Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (26 page)

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 manoeuvre 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 . . .’

O
n clouds of steam the plate ship swam towards 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 travelling 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 neighbouring trajectories approaching the Core. As they round the singularity they fan out, like unravelling fibres; 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. 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 any 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—

—and now it emerged from the other side of the kernel, exploding at her like a fist. She ducked, grabbing for Grye; but the spear passed a few yards above her head and sailed away into the air.

Quid sighed. ‘Not quite true. Old Quid needs to get his eye in. Still—’ He winked. ‘Not bad for a first try, eh?’ He prodded Grye’s sagging paunch. ‘Now, that’s what I call orbital dynamics. And all in old Quid’s head. Astonishing, isn’t it? And that’s why you need the Boneys. Now then, Quid needs his drink. See you later, darling . . .’

And he brushed past them and entered the Quartermaster’s.

Gord shoved his thinning blond hair from his eyes and thumped the table. ‘It can’t be done. I know what I’m talking about, damn it.’

Jaen towered over the little engineer. ‘And I’m telling you you’re wrong.’

‘Child, I’ve more experience than you will ever—’

‘Experience?’ She laughed. ‘Your experience with the Boneys has softened your brains.’

Now Gord stood. ‘Why, you—’

‘Stop, stop.’ Tiredly Hollerbach placed his age-spotted hands on the table top.

Jaen simmered. ‘But he won’t listen.’

‘Jaen. Shut up.’

‘But - ah, damn it.’ She subsided.

Hollerbach let his gaze roam around the cool, perfect lines of the Bridge’s Observation Room. The floor was covered with tables and spread-out diagrams: Scientists and others bent over sketches of orbital paths, models of grandiose protective shells to be built around the Raft, tables showing rates of food consumption and oxygen exhaustion under various regimes of rationing. The air was filled with feverish, urgent conversation. Wistfully, Hollerbach recalled the studied calm of the place when he had first joined the great Class of Scientists; in those days there had still been some blue in the sky, and there had seemed all the time in the world for him to study . . .

At least, he reflected, all this urgent effort was in the right direction, and seemed to be producing the results they needed to carry through this scheme. The tables and dry graphs told a slowly emerging tale of a modified Raft hurtling on a courageous trajectory around the Core; these sober Scientists and their assistants were together engaged on man’s most ambitious project since the building of the Raft itself.