This was a tough universe for humans. The implosion had proved that. And now, if he understood any of what the Mole had said, it seemed that the redness of the sky was a portent of doom for them all, as if the Nebula itself were some vast, incomprehensible lamp of warning.
A sense of confinement returned, its weight more crushing than the pull of the star kernel. He would never get anyone else to understand his concerns. He was just some dumb kid, and his worries were based on hints, fragments, all partially understood.
Would he still be a kid when the end came?
Scenes of apocalypse flashed through his head: he imagined dimming stars, thickening clouds, the very air souring and failing in his lungs—
He had to get back to the surface, the Belt, and onwards; he had to find out more. And in all his universe there was only one place he could go.
The Raft. Somehow he had to get to the Raft.
With a new sense of purpose, vague but burning, he turned his chair to the exit ramp.
2
The tree was a wheel of wood and foliage fifty yards wide. Its rotation slowing, it 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. 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.