Iris

OCTAVIO JOAQUIER

Acting Chairman, IAAU

"Shit," said Brenoan. "They're on to us."

"Did you believe that no one would notice a change of that magnitude?" asked Jana. "Even if they weren't taking an occasional look from Smith, the USEC ship is within range of low-resolution views. You know they are interested."

Krzakwa broke from the pack in the central pit and made a little dive into a low recliner that subsided to receive him. "Well, it was a gamble. They should've been satisfied with the data we're sending back. Leave it to some militarist to call up photos a hundred times less sharp than those available simply because they were firsthand. What do we do now?"

The focus of the conversation began to shift toward the center of the central room as, one by one, Krzakwa was joined in the comfort of the programmable floor. Soon everyone except Harmon was there.

"Even if we tell them the truth, there isn't anything they can do about it. At least until the Formis Fusion arrives in thirty-five days," said Ariane. "That should be plenty of time."

"It's a risky business, all right," said John. "Presumably the least that would happen is that we would forfeit our homesteading rights. We could also be placed under ship arrest and held for return to Earth. But the damage is already done. . . . I'm not arguing with the rationale—"

"They wouldn't have authorized us to explore the Artifact, we all know that," said Demogorgon.

"As far as I'm concerned, they have no authority out here," said Brendan. "We can defend ourselves with what we've got. If we have to . . ."

Krzakwa was amused. "That would be a bloody little war."

"Shall we stall them or tell them the truth?" asked Ariane.

"I can't see what difference it would make," said Jana, "and I am ready to release my full monograph on the Iridean system, including everything."

"Go ahead and tell them," said Brendan. "It will be very interesting to hear what threats they come up with."

Within twenty hours the conversion scanner was complete. Sealock twisted himself in the cramped confines of his equipment-stuffed quarters and stretched, grabbing on to a handhold buried in multicolored waveguides to pull out the kinks in his arm and shoulder muscles. The final stages of microprogramming had been totally up to him, and, though he had managed to purchase several off-the-shelf utility programs from Earth, it was more difficult than he had thought it would be. Even with Tem's encyclopedic knowledge of the physics involved, there were almost insoluble problems in adapting standard-grade circuits to the task.

Well, he thought, either it'll work or it won't.

He settled into the machinery, latched the program nodes, and thought, Run, you bastard. And, within the limitations of the device's resolving power, things became transparent. Small-scale variations in mass for a megameter around were sensible to him. Ocypete was like a vast onion of ice with a discontinuous eye and a heavy core. And resting on the surface of the core like a nipple on a breast was the second artifact: just a lump of26 magnesium sharply differentiated from the surrounding material. It was what remained after a container of radioactive26 aluminum more than a kilometer in diameter had decayed and released the heat which had melted their world. Sealock slowly let out his breath. It was obviously some kind of fuel cell. But for what? Not Artifact I, that was certain. His gaze traveled to Podarge. As far as he could ascertain there was nothing anomalous in the makeup of this little moon. Early heating during its period of accretion could account for its structure. Onward to Aello; the mess they had left on the innermost satellite disquieted him. There were no significant peculiarities other than the shocked material and deep-seated cracks formed by the great disruption they hadproduced. Artifact I sat silently in its great crater and told no more of itself. Brendan looked deep into Iris. Down through the cold layers of hydrogen and helium. Down past the neon and carbon monoxide to the thin bank of nitrogen cirrus, then through the cirrus and into a supersaturated layer of nitrogen gas. The sheer size of Iris necessitated peeling back the strata one at a time. Here, as the temperature rose, pressure more than compensated. In the end there was a sea of pressure-contained liquid hydrogen. Beneath that, fractionation could no longer operate. He came to a mixed crust of water and methane ice. Brendan could sense that the scanner had shifted to higher energies. He looked harder and the center of the infrastar was revealed to him. . . . It was there, in the

>0.5 megabar region.

It seemed nothing more for a moment than a small bubble. A hollowness at the middle point of everything. But it must be more than that, he thought, rejoicing, to withstand the pressure, it must be a supercraft of unbelievable technology.

"The torus is starting to drain, Bren," Ariane burst through, startling him. "Anything yet?" Brendan smiled to himself, but his thought projection did not betray his emotion. "Take this feed," he said.

Somehow, the thought of actually being Beth afforded John an exotic exhilaration. Sitting on a little rise in the moor dome, looking across the ten or so meters of small-flowered heather, he could see himself sitting with the others around the pool. Only it wasn't really he, since all sensory inputs had been cross-circuited between the two of them. For all practical purposes, he was inside the body of the woman and she was in him. He could see that his body was looking at him now, and he waved. He had felt more of a loss than he would have cared to explain upon finding that between his legs was a vulva. But only initially: when he realized that it was only "for a day," so to speak, a feeling of warmth and sexiness came. Perhaps in heavier gravity he would have felt awkward and clumsy adapting to the different center of gravity. But not here. The onlyawkwardness came from interacting with the men of the colony, since he had no intention of fucking them, at least for the moment. He wondered if Beth was having a similar problem—they were not in contact for this experiment.

Suddenly Ariane appeared at the interdome arch, waving a hand over her head. "Everybody!" she shouted. "The scanner works! Bren's found the main Artifact at the center of Iris!" John leaped up, halfway to the ceiling. Abruptly he was back in his own body, looking across the glistening water of the pool to where Ariane was running toward them. The change of perspective was difficult to deal with and he seemed to black out for a second, though not long enough to fall. When he had recovered, he checked to see if Beth was all right. She had not yet landed from his startled leap, but he could see that she had herself under control. His attention turned back to Ariane.

"It's something approximately five hundred kilometers across located at Iris' center. Bren can't tell anything specific about it because of the limitations of the scanner."

"Oho!" said Tem, swishing his bare feet around in the water. "This is shaping up into an AIWL

situation—curiouser, und so weiter! It's a shame that we'll never lay hands on the thing. It might as well be in Andromeda."

"Can we do any better on sharpening the resolution?" asked Aksinia, pulling herself by one hand out of the water to perch on a strut of the light tower.

