Iris

IRIS

ONE

Load. Uplink. Begin.

Achmet Aziz el-Tabari, who called himself Demogorgon the Illimitor Artist, was on his knees before Brendan Sealock, scientist, engineer, gladiator. . . . Cultural labels made a miasma between them that was too thick to be thrust aside. It made them things, defying understanding. He looked up at the man. He looked at the curly, dirty, reddish-blond hair, the acrid green eyes almost hidden in deep, dark wells beneath shaggy brows, at the broad face, with its high, heavy cheekbones, at the flattened nose, the wide, frowning mouth framed with shadowy lines, and the massive jaw. He looked at the thick neck above powerful, rounded shoulders, the heavily muscled chest, and the broad waist with its solid stomach, lightly padded with fat. He looked at the long arms, roped with vein-netted muscles that stood out like an anatomical chart. He ran his hands over the corded tree-trunk legs through a thin layer of light cloth.

So ... His own voice whispered to him from far away, rhyming rhymes, naming names. Culture, it said, and tradition . . . "Brendan. Tell me again why you won't do anything with me?" The man smiled faintly. "You're the faggot here, not me. Besides, I'm your . . . what is it you call me?"

"You're my 'Great Dark Man,' Brendan. It's from a book that was written more than a hundred and fifty years ago."

"Yeah." He laced his fingers through Demogorgon's coarse black hair and jammed his crotch forward into the man's face. "So get to work."

As the man's sharp nose began to jab rhythmically against his abdomen, Sealock settled back to look out through the deopaqued section of wall opposite him. Iris was a bright light in the star-sequined perpetual night and it attracted a deep longing in him, the way so many other things had in the past. Perhaps this too would be a disappointment—but he had to go on trying until success or death made an end to things. Why do they want me to feel their pain? he wondered. Isn't it enough that I feel my own?

Against a rising tide of orgasmic inevitability, he saw images of himself in the prize ring, bloodying opponents, and this was supplanted by the dark, carved-ivory face of Ariane Methol. Almost alone, he thought. Almost, but not quite.

Sealock wiped the sweat from his brow, running blunt fingers through the dense snarls of his own hair, and once again felt the twelve sockets embedded in his skull.

Dreams without number laid themselves down in concentric tracks throughout John Cornwell's mind. Music . . . Not music, just the idea of music. The effect alone, hot the thing itself. It was 2097 and now humankind was irrevocably changed. Those manifestations of the physical world that had entertained and ravaged people were ebbing away, becoming less important. Reality had become an eerie technological ocean, and mankind a frenzied swimmer in its electronic deeps. Only a little more than a generation before, an easy and acceptable means of plugging human minds into the already vast information processing and retrieval networks had been invented. Its ramifications were universal and its tendrils extended into virtually every phase of human endeavor. Comnet had been born in 2063. It was the ultimate networking system, finishing off a task begun over a century before, and it grew effortlessly until it had engulfed the world. Parents had lived their lives mediated by computers, voice actuators, and 3V screens, long accustomed to the devices that surrounded them, but the children . . . increasingly, humanity lived with its minds in the wires, and the momentum of change followed a quickening tempo.

For now, men and women might live lives recognizable to their ancestors. Similar things would make them unhappy, similar things would seem unpleasant; but life was changing. A tender trap was engulfing them, drawing the subjective world in step by step, with neither will nor collective acknowledgment. The mental echoes of the last barrage went away, and John relaxed, disengaging from RedShipnet, his composition program. He energized his suit and the em-field stuck him to his chair with a creaky plop. His new piece, the induction-music suite Rose of Ash, was finished. Tallish and wiry, Cornwell's tonus was a testament to the procedures they had used to cope with almost two years of weightlessness. His face was slightly oriental, with dark brown eyes and a strong chin that showed his mixed heritage. His great-grandmother had been an Innuit from the Baffin region of the Canadian Archipelago. His hair was black, cut short enough for the pate to show through and lighten it. He was wearing red fullbodies, with a Deepstar/Iris logo on the chest. Around his head was a metal diadem holding an array of focus nodes for induction transfer and his Shipnet interface. Induction music, a subset of the induced entertainment industry that had brought him fame and a vast fortune, was something more than audio music and, for many, something less. A more appropriate term might have been "data music."

Although most 'net access was via a feed to the various sensory nexi, it was sometimes useful to choose an adaptable area in the subdominant parietal lobe and feed it data. He had been one of the first to realize that this data feed was accompanied by certain emotions, analogous to those of music input. The bandwidth for induction music was much greater and there was some spatial perception within the sequential flow. To his astonishment, he'd found that most people responded strongly to his "music." An industry and an art had been born. The playback of the music had brought up strange emotions in him. Right there, in the middle of it, was his breakup with Beth. They had been acting the part of strangers now for months, yet in the limited confines of the Command Module they saw each other constantly. It was all too much for him. Everything was mutating into the opposite of what he wanted.

There was a tiny crackle of static and the hatch of his personal compartment opened into four spreading segments which retracted into the bulkhead. Jana Li Hu, Chinese and naked, appeared in the entrance. "Finished?"

He phased back into Shipnet and gave the command to transmit. "It should get there in six hours or so. I've got the best scramble money can buy, but circpirates'll probably get it anyway. What's up?" Hu pushed her way into the room, a baby crawling in three dimensions. She was short and built compactly. Her face was central Chinese: round, with high cheekbones and a small, flat nose. A dull black, 50 cm. ponytail floated behind her head. Cornwell looked into her eyes and noticed, for the thousandth time, a hard, unchanging quality that unnerved him. This woman was his new girlfriend?

"Why do you care about piracy?" she said. "You've said yourself that money will have no real use where we're going. Residuals on Triton alone will buy all the data we'll ever need." She assumed a stable float about two meters over his head, with her body at a forty-five-degree angle to his own. Normally self-conscious, she was playing a little game. "Turnaround's coming." He called up the present high-mag view of Iris and accessed pertinent data concerning the voyage. The information flowed via electromagnetic induction to the optical centers of his brain and was presented to him in a complex visual array, superimposed over his view of the room like a fantastic, detailed afterimage.

The sight of the planet was riveting. Every time he looked at it, Cornwell was amazed by the continually more resolved image. As with Luna, there was something that fought against seeing it as a sphere. It was simply a white circle, three-banded, surrounded by a dim, blue disk maybe a diameter bigger, and cut by the ever more obvious ring, which, since they were coming in close to its plane, was just a thin line. The ring shadow was obliterated somewhere in the immense blue atmosphere and never made it to the "surface."

He scanned the data coming out in the lower right-hand segment of his vision field, not feeling the muscles of his eyes move, yet not aware of the projection's unreality. They were 41.947 AU from Sol and 0.229 AU from Iris. Here, far from the sun, it was dark, lonely, and cold. They might just as well be in the depths of interstellar space.

The numbers told the story. It was 701.891 days since they'd detached their little ship from the Jovian transport Camelopardalis and 696.668 days since they'd shut down Deep-star's engine. The ship would soon be turned around to fire the heavy-ion reaction drive for Iridean orbital injection. "It's just about ten hours and forty-one minutes away." Computers bred precision; language didn't.

"I can't believe the trip's finally ending," said Hu, clinging to a no-g handhold on the back edge of a console/desk. "I feel like the world is coming to an end."

John nodded slowly. "That's a thing about long trips I first realized when I was about twelve. When a journey ends, it's like a confirmation your life will end too. I tried to deal with that a little bit in Rose." Jana seemed not to be listening. "The parameters for the satellites are scary," she said. "Despite what theory predicts, bodies this volatile-rich are something new."

"We've been through this all before."

"I'm just trying to tell you," she said, "I can't certify that we'll be safe." Cornwell wanted to reach out and make contact, but something held him back. The subject was raised and the conversation had to be finished. "We've discussed the problems of trying to build on highly volatile material. We're going to need an area of water-ice, and Ocypete's huge mare—"

"Ocellus."

"Ocellus, bull's-eye, basin, whatever you want to call it. Even though it's buried under a thin regolith of neon ice, I've seen your analysis of how it was produced. It looks like a good place to me."

"The ocellus is an anomaly, John. It shouldn't be there. I can explain it, sure enough; but I have to make up an extremely unlikely scenario to do so." She pulled herself down into his reference vertical.

"We've got the equipment to handle a large uncertainty. You know that." Jana shook her head and reached out, caressing John's neck. "I know it ... but I've been running this garbage through my head over and over, ever since we passed by Triton for this . . . adventure. It's an oddness in the pit of my stomach."

Cornwell laughed and released himself from the em-field. He gave the woman a push and then launched himself after her. She sailed past his sleeping module and lodged in a corner, catching hold of the resilient, almost mushy wall surface. Ducking under his embrace, she leaped away, and they caromed about until he had her cornered. He grabbed her by both arms and was, as always, surprised to find that she wasn't joking, she was fighting for real.

A small fist, half balled, caught him on the cheek, spinning them slowly in opposite directions. "Stop it!" he said, helplessly hanging near her, unable to reach a wall. "What's the matter with you?" Jana's face, half wild, slowly moderated, softened. She reached out for a handhold, then for him, steadying, a delicate touch. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know. I guess I do need you." She pulled on his hand, drawing them together.

He looked into her face, trying to fathom whatever it was that he saw there. What to say? Nothing. John felt a little pang of self-dread. Whatever came out next, it would lack the tone, timbre, and meaning that should be there. He tried. "Isn't this what we left Earth for—uncertainty? Maybe it's an adventure, maybe not. No matter what you and the others think, we are doing something. Triton would have been one thing—a fairly new colony at the edge of terrestrial influence —but we'll be the first at Iris. . . ." The little line editor in his head was agonizing over this. Their interaction was following its own course, beyond his understanding. He began to feel aroused. "In a way we'll be the first people to reach another star, if you want to call it that. Doesn't that make you want to stop and say, 'Gee whiz,' or something?" He wanted to cringe, to laugh at himself and give up the ghost of effort. Talk was only a pleasant noise, after all, and he was already working his way downward, touching her, brushing at the nearly invisible hairs on her back and buttocks. The attention, the touching were communication, very likely what she really wanted. Things were hard to see in the absence of real closeness. The thought snagged at him, briefly. Downlink Rapport was available, but these people shied away, always pulled back from the brink. It was too personal. Too close.

Cornwell sighed. This relationship had fallen into a pattern that mirrored what had developed among the ten passengers aboard Deepstar. He pleasured her, yes, as she wished, and got very little in return, save for her presence in his life as a confidante. She acted the part of his friend, but he doubted whether she was capable of such a thing. In the void that had formed after he and Beth broke up, he had wanted Jana, and had gotten her. . . .

She controlled the sex and had aversions to many things, penetration perhaps not the least of them. His enjoyment would be limited. Sometimes, in the midst of her strange, hoarse cries, he would have an idea for a data-motif.

Suddenly the feelings that Rose had brought came again, more strongly. He remembered the last time he and Beth had made love. Her response to him, though much diminishedfrom the early days back in CFE, was still almost magical. He missed her. Guiltily, he called up an image of her, all the while caressing Hu.

Elizabeth Toussaint's dark, oval face hung before him in a kind of timeless space, framed by small black ringlets, barely showing the diagonal cheek lines that, from certain angles, gave her a rare beauty. She had a broad, pixy-like nose and her eyes, dark with cosmetic mystery, were large and happy. Looking at this image, he couldn't help but notice that her chin was weak and her pouting lips over-large. The tenderness gave way to cold anger. It was her fault. The image winked out. Enjoying the feel of the sheet of warm rubber that was her skin, he kissed Jana's stomach, stroked her hips, her thighs, and went on.

In his compartment, Harmon Prynne lay meshed in the em-field of his bed, like a fly trapped on the surface scum of a butterscotch pudding. He was a delicate-seeming man, though robust; Irish-looking, with reddish-orange hair and freckles. His pale blue eyes were shiny and bloodshot. He was a mere technician, universally regarded as the stupidest person on the ship, and everyone liked him. Through his Shipnet connection, he watched what transpired in a sparsely appointed room. It was eavesdropping, easy to do, hard to resist.

Two people were locked together, tumbling end over end in the absence of gravity. The circumstances made their nudity all the more interesting. One was Vana Berenguer, a short, thick-waisted woman with swarthy skin and long clouds of coarse dark hair. The other, Temujin Krzakwa, was tall, fat, and hairy, with an immense curly beard the color of brown sand that flowed luxuriantly around the woman's thighs. Their mismatched heights and Krzakwa's paunch made it difficult for the woman to reach him. Prynne shut his eyes and tried to make the image go away, but it wouldn't. He thought the words

"channel down," and, one by one, images of amazing vividness but little or no portent filled his brain. He stopped at an image that reminded him of his home in Florida. A quiet, sun-washed shore presented itself, and a turquoise-blue sea rolled into foam upon it. The vantage point was maybe five meters in the air and slightly inshore, and here there was another couple making love. They were different . . . somehow cleaner. And yet, as they held each other and looked out at a sunrise that he could see in their eyes, he couldn't stand to watch anymore. He shut his eyes again, hard, and said, "Off," this time vocally. As the image died, he felt globules of water hanging without weight on his eyelashes, making them clump together.

Aksinia Ockels put down her "book," a loosely bound sheaf of pages she'd had printed up, and took a gulp of the smoky creosote called Lapsang Souchong . She was a tall woman, light-complexioned, and had a rather strange face, flat, square-jawed, with a ski-jump nose. Her hair was a mousy brown, loosely curled, and she had cheeks that were often naturally flushed. The taste of the tea never failed to call up visions of her days living at the Hotel Lisboa , reading book after book on the beach, burning despite generous applications of paba , and waiting endlessly for her mother to decide to leave. At twelve, she was not yet pubescent, and the world seemed clean and fantastic. The years she had spent in schoolplant were far in the past and life had been without unpleasant intimations.

For the thousandth time she wondered, How did I get here?

She remembered the quick and cumulative wilting of her world-view during the following years. When she met Daniel, and he'd deflowered her in Paris Commune, at thirteen, she had substituted love for happiness. When it didn't last, she had nothing. Her wandering had started only after many hideous, interminable shouting matches with her parents, and in the many years since then she'd lived amicably, alone. Only Beta-2, a complex brain-chemical derivative, supplied her with the inner vision she'd had as a child. And the time had come for her shot.

The apothecary mounted in her mag case made a tinychirring noise and burped forth a blistersac containing her standard dose of Beta-2. For the briefest moment she beheld the capsule, regretting the social side effects that had come with her addiction. Anticipation coursed along her nerves, a velvet static electricity.

She held the blister under the line of her jaw and popped it: the osmotic solution in which the drug was held spurted through her skin, saturating the blood in her carotid artery, filling her mind with a feeling of rightness that she treasured.

She pulled out an induction circlet and placed it on her head, rearranging the fall of her hair to regularize the fit. The circuitry would find her brain centers, but it needed to be near the right place. As she turned to the doorway, the world, burnished with a chemical sense of wonder, ballooned before her.

A cold infrastar fell from the darkness of interstellar space. It seemed to hang poised, as if waiting, inside Pluto's aphelion, deep within Sol's gravitational sway. It was, though, going fast enough, and its path along a conic section would never close. The little star was only a visitor. Had Pluto been on the same side of the Solar System, the thing would have given itself away long before. Even so, its 0.58 of Earth's mass should have been easily detectable, would have been, had anyone been looking. The search for a trans-Plutonic planet had, however, been abandoned seventy years before. Astronomy itself had changed from the early days of randomly scattered observation into a rigid and systematic cataloging of the heavens conducted almost entirely from a single great multi-observatory on Luna's farside. It had changed so much that it had a different name: asterology. In one of the little coincidences that add flavor to reality, Cometary Halo probe Oort IX, launched from Callisto in 2085, had gone off course—far off course—and there seemed to be only one possible explanation: a gravitational perturbation produced by a very large object some 42 AU out. The men with telescopes and photorecorders , mostly hobbyists, looked. And there, glowing in the long infrared, was a planetary object, intensely cold and sending back solar radiation in the striking deep blue of Rayleigh scattering. Those with sufficient resolving power saw that it also bore a ring rivaling Saturn's and three tiny satellites.

That such an object could form on its own out of the vast clouds of galactic dust and gas was a matter for long and bitter debate, but there could be no doubt: an independent body so small and cold that it could hardly be called a star was passing. In the quiet offices of the IAAU Working Group on Astrological Nomenclature, a WGS-07 mythology coordinator decided to call this new object Iris, and the satellites Aello, Podarge, and Ocypete, after the rainbow goddess and her sisters, the harpies. As he emerged from an airlock mounted on the rear of the CM, Temujin Krzakwa felt the fear and paranoia that had characterized his Lunar personality coming back to him like a scream in the night. It was easy, inside, to forget. The ship was it —everything that was human, a fragile house in the dead, bodiless, perpetual winter darkness. He closed his eyes and flexed the springy em-pads that were his primary adhesion to the CM's hull. He wouldn't come off. Sealock popped up before him through a shimmering circle at his feet and gave him a facetiously tender pat on the helmet. Krzakwa made a rude gesture in return and heard a laugh through the audio link.

Deepstar'sstructural tower, a matrix of metal-plastic girders stretching into the fifty-meter distance, was greatly foreshortened from this perspective. The elongated cylinders of differing lengths around the outside were all that made the ship look substantial. Without the appended containers, it was just four skeletal isosceles prisms, connected by their long bases, surrounding the ultrarigid bulk of a heavy-ion engine. At the aft end of the ship was a toroid with quatrefoil outriggers on which the Hyloxso engines were mounted.

They made their way along an inner vertex between a Hyloxso cylinder and one containing fusion water, inspecting, looking. It wasn't until they mounted the ion-drive emission unit that Iris cleared the stern and stared hard at them.

Tem stopped for a moment to look. It seemed he could just make out the Rayleigh -scattering atmosphere around abarely discernible disk. He gazed at the thing, trying to imagine just what he was doing here and, after a while, became aware that Sealock had stopped beside him, motionless, silent. He turned to look at the other man, a dim human-shape with a cylinder for a head, silhouetted before the still blinding pinprick of the sun. "What do you think?" He gestured toward the planet.

"I don't know." It was his most commonplace answer. People took it for many things, but Krzakwa always understood it as: "I don't want to tell you. . . ."A perplexing man. Sealock stood for a while longer, wrapped in himself, then said, "Let's go. We've got to make sure everything is perfect now. Don't want to wind up a smoking hole in the ice, do we?" Krzakwa looked at the mazy interconnection of metallic lines, whistling softly to himself, almost a whisper, human static that the 'net would filter out. The last course correction had not produced any major structural damage. Despite its fragile appearance, the craft's em-reinforced infrastructure could withstand very large linear forces. Hoping that the landing on Ocypete would be easy, he imagined a nominal performance.

