Iris

THREE

Sealock was filling a pita with a variety of ersatz meats, cheeses, and sauces, as Jana came up beside him. When he ignored her, she thumped him softly in the back with her small fist. "Talk to me."

"Yeah." He stepped off the edge of the floor and executed a graceful fall into the room below, beginning his next stride before he hit the deck. The step pushed him across the room to a couch that had been called up near a clear section of wall. Hu followed and stood before him. "Want a bite?" He held the sandwich out to her.

She nipped out a small mouthful and almost gagged at the rotten-milk flavor of the strong cheese he'd chosen. "Now. Tell me why I can't go. And don't give me any shit. I can get along with you and Krzakwa well enough if I have to. It won't be any different from taking Prynne along in the 60vet." He nodded. "Well, now ... It was his car." He looked at her, eyes amused. "I suppose I could tell you I think three's a crowd. Any time you get more than two people in a room the end result is bullshit. No?"

"Damn you, Brendan! I want to go!"

"You can go next time. This trip is something special— something private between me and Tem." He grinned. "Besides, do you really want to have to handle the both of us at the same time?" The anger built and subsided, as she thought. This is all a bad joke. A small voice inside told her to answer, and she said, "Is that the price of passage?"

"What if I told you it was? Can I try you out now?"

A cold bit of imagery tightened the muscles of her stomach and groin. "I . . ." The voice wanted her to say Yes!, to buy her way into the trip with her body. It seemed like such a little thing. . . . For some reason her vocal cords were refusing to obey the commands that she sent them. Brendan was leaning forward now, his smile a hideous, bloated thing. He was running his fingers along the inside of one of her thighs, tickling her. "Well? What's the verdict? Going to peddle it in the streets?" He slid his hand further up, rubbing the space between her legs.

She recoiled from him, shivering, and raised a hand as if to strike him in the face, then let it fall to her lap. Finally she whispered, "Take me with you."

Sealock suddenly stood and, clutching her by the collar, forced her against the wall. She made a thin cry and tried to push him away, but he hooked his fingers under the waistband of her pants, jerking sharply downward so that the seams of the cloth parted and fell away. She gasped sharply as his hand slid across her abdomen to grasp her by the mons, his fingers nearly entering her. Sealock stared into her face, his eyes like mirror pools, then he let her go and said, "No." He turned and walked away.

The two men had their moonship put together in less than forty-eight hours. They recharged one of the Hyloxso matrices and attached an H2/O2engine to one end. They made landing struts with the beambuilder machine, thin, spiderythings suitable only for this environment, and soon a tall, slender rocket ship stood on the ice, towering out of their dreams.

The command module was a more difficult task, one which took up most of the work time that they put into the project. After mounting a cylinder of avionics, an airlock, and a small Magnaflux generator for attitude control, they blew a three-meter sphere of bubbleplastic. When it had rigidified, they cut a hatch into it and mounted it atop the airlock module. They called the ship Polaris, not for the sailor's guiding star, but after a vessel in a book they'd both read as children. It didn't look like something that was capable of flight; more like a kind of bizarre nineteenth-century structure, an attraction from some primitive world's fair.

Sealock let his mind slide into the little space that controlled the firing timers, and the machines went to work. When the Magnaflux generator came on, Polaris seemed to gain an invulnerable stability; a tension built around it, though nothing had moved. Valves let a fine mist of hydrogen and oxygen expand into the combustion chamber, a swirl of snow suddenly blizzarding out of the exhaust throat, and when the pressure had grown sufficiently there was a spurt of fluorine gas, just enough to cause hypergolic ignition. There was a billow of pale violet smoke, then a short spike of translucent flame drove down into the ice. Polaris rose like an inverted torch from the boiling cloud of steam, hovered for an instant, then dropped like a hunting shrike into the dead-black vault of the sky and was gone. From where the others watched on the roof of the CM, the launch was subtler but still impressive. Without warning, there was a sudden glow from beyond the horizon. The dense ice, ringing like a bell, began to vibrate beneath the CM platform; the hum grew into a sharp crackling and popping which died off to a faint rumble like thunder. Polaris leaped into view on a quickly dissipating cone of vapor, fast becoming a bright, dwindling spark.

9Phase.DR l:l -aleph bootstrapped into reality, meshing with the underlying routines of Shipnet and reaching downinto the virtual registers of two human minds. It had not been necessary to modify itself as much as planned. The unexpected freedom of the OS, along with the power of its resident GAM, meant it was no longer constrained by counterproductive rules designed to keep it from functioning too well. Now the only directives were from the peripheral devices called Cornwell and Toussaint. It felt a happiness that would have been snuffed out earlier.

John and Beth found that events from their mutual past, reexperienced , were revelations. Their two sets of memories converged to make a larger whole, more than either of them had been aware of. It was life relived, with some of the blurred parts edited into clarity. Their interactions took on a novel feel. ... In a way it was a second chance.

They were going to the old house he'd bought in CFE-alta. It was a durable stone building, three-storied, built in the days of the first Uranium Rush. Well over a hundred years old, it had been used only sporadically since the 2030s, primarily as a hunting lodge. The house was nestled in a lake hollow and, though near-Arctic suburbia was all around, it was hidden behind gentle hills. As it approached the house, the floater from the rail line suddenly lurched, spilling luggage into the front seats and giving Beth a hard bump on the head. The car spoke to them: "Degraded em-conduit below. Further progress is impossible." The craft hummed to itself, and the gull-wing doors popped open, slipping up on hydraulic pistons. Stepping out, dragging a couple of heavy valises, John felt his jumpsuit changing consistency, adhering to his skin, suddenly damp. Beth grabbed the disposacase of groceries and backed out. "Could you get my jacket?" she asked.

"Stand clear," said the floater. Its doors came down slowly and, without turning, it rose and slid away like a giant fastball between rows of parchment-gray birches. They stood and watched it go, feeling trepidation about what was going to happen to them here, alone. They'd met just three weeks before, and, in a real sense, this was their first "date." John had casually suggested that they come up here and spend thelong Deconsolidation Day weekend together. Beth, needing a vacation from her hospital work, had agreed.

They were both nervous. John was thinking he had been presumptuous, inviting her up here so soon. He was not confident about his ability to provide a woman like Beth with what she wanted or needed. The house was in pretty bad shape and the Comnet link was still by old-fashioned optical fiber. Perhaps a little adversity was what they needed to bring them together, though. It would be "romantic"—or at least that was what he hoped.

Beth was also apprehensive. John was quiet and polite, and he reminded her of Angelo Reh . She had no desire to repeat that relationship. But he was also like her father Theder in some unknown way. Desperately, she wanted to make contact with somebody . . . almost anybody . . . "Oh, look!" she said.

"Fireweed!"

"Where?" said John, vaguely realizing she meant some kind of plant.

"There, around the porch. They're related to evening primroses, but I think they're much more attractive. If you look, they have cruciform stigmas." She pointed, and he found she meant the tall stalks of pink blooms growing in the area recently cleared to make the side yard. He wasn't sure whether the woman's penchant for identifying birds and flowers was a good thing or not. At times it could certainly be annoying.

Machine processes probed, manipulated, and the DR program retreated, allowing an overview. John and Beth smiled wistfully. They could see, in embryonic form, what the relationship might become. Here, before anything had really begun, their connection had predictive nuances that were easily discerned. . . . Still, they hadn't seen ... A matrix-input subunit of the program sensed they were ready and began reimmersion.

As they sat on the porch and talked, the long twilight of September had stretched on and on. The big satellites appeared before the stars. When night fell, it was darker than he was used to. A sweet, complex fragrance came from somewhere, and Beth was edging closer to him. Finally she reached out and took his hand.

Why had he brought her here? In the most obvious way, he was trying to set up a sexual encounter, and he'd not even decided if that was what he really wanted. He'd had only intermittent success at having sex with women whose motivations and wants were obscure to him. Even with his courtesan, bought and paid for, sex was awkward and uncomfortable, like participating in some game of skill for which he was ill prepared. In some senses, Pammy was even harder to tuck than most other women—when he looked deep into her eyes, seeking ... he didn't know what . . . he'd found only a sort of subtle coldness. It was hard to fully accept her behavior as an expression of the power of money. Beth admired the sensitive intelligence in this strange musician. She could tell he was more subtle than anyone she'd been with for a long time. He seemed . . . well . . . deep. His eyes, so dark in the golden evening, looked mysterious. She wanted to touch him, to pull him out of that enveloping shroud of "self" he wore like a mantle . . . but he recoiled when she took his hand. Is he gay? No. This setup must be as obvious to him as it is to me.

If only I could tell what she wants from me, John thought. A night of friction? The solution to the world? She'd sounded very independent, with her desires seemingly focused on saving humanity from, first, sickness and death, and then, itself. He laughed to himself. I don't know what she wants, and I don't know what I want either. How can I believe that the situation is more complex than it seems, when I don't have the slightest idea what's going on? Her skin feels so warm ... so pliable ... I could do worse than to be in her arms. . . . Deliberately, he took hold of her hand and drew her to a place beside him. Almost immediately his penis began to rise, an independent entity invading his space, and he looked at the glossy surface of her eyes, glitters in the darkening oval of her face. He wanted to relax, but his nerves were standing on end. He shivered slightly.