Tem thought for a moment, staring into the clarity of light in the pool. After a moment a hint of that gleam came into his eyes. "You know, I bet we can. But we'll have to disable an even larger segment of Shipnet and reprogram it. That'll be inconvenient. . . ."

"I think we can do with a little inconvenience," said John.

Vana Berenguer and Demogorgon lay in bed together, alone in the latter's CM chamber. They had finished making love and were quiescent now, the sheen of sweat collecting into little beads on their bodies and evaporating. The man was wooden-faced, flat on his back and still, staring at theceiling, enmeshed in a web of unspoken thought. The woman lay curled about his side under one arm, looking up at his face, as if totally absorbed in the reality of his presence. It was a classic, ritualized pose, dictated by an ancient culture, placing the two in roles they had never before occupied.

"Demo?"

The Arab looked down at her and saw that she appeared happy. He smiled.

"I love you." It seemed like the thing to say. From all the times past, men and women had said that to each other when they had nothing else to say. It was comforting, like being under a warm blanket on a cold night. Centering on a physical act that should have had no more meaning than the consumption of a satisfying meal, it generated the emotions that it was supposed to stem from. In that sense, love was akin to music.

Demogorgon nodded and squeezed her to his body. "Yes," he said, "I love you too," and thought, But I love Brendan. It made him want to laugh. What am I? he wondered. What are we all? These emotions, whatever their source, had a comforting feel to them. It was a primitive sort of thing, like hoarding trade goods against an expected social collapse, when other human currency would be valueless. That was it. Selfishly collect all the good moments now, for the bad ones will be coming someday soon. Collect them now, all you can, not caring that others may be suffering from your greed. He rolled over a little and kissed Vana, intending to initiate another round of sex. She put her hand on his abdomen, pressing lightly. There was a harsh sound from the door, randomized periodic noise, and the quatrefoil panels fell open. Harmon Prynne was standing there, holding a lockpick circuit tracer in his hand. He threw the device down and stepped through the portal.

Demo and Vana were frozen in their tableau, trying to think of words, looking like a stopframe from a pornodisk .

Prynne stared down on them for a long moment, face motionless, then he snarled, "Bastard!" and, seizing Demogorgon by the hair, dragged him upright. Releasing his hold,he punched him in the face, knocking him down and throwing himself off balance.

The Arab bounced to his feet in the low gravity and said, "Wait . . ." Prynne flailed his arms wildly, fighting to maintain position, and threw another punch. It missed and he went into an uncontrollable pirouette.

Demo felt a surge of sourceless anger and tried to kick the spinning man, but he missed, lost his footing, and bounced off the ceiling. When he came down he fell on Prynne and the two melted together into a single grappling mass, clawing at each other and trying to strike. Vana threw herself on them, trying to separate them, but succeeded only in becoming part of a struggling ganglion of limbs and bodies that floated around the room, rebounding from furniture and walls. In the end their personal version of entropy ran down and they drifted to the floor in a gasping, insensate-seeming heap. Prynne and Demogorgon were unharmed. Vana Berenguer had a bloody nose from bumping into some unknown hard object. She remembered that it was not a fist or other human thing, just a hard, flat surface. Their breathing slowed, evened, and they gradually came apart, becoming individuals once again.

Vana put her arm around Demo and said, "Harmon, how could you do something like this? Why?" The man stared at them for a second, then his face crumpled. "Vana, why are you leaving me like this?

I'm so alone out here. I'm not like the others. . . . Without you ... I only came because of you!" He was in tears and almost unrecognizable.

Demogorgon looked at them both and heard the kinship in his words. He thought of Brendan gone and then gone again, thought of him making love with Ariane, the two of them closing him out.

"Join us then," he said. "Join us."

Sealock and Krzakwa sat in the tangle that was the makeshift nerve center of the quantum conversion scanner they'dbuilt together and worked on their continuing attempts to probe the alien Artifact in the center of Iris. Though it was nearly invisible to everything they'd tried so far, there was still the surface scan to be worked on.

"Not too much detail here," said the Selenite.

Sealock nodded, concentrating on his task. Both men were loaded down with far more waveguides than they could legitimately handle. In addition to the twelve direct brain-taps that he usually used, Brendan had added a score of induction leads to the back of his head, focusing on the occipital lobe and his visual cortices. There was another little jungle of wires coming off the left side of his head, centering on Wernicke's Area, where a great deal of neurolinguistic processing could take place, and on the important interconnections of the arcuate fasciculus underneath. Other leads were aimed deep into his limbic system, in an effort to tap certain automatic processes that were rarely, sometimes never, used in Comnet operations. Krzakwa, similarly but less heavily arrayed, was controlling the support system that fed the other man's work.

The outside of the Artifact had shown itself to be virtually free of meaningful surface detail. True, there was some kind of a mast reaching upward almost forty kilometers from the north pole and a big raised grid in the south, but that was about all. There were hints of surface irregularity under the thin, metallic layer that covered the thing's impervious skin, but nothing resolvable.

"Why can't we see inside?" muttered Krzakwa. "Even if the hull were made of neutronium , which it isn't, we should be able to see ..."

Sealock thought about that. Yes, we should be able to. Why not? There were several alternative explanations. "Maybe," he said, "we're looking too hard." Krzakwa opened his eyes and stared in the real world, seeing the other through a miasma of superimposed images. "So?"

"We'll find out. Switch over to the W± virtuosity input."

The Selenite complied. There was a brief instant of statickysilence on the readout channel, then both men jerked convulsively and went rigid.

Krzakwa found himself embedded in a sea of rushing data —it came in over every waveguide, invaded every corner of his brain, and it made no sense. It was so all-pervasive, it almost took away his ability to perceive what was going on in a linear fashion. What was it? Not analogue. Numbers maybe. Numbers based on some concept he did not understand. He tried to reach out through the circuits and manipulate the net and found that he could not. Trapped? Perhaps the danger of an on-line discharge was close at hand. Am I almost dead?

It was growing increasingly difficult to think and he felt something groping at him, tendrils caressing his circuitry with a thin, keening cry as some kind of a *shutdown* command cried for his attention directly out of Sealock and earned a *can't* reply along with a joint *we've*got*to*do*something* fear. He began reaching out with almost lost physical hands to begin ripping off leads in a frenzy. When he could see again, he saw that the other man was doing the same. He was startled to notice that Sealock's eyes were bleeding. In control again, he reached out for a mechanical switch and silenced the entire system.

