"You really think so? Don't you think that this is a good thing? This morning there was a lot more laughter and good cheer going around than I've seen since the early days, aboard Cam. John's just too much of a weakling to get us to—"
He cut her off. "No, he isn't! Can't you see? He's done it for his own selfish reasons. He wants what we have, what he can't buy with all his money. I don't blame him for it, but he hides what he's doing behind a mess of philosophical crap! Since he has no one, he wants to keep us all apart. . . ." Vana's face grew angry-looking. "Oh, for pity's sake!" They both fell silent and Prynne realized that she'd seen through him, to the incessant background of conversations that had filled their relationship. At last she said, "How soon do you think we'd get bored with each other, out here, without something to keep us interested?" He shrugged, looking miserable, and she sighed. "OK. Forget it. What tool do you want next? The crescent monkey or whatever it is?"
When the domes had been inflated and hardened, Sealock and Krzakwa finished stripping the remains of the ship. The Hyloxso matrices were detached and sitting in a storage rack that had been made from excess girders. The chemical engines had been set up on an insulating platform along with a number of other temporarily useless items, looking like an equipment-auction display. What was left of Deepstar had been put on motorized treads and driven away to a point a little distance from the colony. Jana had been wanting to do a cross section of the mare and they could do it, testing their drill at the same time. The exhaust plume from the well thus produced would be fed through tubing to a condenser and thence to the reactor-fuel storage tank that the work-packs were finishing. When they were ready they stopped to check everything out and discuss procedures. "Now remember," said Sealock, "keep the thrust under a hundred kilograms. We don't want this thing in orbit." Krzakwa looked at him in disgust. He'd gotten used to this sort of thing, after a fashion, but it still rankled. "You're not still mad at me for dropping the reactor, are you?"
"No."
Tem sighed. There was no sense in trying to penetrate his reactions today. It would be a wasted effort. He let the suit optics track back toward the camp, magnifying the image that was on the other side of Sealock's bulky figure, and stopped: a small, gleaming artifact was moving across the ice, away from the little split-open dome that had been its garage. "What the hell is that?" Sealock looked, then grinned. "That's Prynne's little toy. I'm surprised he hasn't mentioned it to you. . .
. 60vet lives!" Leaping down from the drill's structural tower, he went bounding off, and Krzakwa followed.
Harmon had parked the car, depressurized the cabin, and was now standing back, admiring the machine, seen for the first time in its natural setting. The other two came up behind him, noting that he'd not chosen the turquoise color of his space suit at random. It matched the aerodynamic-lookingbody coves in the sides of the car. He seemed oblivious to their presence.
Sealock said, "What've you got there, Harmon?"
The man turned to face him. "You like it?"
"Well ... I think it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen." He laughed unpleasantly. Krzakwa said, "For Christ's sake . . . why do you have to be like that?"
"Because I feel like it. Besides, it is dumb. Especially here." He stalked off and began circling the machine, inspecting it closely. Stupid, he thought, but there was something intriguing about the device. He found himself, almost against his will, growing interested in the mechanical problems that were inherent in adapting this ancient design for use on an airless iceball . He swung open the driver's-side door and started to climb in, then stopped and looked at Prynne. "Mind if I try it out?"
"No. Go ahead."
Sealock looked in, gauging the fit between the seat and his worksuit. "I suppose I could go change to a regular suit. . . ."
Prynne snickered. "Fat people could use these too, you know." He reached in, did something, and the seat slid back to its rear stops. There was now enough room for Sealock to get in, though it would be cramped.
Brendan got in and closed the door. A small, bright cross-hatch cursor appeared on his vision, scanning, as he looked around on the puzzlingly complex control panel for a 'net input. He snorted suddenly, realizing his mistake, and the marker disappeared. Well, he thought, I ought to be smart enough to figure this out. He hunted, then twisted an odd, flat switch on the dashboard to the right of the steering column that had "on/off' printed beneath it. Everything was carefully labeled, and he felt a sudden appreciation for the fact that he could read. It was an increasingly uncommon skill. A green light came on above the switch and dozens of gauges that he didn't know how to interpret came alive. Now what?
