Iris

FOUR

Brendan ate the last of his sandwich as he looked back at Aello. Returning to Polaris had been fairly easy, though the jets had thrown enough heat to widen the hole even further. When they got to the level of the surface, it was obvious they wouldn't have to go out of their way to obscure the Artifact— neon snow had taken care of that. A naked-eye view showed just the tiniest blemish at the center of Sayyarrin—and any telescopes that happened to be trained on Iris I would have poorer resolution than his eyes from this distance. The blurring of Aello's surface might be attributed to equipment malfunction. The first thing they had done was tightbeam an "incommunicado" signal back to the colony. If they had agreed upon an encryption formula for their communications, all this silence wouldn't have been necessary. But they couldn't have had the foresight to predict a situation like this. They had not brought sufficient fuel to take a quick route back to Ocypete. The modified Hohmann would take days. . . . Speculation about what they had seen was futile: an ancient artifact . . . How did it get here? Was it related to the heat source on Ocypete? Did it just so happen that the Iridean system accreted from material already laden with the throw-offs of some alien race? Or is it something else? Is it a spaceship?

The answers were more a reflection of imagination than any hard evidence. Tem came forward and got into his rigging. "Brendan. Let's talk about it." Sealock said, "OK. You go first."

"What I want to know is, how are we going to play this? Are we going to reveal this to the Union?"

"Not for a while."

"It's going to be a hard secret to keep—especially after we blast it out of the ice. Even from Smith they'll be able to tell something funny is going on."

"Let 'em wonder. The real problem is the USEC ship. That shortens our time considerably."

Walking across the blank, black floor of the second dome, Ariane Methol was trying to understand just what was happening to them all. She was not unintelligent, yet it was as if she had to think long and hard to unravel the simplest of connections where her behavior was concerned. At times her memories provided her only clues as to who, or what, she was. It was frustrating. Just when she believed that she had discovered something important about herself, Brendan would start to work on her, to turn everything around. . . .

Now she was alone, with the time to think. Not only were Brendan and Tem gone, the others were wrapped up in their own emotions. Beth and John were totally out of reach, Jana was morose and hostile, Axie spent her time reading and sleeping and was generally too drugged to be of any use. Even Vana, upon whom she could usually depend, was spending more and more of her time in Demo's electronic world, at times even without his guidance. Some society they had created here!

The evening before she had been trying to find areas of mutual interest with Harmon and they had ended up in bed. He'd been competent enough, but it was easy to tell that his mind was elsewhere—and that he was probably just trying to take revenge on Vana. Afterward he seemed ill at ease with her and, violating her preconceptions of his placid, all-accepting nature, almost angry. Any attempt she made at talking about his problem directly was shunted aside. It was frustrating and, worse yet, it made her think about her own relationship with Brendan.

"Ariane, up here."

A voice from somewhere above her head made her look up. It was Demogorgon, sitting alone within the light-spreading mirror at the apex of the girder tower.

"So you decided to visit the real world?" she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Just bringing a little bit of fantasy out with me. I've been designing the colors of the holograph that will fill out the dome. I'm importing a bit of the Illimitor World, compressing it. Want to help?"

"Certainly," Ariane said, and leaped halfway up the tower, clambering lightly the rest of the way. She had known it was the plan for this dome: a simulated environment that would bring a little of home into this world of ice. For some reason she hadn't realized they wouldn't just be using one of the commercially supplied ones from Comnet. It was easy to forget that Demogorgon was skilled at precisely this art. Beneath them, the dark irregular floor of the structure spread like the bleak surface of a carbonaceous asteroid. The slight rises and hollows had been built in to afford a more realistic appearance to the natural setting that was to come.

"You're wearing your circlet," said Demogorgon. "Good. Just sit down and I'll show you the template. I'd like to get your opinion."

Ariane linked into his program. There was a moment of nothingness, and then the world opened up before her like a great multicolored flower. It was mainly deep green and azure—the image of a Scottish moor stretched out in all directions to a horizon of smooth, bare hills under a clear morning sky. A pleasant, darkly sweet odor was carried to her nostrils by a cool breeze. "This is Yvelddur, which I modeled on Northumbria. It's one of my favorite places."

"Is Vana here?"

"No, she's halfway across the world, in Arhos ." He chuckled to himself. "I mean, she would be if we were inhabiting the same software. This is a cutout...."

"I had no idea it would be like this."

"That's what everyone who has experienced it so far has said. Comnet uses old technology and has stalled any attempts to use the refinements that have been developed."

"Well, if you're going to use this as the model for the dome, I don't think I can suggest anything further."

"No? Go ahead, tap into the design function and make a few swipes. It's easy." Ariane called up the Bright Illimit design supermenu and paged through the commands. The words were dark letters and verbal explanations, flowing through her, superimposed over a three-coordinate system, itself superimposed over the world. She tried a simple command, molded a hill into a slightly more humpbacked shape, and added a few summer cumulus clouds at random. The program backtracked and rationalized all of her changes until they were fully integrated. Emboldened, she added a stream to the many that here and there fed a scattering of bright silver-blue pools, then admired the effect. "Demo, I think that's enough. I don't want to get carried away and spoil your landscape."

Demogorgon laughed. "OK—it's time to cut the ribbon. Shall we precede the image into the world or just go with it?"

"Let's watch it appear."

Slowly, the scene faded, and they were once more perched atop the tower, looking down on the drab domescape. "Shall we let it fade in or snap it on like a light?"

"Snap it on."

The dome went green. In an instant the scene from Demogorgon's imagination was there before them. Across the invisible plastic, heather and gorse were in flower; the babble of little brooks coursing into crystalline lakes filled the air. The down-curving dome had broken into the bright blue sky, and at their feet clouds the size of throw rugs gathered. They were the clouds Ariane had designed. It was perfect in every respect and its designers were pleased. Demogorgon gazed outward, feeling Ariane's arm on him, and thought, I can control what's going on. Evade it entirely if I wish . . .

"Come on," said Ariane, slipping from the edge of the tower into a slow-motion fall. "Let's inspect our handiwork."

Demogorgon pushed off and began to accelerate toward the ground. The fall took only a few moments, and he landed in a graceful leonine crouch beside the rim of the real pool, now encased in marble imagery, with the look of an ancient monument. He watched as Ariane ran lightly through the dethorned gorse and plunged through a stream that could not wet her. It acted like water in 1 g, disconcertingly natural in this unnatural environment.

Polarissailed on. Iris slowly shrank in a real-perspective view, and Aello disappeared behind it. When talking failed and speculation gave way to inane guessing games, silence opened up their minds to internal monologues. After a time Sealock succeeded in willfully eliminating the giddy thinking that kept welling up, but what took its place was no more comforting. He knew it was time to fall back on the device of the memory presentations that had diverted them on the way out, but he didn't want to go on to the next logical step in the progression of his story. Remembering the Game, of playing sun-bronzed in the desert heat, was wonderful. What came afterward was not.

They'd tried to teach him. The communal tutor had worked with him more than with any of the others, finally trying desperate measures, but he'd resisted. The time spent learning what he was supposed to learn was hateful, precious time taken from the valued play and, more importantly, from the rapidly growing world inside his head. At the end of that long summer he'd been declared hopeless by the tutor and was sent once a week to the special school Uncompaghre maintained for "difficult" students, mostly functionally illiterate children who were unable to master even the rudiments of binary, but with a sprinkling of gangly boys and pudgy girls whose puberty had come too early for local convention to accept. Brendan could be part of neither group, so he spent free time alone. The teachers assumed an air of condescension that was awful. His rebellion had grown stronger until that dreamlike day when he'd burst into a terrible white-hot rage. It had been in the gymnasium, and he'd hit the physical culture instructor across the face with a baseball bat, the nearest weapon handy. He remembered his amazement at the bright, spurting blood and the woman's high, gargling screams. After that things had gone swiftly. The last day was etched even more vividly into his memory: the school psychologist had spoken before a council of Manti-La Sal adults, and they'd let him be present, as if his feelings didn't matter anymore. The man had said, "There's nothing further we can do for him. In cases of this kind, the only solution is the Exile School in Phoenix." It was as simple as that. They had taken a vote and agreed to send him away, and only his mother, Kathleen, voted no. It was majority rule. Brendan had cried, begging them to let him stay, had promised them that he'd be good, would behave as they wished, but it was all to no avail. He was banished, and it turned out to be forever. He cut off this train of thought with a shudder. Perhaps it was all for the best that it had led him out here, cast him, ultimately, into what could turn out to be the greatest adventure of all time. But he could not bring himself to think this through. He looked at Krzakwa, wondered what thoughts were producing his peculiar look. "Tem?" The man looked over at him. "I need to be entertained. . . ." Concern replaced the other expression, and Krzakwa nodded. "Okay. My turn, huh?" They hooked up, settled down, and went under.

All the little boys and girls on the Moon were fully regimented. It was said they liked it that way, that it was appropriate to their social development. . . .

What was called the children's dormitory at Picard was inreality a multipurpose room. The hexagonal bedchambers that lined the walls were in continuous occupation, and the twenty-four-hour "day" was divided into three eight-hour periods in which the children of Groups 1, 2, and 3 slept. But while the other thirds slept, classes were held below. It was safe to say that, during the five years between the time a child left the supervision of his parents and entered the apprenticeship of his trade, he might spend fully eighty-five percent of his time in this one large hall.

The floor of the dormitory was partitioned into classrooms, a cafeteria, and a health maintenance facility. There were the needs of six hundred boys and girls to meet, and things had to be carefully organized. The population was regulated to assure that only six hundred children would be at the correct age at any given time, and seven-year-olds were continuously entering the system as twelve-year-olds left. Tem was in Group 2, eleven years old, going on the time when he would be transferred to Group 3

for his last year there.

He stood halfway back in the classroom row, supported by the thin column from which the keyboard and screen extended. Though standing was no hardship in Lunar gravity, and in fact was the preferred mode for the youngsters, the arrangement had been designed primarily as a way to save space. He was adjacent to four children, Akio Kurosawa and Sadie Klein in back and front, and Greg Indagar and Patrick Lore on either side. These four he had come to know very well, since almost all activities were organized in the same alphabetical way. Samwar Kirk had occupied Sadie's position until shortly before the memory began, and he had been Tem's best friend, but he had graduated to 3. The communication with this "gang of four" was remarkable, consisting mostly of furtive looks, stifled giggles, and hand signals. Tem understood that each similar group within the class had developed similar, or in many cases the same, methods. Individual children would move on, but the culture would stay. Now it was the time devoted to "socialization," and within certain limits they were free to roam about the classroom and talk to whomever they liked. They spoke in careful whispersand every now and again cast a look at the monitor, a short, fat old man with red skin and a broken nose, who sat, bored and wishing, Tem guessed, for a smoke. Some looked, instead, at the long metal dowel that he used as a prop, wondering if it would ever be used for something else.

