Raft

5

After Rees’s interview with Hollerbach Grye took him to a dormitory building. There was room for about fifty people in the long, flat building, and Rees, overwhelmed by self-consciousness, trailed the fussy Scientist down an aisle between two rows of simple pallets. Beside each pallet was a small cupboard and a rack on which clothes could be hung; Rees found himself staring curiously at the few personal possessions scattered on the floor and cupboard tops — combs and razors, small mirrors, simple sewing kits, here and there photographs of families or young women. One young man — another Science apprentice, judging by the crimson strands woven into his coveralls — lounged on a pallet. He raised narrow eyebrows at Rees’s unkempt appearance, but he nodded, friendly enough. Rees nodded back, his cheeks burning, and hurried after Grye.

He wondered what this place was. Pallis’s cabin — where he had lodged since his arrival — had seemed unimaginably luxurious to his Belt-developed tastes, and this was hardly so grand, but surely still the dwelling of some exalted class. Perhaps Rees was to clean it out; maybe he would be given somewhere to sleep nearby—

They reached a pallet free of sheets or blankets; the cupboard beside it swung open, empty. Grye waved his hand dismissively. “Here will do, I think.” And he turned to walk back down the dormitory.

Rees, confused, followed him.

Grye turned on him. “By all the bloody Bones, what’s the matter with you, boy? Don’t you understand simple speech?”

“I’m sorry—”

“Here.” Grye pointed once more at the pallet and spoke slowly and excessively clearly, as if to a simple child. “You will sleep here from now on. Do I need to write it down?”

“No—”

“Put your personal possessions in the cupboard.”

“I don’t have any—”

“Get yourself blankets from the stores,” Grye said. “The others will show you where.” And, oblivious to Rees’s lost stare at his back, Grye scurried from the building and on to his next chore.

Rees sat on the pallet — it was soft and clean — and ran a finger over the well-worked lines of the little cupboard. His cupboard.

His breath gathered in him and he felt a deep warmth spread through his face. Yes, it was his cupboard, his pallet — this was his place on the Raft.

He really had made it.

He sat on the pallet for some hours, oblivious to the amused stares of the dormitory’s other occupants. Just to be still, safe, to be able to anticipate classes tomorrow; that was enough for now.

“I heard how you fooled old Hollerbach.”

The words floated through Rees’s numbness; looking up, he found himself staring into the fine, cruel face of the Officer cadet he had bested outside the Bridge — he fumbled for the name — Doav? “As if having to live in these shacks wasn’t bad enough. Now we have to share them with the likes of this rat—”

Rees looked within himself and found only calm and acceptance. This wasn’t a time for fighting. Deliberately he looked into Doav’s eyes, grinned slowly, and winked.

Doav snorted and turned away. With much noise and banging of cupboards he collected his belongings from a pallet a few places from Rees’s and moved them to the far end of the hut.

Later, the friendly lad who had acknowledged Rees earlier strolled past his pallet. “Don’t worry about Doav. We’re not all as bad.”

Rees thanked him, appreciating the gesture. But he noticed that the boy did not move his place any nearer to Rees’s, and as the shift end neared and more apprentices gathered for sleep it soon became apparent that Rees’s pallet was an island surrounded by a little moat of empty places.

He lay down on his unmade bed, tucked his legs, and smiled, not worried one bit.

In theory, Rees learned, the Raft was a classless society. The ranks of Scientists, Officers and the rest were open to anyone regardless of the circumstances of their birth, depending only on merit and opportunity. The “Classes” of the Raft were based on roles of the Crew of the semi-legendary Ship; they denoted function and utility, so he was told, and not power or position. So the Officers were not a ruling class; they were servants of the rest, bearing a heavy responsibility for the day-to-day maintenance of the Raft’s social order and infrastructure. In this analysis the Captain was the least of all, weighed down by the heaviest burden.

So he was told.

At first Rees, his experience of human society limited to the harsh environment of the Belt, was prepared to believe what he was taught so solemnly, and he dismissed the snobbish cruelty of Doav and the rest as expressions of immaturity. But as his circle of acquaintances widened, and as his understanding — formally and informally acquired — grew, he formed a rather different picture.

