Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring Read Free

went about his work. Surely the series of implosions could not be blamed on the engineer?
    . . . But if not Gord, who?
    Rees’s shift was cancelled. The Belt had a second foundry, separated from the ruin by a hundred and eighty degrees, and Rees would be expected to call there on his next working shift; but for now he was free.
    He pulled his way slowly back to his cabin, staring with fascination at the blood-trails left by his hands on ropes and roofs. His head seemed still to be full of smoke. He paused for a few minutes at the entrance to his cabin, trying to suck clean oxygen from the air; but the ruddy, shifting starlight seemed almost as thick as smoke. Sometimes the Nebula breezes seemed almost unbreathable.
    If only the sky were blue, he thought vaguely. I wonder what blue is like . . . Even in his parents’ childhood - so his father had said - there were still hints of blue in the sky, off at the edges of the Nebula, far beyond the clouds and stars. He closed his eyes, trying to picture a colour he had never seen, thinking of coolness, of clear water.
    So the world had changed since his father’s day. Why? And would it change again? Would blue and those other cool colours return - or would the redness deepen until it was the colour of ruined flesh—
    Rees pulled his way into his cabin and ran the spigot. He took off his tunic and scrubbed at his bloodstained skin until it ached.
    The flesh peeled from the body in his hands like the skin from rotten fruit-sim; bone gleamed white—
    He lay in his net, eyes wide, remembering.
    A distant handbell rang three times. So it was still only mid-shift - he had to endure another shift and a half, a full twelve hours, before he had an excuse to leave the cabin.
    If he stayed here he’d go crazy.
    He rolled out of his net, pulled on his coverall and slid out of the cabin. The quickest way to the Quartermaster’s was along the Belt past the wrecked foundry; deliberately he turned and crawled the other way.
    People nodded from windows and outdoor nets as he passed, some smiling with faint sympathy. There were only a couple of hundred people in the Belt; the tragedy must have hit almost everybody. From dozens of cabins came the sounds of soft weeping, of cries of pain.
    Rees lived alone, keeping mostly to his own company; but he knew almost everybody in the Belt. Now he lingered by cabins where people to whom he was a little closer must be suffering, perhaps dying; but he hurried on, feeling isolation thicken around him like smoke.
    The Quartermaster’s bar was one of the Belt’s largest buildings at twenty yards across; it was laced with climbing ropes, and bar stock covered most of one wall. This shift the place was crowded: the stink of alcohol and weed, the bellow of voices, the pull of a mass of hot bodies - it all hit Rees as if he’d run into a wall. Jame, the barman, plied his trade briskly, laughing raucously through a greying tangle of beard. Rees lingered on the fringe of the milling crowd, anxious not to return to his desolate cabin; but the drink and laughter seemed to flow around him, excluding him, and he turned to leave.
    ‘Rees! Wait . . .’
    It was Sheen. She had pushed away from the centre of a group of men; one of them - a huge, intimidating miner called Roch - called after her drunkenly. Sheen’s cheeks were moist from the heat of the bar and she had cropped away her scorched hair; otherwise she was bright and clean in a fresh, skimpy tunic. When she spoke her voice was still scoured rough by the smoke. ‘I saw you come in. Here. You look like you need this.’ She held out a drink in a tarnished globe.
    Suddenly awkward, Rees said, ‘I was going to leave—’
    ‘I know you were.’ She moved closer to him, unsmiling, and pushed the drink into his chest. ‘Take it anyway.’ Again he felt the pull of her body as a warmth in his stomach - why should her gravity field have such a distinct flavour from that of others? - and he was distractingly