The bodies were human, one large, one small, huddled up on the floor, spooned together with the adult sheltering the child. They were still clothed, and scraps of skin clung to their bones, withered and dried.
Pesten reached out and took her hand. ‘Long dead. Perhaps these were among the last – when there was nobody left to take care of the bodies.’
And, she thought grimly, in this lethal air there were not even any rats left to consume the flesh, or worms or bugs.
The whale groaned again, and shuddered under them.
Braced in his harness, Otho called, ‘We’re being drawn into the Raft’s own gravity well. In the middle it’s going to be a good fraction of a gravity, I guess, and she doesn’t like it . . .’
Pesten, peering down, ignored him. ‘We’re approaching the centre of the Raft. It’s different again here.’
These buildings were grander, Lura thought, bigger and more elaborate, with fancy colours and decorations, carved doorways and window frames.
‘But if anything, the evidence of burning is even worse,’ Pesten said. ‘Maybe this is where the bosses lived. They’ll have taken the blame when people got angry and frightened. And look at the floor, the texture. That’s different too . . .’
Where the deck further out seemed to have been assembled from sheets of rusted iron, here the material shone, gleaming and rust-free, though it was still a patchwork, and in places was marked with a kind of decoration, markings of black and green on a white surface.
‘Look, the plates curve,’ Pesten said, growing excited. ‘There, and there . . . And that plate looks like it’s been beaten flat. I think this was once some curved surface that’s been cut up and put back together to make this floor.’
‘The hull of the Ship,’ Lura breathed. ‘The stories say it was a great cylinder. Is it possible? And those markings—’
‘I think I recognise numbers,’ the Brother said. ‘Look – that’s a four, I think, and that’s part of a seven. But if the Ship’s name is written here, it must be cut up and fragmented.’
And Lura, who could read nothing but the numbers pilots etched on their flying trees, could not have recognised the letters of the name anyhow.
Now they reached the very centre of the Raft, where a jagged hole perhaps a hundred paces long had been cut into the floor. Pesten said, ‘It looks as if something was fixed here, and was just ripped out. But how, or why?’ He sighed. ‘There’s so much we’ll never know.’
Lura spotted another body. It was small and naked, its withered skin bare – it must have been another child. It was suspended in the centre of the hole, bobbing up and down through the plane of the Raft, held there, she supposed, by the great artefact’s own gravity field.
To the whale riders, passing the rent in the deck marked the halfway point in this strange journey across the Raft. Encouraged, they sang louder, and Otho worked his goads.
Once past the centre, the whale crossed over the Raft’s concentric zones again, the rich central area, the cruder living spaces beyond, the more functional outer rim. They saw more burning and destruction, and a few more bodies. But Lura saw no movement, nothing that looked fresh – no sign that anybody or anything had lived here for a very long time.
At last the whale hovered before one of the big structures at the very edge of the deck. The machine was an irregular block as tall as two humans. Outlets pierced its broad face, and on the far side a nozzle like a huge mouth strained outwards at the atmosphere of the nebula.
‘Coton said it might be like this, remember,’ Pesten said. ‘He said the Raft must have had machines that drew in stuff from the air and turned it into food and water for the people. Doesn’t that look right?’
Yes, Lura thought; it wasn’t hard to imagine the machine taking giant breaths through those metal lips. On a whim she held up the Mole so it could see. ‘Can you identify that?’
Without hesitation it called loudly, ‘Supply Machine, Deck Seven, Sector Twelve, Model 4-X-7-B, Integrality’s Constancy of Purpose. Report status!’
To Lura’s astonishment a panel on the front of the Raft machine lit up, and she heard a voice, carried through the thick dead air, muffled by the whale’s skin: ‘Operational.’
The riders quailed back in superstitious awe.
Otho looked back at Lura. ‘Well, here we are. What now?’
Pesten said, ‘Coton said we have to work on the machine. How can we get to it?’
Lura said, ‘If we go outside—’
‘You’ll be dead in heartbeats,’ Otho said. Lura saw a kind of resentment cloud his face. ‘I’ll have the whale swallow the machine. Then, when it’s sealed up in her gut, we’ll cut it out. This is going to hurt her. You’d better hope it’s worth it, tree girl, because if it’s not, I’ll cut you. Come on, baby. It won’t be so bad.’
He worked his goads, and the whale groaned and shuddered as its face was driven towards the strange old machine.
12
‘We’re in the Marshal’s flitter, deep in the system of the neutron star, Lura. There isn’t much to see. The neutron star is a dull ember, but its huge density twists space. Vala said that if you tried to measure pi by dividing the star’s circumference by its diameter, you’d be out by about ten per cent. I’m not sure what that means . . . We’ve already done some close passes around the star. I thought I could feel the tides, and the hull groaned—’
‘That’s gravity, Coton!’
‘Yes. Which shapes your world. It’s all so strange. When I look at the neutron star I can’t believe that there are people down there, inside it – or anyhow, Vala says, they feel like they’re people, even though they are made of nuclear material and you could fit thousands of them on your thumbnail.
‘But there’s more, Lura. There is life outside the star too, in knots in the magnetic field, blobs of plasma with internal structure. You can barely see them with the naked eye, but they’re very clear in Vala’s instruments. They’re yet another kind of Weaponised people. Nobody knows why they were spun out of magnetism. Vala says maybe they came here as a refuge. When we make our approaches they cluster close to the ship, and they send signals – a kind of screech, which Vala hasn’t managed to decipher yet. They’re trying to talk to us.’
‘Can you help them?’
‘I don’t know. Not today.’
‘And how are you, Coton? Are you sleeping well?’
‘The gravity dreams are too vivid for that. Spacetime is stretched here, and my brain is bathed in gravitons and sterile neutrinos . . . It’s better to stay awake, if I can. And when I do, I can hear you so clearly now.’
‘Coton – are you afraid? After all, it’s your head they’re going to use, if I understand you, to save me. And then those who will follow me. The thing in your head, the only machine they have that’s powerful enough to bring me across . . .’
‘I try not to be afraid. I trust my grandmother.’
‘If all this fails – or if you decide you don’t want to do this after all, Coton, and I’ll understand – it will still have been worth it. Even if we can’t come home, at least you’ll know our story.’
‘Yes.’
‘And we’ll still be able to talk, won’t we?’
‘Until I grow out of my dreaming faculty – yes. I’ll try as long as I can. Vala is waving at me. I think she wants me to rest.’
‘We’ll talk later. One way or another.’
‘Yes. One way or another. Goodbye, Lura . . .’