In the low-gee conditions - gravity here was about half its value near the Labs - the dance had a dreamy slowness. After a while Rees began to relax; and, eventually, he realized he was enjoying himself—
—until his legs whisked out from under him; he clattered to the Platform with a slow bump. Jaen covered her face with one hand, suppressing giggles; a circle of laughter clustered briefly around him. He got to his feet. ‘I’m sorry—’
There was a tap on his shoulder. ‘So you should be.’
He turned; there, with a broad, glinting grin, stood a tall young man with the braids of a Junior Officer. ‘Doav,’ Rees said slowly. ‘Did you trip me?’
Doav barked laughter.
Rees felt his forearm muscles bunch. ‘Doav, you’ve been an irritation to me for the last year . . .’
Doav looked baffled.
‘ . . . I mean, the last thousand shifts.’ And it was true; Rees could bear the constant sniping, cracks and cruelties of Doav and his like throughout his working day . . . but he would much prefer not to have to. And, since the incident at the Theatre, he had come to see how attitudes like Doav’s were the cause of a great deal of pain and suffering on the Raft; and, perhaps, of much more to come.
The wine-sim was like blood now, pounding in his head. ‘Cadet, if we’ve something to settle—’
Doav fixed him with a look of contempt. ‘Not here. But soon. Oh, yes; soon.’ And he turned his back and walked off through the throng.
Jaen thumped Rees’s arm hard enough to make him flinch. ‘Do you have to turn every incident into an exhibition? Come on; let’s get a drink.’ She stamped her way towards the bar.
‘Hello, Rees.’
Rees paused, allowing Jaen to slip ahead into the crush around the bar. A thin young man stood before him, hair plastered across his scalp. He wore the black braids of Infrastructure and he regarded Rees with cool appraisal.
Rees groaned. ‘Gover. I guess this isn’t to be the best shift I’ve ever had.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. I haven’t seen you since not long after my arrival.
‘Yeah, but that’s not hard to understand.’ Gover flicked delicately at Rees’s braid. ‘We move in different circles, don’t we?’
Rees, already on edge after the incident with Doav, studied Gover as coolly as he could. There were still the same sharp features, the look of petulant anger - but Gover looked more substantial, more sure of himself.
‘So you’re still skivvying for those old farts in the Labs, eh?’
‘I’m not going to respond to that, Gover.’
‘You’re not?’ Gover rubbed at his nostrils with the palm of his hand. ‘Seeing you in this toy uniform made me wonder how you see yourself now. I bet you haven’t done a shift’s work - real work - since you landed here. I wonder what your fellow rats would think of you now. Eh?’
Rees felt blood surge once more to his cheeks; the wine-sim seemed to be turning sour. There was a seed of confusion inside him. Was his anger at Gover just a way of shielding himself from the truth, that he had betrayed his origins . . .?
‘What do you want, Gover?’
Gover took a step closer to Rees. His stale breath cut through the wine fumes in Rees’s nostrils. ‘Listen, mine rat, believe it or not I want to do you a favour.’
‘What kind of favour?’
‘Things are changing here,’ Gover said slyly. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? Things won’t always be as they are now.’ He eyed Rees, evidently unwilling to go further.
Rees frowned. ‘What are you talking about? The discontents?’
‘That’s what some call them. Seekers of justice, others say.’
The noise of the revellers seemed to recede from Rees; it was as if Gover and he shared their own Raft somewhere in the air. ‘Gover, I was in the Theatre of Light, that shift. Was that justice?’
Gover’s eyes narrowed. ‘Rees, you’ve seen how the elite on this Raft keep the rest of us down - and how their obscene economic system degrades the rest of the Nebula’s human population. The time is near when they will have to atone.’
Rees stared at him. ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’
Gover bit his lip. ‘Maybe. Look, Rees, I’m taking a chance talking to you like this. And if you betray me I’ll deny we ever had this conversation.’
‘What do you want of me?’
‘There are good men in the cause. Men like Decker, Pallis—’
Rees guffawed. Decker - the huge Infrastructure worker he had encountered on his first arrival here - he could believe. But Pallis? ‘Come on, Gover.’
