Raft

by Stephen Baxter

  "And the answer to this puzzle," Hollerbach said, "turns out to be that it probably didn't evolve here after all."

  "It migrated to the Nebula from somewhere else?"

  "That's right, tree-pilot; from some other, exhausted cloud. And now this Nebula is finished; the whales know it is time to move on. There may have been other nebulae before the predecessor of our Nebula: a whole chain of migrations, reaching back in time as far as we can see."

  "It's a marvellous picture," Rees said dreamily. "Once life was established somewhere in this universe it must have radiated out rapidly; perhaps all the nebulae are already populated in some way, with unimaginable species endlessly crossing empty space—"

  Decker stared from one Scientist to the other. He said quietly, "Rees, if you don't come to the point — in simple words, and right now — so help me I'll throw you over the bloody Rim with my own bare hands. And the old fart. Got that?"

  Rees spread his hands flat on the desk top, and again Pallis saw in his face that new, peculiar certainty. "Decker, the point is — just as the whales can escape the death of the Nebula, so can we."

  Decker's frown deepened. "Explain."

  "We have two choices." Rees chopped the edge of his hand into the table. "One. We stay here, watch the stars go out, squabble over the remaining scraps of food. Or—" Another chop. "Two. We emulate the whales. We fall around the Core, use the slingshot effect. We migrate to a new nebula."

  "And how, precisely, do we do that?"

  "I don't, precisely, know," Rees said acidly. "Maybe we cut away the trees, let the Raft fall into the Core."

  Pallis tried to imagine that. "How would you keep the crew from being blown off?"

  Rees laughed. "I don't know, Pallis. That's just a sketch; I'm sure there are better ways."

  Decker sat back, his scarred face a mask of intense concentration.

  Hollerbach held up a crooked finger. "Of course you almost made the trip involuntarily, Rees. If you hadn't found a way to deflect that whale, even now you'd be travelling among the star clouds with it."

  "Maybe that's the way to do it," Pallis said. "Cut our way into the whales, carry in food and water, and let them take us to our new home."

  Rees shook his head. "I don't think that would work, pilot. The interior of a whale isn't designed to support human life."

  Once more Pallis struggled with the strange ideas. "So we'll have to take the Raft... but the Raft will lose all its air, won't it, outside the Nebula? So we'll have to build some sort of shell to keep in the atmosphere..."

  Hollerbach nodded, evidently pleased. "That's good thinking, Pallis. Maybe we'll make a Scientist of you yet."

  "Patronizing old bugger," Pallis murmured affectionately.

  Again the fire burned in Rees. He turned his intense gaze on Decker. "Decker, somewhere buried in all this bullshit is a way for the race to survive. That's what's at stake here. We can do it; have no doubt about that. But we need your support." Rees fell silent.

  Pallis held his breath. He sensed that he was at a momentous event, a turning point in the history of his species, and somehow it all hinged on Rees. Pallis studied the young Scientist closely, thought he observed a slight tremble of his cheeks; but Rees's determination showed in his eyes.

  At length Decker said quietly, "How do we start?"

  Pallis let his breath out slowly; he saw Hollerbach smile, and a kind of victory shone in Rees's eyes; but wisely neither of them exulted in their triumph. Rees said: "First we contact the miners."

  Decker exploded: "What?"

  "They're humans too, you know," Hollerbach said gently. "They have a right to life."

  "And we need them," said Rees. "We're likely to need iron. Lots of it..."

  * * *

  And so Pallis and Jaen had destroyed a tree, and now sat on a Belt rooftop. The star kernel hung above them, a blot in the sky; a cloud of rain drizzled around them, plastering Pallis's hair and beard to his face. Sheen sat facing them, slowly chewing on a slab of meat-sim. Jame was behind her, arms folded. Sheen said slowly, "I'm still not sure why I shouldn't simply kill you."

  Pallis grunted, exasperated. "For all your faults, Sheen, I never took you for a fool. Don't you understand the significance of what I've traveled here to tell you?"

  Jame smirked. "How are we supposed to know it isn't some kind of trick? Pilot, you forget we're at war."

