Raft

by Stephen Baxter

He dropped out of the mist and the star kernel was revealed. It was a porous ball of iron fifty yards wide, visibly scarred by the hands and the machines of men. The guide cable — and its siblings, spread evenly around the Belt — scraped along the iron equator at a speed of a few feet each second.

  His descent slowed; he imagined the winch four hundred yards above him straining to hold him against the star's clutching pull. Weight built up more rapidly now, climbing to its chest-crushing peak of five gees. The wheels of the chair began to rotate, whirring; then, cautiously, they kissed the moving iron surface. There was a bump which knocked the breath out of him. The cable disengaged rapidly, whipping backwards and away through the mist. The chair rolled slowly to a halt, carrying Rees a few yards from the trail of the cable.

  For a few minutes Rees sat in the silence of the deserted star, allowing his breathing to adjust. His neck, back and legs all seemed comfortable in their deep padding, with no circulation-cutting folds of flesh or cloth. He lifted his right hand cautiously; it felt as if bands of iron encased his forearm, but he could reach the small control pad set into the chair arm.

  He turned his head a few degrees to left and right. His chair sat isolated in the center of an iron landscape. Thick rust covered the surface, scoured by valleys a few inches deep and pitted by tiny craters. The horizon was no more than a dozen yards away; it was as if he sat at the crest of a dome. The Belt, glimpsed through the layer of cloud around the star, was a chain of boxes rolling through the sky, its cables hauling the cabins and workshops through a full rotation every five minutes.

  Rees had often worked through in his head the sequence of events which had brought this spectacle into being. The star must have reached the end of its active life many centuries earlier, leaving a slowly spinning core of white-hot metal. Islands of solid iron would have formed in that sea of heat, colliding and gradually coalescing. At last a skin must have congealed around the iron, thickening and cooling. In the process bubbles of air had been trapped, leaving the sphere riddled with caverns and tunnels — and so making it accessible to humans. Finally the oxygen-laden air of the Nebula had worked on the shining iron, coating it with a patina of brown oxide.

  The star kernel was probably cold all the way to its center by now, but Rees liked to imagine he could feel a faint glow of heat from the surface, the last ghost of star fire —

  The silence was lanced through by a whine, far above him. Something glittering raced down through the air and hit the rust with a small impact a yard from Rees's chair. It left a fresh crater a half-inch across; a wisp of steam struggled to rise against the star pull.

  Now more of the little missiles fizzed through the air; the star rang with impacts.

  Rain. Metamorphosed by its fall through a five-gee gravity well into a hail of steaming bullets.

  Rees cursed and reached for his control panel. The chair rolled forward, each bump and valley in the landscape jarring the breath from him. He was a few yards still from the nearest entrance to the mine works. How could he have been so careless as to descend to the surface — alone — when there was danger of rain? The shower thickened, slamming into the surface all around him. He cringed, pinned to his chair, waiting for the shower to reach his head and exposed arms.

  The mouth of the mine works was a long rectangle cut in the rust. His chair rolled with agonizing slowness down a shallow slope into the depths of the star. At last the roof of the works was sliding over his head; the rain, safely excluded, spanged into the rust.

  After pausing for a few minutes to allow his rattling heart to rest, Rees rolled on down the shallow, curving slope; Nebula light faded, to be replaced by the white glow of a chain of well-spaced lamps. Rees peered up at them as he passed. No one knew how the fist-sized globes worked. Apparently the lamps had glowed here unattended for centuries — most of them, anyway; here and there the chain was broken by the dimness of a failed lamp. Rees passed through the pools of darkness with a shudder; typically his mind raced through the years to a future in which miners would have to function without the ancient lamps.

  After fifty yards of passageway — a third of the way around the circumference of the star — the light of the Nebula and the noise of the rain had disappeared. He reached a wide, cylindrical chamber, its roof about ten yards beneath the surface of the star. Rust-free walls gleamed in the lamplight. This was the entrance to the mine proper; the walls of the chamber were broken by the mouths of five circular passageways which led on into the heart of the star. The Moles — the digging machines — cut and refined the iron in the passageways, returning it in manageable nodules to the surface.

