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  Raft

  ( Xeelee Sequence - 1 )

  Stephen Baxter

  Five hundred years after a handful of human starship travelers got lost in a hostile universe, their descendants are still struggling for survival. As hard as life is on The Raft — a platform remnant of the ship’s hull — it’s even harder in The Belt — a string of shacks circling the iron-rich core of a dead star. Every Belter has heard the story of the legendary starship but most of them don’t believe it. But Rees, a lowly mine-rat, does. He wonders why the sky is angry red instead of the blue his parents remembered. Why food from The Raft gets less and less nutritious. Why fewer and fewer stars form every day. In his quest to find answers, Rees travels from boyhood to manhood, from the outermost edges of his world into its mysterious heart. And along the way he discovers there’s more at stake than his simple curiosity: life in his enigmatic universe is about to become impossible…

  Raft

  by Stephen Baxter

  To my wife, Sandra

  I must express my thanks to Larry Niven, David Brin and Eric Brown, who took the trouble to read and comment closely on drafts of this novel, and on the imagined universe it portrays: thanks to their input the quality of this work has been greatly enhanced. Thanks also to Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Shaw, Charles Sheffield, Joe Haldeman, and David Pringle for their words of praise and encouragement. Finally I owe a great debt of gratitude to Malcolm Edwards, my editor at Grafton, for his patience, encouragement, and close attention to the development of this work.

  1

  It was when the foundry imploded that Rees’s curiosity about his world became unbearable.

  The shift started normally enough with a thump on his cabin wall from the fist of Sheen, his shift supervisor. Groggily Rees pulled himself from his sleeping net and moved slowly about the jumbled cabin, grinding through his wake-up routines.

  The water from the rusty spigot emerged reluctantly in the microgee conditions. The liquid was sour and cloudy. He forced down a few mouthfuls and splashed his face and hair. He wondered with a shudder how many human bodies this water had passed through since its first collection from a passing cloud; it had been dozens of shifts since the last supply tree from the Raft had called with fresh provisions, and the Belt’s antique recycling system was showing its deficiencies.

  He pulled on a stained, one-piece coverall. The garment was getting too short. At fifteen thousand shifts old he was dark, slim — and tall enough already and still growing, he thought gloomily. This observation made him think with a stab of sadness of his parents; it was just the sort of remark they might have made. His father, who had not long survived his mother, had died a few hundred shifts ago of circulatory problems and exhaustion. Suspended by one hand from the door frame Rees surveyed the little iron-walled cabin, recalling how cluttered it had seemed when he’d shared it with his parents.

  He pushed such thoughts away and wriggled through the narrow door frame.

  He blinked for a few seconds, dazzled by the shifting starlight… and hesitated. There was a faint scent on the air. A richness, like meat-sim. Something burning?

  His cabin was connected to his neighbor’s by a few yards of fraying rope and by lengths of rusty piping; he pulled himself a few feet along the rope and hung there, eyes raking the world around him for the source of the jarring scent.

  The air of the Nebula was, as always, stained blood-red. A corner of his mind tried to measure that redness — was it deeper than last shift? — while his eyes flicked around the objects scattered through the Nebula above and below him. The clouds were like handfuls of grayish cloth sprinkled through miles of air. Stars fell among and through the clouds in a slow, endless rain that tumbled down to the Core. The light of the mile-wide spheres cast shifting shadows over the clouds, the scattered trees, the huge blurs that might be whales. Here and there he saw a tiny flash that marked the end of a star’s brief existence.

  How many stars were there?

  As a child Rees had hovered among the cables, eyes wide, counting up to the limits of his knowledge and patience. Now he suspected that the stars were without number, that there were more stars than hairs on his head… or thoughts in his head, or words on his tongue. He raised his head and scoured a sky that was filled with stars. It was as if he were suspended in a great cloud of light; the star-spheres receded with distance into points of light, so that the sky itself was a curtain glowing red-yellow.

