[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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 towards the shuttle craft he had seen earlier. He could just see the
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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
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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 mammary-like 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 centimetres to one side and swivelled 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]