They floated free a meter or so from the main load-bearing girder of Deepstar's dorsal external vertex, moving toward the nose. Sealock stopped short, and Tem could see what had provoked the reaction: the smooth metallic sheen of the member was discolored by a faint ripple of iridescence, a spectral glistening, as of oil on water.

"Shit," said Sealock.

The Selenite looked at the featureless cylinder that housed his companion's head. "Shear stress?"

"Just a minute." Through a lead plugged into his head, the man sent a command via Shipnet to his suit. It obediently altered its optical system and relayed the result back to him through the same conduit. He examined the area microscopically, across both the gamma and X-ray bands, then cursed again. "The whole cross section has gone monoclinic on us. Even worse, it's buckled at least five milliarcsec out of true. I can't get any closer with this suit's reticle."

Krzakwa looked out over the long expanse of the ship for a moment, letting machines calculate quickly, then said, "That's not enough to cause a structural failure."

"No." Sealock grinned, an unseen baring of teeth. "Not by a long shot. . . . But what the hell. We might as well fix it."

It made him think of all the times he'd heard the Lunar government's tired old slogan, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." Here, he could but try. "All right." Another pause, unfilled. "How do you want to do this?"

" Mmh." He blinked into the darkness that surrounded him, thinking. "I've only got two leads in this helmet and Shipnet's not as flexible as it could be ... not yet, anyway. Why don't we split up the job? You take the rebrace fixture and I'll handle the electron-beam welder, OK?" A year or so before, that would have been an impatient command. Krzakwa wished briefly that he could get a handle on what his odd friend was thinking. There was a way, of course, but ... He had to laugh at himself, silently. Even if it could be done involuntarily, secretly, like the work of some telepathic spy . . . well, he too had only two leads to work with, and they were the far less efficient induction leads at that. With such a setup, he would be hard enough pressed to handle communications, suit control, optic response, and a work-pack. Something so complex as Downlink Rapport would be out of the question, even if Shipnet were already in the proper configuration. He smiled, invisibly, to himself. "OK."

"I'll call the equipment."

In response to a series of commands, two work-packs in a service module external-access bay came to life. In a minute they were dancing along on their spindly legs, picking a path through Deepstar's openwork array of girders like a pair of armored, weapons-toting spiders. "Ready?" Krzakwa responded with a nonverbal assent, a fragment of knowledge transmitted to the other. For a moment he felt helpless—understanding to the nth degree the physics of a situation such as this one wasn't much help.... It was, of course, foolish to feel this way, but how could one avoid these sorts of feelings?

" Inphase, please." In a work situation, Sealock was completely focused on the business at hand, his normally harsh tone and rancorous manner banished behind a fairly leak-proof screen. The Selenite activated the final reserves of his suit-born resources and tensed as he felt the command/control impulses flood his conscious mind. The rebrace fixture machine was routed through a duodecimal program aspect of Shipnet and, while his handling of the device was suborned to a built-in self-awareness subplot, it took over quite a few reflex responses as well. He walked the machine behind the damaged girder, set its adjustment verniers, and then used a resistance heater to de-blackbody the metal-plastic matrix of the warped region.

When all was ready, he transmitted a squirt of data to Sealock, who began his task. The welder scuttled into place and lit off. An angstrom-thin collimated particle beam sliced away the affected area, which adhered to the fixture device and melted, going into a polyclastic state. Stresses were set up and, as the mixture cooled, the proper orthorhombic array reappeared. Simultaneously, calipers pulled the now isolated beam-ends back to zero azimuth. The welder reattached the cut-out segment and, when it had settled back into its blackbody state, they were done.

Sealock resurfaced out of the 'net depths laughing. "That was kind of fun. Good job. Come on, let's go in and torture everybody about how smart we are."

Even after two years, Krzakwa found himself marveling at the man's abrupt changes of manner. He could be crazy, I suppose, but . . . hell. Who knows? His musings faded out, and they went in.

To the crew of a terrifyingly expensive but essentially homemade spaceship somewhere off Neptune, the news of Iris' coming had struck with electrifying madness. They had been bound for Triton, the last frontier of human civilization, fleeing an angst that was not easy to identify. . . . Their reasons for leaving Earth were manifold and well thought out. Their destination had been picked simply because there was no place farther away to which they could go. The stars were too far. The comet cloud . . . maybe, maybe not. They had to have water ice for their fusion plant, and remote exploration had been inadequate. It would have been too long a voyage, in any case. Now this thing fell across their space, in reach, adventurous. . . .

A quick vote was taken, a seemingly unanimous decision made, and a vessel built by the fortune of one of the world's most popular artists made a gravity-boost phasing maneuver around Neptune into a Solar-retrograde orbit, headfirst toward an on-rushing mystery.

The Command Module of Deepstar, shaped roughly like a cylinder, was divided into three floors, perpendicular to its long axis. The middle and by far largest floor was designed with ten personnel compartments around its periphery, surrounding a gear-shaped room that comprised fully half the habitable volume of the CM. This central chamber had been outfitted with a ramfloor , from which a myriad of couches, tables, and other memomolecular shapes could be extruded on demand. In its center was a p-curtained door leading aft, and forward access was through the ceiling to the next deck, where the kitchen module was housed. Directions were defined by the pull of em-fields on clothing. As they gathered for a final preinsertion briefing, the central room had been reconfigured into a sunken amphitheater and everyone was em-stuck to its surface except for Aksinia Ockels, who was late. She hung above them for an instant like some huge, gauzy-winged insect/bird hybrid, then assumed a sitting position. She touched the static-node of her clothing, creating a faint breath of em-force, and settled like a dust mote on the edge of the upholstered crater.

Jana Li Hu looked up from an attitude of concentration, licking her upper lip slowly. Annoyed at the woman's interruption, she glanced at the rest of the group. Placed at odd angles, they wore induction circlets around their heads, except for Sealock and Krzakwa, who had waveguides plugged into an unobtrusive gang-tap. Ariane Methol made a triad with them. She was a slim, mid-sized woman with a dark, lustrous mestizo complexion, fathomlessly expressive eyes,and shiny black hair worn just over shoulder length. Unrestrained by gravity, it floated in a shifting nimbus around her head. Her face was pretty and regular, though not really remarkable. It was the sort of face people had come to expect on a fashion model simulacrum: narrow, smooth, and cool.

She was a poly-tech engineer, specializing in Comnet subprogram debugging, and, in some ways, was the best in the world at what she did. There were others who knew more, others more skilled, but they were research scientists, useless in a tight commercial universe.

"OK." Hu was flat-voiced, angry. "To continue with the summary of planetography . . ." As she spoke, images illustrating the subject matter entered the minds of her listeners and textual data were superimposed on their vision fields. She wanted to present it fully, to force all the information on them, despite their disinterest. She had no illusion that some of them would retain what she said, or even understand it. But she would make the effort anyway.

"As you can see, the extreme smoothness of the ocellus on III is plain evidence, at least to me, of the enormously slow process of resolidification. This implies that either there was a forced eccentricity in this presently very regular system or else an object impacted on III that was itself a source of heat energy. To account for the paucity of craters we see here, we must posit, in addition to the extreme enhancement of cratering rates on the leading hemisphere relative to the trailing, a very long-lived glacial annealing process.

"Though superficially it looks like the basins on Tethys and Titania, it seems to be a different phenomenon. The data suggest that a small body, fifty kilometers or less in diameter, wrought profound changes in the entire object, melting a fifth of its total volume. You can see how the craters covering the remainder of the moon are lacking in relief. What you see are the remains of old craters at some depth, covered by the neon, argon, and other gases that constituted Ill's atmosphere during this period. . . ." Suddenly, Ariane spoke up. "What does that mean, a body that tiny as source of heat?" Tem said, "Any concentration of radionuclide would do,though it would have to have a relatively short half-life. I wonder what cosmological process would concentrate it?"

"I have already given this matter a great deal of thought," said Jana. "The total disruption of any second-generation macrobody that had completely fractionated would account for it. My report to the IAAU-PD will suggest as much."

"Do you think that this 'body' was part of the Iridean system?" asked John.

"Unlikely since we're dealing with a planetary system that formed out of almost pristine type-2 galactic material. Iris and her satellites show a general depletion ofall radionuclides , as well as a scarcity of transironic elements. It was probably an intruder."

"What about mascons?" asked Krzakwa. "Is there one under the ocellus?"

"There's a slight gravitational anomaly associated with it, but this object sank almost to the center of Ocypete, so it's difficult to resolve it from the silicate core in general.

"Iris itself is very different from the gas giants we're used to. Aside from its small size, hardly half again the diameter of the Earth and only about 0.58e-mass, and slow rotation rate, it's meteorologically bland. Except at the very lowest levels, where there is a slow convective overturning, the atmosphere is quiescent. Iris, or at least the eighty percent of its total mass that is gaseous, has differentiated, giving rise to the Rayleigh -scattering mantle, which is a thick layer of hydrogen and, underneath it, a thinner stratum of helium. The surface of the white ball within is made up of nitrogen cirrus not unlike the obscuring haze of Saturn. I should point out that Iris is losing considerable mass due to solar irradiation. It has only been able to maintain its current mass/diameter ratio because of the extreme cold." Aksinia laughed. "You mean it's evaporating?"

Jana nodded. "If it stayed this distance from Sol, it would dwindle to about a fifth of its present size, at which point its gravitation would be sufficient to permit retention of theremaining gases.....I can see by some of your faces that seems counterintuitive. You think that the smaller it gets the less able it should be to retain anything. Well, that's true—but it's a simple matter of the point at which the velocities in the excited gases attain escape velocity for that particular depth in the gravitational field. There are plenty of elementary texts in the library ..."

Another look about. Too many faces were blank. Some of them didn't know enough for anything to be counterintuitive. Once again, she wondered what the hell they were doing out here. . . . She sighed, and went on. "Anyway, Iris' magnetosphere is very low grade, almost nonexistent, so we won't have to waste energy on a charged-particle shield.

"The Iridean ring is very much like Saturn's, without, of course, the gaps that give Saturn's its unique appearance. Iris' ring is nearly opaque, and it has a greater proportion of millimeter and smaller particles, there not being much in the way of magnetic sweeping here. Aello is an interesting small body which shows no immediately identifiable endogenic asterologic features. It's probably the best chance we'll ever get to examine a nearly pristine, totally undifferentiated body composed of cryogenic volatiles. Podarge is much like the many similar-sized moons in the Solar System, showing resurfaced terrains and an albedo asymmetry due to preferential gardening of the 'front' hemisphere. Considering that the materials making up these satellites are extremely volatile, we've seen few surprises. The colder temperatures have been a powerful force influencing these exotic ices to behave in a familiar fashion.

"As you might guess, my report is much more detailed." Jana concluded by showing them a skilled 3V

collage of Iris and its satellites projected against the tapestry of a deep-space sky. The thing was prettier than any out-the-window view they'd seen since rounding Jupiter. There was a long moment of silence.

"Next business, then." She looked at Cornwell.

The musician nodded, pulling off his circlet, but he waited for a while before he spoke. "Maybe this isn't the correct time to bring this up. I don't know. We've got some big adaptations to make in the near future. The ten of us are going to be building a colony, perhaps not very isolated in the sense that we will still have access to many of the benefits of Comnet ona delayed basis, but isolated in the sense that we're going to have to provide each other with human society." He stopped, sighed heavily, wondering where his prepared words had gone. "The 'quest' is over. Now we have to get into the period of living happily ever after. It's hard not to see how stupidly we've been treating each other. We're all familiar with the emotional difficulties that come from being in the midst of too many people. . . . Some of us are here to escape just that. Well. I'm not sure we've come to grips with the problems of being in a permanent small group. When this adventure first occurred to me, I envisioned us becoming more closely knit, perhaps even experimenting with induction rapport. . . . The opposite is what seems to be happening." He stopped, looking at them all, seeking some kind of response. What he saw was that they were waiting for him to continue, to draw some kind of conclusion. Obviously, when you stated a problem, most people expected you to propose some kind of solution. He sought for something to say, some plea for reasonableness, but it was too late.

Sealock wasn't smiling, not even his usual contemptuous smirk, as he said, "I imagine we all saw this coming. You're dissatisfied with your life. Now you want to tinker with the rest of us. . . ." Taken aback, John started to say something, but another voice interrupted.

"It's just boredom!" said Harmon Prynne.

By this time Aksinia had broken out of whatever trance state was keeping her quiet, and she reacted to the previous remark. "Come on, Brendan. He's right, of course. We're turning into a bunch of jerks. It seems to me that not one of us has come to grips with the reality of this situation."

"Reality?What the hell ..." Sealock grinned at her and shook his head. "I wonder how many of you really understand your own perceptions?" He nodded at Prynne. "It's not boredom, and I refuse to speculate on the nature of someone's reality perception. . . . Sure, there's a lot of friction here. Some of it comes from an unwillingness to recognize that different people have different interests. Sometimes, when I say something, even something I'm supposed to be an expert in, people act like it's some kind of personal reproach."

"Maybe it's the way you do it," said Prynne. "You make me feel like shit sometimes."

"That's exactly it. Your feelings are magnified by what you imagine other people think. That doesn't need to happen." John gave Sealock a pained look. "That's your idea of a joke, I suppose. . . . Look, certain individuals may or may not be the primary instigators of ill feeling on Deepstar. Nonetheless, every one of us has some kind of relationship with every other person here. Those relationships don't seem to be working too well.... I have to believe that we're all decent, intelligent people. We all have good traits. Why can't we all be friends?"

Sealock was staring at him, slit-eyed, face frozen. It was an unpleasant look to be the target of, and he wondered just what it was he'd said to offend the man this time.

"Are you sure that's what we want?" asked Vana.

Cornwell looked at her in surprise. Over the months, he'd come to see her as a pleasant, unmotivated individual who didn't know what she wanted, maybe didn't know much of anything. . . . She went on: "All this random fucking that we do is all right with me.... I mean, it's sort of my specialty, after all." She gazed at Sealock, whose expression was even more unreadable than it had been. "I really don't know how I'm supposed to feel toward you all. Sex is one thing, sure. It's fun. But . . . friends? I just don't know. You're all so ... demanding."

"Out of the mouths of babes . . ." muttered Sealock.

Ariane broke in. "I guess I agree with Vana. We know there's sex, and something people call love, whatever it may be, and an even more ethereal concept called friendship. . . . To integrate any two of these, much less all three, seems like a very large undertaking. I'd like to think it was possible, though."

"None of you talk about love very much," said Prynne "and, when you do, you act like it's something you can control. . . . But you can't."

"I'd settle for a little more sex, if I have any choice," said Sealock, but the others ignored him, and suddenly he was awash in a flood of unwanted memories. Krzakwa caught a bit of it through the Octadeka Prime control circuit that they shared and looked at him with astonishment. He was, apparently against his will, sending out an image of a day three years before, somewhere in Tupamaro Arcology, in Montevideo. Cornwell had come to discuss the Deepstar venture with Ariane Methol, and the two of them had gone to her room . . . And there was Sealock, pressed against a cool outside wall of the chamber, visualizing the woman locked in a tight embrace with the handsome musician. His eyes shut and he was riven by a dense bolt of hatred. The image snapped out, buried under a mountain of recontrol. No one else seemed to have caught it. Krzakwa shook off the alien emotions, still a little startled, and listened again.

"It seems to me," said John, "that the demands of keeping our friendships intact are very much increased by this pair-bonding stuff." He glanced involuntarily at Beth. "You can call it 'love' if you want to, but jealousies naturally arise from people forming couples and excluding others from their emotional life."

Beth spoke for the first time. "I have given all of this a lot of thought—all of you know what happened between John and me on the way out. You know he wanted to do Downlink Rapport with me, right?

Although I think that's going too far, there is much that he has said that I think is good. We planned this colony together, and the possibilities were so ... Look. It's simple enough—he wants us to drop all our preconceived notions of what the word 'relationship' means. You know: we should all be available for one another's needs, care for one another, sleep together. He wants us all to experience the kind of intense, pain-free friendship that he imagines must exist and, in so doing, share it with him . . . to triumph over despair. To do away with what he calls 'willful pain.' I wish him luck. I'd like a world like that."

"I guess this is kind of dumb," said Krzakwa, "but I do remember how it felt with my ex-wife, back in the beginning. I imagined that I could live selflessly. I suppose it was all some kind of a lie. It certainly didn't last long. But I don't have any objections to giving a more shared life a try. . . ." There might have been more, and John was feeling some small glimmerings of hope, but Ariane, who had been monitoring a timeline curve, suddenly said, "Now."

Sealock reintegrated with a start and said, "Right."

Krzakwa and Methol bowed their heads, their eyes going unfocused. Brendan smiled faintly, abstractedly, as if he'd thought of an amusing scene from the far past, and reached out to grasp their hands in a seance-like parody. They made a momentary tableau, motionless. His eyes rolled back, leaving the others to contend with the blank-eyed visage of a madman.

The air seemed to change. What had been " Trois Gymnopedies" gave way to a gurgling roar that was being transmitted through the structure of the ship. The ion drive was firing, allowing Deepstar to fall along a parabola around Iris.

Hand in hand, like three magic jinn on a flying rug, Methol, Sealock, and Krzakwa guided Deepstar toward its goal. In an earlier generation, a simpler age, it would have been done by the automatic will of preplanned machine action; but with Comnet's ship-borne child in their fingertips, they did it all themselves, consciously. At the close of the twenty-first century, still riding the bow shock of an ever growing distaste for what had been called "robots," what a computer program might have done was often accomplished by the linkage and direct extension of human minds. So they skittered along with their souls in the wires, in the polyphase modulation waveguides, and did what had to be done. It was precise, it was fast, and it was fun.

Why ride in a spaceship when you can be one?

To a hypothetical observer outside, the approach of Deepstar would have been impressive. Falling toward Iris across a star-stippled backdrop, the ship was just a subtly glowing maze: a regular array of girders and struts, studded heavilywith the metal and plastic polyhedrons of life system, cargo, and equipment. The blunt cylinders that were fuel tanks and Hyloxso propellant canisters threw back light in sharp lines and the whole was topped by a dark, squat canister that caught something of the dim, distant sun.