Gover was unruffled. ‘Damn it, Rees, you know what I think of you. You’re a mine rat. You don’t belong here, among decent people. But where you come from makes you one of us. All I’m asking is that you come along and listen to what they have to say. With your access to the Science buildings you could be . . . useful.’
Rees tried to clear his thinking. Gover was a vicious, bitter young man, and his arguments - the contradictory mixture of contempt and appeal to fellow-feeling he directed at Rees, for example - were simple-minded and muddled. But what gave Gover’s words force was their terrible truth. Part of Rees was appalled that such as Gover could so quickly disorient him - but inside him a core of anger flared up in response.
But if some revolution were to occur - if the Labs were smashed, the Officers imprisoned - what then?
‘Gover, look up.’
Gover raised his face.
‘See that star up there? If we don’t move the Raft the star will graze us. And then we’ll fry. And even if we were to survive that - look further out.’ He swept an arm around the red-stained sky. ‘The Nebula’s dying and we’ll die with it. Gover, only the Scientists, backed by the organization of the Raft, can save us from such dangers.’
Gover scowled and spat at the deck. ‘You seriously believe that? Come on, Rees. I’ll tell you something. The Nebula could support us all for a long time yet - if its resources were shared equally. And that’s all we want.’ He paused.
‘Well?’
Rees closed his eyes. Would sky wolves discuss Gover’s case as they descended on the wreck of the Raft and picked clean the bones of his children? ‘Get lost, Gover,’ he said tiredly.
Gover sneered. ‘If that’s what you want. I can’t say I’m sorry . . .’ He grinned at Rees with something approaching pure contempt. Then he slid away through the crowd.
The noise seemed to swirl around Rees, not touching him. He pushed his way through the crush to the bar and ordered straight liquor, and downed the hot liquid in one throw.
Jaen joined him and grabbed his arm. ‘I’ve been looking for you. Where . . .?’ Then she felt the bunched muscles under Rees’s jacket; and when he turned to face her, she shrank back from his anger.
6
The Scientist Second Class stood in the doorway of the Bridge. He watched the new Third Class approach and tried to hide a smile. The young man’s uniform was so obviously new, he stared with such awe at the Bridge’s silver hull, and his pallor was undisputable evidence of his Thousandth Shift celebration, which had finished probably mere hours earlier . . . The Second Class felt quite old as he remembered his own Thousandth Shift, his own arrival at the Bridge, a good three thousand shifts ago.
At least this boy had a look of inquiry about him. So many of the apprentices the Second had to deal with were sullen and resentful at best, downright contemptuous at worst; and the rates of absenteeism and dismissal were worsening. He reached out a hand as the young man approached.
‘Welcome to the Bridge,’ said Scientist Second Class Rees.
The boy - blond, with a premature streak of grey - was called Nead. He smiled uncertainly.
A bulky, grim-faced security guard stood just inside the door. He fixed Nead with a threatening stare; Rees saw how the boy quailed. Rees sighed. ‘It’s all right, lad; this is just old Forv; it’s his job to remember your face, that’s all.’ It was only recently
, Rees realized a little wistfully, that such heavy-handed security measures had come to seem necessary; with the continuing decline in food supplies, the mood on the Raft had worsened, and the severity and frequency of the attacks of the ‘discontents’ were increasing. Sometimes Rees wondered if—
He shook his head to dismiss such thoughts; he had a job to do. He walked the wide-eyed boy slowly through the Bridge’s gleaming corridors. ‘It’s enough for now if you get an idea of the layout of the place,’ he said. ‘The Bridge is a cylinder a hundred yards long. This corridor runs around its midriff. The interior is divided into three rooms - a large middle chamber and two smaller chambers towards the ends. We think that the latter were once control rooms, perhaps equipment lockers; you see, the Bridge seems to have been a part of the original Ship . . .’
They had reached one of the smaller chambers; it was stacked with books, piles of paper and devices of all shapes and sizes. Two Scientists, bent in concentration, sat cocooned in dust. Nead turned flat, brown eyes on Rees. ‘What’s this room used for now?’
