Xeelee: Endurance (37 page)

11

The Raft was an oval shadow against dull crimson.

The whale plummeted blind, through dead air. Since crossing the void between the nebulae the animal had become a slender missile, its deflated flesh a smooth casing around its internal organs. Even the great eyes had closed. At times Lura had thought it was asleep, or dead, but it continued to respond to the handling of its master – Otho himself worked the goads. Now the whale’s great flukes were beating at the air, and its body was counter-turning, so that the Raft rotated in her view as they approached, close enough now for Lura to see detail, how the light shone through rents in that great floor in the sky.

‘Not long now,’ said Pesten.

Otho snapped, ‘Then hope we find what we came here for, and that it makes this jaunt worthwhile.’ He hauled on his harness. The whale shuddered, and a deep bass groan filled its cavernous interior.

Pesten gave Lura a small smile. They had spoken of how Otho seemed to care for his whale more than he cared for his riders, or himself, and now he demonstrated that. He was a bandit, a killer and a rapist, yet he was a competent leader and capable of sentiment – complicated, like all humans.

As the whale spun closer, the Raft grew until it blocked out half the sky. In the light of a big-star somewhere beyond, it cast a diffusing shadow far down through the dusty air. Otho stopped the whale’s spin, and let it drift in slowly for its final approach. Now, as they floated up towards the rim, the Raft foreshortened into an elliptical patchwork of battered deck plates. Lura could see the sooty scars of welding around the edges of the nearer plates, but as her eye tracked across the ceiling-like surface, the plates crowded with distance into a blur.

At last the whale rose up above the rim, and the upper surface of the Raft opened out below them, an enormous dish, full of complexity. The deck, which itself looked knife-thin, was studded with buildings, constructed of wood panels or metal and jumbled together like toys. The surface was damaged everywhere, tears and holes ripped through it, and at the very heart of the Raft a long rectangular gash lay open like an unhealed wound. And on the farside rim tall machines hulked, silent guardians.

They were all silent before this tremendous unfolding spectacle.

Pesten murmured to Lura, ‘Just remember it’s worse for these whale riders than for us. They live in a world of animals, where nothing humans make is much bigger than those goads Otho is sticking into his poor beast’s nerve stumps.
We
couldn’t make anything like this, but it isn’t so strange to us. Look, that floor is made of iron that probably came from some star kernel or other – although it looks to have a different texture towards the centre. It’s big – what, a thousand paces across? – but it isn’t
so
big, our Forest wouldn’t be dwarfed. And this is
ours
, remember – made by our ancestors, and inhabited for generations, and only abandoned when this nebula ran out of air to breathe.’

The whale continued to rise up over the Raft. Otho looked back at Lura and Pesten. ‘What now?’

Pesten said, ‘Coton told us to look for something big, bigger than a human. And obvious.’ He pointed. ‘What about those structures on the far rim?’

Lura peered that way. ‘They look like a row of broken teeth. But they’re big enough, aren’t they?’ She drifted up to the whale’s translucent skin. ‘Mole—’

‘
Massive sensor dysfunction!
’

‘Shut up.’ She held it up to the skin, with the small apertures facing out. ‘Are those machines over there what you’re looking for?’

The Mole hesitated, and not for the first time Lura wondered what strange parodies of thought went on inside its cool shell
.
Then: ‘
Confirmed
.’

‘Let’s get it done,’ Otho grunted. He braced in the harness, and pressed the goads hard.

The whale’s flukes beat, its collapsed skin rippled, and it groaned. Even Lura could sense the animal’s unhappiness as it was forced to swim down towards the vast, strange surface. Apparently unconsciously the riders held each other’s hands and murmured one of their strange, rhythmic, cyclical songs, trying to reassure the beast.

The Raft became a floor that fled beneath them. Pesten lay down on his belly, peering through translucent flesh at the panorama passing below, and Lura joined him, face down, her elbows tucked under her. As they moved in from the rim they passed over an area of big blocky structures, clean-edged. Lura made out cones set in the surface, evidently firmly anchored, some of which had cables trailing from their upper points. But whatever those cables had once been attached to was long gone.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Pesten said. He pointed excitedly. ‘Look at that! See the way the buildings are tipped over, away from the centre? And those rows of terraces?’

She frowned. ‘No, I don’t see.’

‘Well, think about the Raft’s gravity – how the mass of this vast, thin dish would tug at you if you stood on it. At the edge, you’d feel as if you were being pulled towards the centre of mass, as you walked in it would feel as if you were standing on a tipped-up plate. But at the centre you’d be pulled straight down, as if that big plate was level. So they’ve built their houses here on a slant, to make it feel as if they are locally vertical. And the terraces, I suppose, are to stop you rolling all the way down to the centre if you fell over.’