It was certainly possible for a young person from a non-Officer Class to become an Officer. But, oddly enough, it never happened. The other Classes, excluded from power by the hereditary rule of the Officers, reacted by building what power bases they could. So the Infrastructure personnel had turned the Raft’s engineering details into an arcane mystery known only to initiates; and without appeasement of their key figures — men like Pallis’s acquaintance, Decker — they would exert their power to cut water or food supplies, dam up the sewers built into the deck, or bring the Raft to a halt in any of a hundred ways.

Even the Scientists, whose very reason for being was the pursuit of understanding, were not immune from this rivalry for power.

The Scientists were crucial to the Raft’s survival. In such matters as the moving of the Raft, the control of epidemics, the redesign of sections of the Raft itself, their knowledge and structured way of thinking was essential. And without the tradition the Scientists maintained — which explained how the universe worked, how humans could survive in it — the fragile social and engineering web which comprised the Raft would surely disintegrate within a few thousand shifts. It wasn’t its orbit around the Core which kept the Raft aloft, Rees told himself; it was the continuance of human understanding.

So the Scientists had a vital, almost sacred responsibility. But, Rees reflected, it didn’t stop them using their precious knowledge for advantage every bit as unscrupulously as any of Decker’s workmen blocking up a sewer. The Scientists had a statutory obligation to educate every apprentice of supervisory status regardless of Class, and they did so — to a nominal extent. But only Science apprentices, like Rees, were allowed past the bare facts and actually to see the ancient books and instruments…

Knowledge was hoarded. And so only those close to the Scientists had any real understanding of humanity’s origins, even of the nature of the Raft, the Nebula. Listening to chatter in refectories and food machine queues Rees came to understand that most people were more concerned about this shift’s ration size, or the outcome of spurious sporting contests, than the larger issues of racial survival. It was as if the Nebula was eternal, as if the Raft itself was fixed atop a pillar of steel, securely and for all time!

The mass of people was ignorant, driven by fashions, fads and the tongues of orators… even on the Raft. As for the human colonies away from the Raft — the Belt mine and (perhaps) the legendary, lost Boney worlds — there, Rees knew from his own experience, understanding of the human past and the structure of the universe had been reduced to little more than fanciful tales.

Fortunately for the Scientists, most of the other Classes’ apprentices were quite happy with this state of affairs. The Officer cadets in particular sat through their lectures with every expression of disdain, clearly eager to abandon this dry stuff for the quick of life, the exercise of power.

So the Scientists went unchallenged, but Rees wasn’t sure about the wisdom of their policy. The Raft itself, while still comfortable and well-supplied compared to the Belt, was now riven by shortages. Discontent was widespread, and — since the people did not have the knowledge to understand the (more or less) genuine contribution to their welfare made by the more privileged Classes — those Classes were more often than not the target of unfocused resentment.

It was an unstable mixture.

And the enslaving of knowledge had another adverse effect, Rees realized. Turning facts into precious things made them seem sacred, immutable; and so he saw Scientists pore over old printouts and intone litanies of wisdom brought here by the Ship and its Crew, unwilling — or unable — to entertain the idea that there might be facts beyond the ageing pages, even — breathe it quietly — inaccuracies and mistakes!

Despite all his doubts and questions, Rees found the shifts following his acceptance the happiest of his life. As a fully fledged apprentice he was entitled to more than Grye’s grudging picture-book sessions; now he sat in classes with the other apprentices and learned in a structured and consistent way. For hours outside his class time he would pore over his books and photographs — and he would never forget an ageing picture buried in one battered folder, a photograph of the blue rim of the Nebula.

Blue!

The magical color filled his eyes, every bit as clear and cool as he had always imagined.

At first, Rees sat, awkwardly, with apprentices some thousands of shifts younger than himself; but his understanding progressed rapidly, to the grudging admiration of his tutors, and before long he had caught up and was allowed to join the classes of Hollerbach himself.

Hollerbach’s style as a teacher was as vivid and captivating as the man himself. Abandoning yellowing texts and ancient photographs the old Scientist would challenge his charges to think for themselves, adorning the concepts he described with words and gestures.

