Finally, he slept, knowing that it would be more than a year before he graduated. The sequence came to an end.
"Shit," muttered Sealock. "Was it always like that?"
"In one way or another. That was the worst of it, though. Later we had more free time, because the planners assumed we would go berserk otherwise. I guess I chose that particular memory because of what you were saying, before, about the way things are on Earth. I don't know what you were complaining about."
"Yeah. I didn't think you'd understand," said Brendan, smiling. "In some ways you had it lucky. You always knew who the bad guys were."
After setting up the scene in the dome, Demogorgon decided to look in on Vana. The subsidiary program that allowed her to move among the illusions of Bright Illimit was undoubtedly keeping her out of trouble, but there was no harm in checking. He quickly located the section of the program with which she was interacting and projected himself into it.
She had been having a picnic on a hill in the southern marches, toward Rin Renala, under a huge spreading sarisdahn tree that provided shade from both the suns. A clothhad been spread out not far from the place where she'd landed her personal skimmer and, not surprisingly, she was humping madly with a huge, dark man Demogorgon recognized as Qasartun, the King of Radhamash. As he approached, smiling wryly, he cleared his throat.
"Demo!" said Vana, looking at him over the man's shoulder, appearing a little embarrassed. "I didn't expect you . . . here . . . now."
"What? Ho—" called Qasartun, continuing his vigorous thrusting. "If it isn't my fellow liege lord Demogorgon en Arhos! Well met, if I must say so myself!"
"Stop. Qassi, stop!" said Berenguer.
For a moment his face was transfigured with rage, then, somewhat cowed, he complied with her request. His rampant penis was of a size that an irrationally greedy woman might dream about. Vana, in this setting, seemed to have acquired a bit more modesty—she covered herself with a corner of the picnic cloth.
Demogorgon was unable to keep from laughing. He wondered how he would react to being interrupted during one of his trysts with Raabo by a real person. "Dear Vana," he began, "do not feel any embarrassment on account of my presence. After all, Qassi, as you call him, is, in a sense, merely my representative. And gratifying one's desires, as you were doing, is a major part of the reason this world exists."
Qasartun looked back and forth between the two, then said, "I can see that I am not wanted here." He made a sort of humble gesture to Demogorgon. "If it please you, my lady, I will be off." So saying, he buckled on his jewel-encrusted codpiece and strode off toward the west without a backward glance.
"Well, anyway," said Demo, "I'm sorry for the interruption." Vana gave the departing kinglet a quick glance. "There are more where he came from." Demogorgon laughed. "That's very, very, true." He paused, then said, "How are you getting along here in general? I really haven't been giving you the supervision I ought to."
"Fine. I think I've figured out everything I need to know. I have assumed my title, and everybody knows of me ... it couldn't be better."
"Good. You probably ought to come back to Ocypete with me, though. Things are getting a little lonely there. Especially for Harmon."
She was pulling on her clothing now. It did not do much to conceal her nudity but made a great difference in her demeanor. She stood and stretched. "Speaking of Harmon—" she said.
"Yes?"
"What are we going to do about him?"
"What do you mean?"
"He's, well . . . he's jealous. Of you."
"Me?" Demogorgon looked incredulous. "He has nothing to fear from me!"
"Think about it. This is you." She spread her hand in a wide gesture.
"No, it's not me—it's you! If he's jealous of anything it's your fantasies, and your inability to satisfy them through him. This is just a means to an end."
"That's easy to say, but how do things look? And how do I get it across to him?" Demogorgon sat down on the grass and stared at the sky. "How do you tell anything to anybody? Get him in here, if you can ... if you want him—here."
"Can you talk to him?"
"Look, this is going to have to work out in its own way, just like . . ." She saw the unhappiness spread across his features. Somehow it seemed inappropriate, here. "Just like you and Brendan?"
He felt her hand cool on his neck. "Yeah. Just like that."
Jana Li Hu looked down. The squat cylinder that housed what had been a redundant thruster from Deepstar's original configuration sat in a classic graben and was the hub for three hundred-meter metal cords which were affixed to mousetrap pitons that had been dug very far into exposed sections of the bed-ice. She found, to her surprise, that she had been holding her breath, and she let it out into the suit slowly. The worksuit she wore was large for her, and its spaciousness made her feel clumsy, hard to control. Once again she scanned the surrounding terrain with her photochips and was awed by the spirelike , only slightly rounded water-ice massifs that clustered closely here, broken shards of the world thrust upward by the colossal forces which had fought during the period when Mare Nostrum froze and expanded.
It was something only water would do, pushing the partially collapsed Ocypete back into a spherical shape. Unlike what had happened on Ganymede and other Solar moons, the unmelted crust of the area surrounding the mare was already too thick to produce the regional grooves caused by wave systems of extensional faulting during the time of melting. Instead more "Earthlike" oblique-slip faults had spread in a finely reticulate pattern back into the highlands, gathered finally into the huge chasm that trisected the world. When Mare Nostrum froze, it pushed everything back into place— almost. The healed scars remained—and they would tell much. It was all fascinating, but not quite fascinating enough to override the growing fear in her.
Despite the fact that it was yet to come on formally, the internal generator necessary to keep the battery warm was throwing out enough heat to sublimate the neon in the cryolith , and the drill, for that is what it was, was sinking slowly, throwing out a blur of mist. The time had come. She pointed the nozzle of the hydrogen-release device and turned it on. Quickly the small white mountains began to dwindle as she rose, and the systematic faults of this orogeny presented themselves to her in detail. Her entire science lay all around her, a great, crumbled sphinx. The vast blankness of the ocellus came up over the horizon, and she made for it. She was obligated to get very far from the drill site, and thus perhaps a minute passed as she gained speed and height. Finally she felt safe and slowed to a stop by sending out a prolonged blast of compressed gas. The curvature of the small moon was already quite pronounced, and from this height she could probably fall for anhour or more. She spun herself about with a command to her gyro, and blinked inside her helmet. In a moment the exhaust plume, a diffuse comet's tail, reached into the sky, slowly spreading a haze outward to engulf the nearby-seeming stars in a web of twinkling. When it was over the cloud vanished like winter's breath. Jana felt regret that this escaping gas would form a deposit on much of the surrounding territory, somewhat altering what would be found there later. But it was a necessary thing, and even asterology suffered from an uncertainty principle, an observer effect. She continued her fall and, suddenly, seemed paralyzed.