Raft xs-1

by Stephen Baxter

  In fact, perhaps the need to move the Raft had provided the glue which had held society together this far. Here was a project which would clearly benefit all.

  Yes, it was all admirable — but if it was too slow it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. The falling star was still miles overhead, and there was no immediate danger of impact, but if pressure was maintained on the trees for too long the great plants would tire. Not only would they prove unable to drag the Raft anywhere — it was even conceivable that some might fail altogether, threatening the Raft’s security in the air.

  Damn it. He hung his head over the lip of the plate, trying to judge where the problem lay. The Rim wall of smoke looked solid enough; the distant stars cast a long shadow over the masked workers who labored at the base of the cliff of smoke.

  Then the problem must be with the tethered trees themselves. There was a pilot, plus assistants, in each tree, and each of them was trying to maintain his own fence of smoke. Those small barriers were probably the most significant factor in influencing the movement of the individual trees. And, even from up here, Pallis could see how ragged and insubstantial some of those barriers were.

  He thumped his fist into the deck of the craft. Damn it; the purges of the revolution, and the fevers and starvation that had followed, had left his corps of pilots as depleted of skilled people as most other sectors of Raft society. He remembered Raft translations of the past: the endless calculations, the shift-long briefings, the motion of the trees like components of a fine machine…

  There had been time for none of that. Some of the newer pilots barely had the skill to keep from falling out of their trees. And building a lateral wall was one of the most difficult of a pilot’s arts; it was like sculpting with smoke…

  He spotted a group of trees whose barriers were particularly ragged. He pointed them out to Jame.

  The barman grinned and yanked at his control cables.

  Pallis tried to ignore the gale in his face, the stink of steam; he put aside his nostalgia for the stately grandeur of the trees. Beside him he heard Nead curse as his papers were blown like leaves. The plate swooped among the trees like some huge, unlikely skitter; Pallis couldn’t help but flinch as branches shot past, mere feet from his face. At last the craft came to rest. From here those smoke barriers looked even more tenuous; Pallis watched, despairing, as raw pilots waved blankets at wisps of smoke.

  He cupped his hands to his mouth. “You!”

  Small faces turned up to him. One pilot tumbled backwards.

  “Build up your bowls!” Pallis called angrily. “Get a decent amount of smoke. All you’re doing with those damn blankets is blowing around two fifths of five per cent of bugger all…”

  The pilots inched their way to their bowls and began feeding fresh kindling to the tiny flames.

  Nead tugged at Pallis’s sleeve. “Pilot. Should that be happening?”

  Pallis looked. Two trees, wrapped in distorted blankets of smoke, were inclining blindly towards one another, their amateur pilots evidently absorbed in the minutiae of blankets and bowls.

  “No, it bloody shouldn’t be happening.” Pallis spat. “Barman! Get us down there, and fast—”

  The trees’ first touch was almost tender: a rustle of foliage, a gentle kiss of snapping twigs. Then the first snag occurred, and the two platforms locked and shuddered. The crews of the trees gaped with sudden horror at each other.

  The trees kept turning; now sections of rim were torn away and wooden shards rained through the air. A branch caught and with a scream like some animal’s was torn away by the root. Now the trees began to roll into each other, in a vast, slow, noisy collision. The smooth platforms of foliage shattered. Fist-sized splinters sailed past the plate craft; Nead howled and covered his head.

  Pallis glared down at the crews of the dying trees. “Get off there! The damn trees are finished. Get down your cables and save yourselves.”

  They stared up at him, frightened and confused. Pallis shouted on until at last he saw them slide down rippling cables to the deck.

  The trees were now locked in a doomed embrace, their angular momenta mingling, their trunks orbiting in a whirl of foliage and branch stumps. Wall-sized sections of wood splintered away and the air was filled with the creak of rending timber; Pallis saw fire bowls go sailing through the air, and he prayed that the crews had had the foresight to douse their flames.

