branches, he could feel the tree’s turbulent uncertainty.
Two imperatives acted on the tree. It strove to flee the deadly gravity well of the star — but it also sought to escape the shadow of the smoke cloud, which drove it back into the well. A skillful woodsman should have the two imperatives in fine balance; the tree should hover in an unstable equilibrium at the required distance.
Now the tree’s rotating branches bit into the air and it jerked upwards by a good yard. Pallis was almost shaken loose. A cloud of skitters came tumbling from the foliage; the tiny wheel-shaped creatures buzzed around his face and arms as they tried to regain the security of their parent.
He hauled himself through the foliage to the top side of the tree. The ragged blanket of smoke and steam hung a few yards above his head, attached tenuously to the branches by threads of smoke. The damp wood in at least half the fire bowls fixed to the branches had, he soon found, been consumed. And Gover, his so-called apprentice, was nowhere to be seen.
“Gover! By the Bones themselves, what do you think you are doing?”
A thin face appeared above one of the bowls near the rim of the tree. Gover shook his way out of a nest of leaves and came scurrying across the platform of foliage, a pack bouncing against his narrow back. He shoved the back of his hand against his nose, pushing the nostrils out of shape; the hand came away glistening. “I’d finished,” he mumbled.
Pallis stabbed a finger at Gover’s pack. “You’re still carrying half your stock of wood. The fires are dying. And look at the state of the smoke screen. More holes than your damn vest. My tree doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going, thanks to you. Can’t you feel her shuddering? Now
With a flurry of motion Gover pulled himself to the nearest pot and began hauling wood from his pack. Soon fresh billows of smoke were rising to join the depleted cloud, and the shuddering of the tree subsided.
His exasperation simmering, Pallis watched the boy’s awkward movements. Oh, he’d had his share of poor apprentices in the past, but in the old times most of them had at least been willing to learn. To try. And gradually, as hard shifts wore by, those young people had grown into responsible men and women, their minds toughening with their bodies.
But not this lot. Not the new generation.
This was his third flight with the boy Gover. And the lad was still as sullen and obstructive as when he’d first been assigned to the trees; when they got back to the Raft Pallis would be more than glad to hand him back to Science.
His gaze roamed around the red sky, restless.
The air of the Nebula was, as always, stained blood-red. A corner of his mind tried to measure that redness — was it deeper than last shift? — while his eyes flicked around the objects scattered through the Nebula above and below him. The clouds were like handfuls of grayish cloth sprinkled through miles of air. Stars fell among and through the clouds in a slow, endless rain that tumbled down to the Core. It was as if he were suspended in a great cloud of light; the star-spheres receded with distance into points of light, so that the sky itself was a curtain glowing red-yellow. The falling stars were an array of pinpoints dwindling into the far distance; the depths of the Nebula, far below him, were a sink of murky crimson.
The light of the mile-wide stars cast shifting shadows over the clouds, the scattered trees, the huge blurs that might be whales. Here and there he saw a tiny flash that marked the end of a star’s brief existence…
In his time, the world had changed around Pallis. The Nebula seemed to be choking up. The crisp blue skies, the rich breezes of his youth were memories now; the very air was turning into a smoky crimson sludge.
The world was dying, and no one knew why, or how to stop it.
And one thing was for sure. Pallis’s trees didn’t like this gloom.
He sighed, trying to snap out of his introspection. The stars kept falling no matter what the color of the sky. Life went on, and he had work to do.
A heavy cloud, fat with rain, drifted over the Belt, reducing visibility to a few yards; the air it brought with it seemed exceptionally sour and thin.
Rees prowled around the cables that girdled his world, muscles working restlessly. He completed two full circuits, passing huts and cabins familiar since his childhood, hurrying past well-known faces. The damp cloud, the thin air, the confinement of the Belt seemed to come together somewhere inside his chest.
Questions chased around his skull. Why were human materials and building methods so inadequate to resist the forces of the world? Why were human bodies so feeble in the face of those forces?
His father used to say the mine was killing them all. Humans weren’t meant to work down there, crawling around in wheelchairs at five gee.
Now his parents were dead.
Rees was still a boy. But he faced a prospect of nothing more than to labor in the kernel mines, to have his health broken by the monstrous gravity, to die young.
Shards of speculation glittered in the mud of his overtired thinking. His parents had had no better understanding of their circumstances than he had; there had been nothing but legends they could tell him before their sour deaths of overwork: children’s tales, of a Ship, a Crew, of something called Bolder’s Ring…
But his parents had had — acceptance. They, and the rest of the Belt dwellers, accepted their lot.
Only Rees seemed plagued by questions, unanswered doubts. Why couldn’t he be like everyone else? Why couldn’t he just accept and be accepted?
His arms, punctured by hot metal, ached. A vague anger suffused him. Well, why
He had to find out more. And in all his universe there was only one place he could go to find it.
