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

by Stephen Baxter

  8

  Clutching his Surfboard, Cris led Farr through the heart of the City.

  They followed a tangle of subsidiary streets, avoiding the main routes. Farr tried to memorize their path, but his rudimentary sense of City-bound direction was soon overwhelmed. Lost, baffled, but following Cris doggedly, he involuntarily glanced around, looking for the Quantum Sea, the angle of the vortex lines to orient himself. But of course, here deep in the guts of Parz, the faceless wooden walls hid the world.

  After a time, though, he realized that they must have passed below the City’s rough equator and moved into the region called the Downside. The walled streets here were meaner, with illumination shafts and wood-lamps far separated. There were few cars and fewer Wavers, and the doors to dwelling-places off the Downside streets, battered and dirty, looked impenetrably solid. Cris didn’t comment on the changed environment - he kept up his chatter of Surfing as if oblivious - but Farr noticed how the City boy kept his precious board clutched tight against his chest, shielding it with his body.

  At length they came to a wide, oval port set in a street wall. The shaft beyond this port, about ten mansheights across, was much plainer than any City street - long and featureless, and with scuffed, unfinished-looking walls - but it led, Farr saw, to an ellipse of clear, precious Airlight. He stared hungrily into that light, marvelling at how the bright yellow glow glittered from scraped-smooth patches of wall.

  ‘Are we going down here?’

  ‘Through this cargo port? Out through the Skin? But that’s against City ordinances . . .’ Cris grinned. ‘You bet we are.’ With a whoop, Cris placed one hand on the lip of the elliptical entrance and somersaulted into the shaft. His board clutched above his head, he flapped his arms, Waving in reverse feet-first down the shaft. Farr, clumsier, clambered over the lip of the port and plunged down. Laughing, their voices echoing from the wooden walls, the boys tumbled towards the open Air.

  Farr shot out of the oppressive wall of the City and spread his arms and legs, drinking in the yellow-shining Air and staring up at the arc of the vortex lines.

  Cris was looking at him sceptically. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m just glad to be out in the Air . . . even if it is this sticky Polar stuff.’

  ‘Right. Not like back in the good old upflux, eh?’ Cris levelled his board, flexed it with the palm of his hand experimentally against the Magfield.

  Farr rolled luxuriously in the Air. The port they’d emerged from was a rough-rimmed mouth set in the wooden outer hull - the Skin - and it loomed around them still, as if threatening to snap down on them, to swallow them back into the City’s wooden guts. But the boys were drifting in the Air, away from the City, and Farr saw that this port was just one of an array of similar entrances which stretched across the face of the City in all directions, as far as he could see. Farr tried to pick out identifying features of ‘their’ port, so he could find it again if he needed to. But it was simply a crudely finished gash in the wooden Skin, unmarked, with nothing to distinguish it from a hundred others. Farr soon gave up the effort of memorizing. After all, if he did get lost, even if he found this particular port again he’d never find his way back to the Mixxaxes’ home through the City streets.

  He flipped his legs and pulled a little further away from the City. The Skin was like a gigantic mask, looming over him. This close he could see its detail - how it was crudely cobbled together from mismatched sections of wood and Corestuff - but it was hugely impressive nevertheless. The dozens of cargo ports in this part of the Skin were, he thought, like mouths, continually ingesting; or perhaps like capillary pores, taking in a granular Air of wood and food. As he pulled back still further he saw the huge, unending falls from the sewage outlets spread across the base of the City; the roar of the semisolid stuff tumbling into the underMantle seemed to fill the Air.

  The City - battered and imperfect as it might be - was magnificent, he realized slowly; it was like an immense animal, noisily alive, utterly oblivious of his own tiny presence before its face.

  He heard his name called.

  He glanced around, but Cris had gone. Farr felt an absurd stab of disorientation - after all, he had a far smaller chance of getting lost out here than in the City’s guts - and twisted, staring around. There was Cris, his orange coverall bright, a distant, waving figure suspended on his Surfboard. He was close to the Skin but far above Farr’s head. He’d slipped away while Farr was daydreaming.

  Embarrassed, a little irritated, Farr thrust at the Air, letting the upfluxer strength in his legs hurl him towards Cris.