  The burning scent called to him again, seeping through the thin air. He wrapped his toes in the cabin cable and released his hands; he let the spin of the Belt straighten his spine, and from this new viewpoint surveyed his home.

  The Belt was a circle about eight hundred yards wide, a chain of battered dwellings and work places connected by ropes and tubes. At the center of the Belt was the mine itself, a cooled-down star kernel a hundred yards wide; lifting cables dangled from the Belt to the surface of the star kernel, scraping the rusty meniscus at a few feet per second.

  Here and there, fixed to the walls and roofs of the Belt, were the massive, white-metal mouths of jets; every few minutes a puff of steam emerged from one of those throats and the Belt tugged imperceptibly faster at his heels, shaking off the slowing effects of air friction. He studied the ragged rim of the nearest jet; it was fixed to his neighbor’s roof and showed signs of hasty cutting and welding. As usual his attention drifted off into random speculation. What vessel, or other device, had that jet come from? Who were the men who had cut it away? And why had they come here…?

  Again the whiff of fire. He shook his head, trying to concentrate.

  It was shift-change time, of course, and there were little knots of activity around most of the cabins in the Belt as workers, grimy and tired, made for their sleep nets — and, a quarter of the Belt’s circumference from him, a haze of smoke hovered around the foundry. He saw men dive again and again into the grayish fog. When they reemerged they tugged limp, blackened forms.

  Bodies?

  With a soft cry he curled, grasped the rope and sprint-crawled over the diffuse gravity wells of cabin roofs and walls to the foundry.

  He hesitated on the edge of the sphere of smoke. The stench of burnt meat-sim made his empty stomach twist. Two figures emerged from the haze, solidifying like figures in a dream. They carried an unrecognizable, bloodied bundle between them. Rees anchored himself and reached down to help them; he tried not to recoil as charred flesh peeled away in his hands.

  The limp form was bundled in stained blankets and hauled tenderly away. One of the two rescuers straightened before Rees; white eyes shone out of a soot-smeared face. It took him a few seconds to recognize Sheen, his shift supervisor. The pull of her hot, blackened body was a distant tugging at his belly, and he was ashamed to find, even at a moment like this, his eyes tracking sweat droplets over her blood-smeared chest. “You’re late,” she said, her voice smoke-deep as a man’s.

  “I’m sorry. What’s happened?”

  “An implosion. What do you think?” Pushing scorched hair from her brow she turned and pointed into the stationary pall of smoke. Now Rees could make out the shape of the foundry within; its cubical form had buckled, as if crushed by a giant hand. “Two dead so far,” Sheen said. “Damn it. That’s the third collapse in the last hundred shifts. If only Gord built strong enough for this damn stupid universe, I wouldn’t have to scrape my workmates off each other like so much spoiled meat-sim. Damn, damn.”

  “What shall I do?”

  She turned and looked at him with annoyance; he felt a flush of embarrassment and fear climb in his cheeks. Her irritation seemed to soften a little. “Help us haul the rest out. Stick close to me and you’ll be fine. Try to breathe through your nose, OK?”

  And she turned and dived back into the spreadi
ng smoke. Rees hesitated for a single second, then hurried after her.

  The bodies were cleared and allowed to drift away into the Nebula air, while the injured were collected by their families and gently bundled to waiting cabins. The fire in the foundry was doused and soon the smoke was dispersing. Gord, the Belt’s chief engineer, crawled over the ruins. The engineer was a short, blond man; he shook his head miserably as he began the work of planning the rebuilding of the foundry. Rees saw how the relatives of the dead and injured regarded Gord with hatred as he went about his work. Surely the series of implosions could not be blamed on the engineer?

  … But if not Gord, who?

  Rees’s shift was cancelled. The Belt had a second foundry, separated from the ruin by a hundred and eighty degrees, and Rees would be expected to call there on his next working shift; but for now he was free.