She hadn’t had a Brother’s education, but she sensed the ingenuity of the design. It was somehow reassuring to think that the builders of the Raft really had been human, thinking about the needs of the people who would inhabit it.

As they headed to the centre they crossed a different zone, of smaller, more open buildings with doors and windows.

‘Houses,’ Pesten said. ‘This is where people lived. Look at all those houses, stuck to the plate in rows . . .’

Lura said, ‘Coton told me this is how people live in his universe. On surfaces, the surfaces of
planets.
’ Another Coton-word. ‘Not floating around in the air, as we do.’

‘We’re designed to live that way, after all. Walking around on the ground of planets, I mean.’ Pesten slapped his thin thighs. ‘That’s why we have legs. But it’s a long time since anybody lived
here
. And it doesn’t look like they finished their time peacefully.’

He was right. Lura saw the evidence of fires, in burned-out buildings and scorched deck plates. And – ‘Oh, Pesten, look.’

The bodies were human, one large, one small, huddled up on the floor, spooned together with the adult sheltering the child. They were still clothed, and scraps of skin clung to their bones, withered and dried.

Pesten reached out and took her hand. ‘Long dead. Perhaps these were among the last – when there was nobody left to take care of the bodies.’

And, she thought grimly, in this lethal air there were not even any rats left to consume the flesh, or worms or bugs.

The whale groaned again, and shuddered under them.

Braced in his harness, Otho called, ‘We’re being drawn into the Raft’s own gravity well. In the middle it’s going to be a good fraction of a gravity, I guess, and she doesn’t like it . . .’

Pesten, peering down, ignored him. ‘We’re approaching the centre of the Raft. It’s different again here.’

These buildings were grander, Lura thought, bigger and more elaborate, with fancy colours and decorations, carved doorways and window frames.

‘But if anything, the evidence of burning is even worse,’ Pesten said. ‘Maybe this is where the bosses lived. They’ll have taken the blame when people got angry and frightened. And look at the floor, the texture. That’s different too . . .’

Where the deck further out seemed to have been assembled from sheets of rusted iron, here the material shone, gleaming and rust-free, though it was still a patchwork, and in places was marked with a kind of decoration, markings of black and green on a white surface.

‘Look, the plates curve,’ Pesten said, growing excited. ‘There, and there . . . And
that
plate looks like it’s been beaten flat. I think this was once some curved surface that’s been cut up and put back together to make this floor.’

‘The hull of the Ship,’ Lura breathed. ‘The stories say it was a great cylinder. Is it possible? And those markings—’

‘I think I recognise numbers,’ the Brother said. ‘Look – that’s a four, I think, and that’s part of a seven. But if the Ship’s name is written here, it must be cut up and fragmented.’

And Lura, who could read nothing but the numbers pilots etched on their flying trees, could not have recognised the letters of the name anyhow.

Now they reached the very centre of the Raft, where a jagged hole perhaps a hundred paces long had been cut into the floor. Pesten said, ‘It looks as if something was fixed here, and was just ripped out. But how, or why?’ He sighed. ‘There’s so much we’ll never know.’

Lura spotted another body. It was small and naked, its withered skin bare – it must have been another child. It was suspended in the centre of the hole, bobbing up and down through the plane of the Raft, held there, she supposed, by the great artefact’s own gravity field.

To the whale riders, passing the rent in the deck marked the halfway point in this strange journey across the Raft. Encouraged, they sang louder, and Otho worked his goads.

Once past the centre, the whale crossed over the Raft’s concentric zones again, the rich central area, the cruder living spaces beyond, the more functional outer rim. They saw more burning and destruction, and a few more bodies. But Lura saw no movement, nothing that looked fresh – no sign that anybody or anything had lived here for a very long time.

At last the whale hovered before one of the big structures at the very edge of the deck. The machine was an irregular block as tall as two humans. Outlets pierced its broad face, and on the far side a nozzle like a huge mouth strained outwards at the atmosphere of the nebula.

‘Coton said it might be like this, remember,’ Pesten said. ‘He said the Raft must have had machines that drew in stuff from the air and turned it into food and water for the people. Doesn’t that look right?’

Yes, Lura thought; it wasn’t hard to imagine the machine taking giant breaths through those metal lips. On a whim she held up the Mole so it could see. ‘Can you identify that?’

Without hesitation it called loudly, ‘Supply Machine, Deck Seven, Sector Twelve, Model 4-X-7-B,
Integrality’s Constancy of Purpose
. Report status!’

To Lura’s astonishment a panel on the front of the Raft machine lit up, and she heard a voice, carried through the thick dead air, muffled by the whale’s skin: ‘
Operational.
’

The riders quailed back in superstitious awe.

Otho looked back at Lura. ‘Well, here we are. What now?’

Pesten said, ‘Coton said we have to work on the machine. How can we get to it?’