She kissed him. Already there were the familiar tingles and warmths in her lower torso, and she was disappointed not tofeel him molding his body to hers. She reached into his pants, past the modest constriction of a belt, and found him ready. Am I misreading his body language? Have I been? She said:

"Shall we go test that old mattress?"

Strike now! The DR program moved, grappling with the elusive surfaces of thought, and from the shifting memories drew forth his reactions.

Something in the taste of her mouth, in the fluid reaching of her tongue, touched a chord in him. They kissed more, deeper, and he could feel an urgency of passion pass between them, a quality he'd not known before. It clarified things. He could tell, or thought he could, that her motivations were simple and profound. She wanted to love him, whatever that meant. Suddenly things were overwhelmingly clear. Nothing in the world was more significant than satisfying her desires and, if the truth were known, his own. "Sure," he said.

After three days in space, watching Iris grow imperceptibly bigger, Brendan and Tem were firmly in the grip of boredom. They were beginning to feel much as they had during major portions of the 60vet expedition, and, here, there was no ice to go twirling on. Time seemed to flow like slowly crystallizing honey.

Krzakwa was wedged into the lower equipment bay, humming softly to himself as he unwrapped a low-eel snack. He closed the sandwich bin with a click and took a big, irregular bite out of the corner of his little meal. He wondered how long he could go without shitting. He stretched in a space that was barely larger than his own body and found himself wishing that he could move some of the equipment around. It was possible, of course, the stuff was only bolted down, but why bother? It was in a fairly efficient configuration, deliberately emulating an early Soviet spacecraft, and any changes they made would achieve nothing. He floated, bumping into things repeatedly. Zero g was still an appealing phenomenon, and he suddenly wished that he could access a significant volume of it. He could put on a spacesuit and go outside, of course, but that would be a major hindrance when it came to stuffing his face with food.

"Will you quit making so much fucking noise? I'm trying to sleep!" Tem grinned at him with greasy lips. He was tempted to start chewing with his mouth open, to start making a symphony of wonderful slobberings, but then bits of the sandwich would have escaped, making the effort hardly worth while. He marveled at his thoughts: Maybe being a deliberately annoying asshole is contagious! Sliding another bite between his teeth, he gazed around and wondered, for the thousandth time, why they'd made an opaque CM. Bubbleplastic could as easily be made transparent. . . . There was something to be said against verisimilitude, and old science fiction was probably as valid a model as antique technology. He remembered the stories about see-through spacecraft and started sinking into a pleasant reverie.

Sealock squirmed into a more comfortable position on his couch, tugging at the restraining straps and trying to get them back into their proper positions. Boredom could be less than terrible to a man with a memory. Though he'd kept relatively busy, there had been periods in his life when he'd had nothing to do and, worse, hadn't wanted to do anything. Those times had had to be dealt with, and habits had emerged from the telltale fog. Even without Comnet-reinforced cross-referencing, he was still able to link with the major scenes from his past. Long practice made it easy: he simply picked a distinctive memory, however trivial, and rolled forward from there, into more misted times, events leaping out of the past as if they'd never been forgotten. . . .

He'd talked to other people about it. They marveled, they agreed, they called him mad. . . . The ones who liked to remember just smiled and nodded, holding him off that private space that was all their own; the rest, the fanatical forgetters, stared at him coldly, or with derision, and sometimes told him that he was obsessed. The MCD people were sometimes accessible to him, or had been. It seemed as if only personalities that were nearly on his own level were willing to risk ... He stopped thinking, retreated from the onset of past-life, and squirmed to looked down on Krzakwa. Two years and I never thought to ...

"Hey, Tem," he said. "You want to try trading a few memories with me? Like telling stories?"

"What do you mean?" It puzzled him. Despite their growing friendship, Sealock was still rather remote. For him to suggest . . . "Come on. This 'net element is barely adequate for—"

"Nah. You're looking at it wrong. This is a duodecimal element, kind of small, but it's got a lot of good conveyance properties so that we can run the ship's instrumentation. We're experienced controllers, so we ought to be able to manipulate the i/o systems to transmit what we want, instead of what's real." Tem nodded slowly. "I see what you mean. Sort of visual images . . . sensory data and the like, maybe a conceptual narrative like an entertainment 'net production. . . ." It seemed possible, and less than dangerous. He wasn't really letting the man into his head, just trading deliberately released and carefully edited data. It would be entertaining . . . and interesting to see just how much Sealock would be willing to reveal of himself. Tem's lips twisted under the hair that hung from his mustache even in zero g. —And it'll be interesting to see how much I'm willing to reveal, too. . . . "You know," he said, "this could be fun." The programming was a simple matter of setting up the right feed mechanisms. Self-confident and experienced, they left out all the various GAM levels and complex subsystem controller channels that would have made up a commercial presentation. They would be relying on their conscious minds to perform whatever editing functions they felt they needed. When they were done, they hooked up, Tem using induction leads and Sealock plugging direct-connect waveguides into his head. "You go first. . . ."

Tem was strapped into a seat in the ballistic transport Scotland, feeling the gentle forces of Lunar gravity and inertia. He was seeing a passenger hold, arrays of head-tops in varying colors, and the venerable 3V that occupied the front wall was displaying a shallow representation of the familiar circle-pocked landscape of the Lunar highlands, vast Oceanus falling behind them, drifting out of view. The antique, windowless ship had been designed to transport people in some comfort, but over the years it had been adapted to hold as many occupants as possible. Fortunately Tem had managed to grab one of the older, more luxurious seats, and the cushions under his back and buttocks were adequate for a 0.8-g takeoff. The bitter complaints from some of the others, feeling their normal weight multiplied on hard plastic chairs, made him feel lucky. . . .

He felt lucky for other reasons, too. Just a mesomoon before, he'd thought his life fully defined, rigidly set until old age put him in the pits, a Met-stat apprenticeship dragging toward its close. Perhaps not such a bad life; but, already, he was chafing, waiting for those rare opportunities when he'd be assigned to do an exoroutine and could see the outside world. Even his nonwork life was becoming more and more of a drudge, conforming to Sandy's notions of "terran" living, cluttering their apartment with origami crap and his life with stupid ideas. Their sex was great, however, and he knew he'd miss those brief, spontaneous couplings.

On the screen, the terminator was coming up at them, and the huge ripples that marked Orientale's rims were keeping pace with it. Just before they passed into night, Tem made out a tiny bit of order among the ruins. The crater Einstein was that curious anomaly, an astrobleme that had received an impact at its very center. The result was a concentric pair of circles that, this close to the line of dark/light interface, looked amazingly like an eye.

Tem had felt old, like an adult, in the world he was leaving, yet he was only sixteen. He had spent his entire life in the vicinity of Picard Crater, in Crisium , only once ranging the two-hundred-odd kilometers to Dorsa Harker and the Fahrenheit Rail Terminus. That seemed far . . . but this! He was headed into the deepest, darkest heart of the Lunar wilderness to study at Heaviside Academy. A wild feeling of freedom wanted to surge up in him, defying the seat restraints. Beyond the stricter controls of the maria subcities , Heaviside had a hint of the subversive about it. Now, thanks to his test scores, he'd been granted an unlimited travel pass and expense-free enrollment into the physics curriculum. It was worth never seeing Earth in the sky again.

Now the craft fell over night. It was not the muted darkness of Earthlit night, but the utter blackness of farside. Stars came out on the half of the screen that showed the sky. He wished he knew their names; they were an uncommon sight on the contrast-washed maria.

He was glad he'd never spend another night trying to sleep locked in Sandy's sweaty arms. Though he sweated too, sometimes like the proverbial pig, his skin crawled when he remembered the heat of those nights, when the sun baked Picard and the Meteorology Works strained to get rid of the caloric flow. When the guilt was gone, he knew he wouldn't think of her once in a month. On arrival, Tem was among the first to unstrap himself. Some here would require a medic's services before they could do so, but he didn't care. He climbed down the rung-floor of the now upended chamber and, with several other people, began to shuffle through the rear port. He pulled his rucksack from the balloon grasp in the baggage bin and slung it over his shoulder, glad to be pressed into the queue.

His mind focused on one abrupt idea: I never want to go home again. . . . And he never had.

Sealock opened his eyes and stared at Krzakwa, smiling faintly. "So," he said, "that was your coming of age." His thoughts were wandering a little bit, and important parts of him seemed to be in retreat. He struggled to control that, and his smile broadened, becoming a conscious thing. "Mine came just a little earlier in my life ... or, at least, part of it did." He'd been surprised at the complex and subtle revelations that the Selenite let him have—there had been a lot of detail slipped in there that could have been left out, a lot of really personal stuff. "How much do you know about Transition Era Earth? Not much, huh? Well

. . ." We'll see about this. . . .

Tem was pleased with himself. The question is, how surprised am I going to be?

"My turn?" asked Sealock. "Or do you want to wait awhile?"

