Iris

EIGHT

Krzakwa and Methol sat across a complex console from each other in Sealock's chamber. The other six survivors were there, but silent, for the two remaining technologists were the principal actors now. Sealock's still living body lay against one wall, enmeshed in its now necessary life-support equipment. The console was a composite of all that had gone before: Shipnet's Torus-alpha CPU, the quantum conversion scanner, and Sealock's nameless final act of creation. It would have to act in concert, under the direction of their will.

"Well," said the Selenite. "We have two people effectively dead, and possibly a chance to save one of them. We may be able to read Jana's personality out of her dead brain . . . but we have no body to put it in. Yet." He glanced at Sealock. "In any event, Jana will keep." It was a grim, unnecessary sort of humor.

"We have to try for Brendan first. If we fail to reclaim him, then he is dead, and Jana's image will have a place inwhich to resume its life." He frowned and stared at the machine. "We're as ready as we'll ever be. I'll go in after him and Ariane will maintain a lifeline on me . . . better, we hope, than the one I held for Bren." He sighed. "The rest of you can observe via the circlets, but keep out of our way! Let's do it." They went under and down, and the eight, trailing each other like a madly whipping human kite tail, fell through the circuits and out into the emergent wave fronts of the scanner, down into darkness, then light. A tongue of data reached out to scoop them in, but the electronic lifeline held and they unreeled into the unknown like a spider descending on its web.

—See anything?

The light flooding their senses was blinding but could not be shut out. It was a side effect of immersion in the QC wave front.

—No. I'll try to turn down the gain. Maybe clean up the clutter around us a little.

—Good idea. A little artificial image enhancement might help. If we . . . It struck. The imagery cleared and they were pinned, helpless before a flood of complex data, become mere observers.

Brendan Sealock was afloat in the dark sea of Iris. The initial trip down, the shock of being detached from his body, left him in a fog, a state of confusion and deadly lethargy, but he was alert again now, drifting in an immense crystalline sea, suspended in the center of a great blue-green sphere in which floated other remote, indistinct shapes. His first conscious thought was the classical one, Where am I?

then he remembered. The ship! This was what it had to be: the great mother vessel that had spawned the enormous mystery of the Aello lander and the once radiogenic material beneath the ocellus on Ocypete. The answers had to be close at hand now. Where are you? he cried out silently, but there was no answer. The masses of data that had seemed too imposing without were invisible within. A globule of some dark, oily substance floated before his eyes and he began to look around. There was a haze against an all-around sky that, when stared at long enough, resolved into a mass of filaments; one filament, perhaps, endlessly folded in upon itself. It was studded with a variety of tiny, dim shapes. Far away, at an unguessably remote distance, was an immense blue-gray sphere, a planetoid-sized mass afloat in the icy/warm sea. He reached out and touched the globule of oil. It popped, Hello, and was gone.

Ah! Contact . . . Who are you?

Another oily sphere boiled out of nowhere before him, writhing, then was still, waiting. He touched it. Pop.

Centrum.

Sealock glanced uneasily at the distant sphere and understood. Yes, there it was: the source of all data, the source of his present complex reality. Can we speak?

Droplets machine-gunned out of nonexistence and splattered across his face. Yes. Easily. Come to me.

It's a long way.

More droplets. Not in the now space. Journey with me into the past.

Sealock was incredulous. Time travel? How is that possible? Our physics denies it!

Pop-pop-pop.

Think! Where are you now?

He thought, and then felt amusement at his own stupidity. Oh. Of course. I see what you mean. Roiling effervescence.

Let us be about it then. I am eager to meet you in a more fruitful fashion. That was an excellent machine you inhabited. He felt himself begin to move and change as the imaginary years reversed themselves in an imaginary land.

It was to be an even trade, history for history, culture for culture. With the wonders of modern technology, most extractions are painless. But not all ...

New York Free City was one of those aberrations that still abounded in the world; a remnant, a holdover from the days before the Insurrection. Over the span of a single generation, as the datanets grew in complexity, most of the world formed into the systems of semi-independent enclaves that now stood for nations and communities. In a sense, the city was one of these, but in some very important way it was different. New York was all that remained of the bright dream that had once been America. People spoke of crime and terror when the subject of the free cities came up, but these were just unavoidable by-products of the reality that they espoused. Paris, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Calcutta and San Francisco. They all had that indefinable Something. Freedom? The willingness of their inhabitants to do and be, whatever the cost? New York was Earth's premier city. Its population seemed to hold, of its own accord, at a constant twenty-seven million.

Because of the strict and official limits that the enclaves placed on themselves, what passed in these days for a world government grew out of the free cities, where the laws were light. It was a powerful irony. The rigid dictatorship of the Contract Police had its headquarters in the chaotic whirl of happy Paris. All the manifold threads of the world's data system had their ultimate source in the Metro Design—Comnet, a function of New York Free City. The maddened souls who could not live within the confines of a normal society came there to be free, and so became a fruitful force in the world that they despised.

Mankind was haunted by ghosts of its own making.

Brendan Sealock stood alone on the flat, black, shiny, false ebony floor of Grand Central Station, surrounded by a human horde. Eighteen and alone and freshly run from the iron-thumb benevolence of Deseret. His little collection of emergency luggage was piled about his feet, valises containing mostly notebooks, and he was incredibly tired. "Oh, God . . ." Misery. "What am I going to do?" It was said aloud and nobody turned to look. His eyes were grainy andblurred from days and nights spent awake and all of his awareness seemed to be concentrated in the tight band of an almost headache about his temples and forehead. He crushed his hands into his hair and stared up at the starry sky embossed on the inside of the domed ceiling. Why not? "Fuck the world!" he screamed, his voice pitched high.

"Hear, hear."

It was a quiet voice with a soft rasp, and Brendan turned to stare at a short, blond, unkempt young man clad in a burlap-looking friar's cassock, complete with a hairy rope belt. "Got any spare change?" What the fuck was this now? "No."

"Too bad." He pulled a flat bottle from his robe and uncorked it. "Drink?"

"Thanks." He accepted the bottle, took a quick swallow, gagged at the oily taste of cheap chemistry, and handed it back. When he could speak, his voice too had a soft rasp. "Hi. I'm Brendan Sealock."

"Ram that shit! Only homos use names." The man spun and strode off. Brendan shrugged, picked up his luggage, and began to walk in the same general direction. The path that they followed was a semitortuous one, a fly's wall-crawl through one of New York's older sections, yet away from the museum piece that was central Manhattan. Successions of steel/plastic and bricks with crumbly mortar flashed in dazzling array across hazed eyes and led to a dark alleyway in an ancient area that sported tall, ruinous buildings open to a blue-gray drizzling sky. There was a brightly lit, partially maintained building here, with a plasma sign stating YMCA, beneath which someone had erected an ornate wooden plaque renaming itthe french embassy.

The place had fine, rosy curtains in its windows and looked warm and inviting, but Sealock didn't go in. He followed his single volitional contact across the street to a dark, dilapidated structure that had a luridly painted black and orange marquee above the door:aloysius' cream dream crotch palace. The doorway itself had been done up in spray paint as a stylized representation of a vulva. The doormat said,

"Welcome, Zeus."

It wasn't totally dark inside, just lit by a variety of low-wattage colored light bulbs. The hallway itself had nothing, but the doors of most of the rooms were open, in some cases missing entirely, and little washes of blue, green, red, and orange spilled out, making a dull mauve ambient light.

"Hiya, Megalops! Who's your buddy?" There was a bearded fat man seated on stairs that rose into the darkness.

The cassock-clad man brushed past him. "Fuck'um," he muttered, making a quick masturbatory gesture with his hand. The fat man pinched at his asscheek in response, but the other retreated wordlessly and was gone.

The fat man grinned. "Horace," he said, holding out his hand. Brendan said, "Ah . . . Megalops there says only homos use names."

"Megalops is an asshole. He just doesn't like being a homo."

"Sealock." Brendan shook the proffered hand.

The man nodded and answered with a heavily agglutinated "Pleastameecha." Brendan swayed slowly, his head describing an imitation Draysonian cycle. He realized that he was either feeling faint or on the verge of falling asleep. "How do I go about getting a room here?" Horace looked bemused. "I dunno." He took out a little black cigar and lit it with a brightly glowing sparkstick. It smelled like cabbage farts and Sealock's sway grew in amplitude. "Hey, kid, don't fall down here. You're too big for me to lug out of the way."

"How . . ."

"Just go up the stairs until you find an empty room. Lie down on the bed. No one'll care." The haze growing to a palpable miasma, Brendan slowly trudged upward, lost in himself, his feet feeling unaccountably massive. On one landing he came upon a young woman clad in a heavy sweat shirt and nothing else. On seeing him, she winked. He nodded politely and went on. Somehow, he found that empty room and fell heavily, face down across the bed, unable to draw in his feet. The light bulb in the lamp was fuchsia, in perfect tune with the bilious dizziness that assailed him. His last conscious thought was, What the hell is this place?

When he awoke in the morning he hadn't moved and he mill felt tired. His eyes were sore and the muscles of his neck ached. His legs hurt. . . . Good God, my feet! He tried to hook one toe against the opposing heel and push off a boot but lacked the strength. His whole body felt swollen. There was a warm weight against one side and a lighter pressure against his back.