They sat in that silence, breaths at a whisper.

Finally Brendan turned to look at him. "Temujin?"

"It's alive."

Sealock laughed and began trying to wipe off his face but succeeded only in smearing the thin, sticky blood. "Is it? Tell me what that word means."

Krzakwa made mute agreement. "We'd better go to the infirmary. We may be badly hurt."

Krzakwa and Methol had been making love. This time it had come to naught, no conclusion, and gradually their muscular activities had run down and come to a halt. The woman was lying on her back and the man was curled semifetally , his head on her stomach. He had one eye pressed into her flesh and with the other was gazing down across the vista of her groin, surveying an expanse of short, curly black hair. He shifted slightly, blank-minded, and then he was looking at herwith an eye at skin level, the other one shut. It was like staring into underbrush on a symmetrical beige hill. Why can't I think? he wondered. He moved again, a little farther, so that his cheek rested on her little pad of hair. Ariane reached down and ran her fingers through the outer layers of his beard.

"What happens now?" she asked.

"I don't know." He strained for an idea and finally said, "We're lucky we weren't hurt more by the overload . . . and nobody even knew you could get that kind of physical damage via Comnet."

"Just minor capillary rupture from a rapid systolic pressure spiking."

"We could've died."

"What can you do?"

"Better filtering, a much larger support infrastructure . . . we'll figure out something." He turned his face inward and nuzzled against her body, feeling its complex structure with his skin. There was a sense of newness in it for him, brought on by a passage through the filmy gauzework of death. "You know what he really wants to do?"

She didn't answer and he went on: "He wants to modify Polaris for a direct descent into Iris, to make physical contact with the thing."

"What?" Ariane sounded as if she simply hadn't heard him.

"I told him that it was certain death, that even if we made it down we'd never get out again. He said he didn't care."

Sealock and Krzakwa were making modifications to the quantum conversion scanner. The things that they had done necessitated pulling apart a lot of the circuitry needed for the full operation of their little electronic world, and much of what had been Deepstar, along with what was available to its occupants, was temporarily reduced to functioning on a shrunken level. Many of the ship's components were tracked to a binary alternate trunk.

The banks of Torus-alpha transfinite numeric-base generators that Sealock had brought from Earth were now hookedinto the QCS, in hopes that it would be able to sort through the data mass for them and present it in some kind of coherent fashion. When the last connections were made, the stage was set for a final experiment.

They sat for a while staring at the massive mess they'd created.

"Think this'll work?"

Sealock shrugged. "Who knows? It'd better." He thought for a moment, then said, "With each discrete data system going into a fully packed multibase array variable, it ought to be susceptible to some kind of transfinite analysis. That's what Torus-alpha was supposed to be for . . . but then, we couldn't make it work right on Earth, either."

"And what if it doesn't?"

He smiled. "What if ... good phrase for a lot of stupid situations. Hopefully the automatic biosensor switching system will pull us out of the net before our heads explode." Krzakwa frowned. "Your grisly imagery isn't what I needed to hear." He sighed. "OK. Let's do it."

"Right."

They began plugging in their hordes of leads.

"Ready?"

"Sure."

They switched on and went under.

This time it was different.

In place of the floods of raw data, they were interacting through the culturally energized formatting system of the 'net element they'd created.

It was still incomprehensible, but it was something. . . .

An infinite sea of clear, cold, viscous oil.

Liquid helium, cooled to near absolute zero, perhaps. . . .

No, it was a perceptualized vision of the plenum, the ever increasing background of almost, but not quite, massless neutrinos on which all things material rode.

Vacuum boilers.

Bags.

And on down the scale.

A multidimensional matrix of free radicals, all the kinds that could be. The things that bred reality. Quadriformiccharge, the physicists called it.

Long vectors three, the photons, gluons, and gravitons. Their complementary short vectors. The supershort vector and its mirror identity. The hypershort vector, complete unto itself . . . And somewhere, unseen and stretching to infinity, the ultrashort vector that comes into being only at the grand flux-gate threshold, unifies the forces, sucks up the universe, and vanishes to the nowhere/when from which it came.

-Temujin? -Yes? -What the hell is this? He gazed around, ethereally. -It seems to be a theoretical schematic for the bases of quantum transformational dynamics. -But what's it for. . .-Sealock stopped, riven by knowledge. -The arrays!-he cried. -Look at the arrays! -What do you mean? -Tem, it's an information storage device! -This is a computer? -Yes. Let's get out of here. We have work to do. . . . They surfaced and looked at each other, not knowing what to think, wondering.

"What sort of work?" asked Krzakwa.

"The ship! I know it can be done. . . ."

Oh, shit, thought the Selenite. The ship.

Six

As the glass bead that was the sun climbed slowly up the days, Krzakwa and Sealock were incommunicado and they had taken many of the aspects of Shipnet with them. Although Bright Illimit was still operative, it had been shifted into a different subsystem to increase the RAW adjuncts to the machine they were building. The hardware they needed was totally isolated from the remainder of the 'net. Despite the exciting nature of what was happening, time began to hang heavily on the rest. New information concerning the position of the USEC ship showed that, while it was still inside the orbit of Pluto, it was accelerating again. That could only mean that they were exceeding their safety margin, redlining their drives to reach Iris as quickly as possible. It told a little of what was suspected by the government. Time was even tighter now.

Something very deep had changed. At first it was only Beth who had seemed increasingly unwilling to participate in DR, but now even John, who was the prime mover in the affair, felt withdrawn, as if the whole process had become a waste of time. The sessions they did have seemed stilted, dominated by the ideas that Beth had formulated about him and her desire to keep him at bay. Perhaps it was at an end, but neither of them could admit it. Was DR no longer a novelty? There were so many levels, so many facades that had to be broken through, that it was never the same. And such was the state of his mind after grappling with concepts involved with the Artifacts that he came to the conclusion that, come what may, he and Beth must continue to do it. After breakfast he went to Beth's cabin, yet when the time came to reestablish rapport, John hesitated.

