Raft

by Stephen Baxter

  "The supply machines!" Jaen shouted.

  "What?"

  "They're powered by mini black holes... gravitic material. Perhaps that's all the gravitic creature can see, as if we're a ship of ghosts surrounding crumbs of..."

  "Of food," Hollerbach finished wearily.

  Again the creature roared up from its ocean, scattering whales like leaves. This time a limb, a cable as thick as Rees's waist, came close enough to make the ship shudder in its flight. Rees made out detail on the creature's surface; it was like a sculpture rendered in black on black. Tiny forms — independent animals, like parasites? — raced with eye-bewildering speed across the pulsing surface, colliding, melding, rebounding.

  Again the disc fell away, colliding with its spawning sea with a fantastic, slow-motion splash; and again the whirlpool began to gather.

  "Hunger," Hollerbach said. "The universal imperative. The damn thing will keep trying until it swallows us whole. And there's nothing we can do about it." He closed his rheumy eyes.

  "We're not dead yet," Rees muttered. "If baby wants feeding, we'll feed baby." An angry determination flooded his thoughts. He hadn't come so far, achieved so much, merely to see it brushed aside by some nameless horror... even if its very atoms were composed of black holes.

  He scanned the chamber. The rope network had collapsed, leaving the interior of the chamber scoured clear of people; but some ropes still clung where they had been fixed to the walls and ceilings. One such led from the Telescope mount directly to the exit to the Bridge's corridor. Rees eyed its track. It lay almost exclusively within feet of the ship's waist, so that when he followed it he could stay close to the weightless zone.

  Cautiously, one hand at a time, he loosened his grip on the Telescope mount. As the rope took his mass he drifted slowly toward one end of the chamber... but too slowly to matter. Rapidly he worked his way hand over hand along the rope.

  With the port only feet away the rope came loose of its mountings and began to snake through the air.

  He scrambled over the wall surface with the palms of his hands and lunged at the port. When he had reached its solid security he paused for a few breaths, hands and feet aching.

  Once more the animal erupted from its ocean; once more its wriggling face loomed over the Bridge.

  Rees shouted over the moans of the passengers. "Roch! Roch, can you hear me? Miner Roch...!"

  At last Roch's broad, battered face thrust out of the mass of crushed humanity at one end of the cylindrical chamber.

  "Roch, can you get up here?"

  Roch looked about, studying the ropes clinging to the walls. Then he grinned. He stepped over the people around him, pushing heads and limbs deeper into the mêlée; then, with animal grace, he scrambled up the ropes plastered against the great windows. As one rope collapsed and fell away he leapt to another, then another; until at last he had joined Rees at the port. "See?" he told Rees. "All that hard work in five gees pays off in the end—"

  "Roch, I need your help. Listen to me—"

  * * *

  One of the food machines had been mounted just inside the Bridge's port, and Rees found himself giving thanks for the fortuitous narrowness of the Bridge's access paths. A little more room and the thing would have been taken down to one of the Bridge's end chambers — and Rees doubted even Roch's ability to raise tons through the multiple-gee climb to the ship's mid point.

  The ship shuddered again.

  When Rees explained his idea Roch grinned, his eyes wide and demonic — damn it, the man was even enjoying this — and, before Rees could stop him, he slapped a broad palm against the port's control panel.

  The port slid aside. The air outside was hot, thick and rushed past at enormous speed; the pressure difference hauled at Rees like an invisible hand, slamming him into the side of the supply machine.

  The open port was a three-yard square slice of chaos, completely filled by the writhing face of the gravitic animal. A tentacle a mile long lashed through the air; Rees felt the Bridge quiver at its approach. One touch of that stuff and the old ship would implode like a crushed skitter—

  Roch crawled around the supply machine away from the port, so that he was lodged between the machine and the outer wall of the Observatory.

  Rees looked at the base of the machine; it had been fixed to the Bridge's deck with crude, fist-sized iron rivets. "Damn it," he shouted over the roar of the wind. "Roch, help me find tools, something to use as levers..."