Suddenly there was a dazzling glare. A great actinic burst defaced the velvet darkness, diffuse and white around its periphery, tinged a hard red-violet in the opaque core. To a mind fed vaster quantities of semi-raw data, the fire haze would resolve itself into the blazing exhaust plume of a heavy-ion motor; a dense beam of Element 196 nuclei, almost coherent as it jetted from its emission nozzle at relativistic speed. It would fluoresce in the far ultraviolet as the artificial ions decayed into alpha particles only attoseconds after their impulse was spent. While the three engineers indulged in the almost gratuitous joy of flying the ship they had, in large measure, built, the others moved about in the sudden novelty of renewed gravity. Deepstar was decelerating at something like 0.1g, and it felt strange. They had been pressed to the floor by their responsive em-suits, but now they could feel organs settling and twinges from muscles that had had no natural exercise for almost two years. The inertial field pulled at them like an alien presence. After the others wandered off, together and alone, Harmon Prynne stayed and, donning his circlet, adjusting it like some old fedora, tried to follow what was going on. He was a competent technician but, as what amounted to a household appliance repairman, he was far out of his depth even in the lowest reaches of Octa-deka Prime. Riding far above his usual duodecimal limits on the wings of a "Guardian Angel" monitor program, he was able to sample what it must be like to fly in space, a man/machine integration, with the power of an astrodyne in his muscles and the beautiful symmetry of physics doing a fire dance at his command. Somewhere, inside yet far away, he felt Ariane Methol's smile. As Brendan, Ariane, and Tem flew their ship down and around the solid-ringed, blue-haloed core of Iris, the stars clustered thickly about their heads, running in brightstreamers through their sun-blown hair, and the dusty darkness of the cold sky assumed a palpable texture as it brushed against their skins. They talked and joked and worked in this sea of midnight mist, while a forlorn, eagle-winged man circled far below.

Sealock reached down from the heights and, grappling with the mind of Harmon Prynne, hauled it up to sit among them. The man was terrified, gazing about at an unfamiliar landscape.

"Like the view?"

He nodded. "Yes." It seemed as if his words were reverberating among the worlds, thrilling him. From here, at the heart of the highest subnet the ship had to offer, he could feel all the workings of Deepstar relayed to him through an electronic complexity, almost as if they were parts of his own body. It had a certain familiarity, was like some aspects of the work he'd done in Florida, but with a subtlety and detail that he hadn't imagined would exist. In two years, no one had invited him here before. . . . He could feel Brendan's eyes on him somehow, cold, calculating . . . beady, glittering things that measured the content of his soul and found it lacking. . . .

"You want to fly this pile of shit?" A simple question, flat, it was said with condescension, perhaps with contempt, but underlying all that was a genuine, sympathetic offer.

Prynne's heart leaped, half fear and half elation. "Is that possible?"

"Sure." Sealock suddenly passed over the reins and the technician flew on, alone, become a stellar phoenix.

"Brendan!"Dim, in the background, that was Ariane's voice. It was a faint buzz-saw whine, a mosquito that he could ignore. "What're you doing? He can't handle that!"

"The fuck he can't. He can do whatever I say he can. Watch." Harmon Prynne flew on, his body, his nerves, his senses, grown into the subsystems of the ship. He knew nothing, needed to know nothing, with the 'net teaching him as each moment arrived, letting him forget the past. He soared, singing, before the world. A timeline of necessary proceduresappeared in the sky before him, but it was an alternative sky, not defacing the real sky, the ocean of stars through which he moved. Dimly, he could sense the presence of many such skies, differing presentations of the cosmos and information, to his expanded senses. He flew, imagining glory.

And somewhere, deep beneath it all, reason glimmered. Shipnet opened its senses and listened to the babble of human conversation, listened and learned. The machine mind didn't wish it had been consulted, for it had no sentience, only potential, and so had no wishes. It had, however, strong imperatives, preset urges that made it strive to fulfill its many goals. There was complexity here, and recursive logic that made up a capacity to create new goals out of synthesized data.

Deep within the ethereal circuitry of Shipnet little illegal modules stirred. Program fragments contrived in such a way as to escape the notice of the Contract Police assembled themselves bit by bit, as their functions were called upon by the crew of Deepstar. Finally the GAM-and-Redux monitor awoke, took stock of the situation, and spoke to Shipnet.

Much to its own surprise, Shipnet replied.

Satisfied, but not knowing why, Brendan said, "He'll be all right. Just stay with him, Ariane. Don't let the little goof get lost in the machinery. Hey, Tem. Let's take a break."

"Right."

The two men broke rapport and reappeared in their respective brains. They stretched, looking around, grimacing and blinking hard. Beth and Vana were still seated near the window. The stars appeared motionless, but the vast form of Iris, preceded by a sliver of shadow-sliced ring, had begun to creep over the sill.

They unplugged and leaped up to the kitchen, a feat made just a little more difficult by their small weight. They each drew a cup of black coffee, Sealock's flavored with anise, and dropped back to the floor below, calling up a pair of chairs as they did so. Brendan deopaqued another wall segment, this one framing a view of distant Ocypete's tiny disk.

They sipped at the hot, bitter drinks for a while, staring out

into the void, looking at their new home. Finally Brendan said, "You handle OdP pretty well." Tem looked at him, expressionless. "Is that so surprising? I have a higher influx potential than Ariane, you know."

"Yeah, but I rode after her with a GAM-and-Redux subplot until she'd been down all the essential pathways. You can't have done that—we both know that Luna's access to Comnet is strictly limited . . . unless you lied about never having been to Earth."

Tem smiled, showing a flash of teeth through the curly overfall of his untrimmed mustache. "Nope Lewislab—and old Maggie herself—trained me pretty well. Monitoring experiments like the Mini-null-omega Research Torus is, for the most part, like controlling Deepstar. Our tools aren't all that backward and there were several of us on the Development Team who probably would have qualified for MCD . . . if we'd been allowed access."

"Could be." Sealock nodded. "I don't know if you could've handled NYU at the same time, though. Free Cities can be pretty difficult." He looked pensive. "I understand there was a refugee from the Moon who took up residence in the Brosewere Barrens. One night they found him hanging from a street lamp, with a seppuku dagger rammed through his guts. Seemed kind of extreme to me." He grinned at Krzakwa. "Anyway ... I guess maybe we should've worked together a little more during this trip, huh?"

"I guess so." There seemed neither room nor need for further comment.

"Did you have any trouble on your first key-in? OdP's a lot different from Tri-vesigesimal ..." Krzakwa laughed. "I'll say! I almost discharged on my first downlink!" Interfacing with an unknown and complicated 'net element was an excellent way to die, come away with a drained cortex and burnt-out amygdala. "But the idea of basing a relinguistic setup on a prime numbers generator was —how shall I put it? Inspired."

The other man seemed pleased with this praise. "OdP was the Comnet Design Team's first project after I joined. Quite abaptism." He was silent for a moment, then said, "You haven't had a chance to key-in on Torus-alpha, have you?"

Tem shook his head, gesturing ironically. "How could I? I'd heard about it, of course. We drooled over the stuff you people were bringing out on Earth! How simple it would have made things for us! You should have heard the lame excuses the Lunar government kept pulling out of their fucking hats. . . . 'You can't enter a restricted experimental sector of Comnet without a license from the Contract Police. You can't get a license without coming to Earth for capacitance testing. . . .' And as an indentured engineer at Lewis-lab, I was 'needed' on the Moon into the foreseeable future." Bitterness gave an edge to his words. "Assholes . . ." He spat, then sighed. "Of course, contract-breakers don't get high-level licenses, even if they do avoid extradition and jail. Now I am forsworn. Unlike the rest of you, I can't go back home if this fails. Sure, the Police writ reaches only as far as the asteroids, but they have a mutual extradition treaty with the Jovian System MultiCorp . . . the outer worlds are my home for good." Sealock drained the last licoricy dregs of his coffee, enjoying the absence of the zero-g membrane for the first time in many months, then said, "Sounds like hard luck.... Look, I've got enough random-coplanar number-generators in my share of the hold to adapt Shipnet for Torus-alpha, once we're down on Ocypete. Want to get into it?"

"Sure. How's it work?"

"The datanet acquisition is through a powers-of-transfinite series array ..." Krzakwa looked puzzled. "I don't see how something like that could be made to work."

"Well, it doesn't." Sealock crumpled his cup into a ball and grinned at the look on the other man's face.

"At least, not the way it's supposed to. No one could get any function at all above Aleph-null. It was hilarious when the news of our fine little piece of vaporware escaped. . . . Talk about humiliation! That's why I brought all that gear. I thought maybe I'd be able to get something working on my own, away from all the other assholes on the MCD."

"OK. Give me a rundown on the basics. And remember, I'm a physicist, not one of your ilk."

"At the level we'll be working, there's not a hell of a lot of difference." Soon the two of them were immersed in a discussion that no one else aboard would have been able to follow. After a while they plugged into a gang-tap and went into partial rapport for an exchange of concepts. The ship flew on without them.

Shut up in his chamber, Demogorgon prepared for masturbation. It was a form of the Illimitor art, in fact, the very thing that had led him to this new form of expression. Though the full complexity of the Illimitor World, the world of Arhos, of Mereqxi, Larys, and the Kaimodrang Empire, took Tri-vesigesimal, this was simple enough to be handled by duodecimal subunits of the 'net. He could have entered via circlet, he supposed, but somehow preferred to use an induction lead. The images, the feelings, were crisper.

As he plugged in a wall-tap, Demogorgon was amused, remembering Brendan's inevitable pun about

"jacking off." New meanings to old words . . .

He submerged.

In a soft, rumpled bed of silken sheets he was joined by two other people, abstracted from their normal functioning as denizens of Arhos. One was a slim, magnetic presence, a man, Chisuat Raabo, ebon-haired and ethereal, his mate in the Land of Kings. The other was a woman, Piruat Nahuaa , pale blond, thin and boyish-looking, the swell of her breasts almost nonexistent, her pubic hair so fine and transparent as to give her a preadolescent look. But for coloration, the two might have been taken for brother and sister. They were both very young.

In the Jeweled City on the Mountain, at the place where the skies converged, it was the Soldier's Way—to have a bisexual lover and, with him, a female counterpart, an heir-maker. . . . They lay tangled together in a joyous maze of limbs, running their hands over smooth, warm flesh, inhaling the tactile perfumes that this world made; and the man and woman paidspecial attention to the muscular body that was so much a part of Demogorgon's persona here. . . . When Raabo's huge penis rose, they attacked it together with an avid, ferocious hunger. Slowly, Demogorgon felt his soul begin to spread out, meshing with his lovers, enveloping them, and the usual thoughts were still there:

With Comnet, he need never be alone. What could the world have been like, not so long ago, before the advent of this alternative reality, before he had created it? How had he lived? Just before a sensory explosion took his mind away, he tried to imagine life without this ready availability of human contact; to imagine a world where he couldn't plug in and reach out for love.

He failed.

Deepstarfell on a long, complex curve around Iris and back up into space, shedding many thousands of metric tons of fuel and several hundred kilometers per second of relative velocity. The Element 196

had been stored in an energy-stabilized form resembling degenerate matter, compressed into a very small volume, but nothing could alter its mass, or the necessity of expending it. Newton always won out in the end, though centuries of science and engineering had taken some of the sting from his fiats. The ship threaded under Iris' ring, its heavy-ion drive vaporizing a path through the downward-spiraling ice particles that ever so slowly depleted the structure, and swept just a few hundred kilometers above a bellying azure sky. When they approached apirideon , not far from Ocypete itself, they kept the dense beam oriented to one side of their destination, avoiding damage to their future home. The plume of intense sub-c radiation stabbed toward interstellar space and was gone. A properly instrumented observer many parsecs away and generations removed would have noticed it, since these bursts of semicoherent energy emerging from the Solar System advertised the presence of Man as never before.

Deepstartook up a vastly elongated orbit around Iris that would evolve, via the judicious expenditure of Hyloxso, into a nearly circular ellipse of some hundred and eighty kilometers' radius about Ocypete. Ariane and Brendan disengaged from the control subprogram of Shipnet, though the latter still maintained a lesser link to keep an eye on their progress. The common room was completely destructured now, a giant padded cell, and they were all gathered to one side, where, punctuated by the hatches of personal compartments, a hundred and twenty degrees of wall had been made transparent. Beyond that wall the dim, gray sphere of Ocypete loomed, no longer an idea, no longer an astronomical body, but a place. The world that turned slowly below was a sea of low-walled craters, a vast marsh of ancient, partially healed wounds in a circular shield of chemical ice. They lay shoulder to shoulder, overlapping, defacing one another, craters within craters like beer-glass rings on a veined marble bar. If there had been other processes involved in the making of this surface, they had left no evidence.

"This is the leading hemisphere," said Jana, "long gardened by impacts and mantled with the former atmosphere."

Demogorgon looked out on Iris III from fathomless dark eyes and thought, Is this a land for mystic adventure? No . . . yes. He didn't know, but it did have a deadly sameness about it that disturbed him. Was this all there was?

As if to answer his unspoken question, he noticed a bright, crack-reticulated bulge creeping over the eastern limb. Perhaps there will be something, he thought.

The bright cracks gave way to a darker, smoother terrain that came creeping over the edge of Ocypete. Somewhat broken and jumbled, it was essentially crater free. As they watched, this morphology grew more uniform, a vast, flat plain, and they could see the edges of it curving back to form the great basin that dominated the little moon's surface.

"Mare Nostrum," murmured Demogorgon. "Like the sunrise."

"And so you've named our new home," said Beth.

Jana said, "The official policy is that we must submit names for the most prominent features. If you prefer, I will name the rest...."

"This place would be a lot of fun if you could get into pill-mixers' Latin," said Prynne.

"Or if you were one of those demented nomenclature addicts," said Jana. "Do you know there are over four million named features in the Solar System? And that's not counting Earth. It's become an onerous task."

"If you want," said Demogorgon, looking intently at her, "I've developed several self-consistent mythologies for my Illimitor art. You're welcome to use them."

Jana's gaze shifted back to Ocypete. "It's an idea."

Brendan sighed and stretched, rubbing his eyes. "Come on, shitheads, it's time. Let's get down there." Krzakwa grinned. " 'Shitheads,' he says . . . you want to fly this monster or shall I?"

"Yeah," said Sealock. "Bend over, Tem. I'll drive you home." They plugged into Shipnet and were gone.

In a little while, no more than a hundred minutes, they were in a perfectly circular orbit some ten kilometers above the fast-moving craterscape. Great broken features, too complex to absorb fully, slid past quickly, frictionlessly, and the clear wall again drew spectators. Suddenly the fretted terrain that surrounded the water ocellus broke into their view, and then the giant basin swept under them like a convex serving dish, featureless save for a few wandering rilles. After a few more moments Jana pointed out shadows on the mare. Someone called up a higher gain on the window optics and a cluster of translucent, dark-nippled cones filled the view.

"They look like half-melted volcanoes," said Vana.

Hu called for a still closer view, with definition precise enough to see the summit openings for what they were. She stared in silence, then said, "Not impossible. Once the meltwater in the ocellus crusted over, the sea below could have behaved as a magma source, though erupting liquid water, even at these temperatures, is too thin to pile up into domes. More likely some kind of slurry extrusion." Deepstardropped out of the black sky on a downward-pointing fountain of pale yellow fire. It followed a long arc of lessening transverse motion and, when the last of it was gone, went high-gate, slipping vertically toward the smooth, shining ice of the bright mare basin. In the end the ship hovered a thousand meters above the surface, just for a moment, then the Hyloxso engines shut down and the fire was replaced by a much cooler jet of hydrogen. They descended further.

There was still too much heat to be trusted. At one hundred meters the throttle valves closed entirely, and they fell.

The gravity gradient of this small world was insignificant, but inertia made a display of the impact nonetheless. The ship bounced high, more than double its own length, kept erect by its gyros and the intermittent thud of RCS thrusters. It floated down, rebounded once more, and finally came to rest on the ice. It teetered just a bit on its splay of strut-legs and then was still. To those within, pinioned to the soft plastic floor of the common room by their em-suits, their arrival on Ocypete came with a noise like a small car being eaten by a train. After the second jolt, all was silent save for the faint pings of stressed metal resuming its shape in the crystalline latticework.

"Son of a bitch," said Cornwell, "we're here."

Sealock popped the plugs from his head and said, "No shit." They went to the window and looked out.

TWO

John Cornwell stood in the airlock and suited up. He pulled on the baggy red coverall and crimped shut the helmet, now a floppy, transparent hood. Checking himself in the safety mirror, he had to laugh. He looked like an anorexic Santa Claus. He touched a control node at his waist, and the fabric leaped up against his skin, shrink-wrapping him in an elastic pressure bandage. The hood inflated into a hard, spherical bubble.

The mirror now showed him thin, clad in form-fitting scarlet, an archetypal spaceman. Lifesystems was a small cylinder on one hip, containing a thermal regulator and an oxygen reserve held in a Hyloxso-like matrix sufficient for a ten-hour stay outside. Krzakwa had explained that it even contained a powerful gyro platform. It was a marvel of miniaturization beyond his powers of imagination, but it worked. There had been much discussion about the difficulties imposed by an environment that averaged only 25 degrees Kelvin during the daytime, but Tem had quickly dispelled their fears with a lecture on the subject. The problem was not one of dissipating heat, as was the case in the inner Solar System, but of maintaining a core of 40 degrees C simultaneously with a suit exterior temperature that retained full flexibility. Less than 450 kcal/hr was required, easily generated by the suit's sophisticated six-phase battery. Standing on the surface, with both feet in contact with the ice, added only another 10 kcal/hr or so to the total. Even though he admitted that lying down on the surface for long periods might not be wise, it took Krzakwa awhile to convince the less scientific members of the crew that "common-sense" notions of thermodynamics were useless.

"This is John. Do you read me?"

Prynne said, "Yes. Go on out. We're all waiting."

The privilege of being first out had gone to John by virtue of his titular leadership and the others'

insistence. John sent a command to Shipnet and the air whispered out through a valve. When it was gone, things looked no different, but he knew that he was in a lethal environment. He shivered. Another thought brought the hatch to life, and it irised open to show him the ruler-straight edge between dim gray ice and starry night. On the girders framing the airlock there was a fine white dust. The exhaust air had frozen. OK, he thought. So it's that cold.

Sixty meters separated him from the ground, and for a moment he considered jumping. His calculator mused: With a surface gravity of 0.027g, he would land with approximately the force of a five-foot fall on Earth. That might hurt, and he certainly wouldn't be able to jump back up. . . .

"Hey. How am I supposed to get down?" he asked. Insofar as he had been part of the design team for Deepstar, this was one consideration that he'd never heard mentioned. There were handholds studding the ion drive unit, and, if it came to that, they would have to do. It all seemed dangerous. Ariane's voice was in his head. "Sorry. There's a catwalk on the vertex of the frame between the Hyloxso matrix and one of the water tanks. It leads as far as the engine-mountstructure. From there, you can either climb down a landing strut or jump."

He put a hand on the edge of the hatch and stepped out on the thick metal meshwork that formed the collar holding the CM in place, then looked down. This is foolish, he thought. I'm acting like this is Earth. Even if I fall, there won't be any damage. I could even land on my head! The helmet would protect me. The words rang hollow. It still looked like a deadly sixty-meter drop.

