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

a head and neck support and was thickly padded. There was a control panel fixed to a strut at one end of the drum; the panel was an arm’s-length square and contained fist-sized, colour-coded switches and dials. Rees rapidly set up a descent sequence on the panel and the winch drum began to vibrate.
    He slid into the chair, taking care to smooth the clothing under his back and legs. On the surface of the star a crease of cloth could cut like a knife. A red light flashed on the control panel, casting sombre shadows, and the base of the cabin slid aside with a soft grind. The ancient machinery worked with a chorus of scrapes and squeaks; the drum turned and the cable began to pay out.
    With a jolt Rees dropped through the station floor and into the dense cloud. The chair was pulled down the guide cable; the guide continued through the mist, he knew, for four hundred yards to the surface of the star. The familiar sensation of shifting gravity pulled at his stomach like gentle hands. The Belt was rotating a little faster than its orbital velocity - to keep the chain of cabins taut - and a few yards below the Belt the centripetal force faded, so that Rees drifted briefly through true weightlessness. Then he entered the gravity well of the star kernel and his weight built up rapidly, plating over his chest and stomach like iron.
    Despite the mounting discomfort he felt a sense of release. He wondered what his workmates would think if they could see him now. To choose to descend to the mine during an off-shift . . . and what for? To talk to a digging machine?
    The oval face of Sheen floated before him, intelligent, sceptical and pragmatic.
    He felt a flush burn up through his cheeks and he was suddenly glad that his descent was hidden by the mist.
    He dropped out of the mist and the star kernel was revealed. It was a porous ball of iron fifty yards wide, visibly scarred by the hands and the machines of men. The guide cable - and its siblings, spread evenly around the Belt - scraped along the iron equator at a speed of a few feet each second.
    His descent slowed; he imagined the winch four hundred yards above him straining to hold him against the star’s clutching pull. Weight built up more rapidly now, climbing to its chest-crushing peak of five gees. The wheels of the chair began to rotate, whirring; then, cautiously, they kissed the moving iron surface. There was a bump which knocked the breath out of him. The cable disengaged rapidly, whipping backwards and away through the mist. The chair rolled slowly to a halt, carrying Rees a few yards from the trail of the cable.
    For a few minutes Rees sat in the silence of the deserted star, allowing his breathing to adjust. His neck, back and legs all seemed comfortable in their deep padding, with no circulation-cutting folds of flesh or cloth. He lifted his right hand cautiously; it felt as if bands of iron encased his forearm, but he could reach the small control pad set into the chair arm.
    He turned his head a few degrees to left and right. His chair sat isolated in the centre of an iron landscape. Thick rust covered the surface, scoured by valleys a few inches deep and pitted by tiny craters. The horizon was no more than a dozen yards away; it was as if he sat at the crest of a dome. The Belt, glimpsed through the layer of cloud around the star, was a chain of boxes rolling through the sky, its cables hauling the cabins and workshops through a full rotation every five minutes.
    Rees had often worked through in his head the sequence of events which had brought this spectacle into being. The star must have reached the end of its active life many centuries earlier, leaving a slowly spinning core of white-hot metal. Islands of solid iron would have formed in that sea of heat, colliding and gradually coalescing. At last a skin must have congealed around the iron, thickening and cooling. In the process bubbles of air had been trapped, leaving the sphere riddled with caverns and tunnels -