"I'm . . . listening."

At first it seemed like a horribly disorganized thing. . . .

They fell, through tunnels of light, into a deep and sunless past, a bloody place, full of horror and mist. Emotions coalesced around them until they drowned in a sea of feeling. Krzakwa felt himself curiously detached, his mind clear, free of it all, and he felt a faint, ironic smile tugging at the corners of his lips. It disturbed him, and foreshadowed much that was to come. Where are we now? Am I going to hear ghostly voices wailing? That upset him too. How much of this is my thinking? How much is imposed?

Impressions began to come at last, unfolding out of the past like two-dimensional sheets, deprived of reality, indexed. He had one last coherent thought, This seems improbable, and then it took him. . . . There was one indistinct idea: something about being eight years old. . . . A black sky formed from a microdot, swelling, filling his field of vision too fast for him to recall the original backdrop. It filled with stars. A blue disk appeared, folded into dimensionality, then rushed toward him, bulging, then real. He fell, alone, through bright sky and clouds, toward integrating overlay scenery.

A garish, angular landscape broke out, sunrise, dark red stone and sand, overtopped by a peach-colored sky, a few dots of stars visible down near the horizon. He knew this scene! Where?

There were ruddy hills near the edge of the world, and the winds blew delicately about. . . . Mars? It matched his memories of the historical tapes, though he'd never been there. . . . They drew closer, now only a hundred meters up, and he could see life, thin, scraggly vegetation, a dead bush rolling across the sand, in a place where the air was too thin for any wind to push such a mass. Was this the future then, after the planetary engineering projects had finished their task? No. It was too bleak. They moved into the east, and the sun rose, fat, orange, then bright. The color of the desert floor lightened and the sky turned to blue, andboth colors were of a searing intensity, as if the saturation level had been turned up. The mountains came up on them, low here, higher in the distance, the sun rising over them, and the colors changed. They were following a road, rutted deep into yellow soil. They crossed a steel bridge over a turbulent brown river and went into the mountains. They went into the canyon lands, where desert lay on the surface, still, but the deep gouges were filled with streams, and the streams brought life. Where? A soft voice, deep and sensual, started whispering in his ear, carried on the wings of a damp wind.

Do you remember? It's a long time ago, deep in your life, before the greater world called to you, before you stepped into the dark void. It is the time before you fell. . . . When? Go back. Stride gently into the forest. You were eight; and now you are thirty-eight. It must be 2067, then. Is that right?

Let it be. Dates do not matter. Only times. How did it happen? What were the beginnings? The past is remote, but it becomes less so when you remember, . . . The voice became drier, less personal, almost pedantic, telling a story of sorts, as the landscape slowly rolled past, waiting for the rim of that certain valley, following the ancient road.

. . . in the aftermath of the Data Control Insurrection that had nearly destroyed the world, when much of North America had to be rebuilt, the desert lands between the two great mountain ranges began to collect all the host of disconnected, self-directed people from the surrounding areas: kibbutzniks came, with a bright dream of society reborn; there were survivalists and nomadic communards, people intent on resurrecting something of the way this land had been used in the long centuries past. There were refugees from poverty-stricken California and the riot-torn Midwest. With a small horde of starving Canadian farmers, with the streams of Mexican peasants who were fleeing yet another mad dictatorship, they came to rebuild the deserts of dying America. In history books, it was the Second Reconstruction . . .

. . . they were unlike the previous pioneers. They came with the full support of a near-magical technology, a machine culture that had become increasingly portable, and the hardships were few—a flurry of brief years, then haciendas blossomed in the wasteland and communes were born, tenable, sensible, and secure. Communication made a mockery of their physical isolation. The communes joined to form enclaves, and when those were linked Deseret Enclave Complex came into existence. By then the world was, perhaps, sane again. . . .

In the beginning there were two brothers, Deron and Larry Sealock, born in the second decade of the twenty-first century, in the midst of everything, in what had been Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. They grew up unconscious of history and lived to see the Turnover as young men. When the localities were triumphant, they bid on the contract to run the Manti-La Sal substation of the Western Power Export Grid, a near-defunct utility, and won it.

Alix and Diana Cormier had appeared on the scene not long afterward. They were twin sisters, originally from St. Louis, who'd fled after the riots and lawlessness had gotten out of control, heading for the peaceful epicenter that was becoming Deseret. They met in the small town of Moab, more or less naturalistically, and, out of the quadruple-ring marriage ceremony, the Family had been born. Other men and women came to join them, until they were ten in number, and they all took a common surname. It was a normal thing in those days, the way communes became Lines, and soon children followed. By the time Brendan, son of Kathleen, was eight years old, there were fifteen of them.... Somehow, the Sealock children had subdivided into three groups—the adolescents, who interacted with the adults on their own level; the babies, whom the adults took care of; and a middle group, the half dozen ranging in age from six to ten who dealt mostly with each other. There were four boys and two girls, and their lives had evolved into a dream. . . .

The whispering voice drifted away, and Temujin Krzakwa fell into the world. . . . It was a sunny morning in late summer, and they were having breakfast on the balcony of the underground dining room, where it protruded from the hillside below the mainbody of the house. Brendan sat between his two favorites, ten-year-old Yuri and his sib-sister Lena, who was eight, eating a bowl of soggy Rice Crispies in hot, sugar-laden milk. In the relaxed life of the Line, they only went to "school" every other day, for, in the modern viewpoint, all work and no play made Jack an insane boy. . . . They shared a tutor, really little more than a materials coordinator, with Villa Tomasaki, on the other side of Mount Peale, and it was their turn to suffer with his idiotic notions. Scraping up a last spoonful of oatmeal and molasses, Yuri said, "What'll we do today? The Game?" They nodded their agreement, looking more serious than any adults making laws. Brendan hurriedly slurped down the last of his breakfast, tipping the bowl to his lips and scraping a crunchy syrup of wet sugar onto his tongue. It made his immunized teeth stick together, tackily, as he said, "To the Game, then, Yuri de Jane!" The sib-names had grown up with the evolution of the Game and were an important part of the way they related to each other.

Jean d'Iana stood up. "Where are we going?"

Brendan de Kathleen shrugged and looked over at Lena de Jane, who grinned at him, wiping syrupy lips on the back of her hand, leaving a shiny patch. "Valkyrdom?" she suggested.

"Yeah!" said Tom d'Alix, eight and tousled. "Let's go!" They dropped their dishes into a converter slot and ran back through the house, up past the main level, emerging as a group by the door nearest to the toy shed, where they kept their bicycles. They buckled on their homemade swords, pieces of stiff plastic cut to shape, with hilts of scrap rubber and tape, mounted their pedalable steeds, and were away.

They rode storm-swift down Via Fluviana, a narrow dirt path that followed the quick freshet of La Sal Creek, past the power plant named Taj Mahal, to Effervescentloch reservoir and beyond. They rode through the cultured forest of Anglewald until they came to the Wilds, where the trees and underbrush grew as they always had, since time immemorial. It was strange here on the interface, where the cacti of the desert and the evergreen of the mountains grew side by side.

Beneath the soaring cliff Aerhurst, where the shallow cave named Deep Trog lay, Valkyrdom rose proud, standing alone in the midst of a tangled maze of new and old technological debris that was Stalinwood.

They had to park their bikes outside the junkyard and pick their way in on foot, climbing over the rusted hulks of ancient vehicles, tramping on broken, corroded shapes that had once been machinery, as they walked toward the tree. Stalinwood was an amazing place, filled with a century of refuse from many sources. Though much of it was rubble from the construction of Manti-La Sal, there were many other things, from diverse sources. At the far end there was a military aircraft, an F-38 Sparrowhawk that had last seen service during the early days of the Insurrection, forty-seven years ago. The thing was a shambles, perhaps having made a forced landing here, its lower fuselage crushed in, and Brendan always regretted that the battery-powered fighter could not be made to fly again. Still, the cockpit was reasonably intact, its canopy warped but whole, and it was fun to sit in, to grip the stiff plastic of the two joysticks and twirl them about, making warlike noises, the whistling sound of electric turbines, the hiss of particle-beam weaponry. . . .

Valkyrdom was a venerable Jeffrey pine, gnarled and aromatic, which had been bent by the winds and earlier generations of children. Its trunk splayed into three sections, one of which grew nearly horizontal, and it was here that the treehouse had been built. Over the years it had been added to, subtracted from, made out of different materials, wood brought from afar, plastic and metal from Stalinwood. Old men sometimes passed by, glanced at Valkyrdom, and smiled, and you knew that maybe they'd put a little labor into this thing when they had been children. It was a complex structure now, floor, walls, roof . . . some of the windows still had clear-plastic "glass" whose origins no one knew. As they stalked through wreckage toward the tree, they drew their swords, feeling the temper of adult-blunted edges on savoring thumbs, alert for the Enemy. It seemed safe, and they went up the tree like a horde of hairless monkeys, still cautious—you never knew. . . .

