Raft

by Stephen Baxter

  For perhaps thirty minutes the whale cut a path through the cloud of plate creatures... and then something fast moved at the rim of Rees's peripheral vision. He twisted, peering.

  There was a blur, something red and dense that shot across the sky. Now another, and a third; and now a whole flock of them, raining through the air like missiles. The things descended on the shoal of plate creatures in a great, frenzied blur of motion and blood; when they moved on they left behind a cloud of blood and meat scraps—

  —and one of the blurs flew at Rees's face. He cried out and flinched backwards, almost losing his grip on the cartilage mask; then he steadied himself and stared back at the creature.

  It had come to a halt mere yards before him. It was little more than a flying mouth. A red stump of a body, limbless, perhaps two yards long, was fronted by a circular maw wider than Rees could reach. Eyes like beads clustered round the mouth, which was ringed by long teeth, needle points turned inwards. Now the mouth closed, the flesh stretching over a rudimentary bone structure, until teeth met in a grind of white flashes.

  Rees could almost imagine this sky wolf licking its lips as it studied him.

  But the eyes of the whale fixed the wolf with a haughty glare, and after a few seconds the wolf shot away to join its companions amid the easier meat of the plate creatures.

  Apparently satiated, the whale surged out of the cloud of plates and into clear air. Looking back, Rees could see the sky wolves continue to feast on the hapless plates.

  The sky wolves were creatures of children's tales; Rees had never encountered one before. No doubt, like uncounted other species of Nebula flora and fauna, the plates and wolves were careful to avoid the homes of man. Was he the first human to see such a sight? And would the Nebula die before mankind could explore the marvels this strange universe had to offer?

  A heavy depression fell upon Rees, and he pressed his face against the inner face of the whale.

  The whale forged ever deeper into the heart of the Nebula; the air outside grew darker.

  * * *

  Rees woke from a dream of falling.

  His back was pressed against the inner face of the whale, his hands locked around folds of cartilage; cautiously he uncurled his fingers and worked the stiff joints.

  What had woken him? He scanned the cavernous interior of the whale. Shafts of starlight still swept through the body like torch beams—

  —but, surely, more slowly than before. Was the whale coming to rest?

  He turned to look out of the whale's face... and felt a tingle of wonder at the base of his skull. Peering in at him, not a dozen yards from where he stood, were the three eyes of a second whale. Its face was pressed to that of "his" whale, and he saw how the mouths of the two vast creatures worked in sympathetic patterns, almost as if they were speaking to each other.

  Now the other whale peeled away, its flukes beating, and the view ahead cleared. Again wonder surged through Rees, causing him to gasp. Beyond the second whale was another, side on, forging through the air — and beyond that another, and another; as far as Rees's eyes could see, above him and below him, there was a great array of whales which swam through the Nebula. The school must have been spread through cubic miles: the more distant of them were like tiny lanterns illuminated by starlight.

  Like a great, pinkish river, the whales were all streaming toward the Core.

  From behind Rees there was a low grind, as if some great machine were stirring. Turning, he saw that the joint connecting the main body of the whale to its fluke section was swivelling; bones and muscles the size of men hauled at the mass of turning flesh. Soon the whale was banking around a wide arc, its flukes beating purposefully. The whale's rotation increased once more, turning the school of whales into a kaleidoscope of whirling flukes; and at last the whale settled into a place in the vast migration.

  For hours the school forged on into increasing darkness. The stars at these depths were older, dimmer, their proximity increasing as the Core neared. Rees made out two stars so close they almost touched: their tired fires were drawn out in great mounds, and they whirled around each other in a pirouette seconds long. Later the whales passed a massive star, miles across; its fusion processes seemed exhausted, but the iron of its surface, compressed by gravity, gave off a dull, somber glow. The surface was a place of constant motion: every few minutes a portion would subside, leaving a crater perhaps yards wide and a spray of molten particles struggling a few feet into the air. Smaller stars circled the giant in orbits of several minutes, and Rees was reminded of Hollerbach's orrery: here was another "solar system" model, made not of metal beads but of stars...

  The school reached another collection of stars bound by gravity; but this time there was no central giant: instead a dozen small stars, some still burning, whirled through a complex, chaotic dance. At one moment it seemed two stars must collide... but no; they passed no more than yards apart, spun around and hurtled off in new directions. The motion of the star family showed no structure, no periodicity — and Rees, who in his time on the Raft had studied the chaotic aspects of the three-body problem, was not surprised.

  Still the gloom deepened. A gathering blackness ahead told Rees they were nearing the Core. He remembered the Telescopic journey into the Nebula he had taken at the time of the revolt with that young Class Three — what was his name? Nead? Little had he dreamt that one day he would repeat the journey in person, and in such a fantastic fashion...

  Again he thought briefly of Hollerbach. What would that old man give to be seeing these wonders? A mood of contentment, perhaps brought on by his memories, settled over Rees.

  Now, as on his Telescopic journey, the mists of the Nebula's heart lifted away like veils from a face, and he began to make out the sphere of debris around the Core itself. Through breaks in the shell of rubble a pink light flickered.

