Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (22 page)

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 oesophagus. 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 towards a slow death at the hands of tiny, malevolent humans, but towards—

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.

T
he assault of the mine craft on the Raft had been underway 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 towards 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 defence. 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 counterthrust. 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 submerged 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.

‘Shit.’

‘What do we do, Pallis?’

‘We’ve underestimated them. They’ve caught us out, ambushed us. Damn it. Come on, lad, don’t just stand there. We’ve got to rise before they get above us. You work on the bowls near the rim, and I’ll get to the trunk.’

Nead stared at the encroaching forms of the miners as if unable to accept this distraction from the simple verities of the battle below.

‘Move!’ Pallis snapped, thumping his shoulder.

Nead moved.

A floor of smoke spread beneath the trees, spilling over the battlefield. The great wheels lurched up and away from the deck . . . but the mine craft were smaller, faster and far more manoeuvreable. Effortlessly they moved into position above the flight.

Pallis felt his shoulders sag. He imagined a fire bomb hitting the dry branches of his tree. The foliage would burn like old paper; the structure would disintegrate and send blazing fragments raining over the deck—

Well, he wasn’t dead yet. ‘Scatter!’ he yelled to his pilots. ‘They can’t take us all.’

The formation broke with what seemed ponderous slowness. The two mine craft split up, each making for a tree . . .

And one of them was Pallis’s.

As the plate descended the tree-pilot’s eyes met those of the miner above him. Nead came to stand close by the pilot. Pallis reached out, found Nead’s shoulder, squeezed hard—

Then a cold breeze shook the tree and a shadow swept across his face, shocking and unexpected. A huge form sailed across the face of the star above the Raft.

‘A whale . . .’ Pallis felt his jaw drop. The great beast was no more than a hundred yards above the deck of the Raft; never in his life had he known a whale to come so close.

When the miners attacking Pallis saw the vast translucent ceiling mere yards above them they called out in panic and jerked at their controls. The plate wobbled, spun about, then shot away.