Lura said, ‘If we go outside—’

‘You’ll be dead in heartbeats,’ Otho said. Lura saw a kind of resentment cloud his face. ‘I’ll have the whale swallow the machine. Then, when it’s sealed up in her gut, we’ll cut it out. This is going to hurt her. You’d better hope it’s worth it, tree girl, because if it’s not, I’ll cut you. Come on, baby. It won’t be so bad.’

He worked his goads, and the whale groaned and shuddered as its face was driven towards the strange old machine.

12

‘We’re in the Marshal’s flitter, deep in the system of the neutron star, Lura. There isn’t much to see. The neutron star is a dull ember, but its huge density twists space. Vala said that if you tried to measure pi by dividing the star’s circumference by its diameter, you’d be out by about ten per cent. I’m not sure what that means . . . We’ve already done some close passes around the star. I thought I could feel the tides, and the hull groaned—’

‘That’s gravity, Coton!’

‘Yes. Which shapes your world. It’s all so strange. When I look at the neutron star I can’t believe that there are people down there, inside it – or anyhow, Vala says, they
feel
like they’re people, even though they are made of nuclear material and you could fit thousands of them on your thumbnail.

‘But there’s more, Lura. There is life
outside
the star too, in knots in the magnetic field, blobs of plasma with internal structure. You can barely see them with the naked eye, but they’re very clear in Vala’s instruments. They’re yet another kind of Weaponised people. Nobody knows
why
they were spun out of magnetism. Vala says maybe they came here as a refuge. When we make our approaches they cluster close to the ship, and they send signals – a kind of screech, which Vala hasn’t managed to decipher yet. They’re trying to talk to us.’

‘Can you help them?’

‘I don’t know. Not today.’

‘And how are you, Coton? Are you sleeping well?’

‘The gravity dreams are too vivid for that. Spacetime is stretched here, and my brain is bathed in gravitons and sterile neutrinos . . . It’s better to stay awake, if I can. And when I do, I can hear you so clearly now.’

‘Coton – are you afraid? After all, it’s your head they’re going to use, if I understand you, to save me. And then those who will follow me. The thing in your head, the only machine they have that’s powerful enough to bring me across . . .’

‘I try not to be afraid. I trust my grandmother.’

‘If all this fails – or if you decide you don’t want to do this after all, Coton, and I’ll understand – it will still have been worth it. Even if we can’t come home, at least you’ll know our story.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’ll still be able to talk, won’t we?’

‘Until I grow out of my dreaming faculty – yes. I’ll try as long as I can. Vala is waving at me. I think she wants me to rest.’

‘We’ll talk later. One way or another.’

‘Yes. One way or another. Goodbye, Lura . . .’

13

Coton at last drifted to sleep.

Vala returned to the Marshal’s cabin. Fold-out seats had been set up by the main observation window, and Sand sat there, cradling a cup of hot tea, Virtual status displays hovering around her head.

Behind a partition Sand’s crew controlled the flitter with military competence. And in another cabin Croq the antiquarian was adjusting his ancient Ghost teleport equipment, complaining about the challenge of interfacing systems from technological traditions separated by hundreds of thousands of years. But in this lounge the atmosphere was calm.

Vala sat down with Sand and picked up her own cup – which, when it sensed her presence, began to fill up with tea, a minor miracle bequeathed by some long-dead engineer of the deep past.

Sand asked, ‘Is the boy sleeping?’

‘Badly. The dreams—’

‘How sweet it is to hear their conversation,’ Sand said. Vala had arranged a pickup so that Coton’s sub-vocalising of Lura’s speech could be heard. ‘Boy chatting to girl, an eternal story. They aren’t so far removed in age, are they, Academician? Maybe if this girl is successfully retrieved through your lashed-up teleport, they’ll fall in love! How fitting that would be. If she isn’t turned into some grotesque protoplasmic mass, or if a million years in Beta’s super-gravity hasn’t turned her kind into monsters. And if the process doesn’t burn out
his
frontal lobe. Does Coton fully understand the risks for himself, by the way? I imagine not – I imagine you haven’t fully informed him – for Coton might have refused, and then you might have had to face the inconvenience of
forcing
him to obey your will. That wouldn’t fit your image of yourself at all, would it, Vala, as an Academician or a grandmother?’

Guilt swirled in Vala, under a crust of denial. But she had lived a long time and was in control of her emotions, she believed; and she clung to the principle that higher purposes sometimes required sacrifices. Yes, she thought. If she’d had to force her grandson into this, she would have done it. ‘Does it give you pleasure to jab at me in this way, Marshal?’

‘I am interested in people. I could hardly fulfil my role otherwise. And you are quite an extraordinary specimen, Academician. So much conflict! You seethe with ambition and resentment.’