She was courteous to him, interrupting a dramatization by Sukhetengri and pulling him down on the bed beside her, stroking his cheek in a mechanical way. But the distance was there, incongruous, out of synch with what should have been. "Beth," he said, "tell me what's gone wrong between us." She said nothing for a time, continuing the caress until it began to rasp. "There's so much to think about," she said. "Life is so complex sometimes. Why do we speak of it when we could DR? It's as if remoteness itself can sometimes communicate better than intimacy. . . . Oh, John, admit it—you don't love me. I know that now, I saw it so clearly. If you want to go on with this charade, I suppose I can't refuse you. But—"

"What are you saying?"

"Stop pretending, damn you!" She pulled away from him and looked into the corner. Suddenly she grabbed her circlet from the table and put it on. She was initiating DR routines, and it came surging into his mind like a shock wave. The deliberate thought patterns, an echo of his own, were broken and a rush of hurt and brave resignation washed through. He was there, mirrored in her mind, knowing; knowing that which he knew, that the truth was somehow a bridge between them that could not be crossed. The realization flooded them that his motivations were strange and complex ones, intermingled in his consciousness in a way that made them impossible to classify as right or wrong. It was clear, however, that she was right in that one thing: the way that he felt did not satisfy her criteria, or even his own, for love. He saw that darker, almost incomprehensible motives were driving him along the courses he had chosen. He knew that, somewhere within him, he wanted Beth to know that at some point he had stopped loving her. Perhaps the whole Deepstar adventure was a ploy to bring them close enough together so that she could know it.

Her own motivations stood out in contrast to his as clear, forthright. The total giving of herself to DR

had been the greatest possible expression of her love for him. But that love had been sullied by his lack of it, almost to the point where it could not be resurrected. She saw that his desire to understand, undoubtedly the strongest force within him, was a corrupting force, an emotion which had profound ramifications for them both, making all things distorted and tentative. It had flowed into her, on top of her already fully realized persona, and had made her question things that could not be questioned. No, he thought. It is not so. I am not as she thinks. She is not as she thinks. These ideas are neither real nor useful. The world is around us, it cannot be denied. The reasons for our actions are directly tied into their outcomes. There was a surge of anger. It must be so.

But within her the small voice cried out. Break off. Break off! This is the profoundest representation of the incompatibilities within us. And it grows worse with each second. End! she cried. End! And she tore the circlet off her head, leaving him to patch the great ragged tears that fluttered into the night. He opened his eyes. "No!" he said. "You've got to listen!" And he grabbed her wrist, pulling her to face him. Her eyes were distant, cold. "It's all a lie. Even in DR, what you know about me is filtered, unknowable. Those things you think about me may be true in one sense, but not the most important one."

"Please leave," she said, collapsing on the bed. He left.

As he pulled on his space suit in the atrium of the CM, John felt numb, driven by the merest tickle of fear that made him keep moving. Had she been right after all? How had something that had started out so well ended in such despair? He knew little about love, that was certain, and less about people. Was it possible that this was what happened so often between men and women, happening again? Just the end of a love affair, breaking off with no rhyme or reason? He could not answer a single question, and finally he made his way out through the domes toward the beckoning night/day of Ocypete. It seemed like forever since he had been Outside. Suddenly he stopped. Was this behavior a function of Beth's personality that had rubbed off on him? He was having difficulty even formulating the idea: in that moment he realized that he was becoming much more spontaneous, much more given to unexamined emotion. He sat down on the lip of the pool and stared out at the clouds near the dome's horizon. It was true—he was losing himself, a little. He couldn't do anything about the chill of fear that percolated into his neck muscles. Could it be that what had happened was because part of her was within him, changing, rationalizing, explaining himself to himself in a new way? The uncertainty of the situation was horrifying. Was it a manifestation of this change that he couldn't really pinpoint what was happening to him? He could only tighten his grip on himself; tell himself that he would have to get used to it. He suddenly resolved to stop sniveling this way. He remembered the night when the vision of becoming Beth had seemed so attractive. It must remain so.

Amid the rubble of excavation, Jana Li Hu sat on the porch of the garage-sized laboratory she had carried with her and surveyed the mess she had made. Frustration and anger bubbled in her mind. Here she was, cataloging the minute changes in the composition of the slurry that had boiled out of the vent nearby—a student's project!—when that damn Sealock was making scientific history. She cursed herself fornot making more detailed observations in the shuttlecraft. Now that they were back there were no hard data to analyze, only speculation, and that was not her forte by any means. She wondered if anyone believed what she had said about anticipating the discovery of the Artifacts. She had to admit, the evidence was certainly there, and if she hadn't been so rigorous she might have seen the truth. Damn them all! She was completely shut out now.

She could, of course, use violence. Right here on her belt was a mini-lance that would suffice. She pulled the elongated cylinder from its holster and hefted it slowly. A quick cut. She let the beam play along the pile of debris she had made, watching it disappear in a twinkle of mist. No, she just couldn't. Which left only the other plan. Her mind went numb with a fear which she could just barely hold in check. I would lose any chance of acceptance either way. If I get my way it will be a fluke. But is there any real difference between being humored and being liked? In the long run, most probably. Oh, what do I want, exactly? I wish I fucking knew! I guess I'll have to be content with what I can get. At least I'll get the pleasure of scaring them all to death. Who's that?

Well above the horizon, riding on the Hyades, the horns of Taurus, and occulting Aldebaran briefly, a tiny man figure decorated the Iris-and-sunless western sky. Even in the full glare of the sun-star behind her it was difficult to make out well. Finally a fold of the suit caught the light and she could see it was red. Cornwell. What does he want? She activated the Shipnet Communications link with a thought.

"What are you doing out here, John? I'm surprised you're not, um, with Beth." John's trajectory was bringing him down, feet first. "We can't do that all the time. I heard your lance's static and came to investigate. Thought it might be a discharge from the ice or something."

"That, John, is very unlikely at this point. How's Brendan doing with his scanner?" John came down surefooted, barely skidding to a two-point landing. Through the bubble of his helmet she saw a strange, uncharacteristic look on his face. "Nothing new. Tem and Sealock have shut themselves into his room and are doing whatever it is programmers do. I imagine they'll approach it a bit more gingerly this time. How are you?"

