He pushed such thoughts away and wriggled through the narrow door frame.
He blinked for a few seconds, dazzled by the shifting starlight… and hesitated. There was a faint scent on
the air. A richness, like meat-sim. Something burning?
His cabin was connected to his neighbor's by a few yards of fraying rope and by lengths of rusty piping;
he pulled himself a few feet along the rope and hung there, eyes raking the world around him for the
source of the jarring scent.
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. The
light of the mile-wide spheres 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.
How many stars were there?
As a child Rees had hovered among the cables, eyes wide, counting up to the limits of his knowledge and
patience. Now he suspected that the stars were without number, that there were more stars than hairs on
his head… or thoughts in his head, or words on his tongue. He raised his head and scoured a sky that was
filled with stars. 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 burning scent called to him again, seeping through the thin air. He wrapped his toes in the cabin
cable and released his hands; he let the spin of the Belt straighten his spine, and from this new viewpoint
surveyed his home.
The Belt was a circle about 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. He studied the ragged rim of the nearest
jet; it was fixed to his neighbor's roof and showed signs of hasty cutting and welding. As usual his
attention drifted off into random speculation. What vessel, or other device, had that jet come from? Who
were the men who had cut it away? And why had they come here…?
Again the whiff of fire. He shook his head, trying to concentrate.
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