Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring

by Stephen Baxter

  Two humans hung in the Air some distance from the caravan. They seemed to be waiting for Rauc and Dura; as the women approached they called something and set off through the Air to greet them. It was a man and a woman, Dura saw. They were both around the same age as Rauc and Dura, and they wore identical, practical-looking loose vests equipped with dozens of pockets from which bits of rope and tools protruded.

  Rauc rushed forward and embraced the man. Dura and the lumberjack woman hung back, waiting awkwardly. The woman was slim, strong-looking, with tough-looking, weathered skin; she - and the man, evidently Rauc’s husband Brow - looked much more like upfluxers than any hinterland or City folk Dura had met up to now.

  Rauc and Brow broke their embrace, but they stayed close with their arms linked together. Rauc pulled Brow towards Dura. ‘Brow, here’s a friend from the farm. Dura. She’s an upfluxer . . .’

  Brow turned to Dura with a look of surprised interest; his gaze flickered over her. He resembled Rauc quite closely. His body was lean, strong-looking under its vest, and his narrow face was kindly. ‘An upfluxer? How do you come to be working on a ceiling-farm?’

  Dura forced herself to smile. ‘It’s a long story.’

  Rauc squeezed Brow’s arm. ‘She can tell you later.’

  Brow rubbed his nose, still staring at Dura. ‘We see upfluxers sometimes. In the distance. When we’re working in the far upflux, right at the edge of the hinterland. You see, the further upflux you go towards the wild forests, the better the trees grow. But . . .’ He stopped, embarrassed.

  ‘But the more dangerous it gets?’ Dura maintained her smile, determined for once to be tolerant. ‘Well, don’t worry. I don’t bite.’

  They laughed, but it was forced.

  Rauc introduced the woman with Brow. She was called Kae, and she and Rauc embraced. Dura observed them curiously, trying to make sense of their relationship. There was a stiffness between Rauc and Kae, a wariness; and yet their embrace seemed genuine - as if on some level, beneath the surface strain, they shared a basic sympathy for each other.

  Brow tugged at Rauc. ‘Come and see the others; they’ve missed you. We’re going to eat shortly.’ He glanced at Dura. ‘Will you join us?’

  The woman Kae approached Dura with brisk friendliness. ‘Dura, let’s leave these two alone for a while. I’ll show you around the caravan . . . I don’t suppose you’ve met people like us before . . .’

  Dura and Kae Waved side by side along the length of the caravan. Kae pointed out features of the caravan and described how it worked in a brisk, matter-of-fact way, her talk laced with endless references to Dura’s assumed ignorance. Dura had long since grown tired of being treated as an amusing freak by these Parz folk, but - for today - she bit back the acid replies which seemed to come so easily to her. This woman, Kae, didn’t mean any harm; she was simply trying to be kind to a stranger.

  Maybe I’m learning to look beneath the surface of people, Dura wondered. Not to react to trivia. She smiled at herself. Maybe she was growing up at last.

  The chain of trunks slid through the Air at about half an easy Waving speed. There were teams of harnessed Air-pigs, their harness sets fixed - not to Air-cars - but to the rope links in the chain of trees. The pigs squealed and snorted as they hauled at their restraints of leather. Humans, some of them children, tended the animals. The pigs were fed bowls of mashed-up Crust-tree leaf, and their harnesses were endlessly adjusted to keep the teams hauling in the same direction, along the long line of trunks.

  People hailed Kae as she passed, and they glanced curiously at Dura. Dura guessed there must be a hundred people travelling with this caravan.

  The women paused to watch one team being broken up. The animals were released from their harnesses, but they were still restrained by ropes fixed to pierced fins. The animals were led away to be tied up in another part of the caravan to rest, while a fresh team was fixed into place.

  Dura frowned at this. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to stop the caravan, rather than try to change the pigs over in flight?’

  Kae laughed. ‘Hardly. Dura, when the caravan is assembled, back on the edge of the upflux, it takes several days, usually, for the pig-teams to haul it up to speed. And once this mass of wood is moving, it’s much easier to maintain its motion than to keep stopping and starting it. Do you see?’

  Dura sighed inwardly. ‘I know what momentum is. So you don’t even stop when you sleep?’