One shift he had each member of the class build a simple pendulum — a dense metal bob attached to a length of string — and time its oscillation against the burning of a candle. Rees set up his pendulum, limiting the oscillations to a few degrees as Hollerbach instructed, and counted the swings carefully. A few benches along he was vaguely aware of Doav languidly going through the motions of the experiment; whenever Hollerbach’s fierce eye was averted Doav would poke at the swinging bob before him, elaborately bored.

It didn’t take long for the students to establish that the period of the pendulum’s swing depended only on the length of the string — and was independent of the mass of the bob.

This simple fact seemed wonderful to Rees (and that he had found it out for himself made it still more so); he stayed in the little student lab for many hours after the end of the class extending the experiment, probing different mass ranges and larger amplitudes of swing.

The next class was a surprise. Hollerbach entered grandly and eyed the students, bade them pick up the retort stands to which their pendulums were still fixed, and beckoned. Then he turned and marched from the lab.

The students nervously followed, clutching their retorts; Doav rolled his eyes at the tedium of it all.

Hollerbach led them on a respectable hike, out along an avenue beneath the canopy of turning trees. The sky was clear of cloud today and starlight dappled the plates of the deck. Despite his age Hollerbach kept up a good pace, and by the time he paused, under open sky a few yards beyond the edge of the flying forest, Rees suspected that his weren’t the only young legs that ached a little. He looked around curiously, blinking in the direct starlight; since beginning classes he had scarcely had a chance to come out this way, and the apparent tilt of the riveted deck under his feet felt strange.

Solemnly Hollerbach lowered himself to the deck plates and sat cross-legged, then bade his students do the same. He fixed a series of candles to the plates. “Now, ladies and gentlemen,” he boomed, “I would like you to repeat your experiments of our last class. Set up your pendulum.”

There were stifled groans around the class, presumably inaudible to Hollerbach. The students began work, and Hollerbach, restless, got up and paced among them. “You are Scientists, remember,” he told them. “You are here to observe, not judge; you are here to measure and understand…”

Rees’s results were… odd. As Hollerbach’s supply of candles burned through he went over his results carefully, repeating and testing.

At last Hollerbach called them to order. “Conclusions, please? Doav?”

Rees heard the cadet’s breathy groan. “No difference,” he said languidly. “Same result curve as last time.”

Rees frowned. That was wrong; the periods he had measured had been greater than yesterday’s — by a small amount, granted, but greater consistently.

The silence gathered. Doav shifted uneasily.

Then Hollerbach let him have it. Rees tried not to grin as the old Scientist tore into the cadet’s sloppy methods, his closed mind, his laziness, his lack of fitness to wear the golden braids. By the end of it Doav’s cheeks burned crimson.

“Let’s have the truth,” Hollerbach muttered, breathing hard. “Baert…?”

The next apprentice supplied an answer consistent with Rees’s. Hollerbach said, “Then what has happened? How have the conditions of this experiment changed?”

The students speculated, listing the effect of the starlight on the pendulum bobs, the greater inaccuracy of the timing method — Hollerbach’s candles flickered far more out here than in the lab — and many other ideas. Hollerbach listened gravely, occasionally nodding.

None of it convinced Rees. He stared at the simple device, willing it to offer up its secrets.

At last the student Baert said hesitantly, “What about gravity?”

Hollerbach raised his eyebrows. “What about it?”

Baert was a slender, tall boy; now he rubbed his thin nose uncertainly. “We’re a little further from the Raft’s center of gravity here, aren’t we? So the pull of gravity on the pendulum bob will be a bit less…”

Hollerbach eyed him fiercely, saying nothing. Baert flushed and went on, “It’s gravity that makes the bob swing, by pulling at it. So if gravity’s less, the period will be longer… Does that make sense?”

Hollerbach rocked his head from side to side. “At least that’s a little less dubious than some of the other proposals I’ve heard. But if so, what precisely is the relationship between the strength of gravity and the period?”

“We can’t say,” Rees blurted. “Not without more data.”

“Now that,” Hollerbach said, “is the first intelligent thing any of you have said this shift. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you proceed to gather your facts. Let me know what you find out.” He stood, stiffly, and walked away.