  Cris watched him approach, grinning infuriatingly. ‘Keep up. There are people waiting for us.’ He clambered back onto his board, turned and led the way.

  Farr followed, perhaps a mansheight behind; one after the other the boys soared over the face of the City.

  Cris’s Surfing technique was spectacular, bearing little relation to the cut-down caricature he had shown Farr inside the City. Cris pivoted the gleaming board under one bare foot while thrusting with the other heel at the back of the board, making it Wave vigorously. His bare soles seemed able to grip at the surface’s fine ridges. He kept his arms stretched out in the Air for balance, and the muscles in the City boy’s legs worked smoothly. The whole process looked wonderfully easy, in fact, and Farr felt a dull itch - in the small of his back and in his calves - as he stared at Cris. He longed to try out the Surfboard for himself. Why, with his enhanced strength, here at the Pole, he could make the damn thing fly . . .

  But he couldn’t deny Cris’s skill as he expertly levered his mass and inertia against the soft resistance of the Magfield. The speed and grace of Cris’s motion, with electron gas crackling around the Corestuff strips embedded in the board, was nonchalant and spectacular.

  They were climbing up and around the City’s Skin, generally away from the sewage founts at the base but on a diagonal line across the face. They crossed one of the huge Longitude anchor-bands. Farr saw how the band was fixed to the Skin by pegs of Corestuff at intervals along its length. The gleaming Corestuff strip was wider than a mansheight, and - in response to the huge currents surging through the band’s superconducting core - electron gas played unceasingly over its smooth surface. The Magfield here was distorted, constricted by the band’s field; it felt uneven, harsh, tight around Farr’s chest.

  Cris clambered off his board and joined Farr in Waving away from the Skin, working cautiously past the anchor-band. ‘Magfield’s too spiky here,’ Cris said curtly. ‘You can’t get a proper grip.’

  Past the anchor-band, the Skin unfolded before Farr’s gaze. He’d expected the Skinscape to be featureless, uniform, except for the random blemishes of its construction. But it was much too huge to allow such uniformity, he soon realized. As they climbed towards the City’s equator, towards the Upside areas, the huge cargo ports and public Air-shafts became more sparse, to be replaced by smaller, tidier doorways evidently meant for humans and Air-cars, and by small portals which must be windows or light-shafts for private dwellings. A man leaned out of a window and hurled out a bowl of what looked like sewage; the stuff sparkled as it dispersed. Cris cupped his hands around his mouth and called down a greeting. The man - squat and yellow-haired - peered out into the sky, startled. When he spotted the boys he shook his fist at them, shouting something angry but indistinguishable. Cris yelled abuse back, and Farr joined in, shaking his fist in return. He laughed, exhilarated by this display of disrespect; he felt free, young, healthy, released from the confines of the City, and the comparison with the sour old man in his windowed cell made his condition all the sweeter.

  They flew past an area of hull covered by a crude framework, a rectangular lattice of wood. Behind the framework the Skin was broken open, exposing small chambers within the City lit by dim green wood-lamps. Huge sections of wooden panelling drifted in the Air outside the City, attached loosely to the framework by lengths of rope; men and women clambered over the framework, hauling at the panel
s and hammering them into place in the gaps in the Skin.

  ‘Repairs,’ said Cris in uninterested response to Farr’s question. ‘They go on all the time. My father says the City’s never really been finished; there’s always some section of it that needs rebuilding.’

  They arced high across a comparatively blank area of hull, unblemished by door, window or port. Farr looked back to see the last small portals recede over the City’s tightly curving horizon, and soon there was no break in the Skin in sight. Cris Surfed on in silence, subdued. Moving over this featureless Skinscape Farr felt absurdly as if he had been rejected by the City, thrown out and shunned - as if it had turned its back.