  "A trick? You explain how Rees survived his exile from the Belt — and how he came to ride home on a whale. My god, his tale comes close to the simplest hypothesis when you think about it."

  Jame scratched his dirt-crusted scalp. "The what?"

  Jaen smiled. Pallis said, "I'll explain sometime... Damn it, I'm telling you the time for war is gone, barman. Its justification is gone. Rees has shown us a way out of this gas prison we're in... but we have to work together. Sheen, can't we get out of this bloody rain?"

  The rain trickled down her tired face. "You're not welcome here. I told you. You're here on sufferance. You're not entitled to shelter..."

  Her words were much as they had been since Pallis had begun describing his mission here — but was her tone a little more uncertain? "Look, Sheen, I'm not asking for a one-way deal. We need your iron, your metal-working skills — but you need food, water, medical supplies. Don't you? And for better or worse the Raft still has a monopoly on the supply machines. Now I can tell you, with the full backing of Decker, the Committee, and whoever bloody else you want me to produce, that we're willing to share. If you like we'll allocate you a sector of the Raft with its own set of machines. And in the longer term... we offer the miners life for their children."

  Jame leant forward and spat into the rain.

  "You're full of crap, tree-pilot."

  Beside Pallis Jaen bunched a fist. "You bloody clod—"

  "Oh, shut up, both of you." Sheen pushed wet hair from her eyes. "Look, Pallis; even if I said 'yes' that's not the end of it. We don't have a 'Committee,' or a boss, or any of that. We talk things out among us."

  Pallis nodded, hope bursting in his heart. "I understand that." He stared directly into Sheen's brown eyes; he tried to pour his whole being, all their shared memories, into his words. "Sheen, you know me. You know I'm no fool, whatever else I'm guilty of... I'm asking you to trust me. Think it through. Would I have stranded myself here if I wasn't sure of my case? Would I have lost something so precious as—"

  Jame sneered. "As what, your worthless life?"

  With genuine surprise Pallis turned to the barman. "Jame, I meant my tree."

  A complex expression crossed Sheen's face. "Pallis, I don't know. I need time."

  Pallis held up his palms. "I understand. Take all the time you want; speak to whoever you want. In the meantime... will you let us stay?"

  "You're not stopping at the Quartermaster's, that's for sure."

  Pallis smiled serenely. "Barman, if I never sup your dilute piss again it will be too soon."

  Sheen shook her head. "You don't change, do you, pilot...? You know, even if — if — your story is true, your madcap scheme is full of holes." She pointed to the star kernel. "After working on that thing maybe we have a better feel for gravity than you people. I can tell you, that gravitational slingshot maneuver is going to be bloody tricky. You'll have to get it just right..."

  "I know. And even as we sit here we're getting some advice on that."

  "Advice? Who from?"

  Pallis smiled.

  * * *

  Gord woke to a sound of shouting.

  He pushed himself upright from his pallet. He wondered vaguely how long he had slept... Here, of course, there was no cycle of shifts, no Belt turning like a clock — nothing to mark the time but sour sleep, dull, undemanding work, foul expeditions to the ovens. Still, the former engineer's stomach told him that at least a few hours had elapsed. He looked to the diminishing pile of food stacked in the corner of his hut — and found himself shuddering. A little more time and perhaps he'd be hungry enough to eat more of
the stuff.

  The shouting grew in volume and a slow curiosity gathered in him. The world of the Boneys was seamless and incident-free. What could be causing such a disturbance? A whale? But the lookouts usually spotted the great beasts many shifts before their arrival, and no song had been initiated.

  Almost reluctantly he got to his feet and made his way to the door.

  A crowd of a dozen or so Boneys, adults and children alike, stood on the leather surface of the world with faces upturned. One small child pointed skywards. Puzzled, Gord stepped out to join them.

  Air washed down over him, carrying with it a scent of wood and leaves that briefly dispersed the taint of corruption in his nostrils. He looked up and gasped.

  A tree rotated in the sky. It was grand and serene, its trunk no more than fifty yards above him.

  Gord hadn't seen a tree since his exile from the Belt. Perhaps some of these Boneys had never seen one in their lives.