The students dispersed to their task with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Rees went at it with a will, and for the next few shifts scoured the deck, armed with his pendulum, notepad and supply of candles. He recorded the period of the pendulum, made careful notes and drew logarithmic scale graphs — and more; carefully he observed how the plane of the pendulum’s swing formed various angles with the surface, showing how the local vertical was changing as he moved across the face of the Raft. And he watched the slow, uncertain oscillations of the pendulum at the Rim itself.

At last he took his findings to Hollerbach. “I think I have it,” he said hesitantly. “The period of the pendulum is proportional to the square root of its length… and also inversely proportional to the square root of the acceleration due to gravity.”

Hollerbach said nothing; he steepled liver-spotted fingers before his face and regarded Rees gravely.

At length Rees blurted, “Am I correct?”

Hollerbach looked disappointed. “You must learn, boy, that in this business there are no right answers. There are only good guesses. You have made an empirical prediction; well, fine. Now you must check it against the body of theory you have learned.”

Inwardly Rees groaned. But he went away and did so.

Later he showed his findings on the strength and direction of the Raft’s gravitational field to Hollerbach. “The way the field varies is quite complex,” he said. “At first I thought it might fall off as the inverse square of the distance from the center of the Raft; but you can see that’s not true…”

“The inverse square law holds only for point masses, or for perfectly spherical objects. Not for something shaped like a dinner plate, like the Raft.”

“Then what is…?”

Hollerbach merely eyed him.

“I know,” Rees sighed. “I should go and work it out. Right?”

It took him longer than the pendulum problem. He had to learn to integrate in three dimensions… and how to use vector forces and equipotential surfaces… and how to make sensible approximating assumptions.

But he did it. And when he’d done that, there was another problem. And another, and still another…

It wasn’t all work.

One shift Baert, with whom Rees struck up a diffident friendship, offered Rees a spare ticket to something called the Theatre of Light. “I won’t pretend you’re my first choice companion,” Baert grinned. “She was a bit better looking than you… But I don’t want to miss the show, or waste a ticket.”

Rees thanked him, turning the strip of cardboard over in his hands. “The Theatre of Light? What is it? What goes on there?”

“There aren’t too many theatres in the Belt, eh? Well, if you haven’t heard, wait and see…”

The Theatre was situated beyond the tethered forest, about three-quarters of the way to the Rim. There was a bus service from the Raft’s central regions but Baert and Rees chose to walk. By the time they had reached the head-high fence which surrounded the Theatre the deck appeared to be sloping quite steeply, and the walk had become a respectable climb. Out here on the exposed deck, far from the cover of the forest canopy, the heat of the star above the Raft was a tangible thing, and both of them arrived with faces slick with sweat.

Baert turned awkwardly, slippered feet gripping at the riveted slope, and grinned down at Rees. “Kind of a hike,” he said. “But it’ll be worth it. Do you have your ticket?”

Rees fumbled in his pockets until he found the precious piece of cardboard. Bemused, he watched as Baert presented the tickets to a doorkeeper and then followed Baert through a narrow gate.

The Theatre of Light was an oval some fifty yards along its long axis, which ran down the apparent slope of the deck. Benches were fixed across the upper part of the Theatre. Rees and Baert took their places and Rees found himself looking down the slope at a small stage which was fixed on stilts so that it rested at the local horizontal — so at an angle to the “tilted” deck — and beyond the stage, serving as a mighty backdrop to the show, he could see the center of the Raft tip away, a vast metal slope of boxy buildings and whirling, rustling trees.

The Theatre filled up rapidly. Rees estimated there was room for about a hundred people here, and he shivered a little, uncomfortable at the thought of so many people in one place.

“Drinks?”

He turned with a start. A girl, luminously pretty, stood beside his seat with a tray of glasses. He tried to smile back and form an answer, but there was something odd about the way she was standing…

Without effort or discomfort she was standing perpendicularly to the deck; she ignored the apparent tilt of the deck and stood as naturally as if it were level. Rees felt his jaw drop, and all his carefully constructed reasoning about the illusory tilt of the deck evaporated. For if she was vertical then he was sitting at an angle with nothing at his back—

With a stifled yell he tumbled backwards.