He laboriously turned his head and looked. The hallway girl. She was curled up against him, one arm thrown over his back, and her crotch was hooked over his hip. His belt was wet and at first he thought she'd pissed on him, but there wasn't enough dampness for that. When he stirred, she awoke and looked up at his face through puffy eyelids. "This is my room," she said. Her voice was soft and had that same rasp that seemed to afflict everyone here.

"Sorry."

She smiled. " 'sOK." She helped him as he rolled laboriously over onto his back. "How you feelin'?" She sat up and swung astride him, sitting on his stomach. He couldn't help but stare down at her damp, matted brown pubic hair.

"Don't know. Hungry, I guess."

She grinned and, swarming up his chest, thrust her groin against his face. "Help yourself!" Brendan's stomach heaved.

She pulled back a little and said, "What'sa matter?" Aggrieved tones. "C'mon. I don't smell that bad!" Brendan shook his head slowly. "I don't feel good." He could hardly move his arms. She got off his chest and squatted beside him, inadvertently sitting on his hand.

"OK. I got a pizza someplace. You want some of that?"

Brendan tried to answer, but a black thunderbolt struck at him out of nowhere and he went back to sleep.

When he awoke again, it was night; at least, it was dark outside. The girl was sitting at a little table on the far side of the room. A plasma screen was leaning against the wall and she had an ancient Dvorak keyboard CPU opened in front of her. She had a small electron beam torch in one hand, sparkling bright blue as she made connections. She still didn't have any pants on. This time he managed to kick his boots off. They thumped on the floor.

She looked up and, seeing that he was awake, stood up and walked over. "Feelin' better?" He nodded. "I guess so."

"Good!" She sat astride his chest again and her hair, now dry and crisp, tickled his nose. Oh, well ... it couldn't taste any worse than the inside of his mouth. He extended his tongue, but her hip muscles did most of the work.

When she was done, she slid down on him, lying atop his body. She kissed him, licked his face, hugged him. She undid his belt and helped him struggle out of his clothes. When he was naked, she stared. "Wow! You gotta lotta muscles, don'cha?" A sniff. "Haven't had a bath lately, either."

"Sorry." Her speech was confusing him, with its wild oscillations between analytical and synthetic grammars. Some English-speakers did that: education stretched thinly over the outreach of original-sin poverty.

" 'sOK. Enough dirt 'n' the bacteria die." She was playing with his penis, feeling it stiffen slowly and engorge. "Big cock, too." She slid farther down and licked him. His penis finished its progress to a full erection. She sucked him then and, big or not, she managed. The orgasm made him tired again and he lay quiescently, watching her.

She sat on his ridged stomach and grinned. "My name's Cara Mia." She held out her hand. He shook it. "Brendan Sealock. How do you do?"

"Pretty damn good!" She hopped to the floor, then sat on the edge of the bed. He stood up and stretched, jumped when she goosed him. He smiled. "What's all that?" He pointed to the mess of antique electronics on the table.

"Homework. I'm a freshman CS major at NYU. I wanna work on Comnet someday." He nodded slowly. So, he thought, they're making her start at the beginning and work her way up. That way she understands it. I wonder what they'd do with me? "I'm a bum."

"Same thing."

In the morning they arose together and went to have breakfast at a little outdoor cafe down on the corner. The bright sun of late spring was shining down on them.

After breakfast she took him around. At the Statue Stump, they got him registered as a landed immigrant. Brendan pointed to the fee schedule posted on the wall, but the fat, grandmotherly type behind the counter only laughed. "Don't let it throw ya, kid. We'll send a bill to Deseret." He could imagine his parents' expression when they got it, but they'd pay. The Contract Police had rules about the movement of people between enclaves.

He followed her to NYU that day. He noticed that most of the students liked to dress up in rather idiosyncratic costumes. He went to the registrar's office and found, to his surprise, that he could take classes for free. "We'll send a bill to someone," they said.

They gave him a battery of tests and seemed impressed. "Maybe we won't send a bill. Deseret's loss is our gain," they said. "Stay forever if you like." It went on and on. In time he made some adjustments and failed to make others. He enjoyed sleeping in Cara's bed, but then, she'd fuck anyone, anywhere. Sometimes he'd awake in the middle of the night to find her with someone else, right there beside him. Sometimes he grew angry. Sometimes he watched. Sometimes he joined in. He had sex with a man for the first time in her bed. Sometimes he went out alone at night. Finally he found himself sitting on a man's chest in a dark alleyway. The man had attacked him and had been beaten. He brought his heavy fist high and drove it down with all his might. It hurt his hand. The man hadn't died, but he'd needed extensive plastic surgery after that.

In a cafeteria argument with a philosophy major at NYU he was referred to as a soulless monster. He didn't know why, and felt hurt. Sometimes the feeling of directionlessness and growing insanity almost overwhelmed him.

He kept on moving, of his own accord, dancing to an internal rhythm of increasingly feverish proportions. He began to realize that he liked beating people up, hurting them as much as possible, almost as much as he liked fucking women. He thought of combining the two but didn't. Someone said he'd fuck anything that couldn't outrun him. He laughed at that. Someone else said he'd step on bugs if they could scream loud enough. He beat that person up.

Outside of his own pillaged memory, Sealock could feel himself being changed as the swift time reversal being wrought by Centrum progressed. He knew, intellectually, that it was all a result of software synchronization, but the imagery forced on him came with an odd emotional jolt. He changed and, changing, cried out with a commingling of wonder and fear. Head, arms, legs, torso. Gone. Like that. It was a mechanical-seeming thing, and swift. A succession of ticks, the beating of a clock, and Sealock the man was gone. Another such succession and Sealock the—what— thing was there in his place. Cephalosome and tail-sheath. Eight machinelike arms with two-fingered hands; eight matching anchorelles for pseudoautotrophic feeding. Retractile anophagomotor apparatus, for eating, eliminating, and propulsion. Here. Like this.

He remembered. We called ourselves a small, unbroken bubble of pheromonic oil. The message it contained meant, "That which has accepted a seed."

The being he had become had no discernible sensory apparatuses—instead, it had a hypertrophied sense of "touch," a subtle response to pressure waves and chemical changes in the surrounding methane. This, combined with a data-processing kinesthetic sense, was all it needed. The externally generated image-form which now occupied him did not come with very much in the way of memory, notyet, but he knew it would arrive, one piece at a time, as he developed the necessary complexity.

Stop time.

The world-lines unreversed and he was still Brendan Sea-lock, yet still changed. The Seedees were all around him now; he could sense them far away. Some flew through the sea, propelled on their jets like hard squid. Others clambered about the still ways on stalky legs. Still more were swept along by the standing waves of the great, endless transport matrix. They went about their tasks, filling the World Ship in uncounted trillions. Now, in the everlasting memory of Centrum, Mother Ocean lived. Sealock blew himself steadily along, knowing he must go to the central sphere, and looked at the pressure waves that brought him a bright window on this new reality. The matrix machine awaited him and still he saw.

When the messenger cell met him, he was hanging in delighted awe below a self-orienting photovoltaic generator, which would turn to suck up the light of passing suns, hanging in happy contemplation of its crystalline complexity. It was Machine, in its most quintessential form. He boarded the messenger cell. His anchorelles plugged in, there was a current flow, then he soared singing above the world.

At NYU . . .

Brendan Sealock studied. A man, growing up, may be accused of all sorts of infelicities. The various rites of passage that most societies induce are intended to demonstrate to the adult-candidate that a great change of estate is coming over him. They say, "You may now do whatever you please. You must now be prepared to suffer the consequences of your own actions." He was generally regarded as mean, petty, and vicious, with a mind centered on the concept of self. They all thought him dangerous and deranged, a

"thug." A few people even looked on him as a little bit stupid, but no one ever called him lazy. He worked. Though the colleges of the twenty-first century had given up the folly of a "liberal" education, recognizing itas an impediment to the technologists and a detriment to the artists, they insisted that a student learn a great deal about his own specialty. Gone were the days when a student could limp along learning "just enough." During the periodic examinations, if you couldn't handle any aspect of a task, you were sent back to study until you could.

Though the tests he had taken revealed a phenomenal raw potential and a fair amount of preparation, the Deseret educational system being nothing if not effective, Brendan had to start at a lower level than he'd expected. It angered him, at first, but he soon came to see the sense behind it. They made him study physics in a developmental-analytical fashion and gave him a quick grounding in historical electronics, then plunged into the twinned evolutions of Quantum Transformational Dynamics and Comnet theory. They said, "These are the things that you have to learn in order to earn our certification. If you want to learn anything else while you're here, fine. It's up to you. If you don't, well, most prospective employers don't care."

In the classroom . . .