  Soon little was left but the trunks, locked together by a tangle of twisted branches; now the trees’ anchoring cables were torn loose like shoulders from sockets, and the freed trunks pirouetted with a strange grace, half tumbling.

  At last the trunks crashed to the deck, exploding in a storm of fragments. Pallis saw men running for their lives from the rain of wood. For some minutes splinters fell, like a hail of ragged daggers; then, slowly, men began to creep back to the crash site, stepping over tree cables which lay like the limbs of a corpse among the ruins.

  Silently Pallis motioned to Jame. “There’s nothing we can do here; let’s get on.” The plate craft lifted and returned to its patrols.

  For several more hours Pallis’s plate skimmed about the flying forest. At the end of it Jame was muttering angrily, his face blackened by the rising smoke, and Pallis’s throat was raw with shouting. At last Nead placed his sextant in his lap and sat back with a smile. “That’s it,” he said. “I think, anyway…”

  “What’s what?” Jame growled. “Is the Raft out from under the bloody star now?”

  “No, not yet. But it’s got enough momentum without further impulse from the trees. In a few hours it will drift to a halt far enough from the path of the star to be safe.”

  Pallis lay back in the netting of the plate and took a draught from a drink globe. “So we’ve made it.”

  Nead said dreamily, “It’s not quite over for the Raft yet. When the star passes through the plane in which the Raft lies there will be a few interesting tidal effects.”

  Pallis shrugged. “Nothing the Raft hasn’t endured before.”

  “It must be a fantastic sight, Pallis.”

  “Yes, it is,” the pilot mused. He remembered watching cable shadows lengthen across the deck; at last the circumference of the star disc would touch the horizon, sending light flaring across the deck. And when the main disc had dropped below the Rim there would be an afterglow, what the Scientists call a corona…

  Jame squinted into the sky. “How often does this happen, then? How often does the Raft get in the way of a falling star?”

  Pallis shrugged. “Not often. Once or twice a generation. Often enough for us to have built up skills to deal with it.”

  “But you need the Scientists — the likes of this one—” Jame jerked a thumb at Nead “ — to work out what to do.”

  “Well, of course.” Nead sounded amused. “You can’t do these things by sticking a wet finger into the wind.”

  “But a lot of the Scientists are going to bugger off, on this Bridge thing.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So what’s going to happen when the next star comes down? How will they move the Raft then?”

  Nead sipped a drink easily. “Well, our observations show that the next star — a long way up there—” he pointed upwards “ — is many thousands of shifts away from endangering the Raft.”

  Pallis frowned. “That doesn’t answer Jame’s question.”

  “Yes, it does.” Nead’s blank young face bore a look of puzzlement. “You see, by that time we don’t expect the Nebula to be sustaining life anyway. So the problem’s rather academic, isn’t it?”

  Pallis and Jame exchanged glances; then Pallis turned to the rotating forest under his craft and tried to lose himself in contemplation of its steady serenity.

  Rees hardly slept during his last rest period before the Bridge’s departure.

  A bell tolled somewhere.

  At last it was time. Rees rose from his pallet, washed quickly, and emerged from his temporary shelter, feeling only a vast relief that
the time had come.

  The Bridge in its box of scaffolding was the center of frantic activity. It lay at the heart of a fenced-off area two hundred yards wide which had become a miniature city; former Officers’ quarters had been commandeered to give hopeful migrants temporary accommodation. Now small knots of people walked uncertainly toward the Bridge. Rees recognized representatives of all the Nebula’s cultures: the Raft itself, the Belt, and even a few Boneys. Each refugee carried the few pounds of personal belongings allowed. A queue was forming at the open port of the Bridge, behind a human chain which passed into the interior a few final supplies, books, small environmental monitoring instruments. There was an air of purposefulness about the scene and Rees slowly began to believe that this thing was actually going to happen…

  Whatever the future held he could only be glad that this period of waiting, with all its divisiveness and bitterness, was over. After the moving of the Raft, society had disintegrated rapidly. It had been a race to complete their preparations before things fell apart completely; and as time had passed — and more delays and problems had been encountered — Rees had felt the pressure build until it seemed he could hardly bear it.