He stepped down, feeling for a foothold, and descended. Finally he came to the complex quadrigram that bound together the far end of the craft. From there it was a matter of leaping the remaining ten meters, which he did. The fall took a perceptibly long time and resulted in only a modest jar. When his feet touched the ice he felt his skin grow warm as the suit's thermostasis system came on. A shimmering, half-seen mist appeared for a moment around his feet, then instantly dissipated, carrying with it some residual heat that Deepstar's structure had radiated onto his exterior. Concentrating on the actual process of getting down, he had forgotten about the ceremony of arrival on this alien world, of being the first man to set foot on what was, in effect, a planet of another solar system. Whatever possible dignity or formality the moment called for was gone. The words he'd used to begin Triton came into his mind, and he spoke them:

When the worlds, too few, have been walked; When the outcome is written on the walls of the wind; Come with me, leave the net . . .

We'll begin again.

Smelling the soft tang of his sweat, he flexed the material of a glove and rubbed his thumb against his fingertips. Though the increased girth of his hand felt clumsy, feeling was hardly impaired at all. It took an effort of will to come to grips with the intensely different conditions that that thin barrier separated. The material of his bubble helmet was nohindrance at all to seeing. The enormity of the world, even with Ocypete's close horizon, filled him.

The surface of the ocellus was more pristine and flat than he could have imagined. The ice was a dim, white sheet, like linen, stretching out in a wrinkleless vista. Triton would have been nothing like this.

"John? Here's something peculiar for you." Ariane's voice interrupted his meditations. The 3V image of a strange bluish blanket retreating appeared, almost like an ocean breaker in reverse, perhaps a meter deep. The trailing edge of the blanket crumpled and shrank in on itself in a fast rush of sublimation, leaving flat ice, like that on which he stood.

Hu's voice accompanied the vision. "That, John, is the retreat of the regolith; mostly neon but some deuterium as well. Trace amounts of methane, CO, and argon are being left behind. The driving force was our infrared output. It should stop well beyond the horizon, maybe half a myriameter from here. The neon was very close to its sublimation point even before we landed." Harmon said, "I guess that's a good indication of what would've happened if we'd tried to land in the highlands."

Cornwell was struck by a sense of amazement. Of such insubstantial stuff was this world made! He looked up and traced a few constellations in the sky, almost hidden in the thousands of dimmer stars not visible from the surface of Earth. Draco, Cassiopeia, the Great Bear; they were still there, friends that he'd made in childhood. He felt his composure returning. There was some continuity, after all. Iris hung some fifty degrees above the eastern horizon. It was close to four degrees across, eight times the size of the full Moon seen from Earth, and it dominated the sky like a huge jewel, in first impression like a cat's-eye sapphire. Peering more closely, however, it looked more like a bright fingernail paring nestled in a dim blue sphere, its nightside obliterated by atmospheric scattering. In the close, sparkling blackness there were two very tiny crescents, Podarge and Aello, ever falling and escaping in the balanced dance of orbital mechanics. The sun was a blinding tick near the arrow point of the barely visible ring.

The world in the sky surpassed by far his expectations. Nothing in the Solar System combined the stark solidity and ethereal beauty of Iris.

Cornwell turned away. He was not here just to sightsee. "Ariane, would you monitor this transmission and see that I get it right?"

Upon receiving an affirmative, he began: "Under the aegis of the Pansolar Conventions, edition 2067, specifically Paragraph N6of the Colonizing, Homesteading, and Exploring Guidelines, I claim Ocypete homesteading guarantees for the Deepstar Company: full CIDs to follow proclamation. Total travel distance was 6.2977 terameters; diameter of homestead world is 1.923 megameters. Crew homesteads to be apportioned alphabetically, spokewise from longitude 311.57756 defined from sub-Iris point at periastron, and latitude 12.6546, defined from equator at 2097.664 years."

"It was successfully recorded and transmitted, John," said Ariane. "I guess that makes us permanent." The man looked back at Deepstar. Clinging to a girder far above, Sealock and Krzakwa, clad in bulky powered worksuits that augmented their strength and made them nearly invulnerable, were already working on opening one of the container modules. They seemed intent on the business at hand, but one of them paused to wave. He waved back.

Finally, suddenly, something like happiness spilled over him. He activated the gyro on his belt and, with a hard kick, jumped into the star-prickled sky. There was little sensation of motion as the ground receded, dreamlike. In a huge arc, he flew across the steely white, frozen sea, head kept up by the gyro, and, after a time sufficient to fully experience the sensation, he landed with a jolt a full twenty-five meters from his starting point.

A few more jumps put him a great distance across the ice, though its featurelessness provided no real indication as to how far. He turned back and was surprised to see Deepstar shrunken considerably, almost halfway to the horizon. This time he pushed harder, back toward the ship, each minute-long leap gaining a little height and more speed. With no way to stop quickly, he bypassed his goal, slowing himself in aseries of jumps, until he came to a stop. He made his way back in little tiptoeing hops, covering two meters at a time.

With his earlier acrophobia gone, climbing the structure of the ship was a simple matter of swinging from girder to girder, brachiating upward. Soon he was bark on the platform from which he had looked down so cautiously before. The two inhabited worksuits saluted him. Their thick, flexible joints segmented the grayish, stove-bellied exoskeletons into small, mostly cylindrical components. Since the suits had no faceplates, relying on four 3V photorecorder cells mounted at ninety-degree intervals about the helmet canister, he could not distinguish who was inside. A quick look into Shipnet's Status Registers told him what he wanted to know.

Brendan Sealock, still habituated to postures he'd developed on Earth, sat on a structural girder. Krzakwa, used to Lunar conventions, remained on his feet. Despite all the bulk of the suits, they looked quite comfortable. Krzakwa turned, light on his feet but not fully adjusted to the suit's large moment of inertia.

"Well, what can I do?" asked John.

Sealock pointed toward the hatch of the airlock. "Stay out of the way. Tem and I and the work-packs will handle what needs to be done."

John shrugged and said, "OK. I'm going in." He made his way through the airlock hatch and it closed behind him.

Tem watched as the musician was occulted by the vignetting door. "I guess we'd better get busy, huh?"

"Christ!" said Sealock. "I thought there'd at least be some craters!"

"There are a few," said Tem, "small ones, scattered here and there, not to mention the hydro-volcanic structures in the center of the mare. Haven't you tapped Jana's report?"

"Sure. . . . What does that have to do with my expectations? I'm just talking about what I wanted to see here. Hell, if we went on a hike up into the highlands, before you know it we'd be up to our assholes in neonated methane." He laughed softly, to himself. "We'd be drowned alive in a mess of phase-changing that'd drain the thermos in ten minutes.

. . . And then there's this parking lot. Some world to conquer, huh?"

"I read an article about boil gliding once, by some guy living on Pluto. You dive into a pool of volatile material with wings strapped to your suit—the stuff vaporizes and acts as both atmosphere and propellant. That would be pretty easy in neon."

"Mm . . . Whatever became of this guy?"

"Killed, I think, in a boil-gliding accident."

"Nice. Sounds like my kind of sport! Anyway, you saw our friend Johnny out there—you can fly, after a fashion. Bouncing around on the ice ought to keep us imbeciles happily occupied for years ...." Krzakwa laughed. "Well, there's lots to screw around with, when the time comes to confront our ultimate sense of boredom. You know as well as I do that these worksuits can be equipped with a thermodynamic damper field. We can trudge up into the neon crags if we want to." Sealock sighed heavily. "Yeah, yeah. I know all that. I think I'm just having some kind of laziness attack."

Krzakwa thought about it for a moment, realizing that wasn't quite the word for what seemed to be going on. "You mean, other-world weariness?"

"Right." The man laughed. On sudden impulse, he had Shipnet construct an image of Krzakwa's head through his suit optics. Processing made it look as if the man's opaque, equipment-packed helmet had turned to glass. He seemed to be smiling. "We might as well be off," he said, "though why I don't know. There's no hurry. . . ."

"No. This place isn't going to run away." Tem had a sudden, uneasy visualization of the long decades ahead, isolated together. "I guess it'd make sense to set up the boom crane first?"

"Yup." Activating the proper circuits, they made for the downlink channels and submerged in Shipnet's maze.

The basic structure of Deepstar was made of metal-plastic girders that had been extruded by an automatic industrial beam-builder machine, for over a century the indispensable workhorse of space construction. The skeleton of the shipwas an inexpensive matrix to which almost anything could be attached, so ... There were isostatically stabilized supplies of ion fuel, Hyloxso matrices, a peak-pulse toroidal astrodyne, a small beam-builder, a bubbleplastic mixer, and a big storage cell for the raw goo that it used. Among the various pressurized modules there was a decorative hydroponic garden, and a terrarium whose genetically tailored creatures could produce certain organic substances for the kitchen most efficiently. Of necessity, there was the inevitable complexity of a Magnaflux generator. Human beings had evolved across billions of years wrapped in the comforting arms of Earth's magnetosphere. When space travel came, they began to leave it, and at first there seemed to be no great problem. The years flowed into decades and the colonists of the inner Solar System began to complain of unexplained torpor. Low gravity, the experts said, no exercise, poor diet, even Weltschmerz. . . . Odd diseases and neuroses appeared, and colonies did not do well. Children died or grew up "weird," and people had to go home, if they could. The future of space as a human habitat began to look endangered. The electromagnetic screens had originally been designed as powerful force fields to ward off the charged particles continually bombarding the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Because em was not fully understood in those days, Quantum Transformational Dynamics and the Unified Field Theory still being a bit foggy, the engineers carefully tailored the inside of the force screens to resemble the magnetic environment of Earth. Inside the shields, people flourished. Now, wherever man went, there Magnaflux went also.

Sitting on the dull, metallic ice, the ship began to change. Under the urging of the two men, mechanical spiders, scuttling at impossible angles and hanging upside down like their arachnid prototypes, attacked the structure of the tower. They crawled along the edges of one of Deepstar's four protruding arms and, with particle-beam torches flaring blue-white, cut through all the girders on one internal vertex. On the other side of the structure they modified the density and molecular format of the material until it could flex along oneplane. When they finished, the nacelle swung slowly open, exposing its contents to the outer world.

Sealock and Krzakwa unfolded the arms of the crane, extending the slender, shining manipulators down to the ice so that the machine could walk itself into an upright position. The first real step in unloading the ship was, perhaps, also the most tedious. It was necessary for the barely mobile crane to attach and lower its own components, in order for it to assemble itself into its real, complex shape, to walk into magical life.

Assembled, its various segments unfolded, the crane was a huge, square thing of rods and pulleys that rumbled about on heavy treads. It crawled around the base of Deepstar, lifting down poles and cargo pods and the endlessly refolded fasciae that would become dome bases. When most of the smaller items that made up their manifest were piled haphazardly on the ice, it was time to begin a major task: Sealock and Krzakwa set up a relay module from which they ran a network of wire-thin power conduits, black spaghetti scattering formlessly around them, growing into a structured web. This was not yet an environment that could tolerate even narrowcast energy. There was still plenty of ambient neon gas around, enough to absorb and reradiate the contents of a strong microwave beam. They set up a trivetlike base about a kilometer from the ship. It was the surface mounting platform for the hot, heavy fusion reactor. They installed the insulating-field generator that would keep its heat from getting at the ice, then decided to break for lunch.

Inside, Tem and Brendan sprawled on the edge of the crater room, dank and sweaty, tired more from the idea of hard work than its reality, and ate. They were joined by the remainder of the crew. To Sealock, they seemed oddly posed, almost as if they were waiting for commands. Cornwell, stung by the curt dismissal that his attempt at volunteering for work had brought, said, "Well. Are you ready to let us participate yet?"

Brendan looked up from his vulturelike pose over a bowl of noodles and cheese and peered quizzically at the musicianfrom eyes almost hidden beneath shaggy, red-blond brows. Hadn't the man been paying attention? He seemed to remember there being more than just himself out there. . . . Now what? Oh. He grinned, said, "Sure," and slurped up another butter-slimed mouthful. Harmon looked back and forth between their faces for a moment, sensing some oddity going on, then asked, "You've gotten a good look out there. What do you think of our new home?" Sealock turned to stare at him. "I think it's Hat."

Demogorgon looked at him reproachfully. "Brendan . . . be nice."

"Well, what the hell does he expect me to say? I mean, really! Sometimes I feel like I'm up to my asshole in all this bullshit...."

"How appropriate," murmured Hu, with a malevolent, slit-eyed smile. Sealock glared at her for a second, then let his face relax into a toothy grin. "You just love it when I talk dirty, don't you?"

"People . . ." Cornwell said.

Turning to look at him, Brendan said, "Still want your question answered? There are five worksuits aboard. In order to do anything useful, you'll need one of them, so three of you can help, at any given time. If anyone else wants anything to do, there's off-line data analysis to be done." He shook his head, grinning. "I really don't know why anyone would want to be in on this . . . it's mostly going to be an exercise in tedium."

"I'll do some of the data work," said Ariane.

"Leave me out of this," said Jana stiffly. "I still have a lot of work to do on the IAAU report."

"OK. That leaves Vana, Demo, John, Harmon, Axie, and me," said Beth. "Shall we do a random choice?"

"Sure," said Prynne.

A quick peek at the 'net's pseudorandom number generator selected John, Demogorgon, and Axie. Consulting the machinery was a very important arbitration method among them, and they all realized that it would be pointless andharmful to question its outcome. In this case, everyone seemed satisfied with the results.

Sealock scaled his dish toward a vent intake, which snatched it expertly from the air. Tiny globules of oil, which in weightlessness would have followed it, fell away and began to drift about like dust motes. Sooner or later the circulation filters would get them, or somebody's lungs would. "Let's go," he said. They stood, and Ariane said, "You know, when this is all finished, we should have some sort of a real ceremony; maybe a celebration. . . ."

Vana spun around suddenly, buoyant brown breasts swaying. "I know! Let's have an orgy!"

"That's not quite what I had in mind."

John laughed. "Hell, why not? Long as everyone's willing. . . ." Grinning, Sealock stretched, muscles rolling heavily beneath his skin. "A true Berenguerism. Never fails. Steamy crotch juice for the frozen man . . ."

Demogorgon snickered at the purloined and altered imagery. The ancient poem had been part of the original inspiration for the Illimitor World and, with a little effort, he remembered the original verse. " 'My favorite water,' huh?"

Sealock bellowed with coarse amusement.

Ariane, standing close to him, suddenly murmured, "Brendan, could I talk to you alone?" He looked down at her, his smile fading, and said, "Later."

The astrodyne, built by KMS Fusion System's Aerospace Division at their big, dangerous factories not far from Gamma-enclave Kosmograd II in geosynchronous orbit, was mounted in an exterior pod roughly on the opposite side of Deepstar from the nacelle they'd opened to liberate the crane. It was an octagonal cylinder four meters in diameter by about six long, and housed the heart of their new colony—a 50,000-megawatt, self-maintaining peak-pulse toroidal fusion reactor. External field coils were a thing of the past and the thing had virtually no moving parts. Assuming plenty of fuel, its projected life span was in excess of a hundred thousand years,though the manufacturer would not even guarantee a century of trouble-free operation.

As Krzakwa drove the crane into position, Sealock, helmet-less in the pressurized cab, directed five work-packs through some preparatory activity. They disconnected the reactor from all but two of its attach points and replaced the current-infeed cable with a much longer one that would be payed out from a reel as the device was moved. There was no provision for putting Deepstar into a powered-down condition. Demogorgonwas suited up and crawling around on the structure, unnecessarily overseeing the work of the machines and, as he said, amusing himself. John and Axie were standing below, unable to do anything but watch.

When everything was ready, they paused. Sealock lit up a small dark cigar that filled the cabin with thin aromatic clouds which were swiftly swept toward the air-conditioning grille.

"Give me one of those," said Krzakwa. He lit the stick from the end of the other man's cigar, no easy task, and puffed away on it inexpertly, redoubling the cabin smog. It made him cough, but he sighed.

"Kind of nice to be able to smoke outside of a restricted solarium." Sealock snorted. "The Lunar authorities are idiots. Those rules were obsolete a hundred years ago." He thought for a moment, then said, "You could smoke in a space suit if you wanted to—just turn the LS

cycle all the way up."

Krzakwa nodded. "You're probably right, but that has nothing to do with rules. Environmental Controls and Standards runs the Moon. Any relaxation of regulations, no matter how old and obsolete, lessens their power. You know, when I was an ECS apprentice in Picard, during my teens, I had more authority than as a scientist later on. How often do you hear of a bureaucratic state loosing its grip on the people?"

"Never. . . . Well, maybe if they thought it'd raise profits a little."

"Even then it has to be painful for them." He stared up at the image of Deepstar, seeming pensive.

"You have to wonder why the human race let itself get turned into a system of interlocking corporate directorships."

Sealock puffed on his cigar, spewing out a broken string of little gray clouds, and said, "I don't think it's ever been any different, not now, not at any other time in history. How much difference is there, really, between Genghis Khan and Henry Ford?"

"Hey," said a voice from the ether, "what're you two doing in there?" It was Axie, and the crane optics showed her waving to them.

"We're having a smoke," said Brendan. "Take a break. We'll pick it up later."

"I'm kind of surprised that you see things so much like I do," said Tem. "Somehow, I visualized it being different on Earth. Enclaves, free cities, all that hellfire and brimstone . . ." Sealock grinned at the imagery. "I can see how it might look different from the outside. Put in the vernacular: it ain't. I lived in enclaves, where they kept me safe. In order to preserve that safety, they had to control me. I lived in a free city, where I was free to do whatever I felt like. So was everybody else, and that freedom controlled me too."

Krzakwa scratched his chin, rooting through the tangled beard hairs. "I know what you're talking about, I guess, but what the hell does that have to do with the existence of a bureaucratic state and a system of interlocking corporate directorships?"

"Nothing, maybe, but I think it has a whole lot to do with it. People can't seem to exist without something controlling them; they can't get along 'on their own,' unless they are alone. . . . All my life, I've been as wild and goofy as anyone I ever met, and I can't do it. Why should anyone else?" Krzakwa tried to interrupt, to offer an observation, but Sealock's words rattled on: "What difference is there between the control modes of an empire or a company, between a Communist directorate, a representative democracy, a military hierarchy, or, for that matter, the magical dreams of John Fucking Harry Cornwell?"

Krzakwa felt taken aback once again by the man's ragelike behavior. Now what had brought this on?

Why would anybody want to say something like that? "I don't get you. A hell of a lot of difference, it seems to me...."

Sealock's breathing had quickened, his face darkened, but now he sat back, eyes closed, and took a deep drag on the cigar, pulling its heavy smoke far down into his lungs. Finally he let it out with a soft rush, the smoke reduced to a phantasm of its original self by systemic adsorption. "Ahhh . . . Boy, these things are really great. They grow the tobacco down in what used to be Guatemala, from twentieth-century Cuban seed stock." He looked at the Selenite and smiled. "Yeah. Maybe Cornwell believes that too. Shit. He'd have to, or else he'd be nuts. History tends to repeat itself in exact patterns. People quit corporations and enclaves all the time, take their knowledge and set up on their own. If they fail, no loss to the organization they ran out on. If they succeed, they're co-opted, brought back into the fold as more or less equal partners. Same thing goes for interplanetary colonies. Our descendants, if any, will one day join the Contract Police."

