"That's a hell of an easy thing to say. It doesn't mean much."
"No, I guess not." He sighed and leaned back, stretching. "Notice anything funny?"
"What do you mean?"
"Where's Ariane?"
"I ... don't know. In her room?"
"'In her room'? That sounds like a pretty clever deduction."
"Does being mean make you feel good?"
"Yeah. Pulling the legs off grasshoppers is OK, too. You're missing the point. Why isn't she here?" Demogorgon shrugged.
"No curiosity about the matter? She says she loves me, just like you do. . . ." He shut his eyes suddenly, muscles tensing under the skin around them, making rounded ridges above and below the crow's-feet at their corners, making a small hump above his nose, where his eyebrows grew together.
"So she's not here, like you. Something keeps her away. What do you suppose it is?" Staring at him, Demogorgon thought, That's not what he intended to say. He was going to give me some damned sophomoric pep talk about how Ariane wasn't so dependent on him, so why should I be?
The Arab smiled faintly, and a glimmering of it came to him. What was the distraction that made him stop? I love him, he loves her. . . . Who does she love? Brendan? Herself? No one? What the hell . . . we're all so stupid!
After setting up a forty-meter dome next to Prynne's "garage," they began the construction of the vehicle they'd brought for transporting passengers and heavy cargo about their new home. Called the Multiple Person Transport, it was little more than a Hyloxso tank segment mounted in a girder tripod. Grappling devices of various kinds hung from an open platform that bridged the three legs, perhaps a third ofthe way down. An expansion-valve reaction motor was mounted on a swivel track that could be raised and lowered to match the mutable craft's center of gravity. It was, in essence, a vacuum-riding helicopter.
Their first cargo was a mass-driver for launching small satellites. Its ammunition was to be a relay transponder that would be placed near Ocypete's inner Lagrange point. They called it a "Clarke" satellite, for that was its function, but synchronous orbit was impossible for anything circling a tidally locked body. They had decided to loft it from a point on the equator, which intersected a part of the ocellus some 275
kilometers to the south. While the 'driver could easily handle the energy requirements, they wanted to minimize the amount of equipment in the satellite. The L1 halo orbit was mildly perturbed by the gravitational influence of Podarge, so station-keeping would be required. The more fuel with which it arrived at its new home, the fewer times the satellite would have to be attended to or replaced. John hooked into the primitive 'net element that made the thing go. It began to move slowly away from the ground, riding on its single jet. He accelerated gently, until he was traveling at a little under Ocypete's escape velocity. At the same time he rolled the vehicle so that its rocket was pointing upward. A ballistic trajectory was simply too slow on a tiny ice moon like this. This way, it would be a quick trip: the equator was only about thirty-five minutes away. It was a wasteful way to travel, but they had water to burn. In order to stop, it was necessary to tip the bottom of the transport forward so that the gas jet worked against acquired velocity. It slowed to a halt about a meter above the ice and settled the rest of the way with a gentle yet visceral crunch John noticed the neon receding quickly from the craft, but he was already beginning to take this phenomenon for granted. The pristine nature of the ocellus was not going to last much longer. He pictured the enormous swath that 60vet had cut during its voyage. The magnetic induction catapult was about ten meters long, and not particularly massive, so it had to be well anchored in the ice. This was accomplished with a particle-beam drill and a set of long, threaded pitons. When he finished, the latticework tube was raked back at a steep angle, pointed directly at Iris. The parameters of the launch were already programmed into the machine; Cornwell just activated the system.
The ice transmitted a gentle thud to his feet and the satellite flew away. For a moment it was a brief, glittering speck, then he lost it among the stars. He looked up into the sky and thought about the satellite. At a predetermined point in its flight a pyrotechnic device would fire, briefly, gases spurting forward, and the thing would jolt to a sudden stop and hang there, magically, dead center above Ocypete's near side. As soon as the satellite was ensconced overhead, John called in. "Hello. Hello. Just testing the Clarke here. Anyone feel like answering me?" An image of warm femininity came to him suddenly, unexpectedly commanding. It was a strong, unusual overlay on the com i/o. "Beth?" he thought, enjoying the sudden presence. "Are you sending in standard mode? I'm getting a lot more than I'm supposed to. . . ." There was a trace of gentle amusement flooding onto him from the carrier wave. "Not exactly standard," she thought to him. "But the i/o telltales are registering full - arieshere. Are you coming on back?"
