Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page B

and growled at the boys. But, steadily and surely, the tree’s rise through the Nebula was moulded into a slow curve towards the Rim of the Raft.
    As he worked, Rees chanced the wrath of Pallis by drinking in the emergent details of the Raft. From below it showed as a ragged disc a half-mile wide; metal plates scattered highlights from the stars and light leaked through dozens of apertures in the deck. As the tree sailed up to the Rim the Raft foreshortened into a patchwork ellipse; Rees could see the sooty scars of welding around the edges of the nearer plates, and as his eye tracked across the ceiling-like surface the plates crowded into a blur, with the far side of the disc a level horizon.
    At last, with a rush of air, the tree rose above the Rim and the upper surface of the Raft began to open out before Rees. Against his will he found himself drawn to the edge of the tree; he buried his hands in the foliage and stared, openmouthed, as a torrent of colour, noise and movement broke over him.
    The Raft was an enormous dish that brimmed with life. Points of light were sprinkled over its surface like sugar-sim over a confectionery. The deck was studded with buildings of all shapes and sizes, constructed of wood panels or corrugated metal and jumbled together like toys. All around the Rim, machines as tall as two men hulked like silent guardians; and at the heart of the Raft lay a huge silver cylinder, stranded like a trapped whale among the box-like constructions.
    A confusion of smells assaulted Rees’s senses - sharp ozone from the Rim machines and other workshops and factories, woodsmoke from a thousand chimneys, the hint of exotic cooking scents from the cabins.
    And people - more than Rees could count, so many that the Belt population would be easily lost among them - people walked about the Raft in great streams; and knots of running children exploded here and there into bursts of laughter.
    He made out sturdy pyramids fixed to the deck, no more than waist high. Rees squinted, scanning the deck; the pyramids stood everywhere. He saw a couple lingering beside one, talking quietly, the man scuffing the metal cone with one foot; and there a group of children chased through a series of the pyramids in a complicated game of catch.
    And out of each pyramid a cable soared straight upwards; Rees tilted his face back, following the line of the cables, and he gasped.
    To each cable was tethered the trunk of a tree.
    To Rees, one flying tree had been wonder enough. Now, over the Raft, he was faced with a mighty forest. Every tethering cable was vertical and quite taut, and Rees could almost feel the exertion of the harnessed trees as they strained against the pull of the Core. The light of the Nebula was filtered by its passage through the rotating ranks of trees, so that the deck of the Raft was immersed in a soothing gloom; around the forest dancing skitters softened the light to pastel pink.
    Rees’s tree rose until it passed the highest layer of the forest. The Raft turned from a landscape back into an island in the air, crowned by a mass of shifting foliage. The sky above Rees seemed darker than usual, so that he felt he was suspended at the very edge of the Nebula, looking down over the mists surrounding the Core; and in all that universe of air the only sign of humanity was the Raft, a scrap of metal suspended in miles of air.
    There was a heavy hand on his shoulder. Rees started. Pallis stood over him, the canopy of smoke a backdrop to his stern face. ‘What’s the matter?’ he growled. ‘Never seen a few thousand trees before?’
    Rees felt himself flush. ‘I . . .’
    But Pallis was grinning through his scars. ‘Listen, I understand. Most people take it all for granted. But every time I see it from outside - it gives me a kind of tingle.’ A hundred questions tumbled through Rees’s mind. What would it be like to walk on that surface? What must it have been like to build the Raft, hanging in the void above the