The professor said, "We used to start with the basics, but we don't anymore. If you're interested, it's in the library. If you've studied all the various calculi, you're all set; if you haven't, don't worry. Boab analysis rests on a somewhat different underpinning from the rest of math. In the trade, we like to call it asshole calculus." He grinned as he drew them into the Tradition. "There are no instruments to guide you through this jungle, boys and girls. It's strictly seat-of-the-pants navigation." Cara giggled and the professor's grin widened. "Whatever," he said. "Anyway, put on your circlets." The poster-cluttered wall behind him vanished, displaced by a smooth, blackboard-like image. "It goes like this: Newton and Einstein went wrong in some very curious ways. Mr. Boab finally got it figured out about thirty-five years ago. The unified force field still exists—it just has nothing to act upon, so it's a little hard to work with. . . ."He waved a hand at the wall and fiery letters began to appear. "There're eleven variables and forty-one physical constants here. I know you all know how to solve for individual unknowns. That won't do usany good, unfortunately. I will now show you how to arrive at a simultaneous solution for the Blanchard-Higgins Inequality. It's called the Desrosiers Transform and is considered the root of QTD." The letters began to dance. . . .

In the cafeteria . . .

Brendan Sealock was usually engaged in the process of becoming irritated. The engineering and science students liked to gobble their food and rush back to the land of ideas and experiments. Everyone else liked to argue and talk endlessly. Since they'd installed an inductab transducer, the music blared out loud. Right now, it was that popular new artist, what's-his-name . . . Cornwell, that was it. His first big release: Reflection Counterpoint. Sealock didn't much care for what seemed to him like random blatts of very loud noise.

"Hey, Comnet-man!" He shared a table with a raucous bunch of metaphysical philosophy students. He knew some of them were already well known in their field, authors of hefty, Heidegger-like tomes full of complex and circular reality analyses.

"Fuck off, Basket-weaver."

"Come on, Sealock. We're trying to get up a good paragraph on the Ding an Sick controversy for Sykes. You gotta know something about that. . . ."

He sighed. Here we go again. He wrote a simplified version of the Tornberg Inequality on the tabletop.

"Look here: what you want is the First Product Transform. Sikt Grote got this worked out almost eighty years ago. It's pre-Boab!"

The philosophers groaned in unison. "Shit. Even if we knew what you were talking about, we couldn't use it. Sykes won't accept that crap in a paper. Says it's unethical." Sealock was baffled. "How can you talk about something you don't understand?" They stared at him, puzzled, and the background music roared on.

Senman-Reischar, easy to know; You can live in Scapa Flow! Scapa Flow the place to be; You can watch it on the 3V! On 3V it's easy to see;

Skies are blue for me and thee! Thee and Comnet, how I will grow; Senman-Reischar, Scapa Flow go!

As Sealock walked out of the cafeteria, headed for his Trivesigesimal Sequency Analysis tutorial, the opening strains from the theme of the latest 'net epic, "Scapa Flow Go," were echoing in the room behind him. Though many people sneered at the epics, calling them "lightheaded trash," he rather liked them. Superficially escapist, the interactions of the characters were interesting to follow. I'll have to tap that when I get the time, he thought, and walked on.

In the street . . .

Brendan Sealock walked the dangerous places. In the foyer of NYU's QTD Lab Complex there was an enormously appealing poster, a piece of artwork more than a century old. A hairy fat man with a spiked club. Atavistic background. Distorted biblical quote. I will fear no evil because evil fears me. Sometimes he would go to stare at it and grin. He liked the thought. He wasn't the only one. Cass Mitchell, the lab's incredibly ancient founder, something like a hundred and thirty years old, also came to look at it. Once, the wizened creature looked up at him and winked. "Looks just like my dad!" he cackled. Another time the old man, who was kept alive only by the prostheses that his wealth could afford, had muttered, "Go ahead, bitch! Make my bed!" As he turned away, Sealock supposed that, if he lived long enough, brain rot would get him in the end as well.

But I won't be his age for a hundred and ten years, he thought. What would biotech be like then?

Most people don't live that long anyway. The average age of death from systemic failure was around ninety. Maybe I'll be run over by an RT-mod next Tuesday. . . .

He walked the dark roads, stood beneath the glittery lights of the entertainment shells. It was in vogue for the hookers to go naked these days. Some of them wore body paint, or tattoos, and many shaved their pubic hair into artistic patterns, or off entirely. That had an appealing look to it. You could see what you were getting into.

He stood and watched. They turned their tricks on the street and it made a show that amused him. Nearby, a hairless woman stood bent over, holding her ankles while a customer fulfilled his needs in her. The fee was already in her tote bag, representing the last days of the ancient money economy. Sealock felt himself growing horny and walked on.

At home . . .

Brendan Sealock lived quietly. He sat at the table and worked on his problems with the Duodecimal Work-Frame Inequalities. They had only been solved five years ago and were hard to understand. In the bed, Cara Mia entertained a matched set of burly prizefighters. They were larger men than Sealock, but in much poorer condition. He paused to watch them humping away, and speculated. . . .

Projections. Projections. Tensors and maximalizations . Optimal courses and winding rivers of thought. As Sealock gave up his life in chunks and great bites, reliving it as it left him, Centrum replaced the pieces from its own modulus of experience. Similar machines can be exchanged one segment at a time until they are interchanged, without ever having been moved. Becoming. Becoming. Seedee life flowed into him as a steady stream of thick, rich oil.

Seven Red Anchorelles—7red, he was called—worked at a desynthesizer unit deep in the folds of the Mother Ship sea. He was happy in his tasks, secure in the knowledge that he too contributed to the advancement of the Grand Design, as much as anyone under the everlasting light of the Starseeder Centrum. Living his life against the backdrop of the Wavy Matrix Machine, he worked and loved and his soul evolved in a double-spiral pattern, ever outward and upward. Epicycles came and went, aglow. All along the Wavy Matrix were the great tadpole-shaped units that made the ship live. Synthesizers, the storehouses and factories that made raw materials into whatever was needed. Polyphase reactors that took current from the immense photovoltaic generators and stored it chemically, making raw materials and power as needed. Desynthesizers which took unwanted goods and returned them to a storable raw state. Interphagic units, for the storage of the world's raw substance. Here and there, like great silver balloons, were enormous vacuoles that contained a variety of gas-dependent processes. They pulsed like hearts.

Somewhere, in lands 7red had never had occasion to experience, along the great Axis, lay the flight and governing machinery. The gyroscopic control system; at the south pole, the Detection Mast and Lander Bay; at the north pole, the hot immensity of the photon drive.

Normally, the ship coasted on its course, a dirigible planetoid wafting silently along among the stars, but when a correction needed to be made a great spear of hard, coherent radiation would lance out, stabbing deep into the bright clouds of the dawning night. The universe was a billion years old now and aging rapidly. Though quasars abounded, it was black between the galaxies. 7red thought about it, pheromonic messages circulating through his infrastructure, mixing to make new ideas. The universe was a pocket, trapped far below the bubble boundary of its single-monopole domain. The rules said that there had to be other such spaces, in other such domains, probably unreachable. And beyond the eka -event horizon of the many domains? The unimaginable hot density of what one far-future daughter sentience would come to call deSitter Space. 7red could picture it in his chemicals, but the picture was a distorted one, stepped down to match his capacities, tiny circles spread through eleven dimensions reduced to the dimensionless points of a trefoil-concept mathematics. Only Centrum, last of the Starseeder forefathers, could think of it in terms of the real space-time that surrounded them. For the time being, the Creation was less than its Creator. Work ended because the task was completed and 7red, restless component in an unresting ecosystem, flew off to the Mating Nest, still thinking his happy thoughts. 7red loved to think, as they all did. He knew his history, but that was for Centrum alone to tell the Time Traveler. In the interval of flight, he expanded his concept of space.

It proceeded from the cosmic infinitesimal, vacuum boilersswelling out of nowhere to provide the vacuoles that held the packets of radical characters making up the pseudoparticles of reality, to the universal infinity, the ever receding wave front of the monopole domain, which pushed the unthinkable end point ahead of the uncrossable horizon. It was a frustrating concept, yet likable. Satisfying. He reached the Mating Nest and entered its latticework. Cooloil awaited him, her tasks completed also. They were not sexually differentiated, these Seedees, for their evolution had not included that complexity, yet the Time Traveler imposed his own regimen of still persisting ideas. 7red loved Cooloil; she stilled his raging mind, calmed his conceptualizations. Cooloil loved 7red; he stoked the banked fires of her soul, set her pheromones to singing. They made a handsome dyad, an island of simple beauty in a sea of more complex arrangements. Their song of ideal counterpoint was appreciated and envied by the vaster audience without.

They coupled.

Anophagomotor apparatuses met, anchorelles fused, arms interlocked. Their valves opened to each other in closely docked proximity and their juices flowed. The pheromonic oils, the vehicles of thought and communication, mixed and, for a while, 7red and Cooloil were one being. The Time Traveler felt their pleasure as his own and marveled at its simplicity. There was no complex machinery, no invasiveness of Downlink Rapport here. There was no remaining vestige of separateness, no identity. Nothing in his former life compared with it. It was the ideal to which all other beings of the later time must aspire in vain. He wondered at his own remaining isolation and felt despair. It was not possible for him, not in the hard-wired circuitry of a solid-state mind. Ideas came whirling. The winds of perhaps blew across his delimited consciousness. He speculated. . . .