The old man whistled and called out "Time!" and they quickly returned to their assigned spots. The screens were already lit with a calendar and clock showing their progress and future assignments on both a long-term and short-term ruler. Tem sighed, keying in his presence, and responded to a series of questions carefully framed to determine his attitude. He lied without even thinking about it. Hour 4's goal was to master the beginning theorems of Euclidean geometry, and the learning programs ticked off, carefully leading him along to enter the correct answers and providing more detailed explanation when he was wrong. Tem had already found out that the simplest way was to concentrate and cooperate, blotting out everything but the programmed task at hand. In this way he was perhaps unique, because, talking to others about their progress, he had found that they were still doing lessons he had finished as much as a year before. He wondered whether the 3s on the lesson's serial numbers meant he was doing Group 3 work. It was probably so. It made him feel more than a little smug. The memory sequence jumped forward and it was time for exercise. A slim young woman with a pleasant smile took the place of the monitor and led them in a patriotic song, some of which was in a patois that Tem never could quite understand. They sang a more energetic song about pride in being a child, pride in being from Crisium , but most of all pride in being an inhabitant of this harsh, isolated world where sacrifices were absolutely necessary. As they sang this song, which went on interminably, they were led in rhythmic isometric exercises, writhing in comical ways, occasional laughter blotted out by the words of the song. After an hour of this, they were called back to their screens for a lesson on history. These lessons were much cruder than those on math and the sciences, since they couldn't use canned programs fromEarth, and everyone moved at the same pace. It was then that the hand signals began. . . . Time jumped forward again and it was supper. They filed in even queues toward the walls, climbing up the handholds past the descending Group 3'ers. Tem slid himself into the recess of his bedchamber, about halfway up, and closed the hatch behind him. The fluorescent light came on, revealing the foot of the bed on which he was sitting, the sink/toilet, and a screen and keyboard on a moving arm, not unlike those in the classroom. It was prohibited to personalize the cubicle in any way, since he shared it with two others, but he had an area of one gigabyte in the computer that he could do with as he wished. In fact he was encouraged to "play" on the computer for as long as an hour before sleep, and many programs both entertaining and educational were at his beck and call. It was one place upon which they had not stinted.

Finally, he slept, knowing that it would be more than a year before he graduated. The sequence came to an end.

"Shit," muttered Sealock. "Was it always like that?"

"In one way or another. That was the worst of it, though. Later we had more free time, because the planners assumed we would go berserk otherwise. I guess I chose that particular memory because of what you were saying, before, about the way things are on Earth. I don't know what you were complaining about."

"Yeah. I didn't think you'd understand," said Brendan, smiling. "In some ways you had it lucky. You always knew who the bad guys were."

After setting up the scene in the dome, Demogorgon decided to look in on Vana. The subsidiary program that allowed her to move among the illusions of Bright Illimit was undoubtedly keeping her out of trouble, but there was no harm in checking. He quickly located the section of the program with which she was interacting and projected himself into it.

She had been having a picnic on a hill in the southern marches, toward Rin Renala, under a huge spreading sarisdahn tree that provided shade from both the suns. A clothhad been spread out not far from the place where she'd landed her personal skimmer and, not surprisingly, she was humping madly with a huge, dark man Demogorgon recognized as Qasartun, the King of Radhamash. As he approached, smiling wryly, he cleared his throat.

"Demo!" said Vana, looking at him over the man's shoulder, appearing a little embarrassed. "I didn't expect you . . . here . . . now."

"What? Ho—" called Qasartun, continuing his vigorous thrusting. "If it isn't my fellow liege lord Demogorgon en Arhos! Well met, if I must say so myself!"

"Stop. Qassi, stop!" said Berenguer.

For a moment his face was transfigured with rage, then, somewhat cowed, he complied with her request. His rampant penis was of a size that an irrationally greedy woman might dream about. Vana, in this setting, seemed to have acquired a bit more modesty—she covered herself with a corner of the picnic cloth.

Demogorgon was unable to keep from laughing. He wondered how he would react to being interrupted during one of his trysts with Raabo by a real person. "Dear Vana," he began, "do not feel any embarrassment on account of my presence. After all, Qassi, as you call him, is, in a sense, merely my representative. And gratifying one's desires, as you were doing, is a major part of the reason this world exists."

Qasartun looked back and forth between the two, then said, "I can see that I am not wanted here." He made a sort of humble gesture to Demogorgon. "If it please you, my lady, I will be off." So saying, he buckled on his jewel-encrusted codpiece and strode off toward the west without a backward glance.

"Well, anyway," said Demo, "I'm sorry for the interruption." Vana gave the departing kinglet a quick glance. "There are more where he came from." Demogorgon laughed. "That's very, very, true." He paused, then said, "How are you getting along here in general? I really haven't been giving you the supervision I ought to."

"Fine. I think I've figured out everything I need to know. I have assumed my title, and everybody knows of me ... it couldn't be better."

"Good. You probably ought to come back to Ocypete with me, though. Things are getting a little lonely there. Especially for Harmon."

She was pulling on her clothing now. It did not do much to conceal her nudity but made a great difference in her demeanor. She stood and stretched. "Speaking of Harmon—" she said.

"Yes?"

"What are we going to do about him?"

"What do you mean?"

"He's, well . . . he's jealous. Of you."

"Me?" Demogorgon looked incredulous. "He has nothing to fear from me!"

"Think about it. This is you." She spread her hand in a wide gesture.

"No, it's not me—it's you! If he's jealous of anything it's your fantasies, and your inability to satisfy them through him. This is just a means to an end."

"That's easy to say, but how do things look? And how do I get it across to him?" Demogorgon sat down on the grass and stared at the sky. "How do you tell anything to anybody? Get him in here, if you can ... if you want him—here."

"Can you talk to him?"

"Look, this is going to have to work out in its own way, just like . . ." She saw the unhappiness spread across his features. Somehow it seemed inappropriate, here. "Just like you and Brendan?"

He felt her hand cool on his neck. "Yeah. Just like that."

Jana Li Hu looked down. The squat cylinder that housed what had been a redundant thruster from Deepstar's original configuration sat in a classic graben and was the hub for three hundred-meter metal cords which were affixed to mousetrap pitons that had been dug very far into exposed sections of the bed-ice. She found, to her surprise, that she had been holding her breath, and she let it out into the suit slowly. The worksuit she wore was large for her, and its spaciousness made her feel clumsy, hard to control. Once again she scanned the surrounding terrain with her photochips and was awed by the spirelike , only slightly rounded water-ice massifs that clustered closely here, broken shards of the world thrust upward by the colossal forces which had fought during the period when Mare Nostrum froze and expanded.

It was something only water would do, pushing the partially collapsed Ocypete back into a spherical shape. Unlike what had happened on Ganymede and other Solar moons, the unmelted crust of the area surrounding the mare was already too thick to produce the regional grooves caused by wave systems of extensional faulting during the time of melting. Instead more "Earthlike" oblique-slip faults had spread in a finely reticulate pattern back into the highlands, gathered finally into the huge chasm that trisected the world. When Mare Nostrum froze, it pushed everything back into place— almost. The healed scars remained—and they would tell much. It was all fascinating, but not quite fascinating enough to override the growing fear in her.

Despite the fact that it was yet to come on formally, the internal generator necessary to keep the battery warm was throwing out enough heat to sublimate the neon in the cryolith , and the drill, for that is what it was, was sinking slowly, throwing out a blur of mist. The time had come. She pointed the nozzle of the hydrogen-release device and turned it on. Quickly the small white mountains began to dwindle as she rose, and the systematic faults of this orogeny presented themselves to her in detail. Her entire science lay all around her, a great, crumbled sphinx. The vast blankness of the ocellus came up over the horizon, and she made for it. She was obligated to get very far from the drill site, and thus perhaps a minute passed as she gained speed and height. Finally she felt safe and slowed to a stop by sending out a prolonged blast of compressed gas. The curvature of the small moon was already quite pronounced, and from this height she could probably fall for anhour or more. She spun herself about with a command to her gyro, and blinked inside her helmet. In a moment the exhaust plume, a diffuse comet's tail, reached into the sky, slowly spreading a haze outward to engulf the nearby-seeming stars in a web of twinkling. When it was over the cloud vanished like winter's breath. Jana felt regret that this escaping gas would form a deposit on much of the surrounding territory, somewhat altering what would be found there later. But it was a necessary thing, and even asterology suffered from an uncertainty principle, an observer effect. She continued her fall and, suddenly, seemed paralyzed.

The image of a demolished sphinx again superimposed itself over the ocellus' rim, and she knew that it was entirely in her hands to reconstruct this overwhelming landscape. And not only this one—right at this moment, she knew, Sealock and Krzakwa were engaged on their moronic "adventure," taking the already broken blocks and smashing them into pieces too small ever to fix. They took pleasure in thwarting her. She was, despite her credentials, perhaps the least powerful member of the expedition; even Harmon occasionally had some influence over Vana and, through her, Ariane and Brendan. Now, with John immersed in his asinine DR experiment, the only link she had developed with anyone here had disappeared. Damn him! she thought. I should have known he would go back to Beth eventually; leave me completely alone without a second thought. She thought back to moments when she had almost forgotten herself under his persuasive tongue, times when she had trusted him, if only to bring pleasure to her in his own way. But it had only been a game.

Maybe, somehow, if she let herself DR with him, it would bring about his help. Show him her internal sphinx for aid in studying the Iridean one. It was his colony, after all, even if he did everything he could to avoid admitting it. But if he knew . . . No, he wouldn't help at all. Events and feelings no one could ever know about crowded into her mind. At age nine, after being returned to her parents, she had used their position as blockleaders to lord it over the neighboring children, forming them into an "Obey Cadre" and making them, after an initial period of harmlessly serving her, engage in ever stranger sexual acts. Even now she could feel the strong, almost sensual guilt flow over her. No, DR was impossible. Following in the wake of her guilt there came another sensation, similar in some ways. It was a feeling of exhilaration, and suddenly she knew that she would have the strength to do anything to unravel the mysteries of Iris and her moons. The others were not worthy of any consideration, really. She could squash them like so many roaches.

The sphinx loomed above her, a woman like herself, and asked the simple question: How?

Hu was falling rather rapidly now, five meters per second, and she could readily see the expansion of the white texture below her feet. She released some hydrogen until she was motionless again, then began to fall anew. She felt a certain amount of contentment in her purpose. With her heart beating slightly faster than could be explained by physical exertion, she directed herself toward the new-made excavation.

John and Beth riffled through the scenes of their shared past, images and thoughts randomly sampled and released like a video history database run at search speed. John was amazed how much the link could restore memories he'd assumed lost or at least eroded by the passage of time. Previously he had avoided memlinking programs without fully understanding why—now he knew. In the presence of a fully retrieved memory, he felt enthralled in the frame, lost his sense of distinction between the present and the past, and was overpowered by a feeling of deja vu. Predestination and unfree will dogged him as he watched himself, seemingly fully aware at the time, step into trap after trap, parading down his life like some Chaplinesque tramp.

Beth's feelings were nothing of the sort. For her, it was simply what had been. She was able to separate her present self from the memories. John drew this strength from her. And the machine reached and grew, still not satisfied. . . .

They were picking their way through the tourist shops inthe Hvolsvollur section of Reykjavik, dawdling on an old macadam street that led down to the solder-band of the Atlantic. At the very rim of the world was the place from which they had just come: Northern Hemisphere Escape Orbit Docking and Loading. NHEODL, or Noodle as it was called, had been difficult, but they had triumphed over it. It had been a long day of confronting a system designed not for the one but for the millions, and they were lightheaded from the cool, dry air coming down off the glaciers. They had seen Heimaey and the spaceport, and the launch of a GM shuttle in its raucous glory.