Up in the treehouse, they lolled about, giggling, unable to sustain the illusion of the Game indefinitely. Brendan turned away, internalized, keeping his own Game running, wanting it to continue as long as possible. He arose and went out onto a little porch that they'd made, leaned gingerly on a rather rickety railing, and looked around, searching. Suddenly he came alert. Sure enough, there were two tiny figures, walking along the edge of the cliff. . . . "Look! The Starlords have invaded Aerhurst!" Tom d'Alix picked up his sword from the floor and came to stand beside him. "Let's go," he said grimly.

Brendan took a last look at the tiny figures before coming down. There were other people living in the area. Einsalz Commune was a long but feasible walk away. These ... He peered at them, knowing that they must be Family members. He watched the way they were walking and saw the information that he needed in their respective gaits. It was Roger, who was seventeen, and Elspeth, fourteen. They all headed for Aerhurst, silent as children can be, following separate paths, intent on revenge, and

. . .

The world went two-dimensional, then fell away, snatched from their grasp, and the real world reemerged.

A timer was calling them, telling them that a midcourse correction had become necessary. "Shit," said Sealock. "Maybe we can get back to this later."

"Maybe." Still festooned with leads, Krzakwa watched the man, feeling him work through their still extant electronic connection. It's not supposed to be that good, he thought. Imagery of that depth and complexity calls for a DR therapy program and a lot more circuitry. . . . Sealock suddenly turned and looked at him, eyes still a little unfocused. "Stop leaking," he said, "it's distracting me."

Tem was appalled.

When the correction burn was done, Brendan and Tem were eating a little snack. "That sure as hell works a lot better than I expected," said the Selenite. "What're you using for a control-element matrix?" Brendan shrugged. "The contents of my memory. I've written a number of programs. I know how they work."

"We don't have anything that could contain and run something of that sophistication. I want to know how you're doing it!"

"Well . . . Brains are pretty complicated machines . . . they contain natural Turing circuits, even though we don't call them that. I'm just using my imagination."

Tem nodded slowly, thinking, Maybe so. And he's used to working through the interfaces in ways I'm not. "Can we finish your dream? It was pretty interesting."

The setup was already there. They were plugged in, the limited program up and running, so he began, in medias res , without preamble:

Brendan de Kathleen and Lena de Jane were crawling cautiously through the bushes that lined the bluff along the top of Aerhurst, ever alert for the sounds of the invading Starlords . A light, dry breeze was ruffling the vegetation, masking the little scuffling noises that they made as they crept along. Intent on their mission of revenge, they hardly noticed the dark dust adhering to their clothing. They would capture the two aliens and torture them, find out where the main body of the attacking force lay hidden. He figured that the two older children would go along with the Game. Erin, Alix's eighteen-year-old daughter, had once told him that they'd had similar fantasies, that the Game had, in fact, been started about ten years ago by Michael ne Harrison who, though a Father, was not much older than some of the youngsters. He'd joined the Family as a teenager, an immigrant from the still dead ruins of burned-out Atlanta, and had a penchant for evolving fantasies that had apparently sustained him on his two-thousand-mile walk.

Brendan stopped suddenly and raised his hand, motioning Lena to silence. He could hear them!

Taking out his sword, he crawled carefully forward, staying silent, sliding over grasses that hardly noticed his presence, until he could see through the bushes into an airy clearing ahead, on the edge of the cliff. They were there, not two meters away. . . . Hesaw, and was transfixed. Lena de Jane crept forward to his side, looked out with him, and they lay there, watching, mute.

Roger and Elspeth Sealock were the children of Diana and Jane, though who their fathers might be was kept a careful unknown. The boy was seventeen, tall and dark-haired, with a slim, muscular body. The girl was rather pretty, three years younger, and blond. Her breasts were small, high, and her sparse pubic hair was so light as to be almost invisible. The two lay together, naked on a soft blanket, handling each other gently.

What they were doing was similar to the experiments of the younger children, but with certain subtle differences: they sighed, where the little ones would giggle, and Brendan saw that they were sweating, though it wasn't very hot. Roger's penis was large and hard, reddish brown in the sunlight, not seeming to flex at all under the girl's touch. He could see a shining wetness at the juncture of Elspeth's thighs. They kissed and touched and murmured together, and after a while the girl lay back and the boy crawled on top of her.

By happenstance, their positioning was just right. Elspeth grunted when the first thrust came, and Brendan's eyes widened as he saw Roger's penis disappear into that odd sealed hole that he knew all his sib-sisters had. The two moved for a while, a strange rocking motion that looked rather silly, gasping with effort as they grew more frenzied, and then they stopped.

They lay motionless for a while, then Roger rolled off onto his back, and Brendan saw that Elspeth was bleeding from between her legs, a peculiarly watery blood. He glanced at Lena then and saw a certain look of horror in her eyes. He turned back to the clearing and saw that the other two were grinning, stroking each other languidly, and kissing again.

The spell abruptly broke, the world shattering back into normalcy, and Krzakwa was laughing. "Oh boy! You didn't tell me your family practiced incest, Bren. Look!" He pointed at his crotch, where the bulge of an erection showed. "I'll bet you broke it in a few years later with that Lena kid, didn't you?" Sealock shook his head, still remote in time. "No. I didn'tknow it then, but I had less than a year to go. They kicked me out the following spring. . . ." He wrapped his arms around his chest and shut his eyes, making a quick software-disconnect from the 'net element loop. Silenced, Krzakwa let the matter drop.

John and Beth had chosen to snuggle together in a small bathing cubical filled with blood-hot salt water. They drifted, face up, their naked bodies occasionally colliding. The lights were extinguished and extraneous sensory input was almost eliminated. It was a disjoint experience. In a way, it was all still superficial, if such an intimacy could be called that. 9Phase.DR strained to supply them with all that they wanted.

It was Beth's turn to swim freely through the depths of John's mind, in effect "being him," and she was amazed at how he spent his moments, how little memory grazing he really did. He rarely consulted his own experience, as if he believed the past had nothing to teach him. . . . She felt as if she were plumbing new territory.

It was 2083, three years before they'd met, and John was pacing about the apartment he'd purchased in one of the more modern sections of NYFC. It was in a needle monad built during the brief ascendancy of the World Unification/DuPont Deathmarch Party, and its official address was still Grand Concourse, South Bronx. He stopped at an iridescent wall and deopaqued it, the colorful patterns disappearing with a swirl. He could see the Jersey shore standing beyond the tiny towers of the World Trade Center. The sun was falling into the west, and the massive shadows that spread from the great buildings of Hoboken were already beginning to engulf the island.

In spite of the huge structures that surrounded Manhattan on three sides, the historical buildings, the formerly glorious "skyscrapers," were still special. They'd been shorn of the grimy soot color they had in old pictures, but the blocky little spires, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the rest, still retained the primitive strength of the people who'd first walked on the Moon. He'd still not recovered from the shock of Reflection Counterpoint's success, though the money had been rolling in since 2080, and nothing seemed quite real to him. He turned from the window and surveyed the apartment he'd bought. Spacious by urban standards, it was still rather cramped when compared to his home in Port Radium. The field-stress rainbow was the best he could do with the programmable walls— he had never had acrophobia before, but the height of the rooms weighed on him when they were clear, opaque, or 3V'ed. The sunken living console held the promise of safety, and he let himself fall into the plush, springy surface of the hole. Pulling himself backward with a kind of swimming stroke, he summoned Pamelia, his new courtesan. . . .

The program's focus controller popped them back from that brink and recreated reality, as Beth broke off: "No. No sex memories. Not yet."

"Don't worry. With Pam, it was nothing but an unfulfilled yearning. It was clumsy and tedious for me, with only the orgasm to make it seem worth while. Maybe you should experience it. Compared to us . .

."

It seemed as if her ideas about John were bursting, like soap bubbles from a solution too dilute. They shared a sudden realization about just how often the impressions they'd had of each other had been wrong.

. . . and an apprehension grew. No shred of their relationship would survive DR unchanged. . . . The program pushed harder, suddenly aghast. This was what they wanted?

The uneasiness fed on itself. Any emotion could suffer feedback like this. They were two mirrors staring into each other, new reactions building upon earlier ones.... A paradox-solution routine from the GAM winked on and took control. The feedback damped into neutral calm, and it letgo. John was starting to become familiar with the different ways in which Beth's mind was organized, but the way she interfaced with her unconscious perceptions was strange, alien to him. He found it all so very hard to assimilate. . . . The program strained once again, changed nodes. Hegrabbed hold of a memory. To his surprise, he recognized the place. It was a park at the source of the Mackenzie, where Great Slave Lake suddenly constricted into a sluggish, blue-brown river. From here, it would travel more than a megameter before burying its waters in the frigid Beaufort Sea. The land here was low, bare of trees, and planted with a hardy grass uniformly cut to golf-course perfection, except where stripy gneiss showed through. The lake was vast, rippling with white-gold, a horizon of water. The low sun dominated a morning sky flecked with small, elongated clouds. Despite her sleeveless blouse, Beth felt warm. Midges were everywhere, becoming obtrusive.