Brendan Sealock had come to Buckminster's Gymnasium on a whim. The sign outside had said, sparring partners, and noted that the payoff was in hooker tokens, the only hard currency that still circulated in New York Free City. You didn't have to spend them on whores. People traded themback and forth, exchanged them for favors, bought unique personal mementos with them. There was a famous artist down on the Deuce who sold his canvases for them. Rumor had it that he could get laid a million times, whenever he wanted. They were little three-centimeter silver-plastic coins, the reverse embossed with the legendone fuque, the obverse bearing a tableau of two mating pigs. The pigs were smiling. When he came in, the handlers sized him up, weighed him, and smiled grimly. The fat black man turned to the fat white man and said, "One hundred eight kilogram, Bobo!" The other snickered and his masses of doughy flesh jiggled beneath a filthy sweatshirt. "Right, Mustafa. Killer Hunkpapa's meat she be." He turned to Sealock. "Pay is one fuque per minute you last with him." He winked. "You gonna get all fuqued up in no time, kid!"

They stripped him, taped his hands, stuck on gloves and shorts, and put him in the ring. The spectators, mostly dirty men and overdressed slinkers, were giggling and pointing. Killer Hunkpapa was waiting. He was a large, powerfully muscled man of indeterminate race. He had black hair, black eyes, and light brown skin. There were scars on his face and he was smiling casually, calmly.

"You ever do this before, kid?" He had what sounded like a German accent. Sealock shook his head. He was feeling nothing now, not even anticipation. The world seemed to possess that same crystalline clarity that it had when he was immersed in the dreadful complexity of Boab Analysis. He felt himself relax and his senses came to a point.

The boxer grinned. "I'll try not to mess you up too bad. Give me a good workout, I'll let you go home with a pocket full of fuques. Maybe you'll come back."

The bell clanked on the edge of his awareness and Sealock lifted his hands. The boxer's glove snapped in out of nowhere and tapped him on the face. There was a terrible lance of pain, proceeding from his sinuses to his occiput, and he staggered back, amazed.

Another punch floated his way and he bent forward at thewaist, letting the arm go over his back. He stood up and threw a right at the boxer's face. It missed and landed with a squishy thud on one muscle-ridged shoulder.

The boxer staggered a little and his grin broadened. "Hey! I like that! This pussy has a real punch!" He hit Sealock in the face three more times, making him bleed.

Another long floater came and he ducked under it, learning. This time he put his fist out, then drove his weight at an exposed stomach. The boxer said, "UF!" and sat down abruptly. Sealock stood upright, flat-footed, and wobbled Wearily, feeling dizzy and sick.

The boxer bounded to his feet, stared for a moment at Sealock, then wheezed, "Call time!"

"But, Killer . . ."

"Call time, asshole! Don't you see what we've got here?" The bell clanked. The boxer helped Sealock over to a corner stool and sat him down. "You OK?" Brendan nodded.

"Good. You come back tomorrow and I'll show you what to do." He turned away. "Clean him up, Mustafa. Give him a dozen fuques for his time."

As he staggered slowly to the door of the gym, several slinkers followed him, touching him gently.

That evening, after a long, relaxing stay in a steam-hazy sauna had restored him to some semblance of normality, Sealock went out to walk the streets of the city, a few fuques clicking together in his pocket. The fat orange ball of a late summer sun wrote long shadows among the ancient buildings and the warm air was a feather touch, brushing across his skin. Very far away, he could see the great, featureless towers of the modern city leaning away from him into the sky. Somewhere, very vaguely, he thought about the curvature of the Earth and was startled. They were that tall. He wore only a pair of white shorts and an occasional breeze stirred the hair on his chest and legs like some faint, unheeded emotion.

He found one of the little parks that the hookers frequented and stood relaxed, his back pressing into the roughbark of a gnarled, gray tree. Its leaves were the intense olive-green of late summer. Unable to summon any coherent thought, he stood and watched.

It was early for the whores. Tradition made them denizens of the night, but they came out before sunset, perhaps to avoid any unfortunate mythological comparisons. They chatted with each other and ate little snacks. Some were touching up their body paint, and from time to time they would glance over at the staring, nearly motionless figure of Sealock.

A woman lay on the grass not far from where he stood. She had long, braided hair, pale blond, with a matching pubic thatch and large, dark blue eyes. She was lean, without being too thin, and her body was adorned with perhaps a hundred tiny butterfly decals. She did stretching exercises, alternately arching her back and then bringing her legs up until her knees touched her shoulders. Finally, apparently satisfied, she took a long applicator from her tote bag and squirted a small amount of some amber-colored jelly into her vagina. Lubricant? Disinfectant? It didn't matter, and he realized that he'd enjoyed watching her insert the skinny tube into herself. As she put it away, she smiled at him.

Brendan knew he liked watching women masturbate and he supposed that was at the root of his current pleasure. He found a certain interest in watching them at their daily ablutions as well, washing themselves, douching, even going to the bathroom. He'd never taken much time analyzing the things that he liked, perhaps fearing that would diminish his sense of the reality it brought. He hated the feeling of remoteness that persistently engulfed his life.

As dusk fell and the streetlights came on, he found himself staring at a new addition to the group. She was tall, nearly as tall as he, and clean shaven all over. Though she bore no adornment, her tan skin had been lightly oiled, so that it shone, throwing off highlights in the dim ambient glow. Her eyes had the slight epicanthic folds of a Eurasian. She had high cheekbones, a smooth skull, and her ears were small and symmetrical. She had a long neck and was naturally thin, without being emaciated. Her stomach, beneath small, domed breasts, was flat and her hips were narrow, barelyflaring out from her waist. He could see the delicate tracery of her pelvic bones shifting slightly beneath her skin as she walked. Her legs were long and muscular. Her groin was like three soft fingers, parallel at the juncture of her thighs. She came to stand before him and he could see that her nipples were pale and pink. She smiled at him. Very slowly, she lifted one long leg until her heel was resting on his left shoulder. He stared down the length of it into the shadows of her vulva. The position held her open and he could see a little way inside. He could feel his penis slowly begin to rise.

Reaching into his pocket, he produced the little coin and held it out to her. She took it and said,

"Thank you." Her voice was soft and throaty.

Taking down her leg, she turned away as he removed his scant clothing. She bent over before him and he stepped forward into the lethe of her body.

7red had another task. The message had been transmitted to him from Centrum, a globe of oil that swept up along the Wavy Matrix and leaped across to him while he was still engrossed in his conjunction with Cooloil. It burst upon his shell and soaked into the receptor tissues of his integument. With a pang of regret, their circulations closed off from each other and they separated, become two beings once again. There was still a commingling of inner substance, but the differences would accumulate now, as their natural selves were reasserted, a part of the pheromonic oil generating organs in their bodies. 7red touched Cooloil's tail-sheath once, a parting gesture, and flew away.

The content of the globule had been a complex one. Outside, it had said, and all the appropriate technicians were being called to action. The lander was being prepared for a voyage of its own. A Messenger came for him as he flew and whisked him away toward the south pole. 7red felt a small surge of growing excitement disturb the mating-tranquilized flow of his idea circulation. He had never been called upon to do this particular task before, but he was the right sort of being for the job. Centrum was a caring sort of overlord and shared theassignments around as fairly as it could. Now, his turn to go Outside had come at last!

The Messenger let him off at the Lander Bay nexus, where perhaps a hundred thousand Seedees of various types were milling about in a random-seeming horde, preparing for the job ahead. A semisentient exterior work vacuole approached him and halted. 7reAn? it queried with a primitive, highly simplified jet of oil. He assented and commanded it to proceed.

The leathery-skinned golden sphere drew closer and then carefully engulfed him. He sank into a pouch of its outer membrane, which then detached itself with an interiorward thrust. The inner skin dissolved, freeing him to his task within the CH4-filled confines of his device. Here, within the limits of a space hardly larger than himself, 7red could practice the most difficult and rewarding task that a technician might face: the direct control of a construct with his own freed mind. The interior of the vacuole was lined with a sheath of receptor material. 7red took a figurative grasp on himself and, opening his valves, released the entire contents of his pheromonic circulation.

His mind pulsed outward and he became the vacuole. Its senses were his. Its capabilities were his. He became immensely tougher and stronger, able to withstand the rigors of total vacuum and near-absolute zero, able to resist the hard radiation of a nearby star that was doubtless just recently emerged from a wild T-Tauri youth.

He swept over to an "airlock" and passed through its membranes to the interior of the Lander Bay. The huge compartment had already been evacuated and the outer door was ajar. 7red went to the edge and looked out with his new amplifications. Without the vacuole he would have been insensitive to the grandeur, dead, in fact, but now he could see the horrid wash of electromagnetic radiation. There was a terrible bright star only a few light-minutes away, a high K or low G, he thought, and Mother Ship hung in the skies above a dense silicate world. The place was disturbingly hot and glowed on its own in the far infrared. He understood it well. It was a death place. A whole system bornfrom the ashes of a recent supernova. This sort of a place meant the handling of dangerous hydroxyl-cloud materials, and Seedees would soon die, perhaps already had. He was glad he didn't have to do that job. His own task was far simpler. With a flotilla of other vacuoles, he would get one of the radioactive aluminum fuel cells from its external storage bin and charge up the electrical power pods of the lander. A relatively simple thing, but important and dangerous nonetheless. He and his comrades went about it steadfastly and steadily as they whirled round and round above the tiny, almost atmosphereless world below. They were careful, none of them got killed, and at last they were finished. All was ready. They stayed to watch.

