Sand said, ‘Get to the point, salesman. How does this work?’
And Croq described how the Silver Ghosts, notorious tinkerers at the fringe of physics, had meddled with the values of fundamental constants. ‘An object’s quantum wave function describes the probability of finding it at any particular location. But that function is given its scale by a number called the Planck constant. And if you increase the value of that constant, if only locally, then the probability of the object being found over there rather than here is increased. Then all you have to do is pluck the apple from the tree on which you wish to find it, so to speak: there rather than here. The engineering details are a little complex—’
Sand held up her hand. ‘I don’t care how the thing works. No more words. Show us.’
‘If I may have a test object – perhaps your hat, Marshal?’
Sand’s glare was incendiary.
Coton hastily slipped off his jacket. ‘Here. Use this.’
Croq opened up one of the boxes. Featureless inside, it was easily large enough to accommodate a standing human. Carefully Croq folded the jacket and set it down on the floor of the box, and closed up the door. He nodded to his assistants, who murmured to each other and manipulated Virtual displays. Coton thought he heard the hum of some engine gathering its energies, and an ozone, electric smell in the air.
‘It will take a few minutes to prepare . . .’ Croq looked at Vala. ‘This is a proof of concept. We will have to consider the specific details of your project. For instance, the senders in your universe Beta will need access to some kind of technology capable of quantum-level scanning.’
Vala nodded. ‘The ship that stumbled into Beta was equipped with devices to fabricate food and air – even human skin for grafts. They were clearly capable of quantum-level manipulation. We’re hoping that if the folk in Beta can find one of those machines, and if it’s still working, we can download instructions to adjust its function to our purposes.’
‘But then there’s bandwidth. As I understand it the intercosmic signal is transmitted by a stream of gravitons and neutrinos. The greater the flux the faster and more reliable the transmission.’
‘I’m thinking about that,’ Vala said. ‘We should set up a receiving station deep in the gravity well of the neutron star, where spacetime stress is greatest.’
‘And whose ships will you use to do that?’ Sand asked. ‘Ours, I suppose?’
Vala waved that away. ‘You will need access to the gravity well anyhow if we are to help you use the Starfolk. Our projects complement each other, Marshal.’
‘And of course,’ Croq said, ‘you will also need to consider the capacity of the receiver.’
Coton was aware that the salesman was deliberately not looking at him. Vala said nothing. And Coton felt a deep dread. For, of course, that ‘receiver’ was embedded inside Coton’s own head: indeed, it was part of him.
The machine’s low humming continued, and the assistants fussed at their controls.
‘Not much longer,’ Croq said, soothing. ‘Would you like to sit? Something to eat or drink? Of course, Marshal, there may be other facilities we could offer that might be of interest to you as you embark on separate projects—’
Marshal Sand looked down on him. ‘Your manner doesn’t impress me. You’d be surprised how often I come across people like you, salesman – petty and avaricious, grubbing for profit in the misery and ruin the Scourge brings, as humanity flees in a great wave.’
Croq laughed, and Coton grudgingly admired his defiance. ‘What refreshing honesty! Well, I note your contempt, Marshal, but it will not prejudice me against accepting payments in the new Coalition scrip. You disapprove of me selling off bits of the past, do you? But look in the sky. The Scourge is coming, despite your schemes and your strutting and your rather magnificent uniform. So you see, Marshal, I may as well sell off our past, for we humans have no future – eh?’ And he laughed again.
There was a soft chime. One of the assistants hurried to the second coffin-box, opened it, and drew out a jacket. This was unfolded and brought to Coton to inspect. It was undoubtedly his; it fitted when he put it on, and he recognised tears and other minor flaws. Yet it stank slightly of ozone, and was warm to the touch.
The teleport was ready. They were, it seemed, committed.
And now Vala and Sand, together, quite gently, began to tell Coton what they needed of him. Or, more specifically, the alien thing in his head.
11
The Raft was an oval shadow against dull crimson.
