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.