Beth was thinking: how could she shield herself from seeing the patterns that were taking shape in John's feelings and actions? Looking at the space souvenirs in Iceland, it was becoming clear to her in spite of herself. John was not in love with her then, not in any real sense of the word. He had been, she guessed, during the first year, especially during the long cataloging treks across the summer tundra. He had taken joy in her, and she could feel the longings and twinges that kept them together. But had it indeed been love? Now, in DR, she could see that much of it had come back; that their relationship was becoming what it had been. But by the next year there were periods in which the feelings that she recognized in him as love were completely absent, and were replaced by repeated questioning of his real feelings to himself. If he didn't think he was in love, then could he be? Her own feelings had been a consistent, growing passion that could ignite her an average of ten hours out of fourteen, six days out of seven. But in him the spark came and, for increasingly long periods, went. She could see just when the idea of hiring a programmer to circumvent the limitations that he felt, to penetrate the blank wall that was her face, had come. . . . Downlink Rapport was not a possibility within Comnet, and not even all his immense wealth could buy it legally. It was forbidden by the Contract Police on any level of public access—you needed a personal 'net substructure to even approach the problem. That could be had, if you were an MCD-licensed experimenter. . . . They would laugh at the notion that some" bilboartist" might qualify for such a thing. The other was . . . personal 'nets were also made available for purposes of long-range exploration and deep space colonization. Ironically, she had been the one to suggest spending his logarithmically increasing money on building an experimental community in space. The idea seemed a good one as she said it—to start fresh, to get John motivated on something larger than himself. But the reality of it! To leave Earth for a tiny colony on an icebound moonlet far beyond the reaches of the material world! She had been seized with fear when he began taking, one by one, the steps necessary to bring it about, a physical, palpable fear, drawing together the muscles of her back and stomach into hard painful knots.

And she knew she would follow John if he went.

There was a backward timeshift and then they were fucking in the flower-spangled waste out beyond the Mackenzie, on a solar blanket nestled in a hollow beneath the foothills of the glacier-carved mountains. Beth was on top, undulating her torso and carefully expelling and engulfing the hard thing that rode on John's hips. It was a position she never really liked, and here, without springs or liquid, it was even worse John resumed his insistent prodding, his face unreadable. She had assumed at the time that he was being moved by those irresistible forces that bring us to orgasm, but now she could see that he had simply been going through the motions of that which had so recently given him joy, watching her face and waiting for the groans that signaled success.

She was looking at him now/then, wondering what perverse universe would have them groveling like this, each trying to appease the hungry ego in the other, only to see that what was really happening was the ultimate Magianic Gift, a folding in upon itself of mechanical, altruistic ineptitude. Still, somehow, she had reached out and stroked his chest when it was over, when he had finished at last. She had been all right. Sore and . . . happy. How could she have been so blind? And what could she give to become blind again?

John experienced the growing emotions in Beth with a sense of relief. It was coming out finally, all that had beensubmerged for so long. The truth. And the truth would bring him, them, back from the void. Or was truth the void itself? Beth wondered.

Polariscame over the horizon, not yet braking from the transfer ellipse that had carried it from Aello. The dim white pinpoint sped ten degrees across the mystery of stars called Berenice's Hair and intruded upon the starkly bright dipper of the Great Bear. Slowly, it became a real thing: a tiny burst of light and it began to fall. Then, a few kilometers up, it began braking in earnest, spearing down as it grew until every detail could be made out. The silent, translucent flame quickly used up delta-v, modifying the ship's velocity so that it nearly matched that of the Ocypetan surface. About half a kilometer up, the flame died and the ship began to fall, as if through pitch. When it was only a few tens of meters up, the engine vented an invisible mist of cold hydrogen gas which swept the ice viciously. No flame would disturb the fragile solidity of the landing area. The ship slowed, stopped dead, and then drifted down, bouncing once in slow motion.

Sealock and Krzakwa strode into the central room of the CM, exhaustion lining their faces, and looked about at the inhabitants and their varieties of boredom. Cornwell, who also looked tired but resolute, stopped them with a peremptory gesture. Brendan stared down at him, eyes glittering, unreadable.

"All right," said John. "You've had your little gadabout. In the time you've been gone we've put the DR

software to good use, and I've come to some conclusions about myself and the nature of our effort here."

"That's fine," said Brendan. A few lines etched themselves at the corners of his mouth, evidence of a sudden tension in the muscles of his face.

"I want you to know that I am not going to be intimidated by your violence anymore."

"John—" Tem began, but he was waved off by Sealock.

"Go on," said Brendan.

"That's all I have to say," said Cornwell.

"Anyone else?" asked Brendan. He glanced around the chamber. Demogorgon was coming out of his room. "Brendan," he said, "we have to talk. Alone." Sealock grinned, giving a little laugh that sounded more like a cough or small sneeze than anything else.

"Don't sweat it," he said. "We will . . . not right now, though." He shook his head slowly, grin broadening and becoming softer. "Tem, why don't you tell them what's going on?" Krzakwa shrugged, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, looking puzzled. "I, uh . . ." He stopped, cleared his throat, and went on: "This is going to be hard to accept. We found something on Aello ..."

Jana, too, had come out of her compartment and was staring at the two travelers, wondering just what it was that she sensed in their demeanor. "What? What did you find?" He smiled faintly and spread his hands before her, palms up. "Well ... It was a ... thing ... an artifact." There was a moment of silence, a nonreaction that made Krzakwa wonder if they'd heard him, if his statement had somehow failed to penetrate their consciousness. Finally, from his position in the corner, Prynne said, "Huh?"

"What do you mean?" asked Ariane. She hadn't moved and both her face and voice had remained bland, as if she were asking for the time of day.

"Artifact is an understatement, Ari. . . ." He looked at her and thought, Jesus. How the fuck am I going to put this? He tried to come up with a way and realized that, whatever he said, it was going to be outre .

. . . They were going to be talking about something not only outside of human experience but outside of expectability as well. "Hell, why don't I just say it: we found a God damned enormous alien spaceship stuck inside the moon. . . ." He looked at their faces and saw the beginning of incredulity. "I'm not kidding.... It was kilometers across, under the ice of Sayyarrin . . . ." If air could be called dumbstruck, it was this air, now. Jana stood up straight, rising a little into the air. She opened her mouth, as if to speak, then gagged and closed her eyes. She swayed in the air and drifted slowly to the floor.

Demogorgon went to where she had fallen and propped her torso up, saying, "Jana . . . Hey! Jana?" Her eyes opened, and the look inside the lids was not pleasant to see. She did not speak.

"I don't believe it," said John. "Why didn't you radio the information to us?"

"You may not care," said Sealock, "but that thing's ours until we decide otherwise. We decided to avoid the risk of having a signal intercepted, by anyone. I brought the RAW bubble out of Polaris. You can verify everything for yourself."

"But . . ."

"Just tap the fucking thing! We'll talk later. Tem and I have work to do."

They labored and, finally, the rebuilding program was complete. Though they still referred to it as Polaris, it was no longer the same. Where there had been a tall, sleek spaceship form, something that bore a distinct kinship to both the centuries-gone fantasies of a prolonged childhood and the early designs of Sergei Korolyev , there now stood a modernistic girder array, almost the Deepstar reborn. A closer inspection showed the detail of what had been done: the new ship was made of three slim obelisks standing side by side on the ice, encased within a confining structure of beams. In a sense, what they'd built still fitted in with the technological gestalt of their original design. The core of the structure, its middle tower, was the heavy-ion drive unit that had provided Deepstar's principal thrust, encased within its crosshatched metallic housing. The two outriggers, though somewhat differentiated in form, were similar in function. To one side of the engine/drill was one of the Hyloxso matrices that the earlier craft had used, recharged with H2/O2fuel. Beneath it, a high-impulse liquid-fuel rocket motor was secured. On the other side stood Polaris itself, a little longer than it had been, but still largely devoted to being a rocket vehicle, with a module for men to ride in. The added length was necessary, and the story was power. The ion drill/engine was a voracious device, no matter what its intended purpose. Though it used fuel efficiently, it did soat a high cost in electromagnetic energy. It was a pretty little problem for engineers to face, but it had a tractable solution. The ion fuel itself, through its automatic breakdown process, was a form of stored energy, ultimately power-stabilized by the fusion reactor. The complex's Magnaflux generator, intended for attitude control and as an important part of the life-support system, was an em-field manipulation device. Though batteries were no longer a major part of the technological surround, their purpose was still understood, and the generator, by its very nature, could contain stored energy for a certain period of time. It would work, over the short term, recharged from Ocypete via microwave beams, and that was all that they needed to ask of their system. It would work, after a fashion, and accomplish their purposes on Aello. In their haste to return to the Artifact, and what it represented, they had done little to modify the CM

for its enlarged crew. There were four of them now, possessing what passed for physical-science expertise in their little universe on the edge of the void. Sealock, Krzakwa, Hu, and Methol filled the little ship to near overflowing and made the CM into a crowded place indeed. There were two extra couches bolted into the space athwart the top of the lower equipment bay, and Jana and Ariane would ride there, facing into the backs of the upper berths. They would be little more than cargo during the flight, sitting there, watching the bracing struts flex. Because of their presence there would be no room for extra food lockers here, but the already extant ones could be stuffed fuller, and the ship's vaster superstructure invited much external storage. They would use the same airlock, for instance, but the first two to exit could pass in two more worksuits. Aggravations would probably abound in a ship that was even more claustrophobic than it had been previously. With the firing sequences ended, there was little practical to do but wait.

Disconnecting the induction leads from his head, Krzakwa rolled over in his seat to a position that left him uncomfortably back-bent, despite the zero-g float, and grinned at the two women. "This must be how it was for the first astronauts. I feel like an elephant in a birdcage." Sealock, still hooked up to the control element, glanced over and said, "That's a consistent visual image, . . . You're going to have to go on a diet if you want to get to the food, you fat bastard." Tem smiled. It was true—he'd never be able to squeeze his bulk between the two women to reach the provision cabinet. "No, but I can have a lot of fun trying. I feel like I'd be a lot thinner if I could just take a good crap. This shitless food is accumulating somewhere inside me. . . . Anyway, these here cabin boys can cook our meals and serve them to us in bed."

Sealock began unplugging leads from his skull. "They're not boys, my friend, if you haven't noticed. And they should have at least one shit apiece coming, if you would like a little empathic elimination." Krzakwa laughed.

Grimacing, Ariane said, "This is the grossest conversation I've ever heard! Are you two that bored already?"

"Just call it ennui," said Brendan.

Tem said, "Remember, we've been sitting in these very same positions for a good part of the last two weeks. I guess we've been developing ways to entertain ourselves. . . ." Methol laughed. "Well . . . if it's entertainment you want . . . the rest of you can watch me making up for lost time." She peeled off the inertial harness and slithered out between the forward seats, climbing atop Brendan, her legs locking about his waist.

Krzakwa settled back into his couch with an expression of interest. It was not immediately obvious whether Hu was even paying attention. Her eyes were open but she was looking at nothing in particular. Watching them have sex from a close perspective turned out to be no novelty for Tem. After an initial bout of writhing, held in place by Brendan's harness, they coupled and quickly settled into the slide and grind rhythms of woman-on-top sex. There was no real sound beyond the coarse whisper of cloth on cloth and the even quieter one of meshing organs. Tem stole occasional glances at their faces, but in their fixed expressions there was nothing new to learn. The only noveltywas the way Sealock pulled apart Ariane's buttocks and inserted his finger between them as far as he could reach, apparently so he could get independent verification of the sensation of his penis being alternately engulfed and decoupled. After a while Krzakwa fell into a sort of reverie. Contained within himself, he was back on the Moon again, thirteen now and starting his apprenticeship. The surging arcana of sex, though fascinating for their strangeness, were distinctly alien —not unlike the behavior of the exotic small particles that, he was learning, represented the even stranger forces that made up that which was. Perhaps he was thinking about Sadie, and what had become of her when she graduated . . . and then again, perhaps not. It was like a waking dream, and a reverie was like DR, but unaided and alone. It was private, and seemed pleasant: he walked alone down the endless dim hallways that led to the underground rooms in which he received his Met-stat training. He was late because of an incident involving an accusation of "overindulgence," so in all probability that's what he was thinking about. He did not walk as quickly as he could have, and perhaps there was more trouble waiting for him at the class hall. Occasionally he had to stop before closed seals and wait for them to slowly iris open. He would be at least twenty-five minutes late, but he didn't really care. He would blame it all on the residence counselor.