  "No time for that, Raft man." Roch's voice was strained, as Rees remembered it once sounding as the big man had got to his feet under the five gees of the star kernel. Rees looked up, startled.

  Roch had braced his back against the supply machine, his feet against the wall of the Observatory; and he was shoving back against the machine. The muscles of his legs bulged and sweat stood out in beads over his brow and chest.

  "Roch, you're crazy! That's impossible..."

  One of the rivets creaked; shards of rusty iron flew through the turbulent air.

  Roch kept his swelling eyes fixed on Rees. The muscles of his neck seemed to bunch around his widening grin, and his tongue protruded, purple, from broken lips.

  Now another rivet gave way with a crack like a small explosion.

  Belatedly Rees placed his hands on the machine, braced his feet against the angle of floor and wall, and shoved with Roch until the veins of his arms stood out like rope.

  Another rivet broke. The machine tilted noticeably. Roch adjusted his position and continued to shove. The miner's face was purple, his bloody eyes fixed on Rees. Small popping sounds came from within that vast body, and Rees imagined discs and vertebrae cracking and fusing along Roch's spine.

  At last, with a series of small explosions, the remaining rivets collapsed and the machine tumbled through the port. Rees fell onto his chest amid the stumps of shattered rivets, his lungs pumping oxygen from the depleted air. He lifted his head. "Roch...?"

  The miner was gone.

  Rees scrambled up from the deck and grabbed the rim of the port. The gravitic beast covered the sky, a huge, ugly panorama of motion — and suspended before it was the ragged bulk of the supply machine. Roch was spread-eagled against the machine, his back to the battered metal wall. The miner stared across a few feet into Rees's eyes.

  Now a cable-like limb lashed out of the animal and swatted at the supply machine. The device was knocked, spinning, towards the writhing black mass. Then the predator folded around its morsel and, apparently satiated, sank back into the dark ocean for the last time.

  With the last of his strength Rees closed the port.

  16

  AS THE FLIGHT THROUGH SPACE wore on, again and again Rees was drawn to the hull's small window space.

  He pressed his face to the warm wall. He was close to the waist of the Bridge here: to his left the Nebula, the home they had discarded, was a crimson barrier that cut the sky in half; to his right the destination nebula was a bluish patch he could still cover with one hand.

  As the ship had soared away from the Core the navigation team had spent long hours with their various sextants, charts and bits of carved bone; but at last they had announced that the Bridge was, after all, on course. There had been a mood of elation among the passengers. Despite the deaths, the injuries, the loss of the food machine, their mission seemed bound for success, its greatest trial behind it. Rees had found himself caught up in the prevailing mood.

  But then the Bridge had left behind the familiar warm light of the Nebula.

  Most of the hull had been opaqued to shut out the oppressive darkness of the internebular void. Bathed in artificial light, the reconstructed shanty town had become once more a mass of homely warmth and scents, and most of the passengers had been glad to turn inwards and forget the emptiness beyond the ancient walls of the ship.

  But despite this the mood of the people grew more subdued — contemplative, even somber.

  And then the loss of one of their two supply machines had started
to work through, and rationing had begun to bite.

  The sky outside was a rich, deep blue, broken only by the diffuse pallor of distant nebulae. The Scientists had puzzled over their ancient instruments and assured Rees that the internebular spaces were far from airless, although the gases were far too thin to sustain human life. "It is as if," Jaen had told him excitedly, "the nebulae are patches of high density within a far greater cloud, which perhaps has its own internal structure, its own Core. Perhaps all the nebulae are falling like stars into this greater Core."

  "And why stop there?" Rees had grinned. "The structure could be recursive. Maybe this greater nebula is itself a mere satellite of another, mightier Core; which in turn is a satellite of another, and so on, without limit."

  Jaen's eyes sparkled. "I wonder what the inhabitants of those greater Cores would look like, what gravitic chemistry could do under such conditions..."