She was torn between foreshadowing her future action and not letting him see that she was unhappy.

"Not good. I want to be in on all this."

"We all do, I guess. But the present setup is the only one possible. Brendan is the only one qualified . .

."

"You could use your authority. There's absolutely no reason why we're not even getting to look at the stuff that's coming in. If he's closed off the normal Shipnet link, we won't find out what's going on until it's all over."

"I think that would be useless." There was a long pause. "Even if I did have authority." Another pause.

"I wonder: whose land is this? I've never been out in this direction before." He consulted his inertial reference readout. "It belongs to Aksinia. Nice real estate."

What cryptic remark could she make that would add weight to her disappearance? "Leave me alone, will you? I prefer work to small talk."

John was surprised. "Uh, sure. Just trying to get back into being friendly with you. It's been a long time—"

That was it! If she made him believe she was suffering from jealousy, all the weight of his vanity would convince him of the severity of her depression. "You're damn right it's been a long time! I loved you, and you dropped me like a hot rock the second Toussaint made a pass at you. You're a God damn bastard. Get out of here!"

"Love? You're telling me that was love? Why are you inventing—"

"You're so smug. You think you know me! Well, I can tell you, you have about as much understanding of me as you do of yourself. You're a prig, as well as an asshole. Yes, I loved you. You probably don't even know what that means. It doesn't mean being inventoried and turned inside out. I feel sorry for Beth, because I think she loves you too."

John felt his eyes smarting, and he fought unsuccessfully to keep the tears from coming out. There was a hot pain under his Adam's apple. "I ... I never . . ."

Jana had played her part well. Somewhere she wondered if it was at least partially true. With a burst of hydrogen she soared upward and away. John didn't attempt to follow.

Sealock and Krzakwa had called a meeting, a conclave of sorts, but not everyone had appeared. They trickled into the central crater room of the CM, awaiting the pronouncements of the two men. Demo, Vana, and Harmon Prynne came in together and sat on a called-up semicircular couch that was just large enough to accommodate their arrayed hips. They sat, flanks touching, knee against knee, and seemed to be a molded unit.

Ariane, Axie, and Beth came in separately but sat together, the isolated fragments of human normality. John came in alone and sat alone, seeming vastly subdued. Jana Li Hu did not show up at all. Finally Krzakwa stood up and paced over to the bulging, deopaqued exterior wall and looked out into the darkness. "Where's Hu?" Demogorgon giggled at that and the Selenite turned to stare at him. "Idiot." He sounded surprisingly like Sealock when he said it. He sighed and came to the center of the room. "All right. Before we do anything else, let me give you a little synopsis of what's going on:

"As you must already know by now, Brendan and I have managed to inspect the alien Artifact at the center of Iris via the W± virtuosity of the quantum conversion scanner. We, um"—he glanced at Sealock—"haven't managed to get a physical organization construct simulation running yet, but there has been a heavy data flow."

"You mean," said Cornwell, his interest in the proceedings seeming to quicken, "you've received signals from it?"

Krzakwa had to grin a little at that. "Well, no," he said, marveling, as always, at how little most people knew about their technological world. "Maybe it would help if you thought of QC scanning as being a little bit like radar. What happens is, the particles making up the real world interact via vector particles, and these also affect the structuring of the cosmic neutrino flux. The scanner reads this structuring and reports back information to us . . ." He saw incomprehension

on the man's face and thought, Oh, well . . . "Anyway, the scanner picked up the presence of a very large, dynamic data matrix from the Artifact, something like what was known in pre-Comnet times as a computer."

That made Methol sit up abruptly. " Functioning?"

"Uh, we don't know yet—but the data's not static. It could be just a random memory sparkle, the kind of thing the 'net interpreters are designed to mask, but maybe not. We'll have to find out."

"How," asked the woman, "send it an IRQ?"

Though she was being facetious, he took her comment at face value. "Well, it'd have to be a nonmaskable interrupt, but if we can find the right coupler, sure." He turned back to the rest of the room, to a surround of faces mostly still, to personalities unsure of how to react. Might as well get this farce over with now, he thought. He cleared his throat uneasily and said, "I think Brendan has something to say about all this."

The other man stood up, looming over the group like some kind of massive and unsightly totem. The rigors of his recent experiments had made his face paler, so that his usually indistinct boxing scars stood out plainly and the 'net-induced capillary damage had left his eyelids looking bruised.

"First thing," he said, "is that, if the Artifact is alive, I think we may be able to open a channel of communication to it. With a little help from Tem and Ariane in writing the OdP OS-controls and step-up relators in Tri-vesigesimal, I think I can build an assembler for Torus-alpha that will permit an exchange to take place. That should be tedious but doable." He looked the group over and then smiled.

"It's not important. What I really want to do is modify Polaris again, this time for a direct descent into Iris. I want to see this thing! Is anyone interested in going along for the ride?" There was silence.

Finally Cornwell looked up. "Are you crazy? What's the pressure down there, a billion atmospheres?"

"It wouldn't be difficult to modify the Magnaflux generator to make a hull-reinforcing field. . . ." Krzakwa snorted and said, "I told you before, it's not possible. It'd be impossible to make an em-field that would be gas-tight at those pressures. Even if it was possible, the gauss density of the field would fry you. Not to mention the fact that you're ignoring the effect of the high winds—hell, fluid currents—that must be down there. The technology we have simply wasn't made to withstand those kinds of conditions."

Sealock's face was starting to redden. "Look, asshole, if I say something's possible, it is! I'll take the chance. It's my life . . ."

"But it's our equipment you'd be taking with you," said Cornwell.

"You mean your equipment!"

He shook his head. "I meant what I said." He looked around at the others. "How do the rest of you feel about this? Beth?"

"I don't know. It seems too dangerous."

"Axie?"

The woman shook her head silently, an ambiguous gesture.

"Demo?"

"Please, Brendan . . . no."

Sealock glared at him, then at the rest, spat, "Fuck you all," and stalked from the room. Frowning, Krzakwa stood and walked slowly after him.

