his right all drew back and a line of eight men appeared
on that side, holding a long pole together in their
left hands, their other arms stuck out for balance. It was the litter
he had seen being carried into the jungle the day before, when the shuttle had
overflown the island. He watched to see what
it held. Two lines of men turned the litter so that it faced Horza and set it down. Then all sixteen sat
down, looking exhausted.
Horza stared.
On the litter sat the most enormous, obscenely fat human Horza had ever seen.
He had mistaken the giant for a pyramid of golden sand the previous day, when he had seen the litter and its huge burden from
the
CAT
’s
shuttle. Now he could see that his first impression had been close in shape if not in substance. Whether the vast cone
of human flesh belonged
to a male or a female Horza couldn’t tell; great mammarylike folds of naked flesh spilled from the
creature’s upper and middle chest, but they
drooped over even more enormous waves of nude, hairless torso-fat, which lay partly
cradled in the vast beefs of the giant’s akimboed legs
and partly overflowing those to droop into the canvas surface of the
litter. Horza could see no stitch of clothing on the monster, but no trace of
genitals either; whatever they were, they were
quite buried under rolls of golden-brown flesh.
Horza looked up to the head. Rising from a thick cone of neck, gazing out over concentric ramparts of chins, a bald dome of
puffy flesh
contained a limp and rambling length of pale lips, a small button nose, and slits where eyes must be. The head
sat on its layers of neck,
shoulder and chest fat like a great golden bell on top of a many-decked temple. The sweat-glistened
giant suddenly moved its hands, rolling
them round on the end of the bloated fat-bound balloons of its arms, until the merely
chubby fingers met and clasped as tightly as their size
would allow. As the mouth opened to speak, another one of the skinny
humans, his rags slightly less tattered than those of the others, moved
into Horza’s field of vision, just behind and to the
side of the giant.
The bell of head moved a few centimeters to one side and swiveled round, saying something to the man behind that Horza couldn’t
catch.
Then the giant raised his or her arms with obvious effort and gazed round the skinny humans gathered around Horza.
The voice sounded like
congealing fat being poured into a jug; it was a drowning voice, Horza thought, like something from
a nightmare. He listened, but couldn’t
understand the language being used. He looked round to see what effect the giant’s
words were having on the famished-looking crowd. His
head spun for a moment, as though his brain had shifted while his skull
stayed still; he was suddenly back in the hangar of the
Clear Air
Turbulence,
when the Company had been looking at him, and he had felt as naked and vulnerable as he did now.
“Oh, not again," he moaned in Marain.
“Oh-hoo!" said the golden rolls of flesh, the voice tumbling over the slopes of fat in a faltering series of tones. “Gracious!
Our bounty from the
sea
speaks!
" The hairless dome of head turned further round to the man standing by its side. “Mr. First, isn’t this wonderful." the giant
burbled.
“Fate is kind to us, Prophet," the man said gruffly.
“Fate favors the beloved, yes, Mr. First. It sends our enemies away and brings us bounty—bounty from the sea! Fate be praised!"
The great
pyramid of flesh shook as the arms went higher, trailing folds of paler flesh as the turret-like head went back,
the mouth opening to expose a
dark space where only a few small fangs glinted like steel. When the bubbling voice spoke again
it was in the language Horza couldn’t make
out, but it was the same phrase repeated over and over again. The giant was quickly
joined by the rest of the crowd, who shook their hands in
the air and chanted hoarsely. Horza closed his eyes, trying to wake
from what he knew was not a dream.
When he opened his eyes the skinny humans were still chanting, but they were crowded around him again, blocking out his view
of the
golden-brown monster. Their faces eager, their teeth bared, their hands stretched out like claws, the crowd of starving,
chanting humans fell on
him.
They stripped off his shorts. He tried to struggle, but they held him down. In his exhaustion he was probably no stronger
than any one of
them, and they had no difficulty pinning him; they rolled him over, pulled his hands behind him and tied them
there. Then they tied his feet
together and pulled his legs back until his feet were almost touching his hands, and bound
them to his wrists by a short length of rope. Naked,
trussed like an animal ready for the slaughter, Horza was dragged across
the hot sand, past a weakly burning fire, then hauled upright and
lowered over a short pole stuck into the beach, so that
it ran up between his back and his tied limbs. His knees sank into the sand, taking most
of his weight. The fire burned in
front of him, sending acrid wood-smoke into his eyes, and the awful smell returned; it seemed to come from
various pots and
bowls spread around the fire. Other fires and collections of pans were littered across the beach.
The huge pile of flesh the man named Mr. First had called “prophet" was set down near the fire. Mr. First stood at the obese
human’s side,
staring at Horza through deep-set eyes contained within a pale and grubby face. The golden giant on the litter
clapped chubby hands together
and said, “Stranger, gift of the sea, welcome. I… am the great prophet Fwi-Song."