nothing at his back—
With a stifled yell he tumbled backwards.
Baert, laughing, helped him up, and the girl, with an apologetic smile, presented him with a tumbler of some clear, sweet beverage. Rees could feel his cheeks burn like stars. 'What was all that about?'
Baert suppressed his laughter. 'I'm sorry. It gets them every time. I should have warned you, really…'
'But how does she walk like that?'
Baert's thin shoulders moved in a shrug. 'If I knew it would spoil the fun. Magnetic soles on her shoes? The funny thing is, it's not the girl that knocks you over… It's the collapse of your own perceptions, the failure of your sense of balance.'
'Yeah, hilarious.' Rees sucked sourly at his drink and watched the girl move through the crowd. Her footsteps seemed easy and natural, and try as he might he failed to see how she kept her balance. Soon, though, there were more spectacular acts to watch. Jugglers, for instance, with clubs that swooped and soared in arcs at quite impossible angles, returning infallibly to their owners' hands.
During applause Rees said to Baert, 'It's like magic.'
'Not magic,' the other said. 'Simple physics; that's all there is to it. I guess this is making your miner's eyes pop out, eh?'
Rees frowned. On the Belt there wasn't a lot of time for juggling… and no doubt the labor of the miners was going to pay for ail this, in some indirect fashion. Discreetly he glanced around at the rest of the audience. Plenty of gold and crimson braid, not a lot of black or the other colors. Upper Classes only? He suppressed a stab of resentment and returned his attention to the show.
Soon it was time for the main feature. A trampoline was set up to cover the stage and the crowd grew hushed. Some wind instrument evoked a plaintive melody and a man and a woman dressed in simple leotards took the stage. They bowed once to the audience, climbed onto the trampoline, and together began to soar high into the starlit air. At first they performed simple manoeuvres — slow, graceful somersaults and twists — pleasing to the eye, but hardly spectacular.
Then the couple hit the trampoline together, jumped high, met at the top of their arcs — and, without touching, they twisted around each other, so that each was thrown wide.
Baert gasped. 'Now, how did they do that?'
'Gravity,' Rees whispered. 'Just for a second they orbited around each other's center of mass.'
The dance went on. The partners twisted around each other, throwing their lithe bodies into elaborate parabolae, and Rees watched through half-closed eyes, entranced. The physicist in him analyzed the dancers' elaborate movements. Their centers of mass, located somewhere around their waists, traced out hyperbolic orbits in the varying gravity fields of the Raft, the stage and the dancers themselves, so that each time the dancers launched themselves from their trampoline the paths of their centers were more or less determined… But the dancers adorned the paths with movements of their slim bodies so deceptively that it seemed that the two of them were flying through the air at will, independent of gravity. How paradoxical, Rees thought, that the billion-gee environment of this universe should afford humans such freedom.
Now the dancers launched into a final, elaborate arc, their bodies orbiting, their faces locked together like facing planets. Then it was over; the dancers stood hand-in-hand atop their trampoline, and Rees cheered and stamped with the rest. So there was more to do with billion-strength gravity than measure it and fight it—
A flash, a muffled rush of air, a sudden blossom of smoke. The trampoline, blasted from below, turned briefly into a fluttering, birdlike creature, a dancer itself; the dancers, screaming, were hurled into the air. Then the trampoline collapsed into the splintered ruins of the stage, the dancers falling after it.
The audience, stunned, fell silent. The only sound was a low, broken crying from the wreckage of the stage, and Rees watched, unbelieving, as a red-brown stain spread over the remains of the trampoline.
A burly man bearing orange braids hurried from the wings and stood commandingly before the audience. 'Sit down,' he ordered. 'No one should try to leave.' And he stood there as the audience quietly obeyed. Rees, looking around, saw more orange braids at the exits from the Theatre, still more working their way into the ruins of the stage.
Baert's face was pale. 'Security,' he whispered. 'Report directly to the Captain. You don't see them around too often, but they're always there… undercover as often as not.' He sat back and folded his arms. 'What a mess. They'll interrogate us all before they let us out of here; it will take hours—'
'Baert, I don't understand any of this. What happened?'
Baert shrugged. 'What do you think? A bomb, of course.'
Rees felt an echo of the disorientation he had suffered when the drinks girl had walked by. 'Someone did this deliberately?'
Baert looked at him sourly and did not reply.
'Why?'
'I don't know. I don't speak for those people.' Baert rubbed the side of his nose. 'But there's been a few of these attacks, directed against Officers, mostly, or places they're likely to be. Like this.
'Not everyone's happy here, you see, my friend,' he went on. 'A lot of people think the Officers get more than their share.'
'So they're turning to actions like this?' Rees turned away. The red-stained trampoline was being wrapped around the limp bodies of the gravity dancers; he watched with an unshakeable sense of unreality. He remembered his own flash of resentment at Baert, not more than an hour before this disaster. Perhaps he could sympathize with the motives of the people behind this act — why should one group enjoy at leisure the fruits of another's labor? — but to kill for such a reason?
The orange-braided security men began to organize strip searches of the crowd. Resigned, not speaking, Rees and Baert sat back to wait their
turn.
Despite isolated incidents like the Theatre attack Rees found his new life fascinating and rewarding, and the shifts wore away unbelievably quickly. All too soon, it seemed, he had finished his Thousand Shifts, the first stage of his graduation process, and it was time for his achievement to be honored.
And so he found himself sitting on a decorated bus and studying the crimson braids of a Scientist (Third Class), freshly stitched to the shoulder of his coverall, and shivering with a sense of unreality. The bus worked its way through the suburbs of the Raft. Its dozen young occupants, Rees's fellow graduate-apprentices, spun out a cloud of laughter and talk.
Jaen was studying him with humorous concern, a slight crease over her broad nose; her hands rested in the lap of her dress uniform. 'Something on your mind?'
He shrugged. 'I'm fine. You know me. I'm the serious type.'
'Damn right. Here.' Jaen reached to the boy sitting on the far side from Rees and took a narrow-necked bottle. 'Drink. You're graduating. This is your Thousandth Shift and you're entitled to enjoy it.'
'Well, it isn't precisely. I was a slow starter, remember. For me it's more like a thousand and a quarter —'
'Oh, you boring bugger, drink some of this stuff before I kick you off the bus.'
Rees, laughing, gave in and took a deep draught from the bottle.
He had sampled some tough liquors in the Quartermaster's bar, and plenty of them had been stronger than this fizzing wine-sim; but none of them had quite the same effect. Soon the globe lights lining the avenue of cables seemed to emit a more friendly light; Jaen's gravity pull mingling with his was a source of warmth and stillness; and the brittle conversation of his companions seemed to grow vivid and amusing.
His mood persisted as they emerged from beneath the canopy of flying trees and reached the shadow of the Platform. The great lip of metal jutted inwards from the Rim, forming a black rectangle cut out of the crimson of the sky, its supporting braces like gaunt limbs. The bus wheezed to a halt alongside a set of wide stairs. Rees, Jaen and the rest tumbled from the bus and clambered up the stairs to the Platform.
The Thousandth Shift party was already in full swing, bustling with perhaps a hundred graduates of the various Classes of the Raft. A bar set up on trestle tables was doing healthy business, and a discordant set of musicians was thumping out a rhythmic sound — there were even a few couples tentatively dancing, near the band's low stage. Rees, with Jaen in tolerant tow, set off on a tour of the walls of the Platform.
The Platform was an elegant idea: to fix a hundred-yard-square plate to the Rim at such an angle that it