  He pulled his way slowly back to his cabin, staring with fascination at the blood-trails left by his hands on ropes and roofs. His head seemed still to be full of smoke. He paused for a few minutes at the entrance to his cabin, trying to suck clean oxygen from the air; but the ruddy, shifting starlight seemed almost as thick as smoke. Sometimes the Nebula breezes seemed almost unbreathable.

  If only the sky were blue, he thought vaguely. I wonder what blue is like… Even in his parents’ childhood — so his father had said — there were still hints of blue in the sky, off at the edges of the Nebula, far beyond the clouds and stars. He closed his eyes, trying to picture a color he had never seen, thinking of coolness, of clear water.

  So the world had changed since his father’s day. Why? And would it change again? Would blue and those other cool colors return — or would the redness deepen until it was the color of ruined flesh—

  Rees pulled his way into his cabin and ran the spigot. He took off his tunic and scrubbed at his bloodstained skin until it ached.

  The flesh peeled from the body in his hands like the skin from rotten fruit-sim; bone gleamed white—

  He lay in his net, eyes wide, remembering.

  A distant handbell rang three times. So it was still only mid-shift — he had to endure another shift and a half, a full twelve hours, before he had an excuse to leave the cabin.

  If he stayed here he’d go crazy.

  He rolled out of his net, pulled on his coverall and slid out of the cabin. The quickest way to the Quartermaster’s was along the Belt past the wrecked foundry; deliberately he turned and crawled the other way.

  People nodded from windows and outdoor nets as he passed, some smiling with faint sympathy. There were only a couple of hundred people in the Belt; the tragedy must have hit almost everybody. From dozens of cabins came the sounds of soft weeping, of cries of pain.

  Rees lived alone, keeping mostly to his own company; but he knew almost everybody in the Belt. Now he lingered by cabins where people to whom he was a little closer must be suffering, perhaps dying; but he hurried on, feeling isolation thicken around him like smoke.

  The Quartermaster’s bar was one of the Belt’s largest buildings at twenty yards across; it was laced with climbing ropes, and bar stock covered most of one wall. This shift the place was crowded: the stink of alcohol and weed, the bellow of voices, the pull of a mass of hot bodies — it all hit Rees as if he’d run into a wall. Jame, the barman, plied his trade briskly, laughing raucously through a graying tangle of beard. Rees lingered on the fringe of the milling crowd, anxious not to return to his desolate cabin; but the drink and laughter seemed to flow around him, excluding him, and he turned to leave.

  “Rees! Wait…”

  It was Sheen. She had pushed away from the center of a group of men; one of them — a huge, intimidating miner called Roch — called after her drunkenly. Sheen’s cheeks were moist from the heat of the bar and she had cropped away her scorched hair; otherwise she was bright and clean in a fresh, skimpy tunic. When she spoke her voice was still scoured rough by the smoke. “I saw you come in. Here. You look like you need this.” She held out a drink in a tarnished globe.

  Suddenly awkward, Rees said, “I was going to leave—”

  “I know you were.” She moved closer to him, unsmiling, and pushed the drink into his chest. “Take it anyway.” Again he felt the pull of her body as a warmth in his stomach — why should her gravity field have such a distinct flavor from that of others? — and he was distractingly aware of her bare arms.

  “Thanks.” He took the drink and sucked at the globe’s plastic nipple; hot liquor coursed over his tongue, “Maybe I did need that.”

  Sheen studied him with frank curiosity. “You’re an odd one, Rees, aren’t you?”

  He stared back, letting his eyes slide over the smoothness of the skin around her eyes. It struck him that she wasn’t really much older than he was. “How am I odd?”

  “You keep yourself to yourself.”

  He shrugged.

  “Look, it’s something you need to grow out of. You need company. We all do. Especially after a shift like this one.”

  “What did you mean earlier?” he asked suddenly.

  “When?”

  “During the implosion. You said how hard it was to build anything strong enough for this universe.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well… what other universe is there?”

  She sucked at her drink, ignoring the shouted invitations from the party behind her. “Who cares?”