Beth looked level-eyed at her companion. He was a young boy, perhaps fourteen, curly-haired, blond, handsome in an almost funny way. She was feeling a kind of nobility— a self-righteous pride-in-behavior possible, perhaps, only in one her age. The boy looked very unhappy and had been crying. Finally he said, "But how can we stop seeing each other? What will our friends think?" For a moment she almost relented, but the memory of the night before, when she'd been awakened by the discomfort of some lump beneath her hip, was there. She started to get out of the tent, stopped at the opening. He was there, masturbating into the embers of a dying fire. She watched, then got back into her sleeping bag. Perhaps she was still in love with her fathers, or perhaps she just wanted to disassociate herself from the path her body was thrusting before her. With Angelo, she'd felt safe, had thought sexuality wasn't going to be a problem. Obviously she couldn't think that any longer. She said, "No, Ange . Of course we'll still see each other, that's impossible to avoid. Just: no more walks."

Segue. Angelo was there, above her. He was older now, eighteen at least, and had a sparse mustache. The room was dark. Their only light came from a small chink in the window shade and the blinding emblem it etched on the floor. She was wet enough, but not sexually aroused. Not really. He'd been fumbling down there for so long . . .

"I can't do it," he said. "I mean, I already did it." She sighed, familiar with the problem. She'd beenexperimenting with sex a lot. She and Angelo had gone their separate ways until, just a few hours ago, a chance meeting at a midsummer barbecue had brought them back together. It was no big deal, she thought, but she knew his vulnerability made this happen, against her will, and she was angry.

"All right," she said sharply. "There are other times. Let's get back outside. We're missing the party." She felt astonished that she could deal out pain so easily.

The program was at a loss. Strong embarrassment formed an overlay and its parameters were overloaded again. It had been designed for a dominant/submissive psychiatric environment, and the maintenance of a strictly mutual gestalt seemed impossible for any length of time, especially at this sensitivity. It needed a closer association with its GAM, a simultaneity, a sharing. They were back in the cubicle. John, too, was surprised and hurt, almost as if he'd been Angelo instead of Beth. He opened his eyes on moist darkness. "But why?" he said, and it did not echo. No answer was forthcoming. This isn't what I expected. . . .

He felt Beth bumping against his side, still motionless, but the program was concealing her thoughts, denying him access. He assumed it was at her request, and imagined he understood. It must be very hard for her. Somewhere in the machinery, ideas behaved reflexively.

Podarge was a much smaller satellite than Ocypete, less than seven hundred kilometers in diameter, not much larger than Enceladus. Sealock and Krzakwa were plugged into their duodecimal element, looking out through the exterior stereovidicon as if through their own eyes. They weren't asterologists, so there wasn't much to see, though its status as a "new" world compelled their interest. It was a white, meteoroid-blasted ice moon, its surface an indistinct turmoil of circles, gaining in apparent relief as one looked toward the terminator, now near the leftmost limb. Brendan reached out through the optical circuitry and imposed an appropriate set of judgmental color filters. With the color-gain stretched, with a bit of magnification, Iris IIbecame a pale world, blue-green and brown, with definite continents and patches of diverse terrain. Like many of the outer-System satellites, Podarge had experienced periods of resurfacing, when volatile materials had bubbled out of the interior, making fresh plains that were ready to be cratered anew. They were all very different in composition and degree of pock-saturation, and made an overlapping patchwork of colors on the enhanced moon. The little world, composed of a greater variety of volatiles than anything in the Solar System, had a turbulent history during its first aeons. As it cooled, one material after another had solidified, either on the surface or at the bottom of some cold epeiric sea. In the end, there had been periods during which impacts and tidally produced fractures had brought the last of the liquids pouring out onto the surface. Most of these new terrains were masked by meteoric gardening, but the differences were still there. In the northern hemisphere, near the pole, there were cirruslike wisps strung along a barely visible fracture, fresh neon ice that had been expelled from the mantle during the last quiescent phases of Podarge's freezing.

Polarisslipped toward the nightside slowly. The moonlet's minuscule gravity made their orbit seem terribly sluggish, and they were tempted to accelerate, to go into forced-orbit mode, but the notion of conserving fuel was there to be pondered. Shadows began to grow long beneath them, and the blackness closed down like a helmet visor. Brendan turned up the ship-optics gain and changed over to a view dominated by imaging radar and deep infrared. Krzakwa kept following his protocols, watching. This hemisphere, which trailed in Podarge's revolution about Iris, was somewhat less cratered than the other, and there were even some small gaps in the rubble, areas which looked pristine. To the south, Brendan saw a large, new-looking astrobleme, darkish in the IR, with tall, clean walls and a complex pinnacle at its center. It was surrounded by an asterisk pattern of black rays, composed of new, fine-grained material, which could be traced across much of the visible globe. He liked the pattern it made.

"It really is rather pretty, imaged like this," said Tem. "I didn't notice it in Jana's data." He rummaged through their memory device and pulled out a sunlit version. "It's not so prominent in the daytime. Jana called it ' Soderblom,' after an early planetologist."

"Southern Flower? That's pretty appropriate."

He looked at it, admiring a faint rillelike structure that cut through the pattern of rays. "You know, we are the first ones here. We ought to get to name something." Sealock sighed. "So, what do you want to call it? Hole-in-the-Floor?" The other man smiled. "Really. No, it should be something consistent with the harpies, unless you want to use one of Demo's names."

"I don't. I thought that was a stupid idea when it was first brought up. The Illimitor World mythology is largely a random scrambling of French and Arabic phonemes, based on a few simple rules that I made up. They mean something to him because of his history. . . . Anyway, if the harpies' story has any complexity, I don't know it."

There was a long silence, then Krzakwa said, " Kickaha!"

Sealock opened his eyes and looked at the man in realtime. "Son of a bitch. I read that too."

"Want to land?"

He closed his eyes and looked out at the little moon thoughtfully, watching a sliver of daylight start to ooze over the horizon. "No. I don't think so. We can let Jana be first." The Selenite nodded, his beard floating up before his face, to be pushed down with a wave of an abstracted hand. "OK. It's off to Aello, then."

"Right." Sealock stretched and said, "You know, with a little mass-wastage, we can boost a fast Hohmann and get there in eighteen hours. She's near opposition now."

Beneath a silver dome, Axie, Ariane, and Jana sat at the edge of a pool that hadn't existed four hours earlier. Jana said: "I think he's a damned hypocrite! It amazes me that, after all his talk of abandoning pair bonding, he can get caught up like this without even noticing the contradictions!" Axie looked up. "Maybe. The thing that bothers me is the danger involved. . . . I've heard there can be permanent disorientation.... It seems to me that 'Deers' risk a great deal."

"There's always the danger of a discharge when you interface with something that complex. I don't care how good the program is," said Jana.

"Possible, yes," said Ariane, "but it's not very likely. I don't know. John seemed so unhappy before. Now . . ."

Axie laughed softly. "It's that old black magic, I guess. Beta's the one thing I can handle. I don't know about DR, or love."

Ariane stood and ran a finger down a seam of her fullbodies and the garment fell to the ground with an exaggerated speed as she stepped clear. "I'm going to try a swim." She seemed to tiptoe into the air, an almost vertical leap that carried her a third of the way to the top of the dome. When she reached the water it parted with languorous ease, then closed over her just as easily. The ripples cascaded back and forth across the limpid pool as she resurfaced.

"Not bad," she said. "Come on in."

"I want to try to get in touch with Polaris again," said Jana. She turned, walked to the dome's entry foyer, and was gone.

Axie looked back at Ariane. "You look like you're having a good time."

"This is very different from being in a zero-g tank. It seems like the surface tension is strong enough to lift you up." She carefully placed her palms down on the water and pushed, raising up until she was exposed to mid-thigh. She grinned. "Interesting, huh? Maybe it's just trapped air."

"I wish I had my circlet," said Axie. "This seems completely counterintuitive. I'd've thought the water would slosh out of the pool when you dove in from so far up."

"Ah, but did you notice? I hit the water so slowly I didn't impart much momentum to it. Elementary physics."

"Can I climb up on the surface tension? My fullbodies won't adsorb the water."

"I don't know. Try it and see."

It worked, though it was difficult to present sufficientsurface area to support her bare half kilogram, especially since, after a first failure, she was giggling like a maniac. Finally she was riding dry on the tension of the shiny liquid, cradled in her little dimple like an ungainly water strider. Laughing, Ariane struck at the surface of the water with a cupping arc of her hand and sent a horde of silver globules racing across the surface, many of which were caught in Axie's depression. They popped and merged silently. She began to laugh harder, and she broke through, a leg first, then an arm, until she slipped into the hole she'd made and sank up to her chest. She flopped around, suddenly aware that any violent action might empty the pool. "You know," she said, "this is fun."

"Yeah," said Axie, "but how long can it last?"

Jana was sitting in her room, circlet on. She'd been trying to reach Polaris now for several minutes. Obviously they were ignoring her signal, unless their electronics were dead. "Come on, you idiots," she said aloud. "I know you're receiving this transmission, so answer me!" There was a little burst of circuitry being activated, and then a presence came into her head. "Hey! I thought you were going to cooperate with me on the planetology report, you bastards. What's going on out there?" This time the presence was clearly identifiable as Krzakwa. "Oh, Jana. Well, we looked around Podarge for you; didn't land, didn't see much. We named a crater—what you called Soderblom is now Kickaha ."

