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.