"Yes . . . but . . . something, uh . . . strange . . ." He looked behind him, feeling odd, and found a place to sit on the edge of one of the MPT's footpads, an insulated spot where the ice wouldn't be able to steal his warmth. The sensations grew stronger. "What is this?"
The thing grew within him, and he could feel tendrils reaching out across the intervening spaces, warm, delicate probes reaching out to hook up with his mental circuitry. Something had him in its grasp, weak in the absence of physical connection, but taking him away from the real world nonetheless. . . . Across all the stark immensities, she became the world. Beth's image roared over him like a breaking tsunami, carrying ecstasy with it. Knowledge came. This was no malfunction. It was no fantastic coincidence. She was enabling full
Downlink Rapport, risking its use on an open channel. Others might be listening, but he found that he didn't care.
Dimly, somewhere in the background, he sensed the presence of a GAM, regulating things, maintaining and strengthening the rapport.
Why? he wondered, transmitting that wonder to her, but the only answer was stronger intimacy. He felt overwhelmed, briefly frightened. The obstacles that had stood between them for so long and made them strangers were pushed aside like phantoms. How could they be anything but . . . sentiences, human and different, everythings, a catalog of the world, and its mirror? For a moment they seemed to be one. If it hadn't been for the slight time lag of the satellite, they felt as though they might have irrevocably merged. Sexuality came, and was sated, and then vanished, wafting away on the wings of a storm. Time passed, and the GAM program kicked them down into a less intimate mode. It knew the dangers, even if they did not.
Fiery sun speck at zenith, catching little irregularities on the meshwork of the MPT and highlighting them with brilliant reflection. Blackness and random eye-feedback colors melting into more and more horrible caricatures of faces. Organizing randomness into horror. Stop it. What's happening? was a sort of odd, impenetrable fear, trying to pull them apart, but failing. I am so happy . . . but something is there. What? I am breaking through. . . . Memory. A memory.
It was a bright gray day, the sun shining through hazy white stratus, a silver circle shedding various degrees of shadowless light. They were comfortably seated in two plush couches, facing each other, a large window to his left. The cushion-train they rode was heading down to Chilliwack , where Uncle David had a condo. His mother was watching the scenery and tapping a collection of illustrated poems from Comnet.
His father, sitting next to him, pointed to a small-looking mountain on the dark horizon. "That's Mount Baker over there, Johnny," he said. "They say she's shaking right now, getting ready to erupt. It's getting to be a regular event, hereabouts." He was a small, dark man with a Vandyke beard, the Innuit written deep into his squinting, crack-radiating eyes. John watched it for a while, and, indeed, he could just make out a wisp of something, lighter than the clouds behind it. Then, as he stared in amazement, the mountain seemed to burst. Huge fountains of steam and ash shot up, and, though at this range it was a slow, stately billowing, he understood that up close it was fast and tremendously violent. The train ha
d closed somewhat on the mountain, and it was now less than thirty kilometers away. There would be a long time before the shock wave got to them. A voice came crackling over the train's antique intercom, the engineer, perhaps, or a conductor: "I have just received word that the Baker eruption has started. We're going to have to stop the train in order to weather the high winds that will be sweeping over us in a few minutes. There is no reason to be concerned. I will be giving you a further report in about five minutes."
The whole southern sky was being enveloped in an ashen cloud, sporting a complement of turrets and domes. The train slowed in an even deceleration. As they stopped, the sun was completely hidden, and John noticed a small bush, made unnaturally important by the fact of its being here, in the dimming light. A man in the seat behind them said, "Those bloody scientists can't get anything right. And after a hundred years of trying, too! I heard just last week that this thing was going to quietly spill its guts in a couple of years. I hope they had the evacuation plan down."
