Raft

by Stephen Baxter

  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, adaptability, 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 mêlée 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 syn
chronized 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 spread-eagled; 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 a 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.

  So it was over; and Decker was stranded. He turned his attention back to his opponent and began to squeeze away the man's life.

  On the abandoned Raft the killing went on for many hours.

  15

  THE CROWDED SHIP'S FIRST few hours after the fall were nearly unbearable. The air stank of vomit and urine, and people of all ages swarmed about the chamber, scrambling, shrieking and fighting.

  Rees suspected that the problem was not merely weightlessness, but also the abrupt reality of the fall itself. Suddenly to face the truth that the world wasn't an infinite disc after all — to know that the Raft really had been no more than a mote of patched iron floating in the air — seemed to have driven some of the passengers to the brink of their sanity.

  Maybe it would have been an idea to keep the windows opaqued during the launch.

  Rees spent long hours supervising the construction of a webbing of ropes and cables crisscrossing the Observatory. "We'll fill the interior with this isotropic structure," Hollerbach had advised gravely. "Make it look the same in every direction. Then it won't be quite so disconcerting when we reach the Core and the whole bloody universe turns upside down..."

  Soon the passengers were draping blankets over the ropes, fencing off small volumes for privacy. The high-technology interior of the Bridge began to take on a homely aspect as the makeshift shanty town spread; human smells, of food and children, filled the air.

  Taking a break, Rees made his way out of the crushed interior to what had formerly been the roof of the Observatory. The hull was still transparent. Rees pressed his face to the warm material and peered out, irresistibly reminded of how he had once peered out of the belly of a whale.

  After the fall from the Raft the Bridge had rapidly picked up speed and reoriented itself so that its stubby nose was pointing at the heart of the Nebula. Now it hurtled down through the air, and the Nebula had turned into a vast, three-dimensional demonstration of perspective motion. Nearby clouds shot past, middle distance stars glided toward space — and even at the limits of vision, many hundreds of miles away, pale stars slowly drifted upwards.

  The Raft had long since become a mote lost in the pink infinity above.

  The hull shuddered briefly. A soundless plume of steam erupted a few yards above Rees's head and was instantly whipped away, a sign that Gord's ramshackle attitude control system was doing its job.

  The hull felt warmer than usual against his face. The wind speed out there must be phenomenal, but the virtually frictionless material of the Bridge was allowing the air to slide harmlessly past with barely a rise in temperature. Rees's tired mind ambled down speculative alleyways. If you measured the temperature rise, he reasoned, you could probably get some kind of estimate of the hull's coefficient of friction. But, of course, you would also need some data on the material's heat conduction properties—

  "It's astonishing, isn't it?"

  Nead was at his side. The younger man cradled a sextant in his arms. Rees smiled. "What are you doing here?"

  "I'm supposed to be measuring our velocity."

  "And?"

  "We're at terminal velocity for the strength of gravity out here. I estimate we will reach the Core in about ten shifts..."

  Nead delivered his words dreamily, his attention taken up by the view; but they had an electric effect on Rees. Ten shifts... in just ten shifts he would stare at the face of the Core, and the destiny of the race would be made or lost.

  He pulled himself back to the present. "We never did get to finish your training, did we, Nead?"

  "Other events were more pressing," Nead said drily.

  "Let's find a home where we will always have time to train people properly... time, even, to stare out of the window—"

  Jaen started talking even before she reached them. "...And if you don't tell this insufferable old buffoon that he's left his sense of priorities back on the Raft, then I won't be responsible for my actions, Rees!"

  Rees groaned inwardly. Evidently his break was over. He turned; Jaen bore down on him with Hollerbach following, hauling himself cautiously through the network of ropes. The old Scientist muttered, "I don't believe I've been spoken to like that by a mere Second Class since — since—"

  Rees held his hands up. "Slow down, you two. Start from the top, Jaen. What's the problem?"

  "The problem," Jaen spat, jerking her thumb, "is this silly old fart, who—"

  "Why, you impudent—"

  "Shut up!" Rees snapped.


  Jaen, simmering, made a visible effort to calm down. "Rees. Am I or am I not in charge of the Telescope?"

  "That's my understanding."

  "And my brief is to make sure that the Navigators — and their Boney so-called assistants — get all the data they need to guide our trajectory around the Core. And that has to be our number one priority. Right?"

  Rees rubbed his nose doubtfully. "I can't argue with that..."

  "Then tell Hollerbach to keep his damn hands off my equipment!"

  Rees turned to Hollerbach, suppressing a smile. "What are you up to, Chief Scientist?"

  "Rees..." The old man wrapped his long fingers together, pulling at the loose flesh. "We have left ourselves with only one significant scientific instrument. Now, I've no wish to revisit the arguments behind the loading of this ship. Of course the size of the gene pool must come first..." He thumped one fist into his palm. "Nevertheless it is at precisely this moment of blindness that we are approaching the greatest scientific mystery of this cosmos: the Core itself—"

  "He wants to turn the Telescope on the Core," Jaen said. "Can you believe it?"

  "The understanding to be acquired by even a superficial study is incalculable."

  "Hollerbach, if we don't use that damn telescope to navigate with we might get a closer look at the Core than any of us have bargained for!" Jaen glared at Rees. "Well?"

  "Well what?"

  Hollerbach looked sadly at Rees. "Alas, lad, I suspect this little local difficulty is only the first impossible arbitration you will be called on to make."

  Rees felt confused, isolated. "But why me?"

  Jaen snapped, "Because Decker is still on the Raft. And who else is there?"

  "Who indeed?" Hollerbach murmured. "I'm sorry, Rees; I don't think you have very much choice..."

  "Anyway, what about this bloody Telescope?"