Finally he came to the widening out of the corridor that was the atrium to the Met-stat section. Now he began to skip, hurrying to give the impression that he had run the whole way. He passed through the halls, past the numbered empty rooms, and finally looked into the class hall in which he was supposed to be having a lesson. He looked again, harder; no one was there! Where in the fuck was the class? It reminded him of a dream he had had hundreds of times. Shit!

Now he really was running. He slammed through the door into the administrative section, then stopped and tried to compose himself, walking up to the secretary's desk. He was a young, balding man who Tem had sensed was rather in sympathy with the students. "Mr. Tamura. I was delayed by my counselor and just got here. Where's the class?"

Tamura looked up, smiling slightly. "Calm down, Kracka —that's it, isn't it? You haven't missed anything. That is if you've paid attention to the suit-up lectures. They are just going over that material again. In Room K4. Take the Qal7b elevator, that's quickest."

It took him under five minutes to get there. The corridor ended in a small chamber lined with lockers and benches, like the anteroom to a gym. There was a door there with a round bull's-eye for a window, and by standing on the very tips of his toes he could look through. There was an instrument panel, and another door with an identical window. The light over both doors was green, so he pulled the handle and went in, walked to the other door, and pressed his face to the window. His classmates, all twenty of them, were there, in a room larger than any he had seen. And they were putting on space suits!

Of course! This was an airlock! His class was being taken on an unannounced trip outside! And, by Christ, he had almost missed it!

He flung open the door and, going up to his instructor, proffered his planned excuse. "Very well, Krzakwa," the man said, "get a suit from the rack there and put it on—you know how to do that, don't you? You've been lectured enough. Just remember: if you put it on wrong you're dead. Got it?" He nodded.

The room was large, and it was evident that Met-stat didn't just use this airlock for individual egress. There was a large orange machine mounted on five-meter-wide treads that Tem recognized as a bulldozer. The floor was covered with a dull gritty dust that he knew was dirt. He barely had time to take in what was about to happen as he followed the precise steps and put on the suit, piece by piece, and sealed it. He caught up and had it fully on before some of the slower members of the class. Inside the suit it smelled, but he didn't mind. He looked out through the old-style faceplate, scratched and fingerprinted, and turned on the radio channel with his tongue.

They gathered before the large pressure curtain that was the far wall. It was bathed in an internal red glow, indicating that the room was depressurizing. There was a diminuendo hiss, and the curtain turned green. The curtain began to slide aside, more quickly than Tem had expected.

"Oh, my God . . ." You couldn't tell whose whisper that was. The next room had an irregular gray floor and a dead black ceiling decorated by a brilliant blue and white crescent. His breath whispered in his helmet. It wasn't a room . . . and he found himself confronted by the world outside his world:

TemujinKrzakwa, at thirteen, stood on the headway of a long ramp, under an infinite black sky, dotted here and there with impossibly remote points of light barely visible in contrast to the flat gray surface. This was a parking lot, and, besides the occasional great trucks, there were several rows of small rollagon cars. In the distance another of the cars moved slowly along a road of fused regolith, still raising a small smear of dust. Farther—farther away than Tem had ever seen before—was a row of lollipop coils that marked the beginnings of a mass-driver. His eyes felt fatigued already, but he couldn't stop looking. Back over his shoulder was the hemispherical dome that was a surface manifestation of the universe that had heretofore contained him. Under the Earth, on the horizon, sat a tiny spaceship. As he had been instructed, he didn't look in the direction of the sun. Over the radio the instructor said,

"OK, boys. This is just to get you acquainted. Take all the time you want to look around. This'll seem like a bore before you know it."

Somehow, for him, maybe for him alone, that preplanned aphorism turned out to be a lie. He was embarked on a first flight into the unknown, a recognizable sort of adventure. He wanted to look for the exit from this infinite room, not the one that led to his old world, no, but the door to the next world, which would be even grander than this, and even more wonderful.

They were on the surface of Aello now, standing before the Artifact that had called them here, staring silently at it, andthey had fully implemented the thermal retention feature of their worksuits, so no further erosion was taking place. Neon dust about five hundred centimeters thick hid everything except for the grotesque fin, a dark and foreshortened triangle that towered upward above their heads. It was featureless, looking almost naturalistic.

Finally their desire for touristic gawking was fulfilled, and they began to wonder, to speculate. Krzakwa was the first to speak. "Well, this is it, I guess. Time to find out what this thing is made of. Brendan?"

Sealock unhooked a tunable em-wave modulator from his belt and played a tight cone of infrared radiation over the ground in front of him. A great swath of neon simply disappeared, followed by the water nodules that it had contained. They were momentarily surrounded by the haze of a swiftly dissipating cloud of gas, then what was left was a perfectly flat, smooth area, more blue than gray, about the size of a boxing ring.

Kneeling on the surface, he muttered, "I guess a little neutron activation analysis won't hurt anything. . .

." He changed the setting on his suit scanners and exchanged the em-device for a smaller collimated particle beamer. He fired an invisible ray and read its reflection. "Um ..." What the fuck? "This is ridiculous. It's ... it looks like . . . carbon, platinum, and iridium." Using the em-wave device, he did a quick gamma-ray scan. "In a dense, octahedral array . . ." He hung the tools back on his belt and turned to stare at the others, feeling somewhat foolish.

"Bubbleplastic?" Jana's whisper was incredulous, a perfect overlay.

"That seems a little unreasonable," said Krzakwa.

"Yep." Sealock rubbed a gloved hand uselessly over the front of his helmet. "The latticework is smaller, and there's something peculiar about it, but there's no doubt about the readings. There must be something more to this than meets the eye." He grinned to himself, humorlessly. "Not to mention the instrumentation . . ."

Ariane turned up her suit optics and looked hard. "No seams, connectors, doors, or even bumps. No real detailabove the crystalline level, except for the slight variations in color. No way in from this end." The Selenite grunted as he snapped together the fittings of a heavy beam-welder that he'd stripped from one of the remote work units. He took careful aim at nothing in particular, set the charge coupling regulator, and fired. The bright beam reached out and touched the surface but stopped and disappeared there like a broken rod.

"No change in blackbody constant," said Hu.

The beam shut down and, in the dimness, it became apparent that the intense radiation had not even marked the stuff. It hadn't even gotten warm. "Hell," said Krzakwa. "Be nice to find out how they're getting around the basic laws of thermodynamics.''

Ariane nodded. Her speculations were getting ever more grandiose. It was best to take things as they came.

Brendan turned to face Jana. "One thing left to do," he said. The woman nodded and began pulling components from her own belt, assembling them into a device atop a small collapsible tripod. The thing was a partial gravimetric flume gauge, a wave-system detector that could map out anomalies in the local mass-density background. Though useless to asterologists, it was a handy device for prospectors and could tell them a great deal about what lay beneath their feet. All energy fields have patterns, and those patterns contain information. Chains of causation can be unraveled by anyone with sufficient data processing capability. . . .

"I guess we might as well give it a try, huh?"

Hu signaled agreement by unreeling a waveguide from her suit and plugging it into the detector. Sealock joined her and they switched it on.

The Einstein winds blow like a delicate breeze, moving shells of time restrained only by the calming influence of quantum mechanics. Sequencing events are self-ordained and all things come off a steadily unraveling skein. Lachesis. Visualize a rock in a flowing river. Now, hide the rock with an occultation disk. Inspect the turbulence that you can see downstream. Estimate the difficulty in deducing the size and shape of the rock from the wake it leaves in its lee. Q*T*D. Quantum Transformational Dynamics comes along and makes many things possible.

"Jesus!" That from Sealock.

"Yes," said Hu. "I see the infrastructure is too complex for our little 'net element. It seems to be a wingless lifting body something like ten kilometers long. A lot of mass here, disguised by the size of the empty internal cavity. That's why it wasn't apparent from the preliminary system scans. Though I suspected ..."

"What did you suspect?" asked Ariane.

"I suspected that some previously derived theories might have to be revised. That is all a scientist can do, in the end."

"Yeah," said Krzakwa. "We could use some theories now." Ariane shrugged. "Some kind of landing craft? But what kind of atmosphere would you fly something this size in?"

"Jupiter maybe. The sun's chromosphere?" said Tem. "How about Iris'?"

"So? What next? It seems like we're stymied already," said Jana. Sealock looked up into the black circle of sky at the entry to the hole. "We've got a fair number of choices," he said. "We can play with it; we can fuck around looking for some kind of door, scrape the ice off bit by bit while we indulge in the happy explorer game, but ..." Hu turned and looked at him, a cold suspicion forming inside her. "But . . . what?"

"Lots of things. Hell. Let's pull it right out of the ice. Why do you think we brought the ion drill?" There was a silence, and they all heard her gasp, "No!" She took a step forward, almost menacing.

"You stupid bastard! Aello will tell us what we want to know about where this thing came from and when. If you give me a chance to—"

"Maybe so," he said, "but time is not something we have in an abundant supply. Let's get out of here." Jana seemed to have frozen, contained by her visions and at the same time holding them all in.... Visions of fiery destruction.

Polarisdrifted in a slow, elliptical orbit around Aello. Inside the crowded CM the four scientist-engineers sat arguing Krzakwa floated above his couch leafing through a hypothetical sheaf of options, a finger representing each one. "Look why don't we put it to a vote?" Jana Li Hu shook her head emphatically. "No," she said, "this is too important to be decided that way." There was a look of desperation on her face. "I don't think you people understand the magnitude of what you're suggesting. If you try to pull something that size out of the ice, you're going to chew up an entire quadrant . . . you'll ruin the whole moon!" She looked at their faces separately, seeking some form of recognition. "Don't you realize you'll be destroying something that's as important to the physical sciences as these putative 'aliens' are to biology?"

Sealock reached up and began plugging leads into his head. "Jana—I don't know what you're really after, but that's the stupidest argument I've ever heard."

Hu's anxious expression turned to a harsh glare. "Asshole," she said. "I suppose if this were the ruins of Troy you'd want to blow it up to see what's underneath. I'm arguing that we go about this in an ordered way, do a full reconnaissance down to meter resolution before we dig it out." Methol rested an intended calming hand on her forearm. "Jana. I think your principles are fine. But in this situation they're simply inappropriate. The finding of this Artifact could be the most important thing that's ever happened. We have to get it out of there."

"And just how much of it do you think USEC will leave for us?" asked Sealock.

"I still think we should put it to a vote," said Krzakwa .

"No!"

"Bullshit," said Sealock. "Why go on with this? We're ready now." They felt the hull begin to purr as the Magnaflux generator came to life, its wings of force acting like control moment gyros to turn the ship around its center of gravity. Slowly Polaris swung about, pointing its grid toward Aello. Brendanhad an exterior view, with a superimposed reticle imprinted on his vision, and he locked the ACS avionics on the targeted area of the small moon.

Hu screamed, a tortured sound, deafening in the enclosed space, and launched herself at the man. Sealock caught her by the wrists and hurled her back down, where Methol tried to hold her in place. Krzakwa wedged his bulk between the seats, blocking entry to the upper half of the CM, simultaneously reaching up and affixing an induction lead to the back of his head, so his visual cortex could have access to the ship's optical system. This was something he wanted to see. "Ariane?"

"It's OK. Pass me a lead."

The twin H2/O2engines started with a muted roar, accelerating them toward the moon. When the ion drive came on they would be in perfect balance, thrusting in two opposing vectors that would cancel each other out.

"Jana?"

"God damn you all. No."

Sealock lined up his sights on the Artifact and lit off the drill.

