It wouldn’t be easy. Rees would face a lifetime of hostility from the likes of Gover. And the Raft was no bed of flowers and leaves; its economy, too, had declined with the slow choking of the Nebula.
But Rees deserved a chance. And Rees was a smart kid. Maybe, Pallis mused, just maybe he might actually find some answers. Was it possible?
“Now, then, miner,” Pallis said briskly, “we’ve got a tree to fly. Let’s get the bowls brimming; I want a canopy up there so thick I could walk about on it. All right?”
The tree had passed the highest layer of the forest. The Raft turned from a landscape 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 Nebula’s 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.
His heart lifted, bursting with the exhilaration of a thousand questions.
The Tyranny of Heaven
Rodi climbed through the hatch and into the flitter. The craft was a box the size of a small room. He threaded his way through the interior.
There was a girl in one of the pilot seats. She turned. Tall and muscular, she wasn’t much older than Rodi’s twenty years.
Rodi tripped over a locker.
The girl’s eyes glittered with amusement. “Take it easy. You’re Rodi. Right? I’m Thet.”
His face hot, Rodi took the seat beside her. “Glad to meet you.” The instrument panel before him looked utterly alien.
“Well, buckle in.” Thet punched fat buttons. Monitors showed muscles contracting in the Ark’s hull. “And don’t be so nervous.”
“I’m not.”
“Of course you are. I never understand why. You’ve taken flitters outside the Ark before, haven’t you?”
“Sure.” He tried not to sound defensive. “On inter-Ark hops. But this is my first mission drop — my first time out of hyperspace. It’s a little different.”
She raised fine eyebrows. “We didn’t evolve in hyperspace.”
“Maybe. But it’s all I know—”
An orifice in the hull opened and exploded at them; the flitter surged into hyperspace. It was like being born.
A Virtual image of the Ark swam into their monitors. Holism Ark was a Spline ship: a rolling, fleshy sphere encrusted with blisters. It was a living being, Rodi mused, and it looked like it.
He wondered briefly what those blisters on the hull were. They couldn’t be seen from within the Ark…
The flitter receded rapidly. Hyperspace smeared the Ark’s image.
Now more Arks came into view. The flitter skirted islands of huge flesh as it worked its way through the fleet.
At last the flitter surged into clear hyperspace; Thet swung the flitter about.
Holism Ark was lost in a blurred wall of ten thousand Arks that cut the Universe in half. This was the Exaltation of the Integrality. Rodi imagined he could hear a thrumming as the great armada forged onwards; flitters skimmed between the huge hulls and rained into three-space.
“We’re privileged to see this,” Rodi said.
“Definitely,” said Thet laconically. “A sight that hasn’t changed for three thousand years.” She snapped the flitter away; the Exaltation became a blur in the distance. Her shaven head gleamed in the cabin lights. “I’ll tell you how we’re privileged. After a hundred generations it’s us who are around as the Exaltation reaches Bolder’s Ring, the true Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. And so the sky here is full of lost human colonies. Bits of ancient, failed assaults. Instead of a dozen missionary drops a century we’re getting a hundred a year. Which is why they’re pressing almost anybody into service.”
“Thanks,” he said drily.
She grinned, showing teeth. “So I’m your tutor on your first drop. And I’m not what you expected. Am I?”
Rodi said nothing.
“Look — I’m resourceful, a good pilot. I’m no great thinker, okay?… but you’re different. Top marks in the seminary, Gren tells me. You should soon surpass me. And with all that understanding you should have no fear. The Integrality says that the death of an individual is unimportant.”
“Yes.” That was a child’s precept; he clutched the thought and felt his anxiety recede.
“And you do believe in the Integrality. Don’t you?” Her voice was sly.
Was she mocking him? “Of course. Don’t you?”
She didn’t reply. She stabbed at the control panel. The flitter popped out of hyperspace.
Stars exploded around him. Half of them were colored blue.
He gasped. Thet laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Thet watched with amused contempt. “Get your bearings.”
The stars blurred together. Behind him they were tinged china blue. Ahead of him they formed a mist that hid… something, a hint of a torus shape—
“Bolder’s Ring is ahead,” he breathed.
“How do you know?”
Because that was the way everything was falling.
Thet said, “We’ve been space-going for a hundred and fifty millennia, probably. And yet we’re still children at the feet of the Xeelee. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?”
Rodi shrugged. “That’s why we’ve been trying to wreck that thing for almost as long. Envy.”
Thet paged through images on her monitor. “Shocking. And of course we of the Integrality are here to put it all right… ha! There’s our goal.” The screen contained a single spark of chlorophyll green. “Human life… or near enough to show up. A worldful of straying lambs. Right, Rodi?” And she drove the flitter through the crowd of stars.
On Holism Ark there were sim rooms of Earth. This little world, Rodi decided, was like a folded-up bit of Earth. They swept over oceans that sparkled in the jostling starlight — and then flew into an impossible dawn.
It was impossible because there was no sun.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Thet murmured. The light was diffusing down from a glowing sky. “Where’s that damn sunlight coming from?… And the planet’s only a quarter Earth’s size, gravity a sixth standard — too low for this thick layer of air…”
Rodi smiled. The little world was like a toy.
Thet poked buttons in triumph. “Contact! About time…”
A Virtual tank filled up with a smiling male face, long and gracefully austere. He spoke; Rodi picked out maybe one word in two. After a few seconds he flicked the translator button mounted in his thumbnail.
“…this equipment’s a little dusty, I’m afraid; we don’t get too many visitors. It’s only chance I was in the museum when the alarm chimed—”
“We represent the Exaltation of the Integrality,” said Thet formally. “We come from beyond the stars. We are human like yourselves.”
The man laughed; his eyes’ folds crinkled. “Thank you, my dear. You’re welcome to land and talk to us. But you’ll find we’re quite sophisticated. Use this signal as a beacon. The name of this area is Tycho…”
Thet let Rodi pilot the flitter out of orbit. Fifty miles above the surface the little craft shuddered; Rodi’s palms grew slick with sweat.
“That wasn’t your fault, surprisingly,” Thet said calmly. “We just passed through a kind of membrane. It’s — healing — behind us. Now we know how they keep the atmosphere in. And maybe this is where the sunshine comes from. Interesting.”