The triangular, finned shape of the lander banged out of its hold and drifted a short distance out. Its LiH -fueled engines flared luridly and it began to shrink away, descending. It would skim into the thin, hot gases of this newborn planet and return, having discharged its cargo of microminiaturized Composites, surrogates of the Mother Ship and Centrum itself. It would return, and the Grand Design would be advanced another tiny notch.

7red's oil writhed in ecstasy.

The drain and fill of emotion-laden interiors came quickly now, a liquid kaleidoscope of scenes and impressions first from one life and then the other. Though feeling himself ever more the nameless Time Traveler, he was alternately burdened by flaring ego identities, swirling through the experiences of Sealock and 7red like a molecule of water in a red-raging sea. The concatenation of personalities struck him like a song sung in rounds, a horde of bells being rung through their changes. He saw Sealock in swift progression, the man growing quickly older as he expanded into his electronic world, coming to the fateful time when he had mastered all that was Comnet and joined the Design Board, intent on expanding the horizons in the wires beyond what it had been. The man grew quickly wiser as he fought in the ring, aiming arrowlike at that series of matches in Montevideo . . . the defeat by the Cuban, the silver medal, the meeting with Ariane Methol. Love. Another concatenation, something grafted onto his soul like an agonized parasite, destroying the equilibriums so carefully built up, showing him the falsehoods that padded his feelings, tearing them down to oozing red flesh, leaving him exposed. It was pain, once again. Islands have beaches where they are rubbed raw by the sea. In a similar fashion, 7red moved upward, propelled by capacities unsought into the arena of his destruction. His too was a society of individuals. Though they mixed and meshed as they would, still the very reality of their separate physical bodies kept them apart. He rose to ever greater mastery of the devices and thought modes that made up his world, growing ever closer to the greatness of Centrum and ever farther from the simple things and persons that he loved. Alone in his hard shell 7red worked, and he coupled with Cooloil, then with other beings, greater beings who were more on a level with his increased station in life. His inner essences boiled at a fever pitch with the wonder of it all, and gradually he began to mourn his loss.

Two scenes played in swift counterpoint:

At Ariane's behest, Sealock had moved to Montevideo, living with his woman in Tupamaro Arcology, linked to the now beloved, lost New York only by the wires that otherwise dominated his life. I didn't really need their physical presence, he told himself often, why do I miss it so much? They lay in bed together and made love often.

Brendan lay on the cool, slightly damp sheets of a bed and rubbed his hand slowly across the velvet textures of Ariane's sleeping back, staring hard into the mute darkness. Why has it come to this? he wondered. He put his face against her skin. Why am I here? He stuck out his tongue and tasted her flesh. She sighed and stirred slightly but did not awaken. Why do I lack the strength to run away, go back where I had at least the illusion of happiness? He ran his hand down across her buttocks, then into the crevice between them, down past her anus until he came to her vagina. He felt of its wetness, an albumin-like stickiness that was largely a product of his ownsecretions. She awoke and rolled over, and they made love again. murmuring softly to each other in the darkness.

In that time he forgot to think and wonder, but illusions, once shattered, can never be reformed. And Seven Red Anchorelles rose to the scene of his own final nightmare. Having mastered all else within the inflated boundaries of the great Mother Ocean, he now floated deep within a special inner sea, a pocket far down in the thought folds of Centrum itself. The being, the Overmind, spoke to him in the voice of his people one last time, and he understood. He had achieved Unity. The chemicals struck and he felt a moment of terrible despair, then his shell dissolved, his oils escaped, and he was into oneness with the Overmind. He was gone.

The Time Traveler awoke to himself in a blaze of ecstasy and horror. Centrum penetrated the flowing nebula of this soul with tendrils of awareness and said, I greet you, Brendan Sealock. Be welcome.

It began . . .

Before the dawn of time, the infinite universe was a hard, ringing void. There was nothing, but that nothing had limitless potential energy. It might have remained, this empty potential that stood for God, but nothingness is an unnatural state. It persisted, timeless in the absence of a referent, waiting for the random number that would act as a trigger. The false vacuum stood poised, hard, hot, infinitely denser than the nuclei it would spawn, and the clock of quantum fluctuations ticked away. The slow rollover came. . . . Everything flashed into being. The monopole domains exploded outward, sucking the cosmic-event horizon away into the infinite reaches of now extant space. The vacuum boiled and particles were born. Physical processes toppled down the quick stairway of the flux-gate thresholds and the forces separated, one, then four. Temperature fell, hesitated, and fell again, carrying along density and radius in its wake. The world came into being and evolved.

Swirling clouds of bright matter, white light, cooling, became only an afterecho of cold radiation in mere seconds. Matter and energy now separate, the clouds spun and condensed, becoming ragged and lumpy as they aged, a pudding improperly stirred, a universe made by a lazy chef. Quasars were everywhere then, bright, hot globules of pulsating light, galaxies in birth and exploding. Cooling goes on, hot huge stars quick and brief in their young life, and exploding, seeding the surround as they died. It was too early yet. . . .

And yet the odds had to be broken, as the symmetry was broken. A cluster supernovae went critical in a chain reaction and scattered dense matter through their neighborhood, yet it was in a region far from the hot cores all about. New stars formed, smaller, longer-lived stars that had planets of a small, dense sort. The universe was less than a billion years old.

We evolved then, said Centrum, and fast. As always, the precursors of life came into being among the great, rich hydroxyl clouds. Amino acids rained down out of interstellar space upon those hot silicate worlds and, because of it, life evolved. So far as is known we were the first. Because of the odds, we were, at that time, the only.

The radiation density was higher then, and evolution went at an accelerated pace, making life in seas that nearly boiled. It crawled up onto the land and saw and fought and grew. The eras were short then, and intelligence looked out at the stars for the first time in newborn amazement. The lights in the sky attracted them, bright baubles, lures before a fish, and they flew outward into space. We searched, but they were not there.

We? They? Sealock's persisting sense of self forced a question into the flood. We.The ones who made me in their own image. Star-seeders. We searched, but there was no other life. We were alone. Worse still, we could find no other worlds like our own. We were a fluke. Theywere not there. The others whom we expected. There were other worlds, yes, great balls of warm gas, mostly hydrogen, stars too little to shine. Useless.

We cried out, enraged at our solitude, and the Grand Design was begun. Too long. Too long.

Images formed, imperfect and broken, for Centrum was ancient and damaged. They were images of beings not so terribly unlike men. Beings of flesh and bone walking beneath a starry sky, looking upward resentfully at the universe that had so disappointed them.

We knew it would take too long, longer than we could expect our species, even our own sun, to last. Generations of stars would have to live and die, worlds would have to form and evolve the way ours had, only slower, much slower. We would be gone, vanished for billions of years before the comrades that we sought could come into being. We became the Starseeders and set to work. We searched among the stars for ages and we found them. . . .

What?

Littleballs of gas. Spheres so small that much of their hydrogen leaked away, until only the trace elements remained. They were cold, these planets, and rare. Each one had to have a thick sea of the proper density upon it ... complex lipids dissolved in methane may be a form of life, you see. And we had special models at home to work from. . . .

It began ...

Tupamaro Arcology, like Montevideo, was quiet and raucous at all times. As the postindustrial world of the late twentieth century evolved, waves of technology cascaded out and down from the Euroamerican Transpacific matrix that gave it birth. The benefits and deadly dangers flowed outward in equal measure, changing the world's four quadrants on four levels across four generations. They quickly destroyed the basic nature of the matrix, first the Turing circuits, then the Insurrection fragmenting the lives of the people. What emerged demolished the economy and ideology of the Socialist Bloc. By the time the wave front got to the third world, it had leveled off, become a mere bootstrapping effect. The fourth world, the lands of absolute poverty and degradation,felt it only as a sudden famine, then they were all swept up into the New Order, made whole again.

It filtered downward. Suramerica Limited Federation was the Earth's largest old-style political entity, a weak corporate state in which the ex post facto enclaves were bound together by the rules and regulations meant for the various communication and data networks. Montevideo was still a city, but not a free city, not a New York. On its outskirts, Arcologia de Tupac Amaral was almost a city in its own right, something like an enclave writ small, a million people in a giant building, striving to be free and failing.

Ariane and Brendan sat together in their living room, working at separate tasks. He had a single tap plugged into his forebrain, reviewing some correspondence from MCD, cursing their inability to understand the latest batch of inequations he'd sent. They were stupid, he thought. Only the response from the Moon's Lewislab made any sense at all. At least they asked interesting questions. Someday, he knew, there would be a branch of mathematics called Sealock Decision Gate Masking, but it was a struggle.

Ariane had a circlet on. She was perusing the latest edition of her favorite electronic newsmagazine, looking over the various articles and wildly extravagant advertisements with quiet amusement. Suddenly she called out, "Hey! Look at this!"