Baert, laughing, helped him up, and the girl, with an apologetic smile, presented him with a tumbler of some clear, sweet beverage. Rees could feel his cheeks burn like stars. “What was all that about?”

Baert suppressed his laughter. “I’m sorry. It gets them every time. I should have warned you, really…”

“But how does she walk like that?”

Baert’s thin shoulders moved in a shrug. “If I knew it would spoil the fun. Magnetic soles on her shoes? The funny thing is, it’s not the girl that knocks you over… It’s the collapse of your own perceptions, the failure of your sense of balance.”

“Yeah, hilarious.” Rees sucked sourly at his drink and watched the girl move through the crowd. Her footsteps seemed easy and natural, and try as he might he failed to see how she kept her balance. Soon, though, there were more spectacular acts to watch. Jugglers, for instance, with clubs that swooped and soared in arcs at quite impossible angles, returning infallibly to their owners’ hands.

During applause Rees said to Baert, “It’s like magic.”

“Not magic,” the other said. “Simple physics; that’s all there is to it. I guess this is making your miner’s eyes pop out, eh?”

Rees frowned. On the Belt there wasn’t a lot of time for juggling… and no doubt the labor of the miners was going to pay for all this, in some indirect fashion. Discreetly he glanced around at the rest of the audience. Plenty of gold and crimson braid, not a lot of black or the other colors. Upper Classes only? He suppressed a stab of resentment and returned his attention to the show.

Soon it was time for the main feature. A trampoline was set up to cover the stage and the crowd grew hushed. Some wind instrument evoked a plaintive melody and a man and a woman dressed in simple leotards took the stage. They bowed once to the audience, climbed onto the trampoline, and together began to soar high into the starlit air. At first they performed simple manoeuvres — slow, graceful somersaults and twists — pleasing to the eye, but hardly spectacular.

Then the couple hit the trampoline together, jumped high, met at the top of their arcs — and, without touching, they twisted around each other, so that each was thrown wide.

Baert gasped. “Now, how did they do that?”

“Gravity,” Rees whispered. “Just for a second they orbited around each other’s center of mass.”

The dance went on. The partners twisted around each other, throwing their lithe bodies into elaborate parabolae, and Rees watched through half-closed eyes, entranced. The physicist in him analyzed the dancers’ elaborate movements. Their centers of mass, located somewhere around their waists, traced out hyperbolic orbits in the varying gravity fields of the Raft, the stage and the dancers themselves, so that each time the dancers launched themselves from their trampoline the paths of their centers were more or less determined… But the dancers adorned the paths with movements of their slim bodies so deceptively that it seemed that the two of them were flying through the air at will, independent of gravity. How paradoxical, Rees thought, that the billion-gee environment of this universe should afford humans such freedom.

Now the dancers launched into a final, elaborate arc, their bodies orbiting, their faces locked together like facing planets. Then it was over; the dancers stood hand-in-hand atop their trampoline, and Rees cheered and stamped with the rest. So there was more to do with billion-strength gravity than measure it and fight it—

A flash, a muffled rush of air, a sudden blossom of smoke. The trampoline, blasted from below, turned briefly into a fluttering, birdlike creature, a dancer itself; the dancers, screaming, were hurled into the air. Then the trampoline collapsed into the splintered ruins of the stage, the dancers falling after it.

The audience, stunned, fell silent. The only sound was a low, broken crying from the wreckage of the stage, and Rees watched, unbelieving, as a red-brown stain spread over the remains of the trampoline.

A burly man bearing orange braids hurried from the wings and stood commandingly before the audience. “Sit down,” he ordered. “No one should try to leave.” And he stood there as the audience quietly obeyed. Rees, looking around, saw more orange braids at the exits from the Theatre, still more working their way into the ruins of the stage.

Baert’s face was pale. “Security,” he whispered. “Report directly to the Captain. You don’t see them around too often, but they’re always there… undercover as often as not.” He sat back and folded his arms. “What a mess. They’ll interrogate us all before they let us out of here; it will take hours—”

“Baert, I don’t understand any of this. What happened?”