  The real function of humans down here was to supplement the limited decision-making capabilities of the digging machines — to adjust their quota, perhaps, or to direct the gouging of fresh passageways around broken-down wheelchairs. Few people were capable of more... although some miners, like Roch, were full of drunken stories about their prowess under the extreme gravity conditions.

  From one passageway came a grumbling, scraping sound. Rees turned the chair. After some minutes a blunt prow nosed into the light of the chamber, and — with painful slowness — one of the machines the miners called the Moles worked its way over the lip of the tunnel.

  The Mole was a cylinder of dull metal, some five yards long. It moved on six fat wheels. The prow of the Mole was studded with a series of cutting devices and with handlike claws which worked the star iron. The machine's back bore a wide pannier containing several nodules of freshly cut iron.

  Rees snapped: "Status!"

  The Mole rolled to a halt. It replied — as it always replied — "Massive sensor dysfunction." Its voice was thin and flat, and emanated from somewhere within its scuffed body.

  Rees often imagined that if he knew what lay behind that brief report he would understand much of what baffled him about the world.

  The Mole extended an arm from its nose. It reached to the panniers on its back and began lifting head-sized nodules down to a pile on the floor of the chamber. Rees watched it work for a few minutes. There were crude weld marks around the prow devices, the wheel axles and the points where the panniers were fixed; also, the skin of the Mole bore long, thin scars showing clearly where devices had been cut away, long ago. Rees half-closed his eyes so that he could see only the broad cylindrical shape of the Mole. What might have been fixed to those scars on the hull? With a flash of insight he imagined the jets that maintained the Belt in its orbit attached to the Mole. In his mind the components moved around, assembling and reassembling in various degrees of implausibility. Could the jets really once have been attached to the Mole? Had it once been some kind of flying machine, adapted for work down here?

  But perhaps other devices had been fixed to those scars — devices long since discarded and now beyond his imagination — perhaps the "sensors" of which the Mole spoke.

  He felt a surge of irrational gratitude to the Moles. In all his crushing universe they, enigmatic as they were, represented the only element of strangeness, of otherness; they were all his imagination had to work on. The first time he had begun to speculate that things might somewhere, sometime, be other than they were here had been a hundred shifts ago when a Mole had unexpectedly asked him whether he found the Nebula air any more difficult to breathe.

  "Mole," he said.

  An articulated metal arm unfolded from the nose of the Mole; a camera fixed on him.

  "The sky looked a bit more red today."

  The transfer of nodules was not slowed but the small lens stayed steady. A red lamp somewhere on the prow of the machine began to pulse. "Please input spectrometer data."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Rees said. "And even if I did, I haven't got a 'spectrometer.' "

  "Please quantify input data."

  "I still don't understand," Rees said patiently.

  For further seconds the machine studied him. "How red is the sky?"

  Rees opened his mouth — and hesitated, stuck for words.
"I don't know. Red. Darker. Not as dark as blood."

  The lens lit up with a scarlet glow. "Please calibrate."

  Rees imagined himself to be staring into the sky. "No, not as bright as that."

  The glow scaled through a tight spectrum, through crimson to a muddy blood color.

  "Back a little," Rees said. "...There. That's it, I think."

  The lens darkened. The lamp on the prow, still scarlet, began to glow steady and bright. Rees was reminded of the warning light on the winch equipment and felt his flesh crawl under its blanket of weight. "Mole. What does that light mean?"

  "Warning," it said in its flat voice. "Deterioration of environment life-threatening. Access to support equipment recommended."

  Rees understood "threatening," but what did the rest of it mean? What support equipment? "Damn you, Mole, what are we supposed to do?"

  But the Mole had no reply; patiently it continued to unload its pannier.

  Rees watched, thoughts racing. The events of the last few shifts came like pieces of a puzzle to the surface of his mind.