  Now they passed another group of humans clambering over the Skin. At first Farr thought this must be another set of repair workers, but the Skin here was unbroken, clearly undamaged. And there was no repair scaffolding - just a loose net spread across the Skin. A group of perhaps twenty adults were huddled in one corner of their net, engaged in some unidentifiable project. Peering down as they passed, Farr saw how belongings had been stuffed loosely into the net; he saw spears, crude clothing and smaller folded-up nets that wouldn’t have seemed out of place among the belongings of the Human Beings. There was even a small colony of Air-pigs which jostled slowly against the wooden wall, bound by ropes to a peg which had been hammered into the Skin. An infant child squirmed inside the net, crying; its wails, sweet and distant, carried through the silent Air to Farr.

  A woman, fat and naked, turned from whatever she was engaged in with her companions, and peered up at the boys. Farr saw how her fists were clenched. He looked to Cris for a lead, but the City boy simply Waved on with his board, keeping his eyes averted from the little colony below.

  Farr, burning with curiosity, glanced down again. To his relief he saw that the woman had turned away and was returning to her companions, evidently forgetting the boys.

  ‘Skin-riders,’ Cris said dismissively. ‘Scavengers. There are whole colonies of them, living off remote bits of the Skin like this.’

  ‘But how do they survive?’

  ‘They take stuff from the sewage founts, mostly. Filter it out with those nets of theirs. Some of it they consume themselves, and some they use to feed their pigs. Many of them hunt.’

  ‘Doesn’t anybody mind?’

  Cris shrugged. ‘Why should they? The Skin-riders are out of the way in places like this, and they don’t absorb any of the City’s resources. You could say they make Parz more efficient by extracting what they can out of everyone else’s waste. The Committee only takes action against them when they go rogue. Turn bandit. Some tribes do, you know. They ring the exit portals, waiting to descend on slower-moving cars. They kill the drivers and steal the pigs; they’ve no use for the cars themselves. And sometimes they turn on each other, fighting stupid little Skin-wars no one else understands. Then the guards step in. But apart from that, I guess the City is big enough to support a few leeches on its face.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, there’ll always be Skin-riders; you could never wipe them out. Not everyone can live their lives inside six wooden walls.’ He bent his knees, flourishing the board. ‘Which is one reason I’m out here today. I’d have thought you’d understand that, Farr. Maybe the Skin-riders are a little like your people.’

  Farr frowned. Maybe there was a surface comparison, he thought. But Human Beings would never allow themselves to become so - so filthy, he thought, so poor, to live so badly - as the Skin-riders he had seen.

  And no Human Being would accept the indignity of living by scavenging the waste of others.

  The squalid little colony of Skin-riders was soon hidden by the wooden limb of the City face, and Cris led Farr further across the featureless Skin.

  Farr spotted the girl before Cris saw her.

  She was a compact, lithe shape swooping around the vortex lines, high above the City. Electron gas sparkled around her Surfboard, underlighting the contours of her body. There was a grace, a naturalness about her movements which far eclipsed even Cris’s proficiency, Farr thought. The girl saw them approaching and waved her arms in greeting, shouted something inaudible.

  They came to another net, stretched over the wooden Skin between a series of pegs, just as the Skin-riders’ had been. But this net was evidently abandoned: torn and fraying, the net flapped emptily, containing nothing but what looked like the sections of a Surfboard snapped in half, a few clothes tucked behind knots in the net, and some crude-looking tools.

  Cris drifted to a halt over the net and locked an anchoring hand comfortably into a loop of rope. ‘That’s Ray,’ he said enviously. ‘The girl. That’s what she calls herself anyway . . . after the rays of the Crust-forests, you see.’

  Farr squinted up at the girl; she was spiralling lazily around a vortex line as she approached them, electron glow dazzling from her skin. ‘She looks good.’

  ‘She is good. Too bloody good,’ Cris said with a touch of sourness. ‘And she’s a year younger than me . . . My hope is there’s going to be room for both of us in the Games.’

  ‘What is this place?’

  Cris flipped his Surfboard in the Air and watched it somersault. ‘Nowhere,’ he said. His voice was deliberately casual. ‘Just an old Skin-rider net, in a bit of the Skinscape that’s hardly ever visited. We just use it as a base. You know, a place to meet, to Surf from, to keep a few tools for the boards.’