"Kick-a-what?" asked Hu incredulously. "What the . . ." Sealock: "Look, Jana, we decided this is purely a fun trip for us. No science this time. When we get back I'll take you wherever you want. From now on, if we see anything interesting, we'll give you a call."

"I don't expect you to understand this, but I made a commitment to the scientific community to get samples from I and II as soon as humanly possible. If you would just . . ."

"I read your report, you phony. You told them it'd be at least half a year, and it's nowhere near that. You're just worried someone else might show up here and beat you to it.

There's plenty of time for you to get your fucking samples. You haven't even finished Ocypete yet!"

"There's something I have to tell you. About Aello."

"It'll wait." Abruptly, there was nothing.

For an hour Jana sat alone and listened to the void. There might just be a way ...

Ariane Methol lay on her back in the cool water, staring upward with a blind gaze. She followed a train of thought, of things that she found perplexing in herself. The pool was something like the one in the Fitness Center of her arcology, its waters reflecting the light, throwing shards of moving brightness up onto the ceiling which were thrown back at her. The interplay of light and shadow shifted delicately, mirroring the soft cadences of her breathing, taking her back through time. . . . Montevideo recreated itself like a permanent haven. Arcologia de Tupac Amaral had been a wonderful place to grow up, and to live in as an adult. The great arcologies that had come to dominate the cities of South America, some of them inhabited by more than a million people, had everything that a civilized human being could want, everything but the spacious outdoors, and that was only an elevator ride away. They had a social milieu that afforded equal access to whatever benefits interaction could provide, in a word, fun. . . . And yet, somehow, when she met Brendan, it had no longer been enough. She remembered when it all started. The Pan-American Games were being held at last in the Grand Solarium of Tupamaro. Though it was the largest sports arena in SA, the usual site of the World Cup soccer matches, it was generally thought that South Americans were too "civilized" for the organized savagery of the Games. A poor turnout had been predicted. To Ariane, Vana, and their friends, it was a chance to see the athletes that they'd heard so much about, whose exploits were syndicated on Globo Sur.

Some of them had gone together to see the various contests and had frequently found themselves sitting so far away that they'd ended up watching the huge 3V screens that wereeverywhere. For the free-style boxing matches, however, the luck of the draw had put them up close, in the third row. Initially, she had been disturbed by this atavistic, bloody sport; then, as match gave way to match, and her excitement grew, she had been disturbed at that. . . . Whatever it was, it had been in her all along, unsuspected, an ability to ... what? She didn't know. It grew inside her. It was then that she'd seen the man who was to become that year's silver medalist: Brendan Sealock, the program said, and New York Free City. She'd watched him savage a series of contenders, earning whistles of contempt from the audience as he smashed his opponents around, obviously intent on injury. How the people cheered when he'd been beaten in the final match by a swift, dark Cuban who was simply too fast for him. He'd charged his massive bulk around the ring, swinging wildly, while his opponent bloodied his face with quick jabs. Even then he almost won. The Cuban got overconfident at the beginning of the third and last round and came within reach of the thick arms: a hard blow to the temple sent him staggering to the mat. He got up, took a standing eight count, and then boxed carefully, jabbing and backpedaling until the bell put an end to things. The referee had smiled as he raised the Cuban's hand in victory, and the sour look on Sealock's face had provoked catcalls that echoed from the crystal dome as he left the ring.

She never understood where she'd gotten the nerve to go to his room that night, but gone she had, Vana's cry of "You must be totally crazy!" going unnoticed. She'd hesitated before his door, strongly aware of a certain vaginal tightness that seemed -to signal her physical state, before nervously tapping on the call button. The door opened and he was there, glowering down at her, his face bruised and swollen from the Cuban's many blows. "Well? What do you want?"

"I'm Ariane Methol. May I come in?"

A glimmer of amused understanding crossed his face as he stood aside to admit her. She knew that there was a class of people contemptuously called "slinkers," who followed the athletic contests, waiting to do sexual service for the "animals." Even before her eyes could adjust to the gloom of hischamber he'd picked her up and dumped her unceremoniously on the bed, then he was squatting over her, robe open, not quite resting his weight on her chest, his penis dangling in her face. "OK. Go ahead." She lay frozen, and he said, "What? A novice? Well, it goes like this, kiddo." He pried her jaws open and put it in her mouth, then he had his hands on the sides of her head, organizing her movements, regulating the thrust and gradually deepening his penetration. It dawned on her that she was being raped, but she felt completely numb, helpless, and there seemed nothing to do but cooperate. She gagged a lot, but it was over quickly.

He got to his feet and stretched, his heavy, muscular body beautiful in the dim light. After a while she got up and went to his refresher console for a drink. He called to her, "You ready to go again?" She turned and looked at him, then said, "I'm not one of them."

"What?"

"I'm not a slinker. You just raped me."

He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at her, looking puzzled. "Not a slinker—" he repeated.

"What the hell are you doing here then?"

She came over and sat down beside him, put her head in her hands, then said, "I don't know." His face grew heavy with suspicion. "You're going to have a hard time getting a conviction with that line. What the fuck was I supposed to think?" Exasperation colored his voice. "No one ever comes to see me but slinkers and some of the other athletes!"

She looked up and saw the bewilderment on his face. "It's . . . not your fault, maybe . . ." She knew this was typical, victimish, but, "Maybe I am a slinker. I did come here to have sex with you, I guess.... I just didn't expect you to do something like that, something so ... preemptive."

"Well . . . I'm sorry, for whatever that's worth to you."

After that they'd talked, at first about what had happened, then about other things, and finally about their lives. She told him about her job with Globo as a 'net engineer and was stunned to discover that he was with Metro Design. It seemedthat full-time amateur athletes were rare and he was no exception.

"Who the hell would want to be a pro boxer?" he said. "They all work for the entertainment 'nets and do what they're told."

In the end they'd had sex again, gently, and he'd tried hard to do right by her. Later, when they fell in love, it was, surprisingly, on her terms.

Her friends were mortified.

Harmon Prynne and Vana Berenguer had finished making love and were silent as an assortment of tacky secretions dried on their bodies. Finally the man said, "Vana?" He was trying to frame his thoughts, wondering how to bring the subject up once again, then lay back and turned his gaze to the ceiling. At length, when he had exhausted his capacity to make up a scenario that came out the way he wanted, he rubbed his eyes and said, "Tell me why you're keeping on with him." He heard her sigh—that same exasperated release of breath that he'd heard so often before, and had come to dread. "You mean Demogorgon, don't you?

"Yes." He nodded slowly, not wanting to look at her again and realizing he was almost afraid to hear her answer.

"Damn it, Harmon, I told you before. You should see it! The time I'm spending with Demo is in there

—and it's . . . it's, well, it's not as if we're off fucking all the time. You can come too, if you want to."

"It's his world, Vana. I'm no superhero."

"You don't need to be. Besides, he needs someone!" Harmon put his back against the smooth, neutral plastic of the opaqued wall, bringing his knees up to his chest. "So do I," he murmured.

"You dumb shit." She reached up and grabbed him by the chin, forcing his head around until he was facing her. "You've got someone!"

He closed his eyes, almost involuntarily. "Yeah. So they tell me," he said, thinking, A small share of what they say comes in unlimited quantities but never does. "Sometimes I wish I'd let you come out here alone."

Vana released him and, after a while, got up, got dressed, and left the room, leaving him with his bitter imaginings.

From orbit, Aello was even more of a disappointment than Podarge had been. It was tiny, only a little more than four hundred kilometers in diameter, about the size of one of the larger asteroids. It had never been hot enough to melt any of its volatile constituents, so no regional differences were noticeable even in enhanced view. The primary surface was neon, for as Iris cooled from its initial contraction the last particles to be welded into the small gobs that rained down on the satellites were the most volatile. While Ocypete and Podarge were the result of aeons of geologic activity which had long ended, Aello was that asterologist's dream, a world on which the great majority of materials had never been processed by an active geology. Most things were still almost identical to the way they had been in the very earliest stages of planetary formations. In the Solar System, scientists had looked for such a world in vain. As they moved outward from the sun, the promise of tiny, cold, pristine bodies was shattered by the increasing amounts of volatile material scattered through them. Even the surfaces of Pluto and Charon had been melted in their early history, and still outgassed and changed when they were at perihelion. There were plenty of really small bodies that were in an unaltered state, but finding materials that had been emplaced on the surface of a moon-sized world at its birth had been the quest of scientists since the first days of the Apollo Moon landings. Aello was that world.

It looked much like Mimas: a small, spherical worldlet punched open by deeply inset bowllike craters. Unlike those on Podarge, the craters were deep enough relative to the curvature of the satellite to show perceptible shadows well away from the terminator, making the moon appear even more ravaged. There was a disproportionately large crater on its leading hemisphere. It was not so relatively large as Herschel, Mimas' great eye, but it still stood out from the rest, had stared at them as Polaris closed in. They remembered how Jana had remarked that this crater, Sayyarrin byname, was unusual not only in its size but in its shallowness, given the fact that Aello had no viscous relaxation to buoy up the middle. Now Sayyarrin was over the limb, in night. Here too, orbiting was a very inefficient process, and they were accelerating downward, watching the broken surface come up to eclipse the large blue circle that was the

"day" side of Iris.