  This was a tough universe for humans. The implosion had proved that. And now, if he understood any of what the Mole had said, it seemed that the redness of the sky was a portent of doom for them all, as if the Nebula itself were some vast, incomprehensible lamp of warning.

  A sense of confinement returned, its weight more crushing than the pull of the star kernel. He would never get anyone else to understand his concerns. He was just some dumb kid, and his worries were based on hints, fragments, all partially understood.

  Would he still be a kid when the end came?

  Scenes of apocalypse flashed through his head: he imagined dimming stars, thickening clouds, the very air souring and failing in his lungs—

  He had to get back to the surface, the Belt, and onwards; he had to find out more. And in all his universe there was only one place he could go.

  The Raft. Somehow he had to get to the Raft.

  With a new sense of purpose, vague but burning, he turned his chair to the exit ramp.

  2

  THE TREE WAS A WHEEL OF WOOD and foliage fifty yards wide. Its rotation slowing, it lowered itself reluctantly into the gravity well of the star kernel.

  Pallis, the tree-pilot, was hanging by hands and feet below the knotty trunk of the tree. The star kernel and its churning Belt mine were behind his back. With a critical eye he peered up through the mat of foliage at the smoke which hung raggedly over the upper branches. The layer of smoke wasn't anywhere near thick enough: he could clearly see starlight splashing through to bathe the tree's round leaves. He moved his hands along the nearest branch, felt the uncertain quivering of the fine blade of wood. Even here, at the root of the branches, he could feel the tree's turbulent uncertainty. Two imperatives acted on the tree. It strove to flee the deadly gravity well of the star — but it also sought to escape the shadow of the smoke cloud, which drove it back into the well. A skillful woodsman should have the two imperatives in fine balance; the tree should hover in an unstable equilibrium at the required distance.

  Now the tree's rotating branches bit into the air and it jerked upwards by a good yard. Pallis was almost shaken loose. A cloud of skitters came tumbling from the foliage; the tiny wheel-shaped creatures buzzed around his face and arms as they tried to regain the security of their parent.

  Damn that boy—

  With an angry, liquid movement of his arms he hauled himself through the foliage to the top side of the tree. The ragged blanket of smoke and steam hung a few yards above his head, attached tenuously to the branches by threads of smoke. The damp wood in at least half the fire bowls fixed to the branches had, he soon found, been consumed.

  And Gover, his so-called assistant, was nowhere to be seen.

  His toes wrapped around the foliage, Pallis drew himself to his full height. At fifty thousand shifts he was old by Nebula standards; but his stomach was still as flat and as hard as the trunk of one of his beloved fleet of trees, and most men would shy from the network of branch scars that covered his face, forearms and hands and flared red at moments of anger.

  And this was one of those moments.

  "Gover! By the Bones themselves, what do you think you are doing?"

  A thin, clever face appeared above one of the bowls near the rim of the tree. Gover shook his way out of a nest of leaves and came scurrying across the platform of foliage, a pack bouncing against his narrow back.

  Pallis stood with arms folded and biceps bunched. "Gover," he said softly, "I'll ask you again. What do you think you're doing?"

  Gover shoved the back of his hand against his nose, pushing the nostrils out of shape; the hand came away glistening. "I'd finished," he mumbled.

  Pallis leant over him. Gover's gaze slid over and away from the tree-pilot's eyes. "You're finished when I tell you so. And not before."

  Gover said nothing.

  "Look—" Pallis stabbed a finger at Gover's pack. "You're still carrying half your stock of wood. The fires are dying. And look at the state of the smoke screen. More holes than your damn vest. My tree doesn't know whether she's coming or going, thanks to you. Can't you feel her shuddering?

  "Now, listen, Gover. I don't care a damn for you, but I do care for my tree. You cause her any more upset and I'll have you over the rim; if you're lucky the Boneys'll have you for supper, and I'll fly her home to the Raft myself. Got that?"

  Gover hung before him, hands tugging listlessly at the ragged hem of his vest. Pallis let the moment stretch taut; then he hissed, "Now move it!"