  Slowly Rees began to realize he was staring at his own death. What would get him first? The hard radiation sleeting from the black hole? Perhaps the tidal effects of the Core's gravitation would tear his head and limbs from his body... or, as the softer structure of the whale disintegrated, maybe he would find himself tumbling helpless in the air, baked or asphyxiated in the oxygen-starved atmosphere.

  But still the odd mood of contentment lingered, and now he felt a slow, soothing music sound within his head. He let his muscles relax and he settled comfortably against the inner face of the whale. If this really were to be his death — well, at least it had been an interesting journey.

  And perhaps, after all, death wouldn't be the final end. He recalled some of the simple religious beliefs of the Belt. What if the soul survived the body, somehow? What if his journey were to continue on some other plane? He was struck by a vision of a stream of disembodied souls streaking out into space, their flukes slowly beating—

  Flukes? What the hell—?

  He shook his head, trying to clear it of the bizarre images and sounds. Damn it, he knew himself well enough to know that he shouldn't be facing death with an elegiac smile and a vision of the afterlife. He should be fighting, looking for a way out...

  But if these thoughts weren't his own, whose were they?

  With a shudder he turned and stared at the bulge of brain around the whale's esophagus. Could the beast be semi-telepathic? Were the images seeping into his head from that great mound, mere yards from him?

  He remembered how the chanting of the Boney hunters had attracted the whales. Perhaps the chanting set up some sort of telepathic lure which baffled and attracted the whales. With a start he realized that the steady music in his head had the same structure, the same compelling rhythm and cyclical melodies, as the Boneys' song. It must be coming from outside him — though whether through his ears or by telepathic means he found it impossible to distinguish. So the Boneys, perhaps by chance, had found a way to make the whales believe they were swimming, not toward a slow death at the hands of tiny, malevolent humans, but toward—

  What? Where did these whales,
swimming to the Core, think they were going, and why were they so happy to be going there?

  There was only one way to find out. He quailed at the thought of opening his mind to further violation; but he fixed his hands tightly around the cartilage, closed his eyes, and tried to welcome the bizarre images.

  Again the whales streaked into the air. He tried to observe the scene as if it were a photograph before him. Were these things really whales? Yes; but somehow their bulk had been reduced drastically, so that they became pencil-shaped missiles soaring against minimal air resistance to... where? He struggled, compressing his eyes with the back of one hand, but it wouldn't come. Well, wherever it was, "his" whale felt nothing but delight at the prospect.

  If he couldn't see the destination, what about the source?

  Deliberately he lowered his head. The image in his mind panned down, as if he were tracking a Telescope across the sky.

  And he saw the source of the whales' flight. It was the Core.

  He opened gritty eyes. So the creatures were not plunging to their deaths; somehow they were going to use the Core to gain enormous velocities, enough to send them hurtling out—

  —out, he realized with a sudden burst of insight, of the Nebula itself.

  The whales knew the Nebula was dying. And, in this fantastic fashion, they were migrating; they would abandon the fading ruin of the Nebula and cross space to a new home. Perhaps they had done this dozens, hundreds of times before; perhaps they had spread among the nebulae in this way for hundreds of thousands of shifts...

  And what the whales could do, surely man could emulate. A great wave of hope crashed over Rees; he felt the blood burn in his cheeks.

  The Core was very near now; shafts of hellish light glared through the shell of debris, illuminating the rubble. Ahead of him he could see whales expelling air through their mouths in great moist plumes; their bodies contracted like slowly collapsing balloons.

  The rotation of Rees's whale slowed. Soon it would enter the deepening throat of the Core's gravity well... and surely Rees would die. As rapidly as it had grown his bubble of hope disintegrated, wiping away the last traces of his false contentment. He had perhaps minutes to live, and locked in his doomed head was the secret of the survival of his race.

  A howl of despair broke from his throat, and his hands clenched convulsively around the cartilage of the face.

  The whale shuddered.

  Rees stared unbelieving at his hands. Up to now the whale had shown no more awareness of his presence than would he of an individual microbial parasite. But if his physical actions had not disturbed the whale, perhaps his flood of despair had impacted on that vast, slow brain a few yards away...

  And perhaps there was a way out of this.

  He closed his eyes and conjured up faces. Hollerbach, Jaen, Sheen, Pallis tending his forest; he let the agony of their anticipated deaths, his longing to return to and to save his people flood through him and focus into a single, hard point of pain. He physically hauled at the whale's face, as if by brute force he could drag the great creature from its path into the Core.

  A monstrous sadness assailed Rees now, a pleading that this human infection should leave the whale be to follow its herd to safety. Rees felt as if he were drowning in sorrow. He fixed on a single image: the wonder on the face of the young Third, Nead, as he had watched the beauty of the Nebula's rim unfold in the Telescope monitor; and the whale shuddered again, more violently.

  11

  THE ASSAULT OF THE MINE craft on the Raft had been under way for only thirty minutes, but already the air around the Platform was filled with the cries of wounded.