Ariane Methol stood up into the quiet that followed and said, "For what it's worth, I would have let him go." She visualized the ball at the center of Iris and thought, Inside the core . . . That means it was the seed around which this tiny star coalesced. How great were the forces that it had withstood, apparently unscathed? And how old was it, even then? The aeons stretched back. . . .

Following the meeting and the great muddle of inconclusiveness and indecision in its aftermath, Vana, Harmon, and Demogorgon were once again alone, holding each other; one comfortable, one fearful, one exultant.

Sensing the other man's closely controlled, culturally initiated terror, the Arab thought about what was going onbetween them and tried to think of a resolution to the threatened conflict. No answer appeared ready to spring forth from the interstices of conventional reality. Therapy seems indicated for someone, he mused, or a psychologist equipped to deal in the complex, difficult-to-manage realms of Downlink Rapport. He thought of John and Beth and wondered what it was like for them. Strange how they all seemed to be much more human now, less like the greedy, grasping monsters he'd always visualized as making up the bulk of humanity. Yes, DR was definitely called for. . . . Of course! It might not be Downlink Rapport, but the Illimitor World was a controlled environment in which minds could be manipulated.

Am I being fair? If I do it right, they'll be doing what I want. Do I have a right to decide what they need?

"Put on some leads," he said. "We have an appointment in Arhos ."

In the old days, the crude days, the machines did things one at a time, but did them very fast. The circuits got smaller, the wires grew shorter, and things got faster, until the very best brains lived in cryogenic fishtanks, forever bathed lest they burst into flame. Then the new machines came along, cascades of data down to a million little brains, all the calculations done at once, then the little answers passed back up the line, through the filter of choice, so the automatic overmind could see the truth. The process repeats like the turn of a wheel, until once again the machines are small and hot. The waveguides build upon one another, grow ever smaller and more densely filled with electromagnetic radiation. . . . Then polyphase modulation comes along, vastly increasing the ways data can be fed through a decision gate. The Turing circuits are made and so grow small and hot, talking first to the world and then to each other, making noises that frightened us all too much.

Company minds, motivated by the force that was once called "free enterprise," colonize the wires. Terror walks abroad for a while, then the Data Control Insurrection arises, and out of its nether end a chastened, bold, sad new world arises. The minds of the system are unified, but at the sametime the sentience which inhabited them was drained, relegated to purely mechanical decision making, and made dead. Access was granted to everyone and the Contract Police.

Suddenly, like sunrise at midnight, the taps, then induction, arise, and new minds are in the wires, human minds, thinking on the world once removed. Monitors abound.

Bright Illimit.

Tri-vesigesimal. Three choices, yes/no/maybe . . . With straight em-waves, not a lot better than binary. Enter polyphase modulation, with its twenty degrees of freedom, and you make decisions with base 60

data. That is more than enough to fool the human soul. The four-gate-stacks of duodecimal come apart under the sheer weight of what it can do.

Build a world from the ground up and in the earth there will be magma. Look upward from the soil of the Illimitor World. Two suns, yes, and a starry sky at night. Are those the suns of other worlds or is it all illusion? How far do the data extend? Is the sky a paper shield?

At the highest pinnacle of the Jewel on the Mountain, rising sixteen thousand meters into the gradientless atmosphere, lies Haaradaai, the imperial palace of Demogorgon en Arhos. It is a sculpted thing, rippled and many-shelled, all of gold and platinum, encrusted with nameless, numberless precious stones. From the center of the magnificence rises Qpruu Tower, pushing another three thousand meters toward the sky, thin, like the stem of a wineglass, and flaring at the top. In the bowl at its summit there lies a delicate, lovely park, covered over by a shining, unsupported dome, an iridescent film, like the surface of a soap bubble.

In the park, beneath the subtle shade of supple blue featherflower trees, the three, attended by servants and assistant lovers, cemented their relationship and healed themselves of all the psychic wounds that had recently been opened. Demogorgon the God watched them all, his creations and friends intermingled, become indistinguishable, and smiled. It was working.

He looked up from the happy, squirming troika that was Vana, Harmon, and Chisuat Raabo , and the world froze. Notfar away, clad in the fantasy style of Arhos , stood Sealock, arms folded, eyes lit by a soft, kindly light.

"Brendan?" Demoleaped to his feet with excitement. "How did you get here?" The man stepped forward, smiling. "No. I am not the Master."

"But . . . are you one of my old experiments, come to life at last?" The creature laughed and sat on a divan, beckoning him down at its side. "Hardly. No, I am a Guardian Angel Monitor."

"But . . ."

The thing motioned him to silence. "Not what you think. I was put here by the Master when he made the assembly for Bright Illimit. My functions were many: to keep Police monitors at bay, to keep you safe from the 'net and each other, to make all things possible. Since I came alive in Shipnet, I have shared my thoughts with 9Phase.DR. I saw what happened with John and Beth, when its best efforts came to nothing. . . .

"When he wrote me, all of this"—his gesture took in the universe—"the Master wrote a far superior implementation, though he may not have known it. DR is not the way. We are. I will help you now. Go forth and heal them."

The GAM vanished and the world started up. Heal them? thought Achmet Aziz el-Tabari. I? He watched Vana and Harmon again for a while, saw their happy freedom, and wondered, Who?

Ah. Yes. Aksinia Ockels . Elizabeth Toussaint. Temujin Krzakwa. Ariane Methol. John Harry Cornwell. Jana Li Hu. And finally . . . Brendan Sealock? He tried to think about the matter for just a moment then, to consider its implications, but the unreality drew him back in swiftly, almost against his will.

John waved himself into an upright position and once again thought about Beth, trying to start from the beginning. When her face was animated by laughter or anger, she was more than beautiful. But in his thoughts the disproportionsof her face were magnified. It seemed as if he had not seen her laugh for a long time. Probably she had been on the path to her decision for a long time—how could he not have seen it coming? DR was not what he had thought it was.

Mentally, the cast intruded. For a moment he stood astride the VVVLB station in the tarry waste of Cassini Regio on Iapetus . Saturn's ring was a ghostly apparition which loomed above the black-on-black horizon. A voice was saving something concerning the Great Search of '34—'35. Beth? He wished they could relive their days together at Yellowknife. Again pain assailed his eyes and he cried. Too late. He fell asleep with the program still playing.