  ‘We sleep in shifts. We sleep tied up to nets and cocoons fixed to the trunks themselves.’ Kae pointed to the nearest pig-team. ‘We rotate the pigs in flight. It isn’t so difficult to steer a caravan; all you have to do is follow the vortex lines downflux until you get to the South Pole . . . Dura, a caravan like this never stops moving, once it sets off from the edge of the hinterland. Not until it’s within sight of Parz itself. Then the pig-teams are turned around, and the caravan’s broken up to be taken into the City.’

  Dura tried to envisage the distance from the upflux to Parz. ‘But at this speed it must take months to reach the City.’

  ‘A full year, generally.’

  ‘A year?’ Dura frowned. ‘But how can the City wait that long for lumber?’

  ‘It can’t. But it doesn’t have to.’ Kae was smiling, but there didn’t seem to be any impatience in her tone at Dura’s slowness. ‘At any time, there’s a whole stream of caravans like this, heading for the City from all around the circumference of the hinterland. From the point of view of Parz there’s a steady flow of the wood it needs.’

  ‘Rauc knew on exactly which day to come down to the caravan. In fact, you and Brow were waiting to greet us.’

  ‘Yes. We were on time. We always are, Dura; all the caravans are, right across the hinterland. It’s all carefully planned.’

  Dura thought of dozens, hundreds perhaps, of caravans like this, endlessly converging on Parz with their precious lumber . . . and all on time. She felt awed at the idea of humans being able to plan and act systematically on such a scale, and with such precision.

  They moved on along the length of the caravan. In some places the trunks had been opened up to expose the green glow of the wood’s nuclear-burning core. Humans moved around the glowing spots and circles, purposeful and busy. There were nets and lengths of rope trailing from the trunks, and Dura saw sleep cocoons, tools, clothes, food bales tucked into the nets. In one place there was a little clutch of infants and small children, safely confined inside a fine-meshed net.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘the caravan’s like a little City in itself. A City on the move. There are whole families here.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Kae smiled, a little sadly. ‘But the difference is, it’s a City that will be broken up in another few months, when we get to Parz. And we’ll be shipped back to the hinterland in cars, to start work on another.’

  They passed another netful of sleeping children.

  Dura asked gently, ‘Why doesn’t Rauc travel with the caravan? With Brow?’

  Kae stiffened slightly. ‘Because she gets better pay where she is, doing coolie-work for Qos Frenk. They have a kid. Did she tell you? She and Brow are having her put through school in Parz itself. They have to work like this, to afford the fees.’

  Dura let herself drift to a stop in the Air. ‘So Rauc is on a ceiling-farm in the hinterland, her child is in that wooden box at the Pole, and Brow is lost somewhere in the upflux with the lumber caravans. And if they’re lucky they meet - what? once a year?’ She thought of the Mixxaxes, also constrained to spend so much of their time apart, and for much the same motives. ‘What kind of life is that, Kae?’

  Kae drew away. ‘You sound as if you disapprove, Dura.’ She waved a hand. ‘Of all of this. The way we live our lives. Well, we can’t all live as toy savages in the upflux, you know.’ She bit her lip, but pressed on. ‘This is the way things are. Rauc and Brow are doing the best they can, for their daughter. And if you want to know how they feel about so much separation, you should ask them.’

 
Dura said nothing.

  ‘Life is complex for us - more than you can imagine, perhaps. We all have to make compromises.’

  ‘Really? And what’s your compromise, Kae?’

  Kae’s eyes narrowed. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s find the others. It must be time to eat.’

  They worked their way back along the complicated linear community in stiff silence.

  A dozen people had gathered, close to the trunk of one of the great severed trees at the heart of the caravan. A Wheel design had been cut into the trunk: neat, five-spoked, large enough to curve around the trunk’s cylindrical form. Small bowls of food had been jammed into the glowing trenches of the design.

  The people anchored themselves to the trunk itself, or to ropes and sections of net dangling from the trunk, arranging themselves around the glow of the nuclear fire. Occasionally one of them reached into the fire and drew out a bowl.