Singing, high on the wire, the god stood athwart a velvet-dark sky, dust-mote stars swirling around the massive spires of his huge legs. A sparkle of fire raged through his golden hair and in his right hand he clutched a thunderbolt. The thing writhed in his grasp like a glowing snake, a living thing surrounded by a violet nimbus. He raised it high above his head, laughing in his awesome power, a peal of thunder that trailed off into the distance. His body began to throw off radiance, a bright corona that lit the skies all around with its lambent streamers. He cast the thunderbolt down on his little victim. It elongated from his hand, a broad band of coruscating fire, a maze of intertwining beams, and struck the surface of Aello all about the Artifact. There was an instant of dead stillness in which the ice seemed to grow transparent. In the slowed time of Comnet they could see the ship hanging there, nose down into the surface of a world, then the crust ofthe moon, the entire visible hemisphere, was riven by an array of cracks. There was an explosion.

Aello was suddenly hidden by an expanding disk of blinding white mist, a shield that swallowed the power of the ion drill. It swelled until the wave front struck Polaris, rolling it out of its orbit. The beam winked out as Sealock shifted his attention to the matter of recontrol.

He became the bird-king again, soaring on his broad wings in the winds of the storm, riding it out, waiting for the skies to clear. It was soon over. The debris from what they'd wrought fled away in an expanding, glittery shell and was gone. They could see Aello again.

The little moon was eaten away, a great bite taken out of its surface, leaving a raw, gaping, steamy wound, the rest of its cryolith completely disrupted. In the center of this cavity the Artifact lay exposed, tumbling as it sank gently toward the center of its ancient home. It shone in the wan, distant sunlight, not like an ancient machine but like something fresh and new. Magical.

Looking out through the ship's eyes, Temujin Krzakwa was silent. What they'd done was beyond simple blasphemy. He knew of no words possessing sufficient power.

Brendan Sealock sighed, feeling his muscles slowly relax, his mind awash in a gentle afterglow, his heart slowing from its mad, orgasmic beat. A man didn't get to blow up many planets in his lifetime. Ariane Methol said, "Well, now. That was interesting. Let's get down there and see what we've found."

Jana Li Hu said nothing.

The alien Artifact settled faster than it should have in the negligible gravity of Aello. Perhaps this was because some final explosive force vector had given it an impulse toward the center of the ice moon rather than away. The tumbling motion stopped with a few glancing impacts on the frozen, shattered walls as it sank. It came to rest nose down in the deep cavity, its dorsal fin pointing at the black sky, and debris began to accrete all around it. Ultimately the ship, if such it was, would be buried once again. Polarisswung down from its orbit with a single phasingmaneuver and came to rest at its high gate point above the Artifact, hovering on an oxygen jet bled from the Hyloxso tanks. The crew looked down at it through the ship optics, silently examining their find in the harsh yet dim light of the sun. It was simple, almost featureless, a fat, wedge-shaped lifting body, with a tall stabilizer at the stern. There were two winglike control surfaces projecting upward at thirty-degree angles on either side. It appeared to be a soft, pale blue in color, though there were darker spots here and there. On the blunt stern there were five huge black circles, evidently the expansion nozzles of rocket engines mounted in a trapezoidal array. It looked like a primitive human-technology spacecraft blown to unbelievable size. Sealock opened his eyes and glanced over at Krzakwa . "What do you suppose flew the damn thing, mile-high Watusi ?"

The Selenite's teeth showed briefly, a weak sort of grin. "I guess we'd better go down and find out." Turning his attention back to the ship, Brendan said, "We'll be in for a lot of walking no matter where we land. It probably doesn't matter in this gravity."

From the lower equipment bay, Ariane called up, "Why not land right on top of the thing? It's certainly big enough."

Sealock nodded. "Why not? We couldn't ask for a flatter surface." He decreased the flow of gas from the engines and dropped Polaris slowly toward the broad back of the alien vessel. When they were down and the motor stopped, the ship stood canted at a twenty-degree angle. They started to slide, but a slight adjustment to the friction coefficient of the landing pads halted them. Krzakwasat up on his couch, eyes glassy with excitement. "Suit up. Let's see what we've got." The four of them stood outside the ship, back in their armored worksuits, on a smooth, tilted azure plain. In the distance they could see the three fins rising toward the black sky and beyond, very far away, the dark, crystalline horizon that hid the walls of the world-sized crater they'd made. The shrouded eye of Iris looked down on them in three-quartersphase, just above one horizon, and the sun, a fat spark, threw its wan light over the other.

"Where do we begin?" mused Methol.

"Maybe at the nearest dark spot," said Krzakwa . "They seem to be the only real features anywhere on the dorsal surface. There's one about three hundred meters, um, starboard of here." They'd landed just to port of the center line, where most of the Artifact's features seemed to be. When they set out for the thing, they ran into immediate difficulty. The surface of the vessel was so smooth and the gravity so low that it was difficult to push off in the long flat leaps of low-g movement, and even harder to come to a stop after landing. Raising the friction on the soles of their boots remedied this, but, since the em-embedding fields induced a corresponding field in the surface that did not immediately dissipate, they had a tendency to stick to the Artifact as they jumped. Any slight asymmetry in takeoff tended to throw them off course. Eventually they made it to the feature. The disk was just a region of somewhat darker blue, in no other way distinguished from the surrounding area. It was neither raised nor depressed, nor did it seem to have a different texture. "Well," said Krzakwa , "this is useless." He stepped forward onto it, but nothing happened. "I wonder what it's for?" The others joined him and they began walking around, staring at the circle. An analysis of the thing showed that it was simply a region of slightly enhanced titanium concentration. Sealock suddenly squatted near the center of the disk and said, "Maybe it's a giant 'O,' with very thick sides. Look." In front of him, at the circle's focus, was a small white spot, about two centimeters across. It, too, showed no relief.

"Maybe that's just an artifact of whatever process they used to draw this design," said Methol. "The compass point," she laughed suddenly. "We're wasting our time here. Let's go back to the ship and break out the whole barrage of instruments." She and Krzakwa turned and started for Polaris, accompanied by Hu, who had been following them silently about, wrapped in whatever web of thoughts her mind was spinning.

Sealock stood for a while longer, staring down at the white spot. He leaned forward and put his thumb over it, then straightened up. The little world about him remained inert. He muttered something, then put his foot over the mark and turned the sole's friction coefficient to maximum. He could feel his boot seem to cement itself to the surface of the Artifact. When he removed it again, the circular dot looked the same. Nothing happened. He thought he felt a slight current being applied to his skin, perhaps imagination and nothing more. Then he shouted.

The others turned at the sound of his voice, which would have been deafening had the corn-circuits not compensated swiftly, and saw the blue disk being swiftly filled by a spreading pool of black. The edge of the hole seemed paper thin, adding to the impression of two-dimensionality. But there was certainly a third dimension here—Sealock hung poised in space for a moment, then, clasping his knees to his chest, he began to fall down into the darkness, drifting slowly in Aello's weak grasp. In a moment he was gone. They rushed wildly back to the edge of the portal and stood looking down into the nothingness below.

"Brendan?"

"I'm still here, Tem." His voice was crisp in their heads. "I'm standing on some kind of surface about four meters below you. I can see you outlined against the stars." He paused and they could sense his excitement through the telemetry circuits. "There's something very strange going on here."

"What is it?"

"Well . . . jump down and see. It might be best for you to experience it first hand. Just don't alter your optical settings."

Krzakwaglanced at Methol and Hu, then shrugged and stepped over the edge. He fell very slowly, taking a long time to drop the four meters. As the darkness engulfed him, he said, "What am I supposed to be expecting?"

"You'll see."

"Should I try to land flat-footed?"

"That'd be a good idea. Flex your knees a little."

"Flex my ... In this gravity? Why?"

"You'll see."

Krzakwawas silent then, meditative, and prudently fell with his knees flexed. Suddenly his legs straightened out, as if something had grabbed him by the ankles and pulled. There was an instant of sudden acceleration and then his feet hammered into the floor. "What the fuck?" he muttered. Sealock laughed. "Pretty weird, huh? Now try lifting your foot up." The Selenite experimentally hefted his right leg. It came up hard, as if he were standing in a quite respectable inertial field, the closest thing to high gravity in his personal experience. Whatever was holding him abruptly let go, and his knee popped up with released muscular tension. He teetered, almost losing his balance. When he put his foot down the floor grabbed it again. "That's really odd. Some sort of em-field?"

"I don't think so. I was playing some little games while I waited . . . there's a pretty strong gradient down here—like a gravitational field. I guess the region right against the floor has something like a 2-g density."

"What're you telling me? You think the floor is coated with a monoparticular layer of neutronium ?" Sealock made his suit generate an image of Krzakwa against the darkness. "Some kind of neutron paint? No, I'm not saying anything. Just an observation."

"How about another observation: why are we standing around in the dark? These suits have optical-scale enhancers...."

Sealock grinned. "Turn yours on if you want. Maybe you should, so at least one of us can see. . . . But this ship is still turned on and its crew had to see by something. Odds are it was electromagnetic radiation."

Krzakwakicked up the gain on his optical system until he could see by ambient light. "Almost useless. There's nothing in here." He looked around. "Quite a few dark spots on the walls. A few on the floor."

"Airlock controls?"

"Probably." He walked over to the wall, taking high steps the way he would in a shallow pool of water, and reached out.

When his hand neared the wall the force grabbed it. " Hm. Interesting." He pulled one foot clear and stuck it on the wall, then followed it with the other. Suddenly his orientation was changed by ninety degrees. "That's a Useful trait for a spaceship to have."

"Better than low-differential em."

Krzakwasnickered. "Sure." He looked up at the still gaping door through the ceiling. Methol and Hu were bright mannequins to his enhanced vision. "I guess it's safe for us all to be in here at the same time. Come on." The two women came floating down. Ariane deliberately came down like a falling cat, landing full length on the floor and immersing herself in the field.

"Oof," she grunted, "this is worse than Earth. Without the worksuit I'd be stuck here permanently." She found that she had to increase the power of her exoskeleton in order to get up again. Sealock started walking blindly toward where he knew Methol was, stubbornly waiting for the ship to sense their presence and turn on a light. He was not long disappointed.

"Hey, look out," shouted Tem, distracted from his thoughts, "you're about to step on a— ghaah!" He squeezed his eyes shut as a harsh, actinic violet light suddenly flared, quickly dimmed by the suit's internal protections. He turned down his scale enhancers and opened his eyes again. The chamber was flooded with a soft, blue-green light, like an undersea scene.

"I guess I was right," said Sealock.

"It's not coming from anywhere, Bren ," said Ariane.

"Uh-huh. It just is, like the sticking field."

Krzakwa'seyes still felt grainy. "Yeah. Well, I hate to say it, but so far these buttons, despite their apparently random distribution, are producing completely human results. It's a strong argument that form follows function. So far we have an airlock with a door button and a light switch." Hu came up to them now and, for the first time since the disruption of Aello, she spoke. "Since we've come this far, there's no point in being timid." She reached out and punched a gloved hand into one of the dark spots.

"Hey!" said Krzakwa , but nothing happened. Hu punched the next spot in the row and the ceiling door suddenly irised shut and vanished without a trace.

"Uh-oh." That was from Sealock. Hu snorted and hit the third spot. Again nothing happened. Methol stepped forward in alarm and said, "Really, Jana. I don't think you should be . . ." Hu punched the fourth spot and a section of floor under her feet vanished. She dropped through under what looked like a fairly high acceleration and was gone, her brief, chopped-off scream echoing in their heads.