He thought about it for a minute, trying to remembersomething from Prynne's endless babblings about cars, then gave up and popped a line of data from the 'net. Ah. He looked at the floor. There were three pedals at his feet and a bellows/rod contraption sticking from the longitudinal bulge in the middle of the floor. Now then ... He consulted Shipnet again, pushed in the clutch, set the transmission to the numeral 1, and, shoving down on the accelerator, took his foot off the other pedal, so that it snapped up from spring tension.
It was impossible for the Stirling engine to stall, so the wheels spun, despite the best efforts of the fields holding them to the ice. 60vet sat motionless for a moment, then, as he released the accelerator slightly, friction reestablished itself and the car lurched heavily forward. Prynne's laughter echoed in his head.
"You rotten son of a bitch," Sealock muttered. He found the rheostat that controlled the wheel fields and increased their intensity, then pressed down heavily with his foot. He spun the steering device as his speed increased and the car rammed into a sharp skidding turn, throwing up a high, slow rooster tail of fine, glittering ice chips.
He straightened the thing out and let its velocity grow again. He was facing out into the ocellus as he whipped past the drill tower and, suddenly, he felt the flat distances, the bright ice beneath a black sky, calling to him. He wanted to drive to the end of the world. And why not? he wondered. Maybe I should say the hell with the rest of these jerks. He pushed cautiously down on the brake and tried to steer into a slower turn, but the car skidded again, two wheels breaking free of the ice. . . . Abruptly, he was headed toward the colony. He managed to get the car stopped fairly near the two men without further mishap. As he climbed out, feeling slightly weak-kneed, Prynne said to him, "Well, what do you think now?" Sealock stood facing him. "OK. I take back what I said, Harmon. It's great."
"Yeah."
Brendan banged the car's fender lightly near where a metal device that said "Stirling" was affixed. It made what was amuffled thump for him, silence to the others. "Let's take it out to the edge of the mare."
"Really?" Prynne was surprised but pleased.
"Sure. You want to go, Tem?"
"I wouldn't miss it. ... Uh. Shouldn't we drill the hole first, though?" Krzakwa smiled to himself and shook his head. Even after all these months he still couldn't follow the man's sudden sea changes. One moment he was a hulking monster, the next an enthusiastic child. At least he wasn't boring. It took a few days to get ready, and then they went. . . .
It was the second day outward bound from the colony, and the three explorers were finding the surface topography, if one could call it that, fantastically dull. Initially, the sublimation of the volatile regolith, which parted before them like a miniature Red Sea only a stone's throw away, kept them entertained, but the ocellus was largely featureless, and it was hard to avoid the feeling that they were sitting motionless, at times, in the center of a small, blue-white disk. Worse still, they found that the tenuous grip that the electrostatic tires had on the ice could be broken by the slightest bump or ripple, sending the car flying on a long arc, sometimes at a precarious attitude, since it wasn't gyrostabilized. Amusing at first, these flights began to cause motion sickness, and they had to slow down to less than forty kilometers per hour.
They crept along at a slug's pace, supplies dwi
ndling. Sea-lock and Krzakwa seemed to eat continuously.
They were nearly to the center of the eye now and could see that both the surface of the regolith and the underlying ice were darkening. Krzakwa pointed out that the meteoric impacts, few though they may have been, acted to redistribute material evenly across the terrain, resulting in a dark water ice deposited atop the neon in a microthin layer. Though the vast majority of the regolith had originated in larger impacts outside the ocellus, the smaller, more recent impacts nearby controlled the appearance of the surface.