  Pallis crawled through the foliage of his tree, working feverishly at the fire bowls. A glance through the leaves showed him that his blanket of smoke was even and thick. The tree rose smoothly; he felt a warming professional satisfaction — despite the situation.

  He raised his head. The dozen trees of his flight were arrayed in a wide, leafy curve which matched the arc of the Raft a hundred yards above: they were just below the Platform, according to his charts of the underside. His trees rose as steadily as if attached by rods of iron; in a few minutes they would sweep over the Raft's horizon.

  He could see the nearer pilots as they worked at their fires, their thin faces grim.

  "Can't we speed it up?" Nead stood before him, his face stretched with anxiety and tension.

  "Keep at your work, lad."

  "But can't you hear them?" The young man, blinking away tears, shook a fist toward the thin battle noise drifting down from the Platform.

  "Of course I can." Pallis willed the temper to subside from his scarred mask of a face. "But if we go off half-cocked we'll get ourselves killed. Right? On the other hand, if we stick to our formation, our plan, we've a chance of beating the buggers. Think about it, Nead; you used to be a Scientist, didn't you?"

  Nead wiped his eyes and nose with the palm of his hand. "Only Third Class."

  "Nevertheless, you've been trained to use your brain. So come on, man; there's a job of work to be done here and I'm relying on you to do it. Now then, I think those bowls near the trunk need restocking..."

  Nead returned to work; for a few moments Pallis watched him. Nead's frame was gaunt, his shoulder blades and elbows prominent; his Scientist's coverall had been patched so many times it was barely recognizable as a piece of cloth, let alone a uniform. When his eyes caught Pallis's they were black-ringed.

  Nead was barely seventeen thousand shifts old. By the Bones, Pallis thought grimly, what are we doing to our young people?

  If only he could believe in his own damn pep talks he might feel better.

  The flight swept out of the shadow of the Raft, and leaves blazed golden-brown in the sudden starlight. Pallis could feel the tree's sap churn through its branches; its rotation increased like an eager skitter's and it seemed to leap up at the star which hung in the Raft's sky.

  The Rim was mere yards above him now. He felt a growl building in his throat, dark and primeval. He raised a fist above his head; the other pilots waved their arms in silent salute.

  ...And the line of trees soared over the Platform.

  A panorama of blood and flames unfolded before Pallis. People ran everywhere. The deck was crowded with blazing awnings and shelters; where the roofs had been blasted away Pallis could see papers burning in great heaps. The sudden downwash from the trees' branches caused the fires to flicker and belch smoke.

  Three mine craft — iron plates fitted with jets — hovered a dozen yards above the Platform. Their jets spat live steam; Pallis saw Raft men squirm, the flesh blistering away from incautious limbs. Miners, two or three to a craft, lay belly down on the plates, dropping bottles which bloomed fire like obscene flowers.

  This was the worst assault yet. Previously the miners had targeted the sites of the supply machines — their main objective — and had largely been beaten off, with low casualties on either side. But this time they were striking at the heart of the Raft's government.

  There was little sign of organized defense. Even Pallis's flight had been near the end of its patrol of the underside when the miners attacked; if not for a pilot's sharp eyes the Raft might have been unable to mount any real counter-thrust. But at least the Platform's occupants were fighting back. Spears and knives lanced up at the hovering plate craft, forcing the miners to cower behind their flying shields—

  —until, as Pallis watched, one spear looped over a craft and made a lucky strike, driving through a miner's shoulder. The man stared at the bloody tip protruding from his muscle, grabbed it with his good hand, and began to scream.

  The craft, undirected, tipped.

  The other occupants of the craft called out and tried to reach the controls; but within seconds the plate, swaying, had fallen to within a few feet of the deck. Raft men braved live steam to force their way to the craft; a hundred hands grabbed its rim and the steam jets sputtered and died. The miners were hauled, screaming, from the plate, and were sub
merged by the flailing arms of the Raft men.

  Now the tree flight was perhaps a dozen yards above the Rim and was noticed for the first time by the combatants. A ragged cheer spread through the chaotic ranks of the defenders; the miners turned their heads and their faces went slack. Pallis felt a crude pride as he imagined how this awesome dawn of wood and leaves must look to the simple Belt folk.

  Pallis turned to Nead. "Almost time," he murmured. "Are you ready?"

  Nead stood by the trunk of the tree. He held a bottle of fuel; now he lit the wick with a crude match and held the burning lint before his face. His eyes were deep with hatred. "Oh, I'm ready," he said.

  Shame surged through Pallis.

  He turned to the battle. "All right, lad," he said briskly. "On my count. Remember, if you can't hit a miner douse your flame; we're not here to bomb our own people." The tree swept over the mêlée; he saw faces turn up to his shadow like scorched skitter flowers. The nearest plate ship was mere yards away. "Three... two..."

  "Pallis!"

  Pallis turned sharply. One of the other pilots stood balancing on the trunk of his tree, his hands cupped to his mouth. He turned and pointed skywards. Two more mine craft flew above him, their ragged edges silhouetted against the sky. Squinting, Pallis could make out miners grinning down at him, the glint of glass in their hands; the miners were obviously trying to get above his trees.