Marshal Sand looked down on him. ‘Your manner doesn’t impress me. You’d be surprised how often I come across people like you, salesman – petty and avaricious, grubbing for profit in the misery and ruin the Scourge brings, as humanity flees in a great wave.’
Croq laughed, and Coton grudgingly admired his defiance. ‘What refreshing honesty! Well, I note your contempt, Marshal, but it will not prejudice me against accepting payments in the new Coalition scrip. You disapprove of me selling off bits of the past, do you? But look in the sky. The Scourge is coming, despite your schemes and your strutting and your rather magnificent uniform. So you see, Marshal, I may as well sell off our past, for we humans have no future – eh?’ And he laughed again.
There was a soft chime. One of the assistants hurried to the second coffin-box, opened it, and drew out a jacket. This was unfolded and brought to Coton to inspect. It was undoubtedly his; it fitted when he put it on, and he recognised tears and other minor flaws. Yet it stank slightly of ozone, and was warm to the touch.
The teleport was ready. They were, it seemed, committed.
And now Vala and Sand, together, quite gently, began to tell Coton what they needed of him. Or, more specifically, the alien thing in his head.
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.’