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

what baffled him about the world.
    The Mole extended an arm from its nose. It reached to the panniers on its back and began lifting head-sized nodules down to a pile on the floor of the chamber. Rees watched it work for a few minutes. There were crude weld marks around the prow devices, the wheel axles and the points where the panniers were fixed; also, the skin of the Mole bore long, thin scars showing clearly where devices had been cut away, long ago. Rees half closed his eyes so that he could see only the broad cylindrical shape of the Mole. What might have been fixed to those scars on the hull? With a flash of insight he imagined the jets that maintained the Belt in its orbit attached to the Mole. In his mind the components moved around, assembling and reassembling in various degrees of implausibility. Could the jets really once have been attached to the Mole? Had it once been some kind of flying machine, adapted for work down here?
    But perhaps other devices had been fixed to those scars - devices long since discarded and now beyond his imagination - perhaps the ‘sensors’ of which the Mole spoke.
    He felt a surge of irrational gratitude to the Moles. In all his crushing universe they, enigmatic as they were, represented the only element of strangeness, of otherness; they were all his imagination had to work on. The first time he had begun to speculate that things might somewhere, sometime, be other than they were here had been a hundred shifts ago when a Mole had unexpectedly asked him whether he found the Nebula air any more difficult to breathe.
    ‘Mole,’ he said.
    An articulated metal arm unfolded from the nose of the Mole; a camera fixed on him.
    ‘The sky looked a bit more red today.’
    The transfer of nodules was not slowed but the small lens stayed steady. A red lamp somewhere on the prow of the machine began to pulse. ‘Please input spectrometer data.’
    ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Rees said. ‘And even if I did, I haven’t got a “spectrometer”.’
    ‘Please quantify input data.’
    ‘I still don’t understand,’ Rees said patiently.
    For further seconds the machine studied him. ‘How red is the sky?’
    Rees opened his mouth - and hesitated, stuck for words. ‘I don’t know. Red. Darker. Not as dark as blood.’
    The lens lit up with a scarlet glow. ‘Please calibrate.’
    Rees imagined himself to be staring into the sky. ‘No, not as bright as that.’
    The glow scaled through a tight spectrum, through crimson to a muddy blood colour.
    ‘Back a little,’ Rees said. ‘. . . There. That’s it, I think.’
    The lens darkened. The lamp on the prow, still scarlet, began to glow steady and bright. Rees was reminded of the warning light on the winch equipment and felt his flesh crawl under its blanket of weight. ‘Mole. What does that light mean?’
    ‘Warning,’ it said in its flat voice. ‘Deterioration of environment life-threatening. Access to support equipment recommended.’
    Rees understood ‘threatening’, but what did the rest of it mean? What support equipment? ‘Damn you, Mole, what are we supposed to do?’
    But the Mole had no reply; patiently it continued to unload its pannier.
    Rees watched, thoughts racing. The events of the last few shifts came like pieces of a puzzle to the surface of his mind.
    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