  The amount of personal animosity he had encountered had astonished him. He longed to explain to people that it was not he who was causing the Nebula to fail; that it was not he who decreed the physical laws which constrained the number of evacuees.

  …And it had not been he — alone — who had drawn up the list.

  The preparation of that list had been agonizing. The idea of a ballot had been rejected quickly; the composition of this colony could not be left to chance. But how to select humans — families, chains of descendants — for life or extinction? They had tried to be scientific, and so had applied criteria like physical fitness, intelligence, adaptabilty, breeding age… And Rees, embarrassed and disgusted by the whole process, had found himself on most of the candidate lists.

  But he had stayed with it; not, he prayed, merely in order to ensure his own survival, but to do the best job he could. The selection process had left him feeling soiled and shabby, unsure even of his own motivations.

  In the end a final list had emerged, an amalgam of dozens of others drawn together by Decker’s harsh arbitration. Rees was on it. Roch wasn’t. And so, Rees reflected with a fresh burst of self-loathing, he had finished by neatly fulfilling the worst expectations of Roch and his like.

  He walked to the perimeter fence. Perhaps he would see Pallis, get a last chance to say goodbye. Burly guards patrolled, hefting clubs uncertainly. Rees felt depressed as he stared along the length of the fence. Yet more resources diverted from the main objective… but there had been riots already; who was to say what might have happened if not for the protection of the fence and its guards? A guard caught his eye and nodded, his broad face impassive; Rees wondered how easy it would be for this man to fight off his own people in order to save a privileged few…

  An explosion somewhere on the other side of the Bridge, like a massive heel stamping into the deck. A pall of smoke rose over the scaffolding.

  The guards near Rees turned to stare. Rees hurried around the Bridge.

  Distant shouts, a scream… and the fence was down and burning along ten feet of its length. Guards ran to the breach, but the mob beyond seemed overwhelming, both in numbers and in ferocity; Rees saw a wall of faces, old and young, male and female, united by a desperate, vicious anger. Now fire bombs rained toward the Bridge, splashing over the deck.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” It was Decker; the big man took Rees’s arm and pulled him back toward the Bridge.

  “Decker, can’t they understand? They can’t be saved; there simply isn’t room. If they attack now the mission will fail and nobody will—”

  “Lad.” Decker took his shoulders and shook him, hard. “The time for talk is over. We can’t hold off that lot for long… You have to get in there and launch. Right now.”

  Rees shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

  “I’ll show you what’s bloody impossible.” A small fire burned amid the ruins of a fire bomb; Decker bent, lit a chunk of scrap wood, and hurled it into the scaffolding surrounding the Bridge. Soon flames were licking at the dry wood.

  Rees stared. “Decker—”

  “No more discussion, damn you!” Decker roared into his face, spittle spraying. “Take what you can and get out of here—”

  Rees turned to run.

  He looked back once. Decker was already lost in the melee at the breach.

  Rees reached the port. The orderly queue of a few minutes earlier had disintegrated; people were trying to force their way through the doorway, screaming and holding their absurd packages of luggage above their heads. Rees used his fists and elbows to fight his way through to the interior. The Observatory was a cage of noisy chaos, with equipment and people jumbled and crushed together; the single remaining large instrument — the Telescope — loomed over the crowd like some aloof robot.

  Rees rammed his way through the crowd until he found Gord and Nead. He pulled them close. “We launch in five minutes!”

  “Rees, that’s impossible,” Gord said. “You can see the state of things. We’d cause injury, death even, to the passengers and those outside—”

  Rees pointed to the transparent hull. “Look out there. See that smoke? Decker has fired the damn scaffolding. So your precious explosive bolts are going to blow in five minutes anyway. Right?”

  Gord paled.

  Suddenly the noise outside grew to a roar; Rees saw that more sections of the fence were failing. The few guards still fighting were being overwhelmed by a wave of humanity.