‘This is the Library,’ Rees said quietly. ‘The Bridge is the most secure place we have, the best protected from weather, accident - so we keep our records here. As much as we can: one copy of everything vital, and some of the stranger artefacts that have come down to us from the past . . .’
They walked on, following the corridor to a shallow staircase set into the floor. They began to descend towards a door set in the inner wall, which led to the Bridge’s central chamber. Rees thought of warning the boy to watch his step - then decided against it, a slightly malicious humour sparkling within him.
Nead took three or four steps down - then, arms flailing, he tipped face-forward. He didn’t fall; instead he bobbed in the stairwell, turning a slow somersault. It was as if he had fallen into some invisible fluid.
Rees grinned broadly.
Nead, panting, reached for the wall. His palms flat against the metal he steadied himself and scrambled back up the steps. ‘By the Bones,’ he swore, ‘what’s down there?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s harmless,’ Rees said. ‘It caught me the first time too. Nead, you’re a Scientist now. Think about it. What happened when you went down those steps?’
The boy looked blank.
Rees sighed. ‘You passed through the plane of the Raft’s deck, didn’t you? It’s the metal of the deck that provides the Raft’s gravity pull. So here - at the centre of the Raft, and actually in its plane - there is no pull. You see? You walked into a weightless zone.’
Nead opened his mouth - then closed it again, looking puzzled.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Rees snapped. ‘And maybe, with time, you’ll even understand it. Come on.’
He led the way through the doorway to the central chamber, and was gratified to hear Nead gasp.
They had entered an airy room some fifty yards long. Most of its floor area was transparent, a single vast window which afforded a vertiginous view of the depths of the Nebula. Gaunt machines taller than men were fixed around the window. To Nead’s untutored eye, Rees reflected, the machines must look like huge, unlikely insects, studded with lenses and antennae and peering into some deep pool of air. The room was filled with a clean smell of ozone and lubricating oil; servomotors hummed softly.
There were perhaps a dozen Scientists working this shift; they moved about the machines making adjustments and jotting copious notes. And because the plane of the Raft passed over the window-floor at about waist height, the Scientists bobbed in the air like boats in an invisible pond, their centres of gravity oscillating above and below the equilibrium line with periods of two or three seconds. Rees, looking at the scene as if through new eyes, found himself hiding another grin. One small, round man had even, quite unselfconsciously, turned upside down to bring his eyes closer to a sensor panel. His trousers rode continually towards the equilibrium plane, so that his short legs protruded, bare.
They stood on a low ledge; Rees took a step down and was soon floating in the air, his feet a few inches from the window-floor. Nead lingered nervously. ‘Come on, it’s easy,’ Rees said. ‘Just swim in the air, or bounce up and down until your feet hit the deck.’
Nead stepped off the ledge and tumbled forward, slowly bobbing upright. He reminded Rees of a child entering a pool for the first time. After a few seconds a slow smile spread across the young man’s face; and soon he was skimming about the room, his feet brushing at the window below.
Rees took him on a tour around the machines.
Nead shook his head. ‘This is amazing.’
Rees smiled. ‘This equipment is among the best preserved of the Ship’s materiel. It’s as if it were unloaded only last shift . . . We call this place the Observatory. All the heavy-duty sensors are mounted here, and this is where - as a member of my Nebular physics team - you’ll be spending most of your time.’ They stopped beside a tube ten feet long and encrusted with lenses. Rees ran a palm along the instrument’s jewelled flank. ‘This baby’s my favourite,’ he said. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she? It’s a Telescope which will work at all wavelengths - including the visual. Using this we can see right down into the heart of the Nebula.’
Nead thought that over, then glanced at the ceiling. ‘Don’t we ever need to look outwards?’