Back in the Illimitor World, Demogorgon and Vana lay naked together in the purple-cushioned rear section of his royal skimmer. They were drifting without power above the glittery azure waters of the Gevrainhal Sea, far to the northwest of Arhos, flowing with the wind beneath an almost featureless cornflower sky, tracking with the great red suns. The air was blood-warm above the equatorial ocean and fresh, clean sweat dappled the skins of their flawlessly imaginary bodies. Somewhere, in a hidden corner of her consciousness, Vana could imagine how this worked. There were many tricks to the Illimitor World program, enough alternate realities to satisfy the needs of many participants. If a hundred people submerged themselves here together, they would have a common experience, yes, but tailored to a hundred sets of needs. It would be the same but different. Here was a perfect world where everyone got not what he wanted but what he needed. Demogorgon had explained to her the mechanism for it all: a Tri-vesigesimalloop can make an almost infinite number of tracks from every decision point, with three layers of meaning derived from the twenty gradations of choice. The reality was that sex, like everything else, was better here than in the real world. There was no sick feeling, stemming from the initial sensations of desire: it just began. Instead of a gradual building to the trigger-spray release of an orgasm, it began full strength, one long flood of raw, elemental pleasure that ended only when the need for it was gone.

When it was over there were no frustrations, no aches, just perfect satiation and contentment—and if you wanted it to begin again, it did.

In the contented languorous moments here, time was seemingly suspended, and the simple comfort of her relationship with Demo put no pressure on her to act or speak in any particular way. They'd come here again and again to escape the social pressures building in the colony. Somehow, the Thing they had found on Aello meant little to her, here, now ... all her links to the outer world were dissolving. Perhaps not so strangely, she missed Harmon most of all here. But she knew he couldn't accept all this. The perfect pleasures of the Illimitor World were building something between her and Demogorgon. Things were changing. What they were building seemed good, but she didn't know quite what it was. Not yet.

Vana took a sip of her fizzy gin and tonic and watched a broken cloud pass in front of the lower sun. Whatever was going on here, she thought, it was right, for a change.

Sealock fell to his knees beside the hole in the floor that had eaten Jana, fighting the force field, which, in the vicinity of the opening, seemed to want to pull him in. It was a cushiony black below, the chamber-light that spilled through the opening seeming to be swallowed by nothingness. He called up an image of her, based on telemetry signals. There she was, falling slowly away—no, not falling. She was on a ballistic trajectory created by a momentary acceleration as she'd gone through the hole. She was a hundred meters away and receding. "Jana!"

"Yes." The woman's voice was calm. "Brendan, I can't see anything down here. I've turned the scale enhancers all the way up, but it doesn't help. This must be an awfully big room. I'm going to activate my microwave emitter."

"OK." Sealock switched over a portion of his suit optics to short-wave sensing, thoughtfully chose an array of false-color generators, and waited. Hu's suit suddenly went bright, then dimmed again as his rectifiers normalized the image. Lightflickered on in the chamber below. Looking over his shoulder, Krzakwa gasped.

Jana was a flyspeck drifting through space toward a tilted platform more than a half kilometer away. What they could see of the room below made no sense beyond the sheer enormity of it. Sealock turned the holding em of his gloves all the way up and splayed his hands on the deck, then stuck his head over the edge, lurching as the force field tried to draw him downward, and looked around. Jana's radiation was quite sufficient to illuminate the entire chamber, which, by rough estimate, seemed to extend the length of the ship. Though the room was of constant width, the outward-bending walls dwindled into the distance, following the converging lines of perspective, and seemed to almost meet many kilometers away. The floor was cluttered with angularities, incomprehensible objects that changed from a monumental array directly below to a foreshortened jumble in the distance. Sealock turned off his right glove and reached down through the hole. He touched the underside of the floor and, feeling his hand stick, guessed that it too possessed a gravity-like field. He hung his torso down through the opening and quickly got a grip on the surface opposite. Inching his body forward, he suddenly reached a point where the field in the hole and beyond overcame that of the airlock, and he was propelled in a head-over-heels arc that left him sprawling on the other side. Above him the world inverted, and he looked up at the underside of the sky.

Dizziness assailed him, and he shut his suit optics down for a moment, then took a deep breath and brought them up again. The surface to which he was bound was like an immense game board, slightly convex, and populated by a regular array of man-sized white obelisks, for all the world like the bishops of his first chess set. At the level of his eyes they sprouted in great enough profusion to cut off vision about fifteen hundred meters away. So much for form and function, he thought.

"Come on through," Brendan said, extending a hand toward what seemed to be once again "down" through the opening. "Grab my hand and I'll swing you through." Carefully, the others flipped up and through, roughly deposited on the flypaper inner surface. When they were ready, they stood, which by now evoked hardly any vertigo, and looked up in awe. Sealock felt a sudden deterministic frustration at this rapid alteration of his directional sense. He needed to think of this as a zero-g space, but the presence of the gravity-like field prevented him from doing so.

"OK," he said, "up/down is dangerous here, and totally inapplicable, folks. As discomforting as it may be, forget it."

"Jana?" That was from Krzakwa. "Your Doppler telemetry indicates you're going about five m/s, so you're in for a pretty hard landing. If the field doesn't exist on the other side, you'll bounce. . . . Please remember the electromagnetic features of your worksuit. Your wrists . . ."

"I'm not stupid!" she said, sounding angry.

"I know, but I ..."

"More experience in low g, right? But you don't have any experience with this. No one does, so shut up. I'm here." She relayed an image to them. The "floor" grew patiently, broken platforms pulling apart to reveal a bit of smooth floor decorated with another of the mysterious circles. Just before she struck, a force pushed at her and decelerated her into a soft landing. "Wow," she said. "There's a field down here too."

"You're OK, then?" asked Ariane, receiving a noncommittal "Unh" in return. Brendan and Tem had meanwhile been exploring in the vicinity of the nearest of the "bishops." It was set in a dark circle and looked as if it had been turned on a lathe, widening and shrinking in an unpredictable way until it swelled and then tapered to a minaret crown. Sealock reached out and stroked it. "I've heard of queen games, but this is a new one on me."

"No squares, either, Bren . No markings at all, in fact."

"If there are any answers here they're down where Jana is. Sorry, over where Jana is. . . ." Ariane joined them. "Well, what is it? A dildo?"

Brendan laughed, and it sounded unreal.

"Hey," said Jana, from afar, "you need to see this."

"Stay there," said Ariane. "I'm coming over." She leaped up, expecting to fly away, but the floor held on resolutely, and she just managed a little hop. She looked at Sealock. " Bren, we're stuck here . . . how do we get to the other side if this field won't let go?"

"Think about it, Ari," he said. "That's what the hole is for —it's evidently a transport device disguised as a portal. Which probably indicates that there aren't many reasons to hang around here." Krzakwanodded, walked over to the opening, and stepped into it. Instead of being launched outward, however, he disappeared back into the airlock. "Whoops!" they heard him say. "Obviously it's a two-way device." A moment later he appeared, feet first, launched along the same trajectory as Hu had followed. Ariane was next and in a minute was arcing, spread-eagled, toward the other side. Sealock stood on the ceiling, watching them sail off, and felt a slow dawning of his sense of wonder, a returning of some of the lost sensations of his distant childhood. He suddenly remembered a week spent camping in the Roan Mountains, living a blood-crimson life under a burning blue sky, and remembered feeling this way before: a gnawing happiness reacting against "what will happen next" imagery. What, he wondered, am I going to see? Anything. He walked to the edge of the opening, squatted slightly, and fell down, being deposited softly on the former ceiling of the other room. Then, grinning, he bunched the heavy muscles of his thighs and leaped into space.

The fall took a very long time, during which he had ample opportunity to try to make sense of the mountings and cablings that crisscrossed the surface. What had he expected? he wondered. A big cabin with endless kilometers of plush seats arranged in orderly rows, like a commercial space-liner? This was certainly not that. The real question, interrelated with the size of the thing, was, why build a craft this big and then leave it empty? Could this just be a cargo hold of some sort? It made a certain amount of sense. In the end, the four of them were standing on a two-hectare raised platform, nine hundred meters below the nowalmost invisible tiny hole that had been their entrance. Krzakwa and Methol stood examining a large dais covered with thousands of dark spots, what they assumed to be a control panel of sorts, while Sealock and Hu wandered off together, reconnoitering in the area, trying to get an overview of the machinery around the "landing circle" to determine if there were any logical inferences to be made about function.

"What do you think of this thing so far?" Brendan had enacted a face-to-face image mode between them, and Hu looked at him through darkly slitted eyes, her small head protruding from the collar of the worksuit and the image of her ponytail hanging down her back.

"Leave me alone," she said, and the optics image of her cylindrical helmet reappeared. "Why are you such a fucking bastard?"

He laughed. "I like being a fucking bastard. You ought to try it sometime." They walked on, silent for a while, then he said, "I wasn't trying to ride you. I'm asking for some kind of professional opinion from you

... as a scientist."

She stared at him for a moment, then said, "You want to know what I think? I think that what we're seeing is not the whole story. There was something in this cavity at one time. And the purpose of it all may be impossible to figure out without a clue as to what it was. The thing that's got me is, what kind of cargo does this carry?"

"That's just what I was thinking. It may not be so mysterious, though. Those nodes on the far side—could it be that some kind of field held the cargo in a matrix within the space?"

"The strange thing is this—if it's for bringing a cargo up from the surface of a gas giant, say, then where's the offloading equipment? It can't all be done with fields."

"Maybe the cargo was liquid. . . ."

"We don't have any data yet. The time for 'impressions' is later, when we know more." He nodded. "Yes, but guesswork can sometimes help." They came to the edge of the platform and stopped. This interior world stood mostly at a level about one hundredmeters below them. There were other platforms in the distance, and they could see a large number of such structures below them. It looked almost like a cityscape, a scale model on a tabletop, and everything was linked together by a maze of curving cables. The microwave emitter, which had been set on the tallest nearby structure, sharply delineated the staggered blockiness of the scene by throwing long, dense shadows. Here and there cables reached toward the "sky."

There was a sudden change in the texture of the objects they were seeing and Sealock looked back toward Methol and Krzakwa . They were gazing about. He shifted his suit optics from microwave to visible light and the vast chamber was bathed in blue-green radiance. "Looks like you got the lights turned on. . . ." They turned and walked back toward the dais.

"That was an easy one," said Ariane. "At least I think I did it. It happened about twenty seconds after I touched this node. Do you think I should touch it again to see if they go off?"

"Sure," said Jana. Nothing happened.

"We seem to have established that they don't believe in toggle buttons," said Tem. "Try this one next to it," he said, reaching out to touch one of the dark spots. As he did so, something huge began to move in the distance. A sea of cables shimmered, where before there had been nothing, and beneath them the unknown machine glided a small distance and stopped. Sealock smiled grimly. "Be a hell of a note if we accidentally turned on the rocket engines, wouldn't it?"

Watching without expression, Hu said, "It would be interesting to discover that they still worked, that they still had fuel. And that a fuel would indeed still be potent. Most that I know work by the release of stored entropy . . . and time will have its effect."

They touched other buttons, which made other objects move, and Sealock was struck by a sudden analogy: they were like small children, playing with the controls to an older child's complex toy system. It did things that they were too young to understand. They couldn't see the real relationshipbetween cause and effect. And any theories that they may have formed were neither enforced nor disproved.

Harmon Prynne sat in his cubicle in Deepstar's CM, alone, as he had been, now, seemingly for so long. And Vana . . . she was under the wire again with that God damned fagwog ! The black anger built in him and he wanted to rage, to smash things, destroy them. . . . He wanted to throw things, hurl them against the walls of his room, but in this low-g environment they would only ricochet around inanely, making him want to laugh when he needed to cry. He chewed his knuckles in frustration and stared hard at nothing. Why did it have to happen this way?