  “My father used to say the mine was killing us all. Humans weren’t meant to work down there, crawling around in wheelchairs at five gee.”

  She laughed. “Rees, you’re a character. But I’m not in the mood for metaphysical speculation, frankly. What I’m in the mood for is to get brain-dead on this fermented fruit-sim. So you can join me and the boys if you want, or you can go and sigh at the stars. OK?” She floated away, looking back questioningly; he shook his head, smiling stiffly, and she drifted back to her party, disappearing into a little pool of arms and legs.

  Rees finished his drink, struggled to the bar to return the empty globe, and left.

  A heavy cloud, fat with rain, drifted over the Belt, reducing visibility to a few yards; the air it brought with it seemed exceptionally sour and thin.

  Rees prowled around the cables that girdled his world, muscles working restlessly. He completed two full circuits, passing huts and cabins familiar since his childhood, hurrying past well-known faces. The damp cloud, the thin air, the confinement of the Belt seemed to come together somewhere inside his chest. Questions chased around his skull. Why were human materials and building methods so inadequate to resist the forces of the world? Why were human bodies so feeble in the face of those forces?

  Why had his parents had to die, without answering the questions that had haunted him since childhood?

  Shards of rationality glittered in the mud of his overtired thinking. His parents had had no better understanding of their circumstances than he had; there had been nothing but legends they could tell him before their sour deaths. Children’s tales of a Ship, a Crew, of something called Bolder’s Ring… But his parents had had — acceptance. They, and the rest of the Belt dwellers — even the sparkiest, like Sheen — seemed implicitly to accept their lot. Only Rees seemed plagued by questions, unanswered doubts.

  Why couldn’t he be like everyone else? Why couldn’t he just accept and be accepted?

  He let himself drift to rest, arms aching, cloud mist spattering his face. In all his universe there was only one entity which he could talk to about this — which would respond in any meaningful way to his questions.

  And that was a digging machine.

  With a sudden impulse he looked about. He was perhaps a hundred yards from the nearest mine elevator station; his arms and legs carried him to it with renewed vigor.

  Cloud mist swirled after Rees as he entered the station. The place was deserted, as Rees had expected. The whole shift would be lost to mourning; not for another two or three hours would the bleary-eyed workers of the next shift begin to arriv
e.

  The station was little more than another cubical iron shack, locked into the Belt. It was dominated by a massive drum around which a fine cable was coiled. The drum was framed by winch equipment constructed of some metal that remained free of rust, and from the cable dangled a heavy chair fitted with large, fat wheels. The chair was topped by a head and neck support and was thickly padded. There was a control panel fixed to a strut at one end of the drum; the panel was an arm’s-length square and contained fist-sized, color-coded switches and dials. Rees rapidly set up a descent sequence on the panel and the winch drum began to vibrate.

  He slid into the chair, taking care to smooth the clothing under his back and legs. On the surface of the star a crease of cloth could cut like a knife. A red light flashed on the control panel, casting sombre shadows, and the base of the cabin slid aside with a soft grind. The ancient machinery worked with a chorus of scrapes and squeaks; the drum turned and the cable began to pay out.

  With a jolt Rees dropped through the station floor and into the dense cloud. The chair was pulled down the guide cable; the guide continued through the mist, he knew, for four hundred yards to the surface of the star. The familiar sensation of shifting gravity pulled at his stomach like gentle hands. The Belt was rotating a little faster than its orbital velocity — to keep the chain of cabins taut — and a few yards below the Belt the centripetal force faded, so that Rees drifted briefly through true weightlessness. Then he entered the gravity well of the star kernel and his weight built up rapidly, plating over his chest and stomach like iron.

  Despite the mounting discomfort he felt a sense of release. He wondered what his workmates would think if they could see him now. To choose to descend to the mine during an off-shift… and what for? To talk to a digging machine?

  The oval face of Sheen floated before him, intelligent, skeptical and pragmatic.