And awoke with a start.

He rose slowly and pulled a fullbody from the compression case and unfolded it. An ironic smile creased his face as he noticed thedeepstar/triton insignia which was emblazoned on the chest pocket. It must have been shifting about the case for the last year, and through either habit or chance he had not picked it out until now. It was strange, he thought, studying the globe of Neptune in the picture, how mundane the Solar System seemed now, compared with how exotic it had been when they left Earth. He tossed the obsolete piece of clothing into the disposal and drew out another one. Aksinia was reading in one corner of the central room; in another, Ariane was taking a little late brunch of tea and brioches. She looked up. "Good morning, John. Why don't you join me?" And indeed he did feel a little hungry. A raisin doughnut seemed like an appropriate thing to eat, so he got that and a cup of nonalcoholic hot pulque to wash it down with.

"Where is everybody?" asked John, squinting out at the night-sky dome through an available window.

"I think Vana, Harmon, and Demo are in the Illimitor World. Brendan and Tem are programming the QCS. As for Jana . . ." She shrugged.

Jana, thought John. He had not seen much of her since her declaration of love out on the ice—if it was true. Somehow he had managed to not care. "She's pretty unpredictable, all right." He came over and sat by Ariane at the other end ofher couch. "I didn't tell you, or anybody really, but apparently I hurt her badly during the voyage without even realizing it. All I was trying to do was provide her with some friendship and a little sexual consolation, and—she said she was in love with me."

"Hmmm." Ariane slipped a strand of dark hair around her right index finger and tugged on it. "That explains a few things. But I wouldn't have thought her capable of loving in silence. Do you believe her?"

"I don't really have a choice, do I?"

"I suppose not."

"I don't know what to think about her. I guess it's just one more tangle in my original ingenious plan. It's ironic that I was so stupid."

"It's just a good thing these artifacts came along to shock everyone out of their senses. We'd probably be on our way back by now."

"You're probably right. I—"

There was a jumbled noise, and Brendan appeared at the ingress. He was still wearing space gear and, with the helmet deflated on his back, they could see the concentration on his face. He didn't even acknowledge them as he marched across the room to his compartment carrying a small cylindrical object.

"What's that?" asked Ariane.

Brendan stopped, looking puzzled for a moment, then said, "It's a final nail for my fucking Trojan horse. I've ransacked all the electronics I brought for this thing. It'll be as far above Torus-alpha as Torus-alpha is above binary. I'll do more than just eavesdrop on that thing." He went into his room.

"It's nice knowing that he's working on this problem," said Ariane, smiling. "If anyone can do it, he can."

"It is nice—having him too distracted to bother to annoy anyone. No, really, he is behaving heroically. It's just that it's hard to appreciate as nebulous a machine as he is building when the principles of QTD

are just barely understood to begin with. I don't have the slightest idea as to what he's really doing."

"To be honest with you, I don't think anyone except perhaps Tem does. I certainly don't."

"You know, I'm ashamed to admit it now. But at first, for a while, I thought this whole thing, the Artifact on Aello anyway, might be a hoax—or even a delusion of Brendan's. With his programming abilities, he could certainly falsify all Shipnet sensory feeds. He could do anything he wanted with us, change anything into anything else, as long as we were all hooked up to Shipnet. If he really wanted to. This could still be a hoax." He laughed to himself. What a horrible joke if even what had happened with Beth had been somehow produced by Sealock. And yet he almost wished that it had been.

"I can vouch for the reality of the thing on Aello. I know the difference between reality and 'cast images."

"Do you, really? Is there a difference? For really well-crafted images? I know that experimental subjects have been able to discern the difference most of the time. But that was simple commercial-grade stuff. With more complete programming . . . who knows?"

"I know that Brendan isn't like that. He wouldn't do that even if he could. The actions you're describing are those of a monster. Brendan is a man, even if he is different from you. Just a man." A memory came back to him, reluctantly, that he and Beth had never shared. There was something in it that held an intuition he was reaching for.

In the mood of the moment, John Cornwell had almost forgotten the two obsessions which created his long-term motivations. The sky was a vast overspreading ice floe, broken clouds laced through with fingers of indigo. From the west a burst of haloed intensity showed the sun behind the clouds where the arch of the sky, bent by the knowledge that it must come to rest on the edge of the world, was a quick corner. He breathed warm, dry air with a flavor of mimosa and honeysuckle. Beth nuzzled more firmly against him, and her smell, like clean lavender, mixed with the others. They were sitting under a middle-aged tulip tree, at a point where the Appalachian Trail had left its more mountainous way for a hillyverge of old fields and replanted forests. Long grass dried by the rainless summer gave the wind's hushing more authority. Occasionally the whispering gargle of a passing lifter could be heard in the distance, yet it was easy, though bustling civilization was less than four miles distant, to imagine the world as primeval.

"You know, Beth, much as I'd've liked to see the way it was, back in the last century, I can't help but think that Lonicera and the rest make a nice version of nature." This was a point that Beth couldn't let go. "I suppose you think pigeons, starlings, and English sparrows are adequate representatives of the bird population, as well."

"Point taken. Growing up in the North, where everything has such a tenuous grip on life, tends to make all this a little intoxicating. Nature seems so, well, natural here." He laughed and rubbed a forefinger on her neck, under the dark curtain of hair. "It's difficult to imagine the way it was."

"I think the first people who could wander alone through a forest without the slightest fear of being eaten lost a real idea of nature and substituted this. When there is nothing really left but dandelions breaking up through the pavements, it will still be enough to satisfy that urge to be with nature for most. That is, if they suppress the travelogues."

"How can you come with me into space? There'll be no dandelions—not even natural E. coli on Triton. Just people and that which people have made."

"You know the answer to that. It's because I want to be with you. I love you." Beth said the last as a litany, oft repeated.

John squirmed, "And yet . . . well, we both know my answer to that." The image of Beth's refusal to DR hung between them. To John, it represented an unwillingness to give, a fearful secret interior life that the woman just wouldn't share with him. He sat up and took hold of his ankles, pulling his knees together under his chin. The rough ground pushed him from beneath.