Sealock was driving, with Tem at his side and Prynne crammed into the narrow space behind the seats. This turnedout to be his usual station: Sealock would consent to crouch there on occasion, but Krzakwa was simply too fat. Really, it wasn't that bad—with both legs slung over the passenger seat, his feet on Tem's shoulder, Harmon could lie back on a pillow and look out the rear window in fair comfort. They all had on pressure suits, using them as constant-wear garments for lack of room to take them off. Finally, there was something. A pair of dead hydraulic volcanoes, looking like half-melted, monochromatic sundaes, stood before them, a large rille snaking between the two cones. It was almost impossible to gauge their size, with nothing for comparison, but they looked large. The ice had taken on a marbled, irregular texture, veined with ripples of dirtier material, and they had to slow down further because of irregularities in the surface. Sealock stopped the car. "OK," he said. "Let's go sacrifice a virgin to the gods."
"I think it may be a little hard to find a virgin in these parts."
"Nearest one's probably somewhere near Uranus," said Prynne. "Pretty long drive." Tem turned to gaze in amusement at the man. Some people, he told himself, are less than aware of their own words. . . . "Right. Scratch that idea. Let's go look anyway." It was something of a letdown. The low gravity gave the lie to even a fairly steep slope, made it seem flatter than it really was. The fact that the darkest ices had probably been spewed up made it seem a little more impressive, but only if they thought about it first. The summit pit on one did have an open channel reaching who knew how far down, but no one wanted to jump in and find out. Tired from leaping around, they went back to the car and got in.
The craters to be found on the ocellus were usually irregular, shallow depressions, but suddenly the car was skirting the rim of a great hole more than a hundred meters across. It was new enough so that the edges were sharp and the shape was a distinct bowl. It was easy to see the layering of successively darker materials that had formed the central planitia , and in the distance bright rays could be made out where they mantled the bed-ice. At the bottom there was a pool of nowfrozen meltwater. This ice was translucent, smooth as new glass, and looked very much like the frozen surface of a terrestrial lake. Sealock gazed at it silently, slowing down and steering the car around the rim. He tried to look at the layering, to examine it in a detached, scientific fashion, but his eyes kept drifting back to that big patch of clear ice. There was something about the smooth, glassy surface that tickled his memory and he wished for 'net access. What was it? He tried to remember on his own, and at last succeeded. He'd been sitting in his room at NYU one day, more than ten years ago, and had fallen into the grip of an unbreakable boredom. In desperation he'd hooked up to the CoNY Entertainment 'net and tapped a cast of the well-known epic fantasy series "Nineteen Sixty-six"—by luck, it had been the last episode, so the whole two hundred hours was available at one time. He watched, enthralled, pausing for sleep only when he could put it off no longer.
It detailed a grand year of adventure for four young men, crossing the vast expanses of the once open and free continent of North America. The men had had long, shaggy hair, unshaven faces . . . they'd worn fantastic dirty costumes and spoken in a rich, almost incomprehensible dialect that had a romantic appeal to modern ears.
There was one specific thing he was trying to remember, something they'd done during one of the riotous winter scenes. Dammit, that episode was legendary . . . they'd had a car very much like this one—just a bit bigger, and with some kind of fold-back roof. They ... It came back to him suddenly, and he acted.
As the car lurched to one side, Tem looked over at Sealock and saw that a sudden change had come over the man's features. Brendan was hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it hard in gloved hands. His lids were narrowed, green eyes glittering with what looked like . . . Krzakwa fished for a good phrase and the expression "psychotic glee" came to him in response. The rim rushed at them, and Tem wondered, What is he going to do? in dismay.
Prynne cried out suddenly, a squeal of rage and horror, as
Sealock ran 60vet over the edge, yet the wheels somehow managed to stay in contact with the ice as they fell onto the 45-degree slope. Accelerating rapidly, they shot out onto the clear ice and Brendan slammed the wheels into a hard-over position. The car whirled sickeningly through a series of complete turns, sliding forward as it spun, then they hit a small ridge and were launched on a low, whirling trajectory. Sealock, deep in the clutches of the fantasy, screamed, "Far fuckin' out!" They landed tail first and the rear wheels grabbed the ice, pulling the nose down with a jolt. Tem found himself unable to imagine how they were staying upright as they went into another series of vertiginous spins. Sealock was giggling like a child and Prynne, buffeted helplessly in the back, was cursing angrily. Krzakwa held on, shut his eyes, and waited for the end to come. When it was through, he looked out into the spinning stillness and said, "OK, asshole. How do we get it out of here now?" Sealock's eyes were still bright. "Why, we carry it up, of course!"
