Read Online Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online

that?’
    Rees smiled, relishing the moment. ‘Oh, it was nothing. You see, we have - ah - buses where I come from too. I’ll tell you about it some time.’
    And with a delicious coolness he settled back to enjoy the ride.
    The journey lasted only a few minutes. The bus paused frequently, passengers alighting and climbing aboard at each stop.
    They passed abruptly out of the mass of cables and slid over a clear expanse of deck. Unimpeded Nebula light dazzled Rees. When he looked back the cables were like a wall of textured metal hundreds of feet tall, topped by discs of foliage.
    The nose of the bus began to rise.
    At first Rees thought it was his imagination. Then he noticed the passengers shifting in their seats; and still the tilt increased, until it seemed to Rees that he was about to slide back down a metal slope to the cables.
    He shook his head tiredly. He had had enough wonders for one shift. If only Gover would give him a few hints about what was going on—
    He closed his eyes. Come on, think it through, he told himself. He thought of the Raft as he had seen it from above. Had it looked bowl-shaped? No, it had been flat all the way to the Rim; he was sure of that. Then what?
    Fear shot through him. Suppose the Raft was falling! Perhaps the cables on a thousand trees had snapped; perhaps the Raft was tipping over, spilling its human cargo into the pit of air—
    He snorted as with a little more thought he saw it. The bus was climbing out of the Raft’s gravity well, which was deepest at the structure’s centre. If the bus’s brakes failed now it would roll back along the plane in from the Rim towards the Raft’s heart . . . just as if it were rolling downhill. In reality the Raft was, of course, a flat plate, fixed in space; but its central gravity field made it seem to tilt to anyone standing close to the Rim.
    When the slope had risen to one in one the bus shuddered to a halt. A set of steps had been fixed to the deck alongside the bus’s path; they led to the very Rim. The passengers jumped down. ‘You stay there,’ Gover told Rees; and he set off after the others up the shallow stairs.
    Fixed almost at the Rim was the huge, silhouetted form of what must be a supply machine. The passengers formed a small queue before it.
    Rees obediently remained in his seat. He longed to examine the device at the Rim. But there would be another shift, time and fresh energy to pursue that.
    It would be nice, though, to walk to the edge and peer into the depths of the Nebula . . . Perhaps he might even glimpse the Belt.
    One by one the passengers returned to the bus bearing supply packets, like those which Pallis had brought to the Belt. The last passenger thumped the nose of the bus; the battered old machine lurched into motion and set off down the imaginary slope.
    Pallis’s cabin was a simple cube partitioned into three rooms: there was an eating area, a living room with seats and hammocks, and a cleaning area with a sink, toilet and shower head.
    Pallis had changed into a long, heavy robe. The garment’s breast bore a stylized representation of a tree in the green braid which Rees had come to recognize as the badge of Pallis’s woodsman Class. He told Rees and Gover to clean themselves up. When it was Rees’s turn he approached the gleaming spigots with some awe; he barely recognized the clean, sparkling stuff that emerged as water.
    Pallis prepared a meal, a rich meat-sim broth. Rees sat cross-legged on the cabin floor and ate eagerly. Gover sat in a chair wrapped in his customary silence.
    Pallis’s home was free of decoration save for two items in the living area. One was a cage constructed of woven slats of wood, suspended from the ceiling; within it five or six young trees hovered and fizzed, immature branches whirling. They filled the room with motion and the scent of wood. Rees saw how the skitters, one or two adorned with bright flowers, fizzed towards the cabin lights, bumping in soft frustration against