Rees nodded approvingly. Good question. ‘Yes, we do. There are ways of making the roof transparent - in fact, we can opaque the floor, if we want to.’ He glanced at the instrument’s fist-sized status panel. ‘We’re in luck; there are no observations currently running. I’ll give you a quick guided tour of the Nebula. You should know most of what I’ll tell you from your studies so far, and don’t worry about the details for now . . .’ Slowly he punched a sequence of commands into the keypad mounted below the sensor. He became aware that the lad was watching him curiously. Maybe he’s never seen anyone with such rusty keyboard skills, Rees reflected, here on this Raft of a hundred supply machines—
The stab of old resentment shocked him. Never mind . . .
A disc of ceiling faded to transparency, revealing a red sky. Rees indicated a monitor plate mounted on a slim post close to the Telescope. The plate abruptly filled with darkness punctuated by fuzzy lens shapes; the lenses were all colours, from red through yellow to the purest blue. Once more Nead gasped.
‘Let’s review a few facts,’ Rees began. ‘You know we live in a Nebula, which is an ellipse-shaped cloud of gas about five thousand miles across. Every particle of the Nebula is orbiting the Core. The Raft is in orbit too, embedded in the Nebula like a fly on a spinning plate; we circle the Core every twelve shifts or so. The Belt mine is further in and only takes about nine shifts to complete its orbit. When the pilots fly between mine and Raft their trees are actually changing orbits . . . ! Fortunately the gradients in orbital speeds are so shallow out here that the velocities the trees can reach are enough for them easily to fly from one orbit to another. Of course the pilots must plan their courses carefully, to make sure the Belt mine isn’t on the other side of the Core when they arrive at the right orbit . . .
‘Here we’re looking through the Observatory roof and out of the Nebula. Normally the atmosphere shields this view from us, but the Telescope can unscramble the atmospheric scattering and show us what we’d see if the air were stripped away.’
Nead peered closer at the picture. ‘What are those blobs? Are they stars?’
Rees shook his head. ‘They’re other nebulae: some larger than ours, some smaller, some younger - the blue ones - and some older. As far as we can see with this Telescope - and that’s hundreds of millions of miles - space is filled with them.
‘All right; let’s move inwards.’ With a single keystroke the picture changed to reveal a blue-purple sky; stars glittered, white as diamonds.
‘That’s beautiful,’ Nead breathed. ‘But it can’t be in our Nebula—’
‘But it is.’ Rees smiled sadly. ‘You’re looking at the topmost layer, where the lightest gases - hydrogen and helium - separa
te out. That is where stars form. Turbulence causes clumps of higher density; the clumps implode and new stars burst to life.’ The stars, balls of fusion fire, formed dense bow waves in the thin atmosphere as they began their long, slow fall into the Nebula. Rees went on,
‘The stars shine for about a thousand shifts before burning out and dropping, as a cool ball of iron, into the Core . . . Most of them anyway; one or two of the kernels end up in stable orbits around the Core. That’s where the star mines come from.’
Nead frowned. ‘And if the path of a falling star intersects the orbit of the Raft—’
‘Then we’re in trouble, and we must use the trees to change the Raft’s orbit. Fortunately, star and Raft converge slowly enough for us to track the star on its way towards us . . .’
‘If new stars are being formed, why do people say the Nebula is dying?’
‘Because there are far fewer than before. When the Nebula was formed it was almost pure hydrogen. The stars have turned a lot of the hydrogen into helium, carbon and other heavy elements. That’s how the complex substances which support life here were formed.
‘Or rather, it’s life for us. But it’s a slow, choking death for the Nebula. From its point of view oxygen, carbon and the rest are waste products. Heavier than hydrogen, they settle slowly around the Core; the residual hydrogen gets less and less until - as today - it’s reduced to a thin crust around the Nebula.’
Nead stared at the sparse young stars. ‘What will happen in the end?’
Rees shrugged. ‘Well, we’ve observed other nebulae. The last stars will fail and die. Deprived of energy the airborne life of the Nebula - the whales, the sky wolves, the trees, and the lesser creatures they feed on - will cease to exist.’
‘Are there truly such things as whales? I thought they were just stories—’
Rees shrugged. ‘We never see them out here, but we have plenty of evidence from travellers who’ve entered the depths of the Nebula.’
‘What, as far as the Belt mine, you mean?’
Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring Page 10