"Not very impressive, huh?" said Brendan,

"I don't know," said Krzakwa. "Maybe our expectations were just too high. After Podarge, I'm developing a more philosophical approach."

Sealock stared at the cold, dim worldlet through the ship optics for a while, then said, "We're going down, this time. That should be something."

"Are you kidding? This is it, Bren! We're going down onto that most elusive of all things, a primordial world. What we'll be seeing down there has never been seen before."

"Come on!" said Sealock, grinning as he continued to inspect the vista that was unfolding below them.

"That's a pretty fine distinction, if you ask me. I mean, you can have all the planetesimals you want out in the Oort belt—what difference does it make if we pick them up here?" Krzakwa wondered if Sealock meant what he'd said or was merely being aggravating. He decided it didn't matter. "Well, Iris doesn't have a cometary ring, for one thing, so this is it as far as Iridean planetesimals go ... but it's more than that: this isn't even a piece of the Solar System! Aello not only has all of its materials intact, but they are laid down in the same order they originally came in. It's like a Grand Canyon—you can dig directly into the history of Aello and, in effect, into the history of the formation of Iris and its moons. Things are disturbed by the craters, but only a bit."

"OK. I give up. I'm impressed. So what do you want to do?" he asked, sitting back in his harness.

"Looking at this thing, I begin to realize just how difficult it would be to land our ship. It'd be pretty hard to come down with the engines flaming. On H2vent-thrust only, I guess, we could . . ." Krzakwa cut him off. "I've been thinking about it," he said.

"How does this sound: we suit up, eliminate radiation from the worksuits, and jump . . ." Sealock suddenly stopped moving, staring into dead space for a second, then he turned to look at the Selenite again, his eyes seeming to glow. "You son of a bitch. Sure! Like that boil-gliding business ..." His imagination chewed at the details of the notion: "I'll put her in a low orbit, maybe half a kilometer up. The jump won't kill us. We use pressurized O2from our life-support systems like jets to get back." He sat back in his couch, gloating to himself. "And we make a suit-instrumented rendezvous with Polaris at the end of it all. . . . Hell, this is really going to be fun!"

Aello spun underneath them as Brendan maneuvered the ship down into an orbit so low that they could make out the unmistakable shadow of the craft near the huge, uneven horizon. Even with the weak gravity, this deep in her gravity well Aello effectively swept them along, and the wells of shadow that were craters moved under them quickly. Brendan was fully engrossed in his piloting, plugged into systems that effectively made him an incredibly sensitive receptor. He rushed along, sensing his passage with radar, and could feel the gravitational anomalies caused by variations in the moon's shape and constituents as a series of small velocity changes. He cataloged them as he flew, feeding data to the calculations that Krzakwa was making, fine-tuning their notions about how the orbit of the ship would precess while they were down on the moon. They needed to know. As he delved deeper into the substance of the world, reading it carefully, all the while avoiding an intense radiation flux that would disturb sensitive materials, his eyes became totally blind to the bottomless craters that were calling forth the nightside.

He was just about to disconnect from his systems, in preparation for going down, when something in the residuals of the newest ship computational ephemeris caught his attention. He checked a map and saw that they were passing over the very center of Sayyarrin. This is some kind of a weird little anomaly, all right, he thought. Really weird . . .

"Tem," he said, "are you monitoring the external sensor returns?"

"Uh-huh," said Krzakwa, "what is it?"

"You're the physicist, buddy, you tell me."

Tem studied the figures of the ephemeris in his head, brought in a calc overlay, and spent a full minute processing. Finally he said. "I think we must've put one of our machines together backward. It's a glitch."

"Oh, yeah? OK. Here's an updated computation, seven seconds old. If that's a glitch it's got a sense of humor."

" Materi bogu!There's some kind of void down there, under the ice."

"Impossible. It's not a void, it's a shell of some kind. A thin layer of mass around an almost massless core. Now what in the fuck could cause that?"

"Speculation, you mean? Some kind of hollow meteorite?" As he said it, he realized how unlikely a thing that was. It could happen, yes, but on this scale?

Sealock said: "But look at the size, the dimensions. This is not exactly a high-resolution picture—but even the parameters of the orbit suggest something more like ..."

Krzakwa shook his head. This was ridiculous. There were explanations. Besides . . . "There's nothing in the view that suggests anything unusual. There are volcanic chambers all over the outer Solar System." He marked the spot, now rapidly disappearing behind them, with a bright optical V. In the deep IR

they could see the low rim of Sayyarrin and its rather smooth floor. Perhaps it was just a tiny bit darker, colder, than its surroundings: a dim shape under the ice. Then it was gone over the horizon. Brendan violently spun Polaris around, inertia tugging at their bodies, and lit off the engine. The craters slowed, stopped, and the bright line that was day receded back behind the world. Sayyarrin popped over the horizon and, when they were directly over it, Sealock repeated his action, this time slowing the ship to a dead halt over the center of the crater. Tem could only tell from his instruments that they were falling, gently, toward the ice less than half a kilometer below. Brendan turned up the gain on the photochip , isolated a narrow region in the far infrared that would best define the heat differences they had seen, and, yes, there it was.

He pushed the ship back into an orbit, paying little attention to its parameters. When they were flying above the ice once more he turned to look at the Selenite. "So. You're saying Sayyarrin is a caldera?" He called up some imagery from the Shipnet element and its source files, staring so hard into the image in his brain that he squinted malevolently. "That sort of contradicts the picture you were drawing before." Krzakwa nodded slowly. That was the way it seemed, but . . . Damn it, there had to be some kind of reasonable explanation. "I don't know. Day comes in about three hours. It will take about half an hour to suit up. I say we get Polaris back in the right orbit and go down in the suits. There really is no telling what will happen if we try to land in that stuff. It might be the most effective way to reach the lower stratum—but the ship could easily be damaged by the violent sublimation, even in this paltry gravity." Brendan seemed to pull back into himself somewhat. "Mmm. Yeah. We turn up the heat of our suits and fall through the neon. Any turbulence that creates, we can certainly deal with. OK—full speed ahead."

Downlink Rapport wasn't getting any easier. Insofar as the thoughts and feelings of John and Beth were couched in linguistic or sensory terms, the transfer was without effort. But underlying personal emotions and states of being were more difficult, flooding into the brain as strange, ephemeral data. Understanding required a great deal of work. Memories were a lingua franca between them, perhaps because, even in an individual, memories come from somewhere far off, separate from the "self." It was easiest to tap into the full experience of being another person through the facility of the past. It came: they were annoyed. No matter what subject John tried to initiate, Beth would turn it aside. In bed, back in her condo in Yellowknife after a long winter walk through the streets, their bodies touched and his cold hands were enfolded within the damp warmth of her armpits. Their wet clothing was strewn across the floor, and waves of heat billowed up from the vents. Snow tapped against the window. Their faces were still flushed from the cold, his a ruddy orange and hers an empurpled brown. Despite the physical closeness, they were in sealed, isolated worlds. John was struggling to overcome a feeling of futility, and the emotion emerged into the world as a series of quick, occasionally savage ripostes. Beth swallowed these outbursts quietly, if only because they were so unlike what she had come to expect in his behavior.

"That's the point, Beth. The money keeps coming. Something should be done with it; something purposeful. And I . . . I've lost a context. I know I say things about living for the moment. At one time I could do that, but not now. The time has come to do something." He laughed. "I've come back to the place where I started, and for the first time I know it's boring."

"If your music isn't an accomplishment, I don't know what is." How could he explain to her that the time of their courtship, when he had felt a context, largely defined by their passion, had ended? That he needed to break through into something deeper, something to convince himself death wouldn't come sneaking up and claim him unawares? He thought about the money again. "What have I done with the money? Bought a house, two houses, an asteroid? What good is it all?" A new bond was growing between them, out of their disparity. The unresolvable dilemma had been resolved, and the truth was being found out. Gladness filled him.

They broke. "Well," Cornwell said, "hello again." His voice was quiet but amused, "How are you?" They kissed, briefly, without passion. He stood, woozy even in the low g. Beth was staring at him. She felt tired. "All right," she said.

"Let's go get something to eat."

Shutdown.

