The island came closer, but very slowly. The water was warm at first, but it seemed to get colder, and the aches in his body increased. He ignored them, switching them off, but he could feel himself slowing, and he knew that he'd started off too fast. He paused, treading water for a moment; then, after drinking a little of the warm fresh water, set off again, stroking more deliberately and steadily for the grey tower of the distant island.

He told himself how lucky he'd been. The shuttle crash hadn't injured him badly — though the aches still plagued him, like noisy relatives locked in a distant room, disturbing his concentration. The warm water, though apparently getting colder, was fresh, so that he could drink from it and wouldn't dehydrate; yet it crossed his mind that he would have been more buoyant had it been salty.

He kept going. It ought to have been easy but it was getting more difficult all the time. He stopped thinking about it; he concentrated on moving; the slow, steady, rhythmic beat of arms and legs forcing him through the water; up waves, over, down; up, over, down.

Under my own power, he told himself, under my own power.

The mountain on the island grew larger very slowly. He felt as though he was building it, as though the effort required to make it appear larger in his sight was the same as if he was toiling to construct that peak; heap it up rock by rock, with his own hands…

Two kilometres. Then one.

The sun angled, rose.

Eventually, the outer reefs and shallows; he passed them in a daze, into shallower water.

A sea of aching. An ocean of exhaustion.

He swam towards the beach, through a fan of waves and surf radiating from the reef-gap he'd swum through…

… and felt as though he'd never taken the suit off, as though he wore it still, and it was stiff with rust or age, or filled with heavy water or wet sand; dragging, stiffening, pulling him back.

He could hear waves breaking on the beach, and when he looked up he could see people on it: thin dark people, dressed in rags, gathered round tents and fires or walking between them. Some were in the water ahead of him, carrying baskets, large open-work baskets which they 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 paralysed…

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 towards him.

They helped Horza in through the breaking waves, over sun-streaked 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 towards 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 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.