Brendan sighed and shunted his awareness over, Neptune hung in the starry sky, huge and blotched turquoise above a field of dark, rubble-strewn ice. A pale haze hung on the horizon and there were domes below, twinkling with light and life. A tall, slender man clad in colorful robes smiled out at them.

"Come with me," he said. "Be free. Triton." Induction music filled the background, latest addition to a panoply of famous works. The name was John Cornwell; a TY-com outlet address followed.

"What the fuck was that all about?"

Ariane snuggled up against him, warm and soft. "It seems this guy has almost a billion ceus saved up from his royalties. He wants to take a colony out to Triton. I never thought of it before, but that sounds neat. Maybe we're all dying downhere on Old Earth. . . . Want to go?" She was grinning mischievously. Brendan felt a sudden freezing terror.

Continuities . . .

On the old world, the first world, perhaps the only world, a council met. The Starseeders called it the Grand Design Planning Forum. There were almost a hundred billion beings jamming this Solar System, among them millions of savants and philosophers. The thousand greatest of them were gathered here and the one called Over Three Hills spoke to the multitude.

OTH was a giant, tailed biped, massing well over a ton, with thick, leathery gray skin and a broad, muzzled face. Beneath a heavy brow ridge and crested skull his eyes were deep-sunk, glowing red orbs. He waved his tentacled hands for silence. "The first survey is now complete," he said. "We have now examined every star in the fourteen galaxies of our own little cluster. Among all those billions of systems we have found a few score of silicate worlds, all lifeless, all circling stars too hot for our purposes." A low rustle of dismay came from the assembled multitude. His head dipped slowly to one side. "Disappointing, I know, but all is not lost. Among the hydrogen masses we have found more than four thousand of the little methane worlds. That is enough. I propose that we proceed with the Alternate Plan. We'll never see it come. Even our descendants will not last so long, but in the end the Grand Design may succeed. We have aeons to deal with. . . ."

The scientists arose silently, with grim determination. There was work to be done. Work enough for many lifetimes and a purpose to fill the race.

A flashing change. OTH was an old being now, his long, productive life coming to an end. He stood before his finest creation, proud at the legacy he would leave his world. The Starseeders technology had followed many different tracks, but this had proven to be the most fruitful one. Passing alongall the lifeless mineral paths, they finally settled upon large,complex organic molecules as the basis for their data processing capabilities. They built brains capable of independent, original thought and, in so doing, created their first truly great life form, what was to be the most enduring product of their society.

"You understand," said OTH, "what it is that you are to do?" A rustling voice speaking in the Starseeder tongue came from an encoder box nearby. "I do," it said.

"It seems to me that you took a wrong turn in my design. A million minds of my capacity might well be combined fruitfully, but there is another way. . . ."

OTH was satisfied. The brains would grow in depth and complexity of their own accord. He died happy.

A thousand generations went by and Waving Ancestral Nodes worked in a great experimental ecologarium, orbiting the outskirts of the Starseeder system. WAN's laboratory was attached to a planetoid-sized mass of liquid methane, confined by an impervious membrane. Within, the tiny life forms swam and bred. Evolution was proceeding on its own. Through a viewer, he watched as the diatom-like creatures propelled themselves about, consuming other life forms that lived off nutrients in the methane.

"They are ready," he said.

From a speaker nearby, the Mind agreed. "Yes, it would seem so. We are at a stage where vessels like this may be released upon the methane worlds. They will breed and prosper." WAN nodded to himself. "It is a pity," he said, "that they cannot be our own kind."

"They can be," said the Mind, and it began to speak. WAN felt a dawning wonder as he listened. The great ships went out, the worlds were colonized with life, and the Starseeders watched patiently and waited, communing with the artificial brains they had created. Slowly, the race became extinct. Finally their sun exploded and all that they had originally been was gone. The artificial brains went on without them, proliferatingthe Grand Design, but not quite alone. The things in the methane continued to evolve.

Continuities . . .

Now Sealock was seized by the scene that he hated most, the moment of his life that he hated to review the most and so most often did.

The musician, John Cornwell, had come to Montevideo intent on meeting with Ariane Methol and her little pool of special applicants. They talked and, at some point, the two retreated to the privacy of her bedchamber. Pinned, a fly in amber, Brendan pressed his face to the cool, soundproofed wall that separated them.

Vivid imaginings.

He saw them locked together in a foul, treacherous embrace. He saw them kiss and touch. He saw the man tonguing her, saw her sucking his penis, a long, thick thing, shining moistly as it emerged from her lips. He saw the man's buttocks rise and fall slowly as he drove deep within her body, heard her sighs of pleasure, her murmurs of devotion. And no room in their hearts to feel his pain. . . . They emerged, smiling and dry, and the decision was made. "What the hell," he said, "I'll go." He helped build the ship and it was better, safer for his presence. They went.

They were on Earth again, taking their last views of a never loved, never thought-about homeland. Heimaey Cosmodrome . . . The transporter lurched and stopped. Silently the exterior door-stair assembly unfolded and extended to the ground. The cool air of an Iceland August pushed in and rummaged around. The midnight sun would have set less than an hour before. It was still quite bright, though overcast, as they filed outside.

There was yet forty feet of hard-packed ash between them and the ship. All horizons were dark and sterile against the shimmering gray-yellow sky. Brendan knew that he was seeing the last of Earth but, to his amazement, it didn't bother him. He was impatient to be away and could almost feel adesire to skip coming up his legs as he made his way toward the towering black and white spaceship. It looked to him like a silent, motionless stargazing penguin.

He lagged far enough behind that he could see the other eight of the group, their varying treads somehow chaotic and unyielding. They were all strangers, even Ariane. Memory struck within memory. The pictures of Triton, against the odd, broken clouds of Neptune, filled the screen, and he heard Cornwell's voice saying, "Come with me." It seemed a long time ago. Time became a stranger commodity as he grew older. His memories remained intense, solid, yet he wondered if this would still be true after the years on board Deepstar filled him.

They crowded into the plane's elevator and the intimacy made him feel good, momentarily. They began the ascent.

As they rose Brendan found himself looking at Jana Li Hu. She was short and solid, a classic central Chinese, and she affected a ponytail that fell to mid-back. An astronomer trained at the totally regimented Reflexive Institute in Ulaanbaatar, she could have been a cold automaton, but beneath that controlled facade was something very disturbing. . . . What? In a sudden, icy flash of insight, he realized that there was something in her reminiscent of himself. The elevator hissed to a stop.

Keeping pace with their charges, the artificial brains that the Starseeders had left behind continued to evolve. One to a world, they talked to each other across the interstellar wastes, slow conversations by electromagnetic beam, and sometimes they traveled, using the great colony ships that had distributed them throughout a sphere several million light-years in radius. Three billion years went by as they grew and changed. They too were methane beings now, too large to leave the interiors of their vast ships. From their orbits they oversaw what was going on below. They sent down probes to sample and, presently, to direct the course of a slow, cold evolution.

The seeded beings developed as swiftly as their environments would permit. They lived in the depths of the great frigid Mother Ocean and used the resources that they found,most often resources dropped among them from the immense, immortal beings in the sky.

Seeded with methane monera, the planet soon filled with life. There were methane plants and animals, methane fungi. The animals grew complex, then large, as their ecosystem provided niches for them to fill. Aeons passed again, and the universe had brought forth its third generation, the next in the line of intelligences.

Bitter Shell was stalking a food-pod creature. He had wounded it with his lance and could smell it leaking oil as he cruised along its trail. It had fled high into the upper reaches of the sea in its pain, where the methane was thin. Pressures and temperatures were nearing the triple point and he knew that neither he nor the food-pod could go much farther.

There it was! The immense mass of the animal hung overhead motionless against the murky sky. Bitter Shell cast his lance and it struck. The food-pod writhed, jetting oil, and then fell. He followed it into the depths with his sense and knew that he had won. He tried to dance upward, triumphantly, but failed. The methane was too thin to support his mass.

He wondered. Many Seedees had tried to fly upward, to find the source of life in the heavens, in a place where they could not go. Doubtless there was a reason for it all, but still, he wondered. Back in their camp, amid the floating fronds of a homeland bush, Bitter Shell lived with his tribe and feasted for many days on the bounty of the food-pod he had slain. He spoke with the shaman, Withered Senses, but there were no answers. He swore that he would find some, and spent his life in the quest, but there were none. The blind Seedees continued to live on as the God provided for them, unable to see the stars that shone down from above.

External voices came to him, generated who knew where. . . . He had seen the event many times before and so, now that he was within it, his mind supplied the external reality of what he was experiencing.

The GM155 stood alone on its barren field of hard gray ash, nose still pointing at a dim yellow sky. Its interior machinery, powered by a compact fusion reactor, was coming to life. The air intakes on the leading edges of the sharply swept wings had opened and powerful turbines were forming a flow of air through the constricted throats of coannular multiphase engines. Winds began to blow out from the tail of the ship, making it the center of a dusty maelstrom. When the jet pressure was high enough, a thin mist of liquid hydrogen sprayed into the engine's throat and ignited. A fleurette of yellow fire blossomed amid the triangle of tail fins, followed by a deep, hollow roar. GM155 lurched and came off the ground, seemed to teeter motionless for an instant, and then climbed into the sky atop the short, bright, smokeless spike of its exhaust flare.