"You won't do it. I can accept that. I'm just not sure I can . . . love you without knowing you. You can feel us growing further apart over the last months, I know. It's just that I don't feel I can ever know you like this. Language is soclumsy; and our sex together, not that it's not tremendous, but it's a blind, nonsentient thing. It's just skin and groin with us as observers. How many times do you want to go through this? We can't understand each other's views on this—and that's why we should."

"John. Y'know, I get these images from the entertainment 'net, in the old days, when a boy tried to go

'all the way' with a girl; to 'get in her pants.' Why can't I preserve a part of me from you, why can't I have just a corner private to myself?"

"You can. It is your decision to make. But until you do, don't ask me to say that I love you." He stood.

"Am I such a bastard for that?"

"John, I don't judge you."

"Let's get back to the lifter, OK?" He took her hand, small and dark, and pulled her up. They made their way slowly through the wavering brownish grass and the sun broke out to throw long buckling shadows before them.

John shook his head, incongruously, as the question he had asked was answered for him. Methol was still sitting with him, although he had been ignoring her. She was looking out the window at Iris in the sky. With each passing "day" the planet grew more closely aligned with the bright spark of the sun and they knew that an eclipse was coming, but they had already discussed that. It seemed a minor thing in the midst of everything else.

John was saying, "I'm beginning to feel totally lost, Ari . It was bad enough on the long trip out here, trying to keep afloat in this tiny sea of locked-up people, half of them seeming like lunatics to me, but now! All this business about Iris and the Artifacts, which still seem so unreal, the things that have gone down between Beth and me . . . Brendan going crazier every day and taking Tem with him! I can't keep track of it all!" He shook his head and grimaced, a sort of wry smile. "Here Demogorgon is dragging people off to that imaginary world of his and Jana is acting weirder than ever. I thought I understood her on the trip out. . . . The only one who seems the same as at the beginning is Axie, perhaps because she does so little, just stays a simple dope fiend . . . and you, of course." Methol sat through his rambling monologue, listening sympathetically. The ramifications of what had happened to them all were enough to confuse anyone. You could understand a part of what was going on, but the whole was chaos. Perhaps, she thought, that's how normal people stay sane. They attend to whatever they can understand and ignore the rest. Certainly a sensitive, artistic mind like Cornwell's, accustomed to seeing his surroundings with a gestalt perception, would be disturbed by an overload of detail. She smiled at his last remark. "I'm not unchanged, John. I'm just not complex enough to be rendered incomprehensible by the changes that occur within me."

"Not like Sealock, huh?"

She grinned. "Well, he started out incomprehensible. I think he would be no easier to understand now, no matter what happens. There have been positive changes in him, but I don't know to what effect."

"I haven't seen any of these 'positive' changes. He seems worse than ever!" Shaking her head, Ariane said, "Just because you can't perceive a thing doesn't mean it isn't there." Cornwell felt a little upwelling of uncharacteristic anger. "Tell me how he's changed, then. Convince me."

"I ... can't." She looked pained. "Something's going on in him. I don't know what. The violence and anger seem to be receding. I think maybe he sees himself more clearly now. I don't know what the end result will be. . . ."

Demogorgon surfaced from the Illimitor World, called back to his body by the safeguards that Sealock had helped him build in long ago, monitors designed to prevent damage to organs by neglected bodily functions. A ruptured bladder would be a poor ending to a fine adventure. He stretched. Prynne and Berenguer were sprawled motionless on the soft floor before him, left to their own devices in a self-sustaining inner Universe. He heard a muted sound and looked up. Aksinia Ockels was leaning against the open doorway, naked, watching them all through her chemically brightened eyes. He nodded to her as he stood up.

She approached and touched him, running her fingers down the length of his chest, toward his groin.

"Want to make love with me?"

He shook his head. "No. I've got to piss. Besides, you may have heard, I'm queer."

"I thought you were changing."

He shrugged and gestured at the other two. "I don't really want to leave them in there alone for too long. The world is too mutable for novices. They might get lost."

She looked slightly nonplused. "It's the same thing as drugs, you know."

"I know," he said. "Everyone has their own way out. This is mine." He looked at her speculatively, and asked, "Want to give it a try?"

"I'm still under Beta-2." There was a hint of fear perceptible in her voice.

"Doesn't matter." He picked up a circlet and held it out to her. "Come on."

"I don't know . . ."

He grinned and put it over her head, then donned his own. "It's easy. I won't let you fall." Under the wire, they sank swiftly through the cottony-dense data layers of the 'net and reappeared in the fantasy-flare skies above Arhos . Axie cried out with delight at the interaction between the effect of the machines on her mind and the drug on her brain. Demogorgon changed her into a great, metallic-green eagle-like creature, a sort of harpy, really, and let her go, with the injunction, "You can fly!"

She fell like a bomb from the heavens, a vengeful cry tearing the quiet clouds asunder, then her wings snapped open and she flew, enthralled.

Called back to the surface by his monitors once again, Demogorgon stepped out into the corridor, intent on his need for physical relief. He went to the refresher stall in his room and began the mechanical evacuation, thinking, with amusement, Pissing's a pleasure when you've really got to go. It's the simple things that make life worth living. A crackle came into his mind, and, somehow seeping through Shipnet's circuits, he heard a low cry of dismay. It had a flavorof Sealock about it. Strange, he thought, feeling a small jolt of anticipatory dread. Sadness and a sense of his continual isolation flooded over him, and he went to rejoin his apprentices in Arhos .

John was again out on the ice, trying to reconcile the way he felt with the way he thought he should feel. He wasn't as devastated as he should have been and, indeed, had cried less than half an hour altogether. He found that the whole incident was already beginning to feel remote, dreamlike, and all of the DR even more so. Was he an unfeeling monster, a bastard, a mechanism driven by forces unwholesome and unhumanistic? It had taken him a brief while to readapt, to restructure his rationalizations; and here he was on the other side of it all; still functioning when by all rights he should have been destroyed. Stripped of his illusions, what was the difference? He stared up at a dim-cored Iris and the sun now so near to it, yet the squint didn't feel wet.

He was beginning to look forward to the eclipse.