Farr gaped, trying to suppress a laugh. “Me, hard on him? Why, the old Xeelee-lover has it in for me.”

Bzya reached to the conveyor and raised a length of tree trunk longer than Farr was tall. With a single blow of his ax he cracked it open to reveal its glowing core. “See it from his point of view. He’s the supervisor of this section.”

Farr snorted. “Making himself rich out of our work. Bastard.”

Bzya smiled. “You learn fast, don’t you? Well, maybe. But he’s also responsible. We lost another Bell, last shift. Had you heard? Three more Fishermen dead. Hosch is responsible for that too.”

Disasters seemed to hit the Harbor with a depressing regularity, Farr thought. Still, he remained impatient with Bzya’s tolerance, and he began to list Hosch’s faults.

“He’s all of that, and then some you’re too young to understand. Maybe he isn’t up to the responsibility he has.

“But — I’ll say it again — whether he can cope or not, he’s responsible. And when one of us dies, a little of him must die too. I’ve seen it in his face, Farr, despite all his viciousness. Remember that.”

Farr frowned. He shoved more glowing wood into the hoppers. It was so complex. If only Logue or Dura were here to help him make sense of it all…

Or if only he could get out of here and Surf.

The rest of the shift wore away without incident. Afterward Farr filed out with the rest of the laborers to the small, cramped dormitory they shared. The dormitory, home to forty people, was a stained box slung across with sleeping ropes. It stank of shit and food. Farr ate his daily ration — today, a small portion of tough bread — and looked for a stable nest in the web of sleeping-ropes. He wasn’t yet confident enough to challenge the older, powerful-looking Fishermen, men and women both, who monopolized the chamber walls where the Air was slightly less polluted by the grunts and farts of others. He finished up, as usual, close to the center of the dormitory.

One day, he told himself as he closed his eyes and sought sleep. One day.

At the start of his next shift, with eyecups still crusted with sleep deposits, he filed back to his post at the wood hoppers.

The Harbor was an irregular compound of large chambers constructed of stained wood and fixed to the base of the City — in the shadow of the Downside, well away from the bright, fashionable sectors of the upper levels. It was just below the huge dynamos which powered the anchor-bands, and the deep, thrumming vibration of the machines above was a constant accompaniment to life for the Fishermen. The Harbor was a dark, hot, filthy place to work, and the contrast of the heat of the stoves, the grinding roar of the pistons and pulleys with the open Air of the upflux, made it all but unbearable for Farr.

Still, as his shift wore on, Farr relaxed into his work’s heavy, steady rhythms. He hauled the next massive length of tree trunk from the conveyor belt that ran continually behind the row of laborers. He was forced to wrestle with the chunk of wood; its inertia seemed to turn it into a willful, living thing, determined to plow its own path through the Air regardless of Farr’s wishes. The muscles in his arms and back bulged as he braced himself against the floor of the chamber and swung at the section of trunk with his ax of wood, hardened with a tip of Corestuff. The trunk was tough, but split easily enough if he swung the blade along the direction of the grain. When the split was deep enough, Farr forced his hands into the cracked wood and prized the trunk section open, releasing a flood of warmth and green light from the nuclear-burning interior which bathed his face and chest. Then, with the nuclear fire still bright, he dumped the hot fragments into the gaping maw of the hopper before him.

Cutting the wood was the part of his work Farr enjoyed the most, oddly. There was a certain skill to be applied in finding exactly the right spot for his ax blade, a skill Farr found pleasure in acquiring and applying. And when the wood split open under his coaxing, releasing its energy with a sigh of warmth, it was like revealing some hidden treasure.

A line of laborers worked alongside Farr, stretching almost out of sight in the gloom of the Harbor; working in shifts, they fed the ravenous maw of the hoppers unceasingly. The work was heavy, but not impossibly so for Farr, thanks to his upfluxer muscles. In fact, he had to take care not to work too fast; exceeding his quota didn’t earn him any popularity with his workmates.

The heat energy released by the wood’s burning nuclei was contained in great, reinforced vessels — boilers — in another part of the Harbor complex. Superfluid Air, fleeing the heat, was used to drive pistons. These pistons were immense fists of hardened wood twice Farr’s height which plunged into their jackets as steady as a heartbeat.

The pistons, via huge, splintered rotary arms, turned pulleys; and it was the pulleys which sent Bells full of fearful Fishermen toward the mysterious and deadly depths of the underMantle.

It was so different from his life with the Human Beings, where there were no devices more complex than a spear, no source of power save the muscles of humans or animals. The Harbor was like an immense machine, with the sole purpose of sending Fishermen down into the underMantle. He felt as if he were a component of that huge machine himself, or as if he were laboring inside the heart of some giant built of wood and rope…

Bzya apart, the other workers showed no signs of accepting Farr. It was as if their unhappiness with their lot, here in this noisy, stinking inferno, had been turned inward on themselves, and on each other. But still, once each new shift had settled in, the workers seemed to reach a certain rhythm, and a mood of companionship settled over the line — a mood which, Farr sensed, extended even to him, as long as he kept his mouth shut.

He missed Dura, and the rest of the Human Beings, and he missed his old life in the upflux. Of course he did. His sentence in this Harbor seemed to stretch off to eternity. But he was able to accept his lot, as long as he kept his mind focused on the task in hand, and took comforts where he could find them. One shift at a time, that was the secret, as Bzya had told him. And…

“You.”

There was a hand on his shoulder, grasping at his grubby tunic. He was roughly dragged out of the line.

Hosch glared at him, his nostrils glowing sickly-white. “Change of assignment,” he growled.

“What?”

“A Bell,” Hosch said.

As Dura approached — with twenty other new coolies in a huge car drawn by a dozen stout Air-pigs — Frenk’s ceiling-farm seemed tiny at first, a child’s palmprint against the immensity of the Crust itself. The other coolies seemed more interested in another farm, still more distant and harder to make out than Frenk’s. This belonged to Hork IV, Chair of Parz City, Dura was told. The absent-minded Chair escaped his civic responsibilities — leaving Parz in the scheming hands of his son — by indulging in elaborate agricultural experiments, here at the Crust. On Hork’s ceiling-farm there were said to be spears of wheat taller than a man, and Crust-trees no longer than a man’s arm and bound up with lengths of Corestuff-wire…

Dura was barely able to keep her attention focused on this prattle. The thought of being marooned at the Crust, with only these dullards for company, made her heart sink.

At last Frenk’s ceiling-farm filled the clearwood windows. The car settled to rest at the center of a group of crude wooden buildings, and the doors opened.

Dura scrambled out and Waved away from the others. She took a deep breath of clean, empty Air, relishing the sensation in her lungs and capillaries. The Air stretched away all around her, an immense, unbroken layer stretching right around the Star; it was like being inside the lungs of the Star itself. Well, the company might leave a bit to be desired, but at least here she could breathe Air which didn’t taste like it had been through the lungs of a dozen people already.