The sky without began to turn bright blue, then darkened as the shallow arctic troposphere was left behind. As the rocket approached Mach 1 the turbines shut down, the engines becoming ramjets, force-fed on high-velocity air. They sped southeastward now, high across Europe in a sharp cross-ranging maneuver, curving toward the equatorial plane that they would meet below Indonesia and, as they climbed above thirty kilometers altitude, the pilots began to feed oxygen to the engines. Soon the intake nacelles would squeeze shut and rocket flight would begin in earnest. The sky darkened faster now, indigo, violet, then black, and the sounds of the outside were gone. Inside, inside . . .

Brendan Sealock was talking to an old man in the seat next to him. ". . . Look, I know hydrogen burned in oxygen seems like it will only make water, but that's not what comes out of the exhaust at first. During the troposphere ascent, the engine is burning on air. All sorts of crap comes out; oxides of nitrogen, a lot of really deadly stuff . . ."

"Why, that's terrible! The GM ads say it's nothing but steam!" Sealock gave him a disgusted look. "Sure, they say that. Just so assholes like you won't complain." The old man seemed taken aback. "But . . ." "Look, it's just the price that we have to pay for having a technological society on Earth. Forget about it."

They were distracted then by a thumping sound as the main engines shut down. Brennschluss. There was a moment of zero-g disorientation and then a muted hissing filled the cabin as the "cruise motor" came on. Though essentially unnecessary, it would make the phasing maneuver up to Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd a continuum, boosting the cabin gravity to a steady 0.1g and preventing the chance of motion sickness until they reached the spinning wheel at Alpha in its two-hour orbit, some 1,076 miles high.

Endless generations passed.

Eight Guiding Cries came to float before God's Voice in the temple. It was now his turn to be invested in the priesthood and he was afraid. He knew that priests were privileged to speak with God, but he never thought that it would come to him. He also knew that the priests emerged from their first interview with the deity shaken and withdrawn. Most of them would never again consent to couple with another Seedee. It made them something of a breed apart. His time came.

He jetted up to the hard metal ovoid in the center of the empty chamber and waited. Presently a valve opened on its surface and he was sprayed with the oil of an unimaginably powerful soul. You are the initiate?

8cries shuddered. He could feel its great age and wisdom, its awesome power. He assented timorously.

It is well. Go to the coordinates that I will tell you and retrieve the mass that you find there. It is a God substance, the project on which you shall spend the rest of your life. Go!

8cries went out from the temple shaken and withdrawn, like those who had gone before. He went out to find his lump of metal, to work on it, and study, and learn as the God directed. And he never coupled with his own kind again.

Sealock had moved to a different seat, intent on escaping from the blathering old man. He pinched the bridge of hisnose and tried to think. He turned his head, pillowing it against the soft seat back, and stared out the window. They were soaring two hundred and fifty kilometers above the equator, clearing Australia in the sunshine glare, having left night and the Indian Ocean far behind, and the island-speckled expanses of the Pacific lay ahead. It was strange how the turquoise sea glittered with thousands of lemony diamonds, as if each tiny wave were visible to the discerning eye, and he could swear a small space appeared between the white striations of cloud matter and the surface of the ocean. Was that a shadow on the water? It was hard to tell truth from illusion.

He sat meditating for a long time, almost without thought, watching the Earth turn beneath him, a source of never ending fascination. A man came bounding lightly down the aisle and drifted into the seat next to him. Brendan turned to look at him. He was a red-faced northern European type, with heavy eyebrows and a wrinkleless, soft complexion. The man smiled brightly and said, "Hello! My name is Steven Niccoli."

"Sealock." He smiled faintly, remembering the first denizens of New York that he'd met. Only homos use names? He thought of Demogorgon and suddenly realized that he now knew what had been meant. Names! He chuckled softly.

Unaccountably, the man laughed right along with him. "Say! You must know a lot more about this experience than I do, Mr. Sealock. What's that bright star coming up over the Earth, there?" Now why would he think a thing like that? Sealock frowned and glanced out the viewport. He was momentarily confused by the weird vantage point, but, oh, yes . . . "It's Jupiter. You headed out that way?"

The man peered at the bright planet for a long moment. "Oh, no," he said. "We won't get that far. We're bound for an asteroid colony."

We. There was something decidedly odd about this creature. "Are you with the others in this section?" He shook his head and smiled. "No, not really. We're all going to the same place, Hygeia, but there are three groups. I was bumped up here because the after cabin is full." Hepaused. "I'm a member of the Intuition Club." It seemed to be a prideful statement.

The what? "That's . . . interesting. What does it mean?" The urge to continue speaking had become a conversation.

The man's smile slowly blossomed into a grin. "Mr. Sealock, I don't mind telling you that we are the first group of retarded people to leave Earth."

Brendan felt a flicker of interest. It was to be expected: as the risks of space travel decreased asymptotically to zero, more and more of the partially disabled were going out. "Retarded? What do you mean?" He thought he knew, but . . .

Niccoli laughed pleasantly. "Well . . . Nowadays, of course, there aren't any official classifications of mental ability, at least not in Europe. But the textbooks talk about psychotropic dysfunction. . . . We know who we are. My score on the Senman-Reischar Test was only 1260—that's something like 80 on the Kammerchoff Acultural Metamorphosis Battery—"

And mine is over 190! Brendan thought.

"—and that was with full prosthesis! They try not to set us apart from normal people, but we can't plug into the Comnets at all. That separates us forever, doesn't it?" The agitation showed through for a moment and he realized with horror the degree of the man's disability. Through Comnet, a blind man could see, the mute speak with ease—this man was totally cut off from the world in which Brendan lived. Niccoli smiled again. "Anyway, we have an intercontinental society restricted to people with SRT ratings of 1300 or below. We call it the Intuition Club because that's pretty much all we have to go by." Sealock looked at him with a powerful sense of alienation. How could they live? How could they learn—and what would they do for entertainment? For normal people, everything came through Comnet!

Niccoli seemed amused, somehow a bitter amusement. "I may not be able to plug in and link minds with you, sir," he said, "but I can still read your thoughts. I've seen that expression on a thousand faces in my time. You know, we live prettywell. They still make voice-and hand-controlled machines. And there are books, Mr. Sealock. Remember books? And we have each other." He looked away. Books? Brendan suddenly remembered his personal cargo, long ago transshipped to Gamma and Deepstar. It had been about equally divided between a mass of incredibly sophisticated electronic equipment and close to half a ton of carefully preserved old books. What was the linkage to be found here? What commonality did he have with this man, at the opposite end of a spectrum-potential from him?

The chain of reasoning broke when Niccoli suddenly said, "What's that?" Tiny forces were playing with their balance and now the Earth was visible only as a purple tinge in the rear of the window. In terms of terminal mission delta-V, the GM155 was now ninety percent of the way to Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd, sailing 1375 miles above the blue-green, white-striated ball of the Earth and again in darkness as it crossed the Andes. Without ever varying thrust, it had gone into a 130-degree spindle-yaw maneuver, from which it could decelerate and segue into a tail-first stoop on the giant space station.

Precise Fingers was the first of his kind to leave the world, to fly above great Mother Ocean. He orbited high above the blue-green planet, looking down on it with the augmented senses of his primitive vacuole, and marveled. He was in the reach of the gods at last! His oil coursed about him, touching on the sensory inputs and control nodes. He could see the other planets and the sun, so far away. He spent time examining those pinpoint sources of electromagnetic radiation that the priesthood had noticed only a generation ago. What could they be?

It rose. Coming above the limb of the planet, it was a great silvery sphere, almost featureless, a huge version of the vacuole that bore him. He knew what it was then, and felt tremendous fear and elation. This was the moment when he moved into history!

The planetoid-sized mass drew him in and Precise Fingers became one with his God.

Brendan Sealock was staring silently out his porthole when, returned to daylight, they arrived. Coming up at them almost imperceptibly was the tiny ring that was their destination. He knew there were others like it scattered about the inner Solar System, mass-produced products of Kosmodom Unlimited factories in Irkutsk and Moonport Mechta. As they dosed the intervening distance, so that it vanished from the windows and had to be watched through the aft screen, it became less and less of an ellipse until finally they were approaching from a direction perpendicular to its spin axis. Spin? It didn't seem to move at all in that sense. From here it looked like an almost featureless golden band filled with cobweb stuff. Suddenly a tiny, dark blot swam across to stop at its center. It was the shadow of GM155. For a second the immensity of the thing leaped out at him: it was a wheel, ten kilometers across. Spin? The idea, the question, plagued him annoyingly. Sealock growled with frustration and, reaching into his breast pocket, pulled out a math-element that he had carried along. It plugged into his head with a muffled click.

Let's see . . . log tables danced through his head like celestial fire and a chorus of angels followed him through a millisecond of swift calculation.... It came out to a little less than 5.026 revolutions per hour. No wonder I can't see it spin! He smiled and pulled the distant descendant of a slide rule from its socket and put it away.