The whale plummeted blind, through dead air. Since crossing the void between the nebulae the animal had become a slender missile, its deflated flesh a smooth casing around its internal organs. Even the great eyes had closed. At times Lura had thought it was asleep, or dead, but it continued to respond to the handling of its master – Otho himself worked the goads. Now the whale’s great flukes were beating at the air, and its body was counter-turning, so that the Raft rotated in her view as they approached, close enough now for Lura to see detail, how the light shone through rents in that great floor in the sky.
‘Not long now,’ said Pesten.
Otho snapped, ‘Then hope we find what we came here for, and that it makes this jaunt worthwhile.’ He hauled on his harness. The whale shuddered, and a deep bass groan filled its cavernous interior.
Pesten gave Lura a small smile. They had spoken of how Otho seemed to care for his whale more than he cared for his riders, or himself, and now he demonstrated that. He was a bandit, a killer and a rapist, yet he was a competent leader and capable of sentiment – complicated, like all humans.
As the whale spun closer, the Raft grew until it blocked out half the sky. In the light of a big-star somewhere beyond, it cast a diffusing shadow far down through the dusty air. Otho stopped the whale’s spin, and let it drift in slowly for its final approach. Now, as they floated up towards the rim, the Raft foreshortened into an elliptical patchwork of battered deck plates. Lura could see the sooty scars of welding around the edges of the nearer plates, but as her eye tracked across the ceiling-like surface, the plates crowded with distance into a blur.
At last the whale rose up above the rim, and the upper surface of the Raft opened out below them, an enormous dish, full of complexity. The deck, which itself looked knife-thin, was studded with buildings, constructed of wood panels or metal and jumbled together like toys. The surface was damaged everywhere, tears and holes ripped through it, and at the very heart of the Raft a long rectangular gash lay open like an unhealed wound. And on the farside rim tall machines hulked, silent guardians.
They were all silent before this tremendous unfolding spectacle.
Pesten murmured to Lura, ‘Just remember it’s worse for these whale riders than for us. They live in a world of animals, where nothing humans make is much bigger than those goads Otho is sticking into his poor beast’s nerve stumps. We couldn’t make anything like this, but it isn’t so strange to us. Look, that floor is made of iron that probably came from some star kernel or other – although it looks to have a different texture towards the centre. It’s big – what, a thousand paces across? – but it isn’t so big, our Forest wouldn’t be dwarfed. And this is ours, remember – made by our ancestors, and inhabited for generations, and only abandoned when this nebula ran out of air to breathe.’
The whale continued to rise up over the Raft. Otho looked back at Lura and Pesten. ‘What now?’
Pesten said, ‘Coton told us to look for something big, bigger than a human. And obvious.’ He pointed. ‘What about those structures on the far rim?’
Lura peered that way. ‘They look like a row of broken teeth. But they’re big enough, aren’t they?’ She drifted up to the whale’s translucent skin. ‘Mole—’
‘Massive sensor dysfunction!’
‘Shut up.’ She held it up to the skin, with the small apertures facing out. ‘Are those machines over
there what you’re looking for?’
The Mole hesitated, and not for the first time Lura wondered what strange parodies of thought went on inside its cool shell. Then: ‘Confirmed.’
‘Let’s get it done,’ Otho grunted. He braced in the harness, and pressed the goads hard.
The whale’s flukes beat, its collapsed skin rippled, and it groaned. Even Lura could sense the animal’s unhappiness as it was forced to swim down towards the vast, strange surface. Apparently unconsciously the riders held each other’s hands and murmured one of their strange, rhythmic, cyclical songs, trying to reassure the beast.
The Raft became a floor that fled beneath them. Pesten lay down on his belly, peering through translucent flesh at the panorama passing below, and Lura joined him, face down, her elbows tucked under her. As they moved in from the rim they passed over an area of big blocky structures, clean-edged. Lura made out cones set in the surface, evidently firmly anchored, some of which had cables trailing from their upper points. But whatever those cables had once been attached to was long gone.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ Pesten said. He pointed excitedly. ‘Look at that! See the way the buildings are tipped over, away from the centre? And those rows of terraces?’
