Raft

The Bridge was beautiful. It appeared as a half-cylinder twice his height and perhaps a hundred paces long; it lay on its side, embedded neatly in the deck. Rees remembered flying under the Raft and seeing the other half of the cylinder hanging beneath the plates like some vast insect. The pile of books still in his arms, he stepped closer to the curving wall. The surface was of a matt, silvery metal that softened the harsh starlight to a pink-gold glow. An arched door frame had been cut into the wall; its lines were the finest, cleanest work Rees had ever seen. The plates of the disassembled hull lapped around the cylinder, and Rees saw how neatly they had been cut and joined to the wall.

He tried to imagine the men who had done this wonderful work. He had a vague picture of godlike creatures disassembling another, huge cylinder with glowing blades… And later generations had added their crude accretions around the gleaming heart of the Raft, their grace and power dwindling as thousands of shifts wore away.

"… I said now, mine rat!" The Navigator's face was pink with fury; Rees shook himself out of his daydream and hurried to join Cipse at the doorway.

Another Scientist emerged from the shining interior of the Bridge; he took Rees's load. Cipse gave Rees one last glance. "Now get back to your work, and be thankful if I don't tell Hollerbach to feed you to the reprocessing plants—" Muttering, the Navigator turned and disappeared into the interior of the Bridge.

Reluctant to leave this magical area Rees reached out and stroked the silver wall with his fingertips — and pulled his hand back, startled; the surface was warm, almost like skin, and impossibly smooth. He pushed his hand flat against the wall and let his palm slide over the surface. It was utterly friction-less, as if slick with some oily fluid—

"What's this? A mine rat nibbling at our Bridge?"

He turned with a start. The two young Officers he had noticed earlier stood before him, hands on hips; they gri

"No, I—"

"Because if not, I suggest you clear off back to the Belt where the other rats hide out. Or perhaps we should help you on your way, eh, Jorge?"

"Doav, why not?"

Rees studied the relaxed, handsome young men. Their words were scarcely harsher than Cipse's had been… but the youth of these cadets, the way they aped their elders so unthinkingly, made their contempt almost impossible to stomach, and Rees felt a warm anger well up inside him.

But he couldn't afford to make enemies.

Deliberately he turned his face away from the cadets and made to step past them… But the taller cadet, Doav, was in his way. "Well, rat?" He extended one finger and poked at Rees's shoulder—

— and, almost against his will, Rees grabbed the finger in one fist; with an easy turn of his wrist he bent the cadet's hand back on itself. The young man's elbow was forced forward to save the finger from snapping, and his knees bent into a half-kneel before Rees. Pain showed in a sheen of sweat on his brow, but he clenched his teeth, refusing to cry out.

Jorge's smile faded; his hands hung at his sides, uncertain.

"My name is Rees," the miner said slowly. "Remember that."

He released the finger. Doav slumped to his knees, nursing his hand; he glared up. "I'll remember you, Rees; have no fear," he hissed.

Already regretting his outburst Rees turned his back and walked away. The cadets didn't follow.

Slowly Rees dusted his way around Hollerbach's office. Of all the areas to which his chores brought him access, this room was the most intriguing. He ran a fingertip along a row of books; their pages were black with age and the gilt on their spines had all but worn away. He traced letters one by one: E…n…c…y…c… Who, or what, was an "Encyclopaedia"? He daydreamed briefly about picking up a volume, letting it fall open…

Again that almost sexual hunger for knowledge swept through him.

Now his eye was caught by a machine, a thing of jewelled cogs and gears about the size of his cupped hands. At its center was set a bright silver sphere; nine painted orbs were suspended on wires around the sphere. It was beautiful, but what the hell was it?

He glanced about. The office was empty. He couldn't resist it.

He picked up the device, relishing the feel of the machined metal base—

"Don't drop it, will you?»

He started. The intricate device juggled through the air, painfully slowly; he grabbed it and returned it to its shelf.

He turned. Silhouetted in the doorway was Jaen, her broad, freckled face creased into a grin. After a few seconds he smiled back. "Thanks a lot," he said.

The apprentice walked toward him. "You should be glad it's only me. Anybody else and you'd be off the Raft by now."

He shrugged, watching her approach with mild pleasure. Jaen was the senior apprentice of Cipse, the Chief Navigator; only a few hundred shifts older than Rees, she was one of the few inhabitants of the labs to show him anything other than contempt. She even seemed to forget he was a mine rat, sometimes . . , Jaen was a broad, stocky girl; her gait was confident but ungainly. Uncomfortably Rees found himself comparing her with Sheen. He was growing fond of Jaen; he believed she could become a good friend.

But her body didn't pull at his with the intensity of the mine girl's.

Jaen stood beside him and ran a casual fingertip over the little device. "Poor old Rees," she mocked. "I bet you don't even know what this is, do you?"

He shrugged. "You know I don't."

"It's called an orrery." She spelt the word for him. "It's a model of the Solar System."

"The what?"

Jaen sighed, then she pointed at the silver orb at the heart of the orrery. "That's a star. And these things are balls of — iron, I suppose, orbiting around it. They're called planets. Mankind — the folk on the Raft, at least — originally came from one of these planets. The fourth, I think. Or maybe the third.»

Rees scratched his chin. "Really? There can't have been too many of them."

"Why not?"

"No room. If the planet was any size the gees would be too high. The star kernel back home is only fifty yards wide — and it's mostly air — and it has a surface gravity of five gee."

"Yeah? Well, this planet was a lot bigger. It was—" She extended her hands. "Miles wide. And the gravity wasn't crushing. Things were different."

"How?"

"…I'm not sure. But the surface gravity was probably only, I don't know, three or four gee."

He thought that over. "In that case, what's a gee? I mean, why is a gee the size it is — no larger and no smaller?"

Jaen had been about to say something else; now she frowned in exasperation. "Rees, I haven't the faintest idea. By the Bones, you ask stupid questions. I'm almost tempted not to tell you the most interesting thing about the orrery."

"What?"

"That the System was huge. The orbit of the planet took about a thousand shifts… and the star at the center was a million miles wide!"

He thought that over. "Garbage," he said.

She laughed. "What do you know?"

"A star like that is impossible. It would just implode."

"You know it all." She gri

"OK."

Carrying his cleaning equipment he followed her broad back from Hollerbach's office. He glanced back once at the orrery, sitting gleaming in the shadows of its shelf.

A million miles ? Ridiculous, of course.

But what if…?

They sat side by side on the bus; the machine's huge tires made the journey soothingly smooth.

Rees surveyed the mottled plates of the Raft, the people hurrying by on tasks and errands of whose nature even now he was uncertain. His fellow passengers sat patiently through the journey, some of them reading. Rees found these casual displays of literacy somehow startling.