Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (107 page)

Then the burning started.

It was all over his body, like a thousand needles. And inside him too -
by the Wheel! -
scorching into his lungs and stomach; it flooded the capillaries that coursed through his body, turning the network of fine tubes that permeated him into a mass of pain, every threadlike capillary electric-alive with it.

In these extremes of density and pressure the tin nuclei at the surfaces of his body were seeking a new stable configuration. The nuclei were breaking apart from each other and crumbling into their component nucleons, which were then swarming into the fire-Air in search of the single, huge nucleus which filled the heart of the Star ... Bzya was dissolving.

He kicked at the fluid, driving his legs through it. He felt a dull impact as his head struck something. It must be the wall of the Bell. He felt vaguely surprised to find that there was anything left of the familiar, external universe, beyond this pain-realm of dissolution. But he’d managed to move himself. He’d
Waved.

He dragged his hand through the fluid, made a sign of the Wheel against his chest. He couldn’t see, but he could breathe, and he could Wave. He was going to get out of here.

He’d bumped his upper face. He must be facing the rear wall of the cabin, then; he must have been spun around by the incoming underMantle fluid. He turned round, spread his hands behind him across the wall. The pain eclipsed his touch, but he could feel the curve of the wall, the round profile of a window. He pictured the cabin, as it had been in that last instant before the hatch came in. Hosch had been somewhere to his right.

He pushed away from the wall and Waved that way, groping ahead of him.

His hands found something. Hosch, it had to be. He ran his hands over Hosch’s chest and head; Hosch didn’t respond. Hosch’s skin crumbled under Bzya’s touch - or maybe it was the flesh of Bzya’s own fingers and palms.

He found Hosch’s hand, wrapped it in his own.

Two strong kicks and he’d found the open hatchway. He was still blind, and his sense of touch was fading - perhaps, he thought with horror, it would never return; even if he survived perhaps he would have to live in this shell of pain, without light or sound ... But he could feel the rim of the hatchway, the splinters left by Hosch’s brave kicking.

He tried to fall forward, out of the Bell, but something was holding him back. Something hard, unyielding, which pressed into his chest and legs - the Corestuff hoops, wrapped around the Bell. He lifted his feet against the lower hoop, grabbed the upper with a numbing hand, and tried to straighten his body. His lower back, already injured, blazed with pain. He felt an abrupt shift as the hoops slid apart. He lifted his feet and let his body slide forward through the gap; he held his hands over his head and felt the limp form of Hosch rattle against the hoops, following him.

He tumbled out of the Bell, dragging the supervisor after him.

He had to find the Spine. He turned to his left and kicked out. He held Hosch’s hand tight - at least he thought he did; only pain reached him now from his hands, feet and face. He felt a whispering drag pull at his own body ... No, he thought, it was more than that; there were a thousand discrete tugs at his flesh, like hooks dragging into the skin. His flesh was
ablating
, he realized slowly, crumbling off him as he Waved.

He reached ahead with his free hand. His sight was gone, both eyecups useless now. This was the way back to the Spine, as best he remembered it from the moment the Bell had been torn away by the Magfield surges. Of course, since then he’d been unconscious. The Bell could even have turned upside down . . .

But he didn’t have any better guesses. He thrashed at the scouring liquid, trying not to estimate how far he’d Waved from the Bell, how much further before he was
sure
he’d missed the Spine.

Mercifully the pain seemed to be lessening. The burning, the decomposition of his flesh, must be damaging the nerve endings themselves. Soon he genuinely would be isolated inside his body.

Well, I’ll never Surf again. Or sculpt. Or
, and now his inner smile faded,
or feel a woman’s skin.

There was a new stab of pain from his outstretched arm, his useless stub of hand. The arm buckled, forced back by something solid.

His body collided with a hard surface. He tried to feel with his chest, thighs and face.

The Spine. The blessed Spine.

He dragged his free arm across the surface until it snagged on something. There, he had it - a Bell cable. He made his hand into a hook and wrapped it around the cable. With Hosch still towed limply behind him, he flattened himself against the wooden surface of the Spine, and began to Wave once more, along the length of the Spine, using the Cable as a guide.

How ironic, he thought, if he were Waving the wrong way, down towards the Core.