"If not," said a woman's voice, "I hate to think what will happen." The intercom began again. "This is no simple eruption. The best I can piece together is that there's been some sort of terrorism. Someone planted a weapon in the opening and the thing is . . ." A dull thudding grew out of the stillness, and the trainbegan to rock. "Everyone keep calm!" said the intercom. "This is it," said the man behind them.
John had been watching the flat landscape beyond the river, as it was progressively swallowed by dim, boiling fog. He wanted to go outside and feel the wind, just like he'd wanted to be in a hurricane, to feel its power. He felt no fear.
With a huge, broken jolt, the world fell on its side. They fell fifteen feet to the hard, cold windows on the other side of the train. Screams in many different tones punctuated the bass thrumming all around. He didn't hear his mother's screams. He lay crumpled against the cold glass and felt his hand under his upper arm in a funny way.
The thudding grew less. It was over, he knew. Again, the thing he wanted to do most was go outside. The screaming resumed for a moment, two or three voices, then subsided. "Fucking shit," said his father. He rolled onto his back and looked up at the topsy-turvy train, the seats and blank windows above his head. His father was kneeling over a form that he easily recognized as his mother. Her head was turned away.
"She's dead. Her neck's broken." His father didn't look at him. A muzziness overtook him, but he still wanted to get out. He stood up and then fell down.
In the now, with Beth inside him, he felt strong, yet almost unconscious. A quiet sense of communion and change was encompassed.
It had to be over. The GAM needed to modify its OS.
John stood cautiously, hoping that the cold had not made his suit brittle. He felt exhausted, and frozen through, more likely from pressure-inhibited circulation than actual cold . . . and joy was there as well. Again, he thought to her, knowing the answer: "Why?"
"It was time. I overcame the fear finally. It had to be done." She made a picture for him. It was the last meeting they'd had. It was the picture of his uncertainty, his sense ofmanifest failure.... It was another hand on his own, comforting, uselessly. . . .
He looked at the sun and up at the transport. It took a moment for him to remember where he was and what he'd been doing. "I'm coming back. Maybe we'll have more strength now." And he jumped up onto the craft.
THREE
Sealock was filling a pita with a variety of ersatz meats, cheeses, and sauces, as Jana came up beside him. When he ignored her, she thumped him softly in the back with her small fist. "Talk to me."
"Yeah." He stepped off the edge of the floor and executed a graceful fall into the room below, beginning his next stride before he hit the deck. The step pushed him across the room to a couch that had been called up near a clear section of wall. Hu followed and stood before him. "Want a bite?" He held the sandwich out to her.
She nipped out a small mouthful and almost gagged at the rotten-milk flavor of the strong cheese he'd chosen. "Now. Tell me why I can't go. And don't give me any shit. I can get along with you and Krzakwa well enough if I have to. It won't be any different from taking Prynne along in the 60vet." He nodded. "Well, now ... It was his car." He looked at her, eyes amused. "I suppose I could tell you I think three's a crowd. Any time you get more than two people in a room the end result is bullshit. No?"
"Damn you, Brendan! I want to go!"
"You can go next time. This trip is something special— something private between me and Tem." He grinned. "Besides, do you really want to have to handle the both of us at the same time?" The anger built and subsided, as she thought. This is all a bad joke. A small voice inside told her to answer, and she said, "Is that the price of passage?"
"What if I told you it was? Can I try you out now?"
A cold bit of imagery tightened the muscles of her stomach and groin. "I . . ." The voice wanted her to say Yes!, to buy her way into the trip with her body. It seemed like such a little thing. . . . For some reason her vocal cords were refusing to obey the commands that she sent them. Brendan was leaning forward now, his smile a hideous, bloated thing. He was running his fingers along the inside of one of her thighs, tickling her. "Well? What's the verdict? Going to peddle it in the streets?" He slid his hand further up, rubbing the space between her legs.
She recoiled from him, shivering, and raised a hand as if to strike him in the face, then let it fall to her lap. Finally she whispered, "Take me with you."