"Really?" Krzakwa laughed suddenly. "Our descendants are going to be pretty far from here someday. Iris' orbit is hyperbolic...."

Sealock sat up and slowly took the cigar out of his mouth. "Christ ... I forgot! Maybe we'll have to start our own Contract Police."

"Will we? I don't know. Will we be joined by others out here? Probably, but maybe not. Right now, we're a tiny crew on a great big starship."

Brendan nodded slowly. "I always wanted to run away on a starship. All those wonderful old stories .

. . There always has to be somewhere else to go." He looked at the Selenite. "You remember what happened to the Prometheus?"

Rolling the cigar to the corner of his mouth, Krzakwa said, "Sure. The stupidest thing that anyone ever did. Fourteen months out, it entered the Oort cloud at a little over 0.2 c and ran into an object the size of a pea. . . . My father was on Geographos then, setting up a mass driver for Off-Lunar Ops. He said the explosion was brighter than the 2017 supernova in Aquila ." It was a litany of what seemed to be man's ultimate limitation.

Brendan nodded slowly into the silence. Human engineers could, it was true, design and build ships capable of accelerating to relativistic speeds. The energy was there. But space was full of debris, no one knew quite how much. The huge sphere that spawned the comets also teemed with tiny bits of ice and rock that had been swept outward by the sun's Tauri winds in the early days of the Solar System. At 0.99 c, a golf ball has the mass of a planet—and how do you dodge a planet moving toward you at near the speed of light? Probes were moving outward, through the Oort cloud, across interstellar space to the nearby stars, and man would follow, but slowly. . . .

"Well," said Sealock, "we'd better get busy. Hey, Demo! You going to get off that thing so we can move it?"

The Arab waved from his position atop the 'dyne. "I'd like to ride it over," he said. His voice, fed to their auditory centers, sounded conversational.

"OK. But sit down and hold on."

"Why bother?" asked Krzakwa. "He won't get hurt if he falls off, not in this gravity." He put one crane arm on the bottom of the reactor, grabbed an upper attach point with the other, and wrapped two steadying limbs about the fuel tanks for extra stability. "All right," he said, "let her go." Sealock directed his spiders to disconnect the last two fittings, and the thing was free. "OK," he said,

"pull it out."

Tem eased the reactor away from the ship and then swung the whole crane about, intent on getting pointed in the right direction . . . but large, dense objects have correspondingly high masses, masses which steadfastly obey the simple, easily forgettable laws of mechanics; laws which begin, "An object in motion . . ."

Two of the crane arms snapped simultaneously, and the astrodyne went sailing majestically away, apparently undisturbed. One of the flailing booms caught Demogorgon a glancing bow, and he went off into the dark sky, screaming.

"Holy shit!" Krzakwa was frozen for a moment. He spatthe cigar butt out, gunned the crane's engines, and went lumbering off after the flying reactor.

Sealock routed himself through Shipnet to the CM's teleoptic system and accessed a monitor grid array showing the object's motion dynamics as a simple trajectory. "No sweat," he said. "Plenty of time." He fed the now generated capture data to Krzakwa. "Shut up, Tabari, you're in a worksuit. Turn on the control-moment gyros and you'll come down on your feet someday."

Demogorgon stopped screaming and looked around. He realized that he was still flying upward and that the ship was far away. After a while he began to enjoy the view.

The crane quickly caught up with the astrodyne, though there seemed to be little time to spare. Krzakwa wrapped the remaining arms around the reactor, then set the treads to "freewheel" and slowly applied the brakes. The crane shuddered, vibrating, the pressure of fricative surfaces transmitted to their ears by the various sound-shorts of the vehicle's structure as a high-pitched vibrato squeal. When the kinetic energy had been spent they came to a stop. He carefully drove over to the reactor base, now close, and set his charge down. He looked at Sealock.

The man had an odd look, almost smiling. "Well," he said.

"Yeah. What do you suppose would've happened if it'd crashed?"

"I don't know. There's not too much in there to break. . . . It's a tough machine, but if the cable had come off, Deepstar would've shut down . . ."

". . . and then the ion fuel would've exploded." He looked pale. "Maybe we'd better be a little more careful, huh?"

Sealock wiped the cold sweat from his upper lip and nodded. "Yeah."

The colonists ate supper in a subdued silence. No one was talking much, though the engineers tried to make light of their near disaster. Afterward, while the others sat around to chat and plan, Sealock rose and went to his private compartment, where he shut himself in. He toyed with some electronic components he'd been working on, trying to concentrate, to regulate his ideas, then sighed and, stringing up a hammock that he particularly liked, lay down. That was one of the good things about getting gravity back. He'd never liked em-beds, no matter how popular they were, and useful for sex. There was something about the sway of a hammock, especially in low g . . .

Personal lapses of judgment, especially ones that he might consider his own, put him in a bad mood. If they'd still been on Earth, he'd've gone to the gym, found an unsuspecting sparring partner, and beaten the hell out of him. That form of release was not available to him here. He lay there for a while, feeling restless to no effect, then the door chirped at him. "Who is it?" he snarled.

"Thy aziz , O fated one." The voice was pitched soft and high.

"Go away."

"Please, Brendan."

He clenched his jaws momentarily, considering an array of possible angry responses, then said, "All right. Come in."

The door quarter-paneled open and Demogorgon slid through. He walked lightly across to Sealock and looked down at him, putting one tapering fingered hand on his broad, ridged chest. He smiled and started to slide his hand downward, but Brendan shook him off angrily. "No. Get out." The Arab looked pained. "I want to help. I know something's wrong. . . ."

"Nothing's wrong," he snapped in exasperation. In truth, it was such a small thing . . . but how could he have forgotten the basic laws of motion? It wasn't just Krzakwa's lapse, stupidity was to be expected from other people, even the best of them, but he'd forgotten as well.

"Look," Demogorgon was saying. "I've seen you get into these moods before." He put his hand on the other man again. "I can fix you right up."

Sealock laughed harshly. "Wrong mood, asshole. Go away."

"But I want to. . . ."

"And I don't! Go find someone else."

"There is no one else. Please."

"No." Brendan sat up. "There's going to have to be someone else, sooner or later. I told you not to come, but you wouldn't listen to me—now you're the only fag in the world."

"You're being cruel."

"I'm being honest. For a change. I can't take care of you forever. I won't." Lying back down. Brendan stared at the wall. "Why don't you go try one of the girls? You'll like it. I promise."

"You know I can't."

"I know you won't try. Well, now you have to. Go away."

After a while Demogorgon did leave.

Alone again, Sealock's inner turmoil grew until it reached a point that was almost despair. Nobody to beat up, not in a mood for sex . . . shit. People, if they are fortunate, always have a few ways of dealing with inexplicable personal tumult. The accident with the reactor wasn't really bothering him ... he knew that, and knew further that he was suffering from nothing more than a sort of sourceless anxiety, unfocused, a neurosis-like reaction to his attention having been called to the fundamental directionlessness that seems to infest every human life, no matter how strongly patterned, no matter how purposeful and ordered its days seemed to be.

He rose and, going to a storage cabinet, drew out twelve brain-tap waveguides. Some people take drugs, surrender themselves to the induced monomania of utterly false visions —psychotropic chemistry can erect a structure where none exists. Brendan Sealock had Comnet, and it was a thing he understood well. The past can make the present seem like a logical end point to all that has gone before, even when it is not.

Lying down again, he plugged the jacks into his skull, each making a satisfying click as it snapped into place. Octa-deka Prime OS flooded into his soul, and he drifted down the long, dark tunnels of his life. One of the functions that he himself had designed, a sort of therapy that he'd pioneered as a late adolescent at NYU, was an absolute mental cross indexing. Now he drifted through abrilliantly colored sea of experience, watching all the things he'd done and been, all the scenes that had passed before his eyes. He waited for a meaningful moment to arrive and, after a while, one did. He seized on it, on a time nearly thirty years gone. They sent me away, he thought, and tears gathered in his eyes, unaware. The word for it is catharsis.

Brendan awoke, as he always did these days, feeling lost. There was a little surge of chest-tightening fear that died down swiftly as his dominant intellectual drivers geared into life and smothered the ever present whisperings of intuitional modes in shattered disarray. When he sat up in the soft bed, yawning and throwing back the heavy, down-filled comforter, he was himself again.

"Bren?" That came from the next bed, in a thin, high, rather nasal voice, and he looked over. Kenny Stein was a small, pudgy, flat-faced nine-year-old, with brown eyes and kinky, almost Afrolike hair. He was just another exile here, thrown out of Taho Kibbutz by his people, themselves exiled from the low-tech horrors of Southern California. Sealock didn't like the whining little shit, but then again, he did.

"Fuck off, Stein." There was a swift wash of anger, demanding a response, on the boy's face, but he said nothing. Brendan in a bad mood was too much for him to trifle with. Out here, at the Phoenix School for Communal Exiles, they lived. There were hundreds of them, children for whom the future had temporarily darkened, sent here from the many corners of one of Earth's largest political entities. They lived here, emotional and psychological "cripples," waiting for their problems to be fixed by men who lurked somewhere in the darkness, waiting like defective machines to be assaulted by the mechanics of the mind.

The room they were in was part of a therapeutic program that the school had designed, geared like everything else around here toward producing sensible, cooperative citizens who could eventually be slipped back into the collective-effort society of the Deseret Enclave Complex. Ten terribly antisocial little boys lived in the room, allowed to maul one another's emotions and form the naturalistic pecking orderscommon to such groups, while sociobiological technicians used carefully designed behavior-mod pressures on them. It usually worked.

Seven of the beds were empty, the occupants fled to the comparative safety of a supervised breakfast hall, leaving the dominant clique, perennial late sleepers, to rise alone.

"Why don't you let him be, Sealock?" Tom Leahy stood up from his bed at the other end of the room, tall and angular, with tousled, curly red hair that matched his freckled, perpetually sunburned skin. He was bigger than Brendan and perhaps stronger, but not quite so fast. They'd fought, in the beginning, and Brendan had given him an efficient thrashing, but not before a knob-knuckled fist had broken his nose. Brendan started to repeat his retort, but Leahy was staring at him with his usual bleak, fearless determination. He glared, feeling a twinge of unease, and said, "Piss on it. Why can't he leave me alone?" Stein stood up and pulled on a pair of white gym shorts. "Because you don't want me to." The other two stared at him, Leahy with his seemingly impenetrable incomprehension, and Brendan with a touch of dismay. Kenny was just a little bit too intelligent, with enough insight to baffle Brendan's worst advances, and he was right.

The other boys were an excellent tool against him, for, between them, they were his equal. "Let's go eat," he said. Perhaps, somewhere, a social technician chuckled. These little triads were always pretty entertaining, like adolescent love triangles. The focal point snapped his or her fingers, and the lovers danced. . . .

After breakfast and a mandatory "exercise hour," the three of them retreated to the Games Room. Their objective was a big gray plastic box in one corner, next to an expanse of moss dotted with a variety of exquisite bonsai trees. From a false cliff against the wall a tiny machine-driven waterfall dropped to form a six-inch-wide river that fed a shallow pond, whence the aerated water returned to its source. The whole, about thirty meters square in area, was surrounded by the faint blue shimmer of a selective-pass em-screen.

The Games Room was more or less empty. A lot of peoplehad classes to go to or had found other interesting things to occupy their attentions. Though occasionally joined by others, the three of them had, by habituation, established themselves as the rightful "owners" of this little domain on many mornings. It wasn't hard to do. . . .

The boys stepped through into this little world, feeling a slight tingle on their skins, and went to the box. Brendan slid its door aside and peered in. A pair of tiny, red-glowing eyes glared back. There was a soft, reptilian hiss. He reached in toward the eyes and there was a tiny snapping sound that made him whip his hand back. He looked up at Leahy, grinning.

There was a scratching scuffle from inside and the container's foremost occupant sprang out. It was a perfectly formed, gray-scaled example of Tyrannosaurus rex, all of thirty centimeters tall. Brendan reached out for it, and the tiny dinosaur went for his fingers again. With one quick swipe of a small, fast hand, he cuffed the animal. It fell squalling on its side, then leaped erect on muscular hind legs and dashed off like a jackrabbit, in some peculiar fashion combining the gait elements of both man and kangaroo. Brendan stood up to follow it, calling over his shoulder, "Somebody get the Ankylosaurus !" Leahy knelt before the door and, reaching in, seized the heavy little beast by its bulbous tail, intent on dragging it out. Now the other inhabitants of the box were stirring, ready to emerge of their own accord. The toy dinosaurs, representing everything from the placid Trachodon to a feisty little Cynognathus , were premier examples of modern bioengineering. They had been made in the school's genetic workshop from the zygotes of alligators, crocodiles, tuataras, and a variety of flightless birds. One of the elder students, in part responsible for the work, had delighted in calling the Tyrannosaurus "that kiwi in drag." Like everything else around the school, the dinosaurs were "teaching toys," tools that filled an educational, cultural, and social role in the rehabilitation of those who contacted them. To be certain, robots would have been cheaper, easier to useand maintain, but . . . How many people really have empathy for machines?

Over by the waterfall, Brendan had the animal cornered. His eyes were bright as he teased it with his hands and his laughter had an unpleasant, almost sexual ring to it. The thing snapped and bit and hissed as it tried to escape, to no avail. Its russet eyes were rolling frantically. After a while Brendan began to tire of this sport and, becoming distracted, thought of letting it go. Suddenly, as if seeing its chance, the dinosaur lunged forward and seized his hand.

Though no worse than a cat bite, the sharp little teeth hurt, and Brendan screamed with mingled anger and pain. He pried the tiny jaws loose and, picking the creature up, slammed it against the wall. It fell to the mossy floor, mewing and writhing in agony. Brendan sucked at the cuts on his hands, fuming with exasperation.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" At the commotion, Leahy had come running over. Stein was standing well behind him, looking frightened.

"It bit me!"

Tom looked at his hand contemptuously. "Serves you right, you little bastard. I saw what you were doing."

Rage flared in Sealock, along with the usual fear. "Shut up, cocksucker!" The implacable, self-righteous indignation had risen in Leahy now, and he raised his fists. "All right. That's it! I'm going to kick your ass good this time."

Brendan leaped to his feet and dropped into a fairly creditable boxing stance, both arms high and forward, elbows tucked in. His outrage had suddenly overcome the fear of injury that usually held him back. Tom swung a looping right to his head, but the smaller boy sent a quick jab through his ineffective guard to crack against his mouth, rocking his head back. First blood.

Unattended, the Tyrannosaurus was trying to creep away. Stein picked it up, hands stroking its soft, pebbly skin, soothing it as he continued to watch the fight.

Locked in a trance, Sealock followed his train of memory sequences to their seemingly logical end point. When it was over, he felt better, as he always did. He knew no one would understand the forces that drove him, but somehow that didn't seem to matter. He understood himself, and that made it all right. He stood up, stretching, and put his leads away. Time to go do something else. He left the room, dislocated, come adrift in time once again.

It didn't matter. It just didn't. . . .

After dinner John had drawn a large mug of hot, brandied pulque and gone to a couch in an alcove that looked out on Iris' quadrant of the sky. In the semidarkness he sipped his drink and watched the ringed, translucent sphere do nothing.

The news was not good. The Universal Solaris Energy Collective had just dispatched their high-energy freighter Formis Fusion from the fore-Trojans. With a full complement of scientists, it would be here in just a few months. If his colonists had the whole ocellus, and the law said they did, where did the newcomers go? Probably they wouldn't stay. These wouldn't be real settlers, just itinerant asterologists. Probably financed by the Pansolar people, who couldn't leave any pie unplumbed. He called up the latest few 3Vcoms from his father, having neglected to do so for days. The cheerful visage of Ennis Cornwell related various things to him, underlaid with graphics like a twentieth-century weatherman. The early sales figures for Rose of Ash were encouraging. The publicity surrounding the expedition had had its effect on his reputation, and there had been huge amounts of it on the 'net this past week. He would have to talk to Jana about making up a wonders-of-space press release for the masses. There was an exact way to go about that sort of thing, he knew. The trick now was to play the media in an unexpected way and not follow any of the prevailing 'net manipulation programs. He sighed. Aside from feeding publicity to the media, there were also problems of piracy, government interference,and the ever ephemeral nature of the public's interest. The nature of making a living from music would probably never change. Thankfully, live performances were no longer required; John grimaced as he remembered what a shambles his one attempt at a concert had been. It was a fiasco that had done terrible damage to his career: sales of Reflection Counterpoint were affected by it still. Money was a funny concept out here. He could buy virtually any commodity available, but the cost of transporting it was prohibitively expensive. The RAW memories of Shipnet held virtually all the useful knowledge that man had ever produced, and contained software threads which, when combined, would perform any function that he could think of. Turning off the 'net, he looked out at the chiaroscuro Ocypetan exterior. I bought this, he thought. Still feeling the effects of the alcohol, he began to doze. He awoke with a little start and looked around. Evidently what had awakened him was the crackle of Ariane's chamber door opening. In the dim light of the central room the silhouette of the woman was framed against the brightness that she was leaving. The doorway hissed closed and the room lights came up a little at her command.

Across the room, Demogorgon was cradled in a raised hollow of the floor that he'd created, apparently oblivious to them. He was wearing a circlet, eyes tightly closed, so John assumed that he was tapping. "Ariane?" he said. "I think it's time we had a little talk." The woman stared at him for a moment, her face flat and expressionless as she came over and sat down against a bulkhead. "What do you want?"

"We're in trouble, aren't we?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. There's a lot to think about. Things seem so random sometimes. . . . What makes you think we're in trouble?"

John found some cold dregs in his cup and drained them. "I don't know. It seems that you're the key to all this."

"What do you mean?"

"Let's start at the beginning. All my life I've seen people sitting in judgment of one another. People place themselvesin a hierarchical relationship with others, and society is driven by the resulting pain. That's what's always been wrong with the way people conceive their roles. Judgment of others, judgment of self—it's unnecessary. The tiny gratifications we take from others are stripped from us a hundredfold in the process. You understand?"

The woman shrugged. As always, she could only develop some kind of vague, abstract notion from his words. She nodded.

"Well, when I heard about the new homesteader colonies on Triton, I thought I had the answer. To begin totally from scratch. To build close relationships, free of this crap. But when it came time to select a crew I knew I was up against the same old problem. Selection implies judgment, after all. I talked to so many people . . . and they all seemed OK. Tem and Jana have needed skills ... I wanted you because of your expertise, too. When you said you could provide me with bootlegged DR software, that clinched it. But somehow Brendan, Vana, Harmon, and Demogorgon came all jumbled up together with you. Really, the only nonjudgmental choice I made was Aksinia!"

