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—"