  “When they reach us we’re finished,” Rees said. “We have to launch. Not in five minutes. Now.”

  Nead shook his head. “Rees, there are still people—”

  “Close the damn door!” Rees grabbed the young man’s shoulder and shoved him toward a wall-mounted control panel. “Gord, fire those bolts. Just do it—”

  His eyes narrow, his cheeks trembling with fear, the little engineer disappeared into the crush.

  Rees forced his way to the Telescope. He clambered up the old instrument’s mount until he was looking down over a confused sea of people. “Listen to me!” he bellowed. “You can see what’s happening outside. We have to launch. Lie down if you can. Help your neighbors; watch the children—”

  Now fists were battering against the hull, desperate faces pressing to the clear wall—

  — and, with a synchronized crackle, the scaffolding’s explosive bolts ignited. The fragile wooden frame disintegrated rapidly; now nothing held the Bridge to the Raft.

  The floor dipped. Screams rose like flames; the passengers clung to each other. Beyond the clear hull the Raft deck rose around the Bridge like a liquid, and the Raft’s gravitational field hauled the passengers into the air, bumping them almost comically against the roof.

  A crescendo of cries came from the doorway. Nead had failed to close the port in time; stragglers were leaping across the widening chasm between Bridge and deck. A last man clattered through the closing door; his ankle was trapped in the jamb and Rees heard the shin snap with sickening suddenness. Now a whole family tumbled off the Raft deck and impacted against the hull, sliding into infinity with looks of surprise…

  Rees closed his eyes and clung to the Telescope.

  At last it was over. The Raft turned into a ceiling above them, distant and abstract; the thin rain of humans against the hull ceased, and four hundred people had suddenly entered free fall for the first time in their lives.

  There was a yell, as if from very far away. Rees looked up. Roch, burning club in hand, had leapt through the hole in the heart of the Raft. He fell through the intervening yards spreadeagled; he stared, eyes bulging, in through the glass at horrified passengers.

  The huge miner smashed face-down into the clear roof of the Observatory. He dropped his club and scrabbled for a handhold against the slick wall; but helplessly he
slid over the surface, leaving a trail of blood from his crushed nose and mouth. Finally he tumbled over the side — then, at the last second, he grabbed at the rough protrusion of a steam jet.

  Rees climbed down from the Telescope and found Gord. “Damn it, we have to do something. He’ll pull that jet free.”

  Gord scratched his chin and studied the dangling miner, who glared in at the bemused passengers. “We could fire the jet. The steam would miss him, of course, since he’s hanging beneath the orifice itself — but his hands would burn — yes; that would shake him loose…”

  “Or,” Rees said, “we could save him.”

  “What? Rees, that joker tried to kill you.”

  “I know.” Rees stared out at Roch’s crimson face, his straining muscles. “Find a length of rope. I’m going to open the door.”

  “You’re not serious…”

  But Rees was already heading for the port.

  When at last the huge miner lay exhausted on the deck, Rees bent over him. “Listen to me,” he said steadily. “I could have let you die.”

  Roch licked blood from his ruined mouth.

  “I saved you for one reason,” Rees said. “You’re survivor. That’s what drove you to risk your life in that crazy leap. And where we’re going we need survivors. Do you understand? But if I ever — even once — think that you’re endangering this mission with your damn stupidity I’ll open that door and let you finish your fall.”

  He held the miner’s eyes for long minutes; at last, Roch nodded.

  “Good.” Rees stood. “Now then,” he said to Gord, “what first?”

  There was a stink of vomit in the air.

  Gord raised his eyebrows. “Weightlessness education, I think,” he said. “And a lot of work with mops and buckets…”

  His hands around his assailant’s throat and weapon arm, Decker turned to see the Bridge scaffolding collapse into its flimsy components. The great cylinder hung in the air, just for a second; then the steam jets spurted white clouds and the Bridge fell away, leaving a pit in the deck into which people tumbled helplessly.