By the time he was lifted out of the fluid, he was almost isolated from the world, inside a deadened body. He felt as aware, as alert as ever, but he could feel little. Even the pain had gone now. But he could feel his chest expand, dragging in the thinning, clearing Air, and he could feel the Magfield pull at his stomach, the centre of him.

He was still here, he thought. Just a little battered around the edges.

He thought he’d kept Waving until the end, and he thought he’d kept hold of Hosch. But it was hard to be sure.

And now he was being moved again, more delicately. He tried to smile. The Fishermen must have come down for him and Hosch, in a second Bell.

He was glad he couldn’t see the looks on their faces, as they nursed him.

W
ith a final heave from the team of volunteers, the patient was loaded through the kicked-out Hospital wall and into the car waiting in the Air beyond. Adda watched the car recede cautiously from the Hospital, and then turn to join the streams of refugees fleeing to the upflux.

Once the evacuation of the City had begun, this ward of the Hospital of the Common Good, directly behind the Skin of Parz, had rapidly been adapted to serve as a loading bay. Now it was a three-dimensional swarm of Hospital staff, volunteers, patients and those close to them. Patients screamed or moaned, and staff called desperately to each other for splints, bandages, drugs. And as fast as the patients were shipped off in the cars outside, more - ever more - were crowding in from the rest of the broken City. Adda felt overwhelmed, daunted, dismayed, exhausted.
Perhaps I’ve finally seen too many changes. Too many disasters; too many shattered bodies . . .

He leaned out into the Air beyond the Skin. He opened his mouth, trying to expel from his lungs the Hospital stink of stale capillary-Air. But even outside the Skin the Air was sour; he could smell nuclear-burning wood, Air-pig jetfarts, the smell of human fear. It was as if the City, in its death throes, was wrapped in an invisible cloud of sour-smelling photons, like an immense dying creature leaking its last capillary-Air.

The City, suffering hugely with groans of wood and the shearing scream of failing Corestuff metal, shuddered around him. The Hospital was lodged in the Downside belly of the City, so that Adda was peering out of the Skin like an insect gazing out of a wall. The anchor-bands were still functioning; electron gas shone around them in response to the huge currents surging through their superconducting interiors as the City fought to maintain its position.

The Skin was a blur of motion. All over the City the fragile hull had been kicked away. People clambered out of the City and into waiting cars; most of them dragged possessions after them through the ragged holes they’d made. Cars and free-Waving people diffused away from the City in a widening, blurring cloud. The Air was filled with the yells of people, the braying commands of Speakers.

Beyond the pathetic human river the Glitch-wracked vortex lines were mere sketches, scribbles of instability. The Magfield shuddered perceptibly as the massive upwellings from the Quantum Sea continued.

And in the far distance, the blue-violet fire of Xeelee ships raked through the Mantle. It was a sight he never thought he’d live to see.

‘Adda!’

Reluctantly, he turned away from the open Air and concentrated on the ward once more.

The next patient to be evacuated, a woman, was screaming in pain. She was so swaddled in stained bandages that all that could be seen of her was a gaping mouth. Deni Maxx trailed after this grotesque package, stroking the woman’s hair and murmuring futile words of comfort. Deni looked to Adda with a mute appeal. He tried to mask his reluctance to touch the injured woman. He moved closer to the woman and stared into her face, muttering gruff, calming words. It was like soothing a wounded Air-pig. But the woman’s eyecups were black with bruising, and he doubted that she’d heard him.

They moved quickly to load the woman into a waiting Air-car. At last the car pulled away from the building, and the screams of the woman dwindled slowly.

Deni lingered by the improvised doorway and gulped in breaths of dank Polar Air. She looked into the mists of distance, at the violet limbs of the Xeelee starbreaker beams walking easily through the Star.

‘Let’s hope those damn things keep away from the City,’ Adda said.

She brushed back a handful of filthy hair. ‘And from your people, wherever they are . . . Anyway, if the beams do hit us directly, it will be mischance. The purpose of the Xeelee is obviously to disrupt the Core; they wouldn’t waste effort on a tiny, helpless construct like a City.’

‘Yes. So much for Hork’s expedition into the underMantle.’