I'm alone again, he thought, and remembered endless nights he had spent alone as a younger man, when he lived in his ancestral Key West Monad. He'd never fitted in there, or in any of the other places he'd tried to live—he'd always been an outsider, cut off in the midst of his own culture . . . unable to join in the simple, joyous games of the other adolescents. If it is difficult to be strange, how much more difficult can it be to be strange and stupid?

He couldn't fit in with their impersonal ideas about human relationships, the ideas about absolute freedom within the restrictive framework of the Monad. He needed someone, and needed that person to need him. . . .

When he went to Montevideo in the pursuit of his career, when he met Vana Berenguer and loved her

. . . he'd tried so hard to make it work, and now she was slowly being taken from him. He wanted to kill them, or himself. . . . He wanted all life to come to an end. . . . Oh, hell. He couldn't think which way to turn. He didn't know what to do. Maybe when the USEC ship came, he could get away.

Having exhausted their patience in playing with the alien control panel, the four explorers had walked back to the edge of the platform and, in keeping with the topsy-turvy nature of the place, continued to walk down the side to the thing's base. Before the omnipresent lighting came on, this place had been buried in the shadows, but now that they could seeit well they discovered that there was nothing to see. Around them were virtually featureless blue-green rhomboids of various sizes lacking even the circles which allowed one the luxury of imagining that the thing was at least marginally understandable. Alleyways strung with occasional cables led in all directions. Finally they came to an attach point for one of the cables, and Ariane climbed up to it and said, "I wonder what it was for? It seems to go just about everywhere. . . ." The surface of the thing had a strange oily sheen, a faint coruscation of colors that gave the illusion of movement. She reached out to touch it. "You know, it has the same force field that we've found on all the flat interior surfaces." She encircled the ten-centimeter-thick cable with her fingers and let them slowly clamp down. "I wonder if they're all really continuous with each othAAAAaaaa . . ." The scream was a trailing diminuendo, for as soon as her fingers made contact with it she was jerked off her feet and sucked away on the cable, manifestly under rapid acceleration.

Sealock cursed and, throwing himself on the thing, was sucked away in his turn. The other two, unwilling to be left behind, followed suit. Obligingly, the device brought those behind up at a faster pace until they were traveling in a little cluster, like dried raisins on a bare stem.

"Well," said Brendan, "I guess we know what it does now." Ariane laughed weakly. "This is a novel sort of transportation device. I wonder how we get off?" Krzakwawas looking around, trying to make something of the things about them as they soared through alleyways with increasing numbers of cables hung almost within reach. It was as if they had been on a spur of the system that was being fed into the terminal nexus for a large network. Below them, instead of solid bulkhead, was an undulating river of larger-diameter cables. "At this speed," said Tem, "if we did manage to let go, we'd get hurt. Maybe we'd better just ride it to wherever it's going."

"Like a Westerner, you pretend to be in control of a force when in fact you are totally helpless," said Hu. "Let us hope that it remembers how to stop when it does get somewhere." Brendan laughed. "How droll. Be funny if we all got killed in here."

"What an encouraging thought," said Tem. "You're a real optimist, aren't you?" In the end the machine worked as they supposed it should. When they neared the port-side wall their speed of travel dropped. It brought them to a terminus near the floor and let them go. They dropped lightly and were grabbed only at the end of their descent by the now familiar field. The wall in front of which they had been deposited looked like a gigantic honeycomb, an endless array of identical hexagons about one and a half meters across by three deep. Sea-lock crawled into the nearest one and said, "Looks like there's a set of electrical connectors coming in the back end. These are sort of like little garages. . . ."

"Or maybe circuit plug-ins," said Methol. "That'd fit in with the scale of the ship." Jana Li Hu sighed. "The worst of it is, this isn't even a real spaceship. It's an atmospheric shuttle, like the GM155 at Reykjavik."

"But for what kind of a planet?" demanded Sealock, climbing down from his perch. "Can you imagine flying this monster in an Earth-type troposphere? The trailing-edge vortices alone would constitute major weather disturbances!"

"Not to mention what the engines'd do . . ." That was from Krzakwa . "Could it have come from Iris itself?"

"Impossible," said Hu. "Iris is too cold for any conceivable life form. Even if we presuppose complex lipids dissolved in methane . . . well, that might work on a surface-stabilized version of Neptune, but Iris is too cold."

They walked along peeking into the hexagons until they came upon one that still had an occupant. They were silent, looking it over. Whatever it was, it almost filled the capsule, a six-sided, bronze-colored body that tapered to a graceful, gemlike point on the end they could see.

"Let's get it out of there," said Krzakwa .

They pulled the thing out of its cavity and let it fall gently to the floor, not failing to notice that the force field was quite willing to grasp it. The object was three meters long, a littlemore than half of which was the six-sided body. The other end tapered slightly, then evolved into a banded cylinder a little over one meter long. The inner end had eight articulated arms, each possessed of two fingers. Inside the ring that these formed were eight projections, much like the ones that sprouted from the end of an ancient vacuum tube—and they were obviously intended to mate with the sockets in the capsule. Finally, the thing ended in a short, hollow, flexible hose.

"What do you suppose?" said Sealock. "A robot? Maybe something like the work-units we use?" Hu squatted and put her suit sensors to the end of the jointed, hoselike apparatus. "There are chemical traces in side it," she said, "mostly CH4."

They looked at it for a while longer, then, completely frustrated, decided to press on, walking toward the aft part of the ship. Sealock turned around and took a last look at the thing. "You know," he said, "I know that shape from somewhere. I wonder ..." He shook his head in irritation.

While the bulk of Aello's mass stood between the colonists and the Artifact site, there would be no transmission of data for another four hours, at which time the imperceptible but headlong pace of the moons about their small primary would bring the sub-Iridean hemisphere of Aello into view. The broadcast from Polaris had shown the alien vessel being unearthed from the Aellan globe and relayed remote telemetry from the thing. But as soon as the ship started its landing they had been cut off. The six remaining colony-bound people were strewn across the floor of the central room, Beth paired with John and Harmon with Vana. As the enormity of what they had seen faded into the past, they looked at each other, still shaken. Harmon pressed close to Vana, trying to take solace in her presence. Aksiniaabruptly popped up, flinging her hands over her head to project herself into an artful somersault, continuing like a star-shaped Frisbee just above the floor until she gracefully landed by the far wall. " Wheee!" Her breath came suddenly in a series of short bursts. "This is . . . just like . . .every God damn ess -fiction story . . . ever written. Except it's really happening! I think I'm going to pop!" She feverishly combed her hand through her loose curly brown hair.

"Calm down, Ax," said Beth. "I admit that I feel a little like jumping around myself. But you're getting ca—"

"Stop trying to make her act differently," said John suddenly. "I know you have a revulsion to behavior you see as 'drugged,' but she has a right to react any way she chooses. In a way, her reaction is more appropriate than us just coolly discussing it."

Aksiniawas nonplused. "Don't 'discuss' me! You know, you're all a bunch of deadheads. If I don't hang around with you that much it's because of that. You all walk around as if you saw the world through layers of gauze. I get more emotion reading Herodotus than trying to relate to any of you."

"You should try the Illimitor World, Ax," said Vana. "It's different—no, we're different there."

"Fucking fairyland," muttered Harmon.

"That's what I'm trying to point out," said Ax, now suddenly cool. "This is as much of an adventure as anything you could dream up. But does anybody laugh, cry, or even jump up and down? No." She pushed off from the wall and settled slowly to stand on the floor. "I'm going to my room. I'll be back in three hours and forty minutes."

When she was gone, John smiled stiffly. "Defense, anyone?" Four faintly embarrassed grins were the only reply. "Beth? Sorry. Shall we make rapport then?"

"Sure."

"We'll be back in a couple of hours," John said to no one in particular. "If Aello disappears or anything like that, break in. Otherwise please don't."

With John and Beth unconscious to the world, and Aksinia fled, even the momentous discovery of the Aellan Artifact couldn't mask the tension that existed among Harmon, Vana, and Demogorgon. The latter smiled quickly at the two others but remained silent.

"Well," said Harmon, standing, "I'm going to check the mail." This was a function he had assumed for himself; dailyhe reviewed the messages that had been tightbeamed to them from the various comsat stations. It was a way he could be useful. And a way to forget . . .

Prynnesettled into a chair and accessed the stored data. Though not particularly interested in the usual assortment of advertisements, legal briefs, and occasional personal messages that came through from the Solar worlds, Demogorgon found himself listening in on the playback. After all, he told himself, this is a historic date. Even the mundane took on an edge of importance. And besides—there were hours to kill before he could find out if Brendan was all right.

Halfway through the messages there was a notice of real import, not without ominous implications for their present situation. It seemed that Cornwell had purchased an asteroid some years earlier and had put it off limits to mining and colonization. Demogorgon remembered John mentioning it to the group some time before—since the asteroids were quickly being consumed by the voracious needs of mankind, he had bought it as a kind of nature preserve, partially at Beth's insistence. 508 Princetonia , it was called; just a chunk of carbonaceous material 140 kilometers in diameter. It had now been confiscated by the Pansolar Bureau of Asteroid Management. They had credited Cornwell's accounts with the amount of his original investment plus four percent for appreciation. The off-world arm of the Terran government was flexing its muscles. In any case, it was unlikely that the Artifact would remain in their possession once the Union found out about it.

Hours later it was time for Polaris to be wheeled over Aello's horizon by the rotation of the little moon. They all gathered back in the central room's pit. Jana's chip photorecorder was directed at the spot at which they expected the ship to appear. In their minds they saw the uneven white limb of Aello, a welter of craters, small and large, reduced to lines by foreshortening. The resolution of the telescope was such that they would easily be able to see the alien vessel, and perhaps even Polaris. But the debris kicked up from the excavation was still swarming in orbit around the satellite, and this might obscure the tiny human craft.

The moment came; and nothing. An irregular cliff wall was evident on the horizon now, but that was all. "Of course!" said Beth. "It's in a crater—we'll have to wait a little longer." Finally the dark shape of the Artifact was fully revealed to them, nestled at the bottom of the obscenely huge crater. They established contact with Polaris easily, and it replayed a mental rerun of the entry of the exploration party into the huge portal. But when the circle had irised shut, the contact with the others was cut. In present time all they could do was play the camera over the linear blue bulk of the thing. Demogorgon spoke for them all: "We may never know what's happened." He shut his eyes for a moment, keeping his face as cold and still as he could, then turned and walked away.

After some time of travel, both on and off the transport matrix, the four explorers found themselves near the aft end of the alien spacecraft. Here the density of mysterious shapes and incomprehensible devices gradually thinned out, until they were in an open cylindrical area that ended in a flat wall. The floor was a nest of transparent tubes, interconnected with several heavy machines that looked suspiciously like turbo-pumps.

Surveying the scene, Sealock finally turned to Krzakwa and said, "What do you think? Engine room?" The Selenite nodded slowly. "This is the logical place for it." Hu laughed softly. "At least, if you're using our logic." True, thought Sealock, a little surprised that it hadn't occurred to him. This could be the main living quarters. Still . . .

The largest of the hoses led two by two through the rear bulkhead of the ship, and below each set was a dark circle, centering on a white dot. When she pointed them out, Methol said, "If these are like the others we've seen, maybe they're inspection ports."

"Could be. Let's find out." They walked over to the central one and Sealock friction-punched the mark. As expected, the thing irised open, revealing a dimly lit tunnel. They stoodback for a moment, then, without another word, went in. It led aft only a short distance, then emerged into another large chamber. Here there were three huge cylinders mounted up against a curving surface that appeared to be the outer skin of the spacecraft.

Krzakwatook one look at them and burst out laughing.

"Absolutely," said Sealock. "Perfectly ordinary rocket engines."

"A little huge, maybe, but nothing new."

"So it isn't a starship. . . ." Methol's voice mirrored her disappointment.

