Rees found himself grinning. "Can I ask one more question?"

Hollerbach frowned in irritation. "Well, if you must—"

"Tell me about the stars. On the other side of Bolder's Ring. Are they really a million miles across?"

Hollerbach tried to maintain his mask of irritation; but it dissolved into a half-smile. "Yes. And some much bigger! They're far apart, studded around an almost empty sky. And they last, not a thousand shifts like the wretched specimens here, but thousands of billions of shifts!"

Rees tried to imagine such glory. "But…how?"

Hollerbach began to tell him.

5

After Rees's interview with Hollerbach Grye took him to a dormitory building. There was room for about fifty people in the long, flat building, and Rees, overwhelmed by self-consciousness, trailed the fussy Scientist down an aisle between two rows of simple pallets. Beside each pallet was a small cupboard and a rack on which clothes could be hung; Rees found himself staring curiously at the few personal possessions scattered on the floor and cupboard tops — combs and razors, small mirrors, simple sewing kits, here and there photographs of families or young women. One young man — another Science apprentice, judging by the crimson strands woven into his coveralls — lounged on a pallet. He raised narrow eyebrows at Rees's unkempt appearance, but he nodded, friendly enough. Rees nodded back, his cheeks burning, and hurried after Grye.

He wondered what this place was. Pallis's cabin — where he had lodged since his arrival — had seemed unimaginably luxurious to his Belt-developed tastes, and this was hardly so grand, but surely still the dwelling of some exalted class. Perhaps Rees was to clean it out; maybe he would be given somewhere to sleep nearby—

They reached a pallet free of sheets or blankets; the cupboard beside it swung open, empty. Grye waved his hand dismissively. "Here will do, I think." And he turned to walk back down the dormitory.

Rees, confused, followed him.

Grye turned on him. "By all the bloody Bones, what's the matter with you, boy? Don't you understand simple speech?"

"I'm sorry—"

"Here." Grye pointed once more at the pallet and spoke slowly and excessively clearly, as if to a simple child. "You will sleep here from now on. Do I need to write it down?"

"No—"

"Put your personal possessions in the cupboard."

"I don't have any—"

"Get yourself blankets from the stores," Grye said. "The others will show you where." And, oblivious to Rees's lost stare at his back, Grye scurried from the building and on to his next chore.

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.