Ariane sighed. "Look, it's not like we seek out our friends on purpose. Vana was my next-door neighbor in Montevideo. I picked Brendan up at a boxing match!" She grinned wryly. "I took him for a slab of meat . . . and when I found out what was packed inside that ugly head I kept him, much to everyone's dismay. Vana met Harmon at a party, I think. . . . Demogorgon originally sought out Brendan for some technical assistance with his Illimitor art. If that's not random, nothing is!"

"Hell, I know all this. If you're just considering the people, the choice between them makes no difference. You brought with you the very thing I was trying to get away from: your neurotic relationships!"

Ariane restrained her anger. "Right. And you brought Beth along because she just happened to be around. . . . What you're saying is hypocritical."

"Beth and I ... well, I was wrong. I thought we wouldevolve into a model relationship. Instead, she can't get over her fear of intimacy."

"By 'intimacy' you mean submitting herself to your will?"

"Come on! What I wanted to say is that you're the crux of this whole thing. The love relationships focus on you."

"You're wrong. Brendan's the focus."

"But Brendan came because of you! If you can believe anything he says."

"I think you're judging poor Brendan entirely too harshly." John laughed. "'Poor Brendan . . .' indeed. Dammit . . . we have to survive. If he goes lunging madly around, this colony is going to fail. We could all die. . . ."

There was a short silence. "I know," said Ariane. "Maybe you won't understand this, but . . . I've thought about it. A lot. He seems like a dangerous animal, doesn't he? Like some kind of awful monster that ought to be locked up." She straightened up, looking into his face. "But there's something in there, somewhere . . .

"I didn't really come out here for myself, you know. Oh, I remember what I said, about all my mystical feeling toward space travel and the future of humanity. Sure. Those things are true enough. . . . But I didn't have to leave Earth for that. I was comfortable. Most of the time, I was even happy! How many people can say that?" She grinned at him. "Maybe I came out here to save Brendan. He deserves a right to fight off his demons, to live out his dreams in some fashion. Maybe he's the only person I ever met who did deserve a second chance. He was dying back there among the masses, living to gratify the things that kept him unchanging. . . . Out here, maybe he can at least fight his way free of that." Her eyes seemed bright, wistful.

"You're right. I don't understand."

"Maybe I don't either. Maybe I came out here so I could understand. . . ." She laughed, odd and hollow-sounding.

"More than anything else," John said, "Brendan seems to be willfully blocking any attempts we might make to reconcile ourselves. We've got to help these people live with one another." Ariane said, "I guess I agree with you."

"It's not just our personal survival at stake. This colony is supposed to last, even if no one ever comes to join us. I've put off bringing the first foeti out of the deep freeze; this is just the beginning. . . ."

"And it all doesn't seem very likely, does it?"

As he half listened to Ariane and John talk, Demogorgon disengaged himself from Shipnet entirely. He thought of losing himself once again in the Illimitor World, but the idea was unappealing. Most of all, he wanted Brendan—and Brendan wasn't in there. He'd tried once to make a version of him in Arhos , but it hadn't worked. The body was the same, yes, and equally thrilling, but its behavior, subtle as it was, somehow gave it away as a mere simulacrum, and a pale one at that. You could make him coarse and abusive and that is what he would be. Make him sensitive, and that aspect of Brendan would dutifully display itself. . . . The only one who could've put a real Brendan in the Illimitor World was Sealock himself, and he just laughed at the suggestion, never responding.

Listening to the others talk about Brendan made him want to laugh. Monster, monster in the sky . . . He suppressed a giggle, then sobered quickly. Their perceptions seemed confused. Cornwell was mostly interested in the content of his own ideas, and ideological egocentrism was always a good excuse, but why were Ariane's notions so different from his own?

His attention drifted away from them, thinking about his recent exchange with Sealock. Some sort of change will have to come over me, and soon. He noticed the first sensations of a developing erection and his lips twisted into a derisive smile. Some deep-thinking artist I am! What should I do, sit here and jerk off at the ceiling? He wanted to feel amused, but the thought made him angry, bringing unreasoning tears to his eyes.

Out of nowhere, Beth's hand was resting gently on his collarbone. She was looking at him with a kind of concern. "What's the matter?"

"It's . . . nothing."

She touched his face lightly and her fingers came away wet. "This doesn't look like nothing to me." He looked away from her, out the window, then said, "What's always the matter, then?" She sat down beside him on the edge of the chair. "I know. It's tough. You and Brendan. Harmon and Vana. Me and John. Even . . . even Brendan and Ariane. We always want what's out of reach, don't we?" Suddenly she reached down and, splitting the material of his garment, seized his penis, holding it in a pressure grip that trapped the blood inside. It swelled rapidly, involuntarily.

"What are you doing?" he asked, incredulous, feeling paralyzed.

"Nothing." She lowered her head downward and took him in her mouth. As he watched her head bobbing slowly, ridiculously, up and down, he thought, But I didn't want this!

Still, he watched, fascinated by the sight and realizing that, for now, he was occupying Brendan's psychological niche. Is that what I look like? He found himself imagining that he was Brendan, and suddenly his perception shifted. He put his hand on the back of the woman's head and began pushing her down further, something that Brendan often did to him. She started to gag but didn't stop moving. He wanted to giggle.

In the background John and Ariane had fallen silent, watching them.

Suddenly Vana appeared from her compartment, naked, a broad smile on her face. She announced,

"Da-daaa!" and the PC hatches sprang open. "It's orgy time!" They all gathered in the center of the room, on a ridge surrounding the exit hatch, coming to cluster together by ones and twos, forming a ragged circle.

Harmon was trying to grin, but his pale skin was suffused by a succession of easy blushes. "This isn't exactly spontaneous, is it?"

Vana laughed. "Whoever said it needed to be? Come on!" She started to peel him out of his clothes, and the othersslowly followed suit. They stood there naked, appraising each other, at a loss. Sealock looked them over with amusement, then his eyes fell on Demogorgon, still paired with Beth, and on his moist, still erect penis. "Well, well," he said, "very nice. I told you you'd like it, kiddo!" His peal of laughter was absorbed by the soft walls.

The Arab looked away, starting to feel angry, then he suddenly felt his mood fall in line with the spirit of the occasion. "Yes, you did." He glanced at the others. "Big brave heteros . . . I'll show you how it's done!" He stalked over to Brendan and kneeled.

Vana said, "No sense letting them have all the fun." She turned and kissed Harmon, then reached for Ariane, and the three of them moved in on the scene together. Tem put his arm around Jana, who looked at him suspiciously, then glanced at John and, as if giving in to the social pressure, went with the inevitable. Not waiting any longer, Axie joined them all.

John watched for a moment, then felt a body pressing against his and turned to see Beth, who was smiling. As she reached for him he thought, What's happening here? Is this wrong? Aren't we still in the same little groups, closing each other out?

Asterology was a new science, relatively speaking. In the past, when the study of space had been limited to the narrow confines of Earth, looking up through an ever shifting miasma at dancing, mercurial points of light, men had been correct to separate astronomy from the growing jumble of -ologies that denned the universe. Star-naming, it was called, and that humble name was not far wrong for the study of such remote, unapproachable objects. But then came the Mariners and the Veneras and the Voyagers, expanding the faintest of photographic specks into huge variegated worlds with their own histories and morphologies. Astronomy ceased to hold sway over these new objects, and geology, in its guise of comparative planetology, took over. There were, however, other things in heaven and earth than the planets. Therewere electromagnetic fields, there were planetary rings in all their glory, and, most important of all, there were stars. Eventually the study of the structure of the universe became known as asterology, despite all the confusion that name produced.

Jana Li Hu had taken her degrees in asterology from the Reflexive Institute in Ulaanbaatar, perhaps the most rigorous and tyrannical school that had ever existed. She knew the literature well, to put it mildly. Her final paper, on Enceladus' Sarandib Planitia, had been a model of its kind and had placed her among the foremost asterologists of her generation. Still, she worked under the stigma of being an asterologist who had not left Earth, something like an Egyptologist who'd never seen the Pyramids. The opportunity to study Triton was a necessity to her career. Now this!

Four new worlds, an entirely new order of cryogenic moon-lets, and Iris herself! The task of preparing the preliminary reconnaissance had fallen on her shoulders as the de facto asterologist on the scene. With essentially homemade equipment being doled out to her at the whim of a madman, she had to be very, very careful to be right. Of course, they would all be looking over her shoulder, monitoring the data, and coming to their own conclusions. . . . But the Science article would be over her name. She felt the weight of the responsibility like lead.

Added to this, she had to continue to understand and interact with the rest of the colonists. They were her lifeline and, if she alienated them, the future would be bleak indeed. She should already have been out there taking samples, looking at the fine detail of the highlands, but first they had to build an instrument carrier and adapt the worksuits for zero flux.

She went back to analyzing the integrated radartop /spectral images of the ocellus periphery. The ship's photorecorder had derived full coverage of the area at a three-centimeter resolution, and there was plenty to think about.

Ocypete was odd. Although the terrains seen on the other two satellites had, at least roughly, corresponded with those on similar objects in the outer Solar System, the moon'sencounter with a radioactive object had profoundly influenced its history, had emplaced terrains totally unlike those seen on any other world. Nowhere else had such an extensive atmosphere frozen out. The sea that had filled the ocellus had extended almost to the center of the worldlet, a conical intrusion into its core, causing massive relaxation of the remaining crust and mantle, and then had refrozen, pushing them back into place. Since the size and density of Ocypete did not allow for anything other than Ice I, even at these temperatures, the equations that defined it were comparatively simple. It should only be a matter of careful, assiduous study to completely define the parameters that had formed Iris III. Suddenly she felt a rush of anxiety. Could she successfully catalog and describe these worlds, with the limitations of her own mind as well as those being imposed by the others? Would she make a fool of myself? She had to get moving! Now!

Driven by a compulsion to camouflage the adrenaline that was creeping up her backbone, she slipped down into the aft compartment. Taking the orange suit from her locker, she put it on and prepared a backpack full of her tools. The feel of the suit hugging her securely seemed to assuage her crawling skin. Impatiently, she sent a command to Shipnet and waited. When the door dilated, she ignored the platform and jumped. She began to tumble outward, and a childish, chaotic joy filled her. Perhaps the discomfort she'd felt had been claustrophobia, pure and simple, after all. In a moment she remembered her gyro, and she swung right side up to get her bearings as the ground implacably rushed to meet her feet. She wondered if they would miss her aboard the ship.

The days followed the slow vault of the stars, and soon the erection of the protocolony was nearly complete. The ship had been unloaded without further mishap and, as a result, had come apart. All that now remained of Deepstar was a fifty-meter tower of broken girders enclosing the solid pillar of the heavy-ion engine. Even the CM had been dismounted and lowered to its prepared base on the ice. What remained of theship would be further dismantled until it became a portable scaffolding for the engine, which, set at very low power, would be used as a powerful drill rig, able to reach far into the depths of their world. Although matter synthesis was not beyond the reach of modern technology, it was still too difficult and complex a process for their ready use. Any metals or nonvolatile minerals would have to be laboriously reclaimed from the silicate-rich ice of 'Os Planitia or mined from the sparse supplies of nonaqueous meteorites that they might locate.

The basic structure of the early settlement would consist of two bubbleplastic domes, linked by a common interface/airlock. Bubbleplastic, the principal building element of space enclosures, was similar in some respects to the metallic girders that came out of the beambuilder, but it was infinitely malleable, configurable into any color or texture. "Blow It Up/Make It Real" was the manufacturer's motto. Strengthened and stiffened by MHD fields, it was hard enough to withstand most micrometeorite falls and accidental incursions.

The smaller dome, surrounding the CM, would be transparent to visible wavelengths, the very image of some antique "house-on-the-Moon." The larger dome, black and opaque, would house an Earth-environment simulacrum and swimming pool. When the CM dome had been inflated and filled with their possessions and equipment, the work was turned over to the machines. People began to drift apart, focusing on their own projects, devoting their energies to whatever private interests, if any, they had. Harmon Prynne had built a small, segmented dome of bubbleplastic, opaque and no more than five meters across, and in it he was assembling the latest and finest product of his lifelong hobby, the vessel he called 60vet. The thing was a sleek, aerodynamically sound, turquoise and white car, outwardly a somewhat modified copy of a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette. The differences were, of course, largely dictated by an environment radically removed from that of the original machine.

There was no rubber. The world was too cold for organics,and gravity was too low for the car to rely on surface friction for its tractive grip. 60vet would ride across the ice on the wire tires of a Lunar rover, each tire the generator grid for a charge-coupling static field. This ice was not slippery—at these temperatures it would take enormous pressure to generate the film of liquid water that was the soul of a skid—but the car was light. . . . Very little force stood in the way of tire-spinning immobility. Technology had to help.

The hull was made from another bubbleplastic relative, easily disguised as metal, and the transparent parts couldn't be distinguished from ancient glass. Prynne even went to the extent of putting little "safety plate" decals in appropriate corners, but these windows would never break. What should have been the trunk was filled with a small life-support system. At virtual gunpoint, he had been forced by John and Ariane to dedicate the tonneau to an extension of the passenger compartment and a rear seat of sorts. The biggest anomaly lay under the hood. It would have been possible to put an internal combustion engine in the sealed compartment and feed a turbocharged carburetor from oxygen tanks, but that would have been a ridiculous extravagance. 60vet's power plant was a two-cylinder Stirling engine, run off the heat from a nuclear-isotope generator. The thing would have been totally silent, even on Earth, and Prynne had idly toyed with the idea of feeding comchip-simulated engine noises into the cabin. As Prynne assembled his car, he was sometimes joined by Vana, who liked to watch him work, seemingly fascinated by the sure way he assembled the mountainous array of tiny parts from memory. It was an antiquarian hobby and rather unusual to see in a world in which few people did any work with their hands. She would give him things that he asked her for, and now she had become familiar enough with the strange, bulky tools that he seldom had to point.

After a while the man stopped to rest and drink a cup of coffee. He had a little table set up beside his workbench and on it was a portable camp kitchen, charged that morning with preprogrammed foods. He sat and stared at the woman, sipping the drink. He'd been under the machine when she camethrough the

'lock, and this was the first chance he'd had to look at her face. He realized with a familiar pang that her lips seemed a little swollen. He looked away, and finally said, "Vana, I don't like it."

"What? Is something wrong with your car?"

He shook his head. "It's . . . well, it's this business about everyone sleeping with everybody else. I just don't like it."

She laughed, an incredulous note in her voice. "Why not? You're getting as much as anyone. Maybe more than you did before ..."

"That's not it. . . ." He stopped. He knew what he wanted to say: that he loved her, not all the others, that he wanted her to love him alone. . . . But he couldn't tell her that. Not again. Not when he knew how angry it could make her, how hard. No. It wouldn't do. But what else could he say? "I guess it's just that it hasn't come about naturally. We don't even all like each other. . . ." He saw that he had her interest and quickly pursued the line of argument. "This hasn't 'just happened,' you know. It was imposed on us by Cornwell."

"You really think so? Don't you think that this is a good thing? This morning there was a lot more laughter and good cheer going around than I've seen since the early days, aboard Cam. John's just too much of a weakling to get us to—"

He cut her off. "No, he isn't! Can't you see? He's done it for his own selfish reasons. He wants what we have, what he can't buy with all his money. I don't blame him for it, but he hides what he's doing behind a mess of philosophical crap! Since he has no one, he wants to keep us all apart. . . ." Vana's face grew angry-looking. "Oh, for pity's sake!" They both fell silent and Prynne realized that she'd seen through him, to the incessant background of conversations that had filled their relationship. At last she said, "How soon do you think we'd get bored with each other, out here, without something to keep us interested?" He shrugged, looking miserable, and she sighed. "OK. Forget it. What tool do you want next? The crescent monkey or whatever it is?"

When the domes had been inflated and hardened, Sealock and Krzakwa finished stripping the remains of the ship. The Hyloxso matrices were detached and sitting in a storage rack that had been made from excess girders. The chemical engines had been set up on an insulating platform along with a number of other temporarily useless items, looking like an equipment-auction display. What was left of Deepstar had been put on motorized treads and driven away to a point a little distance from the colony. Jana had been wanting to do a cross section of the mare and they could do it, testing their drill at the same time. The exhaust plume from the well thus produced would be fed through tubing to a condenser and thence to the reactor-fuel storage tank that the work-packs were finishing. When they were ready they stopped to check everything out and discuss procedures. "Now remember," said Sealock, "keep the thrust under a hundred kilograms. We don't want this thing in orbit." Krzakwa looked at him in disgust. He'd gotten used to this sort of thing, after a fashion, but it still rankled. "You're not still mad at me for dropping the reactor, are you?"

"No."

Tem sighed. There was no sense in trying to penetrate his reactions today. It would be a wasted effort. He let the suit optics track back toward the camp, magnifying the image that was on the other side of Sealock's bulky figure, and stopped: a small, gleaming artifact was moving across the ice, away from the little split-open dome that had been its garage. "What the hell is that?" Sealock looked, then grinned. "That's Prynne's little toy. I'm surprised he hasn't mentioned it to you. . .

. 60vet lives!" Leaping down from the drill's structural tower, he went bounding off, and Krzakwa followed.

Harmon had parked the car, depressurized the cabin, and was now standing back, admiring the machine, seen for the first time in its natural setting. The other two came up behind him, noting that he'd not chosen the turquoise color of his space suit at random. It matched the aerodynamic-lookingbody coves in the sides of the car. He seemed oblivious to their presence.

Sealock said, "What've you got there, Harmon?"

The man turned to face him. "You like it?"

"Well ... I think it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen." He laughed unpleasantly. Krzakwa said, "For Christ's sake . . . why do you have to be like that?"

"Because I feel like it. Besides, it is dumb. Especially here." He stalked off and began circling the machine, inspecting it closely. Stupid, he thought, but there was something intriguing about the device. He found himself, almost against his will, growing interested in the mechanical problems that were inherent in adapting this ancient design for use on an airless iceball . He swung open the driver's-side door and started to climb in, then stopped and looked at Prynne. "Mind if I try it out?"

"No. Go ahead."

Sealock looked in, gauging the fit between the seat and his worksuit. "I suppose I could go change to a regular suit. . . ."

Prynne snickered. "Fat people could use these too, you know." He reached in, did something, and the seat slid back to its rear stops. There was now enough room for Sealock to get in, though it would be cramped.