  A man dangled upside down from the trunk, dark, slim and oddly familiar. He was waving. "Gord? Is that you...?"

  "Rees? It can't be... You're dead. Aren't you?"

  Rees laughed. "They keep telling me I ought to be."

  "You survived your jump to the whale?"

  "More than that... I made it back to the Raft."

  "You're not serious."

  "It's a long story. I've travelled from the Raft to see you."

  Gord shook his head and spread his hands to indicate the sack of bones that was his world. "If that's true, you're crazy. Why come back?"

  Rees called, "Because I need your help..."

  13

  ON CLOUDS OF STEAM the plate ship swam toward the Belt. Sheen and Grye stood at the entrance to the Quartermaster's and watched it approach with its cargo of Boneys. Sheen felt dread build up in her, and she shuddered.

  She turned to Grye. When the Scientist had first been exiled here by the Raft he had been quite portly, Sheen remembered; now the skin hung from his bones in folds, as if emptied of substance. He caught her studying him. He shifted his drink bowl from hand to hand and dropped his eyes.

  Sheen laughed. "I believe you're blushing."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Look, you've got to lighten up. You're one of us now, remember. Here we are, all humans together, the past behind us. It's a new world. Right?"

  He flinched. "I'm sorry..."

  "Stop saying that."

  "It's just that it's hard to forget the hundreds of shifts we have had to endure since coming here." His voice was mild, but somewhere buried in there was a spark of true bitterness. "Ask Roch if the past is behind us. Ask Cipse." Now Sheen felt her own face redden. Reluctantly she recalled her own hatred for the exiles, how she had willingly allowed their cruel treatment to continue. A hot shame coursed through her. Now that Rees had changed the perspective — given the whole race, it seemed, a new goal — such actions seemed worse than contemptible.

  With an effort she forced herself to speak. "If it means anything, I'm sorry."

  He didn't reply.

  For some moments they stood in awkward silence. Grye's posture softened a little, as if he felt a little more comfortable in her company.

  "Well," Sheen said briskly, "at least Jame isn't barring you from the Quartermaster's any more."

  "We should be grateful for small mercies." He took a sip from his bowl and sighed. "Not so small, maybe..." He indicated the approaching plate. "You miners do seem to have accepted us a lot more easily since the first Boneys arrived."

  "I can understand that. Perhaps the presence of the Boneys shows the rest of us how much we have in common."

  "Yes."

  The Belt's rotation carried the Quartermaster's beneath the approaching plate once again. Sheen could see that the little craft carried three Boneys, two men and a woman. They were all squat and broad, and they wore battered tunics provided by the Belt folk. Sheen had heard legends of what they chose to wear on their home worldlet... She found herself shuddering again.

  The Belt was being used as a way station between the Bone world and the Raft; Boneys traveling to the Raft would stay here for a few shifts before departing on a supply tree. At any one time there was, Sheen reminded herself, only a handful of Boneys scattered around the Belt... but most miners felt that handful was too many.

  The Boneys stared down at her, thick jaws gaping. One of the men caught Sheen's eye. He winked at her and rolled his hips suggestively. She found her food rising to her throat; but she held his stare until the plate had passed over the Belt's narrow horizon. "I wish I could believe we need those people," she muttered.

  Grye shrugged. "They are human beings. And, according to Rees, they didn't choose the way they live. They have just tried to survive, as we all must do... Anyway, we might not need them. Our work with the Moles on the star kernel is proceeding well."

  "Really?"

  Grye leaned closer, more confident now that the conversation had moved onto a topic he knew about. "You understand what we're trying to do down there?"

  "Vaguely..."

  "You see, if Rees's gravitational slingshot idea is going to work we will have to drop the Raft onto a precise trajectory around the Core. The asymptotic direction is highly sensitive to the initial conditions—"

  She held up her hands. "You'd better stick to words of one syllable. Or less."

  "I'm sorry. We're going into a tight orbit, very close to the Core. The closer we pass, the more our path will be twisted around the Core. But the differences for a small deviation are dramatic. You have to imagine a pencil of neighboring trajectories approaching the Core. As they round the singularity they fan out, like unraveling fibers; and so a small error could give the Raft a final direction very different from the one we want."