  Dura joined the group a little nervously. But she was greeted by neutral, even friendly nods. With their nomadic lives, criss-crossing the hinterland, these caravanners must be as used to accepting strangers as anyone in the huge, sprawling hinterland around Parz.

  She found a short length of rope and wrapped it around her arm. The rope, leading to the tree trunk, hauled at her with a steady pressure. So, she realized, she had become part of the caravan, bound to it and swept along by its immense momentum. She glanced around at the group. Their faces, their relaxed bodies in their practical vests, formed a rough hemispherical shell over the exposed wood core. The green glow underlit their faces and limbs and cast soft light into their eyecups. Dura felt comfortable - accepted here - and she drifted closer to the warmth of the nuclear fire.

  She spotted Rauc and Brow, huddled together on the far side of the little group. Rauc waved briefly to her, but quickly returned her attention to her husband. Glancing around discreetly, Dura saw that most of the party had separated out into couples, bonded loosely by conversation. Alone, she turned to stare into the steady glow of the fire.

  There was a tap on her arm. She turned. Kae had settled into place next to her. She was smiling. ‘Will you eat?’

  Dura couldn’t help but glance around surreptitiously. There seemed to be no one with Kae, no partner. There was no sign of Kae’s earlier flash of hostility - she had the impression that there was a core of deep unhappiness in Kae, hidden not far beneath the surface. She smiled back, eager to show good grace. ‘Thanks. I will.’

  Kae reached towards the fire-trenches cut into the wood. She drew out one of the bowls embedded there, taking care to keep her fingers away from the hot wood itself. The bowl was a small globe carved of wood, and it held food, a dark brown, irregular mass. She held the bowl out to Dura.

  Dura reached into the bowl and poked at the food tentatively. It was hot to the touch. She took hold of it and drew it out. The surface was furry, but the furs were singed to a crisp, and they crackled as she squeezed.

  She looked at Kae doubtfully. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Try it first.’ Kae looked sly in the green underglow.

  Dura picked at the fur. ‘The whole thing?’

  ‘Just bite into it.’

  Dura shrugged, raised the lump briskly, opened her mouth wide and bit into the fur. The surface was elastic, difficult to pierce with her teeth, and the furs tickled the roof of her mouth. Then the skin broke, and bits of hot, sticky meat spurted over her mouth and chin. She spluttered, but she wiped her face and swallowed. The stuff was rich, warm, meaty. She took a bite from the skin and chewed it slowly. It was tough and without much flavour. Then she sucked at the remaining meat inside the shell. There was a hard inner core which she discarded.

  ‘It’s good,’ she said at last. ‘What is it?’

  Kae let the empty bowl hang in the Air; she poked at it with her forefinger and watched it roll in the Air. ‘Spin-spider egg,’ she said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t recognize it. But it’s the only way to eat it. It’s actually a delicacy, in some parts of the hinterland. There’s even a community on the edge of the wild forest who cultivate spiders, to get the eggs. Very dangerous, but very profitable. But you have to know how to treat the eggs, to bring out the flavour.’

  ‘I don’t think I would have recognized this as a spider egg at all.’

  ‘It has to be collected when freshly laid - when the young spider hasn’t yet formed, and there’s just a sort of mush inside the egg. The hard part in the centre is the basis of the creature’s exoskeleton; the young spider grows into its skeleton, consuming the nutrient.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me,’ Dura said dryly.

  Kae laughed, and opened up a sack at her waist. She drew out a slice of beercake. ‘Here; have some of this. In Parz, there’s a good market for exotic deep-hinterland produce like that. We make a good side-profit from it. Now. How about some Air-pig meat?’

  ‘All right. Please. And then you can tell me how you came to join these lumber caravans.’

  ‘Only if you tell me how you ended up here, so far from the upflux . . .’

  With food warm inside her, and with the exhilarating buzz of beercake filling her head, Dura told Kae her tangled story; and a little later, in the steady glow of the nuclear-fire Wheel, she repeated her tale for the rest of the lumberjacks, who listened intently.

  The food globes, nestling in the fire trenches, were finished. The conversation gradually subsided, and Dura sensed that the gathering was coming to an end.

  Rauc drew her hand from her husband’s, and pulled forward, alone, into the centre of the little group. She faced the Wheel cut into the tree trunk in silence.