  With a flurry of motion Gover pulled himself to the nearest pot and began hauling wood from his pack. Soon fresh billows of smoke were rising to join the depleted cloud, and the shuddering of the tree subsided.

  His exasperation simmering Pallis watched the boy's awkward movements. Oh, he'd had his share of poor assistants in the past, but in the old times most of them had been willing to learn. To try. And gradually, as hard shifts wore by, those young people had grown into responsible men and women, their minds toughening with their bodies.

  But not this lot. Not the new generation.

  This was his third flight with the boy Gover. And the lad was still as sullen and obstructive as when he'd first been assigned to the trees; Pallis would be more than glad to hand him back to Science.

  His eyes roamed around the red sky, restless. The falling stars were an array of pinpoints dwindling into the far distance; the depths of the Nebula, far below him, were a sink of murky crimson. Was this nostalgic disregard for the young of today just a symptom of ageing...? Or had people truly changed?

  Well, there was no doubt that the world had changed around him. The crisp blue skies, the rich breezes of his youth were memories now; the very air was turning into a smoky sludge, and the minds of men seemed to be turning sour with it.

  And one thing was for sure. His trees didn't like this gloom.

  He sighed, trying to snap out of his introspection. The stars kept falling no matter what the color of the sky. Life went on, and he had work to do.

  Tiny vibrations played over the soles of his bare feet, telling him that the tree was almost stable now, hovering at the lip of the star kernel's gravity well. Gover moved silently among the fire bowls. Damn it, the lad could do the job well when he was forced to. That was the most annoying thing about him. "Right, Gover, I want that layer maintained while I'm off-tree. And the Belt's a small place; I'll know if you slack. You got that?"

  Gover nodded without looking at him.

  Pallis dropped through the foliage, his thoughts turning to the difficult negotiations ahead.

  * * *

  It was the end of Rees's work shift. Wearily he hauled himself through the foundry door.

  Cooler air dried the sweat from his brow. He pulled himself along the ropes and roofs towards his cabin, inspecting his hands and arms with some interest. When one of the older workers had dropped a ladle of iron, Rees had narrowly dodged a hail of molten metal; tiny drople
ts had drifted into his flesh, sizzling out little craters which—

  A huge shadow flapped across the Belt. Air washed over his back. He looked up; and a feeling of astonishing cold settled at the base of his skull.

  The tree was magnificent against the crimson sky. Its dozen radial branches and their veil of leaves turned with a calm possession; the trunk was like a mighty wooden skull which glared around at the ocean of air.

  This was it. His opportunity to escape from the Belt...

  The supply trees were the only known means of traveling from Belt to Raft, and so after his moment of decision following the foundry implosion Rees had resolved to stow away on the next tree to visit the Belt. He had begun to hoard food, wrapping dried meat in bundles of cloth, filling cloth globes with water—

  Sometimes, during his sleep shifts, he had lain awake staring at his makeshift preparations and a thin sweat had covered his brow as he wondered if he would have the courage to take the decisive step.

  Well, the moment had come. Staring at the magnificent tree he probed at his emotions: he knew he was no hero, and he had half-expected fear to encase him like a net of ropes. But there was no fear. Even the nagging pain in his hands subsided. There was only elation; the future was an empty sky, within which his hopes would surely find room.

  He hurried to his cabin and collected his bundle of supplies, which was already lashed together; then he climbed to the outer wall of his cabin.

  A rope had uncoiled from the tree trunk and lay across the fifty yards to the Belt, brushing against the orbiting cabins. A man came shimmering confidently down the rope; he was scarred, old and muscular, almost a piece of the tree himself. Ignoring the watching Rees the man dropped without hesitation across empty air to a cabin and began to make his way around the Belt.

  Rees clung to his cabin by one hand. The rotation of the Belt carried the cabin steadily towards the tree's dangling rope; when it was a yard from him he grabbed at it and swarmed without hesitation off the Belt.