  "I understand... I think. But it doesn't make much difference, surely? You're aiming at a whole nebula, a target thousands of miles wide."

  "Yes, but it's a long way away. It's quite a precise piece of marksmanship. And if we miss, by even a few miles, we could end up sailing into empty, airless space, on without end..."

  "So how is the Mole helping?"

  "What we need to do is work out all the trajectories in that pencil, so we can figure out how to approach the Core. It takes us hours to work the results by hand — work which, apparently, was performed by slavelike machines for the original Crew. It was Rees who had the idea of using the Mole brains."

  Sheen pulled a face. "It would be."

  "He argued that the Moles must once have been flying machines. And if you look closely you can see where the rockets, fins and so on must have fitted. So, argued Rees, the Moles must understand orbital dynamics, to some extent. We tried putting our problems to a Mole. It took hours of question-and-answer down there on the kernel surface... but at last we started getting usable results. Now the Mole provides concise answers, and we're proceeding quickly."

  She nodded, juggling her drink. "Impressive. And you're sure of the quality of the results?"

  He seemed to bridle a little. "As sure as we can be. We've checked samples against hand calculations. But none of us are experts in this particular field." His voice hardened again. "Our Chief Navigator was Cipse, you see."

  She could think of no reply. She drained the last of her globe. "Well, look, Grye, I think it's time I—"

  "Now, then, where can old Quid take a drink around here?"

  The voice was low and sly. She turned, startled, and found herself looking down at a wide, wrinkled face; a grin revealed rotten stumps of teeth, and black eyes traveled over her body. She couldn't help but shrink away from the Boney. Vaguely she was aware of Grye quailing beside her. "What... do you want?"

  The Boney stroked a finely carved spear of bone. His eyes widened in mock surprise. "Why, darling, I've only just arrived, and what kind of welcome is that? Eh? Now that we're all friends together..." He took a step closer. "You'll like old Quid when you get to know him—"

  She stood her ground and let her disgust show in her face. "You come an
y nearer to me and I'll break your bloody arm."

  He laughed evenly. "I'd be interested to see you try, darling. Remember I grew to my fine stature in high-gee... not this baby-soft micro gravity you have here. You're muscled very attractively; but I bet your bones are as brittle as dead leaves." He looked at her acutely. "Surprised to find old Quid using phrases like 'micro gravity,' girl? I may be a Boney, but I'm not a monster; nor am I stupid." He reached out and grabbed her forearm. His grip was like iron. "It's a lesson you evidently need to learn—"

  She thrust at the wall of the Quartermaster's with both legs and performed a fast back flip, shaking free his hand. When she landed she had a knife in her fist.

  He held up his hands with an admiring grin. "All right, all right..." Now Quid turned his gaze on Grye; the Scientist clutched his drink globe to his chest, trembling. "I heard what you were saying," Quid said. "All that stuff about orbits and trajectories... But you won't make it, you know."

  Grye's cheeks quivered and stretched. "What do you mean?"

  "What are you going to do when you're riding your bit of iron, down there by the Core himself — and you find you're on a path that isn't in your tables of numbers? At the critical moment — at closest approach — you'll have maybe minutes to react. What will you do? Turn back and draw some more curves on paper? Eh?"

  Sheen snorted. "You're an expert, are you?"

  He smiled. "At last you're recognizing my worth, darling." He tapped his head. "Listen to me. There's more on orbits locked in here than on all the bits of paper in the Nebula."

  "Rubbish," she spat.

  "Yes? Your little friend Rees doesn't think so, does he?" He hefted his spear in his right hand; Sheen kept her eyes on the spear's bone tip. "But then," Quid went on, "Rees has seen what we can do with these things—"

  Abruptly he twisted so that he faced the star kernel; with surprising grace he hurled the spear. The weapon accelerated into the five-gee gravity well of the kernel. Moving so fast that it streaked in Sheen's vision, it missed the iron horizon by mere yards and twisted behind the star—