‘Resentment? I am a Weaponised, Marshal Sand. And I am highly educated. The more a Weaponised learns of her own past and the past of her kind, the more resentment deepens, I would say. A natural reaction.’ She savoured her anger, as she savoured the tea’s exotic flavour on her tongue. ‘Why, we Weaponised don’t need the Xeelee Scourge. We have you normals, and that’s enough.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Vala.
You
have hardly been persecuted, have you? You make an inappropriate martyr! And besides – what is “normal”? Humanity has been engaged in interstellar war for a million years. After such a history perhaps we are all Weaponised. It’s just that with some of us it isn’t so obvious—’

A faint alarm chimed, and Sand pointed to one of the Virtuals fluttering around her head. It expanded to show a schematic of the ship, with lenticular forms sweeping around it.

‘The mag-field creatures again,’ Vala said.

‘Yes. They don’t seem able to keep away. They beat against the hull like butterflies battering against a window.’

Vala wondered what this stern Marshal knew of butterflies. ‘Military goals were rarely achieved with these projects, you know. The Weaponising. When you read the records of that period, you sometimes think the Integrality scientists created such beings simply because they
could
. . . And certainly little thought was given to those abandoned when the military projects were over.’

‘How do we look to them, do you imagine, the mag-field butterflies?’

Vala shrugged. ‘Cages of electromagnetic and molecular forces. Perhaps like themselves, but made of clumsy, dense stuff, rather than their own graceful plasma wisps. That’s if they perceive such different creatures as ourselves as intelligent entities in the first place. It’s interesting – there may be forms in universe Beta that don’t exist here, that perhaps
we
would have trouble recognising as sentient, or even alive. Like the “beasts of gravitic chemistry” that supposedly swarm in accretion surfaces surrounding their great black holes . . .’

‘All that complexity. And all implicit, I suppose, in the knotted-up strangeness that was the universe Beta Big Bang – as our own existence was implicit in our own singularity.’ Sand studied her own hand, and the Virtual displays’ green and red light reflected in her clear eyes. ‘How strange it all is.’

Vala realised she knew nothing of Sand’s background. Did she have children of her own, for example? ‘You are in a reflective mood today, Marshal. I’ll admit that you are not the person I took you for, when we first met in this very flitter down on Delta Seven.’

‘Well, there you are. How can we expect to make sense of the universe if we can’t understand each other – eh, Academician?’

‘I haven’t wished to push the issue, for fear it would drive you off. But I’m not sure I understand
why
, in the end, you’ve diverted resources to support this project of mine. Unlike the Starfolk, I can’t see that the Beta castaways will be of any use to you as a weapon.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Sand gestured, conjured another Virtual, and with a wave sent it spinning through the air to Vala. ‘Here’s a conceptual study on how we might use Beta itself as a source of gravitons, perhaps of gravity waves . . . After all, the ancient starbreaker weapon is essentially a gravity wave cannon. Could Beta work as a universal energy source for such weapons? Or, as you said yourself, Beta is a messy, porous spacetime. Perhaps it could be used as some kind of cosmic interchange, a wormhole junction. The Xeelee might use it that way already. Maybe we could even tap into the energies of Beta’s Big Crunch, which is coming soon.’

Vala smiled. ‘You would weaponise an entire cosmos? You think big, for a soldier.’

‘We are fighting a big war.’

‘But I don’t buy any of that as a personal motive for attempting this rescue, of Lura and her people. What is it, Marshal? Humanitarianism?’

Sand shrugged, unperturbed. ‘Call it that if you want. We are a species who once won a Galaxy. I believe that even now we should aspire to do more than simply retreat – that even as the darkness closes in, at least we can help each other.’ She was looking steadily at Vala, with a hint of that cold humour in her eyes. ‘And what about you, Academician? I hardly think
you’re
here for reasons of warmth and kindness. Oh, it might have started out that way, when you first heard of the plight of these Beta castaways through the mouth of Coton. But it’s gone beyond that now, hasn’t it? The risk you’re prepared to take with Coton has convinced me of that.

‘You scientists are all the same. You don’t want to make this transfer to save the castaways.
You want to do it because you think you can
. And the cost is irrelevant. Why, you’re as bad as the Weaponeers of the Integrality, who made your ancestors and whom you affect to despise. You’re nothing but a crucible of ambition. And into this crucible your own grandson, young and smiling, is to be thrust.’

Vala glared at her. But she was the first to turn away, her face hot. The Marshal laughed.

Another alarm sounded, a gentle chime.

Croq rapped on the door and opened it. ‘The Beta castaways have powered up their booth. We’re ready to attempt the transfer.’

Sand looked Vala in the eye, and the Academician knew what she was thinking.
Last chance to back out
.

Vala stood. ‘Let’s do this.’