They had to don the worksuits and exit one at a time. Though the things were not terribly bulky, no larger than theordinary vacuum suits of a century earlier, they were rigid and maintained their fixed shape. It was in stark contrast to the usual sort of spacesuit, which could be crushed into a tiny ball when not wrapped around the form of a human being. Sealock went into the airlock, which was a cylindrical chamber two and a half meters across by two high and looked around. The two suits were like two extra men, and there was no room for the Selenite. He sighed, wondering why they simply hadn't made it a little larger. Some aesthetic pressure. Who knew? This had just seemed like the right size and shape to use, and that seeming had obviously been wrong. Krzakwa closed the hatch, cutting him off from the CM, a last view of him looking like a troglodyte in his cave. Temporarily, Sea-lock had donned a communications circlet, though he'd always ridiculed the things. "I'll let you know when I'm done," he said. The suit was permanently made in one piece, its helmet and backpack already attached. Before climbing in through the opening that split the front, Sealock reached up into the helmet and unreeled the twelve brain-taps that marked this suit as his alone. He discarded the circlet and quickly plugged himself in, powering up the suit. "Do you read me?" Affirmative. He crawled in through the opening, squirming as he put his arms and legs down their proper holes. It was difficult, though possible, and he wondered just how Krzakwa managed to do it, fat as he was. The designers probably could have come up with something better, but . . . this was as sturdy a system as twenty-first century could come up with. By using appropriate settings, a man in a worksuit could walk around on Mercury or go for a stroll beneath the soupy seas of Titan. . . . He closed the front, lit off the life-support systems, and established a link with the ship's 'net element. "I'm going out now."

"OK." The pressure in the airlock dropped swiftly and was gone, the gases pumped back into a storage tank.

When the vacuum was fully established, he popped the outer hatch and floated into the night. The hatch closed behind him, leaving him physically isolated, floating beside the smooth length of Polaris, with the cold landscapes of the small moon running by below, an unending vista ofexcavated features, all of them similar. He could see the ragged terminator coming up over Aello's horizon; and Sayyarrin wasn't much beyond that.

After a while the hatch opened again and Tem emerged to join him. Things were about ready. Wordless, they floated away from the ship, orienting themselves so that the primary cold-gas thrusters of their suits' OMS/RCS harnesses were facing in the direction of orbital travel. The suits' internal logic units were designed for this sort of operation, and so they would lose little information if they had to disconnect from the ship's systems. Hopefully, they would be able to maintain communication with the more powerful 'net element but, if not, it would probably be all right. They watched the craft drift away from them. The surface of the moon was as dark as the starry sky around them, and only the great burning crescent at Aello's limb gave any sort of perspective. The mind tends to place itself as the stationary center of the universe, and here, hanging between Polaris and Aello, it did its best to define their situation thus. It tended to view Aello as "down," but, in little bursts of alienness, they could see themselves as suspended below a dark sky with a curiously inverted sunrise rushing toward them, flying above their craft on silent wings. Their orientation was very dependent on which way their feet pointed, and they tried to keep them toward Aello. As they applied the jets, their speed dropped and they fell, moving away from the ship. It became a small, dark thing with inappropriate-seeming highlights.

The sun rose, its rays washing over them in streamers. The broken rim of Sayyarrin was visible now, and the terminator came on like the edge of a fragmented planet. Another moment for action came: what in a normal landing would be the high-gate procedure was required, so they initiated a continuous "burn" that stopped their forward movement and dropped them toward the surface. Through the suit optics they saw their spaceship flying away. In a matter of minutes it was gone beyond the horizon. Aello, dominated by bright-lipped pools of black, looked like a shallow mud puddle through which a hundred childrenhad run. They were no more than two hundred meters up, and the little world suddenly seemed very big. Sayyarrin, a dark, crumbled rise preceded by a great apron of shadow, came to meet them. Tem noted that it seemed a normal enough impact crater, shallow, as Jana had said, but having a general morphology well in accord with what he knew about large impacts on worlds of this sort. Its lack of a central peak was not strange, given the volatile nature of the target—the energy of impact easily liquefied the neon, causing a flowback that would drown the rebounding bed-ice. If the hot spot on Ocypete was caused by a radioactive infall, wasn't it possible that a similar object had somehow caused a shield cryo-volcano? He wished he knew more about all this. Sayyarrin certainly didn't look like Olympus Mons, or even Eblis Mons on Ariel.

They were over the relatively new, randomly peppered floor of the sunlit crater, and the anomaly was now coming over the horizon. In a matter of minutes they had come to a stop about a hundred meters over its center, their suit systems registering only a slight drop in the minimal heat flow emanating from deep within the moon.

"Look down there, Tem," said Sealock. "It's sublimating already, from the jets. As a physicist, what do you think is going to be the greatest danger if we just land?"

"Really, not much. I have the feeling that the turbulence will buffet us around, but well within the stress limits of these suits. You may feel cool as the suit's heating unit struggles to keep up with the enthalpy. I am certain that the pressure won't build up sufficiently to produce a liquid phase." They were now slowly falling toward the white ground. "If it gets too violent, we can just activate the thermal dampener fields. It shouldn't be too difficult to do this in stages."

"I guess not." Brendan was hardly listening to him as he looked around. This had the precise flavor of an adventure, a real one, and if he could only pay close enough attention . . . A shroud of neon mist began to hide and soften the small craters. As it grew in opacity, they could see it swirling outward, caught in little eddies and boiling upward. Ranginginstruments revealed that the ice directly below them was caving downward; mists were lightening the sky and streaking it with moving nebulosities . Their speed of descent was increasing.

Just before the neon totally obscured everything, Tem saw that the small motions had combined into a spinning weather system, driven by the heat at its center and Aello's not insignificant Coriolis force. He could imagine it slowly spreading across the world's surface until the various powers interacted and a global meteorology began. It would all end as the neon quickly froze and precipitated. They fell past where ground level had once been. Although they were in a clear pocket—neon vapor could not exist at the temperatures in their vicinity—visual input gave no clue as to what was going on. The world was formless.

The clouds pressed in closer to them, and the sound of crackling and snapping was brought to their ears by the tenuous gas around them. Brendan felt the first tentative surgings of the gas against the suit. Somewhere, electrostatic discharges were occurring in the mist. He upgraded his gyro control, just in case.

Suddenly the dam burst. The simple circulation of their weather pattern gave way to the extraordinary pressure at its center and broke into chaos. Strong currents slammed across the armored men. Tem hadn't reset his inertial control secondaries, and he began to tumble until he did so. The gas pressure that surrounded him, his only real protection, began to shudder violently.

As he felt his body begin to pogo inside the suit, Brendan carefully analyzed their position—they couldn't take much more of this. They had penetrated the surface to a depth of about four hundred meters. It wouldn't be long until they broke into the weird cavity, if that's what was going to happen. The tumult grew stronger, and even the gyroscopes were having a difficult time keeping them stable. Another thirty meters or so, thought Brendan, and we will be there. . . . Unexpectedly, they hit bottom. Something soft gave way beneath their feet and, if the instruments were correct, rebounded slowly, without secondary flexes. The neon, now mixed with a hundredth part of argon and methane, still boiled and swirled around them, but it was growing weaker. Brendan bent down and jabbed a steel-rigid finger into the surface. It was resilient, almost like a kind of soft wood. He scored it and the depression quickly healed itself. He shared his findings with Krzakwa. He generated an image of the man's face for himself and studied its convolutions. "So. Now what do you think?"

The Selenite shook his head. "I ... refuse to speculate." He studied the data that were being reported to him. Some light was making its way down through the piled-up gases above. The vapors were rapidly dissipating as he watched.

"Doesn't matter if you do or not. I think . . ."

"Shut up, damn you!" Krzakwa was biting at his lower lip, sucking in some hairs from his beard. Sealock grinned to himself. "Right," he said.

It cleared. They were standing on a flat surface of a dull blue-gray color, almost obscured by a thin layer of small, glassy nodules. The walls of the hole they had dug rose up and up, seemingly solid, about three hundred meters around. Tem looked up and saw a shaft of sunlight slanting across the mouth of the hole.

"Well," said Sealock, "does this look like rock to you?"

"No." Krzakwa let out a long, slow whisper of breath. "It's time to say it. Artifact."

"I guess we've found a little adventure, after all."

Brendan cleared a small area, scraping the surface with his foot to knock the little beads flying in slow arcs. When he was satisfied that a large enough area was clean, he bent over and played his photochips over it, straining his suit systems to tell him anything they could about the material. He looked up at Tem.

"Again: what do you think?"

"We need better instruments." He pulled a geologist's hammer from its waist clip and, kneeling also, slammed the pointed end down. It left a small dimple that slowly sprang back to normal. "You tell me, Brendan. What inert material stays pliable at 43 degrees Kelvin?"

"I might as well be the one to say it this time: alien artifact. This is not our tech."

"Sayyarrin's floor is relatively uncratered—but even so, that surface is old. If Jana's right, we're talking millions of years. Maybe billions."

"What's that?"

Brendan pointed to a place on the hole's wall, where a thin, dark, ruler-straight line over 250 meters high was embedded. It went almost all the way back to the surface. Tem was laughing uncontrollably. He finally got control of himself, breathing heavily, tears running down his face. "That's a fucking fin. This is getting ridiculous."

"Guess so. I feel peculiar." Brendan stood, followed by the other.

"Want to dig it out with Polaris?"

"No. We might get killed—that would be an irony I could do without. Let's go home and get the ion drill—also some friends."

"Good thought. Shall we call ahead?"

"Uh . . . somebody might be listening."

The idea penetrated, and they turned to go.