Raft

… 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 color 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 colors return — or would the redness deepen until it was the color 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 graying 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 center 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 flavor from that of others? — and he was distractingly aware of her bare arms.

"Thanks." He took the drink and sucked at the globe's plastic nipple; hot liquor coursed over his tongue, "Maybe I did need that."

Sheen studied him with frank curiosity. "You're an odd one, Rees, aren't you?"

He stared back, letting his eyes slide over the smoothness of the skin around her eyes. It struck him that she wasn't really much older than he was. "How am I odd?"

"You keep yourself to yourself."

He shrugged.

"Look, it's something you need to grow out of. You need company. We all do. Especially after a shift like this one."

"What did you mean earlier?" he asked suddenly.

"When?"

"During the implosion. You said how hard it was to build anything strong enough for this universe."

"What about it?"

"Well… what other universe is there?"

She sucked at her drink, ignoring the shouted invitations from the party behind her. "Who cares?"

"My father used to say the mine was killing us all. Humans weren't meant to work down there, crawling around in wheelchairs at five gee."

She laughed. "Rees, you're a character. But I'm not in the mood for metaphysical speculation, frankly. What I'm in the mood for is to get brain-dead on this fermented fruit-sim. So you can join me and the boys if you want, or you can go and sigh at the stars. OK?" She floated away, looking back questioningly; he shook his head, smiling stiffly, and she drifted back to her party, disappearing into a little pool of arms and legs.

Rees finished his drink, struggled to the bar to return the empty globe, and left.

A heavy cloud, fat with rain, drifted over the Belt, reducing visibility to a few yards; the air it brought with it seemed exceptionally sour and thin.

Rees prowled around the cables that girdled his world, muscles working restlessly. He completed two full circuits, passing huts and cabins familiar since his childhood, hurrying past well-known faces. The damp cloud, the thin air, the confinement of the Belt seemed to come together somewhere inside his chest. Questions chased around his skull. Why were human materials and building methods so inadequate to resist the forces of the world? Why were human bodies so feeble in the face of those forces?

Why had Ms parents had to die, without answering the questions that had haunted him since childhood?

Shards of rationality glittered in the mud of his overtired thinking. His parents had had no better understanding of their circumstances than he had; there had been nothing but legends they could tell him before their sour deaths. Children's tales of a Ship, a Crew, of something called Bolder's Ring… But his parents had had — acceptance. They, and the rest of the Belt dwellers — even the sparkiest, like Sheen — seemed implicitly to accept their lot. Only Rees seemed plagued by questions, unanswered doubts.

Why couldn't he be like everyone else? Why couldn't he just accept and be accepted?

He let himself drift to rest, arms aching, cloud mist spattering his face. In all his universe there was only one entity which he could talk to about this — which would respond in any meaningful way to his questions.

And that was a digging machine.

With a sudden impulse he looked about. He was perhaps a hundred yards from the nearest mine elevator station; his arms and legs carried him to it with renewed vigor.

Cloud mist swirled after Rees as he entered the station. The place was deserted, as Rees had expected. The whole shift would be lost to mourning; not for another two or three hours would the bleary-eyed workers of the next shift begin to arrive.

The station was little more than another cubical iron shack, locked into the Belt. It was dominated by a massive drum around which a fine cable was coiled. The drum was framed by winch equipment constructed of some metal that remained free of rust, and from the cable dangled a heavy chair fitted with large, fat wheels. The chair was topped by 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, color-coded switches and dials. Rees rapidly set up a descent sequence on the panel and the winch drum began to vibrate.