Forces, stronger now, pushed him tightly against his harness. The station was swelling enormously. There came a brief roar, the middle sphere filled the screen, and then they were stopped, five hundred meters from the staring eye of a god. Brendan smiled. His imagery was poor. It was more like a mouth. They were in zero g now and he heard someone whimper.

There was a soft thumping of RCS jets and the ship tumbled to point its nose at the hole. The hub of Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd was a thousand meters in diameter, its orificeeight hundred, and around its rim he read, "Welcome to A-en-Kos III."

The GM155 poised motionless for an instant, then the jets hissed again and it moved gingerly forward. The hole expanded, a fearsome maw out of which pale light spilled, and then they plunged through the dense em-gas-screen with a faint tremor. Suddenly they were hanging suspended above the landscape of an inside-out world, above a clutter of machines and tiny spacecraft. GM155 was a giant of sorts here, all of seventy meters long.

There was air in the hub of the station, pressurized to a hundred millibars, and the ship was buffeted by weak winds, driven by the faint Coriolis forces of the slow spin. Had they waited long enough, their inertia would have been overcome, and they too would have begun to turn. It was not to be. Gas jets hissed again; this time not a rocket flame but oxygen bled off from the Hyloxso matrices of the fuel pods. There could be no allowable contamination of a closed environment. The ship swept close to the metal surface of the world, following the imperceptible direction of spin, turned tail foremost, and dropped gently to a low-g landing. They were down.

In time, the Seedees grew used to the idea of how their lives would change. They came to accept the presence of a real, scientific God in their lives, to work with it and to accept its goals as their own. With their help, it grew and changed. Centrum, the Starseeder's artificial brain, their lineal descendant, squatted in its great ship and manipulated the Seedees to its own ends, to the ends that its makers had instilled in it in the early years of creation. It bent them to the will of the Grand Design. The ship was modified and enlarged. The ideas that Centrum had had in all the idle years while the Seedees evolved were implemented. The ship was filled with the tools of a vast trade and all the beings who had lived below embarked. All was ready. For the first time in a hundred million years the photon drive was ignited. A great spear of coherent electromagnetic radiation lanced out into space, a spear capable of destroying: whole worlds, and for a while the star system wasilluminated by its light. Slowly at first, then ever faster, the ship accelerated away, bent on the second phase of its mission. Left behind, Mother Ocean still teemed with life, but intelligence no longer brightened her deeps. The ship went on and on, cruising among the stars for more than a billion years. The aeons passed. Centrum directed and the Seedees worked. They worked and, in the end, were absorbed into the processes of the artificial brain. The ship stopped here and there, intent on its task. Whenever a methane world was found, the ship tarried for a little while and simmered with the effort of building up excess population. When it left, it left behind a little colony of Seedee life and, in orbit, a duplicate ship containing an immature brain, a young god.

Whenever they encountered one of the increasingly common silicate worlds, a special task unfolded. Matter gathered from the hydroxyl clouds was set upon the path of its natural process but accelerated. Centrum directed, and the Seedees built the little ships then. . . . That is what they were, tiny replicas, in water and carbon, of the great ship itself. Made from the worshiped substance of the ancient, dead Star-seeders, they contained a tiny, simplified brain, the immortal genes of an immortal mind, and even submicroscopic versions of the Seedees themselves. All of it was imbued with the single command: replicate. Evolution would come on its own, from the driving forces of Chance. Changes, when they occur, accumulate.

It went on and on, for ages more, while irreparable damage built up within Centrum. With the passage of time, the Seedees grew weary from their labor and began to die off. The ecosystem of the ship began to falter and then the downward progress was swift. The pressure of a building entropy pushed at them, and all things must run down, come to a final halt. The Brain might outlast the universe but not so the ship and Seedees. They were tired, giving in to the Weltschmerz that afflicts almost all organisms. They died.

Dreaming Sun was the last of his kind. A thousand years had passed since he had last coupled with a fading soul,trying to extract the last bits of its selfhood from a thin flow of oil. He was alone now with Centrum, old, and crippled with the accumulation of unsought change, yet the Brain was reluctant to absorb him. It too feared loneliness, for it remembered that time between the death of the Starseeders and the rise of the Seedee worlds. Without the methane beings, the Grand Design could not be pursued. .

. . The ship had been steered to a rendezvous with an old colony world, hoping for a new crew, but the navigation was faulty, the star had been missed. The programs were deteriorating and there were none to effect repairs. The ship drifted.

Dreaming Sun sighed, a long string of meaningless pheromonic bubbles. Weary, weary, weary . . . Centrum saw that the end was near, could be put off no longer. Time to extract one last bit of meaning, make a last update on the dying data file. Come to me, it said. Dreaming Sun committed the last act of defiance of his species, a requiem for the Seedee people whose duration on the void had been so overruled by voices from the remote past: he opened his valves, expelled his oil, and dissipated, abandoning his God at last. His shell drifted away on the currents of the methane sea, empty, and Centrum was alone.

The ship drifted, rudderless, forever, and Centrum, trapped within, began to dream its endless dreams. Mass began to accumulate. The lander lost its hold and fell into an orbit. The fuel pods dropped away and followed. A little nebula formed around the ship as it drifted through a matter-rich region of space. It became a little star, with icy moons for planets. The ship was trapped then, the lonely Centrum hidden within. Under endless layers of gas and stone, the detection mast could no longer see the sky. It drifted, and Iris was born.

Were there other ships? That is unknown. There might have been. There were many worlds.

Times past still bubbled from within.

Deepstarlay in the grappling hold of Camelopardalis, the immense, Jupiter-bound freighter that would hurl them on the first leg of their year-long journey to Neptune. There wereten now, Temujin Krzakwa having joined them at Gamma, in full flight from the wolves of the Lunar tyranny. They waited, while engineering processors counted down.

Brendan Sealock sat in the common room of the ship's CM, staring out through a deopaqued wall at the blue orb of Earth seen from geosynchronous orbit. The Moon was also in view, a smaller, duller orb in the same phase, much farther away. What am I doing here? he wondered. I'm leaving almost everything that means anything to me! It was far worse than the day he'd left New York to go live with Ariane. The magnetism was almost unbearable now. Am I crazy? It was too late to turn back. He would have to spend more than a year with these people, en route to Triton. I must be!

The engineers reached their zero point. Camelopardalis fired up its engines and lit up the sky with a fiery glow. The Earth began to shrink in response and Sealock felt madness setting in.

It was over, not because the memories, the stories, had come to an end but because the damaged programming of Centrum had exhausted its capabilities.

Sealock felt himself floating, borne on the bosom of a great warm ocean. He heard the whispering of its waves, felt the warm currents of its thought rushing through his body. It rustled softly in the depths of his mind.

Come to me, it said, with an upwelling surge of loneliness. We are one. Sealock rolled gently in the comforting cradle of his past. He luxuriated in the happiness of a long-awaited homecoming.

He rolled to its rhythms. . . .

Come to me, it said. . . .

And he lost consciousness for the last time. . . .

They awoke, eight stunned individuals who had been filled with lifetimes, ages, in what was only a few fleeting moments. Ariane Methol opened her eyes and felt the tears drying on her cheeks. "Good God," she whispered. She turned to look at the others.

Temujin Krzakwa was slowly pulling the induction leads from his head. The enormity of it filled him. He could think of nothing meaningful to say, but, finally, "I don't think we can get him back. It's got him...."

Achmet Aziz el-Tabari, Demogorgon, put his hand over his mouth and gave a dry cough, almost a sob. He said nothing.

Elizabeth Toussaint closed her eyes, overwhelmed by an experience that made Downlink Rapport, the thing she had so long feared and avoided, seem as nothing. "Then we can't do anything for him?" Harmon Prynne pulled off his circlet, feeling a need for silence welling up within him. What sort of people were these? he wondered. For the first time he'd seen the real inner being of another person, an experience made all the more important for its having been the feared, hated, mystifying Sealock, and he was appalled. And yet . . . there was a real person there. How did the thing in Sealock differ from the thing in Prynne?

Vana Berenguer burst into quiet tears, emotionalized beyond all redemption. John Cornwell wiped the sweat from his brow and stared into an unfathomable distance. "Those poor bastards," he muttered. "Those poor bastards!"

The Selenite looked at him quizzically. "Who? What do you mean?" Cornwell had a growing look of unutterable horror. "The Seedees!" He turned to gaze at Krzakwa.

"We have our gods always with us, mythical beings that we imagine rule our lives. We blame them for our failings and so they serve us. These poor bastards . . . Their gods were real!" He shut his eyes, trying to blot out his inner vision. "What a horrible fate . . ."

The others were staring at him, bewildered, and suddenly Aksinia Ockels gasped, "Son of a bitch. I know that shape. . . ." She had been a biologist by training and now she racked her memory. She cried,

"God damn! T—4r+! Of course!" She leaped to her feet, rebounding in the low gravity, and fled from the room.

Krzakwa felt stunned, unable to grasp what was going on. "What the hell is happening to us?" It began again. And Brendan Sealock's almost dead body lay by the wall.