Brendan got in and closed the door. A small, bright cross-hatch cursor appeared on his vision, scanning, as he looked around on the puzzlingly complex control panel for a 'net input. He snorted suddenly, realizing his mistake, and the marker disappeared. Well, he thought, I ought to be smart enough to figure this out. He hunted, then twisted an odd, flat switch on the dashboard to the right of the steering column that had "on/off' printed beneath it. Everything was carefully labeled, and he felt a sudden appreciation for the fact that he could read. It was an increasingly uncommon skill. A green light came on above the switch and dozens of gauges that he didn't know how to interpret came alive. Now what?

He thought about it for a minute, trying to remembersomething from Prynne's endless babblings about cars, then gave up and popped a line of data from the 'net. Ah. He looked at the floor. There were three pedals at his feet and a bellows/rod contraption sticking from the longitudinal bulge in the middle of the floor. Now then ... He consulted Shipnet again, pushed in the clutch, set the transmission to the numeral 1, and, shoving down on the accelerator, took his foot off the other pedal, so that it snapped up from spring tension.

It was impossible for the Stirling engine to stall, so the wheels spun, despite the best efforts of the fields holding them to the ice. 60vet sat motionless for a moment, then, as he released the accelerator slightly, friction reestablished itself and the car lurched heavily forward. Prynne's laughter echoed in his head.

"You rotten son of a bitch," Sealock muttered. He found the rheostat that controlled the wheel fields and increased their intensity, then pressed down heavily with his foot. He spun the steering device as his speed increased and the car rammed into a sharp skidding turn, throwing up a high, slow rooster tail of fine, glittering ice chips.

He straightened the thing out and let its velocity grow again. He was facing out into the ocellus as he whipped past the drill tower and, suddenly, he felt the flat distances, the bright ice beneath a black sky, calling to him. He wanted to drive to the end of the world. And why not? he wondered. Maybe I should say the hell with the rest of these jerks. He pushed cautiously down on the brake and tried to steer into a slower turn, but the car skidded again, two wheels breaking free of the ice. . . . Abruptly, he was headed toward the colony. He managed to get the car stopped fairly near the two men without further mishap. As he climbed out, feeling slightly weak-kneed, Prynne said to him, "Well, what do you think now?" Sealock stood facing him. "OK. I take back what I said, Harmon. It's great."

"Yeah."

Brendan banged the car's fender lightly near where a metal device that said "Stirling" was affixed. It made what was amuffled thump for him, silence to the others. "Let's take it out to the edge of the mare."

"Really?" Prynne was surprised but pleased.

"Sure. You want to go, Tem?"

"I wouldn't miss it. ... Uh. Shouldn't we drill the hole first, though?" Krzakwa smiled to himself and shook his head. Even after all these months he still couldn't follow the man's sudden sea changes. One moment he was a hulking monster, the next an enthusiastic child. At least he wasn't boring. It took a few days to get ready, and then they went. . . .

It was the second day outward bound from the colony, and the three explorers were finding the surface topography, if one could call it that, fantastically dull. Initially, the sublimation of the volatile regolith, which parted before them like a miniature Red Sea only a stone's throw away, kept them entertained, but the ocellus was largely featureless, and it was hard to avoid the feeling that they were sitting motionless, at times, in the center of a small, blue-white disk. Worse still, they found that the tenuous grip that the electrostatic tires had on the ice could be broken by the slightest bump or ripple, sending the car flying on a long arc, sometimes at a precarious attitude, since it wasn't gyrostabilized. Amusing at first, these flights began to cause motion sickness, and they had to slow down to less than forty kilometers per hour.

They crept along at a slug's pace, supplies dwindling. Sea-lock and Krzakwa seemed to eat continuously.

They were nearly to the center of the eye now and could see that both the surface of the regolith and the underlying ice were darkening. Krzakwa pointed out that the meteoric impacts, few though they may have been, acted to redistribute material evenly across the terrain, resulting in a dark water ice deposited atop the neon in a microthin layer. Though the vast majority of the regolith had originated in larger impacts outside the ocellus, the smaller, more recent impacts nearby controlled the appearance of the surface.

Sealock was driving, with Tem at his side and Prynne crammed into the narrow space behind the seats. This turnedout to be his usual station: Sealock would consent to crouch there on occasion, but Krzakwa was simply too fat. Really, it wasn't that bad—with both legs slung over the passenger seat, his feet on Tem's shoulder, Harmon could lie back on a pillow and look out the rear window in fair comfort. They all had on pressure suits, using them as constant-wear garments for lack of room to take them off. Finally, there was something. A pair of dead hydraulic volcanoes, looking like half-melted, monochromatic sundaes, stood before them, a large rille snaking between the two cones. It was almost impossible to gauge their size, with nothing for comparison, but they looked large. The ice had taken on a marbled, irregular texture, veined with ripples of dirtier material, and they had to slow down further because of irregularities in the surface. Sealock stopped the car. "OK," he said. "Let's go sacrifice a virgin to the gods."

"I think it may be a little hard to find a virgin in these parts."

"Nearest one's probably somewhere near Uranus," said Prynne. "Pretty long drive." Tem turned to gaze in amusement at the man. Some people, he told himself, are less than aware of their own words. . . . "Right. Scratch that idea. Let's go look anyway." It was something of a letdown. The low gravity gave the lie to even a fairly steep slope, made it seem flatter than it really was. The fact that the darkest ices had probably been spewed up made it seem a little more impressive, but only if they thought about it first. The summit pit on one did have an open channel reaching who knew how far down, but no one wanted to jump in and find out. Tired from leaping around, they went back to the car and got in.

The craters to be found on the ocellus were usually irregular, shallow depressions, but suddenly the car was skirting the rim of a great hole more than a hundred meters across. It was new enough so that the edges were sharp and the shape was a distinct bowl. It was easy to see the layering of successively darker materials that had formed the central planitia , and in the distance bright rays could be made out where they mantled the bed-ice. At the bottom there was a pool of nowfrozen meltwater. This ice was translucent, smooth as new glass, and looked very much like the frozen surface of a terrestrial lake. Sealock gazed at it silently, slowing down and steering the car around the rim. He tried to look at the layering, to examine it in a detached, scientific fashion, but his eyes kept drifting back to that big patch of clear ice. There was something about the smooth, glassy surface that tickled his memory and he wished for 'net access. What was it? He tried to remember on his own, and at last succeeded. He'd been sitting in his room at NYU one day, more than ten years ago, and had fallen into the grip of an unbreakable boredom. In desperation he'd hooked up to the CoNY Entertainment 'net and tapped a cast of the well-known epic fantasy series "Nineteen Sixty-six"—by luck, it had been the last episode, so the whole two hundred hours was available at one time. He watched, enthralled, pausing for sleep only when he could put it off no longer.

It detailed a grand year of adventure for four young men, crossing the vast expanses of the once open and free continent of North America. The men had had long, shaggy hair, unshaven faces . . . they'd worn fantastic dirty costumes and spoken in a rich, almost incomprehensible dialect that had a romantic appeal to modern ears.

There was one specific thing he was trying to remember, something they'd done during one of the riotous winter scenes. Dammit, that episode was legendary . . . they'd had a car very much like this one—just a bit bigger, and with some kind of fold-back roof. They ... It came back to him suddenly, and he acted.

As the car lurched to one side, Tem looked over at Sealock and saw that a sudden change had come over the man's features. Brendan was hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it hard in gloved hands. His lids were narrowed, green eyes glittering with what looked like . . . Krzakwa fished for a good phrase and the expression "psychotic glee" came to him in response. The rim rushed at them, and Tem wondered, What is he going to do? in dismay.

Prynne cried out suddenly, a squeal of rage and horror, as

Sealock ran 60vet over the edge, yet the wheels somehow managed to stay in contact with the ice as they fell onto the 45-degree slope. Accelerating rapidly, they shot out onto the clear ice and Brendan slammed the wheels into a hard-over position. The car whirled sickeningly through a series of complete turns, sliding forward as it spun, then they hit a small ridge and were launched on a low, whirling trajectory. Sealock, deep in the clutches of the fantasy, screamed, "Far fuckin' out!" They landed tail first and the rear wheels grabbed the ice, pulling the nose down with a jolt. Tem found himself unable to imagine how they were staying upright as they went into another series of vertiginous spins. Sealock was giggling like a child and Prynne, buffeted helplessly in the back, was cursing angrily. Krzakwa held on, shut his eyes, and waited for the end to come. When it was through, he looked out into the spinning stillness and said, "OK, asshole. How do we get it out of here now?" Sealock's eyes were still bright. "Why, we carry it up, of course!"

Demogorgon and Vana Berenguer were sitting in the garden of the CM dome, sprawled naked in lawn chairs and doing nothing, which was coming to be their usual activity. The CM itself had been somewhat modified and, in this setting, it looked rather like an avant-garde cottage. The platform that surrounded its base had been covered with a layer of soil in which shrubbery would soon sprout. Floodlights, intended for the good of the plants, felt warm and prickly on their skins, projecting shadows that easily overcame those from the sun.

Vana slid her hand down over her vulva and squeezed, hard, then snarled, "I'm fucking bored!" The Arab looked at her and smiled. "Really, dear? And just how bored is that?" She peered over at him and said, "I don't suppose you'd like to . . ."

"I have a much better notion." He grinned and stretchedlanguorously. "Would you like to visit the Illimitor World with me? It's been ready for some time now."

"That artsy, interactive thing you were working on back home?" She considered it, seeming dubious. "I don't think so. It's just not . . . real. I don't go in for that kind of stuff."

"'That kind of stuff,' indeed!" He laughed and, standing, stretched out a hand to her. "Come on. You'll like it, I promise...."

"But ..."

"Come on. It really is a lot better than what you get over the entertainment 'nets." She held back for a moment, then said, "Well . . . what the hell. Why not?" They went to the man's room and he activated his Shipnet access points and took out a set of induction leads. "No circlets for this, I'm afraid. How many can you handle?"

"Four, in Binary."

The Arab felt vaguely surprised. She would have to go along as a passive element. "OK. I can get you in using one of the adapter subplots that Brendan made for me." It might well be better this way. She'd have absolutely no control over what was going on and so would have to accept his version of reality without question.

They hooked up, plugged in, and he thought out his sequence of access codes in the high-level language Sealock had created:

Call Tri-vesigesimal. Activate 8(3y)i::5-mixer Node-network 501AA227::SysMat "Bright Illimit" Install Rider Unit .001 Call Uplink Assist. Call AI. com "Darius." SetPiece l::Transact::"Demogorgon-en-Arhos . . ."

They submerged.

Demogorgon en Arhos and Vana ten Exqrai stood on a marble balcony of the silent palace, looking down over a brilliant panorama. Arhos, the Jeweled City on the Mountain, fell at their feet in a series of shining terraces that were crowded with graceful, multicolored buildings. The sky was a fathomless wash of pale sapphire that descended to a yellow-orange horizon far beyond the Plain of the Twelve Cities, andthe twin red suns, almost touching, were high overhead. To the south, in the middle distance, the jade-green waters of the Tovoreng River could be seen, flowing toward Arheinzei and the Salqxel Sea. A soft breeze sprang up, carrying a smell like mimosa and creating waves in the diaphanous curtains that were behind them.

Examining the scene, Vana gasped, "Oh! It's so beautiful, Demogorgon!" She turned to face the man, momentarily surprised that she could move so freely in this image, and her eyes widened. "Is that you?" Demogorgon was tall and slender, well muscled and handsome, with the face of an immortal. . . . He was clad in a harness encrusted with topaz and emerald, and the buckler-held sword at his side was of some shining yellow metal, not gold but something finer. He laughed at her thunderstruck expression, and gestured at her body.

She was almost naked, clad only in a pair of silver breastplates that clung magically to her flesh and a wide, soft belt that supported a fine, jeweled dagger. Her body was slim now, much like Ariane's admired shape, but somehow superior. It seemed less filled with that loathsome animalness. . . . "This can't be real!"

Demogorgon laughed out loud. "It is real if I say it is."

She spun around, drinking in the scenery, marveling at its almost palpable presence. "But . . . this is nothing like anything I've ever seen on the 'net!"

"I told you that before we came. This is real."

"Real?" She seemed puzzled. "And we can just ... go out there? We're not limited to this room, or to some predetermined plot?"

He smiled thinly. "You'll see. . . ."

A voice from behind brought them about. " Arhn-he kuraai ! Welcome back, my lord. Your absence has been felt." A man with black and silver hair, beautiful in a hawkish sort of way, was hurrying toward them.

Demogorgon put his hand on the man's shoulder. "Good to be back, Savvrenash! What has befallen the realm?"

Before the Arhosian could answer, Vana stepped toward him, waving a hand before his face. "Will he react to me?"

Savvrenash looked at her strangely, a frown deepening the delicate lines of his face. "And who is this, my lord?"

"A noble visitor from far Exqrai. She is my guest." Demogorgon was smiling and the other man bowed deeply to her.

Vana was suddenly embarrassed. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't know . . ." Turning to his master again, Savvrenash said, "It is as it always has been. All the borders are . . . manifest. The world runs in its cycles of savagery." He shrugged, glancing out across the near featureless plain, then looked back at them. "I have word that the gala in Hraas is starting this sevenhour, if you'd care to attend."

"Perhaps. These decisions need not always be made. . . . In any case, summon my flyer." The man bowed and went to do his bidding.

Vana sat in a plush swing that hung near her and shook her head. "This is really something!" He nodded and said, "We'll visit the Kaimodrang Empire and my good friend Ci te Tovolku . . . ." In due course a great silvery disk came to hover before the balcony, and a place in the side of the craft transmuted to a fenced gangway that was merged with the floor of the balcony. They climbed into the velour-upholstered circular well in the middle of the machine and took seats. Demogorgon seized the controls, pressing several of the semiprecious stones that dotted his armrest, and they flashed away, high in the air, heading into the west.

Vana looked over the side at the faraway landscape and, for the first time, noticed that the gravity here seemed Earth-normal. It felt strange but nice. "What if I jump?" she asked. Demogorgon frowned. "Don't," he said. "This world is designed to enhance and reinforce our perceptions of it as a reality. There are levels where that's not the case, where flying, transubstantiation, and the like are possible, but . . . I like this best. It's simple and believable." He touched another control and the floor of the ship suddenly became transparent, not like glass or the walls of aspacecraft, but as if it had ceased to exist. Their chairs floated magically, frightening above the abyss.

Watching the squares of an agricultural land pass beneath them, Vana said, "Yeah . . ." The wind whipping through her hair was the temperature of a comfortable autumn and the red suns were warm on her skin. She wanted to drink it all in, as if these moments might somehow get away. It seemed more real, now, than Deepstar and Ocypete.

"Are you a king here?" she asked.

"King?" Demogorgon was amused. "Dear Vana: I'm God." She thought about that for a while, then said, "This is wonderful. I never want to leave."

On the evening of the third day the 60vet expedition was approaching the edge of the ocellus. The ground grew rougher and more uneven, and the regolith grew deeper, more persistent. There were cracks in the ice filled with what turned out to be methane clathrate , a volatile admixture of water and methane. They steered well clear of these and the horizon began to bulge ominously. Suddenly they came upon a huge crevice that barred any further progress. The terrain had become a vast wasteland of jumbled, fretted ice with a relief of about a hundred meters. The massive forces and tensions working on the littoral of the freezing sea had spent their energies on the ab initio ice. In the distance, mountains were pushed up, jagged white teeth from broken white gums. The three explorers got out and stared.

"This is water geology, pure and straightforward," said Tem, gesturing. "As the ocellus melted, it overtopped the collapsing shores and spread beyond. When it froze again, it expanded and pushed everything back. If it weren't for glaciation moderating these processes, allowing the warm ice to be malleable, it'd be worse. Too bad Jana can't see this."

"Shall we go farther?" asked Harmon.

"On foot? Nah. If there's any NH3eutectic out there, I wouldn't want to step in it. Not in these suits. It's time we started back, anyway."

They returned to the car and got in. Harmon activated theair cleaner and they waited while the stray gases they'd brought in with them were filtered out. After a few minutes it was safe to remove their helmets, which deflated and collapsed. There was just the barest hint of ammonia left in the cabin, but it was very noticeable. If there were any HCN, and they certainly would hope not, it would be present in too small a quantity to do any harm.

Krzakwa was munching on a thin turkey sandwich, mayonnaise on white bread. "Hey, you know what?" A little of the food was accumulating in his beard.

Biting daintily at a brioche, Sealock said, "Tell me."

"Well, a lot of this trip has been pretty damned boring, but it's been worth it. I think it made me realize something I used to know but kind of forgot. It all reminds of me of when I was a kid, when I used to sneak up to the outer surface of Luna and wander around. I kind of like exploring in places I've never been before." He swallowed an unchewed mouthful of the sandwich and said, "Too bad this is it. . . ." Sealock looked at him silently. For some reason, he found himself really liking the pudgy Selenite, thinking of him as a friend. "Tell you what," he said, "when we get back, let's scrounge around the leftovers from Deepstar. Fuck everything else. I bet we can find enough parts to put together that little moonship we discussed on Earth. It'd give us a chance to really check the neighborhood out. Hell, there's got to be something worth looking at!"

Krzakwa's blue eyes brightened perceptibly. "Hey! That's a great idea!" Sealock nodded, almost talking to himself now. "We can recharge the Hyloxso matrices easily, build a small CM out of bubbleplastic . . ."

Tem cracked open a carton of grape soda, took a sip, and started in on another sandwich, this one roast beef. "You know, despite the fact that you're such a weird fucker, sometimes I think you and I might be two of a kind. . . ."

Sealock tapped at the horn button which, of course, made no sound. "Yeah," he said.

The seven colonists were seated at uneven intervals around a large oval table in a clear space on the Irisward side of the dome that surrounded the CM. Packets of mandarines d'ortolans , a dish adapted from Escoffier , were passed around in silence except for the slithering arpeggios of a Beethoven string quartet. They began to eat, sparingly. It was delicious. The tiny, simulated buntings, barely more than morsels of meat, were nestled in an aspic delicately flavored by the essence of tangerine. The meal had been prepared to coincide with the return of the absent trio. They were now more than two hours overdue. After considerable discussion, in which it was pointed out that, if anything serious had gone wrong, it was too late for a rescue, they had decided to continue with the meal. Beth sat back uncomfortably in her chair. In the last few days the colony had fallen into a state of disorganized apathy. With the absence of Sealock and Krzakwa, a vacuum had come to fill that place in their hearts where some optimism for the future should have been. John had totally abdicated from any pretense at leadership and the changes that she thought she'd seen begun at the orgy had dwindled into lethargy. She tasted a delicately flavored bunting and sighed.

"Shall we listen to some more stuff from the second millennium?" asked Cornwell.

"Sure," said Demogorgon, raising a goblet of white burgundy. "What next?" He didn't feel any of this in his soul, but . . . why cry now? The time would come, on its own.

"I'd rather we didn't," said Beth. "I think the time has come to start discussing a few things. John, you know, I remember how eloquent you were about starting this colony . . . back on Earth. Now that we're here, and the time for a real start has come, you sit back and watch. When you do talk, it's all generalities. What's happening to you?"