  Rees shrugged. "Maybe one day we'll send up a ship to find out. Travel to the Core of Cores... but there may be more subtle ways to probe these questions."

  "Like what?"

  "Well, if our new nebula really is falling into a greater Core there should be measurable effects. Tides, perhaps — we could build up hypotheses about the mass and nature of the greater Core without ever seeing it."

  "And knowing that, we could go on to validate whole families of theories about the structure of this universe..."

  Rees smiled now, something of that surge of intellectual confidence returning briefly to warm him.

  But if they couldn't feed themselves all these dreams counted for nothing.

  The ship had picked up enormous velocity by its slingshot maneuver around the Core, climbing into internebular space within hours. They'd traveled for five shifts since then... but there were still twenty shifts to go. Could the ship's fragile social structure last so long?

  There was a bony hand on his shoulder. Hollerbach thrust forward his gaunt face and peered through the window. "Wonderful," he murmured.

  Rees said nothing.

  Hollerbach let his hand rest. "I know what you're feeling."

  "The worst of it is," Rees said quietly, "that the passengers still blame me for the difficulties we face. Mothers hold out their hungry children accusingly as I go past."

  Hollerbach laughed. "Rees, you mustn't let it bother you. You have not lost the brave idealism of your recent youth — the idealism which, untempered by maturity," he said drily, "drove you to endanger your own skin by associating yourself with the Scientists at the time of the rebellion. But you have grown into a man who has learned that the first priority is the survival of the species... and you have learned to impose that discipline on others. You showed that with your defeat of Gover."

  "My murder of him, you mean."

  "If you felt anything other than remorse for the actions you have been forced to take, I would respect you less." The old Scientist squeezed his shoulder.

  "If only I could be sure I have been right," Rees said. "Maybe I've seduced these people to their deaths with false hope."

  "Well, the signs are good. The navigators assure me our maneuver around the Core was successful, and that we are on course for our new home... And, if you want a further symbol of good fortune—" He pointed above his head. "Look up there."

  Rees peered upwards. The migrating school of whales was a sheet of slender, ghostly forms crossing the sky from left to right. On the fringes of that river of life he caught glimpses of plate creatures, of sky wolves with firmly closed mouths, and other, even more exotic creatures, all gliding smoothly to their next home.

  Throughout the Nebula there must be more of these vast schools: rank on rank of them, all abandoning the dying gas cloud, scattering silhouettes against the Nebula's somber glow. Soon, Rees mused, the Nebula would be drained of life... save for a few tethered trees, and the trapped remnants of humanity.

  Now there was a slow stirring in the whale stream. Three of the great beasts drifted together, flukes turning, until they were moving over and around each other in a vast, stately dance. At last they came so close that their flukes interlocked and their bodies touched; it was as if they had merged into a single creature. The rest of the school drifted respectfully around the triad.

  "What are they doing?"

  Hollerbach smiled. "Of course I'm speculating — and, at my age, mostly from memory — but I believe they're mating."

  Rees gasped.

  "Well, why not? What better circumstances to do so, than surrounded by one's fellows and so far from the stresses and dangers of nebular life? Even the sky wolves are hardly in a position to attack, are they? You know, it wouldn't surprise me — given these long, enclosed hours with nothing much to do — if we too didn't enjoy a population explosion."

  Rees laughed. "That's all we need."

  "Yes, it is," Hollerbach murmured seriously. "Anyway, my point, my friend, is that perhaps we should emulate those whales. Self-doubt is part of being human... but the main thing is to get on with the business of survival, as best one can. And that is what you have done."

  "Thanks, Hollerbach," Rees said. "I understand what you're trying to do. But maybe you need to tell all that to the passengers' empty bellies."

  "Perhaps. I... I—" Hollerbach collapsed into a bout of deep, rasping coughing. "I'm sorry," he said at last.

  Rees studied the old Scientist with some concern; in the blue internebular light it seemed he saw the lines of Hollerbach's skull.

  * * *

  The Bridge entered the outermost layers of the new nebula. Thin air whistled around the stumps of the control jets.

