At last, only the Xeelee themselves were more potent than mankind…

Humans railed against the Tyranny of Heaven.

More legends were written, as waves of human assaults pounded against the great Xeelee sites. It was a remote, inhuman time. I watched, repelled, terrified.

PART 5

ERA: The War to End Wars

Fragments. Shards…

Humans even reached into the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee.

Here was a warship, its engine blazing, falling through Bolder’s Ring — and into a new Universe.

The ship imploded, and fell into a compact, glowing nebula. Crew members hurried through the corridors of their falling ship; smoke filled the passageways as lurid flames singed the air. The hull was breached; the raw air of the nebula scoured through the cabins, and through rents in the silver walls the crew saw flying trees and huge, cloudy whales, all utterly unlike anything in their experience…

Gradually they came to understand. Gravity was the key to the absurd place they were stranded in. Gravity here was a billion times as strong as in the Universe they’d come from. Here their home planet would have a surface gravity of a billion gees — if it didn’t implode in an instant.

The crew adapted, and survived. Gradually humans spread through the nebula…

Stowaway

It was the end of Rees’s work shift. Wearily he hauled himself through the foundry door. Cool air dried the sweat from his brow.

He pulled himself along the ropes and roofs towards his cabin, inspecting his hands and arms with some interest. When one of the older workers had dropped a ladle of iron, Rees had narrowly dodged a hail of molten metal; tiny droplets had drifted into his flesh, sizzling out little craters which—

A huge shadow flapped across the Belt. Air washed over his back. He looked up; and wonder settled at the base of his skull.

The tree was a wheel of wood and foliage fifty yards wide, magnificent against the crimson sky. Its dozen radial branches and their veil of leaves turned with a calm possession; the trunk was like a mighty wooden skull which glared around at the ocean of crimson air.

Its rotation slowing, the tree lowered itself reluctantly into the gravity well of the star kernel.

Pallis, the tree-pilot, was hanging by hands and feet below the knotty trunk of the tree. The star kernel and its churning Belt mine were behind his back. The Belt itself was a circle eight hundred yards wide, a chain of battered dwellings and work places connected by ropes and tubes. At the center of the Belt was the mine itself, a cooled-down star kernel a hundred yards wide; lifting cables dangled from the Belt to the surface of the star kernel, scraping the rusty meniscus at a few feet per second. Here and there, fixed to the walls and roofs of the Belt, were the massive, white-metal mouths of jets; every few minutes a puff of steam emerged from one of those throats and the Belt tugged imperceptibly faster at his heels, shaking off the slowing effects of air friction…

It was a spectacular sight, but it was of little interest to Pallis.

With a critical eye he peered up through the mat of foliage at the smoke which hung raggedly over the upper branches. The layer of smoke wasn’t anywhere near thick enough: he could clearly see starlight splashing through to bathe the tree’s round leaves. He moved his hands along the nearest branch, felt the uncertain quivering of the fine blade of wood. Even here, at the root of the 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.

Damn that boy —

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 move it.”

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.