She frowned. ‘No, I don’t see.’
‘Well, think about the Raft’s gravity – how the mass of this vast, thin dish would tug at you if you stood on it. At the edge, you’d feel as if you were being pulled towards the centre of mass, as you walked in it would feel as if you were standing on a tipped-up plate. But at the centre you’d be pulled straight down, as if that big plate was level. So they’ve built their houses here on a slant, to make it feel as if they are locally vertical. And the terraces, I suppose, are to stop you rolling all the way down to the centre if you fell over.’
She hadn’t had a Brother’s education, but she sensed the ingenuity of the design. It was somehow reassuring to think that the builders of the Raft really had been human, thinking about the needs of the people who would inhabit it.
As they headed to the centre they crossed a different zone, of smaller, more open buildings with doors and windows.
‘Houses,’ Pesten said. ‘This is where people lived. Look at all those houses, stuck to the plate in rows . . .’
Lura said, ‘Coton told me this is how people live in his universe. On surfaces, the surfaces of planets.’ Another Coton-word. ‘Not floating around in the air, as we do.’
‘We’re designed to live that way, after all. Walking around on the ground of planets, I mean.’ Pesten slapped his thin thighs. ‘That’s why we have legs. But it’s a long time since anybody lived here. And it doesn’t look like they finished their time peacefully.’
He was right. Lura saw the evidence of fires, in burned-out buildings and scorched deck plates. And – ‘Oh, Pesten, look.’
The bodies were human, one large, one small, huddled up on the floor, spooned together with the adult sheltering the child. They were still clothed, and scraps of skin clung to their bones, withered and dried.
Pesten reached out and took her hand. ‘Long dead. Perhaps these were among the last – when there was nobody left to take care of the bodies.’
And, she thought grimly, in this lethal air there were not even any rats left to consume the flesh, or worms or bugs.
The whale groaned again, and shuddered under them.
Braced in his harness, Otho called, ‘We’re being drawn into the Raft’s own gravity well. In the middle it’s going to be a good fraction of a gravity, I guess, and she doesn’t like it . . .’
Pesten, peering down, ignored him. ‘We’re approaching the centre of the Raft. It’s different again here.’
These buildings were grander, Lura thought, bigger and more elaborate, with fancy colours and decorations, carved doorways and window frames.
‘But if anything, the evidence of burning is even worse,’ Pesten said. ‘Maybe this is where the bosses lived. They’ll have taken the blame when people got angry and frightened. And look at the floor, the texture. That’s different too . . .’
Where the deck further out seemed to have been assembled from sheets of rusted iron, here the material shone, gleaming and rust-free, though it was still a patchwork, and in places was marked with a kind of decoration, markings of black and green on a white surface.
‘Look, the plates curve,’ Pesten said, growing excited. ‘There, and there . . . And that plate looks like it’s been beaten flat. I think this was once some curved surface that’s been cut up and put back together to make this floor.’
‘The hull of the Ship,’ Lura breathed. ‘The stories say it was a great cylinder. Is it possible? And those markings—’
‘I think I recognise numbers,’ the Brother said. ‘Look – that’s a four, I think, and that’s part of a seven. But if the Ship’s name is written here, it must be cut up and fragmented.’
And Lura, who could read nothing but the numbers pilots etched on their flying trees, could not have recognised the letters of the name anyhow.
Now they reached the very centre of the Raft, where a jagged hole perhaps a hundred paces long had been cut into the floor. Pesten said, ‘It looks as if something was fixed here, and was just ripped out. But how, or why?’ He sighed. ‘There’s so much we’ll never know.’
Lura spotted another body. It was small and naked, its withered skin bare – it must have been another child. It was suspended in the centre of the hole, bobbing up and down through the plane of the Raft, held there, she supposed, by the great artefact’s own gravity field.