  Rees and Gord manhandled Nead into the corridor close to the port. The young Scientist's legs — rendered useless by the smashing of his spine during his fall at closest approach — had been strapped together and stiffened with a length of wood. Nead insisted that he felt nothing below his waist, but Rees saw how his face twisted at each jarring motion.

  Studying Nead he felt a deep, sick guilt. The lad was still barely eighteen thousand shifts old, and yet by following Rees he had already been maimed; and now he was volunteering for still more peril. The stumps of snapped rivets at the supply machine's vacant mount reminded Rees of the sacrifice Roch had made at this place. He was, he found, deeply reluctant to witness another.

  "Listen to me, Nead," he said seriously. "I appreciate the way you've volunteered for this mission—"

  Nead looked at him in sudden concern. "You have to let me go," he insisted.

  Rees placed a hand on Nead's shoulder. "Of course. What I'm trying to tell you is that I want to see you fix the new steam jets out there... and then return, safely. We need those jets, if we're not to fall straight into the Core of this new nebula. We don't need another dead hero."

  "I understand, Rees." Nead smiled. "But what can happen? The air out there is desperately thin, but it contains oxygen, and I won't be out for long."

  "Take nothing for granted. Remember our sensor instruments were constructed ages ago and in another universe, for god's sake... Even if we knew precisely what they were telling us we wouldn't know if we could rely on them working here."

  Gord frowned. "Yes, but our theories back up the instrument readings. Because of the diffusion of oxygen-based life we expect most of the nebulae to consist of oxygen-nitrogen air."

  "I know that." Rees sighed. "And theories are fine. All I'm saying is that we don't know, here and now, what Nead will find on the other side of that door."

  Nead dropped his eyes. "Look, Rees, I know I'm crippled. But my arms and shoulders are as strong as they ever were. I know what I'm doing, and I can do this job."

  "I know you can... Just come back safely."

  Nead smiled and nodded, the characteristic streak of gray in his hair catching the corridor light.

  Now Rees and Gord fixed two steam jets to Nead's waist by a length of rope. The bulky jets were awkward but manageable in the micro-gravity conditions. Another rope was fixed to Nead's waist and would be anchored t
o the ship.

  Gord checked that the inner door to the Observatory was sealed, so that the passengers were in no danger; then they exchanged final, wordless handshakes, and Gord palmed the opening panel.

  The outer door slid out of sight. The air was sucked from Rees's chest. Sound died to a muffled whisper and he tasted blood running from his nose. A warmth in his popping ears led him to suspect he was bleeding there too.

  The door revealed a sea of blue light far below. They had already passed through the nebula's outer halo of star-spawning hydrogen and it was possible to make out stars above and below them. Far above Rees's head a small, compact knot of redness marked the position of the Nebula from which he had flown. It was strange to think that he could raise a hand and block out his world, all the places he had seen and the people he had known: Pallis, Sheen, Jame the barman, Decker... He knew that Pallis and Sheen had decided to live out their remaining shifts together; now, eyes fixed on that distant blur, Rees sent out a silent prayer that they — and all the others who had sacrificed so much to get him this far — were safe and well.

  Rees and Gord lifted Nead bodily through the open Port. His legs swinging as if carved from wood, the injured Scientist shoved himself off in the direction of a jet mounting. Rees and Gord waited in the open doorway, the securing rope in their hands.

  Nead slowed a few feet short of the jet mount. Rees watched anxiously as Nead scrabbled at the frictionless surface of the hull. Then the mount came within reach and he grabbed at it gratefully, locking his fingers around small irregularities in the iron surface.

  He hauled on his ropes. Gord and Rees bundled the first steam jet out of the port and shoved it toward the young Scientist. They judged it well, the package of machinery stopping a few feet short of Nead. With fast but precise motions Nead dragged at his rope and fielded the machine. Now the Scientist had to align the jet, at least roughly, with the Bridge's axis, and he spent long seconds struggling with the old device's bulk.