"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.