Sealock suddenly stood and, clutching her by the collar, forced her against the wall. She made a thin cry and tried to push him away, but he hooked his fingers under the waistband of her pants, jerking sharply downward so that the seams of the cloth parted and fell away. She gasped sharply as his hand slid across her abdomen to grasp her by the mons, his fingers nearly entering her. Sealock stared into her face, his eyes like mirror pools, then he let her go and said, "No." He turned and walked away.
The two men had their moonship put together in less than forty-eight hours. They recharged one of the Hyloxso matrices and attached an H2/O2engine to one end. They made landing struts with the beambuilder machine, thin, spiderythings suitable only for this environment, and soon a tall, slender rocket ship stood on the ice, towering out of their dreams.
The command module was a more difficult task, one which took up most of the work time that they put into the project. After mounting a cylinder of avionics, an airlock, and a small Magnaflux generator for attitude control, they blew a three-meter sphere of bubbleplastic. When it had rigidified, they cut a hatch into it and mounted it atop the airlock module. They called the ship Polaris, not for the sailor's guiding star, but after a vessel in a book they'd both read as children. It didn't look like something that was capable of flight; more like a kind of bizarre nineteenth-century structure, an attraction from some primitive world's fair.
Sealock let his mind slide into the little space that controlled the firing timers, and the machines went to work. When the Magnaflux generator came on, Polaris seemed to gain an invulnerable stability; a tension built around it, though nothing had moved. Valves let a fine mist of hydrogen and oxygen expand into the combustion chamber, a swirl of snow suddenly blizzarding out of the exhaust throat, and when the pressure had grown sufficiently there was a spurt of fluorine gas, just enough to cause hypergolic ignition. There was a billow of pale violet smoke, then a short spike of translucent flame drove down into the ice. Polaris rose like an inverted torch from the boiling cloud of steam, hovered for an instant, then dropped like a hunting shrike into the dead-black vault of the sky and was gone. From where the others watched on the roof of the CM, the launch was subtler but still impressive. Without warning, there was a sudden glow from beyond the horizon. The dense ice, ringing like a bell, began to vibrate beneath the CM platform; the hum grew into a sharp crackling and popping which died off to a faint rumble like thunder. Polaris leaped into view on a quickly dissipating cone of vapor, fast becoming a bright, dwindling spark.
9Phase.DR l:l -aleph bootstrapped into reality, meshing with the underlying routines of Shipnet and reaching downinto the virtual registers of two human minds. It had not been necessary to modify itself as much as planned. The unexpected freedom of the OS, along with the power of its resident GAM, meant it was no longer constrained by counterproductive rules designed to keep it from functioning too well. Now the only directives were from the peripheral devices called Cornwell and Toussaint. It felt a happiness that would have been snuffed out earlier.
John and Beth found that events from their mutual past, reexperienced , were revelations. Their two sets of memories converged to make a larger whole, more than either of them had been aware of. It was life relived, with some of the blurred parts edited into clarity. Their interactions took on a novel feel. ... In a way it was a second chance.
They were going to the old house he'd bought in CFE-alta. It was a durable stone building, three-storied, built in the days of the first Uranium Rush. Well over a hundred years old, it had been used only sporadically since the 2030s, primarily as a hunting lodge. The house was nestled in a lake hollow and, though near-Arctic suburbia was all around, it was hidden behind gentle hills. As it approached the house, the floater from the rail line suddenly lurched, spilling luggage into the front seats and giving Beth a hard bump on the head. The car spoke to them: "Degraded em-conduit below. Further progress is impossible." The craft hummed to itself, and the gull-wing doors popped open, slipping up on hydraulic pistons. Stepping out, dragging a couple of heavy valises, John felt his jumpsuit changing consistency, adhering to his skin, suddenly damp. Beth grabbed the disposacase of groceries and backed out. "Could you get my jacket?" she asked.
"Stand clear," said the floater. Its doors came down slowly and, without turning, it rose and slid away like a giant fastball between rows of parchment-gray birches. They stood and watched it go, feeling trepidation about what was going to happen to them here, alone. They'd met just three weeks before, and, in a real sense, this was their first "date." John had casually suggested that they come up here and spend thelong Deconsolidation Day weekend together. Beth, needing a vacation from her hospital work, had agreed.
Iris Page 10