To the whale riders, passing the rent in the deck marked the halfway point in this strange journey across the Raft. Encouraged, they sang louder, and Otho worked his goads.
Once past the centre, the whale crossed over the Raft’s concentric zones again, the rich central area, the cruder living spaces beyond, the more functional outer rim. They saw more burning and destruction, and a few more bodies. But Lura saw no movement, nothing that looked fresh – no sign that anybody or anything had lived here for a very long time.
At last the whale hovered before one of the big structures at the very edge of the deck. The machine was an irregular block as tall as two humans. Outlets pierced its broad face, and on the far side a nozzle like a huge mouth strained outwards at the atmosphere of the nebula.
‘Coton said it might be like this, remember,’ Pesten said. ‘He said the Raft must have had machines that drew in stuff from the air and turned it into food and water for the people. Doesn’t that look right?’
Yes, Lura thought; it wasn’t hard to imagine the machine taking giant breaths through those metal lips. On a whim she held up the Mole so it could see. ‘Can you identify that?’
Without hesitation it called loudly, ‘Supply Machine, Deck Seven, Sector Twelve, Model 4-X-7-B, Integrality’s Constancy of Purpose. Report status!’
To Lura’s astonishment a panel on the front of the Raft machine lit up, and she heard a voice, carried through the thick dead air, muffled by the whale’s skin: ‘Operational.’
The riders quailed back in superstitious awe.
Otho looked back at Lura. ‘Well, here we are. What now?’
Pesten said, ‘Coton said we have to work on the machine. How can we get to it?’
Lura said, ‘If we go outside—’
‘You’ll be dead in heartbeats,’ Otho said. Lura saw a kind of resentment cloud his face. ‘I’ll have the whale swallow the machine. Then, when it’s sealed up in her gut, we’ll cut it out. This is going to hurt her. You’d better hope it’s worth it, tree girl, because if it’s not, I’ll cut you. Come on, baby. It won’t be so bad.’
He worked his goads, and the whale groaned and shuddered as its face was driven towards the strange old machine.
12
‘We’re in the Marshal’s flitter, deep in the system of the neutron star, Lura. Th
ere isn’t much to see. The neutron star is a dull ember, but its huge density twists space. Vala said that if you tried to measure pi by dividing the star’s circumference by its diameter, you’d be out by about ten per cent. I’m not sure what that means . . . We’ve already done some close passes around the star. I thought I could feel the tides, and the hull groaned—’
‘That’s gravity, Coton!’
‘Yes. Which shapes your world. It’s all so strange. When I look at the neutron star I can’t believe that there are people down there, inside it – or anyhow, Vala says, they feel like they’re people, even though they are made of nuclear material and you could fit thousands of them on your thumbnail.
‘But there’s more, Lura. There is life outside the star too, in knots in the magnetic field, blobs of plasma with internal structure. You can barely see them with the naked eye, but they’re very clear in Vala’s instruments. They’re yet another kind of Weaponised people. Nobody knows why they were spun out of magnetism. Vala says maybe they came here as a refuge. When we make our approaches they cluster close to the ship, and they send signals – a kind of screech, which Vala hasn’t managed to decipher yet. They’re trying to talk to us.’
‘Can you help them?’
‘I don’t know. Not today.’
‘And how are you, Coton? Are you sleeping well?’
‘The gravity dreams are too vivid for that. Spacetime is stretched here, and my brain is bathed in gravitons and sterile neutrinos . . . It’s better to stay awake, if I can. And when I do, I can hear you so clearly now.’
‘Coton – are you afraid? After all, it’s your head they’re going to use, if I understand you, to save me. And then those who will follow me. The thing in your head, the only machine they have that’s powerful enough to bring me across . . .’
‘I try not to be afraid. I trust my grandmother.’
‘If all this fails – or if you decide you don’t want to do this after all, Coton, and I’ll understand – it will still have been worth it. Even if we can’t come home, at least you’ll know our story.’
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