Baert shrugged. “What do you think? A bomb, of course.”

Rees felt an echo of the disorientation he had suffered when the drinks girl had walked by. “Someone did this deliberately?”

Baert looked at him sourly and did not reply.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t speak for those people.” Baert rubbed the side of his nose. “But there’s been a few of these attacks, directed against Officers, mostly, or places they’re likely to be. Like this.

“Not everyone’s happy here, you see, my friend,” he went on. “A lot of people think the Officers get more than their share.”

“So they’re turning to actions like this?” Rees turned away. The red-stained trampoline was being wrapped around the limp bodies of the gravity dancers; he watched with an unshakeable sense of unreality. He remembered his own flash of resentment at Baert, not more than an hour before this disaster. Perhaps he could sympathize with the motives of the people behind this act — why should one group enjoy at leisure the fruits of another’s labor? — but to kill for such a reason?

The orange-braided security men began to organize strip searches of the crowd. Resigned, not speaking, Rees and Baert sat back to wait their turn.

Despite isolated incidents like the Theatre attack Rees found his new life fascinating and rewarding, and the shifts wore away unbelievably quickly. All too soon, it seemed, he had finished his Thousand Shifts, the first stage of his graduation process, and it was time for his achievement to be honored.

And so he found himself sitting on a decorated bus and studying the crimson braids of a Scientist (Third Class), freshly stitched to the shoulder of his coverall, and shivering with a sense of unreality. The bus worked its way through the suburbs of the Raft. Its dozen young occupants, Rees’s fellow graduate-apprentices, spun out a cloud of laughter and talk.

Jaen was studying him with humorous concern, a slight crease over her broad nose; her hands rested in the lap of her dress uniform. “Something on your mind?”

He shrugged. “I’m fine. You know me. I’m the serious type.”

“Damn right. Here.” Jaen reached to the boy sitting on the far side from Rees and took a narrow-necked bottle. “Drink. You’re graduating. This is your Thousandth Shift and you’re entitled to enjoy it.”

“Well, it isn’t precisely. I was a slow starter, remember. For me it’s more like a thousand and a quarter—”

“Oh, you boring bugger, drink some of this stuff before I kick you off the bus.”

Rees, laughing, gave in and took a deep draught from the bottle.

He had sampled some tough liquors in the Quartermaster’s bar, and plenty of them had been stronger than this fizzing wine-sim; but none of them had quite the same effect. Soon the globe lights lining the avenue of cables seemed to emit a more friendly light; Jaen’s gravity pull mingling with his was a source of warmth and stillness; and the brittle conversation of his companions seemed to grow vivid and amusing.

His mood persisted as they emerged from beneath the canopy of flying trees and reached the shadow of the Platform. The great lip of metal jutted inwards from the Rim, forming a black rectangle cut out of the crimson of the sky, its supporting braces like gaunt limbs. The bus wheezed to a halt alongside a set of wide stairs. Rees, Jaen and the rest tumbled from the bus and clambered up the stairs to the Platform.

The Thousandth Shift party was already in full swing, bustling with perhaps a hundred graduates of the various Classes of the Raft. A bar set up on trestle tables was doing healthy business, and a discordant set of musicians was thumping out a rhythmic sound — there were even a few couples tentatively dancing, near the band’s low stage. Rees, with Jaen in tolerant tow, set off on a tour of the walls of the Platform.

The Platform was an elegant idea: to fix a hundred-yard-square plate to the Rim at such an angle that it matched the local horizontal, surround it by a wall of glass, and so reveal a universe of spectacular views. At the inward edge was the Raft itself, tilted like some huge toy for Rees’s inspection. As at the Theatre the sensation of being on a safe, flat surface gave the proximity of the vast slope a vertiginous thrill.

The space-facing edge of the platform was suspended over the Rim of the Raft, and a section of the floor was inset with sheets of glass. Rees stood over the depths of the Nebula; it felt as if he were floating in the air. He could see hundreds of stars scattered in a vast three-dimensional array, illuminating the air like mile-wide globe lamps; and at the center of the view, towards the hidden Core of the Nebula, the stars were crowded together, so that it was as if he were staring into a vast, star-walled shaft.