"I think we knew that already," said Krzakwa .

They spent a few minutes confirming their analysis, then began to look around again. On the floor nearby they found another portal and opened it. Below them was a wide corridor flanked by curving walls. There were more transparent hoses leading up into the ceiling.

"Now what?"

Sealock looked meditatively at the walls for a while, then said, "Whatever these things may be, we should just go on assuming that this thing is set up human-technology style. If that is the case, then these can be nothing but the fuel tanks. Jana, run me up a line so we can coordinate our scanners." The woman did as she was bid and they switched on. After a few seconds the man smirked and said,

"Well, well. Lithium hydride in a carbon-crystal matrix." He deaccessed the device and unlinked from Hu.

" Hyloxso," said Krzakwa . "Swell."

"Not quite, but . . . close enough," said Methol. "If this isn't a starship, how did it get here?"

"Maybe it is," said Hu. "Reaction engines could be the best form of propulsion available. That would bode ill for the future of interstellar travel, but it may be true."

"Why build a starship with wings?" That was from Krzakwa .

"Why build a lander this big?" demanded Sealock.

Hu sighed. "Two concepts: either they were from Iris, which I find difficult to accept, or there was once a mother ship."

Sealock laughed harshly. "A rather, um, large mother ship."

"Well, I know one thing," said Methol. " LiHwould give a much higher specific impulse than Hyloxso , and that carbon-crystal matrix probably means the stuff doesn't have to be power stabilized. The patent on an idea like that would be worth a lot of money...."

As they began walking toward the forward end of the ship, the walls of the corridor gradually closed in, until they found themselves having to move in single file. Before they had gone far Sealock, who was in the lead, came to a sudden stop.

"What is it?" Hu, next in line, couldn't see past his bulk.

"I don't know. The character of the surface changes here. It looks almost . . . slick." He took a tentative step forward and abruptly fell down, his legs scissoring apart as he dropped.

"Shit!" He grunted with pain and tried to roll over, moving forward in the tunnel as he did so. He failed to get up, pawing ridiculously at the floor, and began to slide slowly away from the others, gradually accelerating.

Methol crowded past Hu and launched herself after him. She tried to crouch like a skater but fell to a sitting position nonetheless. With her higher initial impulse, she quickly caught up with Sealock and, together, they began to recede.

Hu knelt and touched the beginning of the shininess. "It seems to be a frictionless surface," she said. Krzakwalooked over her at the others, who seemed quite far away now, and said, "That's interesting, but I think we'd better go after them. I don't think it would do to get separated in here."

"Agreed." She braced herself, pushed hard with her feet, and sailed off on her hands and knees. The Selenite let her get a safe distance ahead, then crouched down and, with a movement common to low-g wrestlers, launched himself forward, electing an upright, seated mode of travel. They accelerated fairly quickly along the declivity of their inertial frame and Krzakwa found himself thinking, This is sort of fun. He imagined a sort of giant amusement park on the Moon, with the tunnel twisted into a giant slide . . . andtransparent. Suspended above the surface somehow. His lips worked into a wry smile. It was the kind of brief dream he'd had often as a child—but the Lunar authorities had never been interested in anything that might be characterized as "fun." One day, perhaps, that government might be overthrown by a furious rabble of amusement-starved hedonists, but until then they would still be gray men, living somberly and industriously beneath the lusterless gray stone. It was one of the many reasons behind his decision to leave. Noble ideals were all very well, in their place, but fun . . .

"Hey, I think we're coming to the end of it," said Sealock. "The floor's about to . . ." He and Methol suddenly went tumbling as friction grabbed at them. Hu curled herself into a ball and halted much more gracefully. When his turn came, Krzakwa tensed his leg muscles and simply slid to a stop on the seat of his suit.

They stood up and looked around. It was another almost featureless chamber, but this one had an open hatch overhead, and they could see much brighter light shining down on them.

"Careless," said Methol. "Somebody forgot to shut the door when they left. No wonder they got their ship stuck inside an ice moon."

Sealock nodded at that and, with vague surprise, found himself understanding the urge to make these sorts of inane statements. He was beginning to feel strong surges of unreality, as if prowling about this huge structure were depriving him of some capacity for rational thought. Fragmenting . . . One at a time, they jumped up at the hole, which caught them and pulled them through to rest on the far wall. The room in which they found themselves was not featureless. If anything, it contained too many details. Though not large, it had bristles erupting from almost every surface, with no regard for a preferential orientation. It almost looked as if some misbegotten moss had spread across the walls of the room and erected its sporophytes , up, down, and from both sides. It was a forest of poles of varying heights, and even pole was surmounted by a different-sized globe. The globes were stippled like golf balls, marked by the little nodes they'dcome to recognize as controls and thought of as "buttons." The only empty area was the small section on which they had landed.

Sealock stepped up to the nearest of the poles and took its globe between his gloved hands, peering at it closely. A moment later he shrugged and began tapping the buttons on it at random.

"We're going to get killed at this yet," murmured Krzakwa .

"So what?" Hu picked a globe of her own and began prodding it with a finger. The Selenite watched them, feeling very strange, and thought, There's something wrong with us. Maybe we shouldn't be out here on our own.

KHAAAAAAAHHHH.

Suddenly their heads filled with a crash of static, white noise tuned to a deep F-sharp. It seemed to blank their perceptions and lock their muscles into an almost tetanus-like rigidity. Whatever it was reached through the control elements of their suits, right into their brains, and began activating the various centers . . . senses and ideas swirled in flux.

They were immersed in a deep, deep blue sea.

Kinesthetic suspension, in an unending void.

Cool currents flowed across their exoskeletons, their rigid, hinged exteriors. Though they had no eyes, a hard squid swam into view, jetting along point foremost. Anophagomotorapparatus ...

Though it had no mouth it spoke to them.

Baajood, it said. Baajood and awaah .

Little bubbles of gray-green oil broke on their armless, legless cephalothoraxes. Somehow the bubbles were meaning incarnate, and they saw the lifting body ship move through a series of animation frames as it detached from something that was much larger.

"Oh, God," the squid shattered, burbling their names one by one. The sea turned black.

"Where the fuck are we?" gasped Krzakwa .

"Shut up!" screamed Sealock, agony trailing along his nerve fibers. Then, quieter, "I'm trying to regain control."

Silence, sore-kara, "Ahhh, help me, Tem." They could feel the water spilling from beneath his lids.

"What?"

"Push,God damn you!"

Krzakwapushed.

And the black sea burst into flame, licked up red around their bodies, and burned away. They were still standing in the control room, in the clearing among the sporophytes , of course, but everything had changed. Where this world had been a maze of interwoven mysteries, now there was an overlay of functionality. This was the control room for the entire ship, and the globes were the heart of the vast communication network that linked virtually every function in it.

"Well . . ." began Hu.

"Look," said Methol. "What happened to the control nodes?" They looked around them and saw that the globes were now quite featureless. In their new, incomplete knowledge they understood that this could only mean something extremely bad, a malfunction wrought by some near-total failure of the system. Suddenly the portal through which they had entered began to shut, but it only closed halfway, then fell open, a relaxing sphincter, opening at the moment of death. The light seemed to grow dimmer, then dimmer still.

Krzakwafancied he could hear the sounds of machinery, gradually slowing down. " Ummm. I think we'd better get out of here."

They ran.

Animals and plants usually die one cell at a time, in an orderly sequence. An explosion may blow them apart, a fire may burn them up fast, but the standard is one cell at a time, in a logical progression. The cells of consciousness are usually the first to go. The heart stops, the brain blacks out and turns to a nasty soup, and the man is dead, but it's quite a while before the last ATP cycle turns over and grinds to ahalt. The chemical reactions in his intestines go on to equilibrium.

Technological items tend to mimic natural processes. An amoeba dies fast and so does a lawn mower, but then it's an interesting trip up the crooked ladder of evolution. . . . The four of them went through the dying spaceship as fast as they could, scanning the remote overhead for signs of a door, and nothing worked quite right anymore.

Somewhere, far ahead, something exploded with a radio-bang and threw its liquid contents to the floor in a quick eruption of globules. They were multicolored and made a wonderful low-g splash, oscillating as they sailed through space, in-out and in again. The ambient light continued to dim on an arithmetic decline and their suit rectifiers had to work for them.

The four climbed to a structural high point and stood scanning the sky. "There," said Sealock, pointing about half a kilometer away. "A traverse node. Let's hope the system is still functioning."

"And what if it isn't?" said Methol.

"Then we die in the dark," said Hu.

Krzakwagrinned. "Imagine how that'll confuse the next people who manage to get in here." Sealock turned and stared at them. "There must," he said, "be some evolutionary advantage to being an asshole. Let's go." He turned and strode in the direction of the machine that somehow he knew was used to launch "people" to the door nodes on the far side when the central cavity was evacuated. It was very dark now, and he activated a microwave emitter and played it over the corridor in front of them. Finally they reached the place, which looked just like the dais upon which they had first landed. Holding his breath in suspense, he stepped onto the circular spot and jumped for the other side. Miraculously, it worked. Brendan found himself reversing the long ballistic arc between sides. Apparently Aello's gravity was being compensated for, and he landed, hands first, on the gently cradling game board opposite. The others followed, landing in their own peculiar ways. Looking"up" at the dying world below, Krzakwa said, "Good thing the field still works."

"Let's get the fuck out of here, if we still can." Sealock stood on the node and cranked up his friction coefficient. The door irised open and he was accelerated through.

They left.

Back in Polaris, on the ventral surface of the now dead-seeming alien craft, not far from an airlock door which had failed to shut properly, they sat around suitless and had a meal, mostly in silence. Krzakwa, tidier than usual and perhaps more subdued, put aside his sandwich with a gusty sigh. He tugged softly on his beard and said, "All right, what have we seen? We might as well face this now."

"Obviously," said Hu, "a landing craft."

"We all saw the mother ship in the playback. Given the generally sealike nature of that scene, I think it's safe to say that this Artifact housed some sort of aquarium . . . maybe a whole ecology. And the purpose of it all was to cart this marine ecology down to the surface of a planet."

"Do you believe all that?" asked Ariane.

Brendan paused. "I—I don't know what I believe."

"Could this larger ship be embedded in Ocypete ?" asked Krzakwa . "Or is this some sort of abandoned lifeboat, left behind by its mother?"

Jana said, "Something that large would have shown up even in the low-res gravitational survey. This ship just happened to be overlooked because the large empty cavity perfectly camouflaged the mass of the shell."

"Is there a chance that it's—" said Ariane.

"I'm afraid you're on a wild goose chase," said Jana. "It's not here. Now that we've done a preliminary reconnaissance in the Artifact, I feel we should write up a quick resume and transmit it to the authorities. Then we should go back in."

There was a moment of stunned silence.

"What?" growled Krzakwa . "You want to go back in there?"

"Sure," said Hu. "Why not?"

"I don't know about you, Jana," said Methol, "but it's too dangerous in there for me. I'm afraid."

"What are you going to do—just go back to Ocypete ?" asked Jana, anger rising in her voice.

"That's what I had in mind," said Brendan.

Jana began to struggle in the cramped quarters, trying to get back into her suit. "I'm staying here. There's no point in coming here and then just leaving. I'm not going to share this with the USEC people." She began to push her way into the worksuit.

Tem grabbed her and pulled her out, like the meat from a crab's claw. "You are crazy, lady." He held her in a crushing bear hug, and eventually she stopped wriggling.

"Hey, Tem," said Sealock. "When we get home, want to help me build a quantum conversion scanner?"

The Selenite's eyes seemed to light up. "You've got the components?"

"We can make what we don't have."

"Let's go." Brendan relaxed into his command chair and began to plug in. They would make a quick transit home.