  Just a base to Surf from . . . Cris’s tone made it sound a lot more important than that, to him. Farr watched the girl approach, casually skilful, slowing as she rode the Magfield towards the Skin. He thought of what it must be like to be accepted by a group of people like Cris and this girl Ray - to have a place like this to come to, hidden from the gaze of families and the rest of the City.

  He could barely imagine it. He realized suddenly that he’d never even been out of sight of his family before the Glitch that killed his father. A place like this must mean a great deal.

  He wanted to ask Cris more questions. Who were these Surfers? What were they like? How many of them were there? . . . But he kept quiet. He didn’t want to be the clumsy outsider from the upflux - not here, not with these two. He wanted them to accept him, to make him one of theirs - even just for a day.

  Maybe if he kept his mouth shut as much as possible they would think he knew more than he did.

  The girl, Ray, performed one last roll through the Air and stepped lightly off her board before them. With one small ankle she flipped the board up, caught it in one hand, and tucked it into a gap in the net. She hooked a hand into the net, close to Cris’s, and smiled at him and Farr. She was nude, and her long hair was tied back from her face; there were streaks of yellow dye across her scalp, just as Cris affected.

  ‘You’re on your own today?’ Cris asked.

  She shrugged, breathing heavily. ‘Sometimes I prefer it that way. You can get some real work done.’ She turned to Farr, a look of lively interest on her face. ‘Who’s this?’

  Cris grinned and clapped a hand on Farr’s shoulder. ‘He’s called Farr. He’s staying with us. He’s from a tribe called the Human Beings.’

  ‘Human Beings?’

  ‘Upfluxers,’ Cris said with an apologetic glance at Farr.

  The girl’s smile broadened, and Farr was aware of her light gaze flicking over him with new interest. ‘An upfluxer? Really? So what do you make of Parz? Dump, isn’t it?’

  Farr tried to find something to say.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. Her face was broad, intelligent, vividly alive, her perfect nostrils shining. She was still breathing deeply after her exertions, and her chest and shoulders were rising and falling smoothly. The capillary pores across her chest and between her small breasts were wide and dark.

  Cris was staring at him strangely, and Ray was watching him, interested, amused. He had to find something to say. ‘It’s okay. Parz is fine. Interesting.’ Interesting. What a stupid thing to say. His voice sounded booming and uncontrolled, and he was aware of his bul
ky, overmuscled body, his hands huge and useless at his side.

  She let herself drift a little closer to him. He tried to keep his eyes on her face. Her nakedness was spectacular. But that didn’t make sense; the Human Beings had always gone naked, save for occasional toolbelts or ponchos, so why should he be so disturbed now? He must have become accustomed to bodies hidden by City clothes, like the light coveralls he and Cris were wearing; Ray’s sudden nudity by contrast was impossible to ignore. Yes, that must be it . . .

  But now he felt a deep warmth in his lower belly. Oh, blood of the Xeelee, help me. Like an independent creature - utterly without his volition - his penis was trying to push out of its cache. He leaned forward, hoping that folds in the cloth of his coveralls would hide him. But the girl’s eyes were wide and appraising, and he could see a smile forming on her small mouth. She knew. She knew all about him.

  ‘“Interesting”,’ she repeated. ‘Maybe, if you haven’t had to grow up in it.’

  ‘We saw you practising,’ Cris said. ‘You’re looking good.

  ‘Thanks.’ She looked at Cris awkwardly. ‘I’ve been selected for the Games. Had you heard that?’

  ‘Already?’ Farr could see envy battling with affection for the girl on Cris’s face. ‘No, I - I mean, I’m pleased for you. Really, I am.’

  She brushed Cris’s shoulder with her fingertips. ‘I know. And it’s not too late for you.’ She took her board from the net. ‘Come on, let’s practise.’

  Cris glanced at Farr. ‘Yes, soon. But first . . .’ He held out his board to Farr. ‘Would you like to try it?’

  Farr took the board hesitantly. He ran the palm of his hand across its surface. The wood was more finely worked than any object he’d ever held, and the inlaid strips of Corestuff were cold and smooth. ‘Don’t you mind?’

  Cris laughed easily. ‘As long as you bring it back whole, no. Go with Ray - she’s a better Surfer than me, and a better teacher. I’ll wait here until you’re done.’