‘Perhaps. But, Adda, that brave and foolish expedition was the only hope any of us had. I have clung to it far beyond any rational point.’ She smiled thinly. ‘In fact I still cling to it. Why not? As long as it keeps me functioning.’

He surveyed the thin trails of Air-cars and people dispersing into the roiling Air. In the distance the larger cars showed up as silhouettes, fleeing insects against searing Xeelee light.

Deni rubbed her chin. ‘You may not understand this, Adda, but most of the City’s people have never strayed outside Parz before. To them, the City has always been the safest place in the world. Now that it’s falling apart around them, they feel - betrayed. Like a child abandoned by its parents.’ She hesitated. ‘We’re talking of hope. But in a way, for many the worst has already come to pass.’

‘Do you think we’re doing any good here?’

She looked strained. ‘Well, we’re shoving the patients out of this improvised port as fast as they are coming in - crushed in the Stadium, or burned and sliced open by that Corestuff berg incursion through the Midside . . . But whether they are any safer out there than in what’s left of the City, I don’t care to judge.’ She smiled without humour. ‘But at least it makes us feel better to help them. Don’t you agree?’

Another patient was shouldered past them and out into a waiting car. Farr was in this latest work party, and as soon as the patient - an unconscious child - was delivered, Farr turned to make his way back into the chaos of the ward. Adda laid a hand on his shoulder, restraining him. There were deep bruises around the boy’s eyes; his shoulders were hunched and his mouth was working as if he was mumbling to himself.

Adda shook him gently. ‘Farr? Are you all right, lad?’

Farr focused on the old man. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, his voice high and thin. ‘I’m just a little tired, and . . .’

‘Listen, you don’t have to carry on with this.’

Farr looked offended. ‘Adda, I’m not a kid.’

‘I’m not suggesting you are, you damn . . .’

Deni moved smoothly between them, something of her old sheen of competence returning to her. ‘Farr, you’re doing a marvellous job . . . and I need you to keep on doing it. So I agree with Adda; I think you should take a short break - find something to eat, a place to rest.’

Farr looked ready to protest further, but Deni pushed him gently in the chest. ‘Go on. That’s an order.’

With a thin smile the boy complied.

Deni turned a quizzical face to Adda. ‘I can tell you were never a parent.’

Adda growled wordlessly.

A new Air-car approached the rough lip of the opened-up wall; five nervous pigs jostled together, bumping against the Skin like inflated toys. The car’s door opened and the driver leaned across. ‘Adda,’ Toba Mixxax said, his broad, weary face splitting into a grin. ‘I’m glad to find you. Ito said you were trying to get here, with Farr.’

‘Well, he’s here. He’s fine. He’s working hard.’ Adda had always found Toba’s round, flat face rather bland and unexpressive; but now Adda could see real pain in the set of Toba’s eyecups, the small lines at the corners of his mouth. ‘Cris isn’t here. I’m sorry.’

Toba’s expression barely changed, but Adda could see a small light go out of him. ‘No. I, ah - I didn’t expect he would be.’

‘No.’

The two men let their gazes slide away from each other, briefly embarrassed.

‘How’s Ito? Where is she?’

‘At the ceiling-farm. What’s left of it. She’s found plenty to do. She’s a craftswoman, Adda, and she’s launched herself into repair work, with the coolies who’ve stayed.’ He shook his head. ‘Everything’s smashed, though. You wouldn’t believe it.’ There was bitterness in Toba’s voice. ‘This latest Glitch has done for us, Adda.’

Toba’s words made him think of what Deni had said - that the Xeelee were here to disrupt the Core, to devastate
the Star itself
. Adda wasn’t very imaginative; he focused on the here-and-now, on what was achievable. But, he suddenly wondered, what if Deni Maxx was right - that the Xeelee truly had come, this time, to finish the Star - to do for them all?

He glanced around the lurid sky. Inside himself, he’d been expecting this Glitch to come to an end, eventually - just like all the other Glitches in his long life, no matter how severe. But what if that wasn’t true, this time? After all, the Xeelee were
manufacturing
this Glitch; his previous experience wasn’t a reliable guide. What if the Xeelee kept on, persisted until the Core itself welled out from rents in the Quantum Sea . . .