  The last trickles of conversation died. Dura watched, puzzled. The atmosphere was changing - becoming more solemn, sadder. The lumberjacks drew away from each other, their postures stiffening in the Air. Dura glanced at Kae’s face. The lumberjack’s eyecups were wide, illuminated by the fire-glow, fixed on Rauc.

  Slowly Rauc began to speak. Her words consisted of names - all of them unknown to Dura - recited in a steady monotone. Rauc’s voice was tired, quiet, but it seemed to enfold the intent gathering. Dura listened to the lulling, rhythmic chant of names as it went on, for heartbeat after heartbeat, read evenly by Rauc to the great Wheel carved into the wood.

  These were the names of victims, Dura realized slowly. Victims of what? Of cruelty, of disease, of starvation, of accident; they were the names of the dead, remembered now in this simple ceremony.

  Some of the names must go back generations, she thought, their deaths so ancient that all details had been forgotten. But the names remained, preserved by this gentle, graceful Wheel cult.

  And people who lived in the sky could have no other memorial than words.

  At last the list came to a close. Rauc hung in the Air before the fading glow of the Wheel trenches, her face empty. Then she stirred and looked around at the faces watching her, as if waking up. She Waved back to her husband.

  The group broke up. Brow enfolded his wife in his arms and led her away. All around the group, couples bid farewells and drifted off.

  Dura observed Kae surreptitiously. The woman was watching Brow and Rauc, her expression blank. She became aware of Dura. She smiled, but her voice sounded strained. ‘I’ve the feeling you’re judging me again.’

  ‘No. But I think I understand your compromises now.’

  Kae shrugged. ‘We’re together, Brow and I, for most of the time. Rauc knows it, and has to live with that. But Brow - loves - Rauc. This day with her is worth a hundred with me. And I have to live with that. We all have to compromise, Dura. Even you.’

  Dura thought of Esk, long dead now, and a similar painful triangle. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We all have to compromise.’

  Kae offered her a place to sleep, somewhere in the tangle of nets and ropes that comprised this strange, linear City. Dura refused, smiling.

  She said farewell to Kae. The lumberjack nodded, and they regarded each other with a strange, calm understanding.

  Dura pushed away from the tr
unk and kicked at the Air, Waving for the ceiling-farm and her secure, private little nest.

  The caravan spread out beneath her, Wheel-shaped fires burning in a dozen places.

  13

  Accompanied by a nervous-looking nurse from the Hospital of the Common Good, the injured old upfluxer diffidently entered the Palace Garden. When Muub spotted him he beckoned to the nurse - over the heads of curious courtiers - that she should bring the upfluxer to join him at the Fount. Then he turned back to the slow ballet of the superfluid fountain.

  The Garden was a crown perched atop Parz City, an expensive setting for the Palace of the City Committee. The Garden had been established generations before by one of the predecessors of Hork IV. But it had been the particular genius of the current Chair, and his fascination for the natural world around him, that had made this place into the wonder it was. Now it was a lavish park, with exotic plants and animals from all around the Mantle brought together in an orderly, tasteful display. The low - but extravagant - buildings which made up the Palace itself were studded around the Park, gleaming like Corestuff jewels set in rich cloth. Courtiers drifted through the Garden in little knots, huddling like groups of brightly coloured animals.

  Muub was no lover of the great outdoors, but he relished the Garden. He tilted back his stiff neck, looking up into the yellow-gold Air. To be here beneath the arching, sparkling vortex lines of the Pole - and yet securely surrounded by the works of man - was a fulfilling, refreshing experience. It seemed to strengthen his orderly heart that the Garden was an artifact, a museum of tamed nature - but an artifact which stretched for no less than a square centimetre around him . . . The Garden was enough to make one believe that man was capable of any achievement.

  He ran a discreet doctor’s eye over the approaching upfluxer. Adda was recovering well but he could still barely move without assistance. Both his lower legs were encased in splints, and his chest was swathed in bandages; a cast of carved wood enclosed his right shoulder. His head, too, was a mass of strapped-up cloth, and an eye-leech patiently fed in the corner of the old fellow’s only working eye.