Demogorgon and Vana Berenguer were sitting in the garden of the CM dome, sprawled naked in lawn chairs and doing nothing, which was coming to be their usual activity. The CM itself had been somewhat modified and, in this setting, it looked rather like an avant-garde cottage. The platform that surrounded its base had been covered with a layer of soil in which shrubbery would soon sprout. Floodlights, intended for the good of the plants, felt warm and prickly on their skins, projecting shadows that easily overcame those from the sun.
Vana slid her hand down over her vulva and squeezed, hard, then snarled, "I'm fucking bored!" The Arab looked at her and smiled. "Really, dear? And just how bored is that?" She peered over at him and said, "I don't suppose you'd like to . . ."
"I have a much better notion." He grinned and stretchedlanguorously. "Would you like to visit the Illimitor World with me? It's been ready for some time now."
"That artsy, interactive thing you were working on back home?" She considered it, seeming dubious. "I don't think so. It's just not . . . real. I don't go in for that kind of stuff."
"'That kind of stuff,' indeed!" He laughed and, standing, stretched out a hand to her. "Come on. You'll like it, I promise...."
"But ..."
"Come on. It really is a lot better than what you get over the entertainment 'nets." She held back for a moment, then said, "Well . . . what the hell. Why not?" They went to the man's room and he activated his Shipnet access points and took out a set of induction leads. "No circlets for this, I'm afraid. How many can you handle?"
"Four, in Binary."
The Arab felt vaguely surprised. She would have to go along as a passive element. "OK. I can get you in using one of the adapter subplots that Brendan made for me." It might well be better this way. She'd have absolutely no control over what was going on and so would have to accept his version of reality without question.
They hooked up, plugged in, and he thought out his sequence of access codes in the high-level language Sealock had created:
Call Tri-vesigesimal. Activate 8(3y)i::5-mixer Node-network 501AA227::SysMat "Bright Illimit" Install Rider Unit .001 Call Uplink Assist. Call AI. com "Darius." SetPiece l::Transact::"Demogorgon-en-Arhos . . ."
They submerged.
Demogorgon en Arhos and Vana ten Exqrai stood on a marble balcony of the silent palace, looking down over a brilliant panorama. Arhos, the Jeweled City on the Mountain, fell at their feet in a series of
shining terraces that were crowded with graceful, multicolored buildings. The sky was a fathomless wash of pale sapphire that descended to a yellow-orange horizon far beyond the Plain of the Twelve Cities, andthe twin red suns, almost touching, were high overhead. To the south, in the middle distance, the jade-green waters of the Tovoreng River could be seen, flowing toward Arheinzei and the Salqxel Sea. A soft breeze sprang up, carrying a smell like mimosa and creating waves in the diaphanous curtains that were behind them.
Examining the scene, Vana gasped, "Oh! It's so beautiful, Demogorgon!" She turned to face the man, momentarily surprised that she could move so freely in this image, and her eyes widened. "Is that you?" Demogorgon was tall and slender, well muscled and handsome, with the face of an immortal. . . . He was clad in a harness encrusted with topaz and emerald, and the buckler-held sword at his side was of some shining yellow metal, not gold but something finer. He laughed at her thunderstruck expression, and gestured at her body.
She was almost naked, clad only in a pair of silver breastplates that clung magically to her flesh and a wide, soft belt that supported a fine, jeweled dagger. Her body was slim now, much like Ariane's admired shape, but somehow superior. It seemed less filled with that loathsome animalness. . . . "This can't be real!"
Demogorgon laughed out loud. "It is real if I say it is."
She spun around, drinking in the scenery, marveling at its almost palpable presence. "But . . . this is nothing like anything I've ever seen on the 'net!"
"I told you that before we came. This is real."
"Real?" She seemed puzzled. "And we can just ... go out there? We're not limited to this room, or to some predetermined plot?"
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