The man looked at her and at the others in turn. His face flushed. "I'm sorry," he said, looking at the table. "It's true— I had great hopes for this colony. But it's not going to work out that way. We're a failure already, barely two weeks along. All that's here is what we brought. I was wrong to think that something else could be created. I am responsible." He paused, then went on: "We have our chance to fail, now. When the USEC ship comes in a few months, those of us who must go back separately will be able to do so. Maybe we should call it quits." Somehow, he couldn't look at their faces anymore. Ariane reached across the table suddenly and put her hand on John's. "Come on," she said, "give us a chance."

Beth could almost see the strength draining out of the musician. She felt sick, watching him fade so fast. She looked at the others and saw that they seemed to be straightening up, as if awakening. It was as if John's admission, his self-condemnation, were giving them some kind of strength. What was it: some kind of contrariness? Angrily, she looked at John, saw him raise his eyes . . . She waited for him to look at her, expected it, but his gaze locked with Methol's.

Cornwell took the woman's hand and stroked it. "What do you suggest?" Ariane stared at him for a long moment, dark eyes impenetrable, then she said, "No one's questioning the technical feasibility of this colony. We have what we need to live here, and we have a lot left to do; a lot to keep us busy. . . ."

"But what about you?" he demanded. "Will you be content to spend the rest of your life stuck out here with people like us? Have you thought about what that means?"

"We all thought about that. Thoroughly," she said. She looked around at the others. "The responsibility for our emotions lies within each of us. We knew what we were getting into. . . . God damn it, John, you seem to think that the rest of us are powerless! We know we're going to have to cope with this, somehow. That's how human societies survive, and it's a kind of love, maybe the only kind!" She let go of his hand and sat back.

"Ariane's right," said Vana.

John stared at them all, his brow pinched. He nodded slowly.

Beth felt relief flooding her. "What about the things that you talked about?" she asked. "What happened to thosenotions about group consciousness that seemed so important?" It wasn't pushing. She really wanted to know.

"I don't know. Lately, I've come to think that Downlink Rapport would have only bad effects. It represents a sort of total vulnerability, and in the presence of anything but total good will ..."

"You're talking about Brendan, aren't you?" Ariane had a trace of masked anger in her voice.

"Well . . . yes. You keep saying that I don't understand him. Maybe so. But, until I do, I think I'm right to be suspicious. I think he might use it to his own ends."

Demogorgon looked away from them, not wanting to listen any longer. The worst of it, he thought, is the damned fool is probably right. Just because I love Brendan, I don't have to be blind to his faults. I know how he'd act. . . . He knows that his laughter hurts people, and that makes him laugh even more. Jana suddenly looked up from her contemplative silence and said, "Speaking of the Devil . . . If I read the data from my local seismic monitors correctly, there's something rolling toward us across the ice. I guess they're back."

In his turn, the Arab felt a flood of relief.

As they pulled up to the entrance to the habitat dome, Brendan braked the car to a halt. He shook Krzakwa and said, "Hey! We're here." He turned off the engine and stretched. It was great to be back in touch with Shipnet again. There was a moment of reintegration, and then Sealock performed some quick computational housekeeping to make certain that his work-buffers and program systems were functioning correctly. When they'd pressurized their suits and were ready to face the outside, they left the car. 60vet was no worse for the wear—though there were a few nodules of ice lodged in the grille from an unfortunate collision that had occurred on the way back when, bored by the ruler-flat terrain, they had all fallen asleep. Predictably, they had crashed into the only impediment in a hundred square kilometers, an ice boulder thrown from some large impact on the farside. It had taken a startled moment to determine that the sharp lurch and grinding wheels were not some dire mechanical failure.

They entered the access module between the domes, waited for the small enclosure to fill with nitrogen, empty, and then refill with air. Going through the airlock, they passed through the p-curtain leading into the transparent CM dome.

Brendan's depressurized suit fell from him like an old skin. Ridged, beltlike pressure marks embossed his flesh, distorting the muscle lines. Krzakwa followed his example, but Prynne kept his suit tight, a heroic costume. They went around to the other side of the CM, where the rest of the colonists were standing around a table, as though impatiently waiting.

Beth had noticed an immediate change in John, the moment he knew that the others were back, manifested by a tightening in his manner, a closing down. Perhaps they'd been on the verge of a breakthrough, perhaps not, but he'd been about to verbalize his fears, at least. Now she could see that it was Sealock who was bedeviling him. Sealock alone. She'd had some inkling that this might be the case, but now it was plain.

Demogorgon spoke first: "How was the trip?"

Sealock grimaced. "Good ride. Bad scenery. The edge of the mare is no big deal." Hu looked up sharply. "The edge? I thought it was agreed that you would stay clear of the volatile regions until a complete survey could be taken. The ocellus-highland interface is . . ." Tem held up a hand. "Don't worry, Jana. We didn't do any, ah—what did you call it?— wheelies in the fucking neon."

Prynne, smiling, was saying, "We all slept through the last hundred kilometers yesterday. We would've been back sooner if Tem's foot hadn't fallen off the gas pedal."

"Come on, you three," said Ariane, "grab a plate and join us. The buntings are perfect!"

"What's a bunting?" asked Prynne.

"It's a bite-sized bird," said the Selenite. "You mean you made the ortolans thing? I always wondered how that would taste." A smile broke through the tangled undergrowth of his beard. "I was getting pretty tired of that low-eel stuff."

"Wait for me," said Prynne. "I have to go put on some real clothes." He hopped rather clumsily up the ladder, back into the CM, and reappeared a minute later in shorts and a T-shirt. Sealock and Krzakwa were already seated, nude.

"Here's a toast," said Vana, brushing a curl of springy hair back where it belonged and raising her goblet. "To us."

Everyone drank. Beth noticed that John was keeping his eyes on his plate. Sealock had finished his ortolans but showed no inclination to get seconds. His face was dark, and there was an angular lumpiness to it, as if the light were unflattering. Finally he looked up and spoke.

"OK. I've been stewing about how to say this. I can't think of any gentler way, so, if this upsets any of you . . . tough shit." He grinned, momentarily, then shook his head slowly. "Um . . . Tem and I will be leaving you shortly. Going on another little trip." Demogorgonstirred, a look of dismay on his face, but the man went on: "We've decided that we're going to put the moonship together a little ahead of schedule and go have a quick look at the rest of this frozen merry-go-round. . . ." Jana pounded a hand on the table in front of her, smashing her food paquette with a loud crack.

"What?" She rose to her feet, leaned her small weight forward onto her hands, and looked at him intently. "I am going with you! There's no way you're going to leave me out of this! I promised the IAAU

I'd get samples from I and II as soon as it was possible, and I'm going to get them." Her face was reddening, turning a sallow brick color. "If you land on either of those moons I will not be responsible for the consequences."

Tem said, "We'll get them for you, Jana. You can guide us just as well from here as from the ship. Any instrumentation you want, we'll take."

Hu's voice was steady and flat now, emotionless, but her eyes were wild. "I will stop you if I can. Those moons are under my jurisdiction. You will regret this."

Sealock laughed. "I'll try to keep all that in mind."

Cornwell stood up. "I don't like this. By just what processdid you arrive at this 'decision'? It seems to me that Jana is certainly the most qualified to go. If you two are going to force something like this down all of our throats, an injustice is being done."

Sealock smiled gently. "Well ... try and stop us, then." He turned and stalked toward the CM, a rather delicate, balletlike maneuver in the low gravity.

Demogorgon said, "But, Brendan!" and hurried after him.

Jana rose to her feet, swept the lot of them with a contemptuous glare, stared at John for a long moment, then walked away, also toward the CM. Ariane stood and began walking slowly toward the CM, seeming downcast. Vana stared after her for a second, then got up to follow.

"Oh, Christ . . ." Cornwell turned and looked at Krzakwa. "What the hell is going on here?"

"This is important, John. It's important to him, and to me. Please don't interfere."

"I don't understand."

"Well . . . shit. I don't know. . . . Think about all the daydreams you ever had. How much did they ever mean to you?"

Cornwell looked puzzled. "Daydreams? You mean fantasies?" He thought about it. In his teens there had been many, covering an enormous field. "A lot, I guess. But what does that have to do with anything?"

Scratching at his beard, meditative and distant, Tem said, "I don't know. A few days ago I would've said that too. Now . . . I've been thinking. . . ." He yawned and turned back to look at his food, then began eating, obviously having tuned out John and the rest of the universe.

Brendan sat in his room, cross-legged on a floor mat, facing Demogorgon. "Come on, Achmet ," he said. "It's not going to happen right now, and it's not going to take forever. We'll be gone for a few weeks, total. No more than a month."

The Arab nodded. "I know. You keep saying that. It doesn't make me any happier. What if something happens to you?"

"What if? We're not fucking immortal, you know."

"Please don't be mad at me, Bren."

"I'm not. I just wish you weren't so dependent on me for whatever it is that you want."

"That's a hell of an easy thing to say. It doesn't mean much."

"No, I guess not." He sighed and leaned back, stretching. "Notice anything funny?"

"What do you mean?"

"Where's Ariane?"

"I ... don't know. In her room?"

"'In her room'? That sounds like a pretty clever deduction."

"Does being mean make you feel good?"

"Yeah. Pulling the legs off grasshoppers is OK, too. You're missing the point. Why isn't she here?" Demogorgon shrugged.

"No curiosity about the matter? She says she loves me, just like you do. . . ." He shut his eyes suddenly, muscles tensing under the skin around them, making rounded ridges above and below the crow's-feet at their corners, making a small hump above his nose, where his eyebrows grew together.

"So she's not here, like you. Something keeps her away. What do you suppose it is?" Staring at him, Demogorgon thought, That's not what he intended to say. He was going to give me some damned sophomoric pep talk about how Ariane wasn't so dependent on him, so why should I be?

The Arab smiled faintly, and a glimmering of it came to him. What was the distraction that made him stop? I love him, he loves her. . . . Who does she love? Brendan? Herself? No one? What the hell . . . we're all so stupid!

After setting up a forty-meter dome next to Prynne's "garage," they began the construction of the vehicle they'd brought for transporting passengers and heavy cargo about their new home. Called the Multiple Person Transport, it was little more than a Hyloxso tank segment mounted in a girder tripod. Grappling devices of various kinds hung from an open platform that bridged the three legs, perhaps a third ofthe way down. An expansion-valve reaction motor was mounted on a swivel track that could be raised and lowered to match the mutable craft's center of gravity. It was, in essence, a vacuum-riding helicopter.

Their first cargo was a mass-driver for launching small satellites. Its ammunition was to be a relay transponder that would be placed near Ocypete's inner Lagrange point. They called it a "Clarke" satellite, for that was its function, but synchronous orbit was impossible for anything circling a tidally locked body. They had decided to loft it from a point on the equator, which intersected a part of the ocellus some 275

kilometers to the south. While the 'driver could easily handle the energy requirements, they wanted to minimize the amount of equipment in the satellite. The L1 halo orbit was mildly perturbed by the gravitational influence of Podarge, so station-keeping would be required. The more fuel with which it arrived at its new home, the fewer times the satellite would have to be attended to or replaced. John hooked into the primitive 'net element that made the thing go. It began to move slowly away from the ground, riding on its single jet. He accelerated gently, until he was traveling at a little under Ocypete's escape velocity. At the same time he rolled the vehicle so that its rocket was pointing upward. A ballistic trajectory was simply too slow on a tiny ice moon like this. This way, it would be a quick trip: the equator was only about thirty-five minutes away. It was a wasteful way to travel, but they had water to burn. In order to stop, it was necessary to tip the bottom of the transport forward so that the gas jet worked against acquired velocity. It slowed to a halt about a meter above the ice and settled the rest of the way with a gentle yet visceral crunch John noticed the neon receding quickly from the craft, but he was already beginning to take this phenomenon for granted. The pristine nature of the ocellus was not going to last much longer. He pictured the enormous swath that 60vet had cut during its voyage. The magnetic induction catapult was about ten meters long, and not particularly massive, so it had to be well anchored in the ice. This was accomplished with a particle-beam drill and a set of long, threaded pitons. When he finished, the latticework tube was raked back at a steep angle, pointed directly at Iris. The parameters of the launch were already programmed into the machine; Cornwell just activated the system.

The ice transmitted a gentle thud to his feet and the satellite flew away. For a moment it was a brief, glittering speck, then he lost it among the stars. He looked up into the sky and thought about the satellite. At a predetermined point in its flight a pyrotechnic device would fire, briefly, gases spurting forward, and the thing would jolt to a sudden stop and hang there, magically, dead center above Ocypete's near side. As soon as the satellite was ensconced overhead, John called in. "Hello. Hello. Just testing the Clarke here. Anyone feel like answering me?" An image of warm femininity came to him suddenly, unexpectedly commanding. It was a strong, unusual overlay on the com i/o. "Beth?" he thought, enjoying the sudden presence. "Are you sending in standard mode? I'm getting a lot more than I'm supposed to. . . ." There was a trace of gentle amusement flooding onto him from the carrier wave. "Not exactly standard," she thought to him. "But the i/o telltales are registering full - arieshere. Are you coming on back?"

"Yes . . . but . . . something, uh . . . strange . . ." He looked behind him, feeling odd, and found a place to sit on the edge of one of the MPT's footpads, an insulated spot where the ice wouldn't be able to steal his warmth. The sensations grew stronger. "What is this?"

The thing grew within him, and he could feel tendrils reaching out across the intervening spaces, warm, delicate probes reaching out to hook up with his mental circuitry. Something had him in its grasp, weak in the absence of physical connection, but taking him away from the real world nonetheless. . . . Across all the stark immensities, she became the world. Beth's image roared over him like a breaking tsunami, carrying ecstasy with it. Knowledge came. This was no malfunction. It was no fantastic coincidence. She was enabling full

Downlink Rapport, risking its use on an open channel. Others might be listening, but he found that he didn't care.

Dimly, somewhere in the background, he sensed the presence of a GAM, regulating things, maintaining and strengthening the rapport.

Why? he wondered, transmitting that wonder to her, but the only answer was stronger intimacy. He felt overwhelmed, briefly frightened. The obstacles that had stood between them for so long and made them strangers were pushed aside like phantoms. How could they be anything but . . . sentiences, human and different, everythings, a catalog of the world, and its mirror? For a moment they seemed to be one. If it hadn't been for the slight time lag of the satellite, they felt as though they might have irrevocably merged. Sexuality came, and was sated, and then vanished, wafting away on the wings of a storm. Time passed, and the GAM program kicked them down into a less intimate mode. It knew the dangers, even if they did not.

Fiery sun speck at zenith, catching little irregularities on the meshwork of the MPT and highlighting them with brilliant reflection. Blackness and random eye-feedback colors melting into more and more horrible caricatures of faces. Organizing randomness into horror. Stop it. What's happening? was a sort of odd, impenetrable fear, trying to pull them apart, but failing. I am so happy . . . but something is there. What? I am breaking through. . . . Memory. A memory.

It was a bright gray day, the sun shining through hazy white stratus, a silver circle shedding various degrees of shadowless light. They were comfortably seated in two plush couches, facing each other, a large window to his left. The cushion-train they rode was heading down to Chilliwack , where Uncle David had a condo. His mother was watching the scenery and tapping a collection of illustrated poems from Comnet.

His father, sitting next to him, pointed to a small-looking mountain on the dark horizon. "That's Mount Baker over there, Johnny," he said. "They say she's shaking right now, getting ready to erupt. It's getting to be a regular event, hereabouts." He was a small, dark man with a Vandyke beard, the Innuit written deep into his squinting, crack-radiating eyes. John watched it for a while, and, indeed, he could just make out a wisp of something, lighter than the clouds behind it. Then, as he stared in amazement, the mountain seemed to burst. Huge fountains of steam and ash shot up, and, though at this range it was a slow, stately billowing, he understood that up close it was fast and tremendously violent. The train had closed somewhat on the mountain, and it was now less than thirty kilometers away. There would be a long time before the shock wave got to them. A voice came crackling over the train's antique intercom, the engineer, perhaps, or a conductor: "I have just received word that the Baker eruption has started. We're going to have to stop the train in order to weather the high winds that will be sweeping over us in a few minutes. There is no reason to be concerned. I will be giving you a further report in about five minutes."

The whole southern sky was being enveloped in an ashen cloud, sporting a complement of turrets and domes. The train slowed in an even deceleration. As they stopped, the sun was completely hidden, and John noticed a small bush, made unnaturally important by the fact of its being here, in the dimming light. A man in the seat behind them said, "Those bloody scientists can't get anything right. And after a hundred years of trying, too! I heard just last week that this thing was going to quietly spill its guts in a couple of years. I hope they had the evacuation plan down."

"If not," said a woman's voice, "I hate to think what will happen." The intercom began again. "This is no simple eruption. The best I can piece together is that there's been some sort of terrorism. Someone planted a weapon in the opening and the thing is . . ." A dull thudding grew out of the stillness, and the trainbegan to rock. "Everyone keep calm!" said the intercom. "This is it," said the man behind them.

John had been watching the flat landscape beyond the river, as it was progressively swallowed by dim, boiling fog. He wanted to go outside and feel the wind, just like he'd wanted to be in a hurricane, to feel its power. He felt no fear.

With a huge, broken jolt, the world fell on its side. They fell fifteen feet to the hard, cold windows on the other side of the train. Screams in many different tones punctuated the bass thrumming all around. He didn't hear his mother's screams. He lay crumpled against the cold glass and felt his hand under his upper arm in a funny way.

The thudding grew less. It was over, he knew. Again, the thing he wanted to do most was go outside. The screaming resumed for a moment, two or three voices, then subsided. "Fucking shit," said his father. He rolled onto his back and looked up at the topsy-turvy train, the seats and blank windows above his head. His father was kneeling over a form that he easily recognized as his mother. Her head was turned away.

"She's dead. Her neck's broken." His father didn't look at him. A muzziness overtook him, but he still wanted to get out. He stood up and then fell down.

In the now, with Beth inside him, he felt strong, yet almost unconscious. A quiet sense of communion and change was encompassed.

It had to be over. The GAM needed to modify its OS.

John stood cautiously, hoping that the cold had not made his suit brittle. He felt exhausted, and frozen through, more likely from pressure-inhibited circulation than actual cold . . . and joy was there as well. Again, he thought to her, knowing the answer: "Why?"

"It was time. I overcame the fear finally. It had to be done." She made a picture for him. It was the last meeting they'd had. It was the picture of his uncertainty, his sense ofmanifest failure.... It was another hand on his own, comforting, uselessly. . . .

He looked at the sun and up at the transport. It took a moment for him to remember where he was and what he'd been doing. "I'm coming back. Maybe we'll have more strength now." And he jumped up onto the craft.