“Rees. I congratulate you.” Rees turned. Hollerbach, gaunt, unsmiling and utterly out of place in all this gaiety, stood beside him.

“Thank you, sir.”

The old Scientist leaned towards him conspiratorially. “Of course, I didn’t doubt you’d do well from the first.”

Rees laughed. “I can tell you I doubted it sometimes.”

“A Thousand Shifts, eh?” Hollerbach scratched his cheek. “Well, I’ve no doubt you’ll go much further… And in the meantime here’s something for you to think about, boy. The ancients, the first Crew, didn’t measure time exclusively in shifts. We know this from their records. They used shifts, yes, but they had other units: a ‘day,’ which was about three shifts, and a ‘year,’ which was about a thousand shifts. How old are you now?”

“About seventeen thousand, I believe, sir.”

“So you’d be about seventeen ‘years’ old, eh? Now then — what do you suppose these units, a ‘day’ and a ‘year,’ referred to?” But before Rees could answer Hollerbach raised his hand and walked off. “Baert! So they’ve let you get this far despite my efforts to the contrary—”

Bowls of sweetmeats had been set out around the walls. Jaen nibbled on some fluffy substance and tugged absently at his hand. “Come on. Isn’t that enough sightseeing and science?”

Rees looked at her, the combination of wine-sim and stars leaving him quite dazed. “Hm? You know, Jaen, the stories of our home universe notwithstanding, sometimes this seems a very beautiful place.” He grinned. “And you don’t look too bad yourself.”

She punched him in the solar plexus. “And nor do you. Now let’s have a dance.”

“What?” His euphoria evaporated. He looked past her shoulder at the whirl of dancing couples. “Look, Jaen, I’ve never danced in my life.”

She clicked her tongue. “Don’t be such a coward, you mine rat. Those people are just ex-apprentices like you and me, and I can tell you one thing for sure: they won’t be watching you.”

“Well…” he began, but it was too late; with a determined grip on his forearm she led him to the center of the Platform.

His head filled with memories of the unfortunate gravity dancers at the Theatre of Light and their swooping, spectacular ballet. If he lived for fifty thousand shifts he would never be able to match such grace.

Luckily this dance was nothing like that.

Young men eyed girls across a few yards of floor. Those who were dancing were enthusiastic but hardly expert; Rees watched for a few seconds, then began to imitate their rhythmic swaying.

Jaen pulled a face at him. “That’s bloody awful. But who cares?”

In the low-gee conditions — gravity here was about half its value near the Labs — the dance had a dreamy slowness. After a while Rees began to relax; and, eventually, he realized he was enjoying himself — until his legs whisked out from under him; he clattered to the Platform with a slow bump. Jaen covered her face with one hand, suppressing giggles; a circle of laughter clustered briefly around him. He got to his feet. “I’m sorry—”

There was a tap on his shoulder. “So you should be.”

He turned; there, with a broad, glinting grin, stood a tall young man with the braids of a Junior Officer. “Doav,” Rees said slowly. “Did you trip me?”

Doav barked laughter.

Rees felt his forearm muscles bunch. “Doav, you’ve been an irritation to me for the last year…”

Doav looked baffled.

“… I mean, the last thousand shifts.” And it was true; Rees could bear the constant sniping, cracks and cruelties of Doav and his like throughout his working day… but he would much prefer not to have to. And, since the incident at the Theatre, he had come to see how attitudes like Doav’s were the cause of a great deal of pain and suffering on the Raft; and, perhaps, of much more to come.

The wine-sim was like blood now, pounding in his head. “Cadet, if we’ve something to settle—”

Doav fixed him with a look of contempt. “Not here. But soon. Oh, yes; soon.” And he turned his back and walked off through the throng.

Jaen thumped Rees’s arm hard enough to make him flinch. “Do you have to turn every incident into an exhibition? Come on; let’s get a drink.” She stamped her way towards the bar.

“Hello, Rees.”

Rees paused, allowing Jaen to slip ahead into the crush around the bar. A thin young man stood before him, hair plastered across his scalp. He wore the black braids of Infrastructure and he regarded Rees with cool appraisal.