The Raft. Somehow he had to get to the Raft.
The shadow of the great tree slid over the Belt. A rope had uncoiled from the tree trunk and lay across the fifty yards to the Belt, brushing against the orbiting cabins. A man came shimmering confidently down the rope; he was scarred, old and muscular, almost a piece of the tree himself. The man dropped without hesitation across empty air to a cabin and began to make his way around the Belt.
A sudden determination crystallized in Rees. He hurried around the Belt to his cabin.
It took minutes to gather up some food, wrapping dried meat in bundles of cloth, filling cloth globes with water.
Then he climbed to the outer wall of his cabin.
Rees clung to his cabin by one hand. The rotation of the Belt carried the cabin steadily towards the tree’s dangling rope.
As the rope approached, a thin sweat covered his brow. Was he somehow throwing his life away in this impulsive gesture? Would he, in the end, have the courage to take the decisive step?
Staring at the magnificent tree he probed at his emotions. There was no fear. There was only elation; the future was an empty sky, within which his hopes would surely find room.
When the rope was a yard from him he grabbed at it and swarmed without hesitation off the Belt.
A file of miners clambered up to the tree, iron plates strapped to their backs. Under the tree-pilot’s supervision the plates were lashed securely to the tree rim, widely spaced. The miners descended to the Belt laden with casks of food and fresh water, delivered from the Raft in payment for the kernel metal.
Rees, watching from the foliage, stayed curled closely around a two-feet-wide branch — taking care not to cut open his palms on its knife-sharp leading edge — and he kept a layer of foliage around his body. He had no way of telling the time, but the loading of the tree must have taken several shifts.
He was wide-eyed and sleepless. He knew that his absence from work would go unremarked for at least a couple of shifts — and, he thought with a distant sadness, it might be longer before anyone cared enough to come looking for him.
Well, the world of the Belt was behind him now. Whatever dangers the future held for him, at least they would be new dangers.
In fact he only had two problems. Hunger and thirst…
Disaster had struck soon after he had found himself this hiding place among the leaves. One of the Belt workmen had stumbled across his tiny cache of supplies; thinking it belonged to the despised Raft crewmen the miner had shared the morsels among his companions. Rees had been lucky to avoid detection himself, he realized… but now he had no supplies, and the clamor of his throat and belly had come to fill his head.
When the final miner had slithered down to the Belt Pallis curled up the rope and hung it around a hook fixed to the trunk. He hated these visits to the Belt, the way he was forced to negotiate so hard with these ragged, half-starved miners. He shook his head and turned his thoughts with some relief to the flight home.
“Right, Gover, let’s see you move! I want the bowls switched to the underside of the tree, filled and lit before I’ve finished coiling this rope. Or would you rather wait for the next tree?”
Gover got to work, comparatively briskly; and soon a blanket of smoke was spreading beneath the tree, shielding the Belt and its star from view.
Pallis stood close to the trunk, his feet and hands sensitive to the excited surge of sap. It was almost as if he could sense the huge vegetable thoughts of the tree as it reacted to the darkness spreading below it. The trunk audibly hummed; the branches bit into the air; the foliage shook and swished and skitters tumbled, confused at the abrupt change of airspeed; and then, with an exhilarating surge, the great spinning platform lifted from the star. The Belt and its human misery dwindled to a toylike mote, falling slowly into the Nebula, and Pallis, hands and feet pressed against the flying wood, was where he was most happy.
His contentment lasted for about a shift and a half.
He prowled the wooden platform, moodily watching the stars slide through the silent air. The flight just wasn’t
This felt like a loading imbalance… but that was impossible. He’d supervised the stowage of the cargo himself to ensure an even distribution of mass around the rim. For him not to have spotted such a gross imbalance would have been like — well, like forgetting to breathe.
Then what?
With a growl of impatience he pushed away from the trunk and stalked to the rim. He began to work around the lashed loads, methodically rechecking each plate and cask and allowing a picture of the tree’s loading to build up in his mind—
He slowed to a halt. One of the food casks had been broken into; its plastic casing was cracked in two places and half the contents were gone. Hurriedly he checked a nearby water cask. It too was broken open and empty.
He felt hot breath course through his nostrils. “Apprentice! Come here!”
The boy came slowly, his thin face twisted with apprehension.
Pallis stood immobile until Gover got within arm’s reach; then he lashed out with his right hand and grabbed the apprentice’s shoulder. Pallis pointed at the violated casks. “What do you call this?”
Gover stared at the casks with what looked like real shock. “Well, I didn’t do it, pilot. I wouldn’t be so stupid — ah!”
Pallis worked his thumb deeper into the boy’s joint, searching for the nerve. “Did I keep this food from the miners in order to allow you to feast your useless face? Why, you little bone sucker,