Rees groaned. “Gover. I guess this isn’t to be the best shift I’ve ever had.”

“What?”

“Never mind. I haven’t seen you since not long after my arrival.”

“Yeah, but that’s not hard to understand.” Gover flicked delicately at Rees’s braid. “We move in different circles, don’t we?”

Rees, already on edge after the incident with Doav, studied Gover as coolly as he could. There were still the same sharp features, the look of petulant anger — but Gover looked more substantial, more sure of himself.

“So you’re still skivvying for those old farts in the Labs, eh?”

“I’m not going to respond to that, Gover.”

“You’re not?” Gover rubbed at his nostrils with the palm of his hand. “Seeing you in this toy uniform made me wonder how you see yourself now. I bet you haven’t done a shift’s work — real work — since you landed here. I wonder what your fellow rats would think of you now. Eh?”

Rees felt blood surge once more to his cheeks; the wine-sim seemed to be turning sour. There was a seed of confusion inside him. Was his anger at Gover just a way of shielding himself from the truth, that he had betrayed his origins…?

“What do you want, Gover?”

Gover took a step closer to Rees. His stale breath cut through the wine fumes in Rees’s nostrils. “Listen, mine rat, believe it or not I want to do you a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“Things are changing here,” Gover said slyly. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Things won’t always be as they are now.” He eyed Rees, evidently unwilling to go further.

Rees frowned. “What are you talking about? The discontents?”

“That’s what some call them. Seekers of justice, others say.”

The noise of the revelers seemed to recede from Rees; it was as if Gover and he shared their own Raft somewhere in the air. “Gover, I was in the Theatre of Light, that shift. Was that justice?”

Gover’s eyes narrowed. “Rees, you’ve seen how the elite on this Raft keep the rest of us down — and how their obscene economic system degrades the rest of the Nebula’s human population. The time is near when they will have to atone.”

Rees stared at him. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

Gover bit his lip. “Maybe. Look, Rees, I’m taking a chance talking to you like this. And if you betray me I’ll deny we ever had this conversation.”

“What do you want of me?”

“There are good men in the cause. Men like Decker, Pallis—”

Rees guffawed. Decker — the huge Infrastructure worker he had encountered on his first arrival here — he could believe. But Pallis? “Come on, Gover.”

Gover was unruffled. “Damn it, Rees, you know what I think of you. You’re a mine rat. You don’t belong here, among decent people. But where you come from makes you one of us. All I’m asking is that you come along and listen to what they have to say. With your access to the Science buildings you could be… useful.”

Rees tried to clear his thinking. Gover was a vicious, bitter young man, and his arguments — the contradictory mixture of contempt and appeal to fellow-feeling he directed at Rees, for example — were simple-minded and muddled. But what gave Gover’s words force was their terrible truth. Part of Rees was appalled that such as Gover could so quickly disorient him — but inside him a core of anger flared up in response.

But if some revolution were to occur — if the Labs were smashed, the Officers imprisoned — what then?

“Gover, look up.”

Gover raised his face.

“See that star up there? If we don’t move the Raft the star will graze us. And then we’ll fry. And even if we were to survive that — look further out.” He swept an arm around the red-stained sky. “The Nebula’s dying and we’ll die with it. Gover, only the Scientists, backed by the organization of the Raft, can save us from such dangers.”

Gover scowled and spat at the deck. “You seriously believe that? Come on, Rees. I’ll tell you something. The Nebula could support us all for a long time yet — if its resources were shared equally. And that’s all we want.” He paused. “Well?”

Rees closed his eyes. Would sky wolves discuss Gover’s case as they descended on the wreck of the Raft and picked clean the bones of his children? “Get lost, Gover,” he said tiredly.

Gover sneered. “If that’s what you want. I can’t say I’m sorry…” He grinned at Rees with something approaching pure contempt. Then he slid away through the crowd.

The noise seemed to swirl around Rees, not touching him. He pushed his way through the crush to the bar and ordered straight liquor, and downed the hot liquid in one throw.

Jaen joined him and grabbed his arm. “I’ve been looking for you. Where…?” Then she felt the bunched muscles under Rees’s jacket; and when he turned to face her, she shrank back from his anger.